This page features brief excerpts of stories published by the mainstream
media and, less frequently, blogs, alternative media, and even obviously
biased sources. The excerpts are taken directly from the websites cited in
each source note. Quotation marks are not used.
Source: LAT
Jul 8, 2007
The Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda has long been the most kicked-around of presidential libraries, and nothing invited more ridicule than the dim, narrow room purporting to describe the scandal that drove its namesake from office.
Venturing into that room, visitors learned that Watergate, which provoked a constitutional crisis and became an enduring byword for abuses of executive power, was really a "coup" engineered by Nixon enemies. The exhibit acc
Source: Sydney Morning Herald
Jul 7, 2007
DOCTORS have frequently been accomplices in politically motivated repression, brutality and genocide, conducting inhumane experiments on victims, participating in torture and directing programs to exterminate the enemy. For no reason other than they had the power to do it at the time, they have beaten, tortured and killed victims.
Political medical murderers reverse the process of patients seeking help from a doctor, instead misusing their skills on vulnerable groups in the name of
Source: Email circulating on the Internet from the International Council of Museums
Jul 7, 2007
The illicit traffic of cultural property is currently one of the most lucrative criminal
activities in the world. Every civilisation's cultural heritage is universal and priceless, and
the harm caused by illicit trafficking has disastrous repercussions, not only on peoples'
understanding of their history, and thus on their cultural identity, but also with regard to the
future of all humankind.
ICOM, UNESCO and INTERPOL are all the more concerned about this plague since illicit tra
Source: BBC
Jul 7, 2007
Enver Hoxha, the Stalinist communist dictator of Albania until 1985, was proud of Butrint.
At the height of the Cold War in the 1960s he showed Nikita Khrushchev around. But only after the sites in the forest were sprayed with DDT and purged of snakes, wild animals and insects.
Khrushchev was more interested in establishing a secret submarine base in the lake of Butrint - an idea that Hoxha did not follow up.
Source: AP
Jul 7, 2007
On April 12, 1945, Lt. Shinichi Uchida faced a terrifying mission — crash his plane into a U.S. warship. But the young kamikaze's final letter to his grandparents was full of bravado.
"Now I'll go and get rid of those devils," the 18-year-old wrote shortly before his final flight, vowing to "bring back the neck" of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He never returned.
For many, such words are redolent of the militarism that drove Japan to ruin in World
Source: PakTribune
Jul 7, 2007
The Ministry of Defence has sold off historic barracks and land worth more than £2.2 billion to fund the spiralling cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Figures show ministers have met about half the cost of the conflicts by selling armed forces assets, including accommodation, airstrips, sports fields, military hospitals and firing ranges.
The true cost of the invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein and driving the Taliban out of Afghanistan has never officially
Source: Australian
Jul 7, 2007
PUBLISHERS in the 1980s and 1990s sanitised Aboriginal history by censoring accounts of violence, including sexual abuse and infanticide.
Award-winning historical author Susanna de Vries has revealed that her books on early colonial life, based on the memoirs of pioneer women, were allegedly toned down so as not to upset Aboriginal sensibilities.
De Vries said the memoirs of one woman, Louisa Meredith, were allegedly censored by Queensland publishing house Michael White
Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jul 7, 2007
Boston — During his life, three cities defined Martin Luther King Jr.
Atlanta, where he was born and raised. Montgomery, where he launched a movement. Memphis, where he was killed.
But it was in Boston where he met his wife, Coretta, and received his doctorate from Boston University that King honed his philosophy.
In 1964, he donated more than 80,000 pages of his writings, letters and notes to BU. Compared to the recent $32 million sale of a 7,000-page coll
Source: Independent (UK)
Jul 6, 2007
Only one out of 20 would-be teachers on a Cambridge University history and education course knew anything about Christopher Columbus, a conference was told yesterday.
The figure was revealed by Kate Pretty, pro-vice chancellor of Homerton College, as evidence of the decline in history in primary and secondary schools. Later this month, a report by Ofsted, the education standards watchdog, will reveal that seven out of ten pupils have ditched the subject by the time they are 14. Only
Source: WSJ
Jul 6, 2007
A new manual for Russia's history teachers succinctly distills President Vladimir Putin's drive to rekindle patriotism, retelling events of the past six decades according to the Kremlin's preferred storyline: Russia is a great power that shouldn't be ashamed of its past.
