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 11, 2005
The Sept. 11 commission was warned by a uniformed military officer 10 days before issuing its final report that the account would be incomplete without reference to what he described as a secret military operation that by the summer of 2000 had identified as a potential threat the member of Al Qaeda who would lead the attacks more than a year later, commission officials said on Wednesday.The officials said that the information had not been included in the report becaus
Source: David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
Aug 11, 2005
The author of a book cited by Harry Belafonte in presumed defense of his controversial statements about Jews and Hitler has denounced Belafonte for distorting his work.Belafonte had dismissed the presence of African-Americans in the Bush administration on the grounds that there were "a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of [Adolf Hitler's] Third Reich." (CNS News, August 5, 2005)
After Belafonte's baseless statement was strongly criticized by The Dav
Source: Bloomberg News
Aug 11, 2005
As Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney weighs a presidential race, the former business executive brings assets, liabilities and one wild card: his Mormon religion. Religion hasn't played a major role in a presidential race since John F. Kennedy was the first Roman Catholic elected 45 years ago. Yet Romney's membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, nicknamed the Mormon Church, may complicate his courtship of Republican social conservatives and the e
Source: Medical News Today
Aug 11, 2005
New research from The University of Manchester dispels the myths around death and working-class Britain by suggesting that the expression of grief amongst this social class in fact increased during periods of poverty.
In the first book to cover the experience of the working-class attitude to death in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, Julie-Marie Strange, a lecturer in Modern British History at the University, argues against the common consensus that the poor did not mourn their dead.
Source: Knight Ridder
Aug 10, 2005
Five months before the Bay of Pigs invasion, the CIA task force plotting to overthrow Fidel Castro concluded that the invasion was ``unachievable'' as a covert paramilitary operation, according to a newly discovered unclassified document.Indeed, historians have documented individuals expressing doubts at various times ahead of the ill-fated mission.
But the document, a 300-page internal CIA history, reveals for the first time that the architects themselves
Source: AFP
Aug 10, 2005
Drawn on a wooden frame to the execution site, hanged until almost dead, but still conscious, castrated, disembowelled and finally beheaded, bodies quartered and displayed with the head in public to deter others -- Britain historically dealt mercilessly with traitors.
The centuries-old charge of betraying the monarch and his or her government no longer carries the death penalty, but it is still one of the gravest crimes on the statute books and condemns those found guilty to life im
Source: WP
Aug 10, 2005
An Internet video that depicts the Nazi death camp Auschwitz as a rave party drew sharp criticism Wednesday from a Jewish rights group, which urged authorities to have it removed from European Web sites.The three-minute video titled "Housewitz" a pun on house music and Auschwitz casts Nazi soldiers as DJs. It alternates black-and-white still photos of Holocaust atrocities with color images of youths at an outdoor party. And it advertises a "Free ta
Source: The Guardian
Aug 10, 2005
When it comes to a duel between DePaul university political science professor Norman Finkelstein and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz over Finkelstein's upcoming book, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, gigantic bombast feels like an understatement. It is a row that has spilled on to the pages of most of the nation's prominent newspapers and gone all the way to the desk of California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Like the two professors
Source: Ottawa Citizen
Aug 10, 2005
Hundreds of Canadian and British soldiers held as prisoners of war during the American Revolution lie buried in a Pennsylvania farm field that is now the focus of a bitter legal battle between a housing developer and heritage advocates.The struggle over the former site of Camp Security -- a sprawling prison compound near the present-day city of York that was used to house captured Red Coats between 1781 and 1783 -- recently resulted in it being named one of the top 10 most t
Source: Secrecy News
Aug 10, 2005
American military casualties from the Revolutionary War to the present day are tabulated in a new report from the Congressional Research Service.Notable findings include these:
** During the period between the Revolutionary War and the
Persian Gulf War, it was the Civil War that produced the most American fatalities, when Union statistics and Confederate estimates are taken into account.
