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: Scripps Howard
Mar 13, 2006
For at least seven years, it's been publicly known that 12 days before Red Chinese troops poured over the Korean borders, the CIA issued an intelligence estimate flatly predicting that wouldn't happen. But the original 56-year-old document has been reclassified and taken out of public view sometime in the last seven years _ one of more than 55,000 pages of previously declassified documents that have been swept from the shelves of the National Archives and removed from public scrutiny.
Source: St. Petersburg Times
Mar 13, 2006
U.S. government secrecy will not be an issue, I told myself optimistically, as I began to research a history of the Cuban missile crisis. After all, the classic showdown of the Cold War occurred more than four decades ago, well outside the 25-year period established by the administrations of both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush for the automatic release of everything but the most sensitive government documents. The Soviet Union has been consigned to the ash heap of history, and ‘60s-era defense
Source: NYT
Mar 13, 2006
President Bush has been back from the Asian subcontinent for more than a week now, but one big question from his trip remains: How did it happen that the president spent a night in Pakistan, the assumed haven of Osama bin Laden and one of the one most dangerous countries in the world?The short answer is that Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, insisted. The long answer is a tale about the nightmares of the Secret Service and the calculated risks of presidential tra
Source: National Security Archive
Mar 13, 2006
The Central Intelligence Agency has won the second annual Rosemary Award, recognizing the worst performance by a federal agency in complying with the Freedom of Information Act. The Award is named after President Nixon's secretary Rosemary Woods and the backwards-leaning stretch which she testified resulted in her erasing eighteen-and-a-half minutes from a key Watergate conversation on the White House tapes.National Security Archive director Thomas Blanton announced to
Source: Boston Globe
Mar 13, 2006
BAGNEUX, France -- In the bleak housing project where a young Jew named Ilan Halimi was held captive and tortured before being dumped in a vacant lot to die, there's scant sympathy for the victim.
''It's too bad this happened, because we immigrants are always blamed," said Ibrahim Ag Ahmalou, a lanky man of West African heritage who shares his girlfriend's apartment in the project. ''But Jews have all the money and power. Everyone knows this and resents them. That's why they ha
Source: National Security Archive
Mar 13, 2006
The U.S. Intelligence Community failed to penetrate the veil of secrecy surrounding the nuclear activities of South Africa's apartheid regime, particularly its nuclear weapons program, according to documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and archival research and posted on the Web today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.Included in the Archive posting are over thirty documents -- many originally classified Top Secret/Cod
Source: LAT
Mar 13, 2006
Early one morning last month, with little fanfare a padded truck pulled out from the warehouse of a South Korean museum with a precious cargo on the last leg of a 100-year journey home. Inside was a simple 1,000-pound slab of granite whose rite of passage tells a lot about what's happened in recent years to relations among the three countries involved -- South Korea, North Korea and Japan.The monument, which celebrates the victory of a 16th century Korean warrior over Japane
Source: The Courier Mail
Mar 13, 2006
A DOCUMENT which portrays Judas Iscariot as a hero and Christ's favourite disciple is set to cause a storm when it is published next month. The ancient text says that Judas -- one of history's greatest villains -- was fulfilling a divine mission when he betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver.The distinguished National Geographic magazine is about to publish what it believes is an extract of the previously unknown Gospel of Judas.
But Christian scholars, pa
Source: Defence News
Mar 13, 2006
Over a thousand years of recorded military history came to an end on Friday 10 March 2006, when the army staged a final march through the streets of Dover.The 1st Battalion The Parachute Regiment bade the people of the Kent port farewell as they begin leaving the town's Connaught Barracks for St Athan in South Wales. The military unit will be the last to have served in Dover - known for centuries as the ‘lock and key to England’.
