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: NYT
Dec 16, 2006
Some of the world’s leading policy institutes announced Friday that they were breaking off relations with a group within the Iranian Foreign Ministry that organized a conference on the Holocaust in Tehran featuring discredited academics and Holocaust deniers.
In a statement, the leaders of the institutes said that the ministry’s Institute for Political and International Studies, which had served in the past “as a mainstream Iranian interface with foreign think tanks and research ins
Source: NYT
Dec 16, 2006
The Smithsonian Institution has agreed to develop a system to document and explain its decisions about why television and film producers are granted or denied access to its collections outside of a widely criticized contract the institution entered into with Showtime Networks.
The agreement was disclosed in a report issued Friday by the Government Accountability Office that rebuked the Smithsonian for failing to provide the public with sufficient details about the Showtime contract.
Source: Tennessean
Dec 15, 2006
A battle over history and property is developing high up on a ridge in West Meade.
Gene Scott, who owns four acres in the west Nashville neighborhood, brought a bulldozer up to the ridge Dec. 8 and had the driver plow through a long stretch of a stone wall.
Scott, 76, said he owns the land where that section of the wall stood, and he eventually wants to sell it.
But some neighbors and historic preservationists are fuming. They say the 4-foot-high wall wasn'
Source: Salisbury Journal (UK)
Dec 15, 2006
A PROPOSAL to run a land train as part of plans for a new £67.5m Stonehenge visitors centre has come under fire during the second week of the Salisbury public inquiry.
The aim is to use the train to transport tourists from the visitors centre to within walking distance of the ancient stones.
But the chairman of the Stonehenge Alliance, George McDonic, said the trains would conflict with both national and international policies that seek to protect the landscape around t
Source: AP
Dec 15, 2006
The chief U.N. war crimes prosecutor urged the Security Council on Friday to pressure Serbia and Bosnia to arrest fugitive leaders from the Bosnian war, saying it was clear after 11 years that neither country was willing to do so.
Successive Serbian and Bosnian governments have lacked the political will to arrest wartime political leader Radovan Karadzic and his military chief, Gen. Ratko Mladic, said Carla Del Ponte.
"My assessment remains that the Serbian gover
Source: Richard Cohen at Slate.com
Dec 15, 2006
I confess to being in the market for an expensive watch. I say I confess because I know the watch I buy for a lot of money will not be more accurate than a watch I could have bought for a lot less, but there you have it. This explains why I gave more than cursory attention to a double-page ad in the Sunday New York Times for expensive watches. One caught my eye. It seemed oversized, which is the fashion these days, and built to take a bullet or two, which is required these days, and undoubtedly
Source: Reuters
Dec 15, 2006
KENT, Ohio (Reuters) - Jerry M. Lewis has seen anti-war protests at their mightiest and most tragic. As a faculty peace marshal in 1970, he saw Ohio National Guardsmen kill four students at Kent State University during a protest against the Vietnam War.
Today, the sociology professor sees little anti-war sentiment at the liberal arts school. Iraq, he says, is a different war than Vietnam, in one big way.
"It's a pretty short explanation: D-R-A-F-T," Lewis said
Source: Toronto Globe and Mail
Dec 15, 2006
Rita Weiss has some questions she'd like to put to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Ms. Weiss was just 18 when the Nazis came to her village in Hungary in 1944, and put her entire family on a train to Auschwitz II (Birkenau) concentration camp. She lost her father, her mother, her brother and seven sisters in the gas chambers and crematoria. Of 49 relatives, she was the only survivor.
"I now ask you, Ahmadinejad, what happened to them? Where are they?" M
Source: AP
Dec 15, 2006
Not to be outdone by their husbands, the
first ladies are getting their chance to shine on the nation's coins.
Starting next year, Martha Washington, Abigail Adams and all the rest will
begin appearing on a new series of gold coins.
It will be the first time in history that the U.S. Mint has produced a
series featuring women.
While a new presidential series will be $1 circulating coins, the wives
will be on half-ounce gold coins with each likely to sell for more than
$300.
Source: Breitbart
Dec 15, 2006
Seventy years after the last streetcar vanished from the streets
of Paris, the tramway, increasingly touted as a clean, fast mass
transport solution, makes its big comeback to the capital on
Saturday.
Once criss-crossed by more than 120 tramway lines -- horse-drawn from
1855, then steam- and finally electric-powered -- Paris, like most major
European cities, was gradually seduced away by the car and underground
train, closing its last line in 1937.
