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: AP
Dec 30, 2006
A historic church in the seaside city of Steinbeck can cut down four redwood trees that are damaging the structure, city officials said.
The roots from the 100-foot trees have grown into the foundation and crumbling sandstone walls of San Carlos Cathedral. Church officials also said the trees threatened an adjacent property, which contains pottery remnants and other artifacts dating back centuries to Monterey's early days.
"I will be granting their request to remov
Source: AP
Dec 30, 2006
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina -- A key witness in a human rights trial stemming from Argentina's military dictatorship was found beaten Friday, two days after he went missing.
Luis Gerez, who has accused a former police chief of torturing him during the 1966-73 dictatorship, was found by a police patrol in a street of Garin, a town just north of Buenos Aires, said Leon Arslanian, the Buenos Aires security minister.
A friend who spoke to Gerez at a hospital, Alberto Fernande
Source: Deutsche Presse
Dec 30, 2006
Disputes over history are the biggest contributing factor to friction between Japan and China, coming in ahead of economic rivalry and China's rise as an Asian power in a poll released Saturday.
More than 900 people in seven Asian countries were queried for The Straits Times-Asia News Network (ANN) poll on the state of relations between the two countries.
Disagreements over history were identified by 54 per cent of those polled as the major sticking point. Economic ri
Source: NYT
Dec 30, 2006
WASHINGTON, Dec. 29 — This supremely political city has a keen sense of history and its uses. So, not surprisingly, it also has a thing for memorials: marble, granite and otherwise. Six presidents and seven wars have monumental tributes in or near downtown Washington.
But presidents are not the only people so honored. Ground was broken for the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial on the Mall six weeks ago, and Congress has approved a monument to Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox” of the Car
Source: NYT
Dec 30, 2006
The hanging death of Saddam Hussein tonight ended the life of one of the most brutal tyrants in recent history and negated the fiction that he himself maintained even as the gallows loomed— that he remained president of Iraq despite being toppled by the American military and that his power and his palaces would be restored to him in time.
The despot, known universally as Saddam, had oppressed Iraq for more than 30 years, unleashing devastating regional wars and reducing his once pro
Source: NYT
Dec 30, 2006
After the hanging, the body remains.
While the verdict and death sentence for Saddam Hussein were swift and unambiguous, it was much less clear on Saturday what would be done with his body.
Privately, both American and Iraqi officials say that the subject has been raised at the highest levels, but no decisions have been made. There is wide disagreement on the subject of his body, according to interviews with several top Western and Iraqi officials, nearly all of whom in
Source: NYT
Dec 30, 2006
Call it “The Supreme Court: The Missing Years.” A small team of legal historians is wrapping up the work of reconstructing the Supreme Court’s first decade, a period largely lost to history due to poor official records, misleading contemporaneous accounts and the fire that burned the Capitol, where the Supreme Court was located, in the War of 1812.
The task figured to be a challenge, but no one realized just how daunting it would be when the Supreme Court Historical Society conceive
Source: NYT
Dec 30, 2006
This year’s annual gathering of Gerald R. Ford administration alumni took place in June at the National Archives, where graying former officials socialized near a display of the Constitution.
Mingling with the retirees were two men still very much in power: Dick Cheney and Donald H. Rumsfeld, each of whom had served under Mr. Ford as White House chief of staff.
The setting had an apt symbolism. Since taking office as part of the Bush administration in 2001, both Vice Pr
Source: AP
Dec 29, 2006
Some ended up in prison, others were butchered at the hands of their own people. A lucky few lived out their days in comfortable exile or in positions of privilege in the lands they ruled. India's independence leader Mohandas K. Gandhi said dictators "can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall."
That hasn't always proven true. Russia's Josef Stalin, North Korea's Kim Il-Sung, China's Mao Zedong, Spain's Francisco Franco, Albania's Enver Hoxha and Syria's Hafez A
Source: UKTV
Dec 29, 2006
An Ofsted report suggesting that many pupils find history teaching too hard has caused consternation among historians.
Historians have expressed fears that history in schools is being "dumbed down" following calls for courses in schools to focus on world events.
