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
Oct 13, 2006
Historians studying newly opened Vatican archives say the material strengthens views that the future wartime pontiff, Pius XII, was a sometimes indecisive diplomat.
Scholars will have to wait years before the Holy See opens its files on Pius XII, who has been accused of failing to speak out enough against the Holocaust. But historians who have studied just a fraction of the 30,000 files from the papacy of his predecessor, Pius XI, say the material is providing insights into the ma
Source: National Security Archive
Oct 13, 2006
President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev almost achieved a deal 20 years ago at the 1986 Reykjavik summit to abolish nuclear weapons, but the agreement would have required "an exceptional level of trust" that neither side had yet developed, according to previously secret U.S. and Soviet documents posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive (www.nsarchive.org) of George Washington University and presented on October
Source: Wa Po
Oct 13, 2006
The Bush administration is one of the most disciplined in modern political history, with barely a peep heard in terms of dissenting voices.
But when some of its charter members leave the lofty confines of power, watch out.
It's almost like they wriggle free of the straitjacket, rip the masking tape off their mouths and finally feel free to reveal the inner machinations of Bush World.
Paul O'Neill was a garden-variety Treasury Secretary until he quit, later
Source: Wa Po
Oct 13, 2006
President Bush finds the world around him increasingly "unacceptable."
In speeches, statements and news conferences this year, the president has repeatedly declared a range of problems "unacceptable," including rising health costs, immigrants who live outside the law, North Korea's claimed nuclear test, genocide in Sudan and Iran's nuclear ambitions.
Bush's decision to lay down blunt new markers about the things he deems intolerable comes at an odd t
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 13, 2006
A Catholic seminary in Rome has opened its wartime archives to shed light on a notorious Austrian bishop who supported the Nazis.
Bishop Alois Hudal, who died in 1963, was the director of the Pan-Germanic College of Santa Maria dell' Anima in Rome between 1923 and 1952. The college is the main training centre in Rome for German priests.
The priest openly declared his pro-Nazi views and has been labelled the "Black Bishop" by Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter w
Source: BBC
Oct 13, 2006
Brazilian church leaders have marked the 75th birthday of one of the world's best known landmarks - Rio de Janeiro's statue of Christ the Redeemer.
The site has been formally declared a Catholic sanctuary, which means that in future it can host religious ceremonies such as weddings and baptisms.
The statue's serene gaze over the city gives little hint of the Herculean effort that went into its construction.
Over 1,000 tons of materials had to be moved
Source: Armenian News Network
Oct 13, 2006
As the French Parliament is preparing to vote on a bill to penalize the rejection of the purported Armenian genocide Thursday, the Armenian Parliament passed a similar bill this week.The parliament made a series of amendments to the Armenian Penal Code, Armenia's Yerkir News Agency said.
"Penalizing the genocide" is also among the amendments.
Terming the 1915 incidents as genocide, Yerevan set the penalty for those who "deny the genoc
Source: Philadelphia Daily News
Oct 13, 2006
Anti-homosexual slurs flew through the air, as did the gay-pride rainbow flag, during an emotionally charged meeting of the School Reform Commission yesterday. High school students, teachers and activists, some with emotion-filled voices, spoke out in support of the school district's decision to recognize October as Gay and Lesbian History Month on school calendars for the first time.Opponents said recognizing the month was an attempt by the district to indoctrinate students
Source: USA Today
Oct 13, 2006
Documents from newly opened Vatican archives indicate a hardening stance by the Holy See on European fascism years before World War II began and a push for formal U.S.-Vatican relations after a break of decades, scholars say.Historians who have studied just a fraction of the 30,000 files that were opened last month say the material also strengthens views that the future wartime pontiff, Pius XII, was a sometimes indecisive diplomat.
The files span the 1922-39 po
Source: Press Release -- NYHS
Oct 13, 2006
How did New York City of the mid-19th century capitalize on the slave-based cotton trade to emerge as the financial epicenter of America? How did New York become a veritable Confederate city, with hotels catering to Southern tastes and blackface minstrel shows playing to sold-out theaters? Who was America’s first black doctor and politician, and how did this little-known hero help inspire the abolitionist movement that was critical to bringing slavery to an end?
