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: Times (London)
Aug 20, 2006
Bonnie Prince Charlie’s defeat at Culloden should be a cause for national celebration instead of collective wailing and gnashing of teeth, one of Britain’s leading historians has advised Scots.Dan Snow, presenter of the BBC’s Battlefield Britain series, said that the most famous defeat on Scottish soil was good for the country. He condemned Scottish nationalists for using the result to promote anti-English hatred.
For many Scots it will be the ultimate heresy bu
Source: Wa Po
Aug 20, 2006
Spread across the Smithsonian's 18 museums, nine research centers and the National Zoo are 13 million photographs. In the hallways and laboratories are about 700 collections of photos. Harnessing them into a form that gives researchers and the public some access has long been a goal for Smithsonian caretakers.
But like a lot of things at the Smithsonian, you had to know where to go to find what you were looking for. Some photos were locked away in the researchers' storehouses.
Source: CDNN
Aug 20, 2006
The ocean has revealed a secret 120 years old on the most remote island in the Hawaiian chain. In July, state workers happened upon the wreck of the full-rigged ship Dunotter Castle, vintage Falls of Clyde, in 25 feet of crystal clear water off Kure Atoll, the last island beyond Midway.
The wreck made headlines in 1886 after seven survivors sailed 52 days and 1,200 miles in an open boat and were picked up off Kaua'i. A voyage to rescue crew members remaining on Kure set out the next
Source: Baltimore Sun
Aug 20, 2006
Harpers Ferry, W.Va -- Retracing early path of civil rights group
The elderly woman sat in the shade, painstakingly penning her autograph onto yet another program.
Precisely 100 hundred years ago, in almost the exact spot, her grandfather, W.E.B. Du Bois, spoke words that electrified the civil rights movement at a historic meeting that many people have never heard of.
"We will not be satisfied to take one jot or tittle less than ou
Source: Wa Po
Aug 20, 2006
For more than 60 years, they kept their military secrets locked deep inside and lived quiet lives as account executives, college professors, business consultants and the like.
The brotherhood of P.O. Box 1142 enjoyed no homecoming parades, no VFW reunions, no embroidered ball caps and no regaling of wartime stories to grandchildren sitting on their knees.
Almost no one, not even their wives, in many cases, knew the place in history held by the men of Fort Hunt, alluded
Source: Deborah Nelson and Nick Turse in the LA Times
Aug 20, 2006
In early 1973, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Creighton Abrams received some bad news from the service's chief of criminal investigations.
An internal inquiry had confirmed an officer's widely publicized charge that members of the 173rd Airborne Brigade had tortured detainees in Vietnam.
But there was a silver lining: Investigators had also compiled a 53-page catalog of alleged discrepancies in retired Lt. Col. Anthony B. Herbert's public accounts of his war experiences.
Source: NYT
Aug 20, 2006
Lydia, Duchess of Bedford, an English aristocrat who helped transform Woburn Abbey, her second husband’s ancestral home in Bedfordshire, into a pioneering and satisfyingly lucrative example of blueblood tourism, died July 25 in Chertsey, Surrey, England. She was 88.
Her death came after she was injured in a fall, said Paul de Fraine, personal assistant to the present duke.
After inheriting Woburn Abbey in 1953, with its staggering estate taxes and annual heating bills o
Source: NYT
Aug 20, 2006
LA PLATA, Argentina, Aug. 14 — The horrific events under a military dictatorship — murders, kidnappings, torture, rapes, the abduction and sale of infants — had gone unpunished for nearly 30 years. But last year Argentina’s Supreme Court overturned a pair of amnesty laws, and now the trials of military and police officials accused of human rights violations are finally under way.In late June, the first trial, involving a police commissioner general named Miguel Etchecolatz,
Source: NYT
Aug 20, 2006
Two books on Lincoln and one on polio. Oh, and a Camus novel. It was “The Stranger” that caught everyone’s attention when the White House told of the books that President Bush was taking to Texas on his ranch vacation. Last year, he toted books about a czar, a plague and salt — no French philosophers.This business of the most powerful man in the world announcing his current reading list, presumably to demonstrate a restless intellect (although there’s no pop quiz to see whet
Source: NYT
Aug 20, 2006
BUSINESS bashing by politicians in America has a long history, including rhetoric far more inflammatory than the denunciations being directed at Wal-Mart this year by some Democrats, who sometimes sound as if they are running against the company instead of another politician.
