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: Tennessean
Feb 18, 2007
Luvenia Butler doesn't have photographs of her ancestors — among them cooks and masons — who lived as slaves at the Belle Meade Plantation some 150 years ago. But, she says laughing, she sees them every time she visits the premises. In her case, that's pretty often.
Butler is one of the newest members of the board of directors at the plantation — the very place where her great-grandmother Jenny White once lived in bondage.
"I've always been taught it's important to
Source: AP
Feb 18, 2007
A group of Virginia historians and an Army archaeologist say more research is needed before anyone can determine for sure that an early 17th-century settlement known as Henry Towne ever existed.
A Fort Eustis spokeswoman said Friday that Randy Amici, the Army's lead archaeologist for Fort Eustis on the Peninsula and Fort Story in Virginia Beach, has been at the center of the possible Henry Towne discovery and will continue to participate in that research.
"When I asked h
Source: New York Times
Feb 18, 2007
[Note: In a Sunday Times 'Week in Review' article by C.J. Chivers about a recent friendly-fire incident in Iraq in which an American pilot accidentally killed a British soldier (see link below), reference was made to a once-secret Vietnam War report by an Army captain"that provided a glimpse at [the] grim, ineludible facts [of friendly fire]. Replying to a request from another headquarters, he compiled a list of the small-arms mishaps in which American soldiers were killed or injured in the fir
Source: Times (of London)
Feb 18, 2007
When Irène Némirovsky [one of France's leading novelists] was sent to Auschwitz she left behind a hidden literary sensation – [a suitcase full of manuscripts] ....
... The manuscripts inside the suitcase contained the text of Suite Française, the French publishing sensation of 2004 that is taking the Anglo-Saxon world by storm. It tells in vivid prose the story of the early days of the second world war and the reaction of the French to the German invasion.
Source: Independent
Feb 18, 2007
[London's] Natural History Museum has been accused by Tasmanian Aboriginals of "mutilating" the remains of their ancestors. Native Australians say the institution has defiled the 17th-century bones by removing parts for scientific tests.
The dispute centres on 17 skeletons held by the museum in London since the 1940s. Although it has agreed to return the remains in its possession, the museum has been collecting samples from skulls and bones for DNA analysis.
T
Source: Reuters
Feb 18, 2007
WARSAW -- A local joke runs that the luckiest man in Warsaw is the caretaker who lives on the top floor of its towering Palace of Culture -- because he is the only one who can look out of his window and not see it.
Loathed by many older Poles as a symbol of oppression, the 754-foot (230-meter) neo-Gothic skyscraper was a "gift" from Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in the 1950s, but as a post-Communist generation matures it is finding a new role.
The grey-brown s
Source: Reuters
Feb 18, 2007
WASHINGTON -- In the Lincoln Bedroom, President George W. Bush likes to show off one of the most treasured historical artifacts in the White House, a handwritten copy of Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Gettysburg Address.
The building's walls speak of past battles, victories, defeats, heartache. President George Washington's portrait hangs in the Oval Office. Civil War Commander and two-term President Ulysses Grant is placed in Bush's private study.
The Queen's Bedroom offers me
Source: AP
Feb 18, 2007
PARIS -- A prominent French political figure who ordered hundreds of Jews to Nazi death camps during World War II will be buried wearing his Legion of Honor medal, his lawyer said Sunday, even though the deceased man was stripped of his right to wear the decoration in 1998.
Maurice Papon, the No. 2 official in the Bordeaux region in southwestern France during Germany's World War II occupation, was convicted in 1998 on charges of complicity in crimes against humanity. The former Fren
Source: Press Release -- The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
Feb 18, 2007
A special event will be held in Silver Spring, Maryland this week to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the voyage of the S.S. Ben Hecht, an unusual Jewish refugee ship that not only tried to crash the British blockade of Palestine, but also brought down the barriers of racial segregation in Baltimore, and played a role in one of the most spectacular prison breaks in history.
The commemoration will take place at the Silver Spring Jewish Center, 1401 Arcola Avenue, on Sunday evenin
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Feb 18, 2007
A tiny community of reindeer herders in Siberia holds intimate knowledge of the lives, the foraging and the rutting season of their priceless animals, and it's the kind of information that is vital to anyone concerned by the loss of human cultures -- and to biologists worried about the loss of species diversity anywhere in the world.
Of the 426 members of Siberia's isolated Chulym people, only 35 still speak Tuvan, their ancient language, fluently, and they're all older than 50. Eve
Source: Sky News
Feb 18, 2007
Two First World War soldiers shot for cowardice but pardoned 90 years later have been formally honoured on a war memorial.
