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: Ralph Luker at HNN blog, Cliopatria
Jan 1, 2007
Hoary myths about slavery in the American South survive, even as the year 2007 dawns across the world....
On H-Slavery, inquiries about the popular notion that slaves made quilts encoded with signals about the"underground railroad" appear with some regularity. In late 2005, a faculty member in Communications at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, inqui
Source: LAT
Jan 1, 2007
ANN ARBOR, MICH. — If David A. Horrocks could point to a favorite historical gem housed inside the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, it would be this: a single sheet of paper, outlining a 1975 senior staff meeting.
Ford had called the aides into the Oval Office to iron out key staff changes.
Donald H. Rumsfeld would become secretary of Defense. Dick Cheney would be named chief of staff. George H.W. Bush would "replace Bill Colby at CIA."
"
Source: Indo-Asian News Service
Jan 1, 2007
The Rajasthan government has sought the help of academicians to rewrite the history of all villages, towns and cities of the state.
Historians will probe and verify the history of all 41,000 villages and 186 cities and towns of the state after talking to the village heads and elders. The project is called "Aapno Dharti, Aapno Log" (our land, our people).
"We have decided to launch the project on Jan 4," State Education Minister Ghanshyam Tiwari told
Source: WaPo
Jan 1, 2007
On sunny afternoons in the German capital, heads swivel skyward as a throwback DC-3 airplane rumbles overhead on its way to Tempelhof airport, just as it did six decades ago during the military operation that kept half of a divided and broken city alive at the start of the Cold War.
These days, the restored Candy Bomber -- one of the Allied aircraft beloved by West Berlin's children for dropping bags of chocolate and raisins from the skies, as well as delivering hundreds of thousand
Source: AP
Jan 1, 2007
... Americans may question this war for many reasons, but their doubts often find voice in the count of U.S. war deaths. An overwhelming majority — 84 percent — worry that the war is causing too many casualties, according to a September poll by the nonpartisan research group Public Agenda.
The country largely kept the faith during World War II, even as about 400,000 U.S. forces died — 20,000 just in the monthlong Battle of the Bulge. Before turning against the wars in Korea and Viet
Source: Guardian
Jan 1, 2007
AWJA, Iraq -- Pledging revenge, hundreds of mourners flocked to Saddam Hussein's tomb in his home village in northern Iraq on Sunday, where the ousted leader was buried in private after being hanged for crimes against humanity.
In an outpouring of grief and anger from Saddam's fellow Sunni Arabs at the Shia-led government that rushed through the execution, mourners knelt and prayed by the tomb in Awja over which the Iraqi flag had been draped.
Sectarian passions that h
Source: Guardian
Dec 31, 2006
American and Iraqi government investigators tracing hundreds of millions of pounds missing from Saddam Hussein's illicit fortune are hoping to question members of the former dictator's close family.
Officials from the FBI, the American Treasury and the State Department particularly want to find £2.2bn in illegal profits that Saddam's regime is alleged to have earned from 2000-2003 from an oil-for-trade pact signed with Syria that was outside the official United Nations administered
Source: AP
Dec 31, 2006
ATHENS, Greece -- Unlike its larger, postcard-perfect neighbors in the Aegean Sea, Keros is a tiny rocky dump inhabited by a single goatherd. But the barren islet was of major importance to the mysterious Cycladic people, a sophisticated pre-Greek civilization with no written language that flourished 4,500 years ago and produced strikingly modern-looking artwork.
A few miles from the resorts of Mykonos and Santorini, Keros is a repository of art from the seafaring culture whose fla
Source: AP
Dec 31, 2006
ANKARA, Turkey -- When political science professor Atilla Yayla questioned the legacy of the revered founder of modern Turkey, nationalists called him a traitor and his university suspended him.
Yayla said he was punished for shattering a taboo: daring to criticize Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a leader so idolized that his portrait hangs in all government offices, life stops for a minute every year on the anniversary of his death 68 years ago, and his ideas are still the republic's most
Source: AP
Dec 31, 2006
SCOTIA, California -- Along with the scent of freshly cut redwood, an air of uncertainty hangs over this idyllic Northern California logging town.
Mel Berti feels it from behind the butcher counter at Hoby's Market, where he has greeted lumber mill workers and their families by name for three decades.
Nodding toward the tidy streets and rows of whitewashed bungalows outside, he wonders what the Scotia he knows will look like in another 10 years — now that its days as a
Source: NYT
Dec 31, 2006
LYNDON JOHNSON in 1973. Richard Nixon in 1994. Ronald Reagan in 2004.
