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: Los Angeles Times
Jan 29, 2007
THE year was 1915. War and privation had come to Germany. Meanwhile, in Berlin, a solitary man struggled with the equations for a new theory of gravity.
"I have been laboring inhumanly," Albert Einstein, then 36, wrote to a friend in his native German. "I am quite overworked."
His fellow scientists, he complained in a letter contained in a newly published collection of his personal correspondence, were behaving abominably, either "trying to pok
Source: New York Times
Jan 29, 2007
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. -- More times than he remembers, La’Markus Cook has traveled south on Interstate 65 from Nashville, where he attends American Baptist College, to his home outside Montgomery, Ala. But never, he said, as he did this weekend.
Air brakes hissing and motors rumbling, four buses retraced segments of the 1961 Freedom Rides on Saturday and Sunday, giving students aboard a front-seat view of a pivotal moment in civil rights history. On the rides 46 years ago, activists arme
Source: Washington Times
Jan 29, 2007
DALLAS -- The suburban house where Lee Harvey Oswald spent the night before he shot President John F. Kennedy and where he stored his mail-order rifle may be made into a museum, according to officials in Irving.
"My idea is to first look at the property and see if there's an opportunity there," said Irving Mayor Herbert Gears.
City staffers have had informal discussions on how -- and whether -- to proceed, since the local press mentioned the possibility earlie
Source: The Independent
Jan 29, 2007
MADRID -- Cesare Borgia, son of Rodrigo Borgia - Pope Alexander VI - brother of Lucrezia, a serial murderer by his early twenties, whose family name has long been a byword for corruption, greed and violence, is to be rehabilitated in the northern Spanish town where he died.
The family was originally Spanish - "the Borjas" - and, in Viana in Navarra, where Cesare fell in battle in 1507, a campaign is afoot to recycle this symbol of Catholic depravity as a local hero.
Source: Telegraph
Jan 29, 2007
One of Britain's most notorious traitors was tricked into staying in exile in Moscow by a Government that knew it had insufficient evidence to convict him of espionage. Guy Burgess could have come home untouched by British justice whenever he wanted despite having worked within the Establishment for almost two decades as a Soviet agent.
Formerly top secret Cabinet documents discovered by The Daily Telegraph show that Harold Macmillan, then prime minister, organised a top-level cover
Source: AP
Jan 29, 2007
[The Smithsonian Institution's joint TV unit with Showtime Networks Inc., slated to launch in April,] is set to announce Monday about a half-dozen of its initial 60 programs, including a co-production deal with the BBC's flagship "Timewatch" history series and documentaries focusing on the Smithsonian's treasured artifacts.
David Royle, executive vice president for programming and production at Smithsonian Networks, said the goal is to do more than "merely museum tele
Source: DPA (German Press Agency)
Jan 29, 2007
TAIPEI -- Taiwan has revised its high-school history textbook to show that Taiwan is an independent country, not part of China, a newspaper reported Monday.
The China Times said that under the order of the Education Ministry, the title of the national history textbook for high school to be used after the winter vacation has been changed from 'National History' to 'China History.'
In this textbook, terms like 'our country,' 'this country' and 'the mainland' have been cha
Source: Newsday
Jan 28, 2007
The area of Long Island that would become synonymous with suburbia was farmland on the edge of the Hempstead Plains until William J. Levitt arrived in 1947 to build the development that shares his surname.
Levitt, then 40, broke ground for the first of the 17,000 homes that would pop up on 1,000 acres of potato farms 15 miles east of New York City on July 1, 1947. He earned his nickname as "the Henry Ford of Housing" by building fast, using mass-production techniques. By b
Source: BBC News
Jan 28, 2007
Khaled Mahameed admits his museum, in Nazareth in northern Israel, is small. But he believes it is unique.
According to Mr Mahameed, it is the first and only Arab run centre for promoting the study of the Holocaust.
The museum contains a collection of just 60 photographs depicting the genocide with Arabic captions explaining the scenes. The pictures were purchased from Yad Vashem - the Israeli national Holocaust memorial.
Mr Mahameed firmly believes that it
Source: Press Trust of India
Jan 28, 2007
NEW DELHI -- To counter the official version of history, the CPI(M) [Community Party of India] has decided to trace the events from 1857 Sepoy Mutinee to India's independence through party organs like 'People's Democracy'.