The New-York Hist
Source: NYT
Oct 13, 2006
The Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, whose exquisitely constructed, wistful prose explores the agonized dance between Muslims and the West and between past and present, on Thursday won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy said Mr. Pamuk’s “quest for the melancholic soul of his native city,” Istanbul, led him to discover “new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.”
Mr. Pamuk, 54, is Turkey’s best-known and be
Source: Press Release -- Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
Oct 12, 2006
On Thursday, October 12, at the Academy of American Studies, a public high school in Long Island City, students, educators, and elected officials participated in a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new Gilder Lehrman Research Center, a student-run history research center. The Academy of American Studies, the flagship school of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, is the first history high school in the U.S.
The center, located in a renovated classroom in the school, will
Source: USA Today
Oct 12, 2006
MOUNT VERNON, Va. — Forget what you think George Washington looked like — that familiar face on the dollar bill — because he didn't. In fact, the Father of Our Country was not always well served by his portraitists (or his dentists).
This becomes all the more apparent after a visit to the new Mount Vernon museum and visitors' orientation center, which opens Oct. 27 at the first president's 18th-century estate in the Virginia countryside south of the national capital named for him. I
Source: AP
Oct 12, 2006
An oak tree was still burning nearby when Margaret Hangan made her way across a wildfire-scorched landscape and spotted to her delight a set of flat-topped granite boulders that served as kitchen counters in an ancient village 2,000 years ago.
In the rocks were manmade oval depressions in which acorns were ground into flour.
"This place was happening," said Hangan, a U.S. Forest Service archaeologist. "They had water, food, grass for baskets — everything
Source: Yahoo News
Oct 12, 2006
The government's plans to give posthumous pardons to soldiers executed during World War I advanced when they were backed by parliament's upper house.Families of 306 men from Britain and the Commonwealth have been campaigning for years to clear the names of their relatives executed during the 1914-1918 conflict.
Members of the unelected House of Lords backed the plans contained in an amendment to the Armed Forces bill as it passed through the committee stage of t
Source: Reuters
Oct 12, 2006
Yahoo has dropped plans to use Mexico's Teotihuacan archaeological site for its much-hyped "time capsule" project after authorities fearing damage to the ancient ruins denied them permission.
Yahoo launched the project this week aimed at gathering text, images, video and sounds submitted by visitors from all over the world through 20 of the company's multiple-language sites.
The information was to be beamed by laser into space on Oct. 25 from the Pyramid of
Source: Times Online (UK)
Oct 12, 2006
French MPs have today approved a Bill that makes it a criminal offence to deny that Turkish massacres of Armenians in 1915-17 constituted genocide, causing embarrassment to the French Government and outrage in Turkey.
Deputies in the National Assembly voted 106-19 for the bill, which if signed into law, would punish denial with a maximum one-year prison term and a fine of up to €45,000 (£30,000).
After the vote, the French government stressed that it valued close ties
Source: AP
Oct 12, 2006
GREENFIELD, Ohio — Clad in a brown, animal-hide cover spider-webbed with cracks, the Bible gives off a musty smell as Earlene Scott gently leafs through its fragile pages yellowed with age.
The 178-year-old book gives clues about its original owners — not only names and dates of births, deaths and marriages, but also two locks of hair, a handwritten poem and several pressed leaves, possibly from a funeral floral arrangement.
Scott bought the Bible at an auction in this
Source: Independent (UK)
Oct 12, 2006
Few films in the history of cinema can claim to have had a direct impact on the real world. A movie showing in France has managed to repair a half-century of injustice even before it appeared on general release.
Indigènes tells the largely concealed story of the 300,000 Arab and north African soldiers who helped to liberate France in 1944.
In one respect, the film has already succeeded where years of complaints have failed. Last week, just before it reached the cinema,
Source: Reuters
Oct 12, 2006
A land bridge between Alaska and Siberia flooded to make
the Bering Strait 11,000 years ago, more than 1,000 years earlier than
previously thought, US researchers reported on Wednesday.
This would have closed off human migration by foot across the bridge
1,000 years earlier, too, the researchers said.
A team at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, the
Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego and the University of
Massachusetts found places on t