Running 7.9 kilometres (4.7 mi
Source: Breitbart
Dec 15, 2006
US authorities indicted 16 former soldiers in the Bosnian Serb
military, including one who allegedly took part in the 1995
Srebrenica massacre, for hiding their past to obtain refugee
status.
Indictments issued in six states by the US Justice Department accused 15
of the 16 of fraudulently immigrating into the US by lying about their
background in Bosnian Serb military forces, the department said in a
statement.
Source: Reuters
Dec 15, 2006
Bangladesh celebrated the 35th anniversary of its independence on Saturday
amid continuing strife ahead of parliamentary elections due next month,
with rival leaders laying wreaths at a war memorial near the capital.
Bangladesh won independence from Pakistan on December 16, 1971, following
a nine-month guerrilla war which cost millions of lives.
Source: Newsletter of the National Coalition for History (NCH)
Dec 15, 2006
The bill was introduced by Congressman Robert Goodlatte (R-VA) and supported by eleven members of the Virginia Congressional delegation. The bill sought to authorize the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to make a grant contribution of an undisclosed amount at some future undisclosed date toward the establishment of the "Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library" in Staunton, Virginia.
This legislation was never subjected to the scrutiny of a congressional hear
Source: AP
Dec 15, 2006
A group of Germans kicked out of Poland after World War II want restitution for lost property, arguing in a complaint that their human rights were violated when Eastern Europe's boundaries were redrawn and they were driven from their homes.
The case has put fresh strains on German-Polish ties -- a relationship still troubled by painful memories of Nazi brutalities.
The Prussian Claims Society complaint filed with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg in Nov
Source: AP
Dec 15, 2006
A Japanese parliamentary committee approved a revised education law Thursday that would require schools to promote patriotism, part of the prime minister's efforts to distance Japan from its pacifist postwar system.
Critics have attacked the education reform as reminiscent of the pre-World War II system that encouraged children to sacrifice themselves for the emperor and nation.
The measure, a reform of Japan's 1947 education law, would call on schools to teach "
Source: Independent (UK)
Dec 15, 2006
The Government's case for going to war in Iraq has been torn apart by the publication of previously suppressed evidence that Tony Blair lied over Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
A devastating attack on Mr Blair's justification for military action by Carne Ross, Britain's key negotiator at the UN, has been kept under wraps until now because he was threatened with being charged with breaching the Official Secrets Act.
In the testimony revealed today Mr Ross
Source: Press Release -- The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
Dec 15, 2006
The author of a recent book about President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust has admitted that he wrongly portrayed two Holocaust rescue activists as draft-dodgers.
South Carolina attorney Robert N. Rosen, author of Saving the Jews: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust, has admitted that he was wrong to claim that Yitshaq Ben-Ami and Dr. Alexander Rafaeli, two leaders of the activist Bergson Group, "sat out the war in America, preferring to agitate for the overthrow o
Source: WaPo
Dec 15, 2006
He led the United States into war and saw his popularity plummet, yet some 60 years later his reputation has never been higher: It's small wonder Harry S. Truman seems to hold a special fascination for President Bush these days.
That interest came into focus recently after Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) went public with an account of a meeting last Friday in which he said the president seemed to be comparing his situation to that of Truman in the late 1940s. According to Durbin's a
Source: Columbia Journalism Review
Dec 14, 2006
It's that time of year again for the newsweeklies: Christ-as-Cover-Boy time.
Jesus, of course, is as reliably evergreen a cover subject as they come -- ever-mysterious, ever-controversial -- and one that, naturally, pops up annually on newsstands around Easter and/or Christmas. With the appearance this week of two visually similar Jesus Cover Stories (Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report), we wondered: How has the Jesus Cover Story been packaged over the years? How has it changed (o
Source: NPR (audio)
Dec 14, 2006
Two Philadelphia museums are scrambling to raise $68 million, enough money to keep a local art treasure from slipping away. If they fail to reach their goal by a Dec. 26 deadline, "The Gross Clinic," Thomas Eakins' 1875 masterpiece, will be sold to museums in Washington, D.C., and Arkansas.
The painting depicts doctors performing surgery on a boy's leg -- an unusual subject for art at the time. Dr. Samuel Gross, a world-famous Philadelphia surgeon, stands, lecturing to stu
