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: Guardian
Aug 12, 2005
Britain secretly sold Israel a key ingredient for its nuclear programme in 1958, according to official documents obtained by BBC News. Papers in the British National Archives show a deal was done to export 20 tonnes of heavy water for about £1.5m. No "peaceful use only" condition was placed on its use. Officials said imposing one would be "over zealous".http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4743987.stm
Israel's
Source: Editor & Publisher
Aug 12, 2005
Author: Greg Mitchell
In the weeks following the atomic attacks on Japan almost 60 years ago, and then for decades afterward, the United States engaged in airtight suppression of all film shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings. This included footage shot by U.S. military crews and Japanese newsreel teams. In addition, for many years all but a handful of newspaper photographs were seized or prohibited.
The public did not see any of the newsreel footage for 25
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 12, 2005
The history of Russia is full of unanswered questions, but for almost two and a half centuries one of its most interesting questions was never even asked. How did a black African slave called Abram Gannibal come to change the face of Russian politics and literature? Tsarist and Soviet historians alike were reluctant to investigate the mystery. No doubt they feared the interloper's achievements might overshadow national heroes. Only with the discovery of new evidence in the past decade can the ri
Source: Times Online
Aug 12, 2005
It has taken 700 years, a Hollywood film and the occasional word of encouragement from Sir Sean Connery, but a funeral is finally to be held for William Wallace. David Ross, a Scottish amateur historian, will today embark on a 450-mile pilgrimage that will culminate in a service to the Scottish rebel and freedom fighter later this month yards from the spot where he was executed.
Source: Wa Po
Aug 12, 2005
An aging Chicago carpenter should be stripped of his U.S. citizenship because he was a member of a police unit that helped the Nazis round up Ukrainian Jews for forced labor and death camps during World War II, federal attorneys argue.
"He acquiesced in conduct contrary to civilization and decency," government attorney Gregory Gordon told U.S. District Judge Samuel Der-Yeghiayan as a civil trial against Osyp Firishchak began Monday.
Source: Times Online
Aug 12, 2005
A group of Japanese women braved threats from right-wing extremists this weekend to open a museum exposing the crimes of the imperial Japanese army. Their aim is to force the public to face the facts about sexual slavery in the second world war.
It is a politically loaded gesture, one week before Japan commemorates the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, which led to the announcement of the country’s unconditional surrender on August 15, 1945.
Source: Sun Times
Aug 12, 2005
The British Consulate in Chicago has a mystery worthy of Sherlock Holmes: Who sends six red roses every Aug. 1 in memory of English troops who died at the Battle of Minden in Germany in 1759?
Since 1967, the roses have been delivered every Minden Day at the consulate on Michigan Avenue. With the flowers comes an envelope addressed: "The Suffolk Regiment, Lancashire Fusiliers, Royal Welch Fusiliers, Kings Own Scottish Borderers, Royal Hampshire Regiment, Yorkshire Light Infantry
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Aug 12, 2005
The slender, bruised arm of Japanese dancer Nao Ohta -- injured in her nation's revived civil war over World War II history -- could be a symbol for modern Japan.
"We all have them," Ohta, 31, said of her fresh scab and bruises as she gestured toward three fellow dancers last week. They had just taken a battering in their intense Tokyo performance of "Silent Trace," an allegory about the brutal treatment suffered by "comfort women," the women forced to
Source: Balt Sun
Aug 12, 2005
In a Carroll County cornfield stands a shrine to one of the pioneers of Methodism in America. A larger-than-life granite statue of the preacher Robert Strawbridge was erected last year -- 8 feet tall atop an 8-foot pedestal -- not far from the true centerpiece of this hallowed ground: the house Strawbridge was thought to have lived in through the 1760s and part of the 1770s.
Convinced by a snippet of oral history that this was the place, Methodist patrons for decades tried to secure
Source: BBC
Aug 12, 2005
From hand-written letters from the American civil war to e-mails from Afghanistan and Iraq, letters written during conflicts give great insight into life on the front lines - history, as recorded by soldiers and civilians.