A NEW CAMPAIGN Protesters against Wal-Mart in Illinois this summer objected to the health care coverage provided to workers.
Wal-Mart is under attack for paying too little, providing benefits that are to
Source: Yahoo
Aug 20, 2006
American students often get the impression from history classes that the British got here first, settling Jamestown, Va., in 1607. They hear about how white Northerners freed the black slaves, how Asians came in the mid-1800s to build Western railroads.
The lessons have left out a lot.
Forty-two years before Jamestown, Spaniards and American Indians lived in St. Augustine, Fla. At least several thousand Latinos and nearly 200,000 black soldiers fought in the Civil War.
Source: Wa Po
Aug 18, 2006
Amateur historian Matthew M. Aid made news this spring by exposing a secret federal program to remove thousands of public documents from the National Archives. It turns out that Aid harbored a secret of his own.
Twenty-one years ago, while serving as a staff sergeant in the U.S. Air Force in England, Aid was court-martialed for unauthorized possession of classified information and impersonating an officer, according to Air Force documents. He received a bad-conduct discharge and wa
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 18, 2006
ROMANIA'S leading political and media figures are rushing to confess that they were informers for the feared Securitate as the nation prepares for the files of the old secret police to be opened.
Several well-known politicians and journalists in recent days have admitted co-operating with the Securitate - desperate to pre-empt disclosures that would reveal their role as spies for the former Communist regime.More than 16 years after the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu
Source: Business Week
Aug 18, 2006
Switzerland's supreme court dismissed a lawsuit accusing International Business Machines Corp. of aiding the Nazi Holocaust because too much time has elapsed, the Gypsy organization that filed the case said Friday.
Gypsy International Recognition and Compensation Action said it had been given notice of the decision by the Federal Tribunal in Lausanne that the statute of limitations applied to the case. It said the court's explanation would be released in several weeks.
Source: NYT
Aug 18, 2006
Far fewer Vietnam veterans suffered from post-traumatic stress as a result of their wartime service than previously thought, researchers are reporting today, in a finding that could have lasting consequences for the understanding of combat stress, as well as for the estimates of the mental health fallout from the Iraq war.
The report, published in the journal Science and viewed by experts as authoritative, found that 18.7 percent of Vietnam veterans developed a diagnosable stress di
Source: NYT
Aug 18, 2006
Two philatelic experts have announced a discovery that seems likely to renew one of the longest-running controversies among stamp collectors.
Ken Lawrence and Richard C. Celler, both respected for their expertise in 19th-century stamps, have found evidence that a group of stamps long held to be fakes may be genuine and potentially worth as much as $10 million.
“This is one of the most exciting stamp stories of the last 100 years,” said Donald Sundman, president of the M
Source: Australian
Aug 18, 2006
THREE state governments risk losing billions in schools funding after dismissing the finding of a summit of historians that recommended postmodern subjects be replaced with a traditional history course.
The history summit communique foreshadowed a massive shift in the teaching of history, as well as a new level of commonwealth interference in state and territory education systems.
But the Queensland, South Australian and West Australian education ministers yesterday dismissed
Source: BBC
Aug 17, 2006
An MP is asking the UK Government to investigate pardoning soldiers who took part in the biggest mutiny of WWII, BBC Scotland has learned.
Anne Begg, who represents Aberdeen South, believes almost 200 Scottish soldiers who refused orders at Salerno in Italy in 1943 were not cowards.
Every man involved would have been court martialled, imprisoned and some were sentenced to execution.
Ms Begg spoke out after it emerged shot WWI soldiers would be pardoned.
Source: BBC
Aug 17, 2006
A lost diary documenting the last days of a famous Scottish physician has been discovered in a second hand bookshop.
The diary depicts the life of Sir James Young Simpson, who discovered the anaesthetic properties of chloroform in Edinburgh in the 19th Century.
It was handed in to the Shelter bookshop in the Stockbridge area of the city by an anonymous donor.
Source: cronaca
Aug 17, 2006
A painting of Mary Queen of Scots, one of only two thought to have been made in her lifetime, has been discovered - in the National Portrait Gallery's very own store. The portrait was bought for £50 by the gallery in 1916 at Christie's. But later it was written off as an 18th century fake and was left to gather dust.
