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
Aug 17, 2006
JAKARTA, Indonesia, Aug. 14 — For more than two decades, the brutal military occupation of East Timor, a distant, impoverished territory, brought Indonesia little but disdain and dishonor on the world stage. The ending, a bloody rampage by Indonesian-backed militias after a vote for independence in 1999, further curdled the nation’s reputation and left a bitter mood at home, where the loss of East Timor was treated as a subject best left untouched.
Source: NYT
Aug 17, 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 11 — Beneath the clinical glare of fluorescent lights in a collection of makeshift laboratories here, the victims of mass murder under Saddam Hussein are slowly brought back to life. For two years, a team of forensic scientists from around the world has sifted through bones, clothes, identity papers and spent bullet casings exhumed from mass graves to build criminal cases against Mr. Hussein and to reconstruct the victims’ final moments.
Source: NYT
Aug 17, 2006
In what might be the final major disclosure of records from New York’s worst calamity, the city yesterday released recordings of 1,600 emergency calls made on Sept. 11, 2001. With the voices of callers removed for privacy considerations, only the 911 operators can be heard on most of the calls. The recordings were released in response to a freedom of information request for a variety of city records made by The New York Times in January 2002. After the administra
Source: NYT
Aug 17, 2006
Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, the former president of Paraguay whose harsh and capricious 35-year hold on power made him South America’s most enduring dictator during the cold war and gave him the aura of a character out of a Gabriel García Márquez novel, died yesterday. He was 93.
The cause of death was a stroke, The Associated Press said, citing information from a grandson, Alfredo Domínguez Stroessner.
General Stroessner had lived in Brazil since 1989, moving there afte
Source: Independent (UK)
Aug 17, 2006
He was born in Liverpool in 1911, a product of the romance between the Fuhrer's brother and his Irish sweetheart. Now the extraordinary story of William Patrick Hitler is coming to the stage.The year 1911 was one of Liverpool's most turbulent. Tension among the city's seamen was to spill over into a general transport strike that would paralyse the "Second Port of the Empire" for 72 days and bring hardship to the thousands of families dependent on the men's wages.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 17, 2006
THE German author Günter Grass admitted that he had been in the Waffen-SS to pre-empt the release of the information from the East German secret police archive next year, a regional newspaper claimed.
The information about Grass's past is contained in Nazi era records compiled by the Stasi, the secret police of the communist government of former East Germany. The files were used for blackmail, the Kölner Stadtanzeiger wrote.
Historians have been working through the arc
Source: Reuters
Aug 17, 2006
BEIJING (Reuters) - A centuries-old brothel teetering on the verge of collapse has red-faced Chinese officials pondering heritage versus morality behind closed doors, state media reported Thursday.
A local government in Jinggang, a town in central Hunan province, must decide whether to restore crumbling Hongtaifang, a brothel established in 1733, and face the ire of residents who see it as debauched, Xinhua news agency said.
"The brothel was a place where women were humi
Source: Narooma
Aug 17, 2006
THE deep waters off Bermagui continue to give up some their secrets with specialist divers in recent months positively identifying the shipwreck of the Iron Knight.
While trawlers have for decades known about the shipwreck located due east off Bermagui, the Iron Knight has now been formerly declared a protected site with relatives of the lost sailors able to lay flowers at the site of sinking.
The ship was transporting iron ore and associated materials up the coast on
Source: Wa Po
Aug 17, 2006
TEHRAN, Aug. 16 -- At the exhibition entrance, a poster shows a helmet with the Star of David lying on top of others carrying a Nazi swastika. Inside, the Statue of Liberty is pictured holding a Holocaust book while giving a Nazi salute.
Organizers say the exhibition of more than 200 entries from Iran's International Holocaust Cartoons Contest aims to challenge Western taboos about discussing the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews died. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has call
Source: Courier-Mail (Australia)
Aug 17, 2006
AUSTRALIAN history should be a compulsory, stand-alone subject at some stage during high schooling, Education Minister Julie Bishop said last night.
Opening Australia's History summit, Ms Bishop said she hoped the meeting would help to define the body of historical knowledge that should be taught to all Australian students.
''Yes, there will be controversy but I would hope we can find agreement on the main currents and big themes in our national story,'' she said.
Source: Australian
Aug 17, 2006
STATE Governments will be under pressure to reinstate history as a compulsory separate subject in schools or risk losing nearly $13 billion in federal funding as a summit of experts meet in Canberra today.