The last three former presidents to die dominated the world stage. They bent history to their will, for better or worse, and became the subjects of a crowded shelf of biographies. For the writers of memorials and obituaries, they were easy.
Not so Gerald R. Ford, who served only 29 months, never won a national election, and was constricted by an overwhelmingly hostile Congress. He is remembered mainly
Source: NYT
Dec 31, 2006
KARAGANDA, Kazakhstan — Maria Sadina hunched over fading pictures of her parents, ethnic Germans who were deported in 1941 from the Volga region in Russia to one of Karaganda’s many gulag camps.
Ms. Sadina’s father was imprisoned for praising the quality of a German-made tractor, and for a decade he worked as a slave laborer in the nearby coal mines. Her mother was sent to the Karaganda gulag simply for her German heritage.
They had married and reared their daughter, Ms
Source: NYT
Dec 31, 2006
Saddam Hussein is one of the few modern leaders to have been tried and executed for his crimes and other abuses of power. Most dictators of the past century have died of natural causes at home or in comfortable exile — or at the hands of assassins.
But with trials of former leaders becoming more common in the past decade, there are other distinguishing features in the Hussein case: he was the first former leader to be tried by a domestic court for crimes against humanity — a crime e
Source: NYT
Dec 31, 2006
NASHVILLE, Dec. 30 — In the anxious countdown to New Year’s Eve, clubs inventory their stockpiles of liquor and champagne, party hosts check and recheck invitation lists, and frantic revelers cast about for the most promising party destinations.
But in many black churches across the country, midnight on Dec. 31 marks the culmination of a far different observance. In a tradition with roots in the Civil War and a nod to the days of slavery, many black Americans spend New Year’s Eve in
Source: NYT
Dec 31, 2006
WILLIAMSBURG, Va. — The old mahogany furniture is shrouded in white dust covers, and the espaliered gardens overlooking the James River have gone to seed. Colonial Williamsburg is selling Carter’s Grove, an imposing 18th-century Georgian mansion and one of the most renowned plantations in Virginia.
Colin Campbell, Williamsburg’s chairman and president, said he had tried to interest other preservation groups in the property, with no luck. And so the 400-acre riverfront residence, clo
Source: NYT
Dec 31, 2006
NORTHPORT, N.Y. — The King of the Beats was already a literary celebrity when he moved with his mother, Gabrielle, to this Long Island harbor town in 1958, but the locals remember him mainly as a broke barfly who padded about barefoot or in bedroom slippers.
“He never had any money, so he’d get your ear till you bought him a drink, always Schenley’s whiskey,” Bob Reid, a 69-year-old clammer, recalled of Jack Kerouac’s six years here, much of them spent in Murphy’s, a salty bar overl
Source: NYT
Dec 31, 2006
It has been a while since America drew its face close to Betty Ford. But what the nation saw this week here in Southern California — an impossibly tiny face, lips pinched in grief and eyes blinking in the harsh midday sun — served as a poignant reminder of the woman whose reign as first lady, while brief and wholly unexpected, was among the most remarkable in modern history.
Former President Gerald R. Ford’s death on Tuesday at the age of 93 thrust Mrs. Ford back into a public spotl
Source: NYT
Dec 31, 2006
After a slow journey past the touchstones of his political life, Gerald R. Ford was brought to a place of honor Saturday under the Capitol dome, where a crowd of dignitaries gathered to commemorate the man whose presidency encompassed one of the most tumultuous periods of American history.
Many of Mr. Ford’s most prominent protégés came to mourn him, remembering the era of political unity, however brief, he oversaw after the Watergate scandal. Vice President Dick Cheney, who served
Source: AP
Dec 30, 2006
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. -- President Gerald Ford's death is expected to spark renewed interest in his life and draw more visitors to his presidential library and museum in Michigan.
Unlike other presidential centers, Ford's library and museum are divided between sites in Grand Rapids, where he grew up, and Ann Arbor, where he attended the University of Michigan in the 1930s.
A museum holding artifacts from his life sits on a scenic, 20-acre patch of downtown Grand Rapids
Source: AP
Dec 30, 2006
In a city that lost several beloved institutions in 2006, the sound coming out of Chicago's jazz scene is providing a year-end coda no one wants to hear.
The Jazz Showcase, this jazz-drenched city's oldest club dedicated to the musical form and the second-oldest U.S. jazz venue after New York's Village Vanguard, is closing its doors this weekend after 59 years.
A New Year's Eve "last blast" featuring saxophonist David "Fathead" Newman and Henry Johns
