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: Virginia Gazette
Dec 26, 2006
YORKTOWN The oldest customhouse in America has unearthed new history in its own backyard.
Over the last three weeks local archaeologists have uncovered handfuls of artifacts from the 18th and 19th centuries as part of a routine pre-construction archaeological dig at the Old Custom House.
Wine bottles and pottery have been found by the James River Institute for Archaeology. Crews found a bayonet from a British Brown Bess Musket believed to have been used during the Rev
Source: AP
Dec 26, 2006
In a span of a few hours, 2,973 people were killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In a span of 45 months, the number of American troops killed in Iraq exceeded that grim toll as the war continues.
The milestone in Iraq came on Christmas, nearly four years after the war began, according to a count by The Associated Press.
The U.S. military on Tuesday announced the deaths of six more American soldiers, pushing the U.S. military death toll since the beginning o
Source: LAT
Dec 26, 2006
The tip came in an e-mail from the home office in Los Angeles, the headquarters of a human rights organization that promotes tolerance around the world.
It sent Efraim Zuroff and an informal network of associates on a hunt from Jerusalem to Scotland to Hungary. In Budapest, they found the subject of their search: Sandor Kepiro, a frail old man living quietly across the street from a synagogue.
Zuroff wanted him thrown in jail for crimes committed in 1942. It didn't mat
Source: Northern Echo (Darlington, County Durham) (UK)
Dec 26, 2006
A First World War soldier who was shot for cowardice is to be formally recognised on a war memorial.
Private Harry Farr of the 2nd Battalion Yorkshire Regiment was shot in October 1916 for cowardice despite suffering severe shell shock.
Pte Farr was one of 306 soldiers shot for military offences during the conflict. His was one of several cases highlighted by The Northern Echo and, after years of campaigning, all have now received pardons from the Government.
Source: This Is London/Evening Standard
Dec 25, 2006
History lessons for 13-year-olds blacken the name of Winston Churchill and promote the Kama Sutra, it is claimed.
Leading historians accused curriculum chiefs of adopting an "anti-British" stance and misquoting the revered former Prime Minister.
They said new teaching packs on the British Empire were grossly unsuitable for their intended audience of 13 and 14-year-olds since they directed pupils to a sexually-explicit internet edition of the Kama Sutra.
Source: Cox News Services (in Midland, Tex., Reporter-Telegram),
Dec 25, 2006
When it comes to presidential legacy, the current George W. claims to have learned the lessons of the original George W.
Earlier this year, gazing at an Oval Office portrait of George Washington, President Bush, unprompted, offered this thought:
"The important thing about him is that I read three or four books about him last year. Isn't that interesting? People say 'So what?' Well, here's the 'so what.' You never know what your history is going to be until long
Source: This Is London/Evening Standard
Dec 25, 2006
An Ofsted [Office for Standards in Education] report found that many pupils wanted to drop British history and focus on world events
Historians have raised fears that A-level history will be "dumbed down" after teachers called for a new course with more film and TV for less academic teenagers.
An Ofsted report found that many pupils wanted to drop British history and focus on world events, which they said would be more useful for their future careers.
Source: International Herald Tribune
Dec 25, 2006
OBIHIRO, Japan -- It was one of the last contests of the day at the draft- horse racetrack in this rural corner of Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost main island.
The spotlights glimmered in the snow-streaked evening sky as the gamblers, who had been inside huddling around portable kerosene heaters, took their spots alongside the track. The gates opened, and 10 huge draft horses, each weighing about a ton and pulling an iron sled just as heavy, rumbled forward as the jockeys urged them
Source: NYT
Dec 25, 2006
OSLO, Dec. 24 — The University of Oslo has decided to move three grand Viking ships, probably by truck and barge, to a new museum across town despite dire claims that the thousand-year-old oak vessels could fall apart en route.
A retired curator of Oslo’s Viking Ship Museum said the delicately preserved ships, two of which are nearly 80 feet long, were almost equal in archaeological importance to the Pyramids.
“Even if I have to live till I am 100, I will go on fighting
Source: NYT
Dec 25, 2006
In a sign of how badly German-Polish relations have frayed in recent months, a long-shot lawsuit by an obscure German claims group has prompted Poland to call into question a treaty meant to settle forever the borders between the countries.