The granddaughter of one of the men said her family now had the chance to "put everything to rest and carry on with our lives".
The names of Privates Harry Farr and James Swaine have finally been engraved on to Wealdstone war memorial in north-west London.
They were among 306 soldiers shot for military offences during the Firs
Source: AP
Feb 18, 2007
An Israeli archaeologist said Sunday that what could be a Islamic prayer room was found at the site of the Mugrabi ramp in the Old City of Jerusalem, where excavation work has sparked angry protests by Muslims who say that the work endangers the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Muslim leaders and critics of the work said the announcement of the find, three years after it was discovered, confirmed their fears that the Antiquities Authority is intent on hiding Muslim attachment to the site.
Source: NYT
Feb 18, 2007
Maurice Papon, a prominent French functionary convicted in 1998 of complicity in Nazi crimes against humanity during the German occupation in World War II, died yesterday at a private clinic near Paris. He was 96.
He underwent heart surgery related to his pacemaker on Tuesday, and died in his sleep, said his lawyer, Francis Vuilleman, The Associated Press reported.
In the end, Mr. Papon served less than three years of his 10-year sentence for deporting hundreds of Jews
Source: New York Times
Feb 18, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO -— For nearly 50 years, Bob Morgan and his family have kept a box full of charred debris that they swear fell out of the early morning sky on Dec. 8, 1957.
“My dad said it was glowing so bright that you couldn’t look at it with your naked eye,” Mr. Morgan said of the pieces of metal and plastic that came to rest behind his grandfather’s house in Encino, Calif. “So they grabbed some sunglasses until this thing had cooled down.”
Although no one has ever conf
Source: Boston Globe
Feb 18, 2007
Most people may believe that the reason for studying history is to learn what happened in the past," begins the foreword to Japan's "New History Textbook," "but that is not necessarily correct."
This is not the kind of opening that inspires confidence in a text's objectivity. The "New History Textbook" was introduced in 2001 by a group of right-wing scholars and politicians with the explicit aim of giving junior high school students a more positive
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Feb 18, 2007
A New Jersey man charged Saturday with attacking Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel at a San Francisco hotel earlier this month was a "lone wolf" who had also stalked the Nobel laureate in Florida, authorities said.
Police found 22-year-old Eric Hunt at a mental health treatment center in Belle Mead, N.J., where he had sought treatment within the past week for undisclosed reasons. He remained jailed Saturday night in Somerville, N.J.
Hunt faces charges of attempte
Source: Times (of London)
Feb 18, 2007
The KGB hatched a plot to smear the late Pope Pius XII as an antisemitic Hitler supporter and fostered a controversial play that tarnished the pontiff, according to the highest-ranking Soviet bloc intelligence officer to have defected to the West.
Former Lieutenant-General Ion Mihai Pacepa, who headed the Romanian secret service before defecting in 1978, has broken a silence of nearly half a century to reveal [in an article for the National Review Online January 25--link below] that
Source: Times (of London)
Feb 18, 2007
GORAZDEVAC, Kosovo/Serbia -- To the outside world, they are the bullyboys of Europe. The Serbs have a rather more romantic image of themselves; not so much Roman-style imperialists as the plucky Gauls of Asterix fame.
Like the cartoon character’s besieged village, Serbia is surrounded by enemy garrisons, according to a postcard on sale in Mitrovica. “One small country of indomitable Serbs still holds out against the invaders.”
But it is in this western corner of Kosovo,
Source: Telegraph
Feb 18, 2007
Hundreds of memorials dedicated to soldiers murdered by terrorists in Northern Ireland over the past 30 years are to be moved amid fears they will be vandalised by Irish republicans.
More than 250 memorials, including plaques, stone carvings and trees, located at more than 20 bases across Ulster will be removed to more secure locations within the province and the British mainland during the next few months.
Defence chiefs have ruled out any possibility of permanent memo
Source: Telegraph
Feb 18, 2007
SAMARRA, Iraq -- The labour would be unpaid, but the rewards in Heaven would be guaranteed.
When Iraq's Shia religious leaders issued an appeal last summer for volunteers to help rebuild the bomb-damaged wreckage of Samarra's Golden Shrine, a task force of more than 3,000 people formed almost overnight.
Yet despite the massed show of willing hands, so far not a single tile of the distinctive gold-plated dome that once dominated the city's skyline has been put back in pl