But in launching the history summit last night, federal Education Minister Julie Bishop told the 23 participants she was not in favour of ''creating some form of an official'' history.
''We start, however, with a strong view that Australian history should be a compuls
Source: cronaca
Aug 16, 2006
After almost 50 years, one of Malta’s most intriguing Roman catacombs has been re-discovered by officers of the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage within a traffic roundabout close to the Malta International Airport on Friday.
The important archaeological discovery was made at Hal Resqun, a site on the outskirts of Gudja. The discovery consists of a Roman Catacomb which had been originally excavated by Sir Temistocles Zammit in 1912. However since then the catacomb has been compl
Source: NYT
Aug 16, 2006
With each annual visit Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has paid to the Yasukuni Shrine, the war memorial linked to Japan’s imperial past, the damage to the nation’s relations with China and South Korea has worsened.
Even as Mr. Koizumi claimed a more assertive role for Japan in the world — and called for China’s and South Korea’s endorsement to realize it — he chose to be unyielding on his visits to Yasukuni, the one issue that was certain to offend them to the core and stir up me
Source: Cyrus Nowrasteh, the writer/producer of the ABC 6-hour miniseries The Path to 9/11 which will air September 10th & 11th; in an interview at frontpagemag.com
Aug 16, 2006
This miniseries is not just about the tragedy and events of 9/11, it dramatizes "how we got there" going back 8 years to the first attack on the WTC and dealing with the Al Qaeda strikes against U.S. embassies and forces in the 90s, the political lead-up, the hatching of the terrorist plots, etc. We see the heroes on the ground, like FBI agent John O'Neill and others, who after the '93 attack felt sure that the terrorists would strike the WTC again. It also dramatizes the frequent opp
Source: Independent (UK)
Aug 16, 2006
Pte Harry Farr, shot for cowardice during the First World War, is to be granted a pardon posthumously. His pardon came as Des Browne, Minister of Defence, said all 306 soldiers executed during the First World War for cowardice and military offences would be issued a group pardon.
Mr Browne said that the Armed Forces Bill will be amended . "Although this is a historical matter, I am conscious of how the families of these men feel today. They have had to endure a stigma for dec
Source: Washington Times
Aug 16, 2006
Britain's Ministry of Defense will grant pardons to 306 soldiers executed by the British army for cowardice or desertion during World War I.Defense Secretary Des Browne said emergency legislation would be waiting for parliament when it resumes in the fall to clear the names of the Commonwealth soldiers who were executed, The Telegraph reported.
The government faced several challenges to issue pardons by the soldiers' survivors. One of the lawyers represen
Source: Press Release--Hurricane Archive
Aug 15, 2006
NEW ORLEANS, August 15, 2006-Courtney Giarrusso and her family followed a Crescent City tradition and decided to ride out Hurricane Katrina on the top floors of the Fairmont Hotel in downtown New Orleans. Little did they know that the levee flooding would trap them in the hotel and later destroy their Lakeview home, which was designed to accommodate Courtney’s needs as a quadriplegic. Since she returned to New Orleans in December, Courtney has encountered many more challenges, including finding
Source: freeforumzone
Aug 15, 2006
Two German teenagers meet each other at a POW camp among tens of thousands of fellow soldiers rounded up by the Allies at the end of the Second World War. One ends up being Germany's most celebrated postwar writer and 1999 Nobel Prize winner for Literature, and the other becomes Pope.
Here is the translation of a most interesting story from AGI, an Italian news agency...
Source: CBC News
Aug 15, 2006
A new discovery at Grand Pre has archeologists wondering if they've unearthed "ground zero" of the Acadian deportation of 1755.
Jonathan Fowler, a Nova Scotia archeologist, and his team recently discovered about 15 musket balls in the ruins of an old house.
"This volume of musket balls is a little bit strange for the usual domestic occupation," he told CBC News on Tuesday.
When Fowler compared the find to those at other Acadian archeolog
Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch
Aug 15, 2006
For the first time in its 110-year history, the Museum and White House of the Confederacy will cut its operating hours.
The museum will close on Wednesdays, from Labor Day to Memorial Day. In addition, the White House will be closed for public tours in January and February.
The moves come a few months after approval of the state budget that awarded the museum just $50,000 of a $700,000 grant the downtown institution had requested for fiscal 2006-08. The money would have