** World War II was the first war in which there were m
Source: Poynteronline/Romanesko
Aug 10, 2005
New York Times science writer William L. Laurence became a staunch advocate of the atomic bomb long before the atomic bomb was ever dropped, says David Goodman. He tells Bob Garfield:"What Laurence wrote was that he felt no, quote, 'pity or compassion for the poor devils' who were about to die." Goodman and his sister, Amy, write in the Baltimore Sun:"[L
Source: NYT
Aug 10, 2005
Seneca Village, an African-American ghost town that lies beneath Central Park, ingrained but invisible, has been waiting a century and a half to be rediscovered.Today may be the day.
Using ground-penetrating radar in areas west of the Great Lawn where building foundations and burial shafts are believed to exist, archaeologists from Barnard College and City College will try to learn whether there is anything left of the town but ghosts.
Once, there w
Source: Armenia Liberty
Aug 10, 2005
After a century of neglect and decades of political wrangling, Turkey has begun restoring Akhtamar, a thousand-year-old Christian church at a time when Turkish leaders face intense pressure from the European Union to improve their treatment of minorities.
The 2 million Turkish Lira ($1.5 million) restoration, ordered and paid for by the Turkish government, began in May and is raising hopes that a small, cautious thaw in relations between Turkey and neighboring Armenia could expand.
Source: Hindustan Times
Aug 10, 2005
According to confidential letters provided to documentary makers in India, Winston Churchill was using Mohammad Ali Jinnah to create the "great divide" — the schism between Hindus and Muslims in India.
Two independent film-makers commissioned to make a docu-drama on Jinnah laid their hands on the confidential correspondence between the two leaders which smacks of Churchill’s bias against Hindus.In a letter to Jinnah dated August 3, 1946, Ch
Source: NYT
Aug 10, 2005
Members of the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11 terror attacks called on Congress to determine whether the Pentagon withheld intelligence information showing that a secret American military unit had identified Mohammed Atta and three other hijackers as potential threats more than a year before the attacks.The former commission members said the information, if true, could rewrite an important chapter of the history of the intelligence failures befor
Source: BBC
Aug 10, 2005
"Japan - reveal the truth! Admit the crime! Officially apologise! Punish the criminals!" South Korean protesters chant every Wednesday outside the Japanese Embassy in Seoul.
They are the survivors of the brutal, Asia-wide system of sex slaves for the Imperial Japanese Army, which the military government encouraged and helped to operate for 13 years, from 1932 until the end of World War II in 1945.They were euphemistically called "comfo
Source: Expatica (Netherlands)
Aug 10, 2005
Germany's new Left Party, which polls show will win 12 per cent next month's general election, draws on a concept of 'National Socialism' from the Nazi era, a prominent German historian alleged on Wednesday.
"This is not an accident - it's intentional," said Goetz Aly who recently published a book arguing that Hitler's Nazis won allegiance by creating a huge social welfare state funded by property stolen from the Jews and people in Third Reich-occupied Europe.
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Aug 10, 2005
Tucked in the far corner of Nagasaki Peace Park sits a small monument next to a memorial featuring a streetcar platform ruined by the atomic bomb. The simple marker is easy to miss, a lonely tribute to the non-Japanese survivors of atomic destruction. Their numbers are unknown, and their struggle for recognition and financial assistance continues six decades later. A 1,000-man camp in Nagasaki is believed to have been destroyed when the bomb fell 60 years ago Tuesday. A grou
Aug 10, 2005
Michael Newman, a lecturer in peace and conflict studies at London Metropolitan University, was in Japan to mark the 60th anniversary of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima. Here he reflects on the experience and the affect the bomb had on the country, then and now.Read the full article.
Aug 10, 2005
The mother of a Turkish researcher facing up to eight years in prison for attempting to take old books out of Armenia pleaded with the authorities in Yerevan on Monday to set him free and end his controversial prosecution.
Gulsin Turkyilmaz spoke to RFE/RL after visiting her 33-year-old son Yektan in a maximum security prison in Yerevan where he has been kept since his arrest on June 17. “I hope that they won’t imprison him,” she said. “If he knew that [he is violating Armenian laws