As war becomes ever more hi-tech, fewer and fewer people will have first-hand experience of a life lived on the front lines. The emotions experienced run the gamut from fear to excitement and even hilarity - and it is these emotions that are detailed in that most
Source: NYT
Aug 12, 2005
It does not take an archaeologist's training to see the risks of digging a railway tunnel under one of the world's most ancient cities - a center of both Islam and Christendom - where remnants of civilizations and empires are piled on top of one another like a stack of history books.
Istanbul, however, is pressing ahead with the construction of the 47-mile rail system, which will connect the city's European and Asian halves through a tunnel that runs beneath the Bosporus.
Source: Newsday
Aug 12, 2005
Last year, around the time when President Ronald Reagan's body was being ceremoniously transported to lie in state in the Rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., Bayside activist Mandingo Osceola Tshaka was a patient in a Queens hospital.
"Watching the event on television," he recalled recently, "I was fascinated by the military choreography, which was fabulous; the pomp and circumstance. The area where this was going on is absolutely beautiful."
Source: NYT
Aug 12, 2005
Not enough to have fired a shot, but quite enough to have fired a few imaginations, a fortresslike 19th-century wall came to light briefly in recent weeks under a construction site at West End Avenue and 59th Street.
Old foundations are exposed all the time as New York perpetually rebuilds itself. But this was something different. About 30 feet deep and 100 feet long, the wall was composed of stones laid with evident care and skill. Most intriguingly, its roughhewn face was punctuat
Source: NYT
Aug 12, 2005
Who in Allied governments, the Vatican and the press knew what about the Holocaust and when? What could and should have been done to save Europe's Jews? Ever since World War II, those questions have been fiercely debated. Now, a United States government analysis suggests that while the evidence was incomplete, gruesome details from coded Nazi messages that Britain intercepted beginning in 1941 could have confirmed and exposed the scope of German genocide well before 1945, when Allied troops libe
Source: Wa Po
Aug 12, 2005
Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner (D) launched an effort Friday to erect a civil rights memorial on the grounds of the State Capitol, a project pushed by his wife, Lisa Collis, for more than three years. The goal, Collis said after her husband signed Executive Order 96, is to create a statue honoring the leaders of Virginia's civil rights movement. The statue would be placed among other monuments on the green space around the Capitol in time for the state's 400th anniversary in 2007.
Source: NYT
Aug 12, 2005
IN March 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson eyed one of the toughest unfinished tasks he had inherited from John F. Kennedy: creation of a national health care program for the elderly. With typical ambition and determination, he told his aide on health care, Wilbur Cohen, "We're going to spend the rest of our lives if necessary passing medical care." Fifteen months later, on July 30, 1965, Johnson traveled to Independence, Mo., and with Harry Truman at his side, signed the legislation t
Source: NYT
Aug 12, 2005
For those seeking clues to the judicial philosophy of John G. Roberts, documents from his years as a lawyer in the White House counsel's office during the Reagan administration provide revealing evidence. in 1983, Mr. Roberts addressed a proposed constitutional amendment setting a 10-year term of office for federal judges. The Justice Department opposed the measure on the ground that life tenure was critical to judicial independence. Mr. Roberts did not disagree, but noted that the framers had a
Source: Las Vegas Sun
Aug 12, 2005
Presidents since George Washington have made appointments during congressional recesses to fill positions in the executive and judicial branches. Under the Constitution, the president can make temporary appointments while the Senate is in recess, without Senate approval. The appointment lasts through the end of the following one-year session of Congress. Following are some of the more notable recess appointments.
Source: Chicago Trib
Aug 12, 2005
Neighbors have kind words to say about Osyp Firishchak, a retired North Side carpenter, but the U.S. Justice Department says he played a role in one of history's darkest chapters. On Monday, Firishchak, 86, is scheduled to go on trial in Chicago over allegations that more than 60 years ago he was part of a Nazi-controlled Ukrainian police unit that transported tens of thousands of Jews to their deaths in concentration and labor camps.
Nearly 20 cases are pending in courts around the count
Source: NYT
Aug 12, 2005
When the school board in Odessa, the West Texas oil town, voted unanimously in April to add an elective Bible study course to the 2006 high school curriculum, some parents dropped to their knees in prayerful thanks that God would be returned to the classroom, while others assailed it as an effort to instill religious training in the public schools. Hundreds of miles away, leaders of the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools notched another victory. A religious advocacy group bas