A report from schools inspectorate Ofsted discovered that large numbers of pupils would rather concentrate on current events than British history and teachers have called for courses to include more film and
Source: Richard Ben-Veniste in the WaPo
Dec 29, 2006
[The writer, former chief of the Watergate Task Force of the Watergate Special Prosecutor's Office, is a partner in the Washington office of Mayer, Brown, Rowe and Maw.]
Upon taking office as president, Gerald Ford gave reason to believe that any decision regarding a pardon for his predecessor would be made carefully and deliberately. Nineteen days after taking the oath of office, he responded to a press inquiry about a possible Nixon pardon, saying that until any legal process was
Source: HNN summary of NBC report. Story: "Ford shared his feelings about Republican party"
Dec 29, 2006
NBC Nightly News reported this evening that Gerald Ford made disparaging remarks about Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in interviews with Michael Beschloss in the mid-1990s. The network played tapes from the interviews. Ford said he was disappointed Reagan had declined to campaign for him in 1976 in several key states, saying this cost him the election. Ford said he knew for a fact that both Barbara and George H.W. Bush supported abortion rights and was sad to see he wasn't braver in resist
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Dec 29, 2006
The 300th birthday of Great Britain is to pass next year without any major celebrations.
January 16 sees the tricentenary of the Act of Union which merged the parliaments of England and Scotland in 1707.
Historians consider it one of the most important events in the nation's history, laying the foundations for imperial expansion a century later.
Source: BBC
Dec 29, 2006
The achievements of Scottish emigrants should be celebrated in a national museum, according to the SNP [Scottish Nationalist Party].
The party has called for a new museum to be created in Edinburgh to record the accomplishments of Scots such as philanthropist Andrew Carnegie.
SNP Lothians MSP Kenny MacAskill said there were up to 80 million people across the world who claimed to be of Scottish descent.
Source: Guardian
Dec 29, 2006
Defence chiefs warned seven years before the Falklands War that the islands would be almost impossible to defend in the event of an Argentine invasion, according to official papers made public.
Files released to the National Archives in Kew, west London, under the 30-year rule show that in 1975 Defence Secretary Roy Mason urged Prime Minister Harold Wilson to seek a "political solution" to the long-running dispute over the islands.
A Ministry of Defence briefi
Source: scotsman.com
Dec 29, 2006
HAROLD Wilson warned that an independence struggle by paramilitaries in Northern Ireland would unleash an "apocalyptic" bloodbath, plunging the UK into civil war.
The Labour prime minister made the dramatic prediction in previously secret documents released under the 30-year rule.
But other Whitehall files showed that, despite Mr Wilson's fears, the British government considered creating an independent Northern Ireland anyway.
In 1976, both the
Source: Reuters
Dec 29, 2006
LONDON - Four men will appear in a central London court on Friday on extradition warrants from Rwanda where they are wanted on charges of taking part in the 1994 genocide in which more than 800,000 minority Tutsis were slaughtered.
Police said the men, all in their 40s and 50s, were arrested at their homes in coordinated raids in various parts of the country and were being held in a central London police station.
Source: BBC
Dec 29, 2006
Britain will settle its World War II debts to the US and Canada when it pays two final instalments before the close of 2006, the Treasury has said.
The payments of $83.25m (£42.5m) to the US and US$22.7m (£11.6m) to Canada are the last of 50 instalments since 1950.
The amount paid back is nearly double that loaned in 1945 and 1946.
"This week we finally honour in full our commitments to the US and Canada for the support they gave us 60 years ago,&
Source: BBC
Dec 29, 2006
A former police officer who is alleged to have been a leader of a far-right death squad in Argentina during the 1970s has been arrested in Spain.
Rodolfo Almiron was detained near Valencia on a warrant to face murder charges in Argentina.
He is a suspected member of Triple A, the anti-communist alliance that operated under the governments of Juan Peron and then his widow Isabel.
Source: NYT
Dec 29, 2006
Irish authorities were aware of three separate death threats against President John F. Kennedy when he visited Ireland in 1963, five months before his assassination in Dallas, according to government papers released in Dublin on Friday.
Two threats came in anonymous telephone messages to the police saying President Kennedy would be killed during the three-day visit, and a third was received by the news desk at a major newspaper group, Ireland’s Department of Justice said in declassi