Backed by support from the president himself, the book, which rails against U.S. hegemony, is raising fears among some historians that the Kremlin is -- quite literally -- trying to rewrite history in a way that ris
Source: CNN
Jul 6, 2007
The new seven wonders of the world were named Saturday following an online vote that generated server-crushing traffic in its final hours.
The final tally produced this list of the world's top human-built wonders:
• The Great Wall of China
• Petra in Jordan
• Brazil's statue of Christ the Redeemer
• Peru's Machu Picchu
• Mexico's Chichen Itza pyramid
• The Colosseum in Rome
• India's Taj Mahal
Source: http://www.ireland.com
Jul 6, 2007
Minister for the Environment John Gormley is to review how the State protects its national heritage and landscape following the controversy over the planned construction of the M3 motorway over historic sites near the Hill of Tara.
Mr Gormley said today that Tara and "similar controversies" of recent years raised the "valid question" as to whether the current measures we have to protect our archaeological and natural landscape are adequate. However, he again ins
Source: BBC
Jul 6, 2007
It happened a century ago, but has all the ingredients of a modern detective thriller, theft, dishonour and rumours of sexual indiscretion.
On 6 July 1907, the Irish 'crown jewels' were discovered to have been stolen from Dublin Castle.
The jewels were the insignia of the Illustrious Order of St Patrick, instituted in 1783 as the Irish equivalent of the Order of the Garter.
Normally kept in a bank vault, they had been moved in 1903 to Dublin Castle, the cen
Source: Bloomberg
Jul 6, 2007
New York art
dealer Ira Spanierman's Raphael painting sold last night for 18.5 million pounds
($37.3 million) with commission, more than 100,000 times the price he paid for it.
The portrait of the Florentine ruler Lorenzo de' Medici set a record for the
Italian painter at the Christie's International sale in London. Spanierman
bought the work for $325 at a 1968 New York auction when scholars didn't believe
it was by Raphael. Dealers said he tried and failed to sell it himself before
Source: Guardian
Jul 6, 2007
Choho Zukeran was a schoolboy, mobilised to dig beachfront trenches, when US soldiers landed on his native Okinawa, sparking one of the bloodiest battles of the second world war. Over the next few weeks, some 200,000 Japanese and Americans would die, including more than a quarter of Okinawa's civilian population. Most died in the invasion, others killed themselves - on the orders of the army that was supposed to be protecting them.
"The army had given us two grenades each. They told
Source: Archaeology
Jul 6, 2007
On June 14, 2007, construction resumed on a four-lane highway near the Hill of Tara in central Ireland. Traditionally the seat of the high kings of Ireland, the landscape is littered with burial mounds, rock art, earthen enclosures, and stone monuments. Tara, which has been described as Ireland's equivalent of Stonehenge, was named one of the 100 most endangered sites by the World Monuments Fund this year.The Irish government met resistance when it announced plans for a 60 k
Source: DPA
Jul 6, 2007
Two of Germany's leading novelists, Martin Walser and Siegfried Lenz, were inducted into the Nazi Party as 16-year-old boys late in the Second World War, it has been revealed.Both men angrily denied this week that they had sought Nazi party membership. It was suggested that local party officials had compelled schoolboys to enroll en masse, perhaps as a "birthday gift" to dictator Adolf Hitler.
The controversy, triggered by journalists fishing for famou
Source: Independent (South Africa)
Jul 6, 2007
In an unprecedented truth-seeking process in the Arab world, Morocco tried to blot out stains of past human rights abuses on Tuesday with public testimony about tortures and disappearances in the Muslim kingdom.The hearings were broadcast live on national radio and television - another first - and held by a state body empowered to look into widespread abuses committed over a period of 43 years, from independence from France in 1956 to 1999.
The Equity and Reconc
Source: AP
Jul 6, 2007
Aged men and women in Ukraine are unburdening themselves of wartime memories, many for the first time, in testimonies to a French priest. Their words may change history, as they shed light on this poorly known chapter of the Holocaust.Father Patrick Desbois and his mixed-faith team have been crisscrossing Ukraine for six years and have located more than 500 mass graves, many never before recorded. The project is central to a broader reassessment of the Nazi horr
Source: Sydney Morning Herald
Jul 6, 2007
THE US President, George Bush, has compared the war in Iraq with the US war for independence in his Fourth of July speech.
Like the revolutionaries who "dropped their pitchforks and picked up their muskets to fight for liberty", Mr Bush said American soldiers were fighting "a new and unprecedented war" to protect US freedom.
In a reprise of speeches he delivered in the congressional campaign last year, Mr Bush said the threat that emerged on Septembe