The party, supporting the UPA [United Progress Alliance, the ruling] coalition from outside, also asked the government today to take "corrective measures" to portray the people's participation in the freedom struggle -- ranging from the Battle of Plass
Source: AP
Jan 28, 2007
NEW YORK -- The museum planned for the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York should include a memorial to workers who died after becoming ill during recovery and cleanup, two state lawmakers said.
Assemblyman Michael Gianaris and Senator Martin Golden said Sunday they would introduce legislation to ensure those workers are recognized.
"We want to tell the story of the 9/11 workers who rushed here to help put the city back on its feet, who got sick because
Source: http://www.ynetnews.com
Jan 28, 2007
Former US President Jimmy Carter once complained there were "too many Jews" on the government's Holocaust Memorial Council, Monroe Freedman, the council's former executive director, told WND in an exclusive interview.
Freedman, who served on the council during Carter's term as president, also revealed a noted Holocaust scholar who was a Presbyterian Christian was rejected from the council's board by Carter's office because the scholar's name "sounded too Jewish."
Source: AP
Jan 28, 2007
WASHINGTON — The Rev. Robert Drinan, a Jesuit who -- over the objections of his superiors -- became the first Roman Catholic priest to serve as a voting member of Congress, died Sunday.
Drinan, 86, had suffered from pneumonia and congestive heart failure during the previous 10 days, according to a statement by Georgetown University...
An internationally known human-rights advocate, Drinan represented Massachusetts in the U.S. House for 10 years during the turbulent 1970
Source: AP
Jan 28, 2007
Egypt is scoffing at a global contest to name the new seven wonders of the world, saying it is a disgrace that the ancient Pyramids of Giza — the only surviving structure from the traditional list of architectural marvels — must compete for a spot.
Top Egyptian officials have criticized the popular contest that urges people around the world to vote for their top sites from a list of 21 finalists that lumps the pyramids with upstart wonders like the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Towe
Source: AP
Jan 28, 2007
OSWIECIM, Poland -- Dozens of people who lived near Auschwitz and risked their lives to help inmates at the Nazi death camp were honored Saturday on the 62nd anniversary of the camp's liberation.
At a ceremony outside the site, Holocaust survivors and local residents listened to a letter from President Lech Kaczynski in which he said that the world has underestimated the determination of people outside the camp to save prisoners.
"World public opinion has often hel
Source: AP
Jan 28, 2007
HANOI, Vietnam -- A bowl of noodle soup for breakfast was beyond the dreams of most people back in the days before Vietnam's economic reforms...
These memories pour back at an exhibit at Hanoi's Museum of Ethnology titled "Thoi Bao Cap" -- the Subsidized Period...
The show has drawn record crowds and earned praise for its frank depiction of the shortcomings of the past, when the government micromanaged even the smallest economic transactions, consumer goods we
Source: AP
Jan 28, 2007
BEIRUT, Lebanon -- At a makeshift roadblock of iron bars and car tires, a masked gatekeeper shines a flashlight into the driver's eyes and asks: Where do you live?
In Lebanon, even that's a disturbing question.
It dredges up all the ghosts the country had hoped were banished for good: factions clawing for the upper hand, and freelance thugs demanding home addresses to see if the neighborhood is an ally or enemy in Lebanon's patchwork of religious and political loyalties
Source: Independent (UK)
Jan 28, 2007
Its archives hold the Magna Carta, Beatles manuscripts and the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. Visitors to its fabled reading room in the British Museum included Karl Marx, Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens and George Bernard Shaw. But the future of the British Library as a world-class, free resource is under threat fromplansto cut up to 7 per cent of its £100m budget in this year's Treasury spending round.
To survive, the library proposes to slash opening hours by more than a third a
Source: NYT
Jan 28, 2007
HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON dashed to Iowa this weekend to hang an open-for-business sign on her new campaign operation. Barack Obama is besieged by admirers begging to join his team. And John Edwards has already dipped his toes into each of Iowa’s 99 counties — and started his second lap.
So is the Democratic stable too full for a dark horse presidential candidate to emerge?
The current thinking suggests that only famous candidates, Democrat or Republican, can seize their p
Source: Dorothy Samuels on the editorial page of the NYT
Jan 28, 2007
The news reports that President Bush’s representatives seem to be closing in on a deal to put a half-billion-dollar presidential library and policy institute at Southern Methodist University in Dallas has inspired the predictable lame jokes and references to “The Pet Goat.”
But the project raises issues that are no laughing matter, touching on the writing of history, the university’s scholarly mission, governmental integrity and the rule of law.
S.M.U.’s negotiations re