Over the years it was the
Source: stonepages.com
Mar 12, 2006
Chinese archaeologists have found two prehistoric settlements, dating back to more than 4,000 years ago, at the Puchengdian ruins in central China's Henan province. The Puchengdian site were designated as the first group provincial-level cultural relic protection units of Henan in 1963. With an area of 150,000 square meters, the site contain relics of the Neolithic age and the Xia, Shang, Zhou and Han dynasties. One of them was confirmed by archaeologists to belong to the late period of the Long
Source: Boston Globe
Mar 12, 2006
President Lyndon Johnson didn't mention Vietnam as he discussed the major issues facing the nation during the long night after John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963. But by 1968, amid mounting US casualties and Pentagon requests for more troops, the unpopularity of the war forced Johnson to drop out of the race for reelection, leaving him a broken man, a former adviser recalled yesterday.''No president can win a war when public support for that war begins to decl
Source: Providence Journal
Mar 12, 2006
For more than 75 years, the Triangular Trade flourished in Newport. Rhode Island rum was traded in Africa for slaves, many of whom were sold in the West Indies. Molasses was brought back to Newport so distillers could make more rum. Now the Providence Journal is runni9ng a multi-part series about the slave trade in Rhode Island. Day 1, Sunday, Mar. 12
Buying and Selling the Human Species: Newport and the Slave TradeFor more than 75 years, the Triangular Trade flou
Source: Pittsburgh Tribune
Mar 12, 2006
An archaeological dig at Westinghouse Park in Point Breeze has unearthed the ruins of what once was a nerve center of scientific innovation. The finds show entrepreneur and engineer George Westinghouse at his zenith in the late 1800s, when his rivalry with Thomas Edison fueled a kinetic exploration of energy that shaped American life for generations.
He crafted a power network that sent electricity surging into his three-story villa, making it perhaps the first
Source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Mar 12, 2006
An 18th-century stone fort discovered in St. Charles and rebuilt in Defiance could be one of the biggest historical finds in Missouri in the last 50 years, experts say, but until recently, almost no one knew it existed."Does it make a lot of noise, and is it flashy?" asks C.W. Stewart, director of the Daniel Boone Home and Boonesfield Village in Defiance. "No, but it's a real find. How many 1793 buildings are we going to find that weren't known?"
Source: Yahoo News
Mar 12, 2006
A team of German archeologists has unearthed 17 statues of the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet during restoration work at an ancient temple in the southern city of Luxor, Culture Minister Faruq Hosni announced. The team found the statues of the war goddess near the same site where six similar statues were unearthed last week, on the location of the 18th dynasty (1580-1314 BC) temple of pharaoh Amenhotep III on the west bank of the Nile, Hosni added in a statement received
Source: Asia News Network
Mar 12, 2006
Archaeologists have discovered artefacts at a village in Narsingdi, east of Dhaka, that resembles traits of the Chalcolithic culture, which is around 4,000 years old, and believe the finds are the earliest signs of settlement in the region.The Chalcolithic Age, also known as the Aeneolithic or Copper Age, is a phase in the development of human culture in which the use of early metal tools appeared alongside the use of stone tools.
The excavators led
Source: Timesonline (UK)
Mar 12, 2006
UP TO four tons of ancient Afghan artefacts have been seized in Britain after an unprecedented wave of looting from archeological sites in Afghanistan that has exceeded the plundering of treasures in Iraq. “All the attention has been on Iraq but this is a far, far bigger problem,” said Detective Sergeant Vernon Rapley, who heads the art and antiques unit of the Metropolitan police. “Afghanistan is the main source of unprovenanced antiquities into Britain. It’s coming in by a
Source: Washington Times
Mar 12, 2006
The first significant exhibition of Pablo Picasso's work in South Africa has provoked a furious row after a senior government official accused him of stealing the work of African artists to boost his "flagging talent." The Picasso and Africa exhibition, which has been drawing capacity crowds at Johannesburg's Standard Bank Gallery, contains 84 original works by Picasso along with 29 African sculptures similar to those in the artist's own collection, and is d
Source: Timesonline (UK)
Mar 12, 2006
EVER since Mehmet Ali Agca, a Turkish gunman, shot the late Pope John Paul II on May 13, 1981 in St Peter’s Square in Rome, investigators have tried to solve one of the 20th century’s greatest mysteries: did Agca act alone or was he obeying communist orders? This week an Italian parliamentary commission will officially conclude that Agca was part of a huge conspiracy masterminded by the GRU, the Soviet military secret service, on the orders of the politburo and Leonid Brezhnev, general secretary
Source: NYT
Mar 12, 2006
A high school geography teacher in Aurora who compared a speech by President Bush to language used by Hitler and sparked an uproar in the Denver region will return to the classroom on Monday after an investigation by school officials. The teacher, Jay Bennish, who had been on paid leave from Overland High School, said he was trying to make students think in a lecture on Feb. 1 that a student recorded. The State Board of Education split on Thursday, four Republicans vs. four