The Polish foreign minister, Anna Fotyga, raised doubts about the treaty in a radio interview last Tuesday, a week after a group representing Germans expelled from present-day Poland after World War II filed suit at the European Court of Human Ri
Source: NYT
Dec 25, 2006
President Bush marched into his year-end news conference last week with the usual zip in his step. As always, he professed little worry about his legacy or the polls. As always, he said the United States would win in Iraq. The nation might despair, but not Mr. Bush; his presidential armor seemed firmly intact.
Yet a longtime friend of Mr. Bush’s recently spotted a tiny crack in that armor. “He looked tired, for the first time, which I hadn’t seen before,” this friend said.
Source: AP
Dec 24, 2006
Preliminary forensic tests conducted on the mummified body of 14th century prince found the 7-year-old may not have been poisoned by an uncle, as historians have suspected for centuries, a newspaper reported Saturday.
The preliminary tests indicated that Prince Sancho de Castilla may have died in 1370 of a lung infection after chronic exposure to smoke, likely to have come from a fireplace, El Pais reported.
Source: Times Online (UK)
Dec 24, 2006
IT WAS the night before Christmas and Ebenezer Scrooge was facing a succession of supernatural terrors; or, as the latest medical thinking would have it, he was succumbing to a brain disease so obscure that doctors would not give it a name for another 150 years.
A pair of medico-literary sleuths claimed last week to have tracked down the illness that haunted Scrooge. They concluded that Charles Dickens brilliantly observed the symptoms in A Christmas Carol.
Robert Cha
Source: NYT
Dec 24, 2006
THE predicament: A president wants to end an unpopular war. A potential solution: Negotiate with enemies.
The question confronts President Bush today, in the case of Iraq. The question challenged President Richard Nixon in 1972, when he and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, secretly arranged a summit meeting with Leonid I. Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, in the hope that a grand bargain with Moscow might help the United States negotiate an end to the war in Vietnam.
Source: NYT
Dec 24, 2006
Gen. Augusto Pinochet died this month without ever being held legally accountable for human rights abuses that occurred during his dictatorship. But his subordinates are now facing a new threat: President Michelle Bachelet is pushing to invalidate an amnesty law that for nearly 30 years has exempted them from prosecution on murder and torture charges.
General Pinochet originally decreed the amnesty in April 1978, four and a half years after he seized power in the coup that overthrew
Source: NYT
Dec 24, 2006
Maybe it was just a Freudian slip. Or a case of hiding in plain sight.
Either way, Sigmund Freud, scribbling in the pages of a Swiss hotel register, appears to have left the answer to a question that has titillated scholars for much of the last century: Did he have an affair with his wife’s younger sister, Minna Bernays?
Rumors of a romantic liaison between Freud and his sister-in-law, who lived with the Freuds, have long persisted, despite staunch denials by Freud loya
Source: AP
Dec 23, 2006
Within weeks of Hitler's 1933 rise to power, the iron gates slammed shut on inmates of the first Nazi concentration camps. It was the start of an unparalleled experiment in persecution and genocide that expanded over the next 12 years into a pyramid of ghettos, Gestapo prisons, slave labor camps and, ultimately, extermination factories.
Holocaust historians are only now piecing together the scattered research in many languages to understand the vast scope of the camps, prisons and p
Source: AP
Dec 23, 2006
LIMA, Peru -- Heavy rains damaged several adobe walls in the ancient ruins of Chan Chan, the world's largest mud city on Peru's northern coast, the newspaper El Comercio reported Saturday.
An unusual downpour Friday morning saturated the top seven inches of the walls in a southern portion of the ruins and penetrated the sides, Cristobal Campana, the director of the archaeological site, told the newspaper.
With more rains expected in the usually arid coastal de
Source: BBC
Dec 23, 2006
Japan's Emperor Akihito has said the practice of mourning Japan's war dead can help younger generations better understand the past.
He said he hoped facts about World War II would be correctly conveyed so the suffering his generation experienced would never be repeated.
The emperor's comments came in a speech marking his 73rd birthday.
Correspondents say teaching Japan's wartime history and remembering the war dead is still highly controversial.
Source: LAT
Dec 23, 2006
MONTEREY -- A classic struggle is playing out here in the first capital of California, and it's anyone's guess who the victor will be: God or nature.
On one side stands San Carlos Borromeo de Monterey, believed to be the oldest continuously functioning church in California, completed in 1794. On the other, a small stand of stately redwood trees, whose roots have made their way through the chapel's foundation and threaten its survival.
For this clash of California icons,
