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This page features brief excerpts of news 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.
Highlights
Miss Bell, a renowned archaeologist, brilliant linguist and Arabist, had drawn up the new state's borders and become the confidante of the country's first Hashemite monarch, King Faisal.
She wrote to her father: "As we rode back through the [Baghdad] suburb where all the people know me and salute me when I pass, my friend Nuri Said turned to me and said, 'For a hundred years they will talk of the fine lady riding by.' I think they very likely will."
Miss Bell's forecast now looks optimistic indeed. She is being quietly forgotten as her legacy - the shape of modern Iraq - appears threatened by the hatreds between Sunnis, Shias and Kurds.
Her tomb, in the British Civil Cemetery in central Baghdad, has been abandoned to the ravages of time. Her limestone marker is crumbling to dust, as are the cracked gravestones and shattered statues marking the final resting places of her countrymen.
There is a custodian, Ali Mansur, who lives on a dirty mattress in a half-collapsed shack in a far corner. But he says he receives no money and that "conservation" is limited to picking up the fragments when a memorial cracks and placing them on the surface of the grave.
"There's been a total devastation of homes, communities, jobs and lifestyle," said Brenda Dardar Robichaux, principal chief of the United Houma Nation.
Tribal leaders said it is important that their members remain near ancestral land and worried that many might eventually be forced to move away. Hurricanes, they said, threaten to erode not only their land but age-old community ties as well.
"We feel like we've got to get our people home to rebuild, because if we don't, we lose a part of our history; we lose a part of our culture; we lose a part of who we are as Houma people," Robichaux said.
She estimated that at least half of the tribe's 16,000 members were affected by the storms. Some lived in urban New Orleans parishes, and many lived near the bayous.
The colour, elegance and cultural diversity of Nigeria will be on show with masquerades, a durbar ensemble of horses and traditional circus performances.
But Nigeria's religious leaders claim carnival is not African, arguing that it will promote only idolatry and immorality and invite the wrath of God on the nation.
After five years of being lobbied intensely, Evans and the library panel narrowed the field last month. SMU, alma mater of First Lady Laura Bush, appears to be the front runner. Yet other finalists have tapped close Bush associates to help boost their bids. Texas Tech's presentation features a video narrated by cowboy poet Red Steagall, a close friend of the Bushes. Baylor's library committee includes Bush fund-raisers Drayton McLane, owner of the Houston Astros, and Bob Perry, the Texas developer who funded the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. "Having friends in high places is certainly not a negative," says Baylor spokeswoman Tommye Lou Davis. Bush is expected to make a final decision on the estimated $300 million project early next year.
"It allows our young people to understand, really, how this city was born and who carried the brunt of the prosperity that we see in New York, not only then but now," a black man from "Harlem, New York," said of the show, the largest in the museum's 201-year history. The man, who appeared to be in his 30's, said he wanted to know what businesses in the city today derived profits in the past from selling human beings.
A white lawyer went into the booth twice to sort out his feelings. "This has just been devastating," he said. As he looked at the exhibition's array of documents, he said, he realized that the some of the laws used to isolate and dehumanize enslaved black New Yorkers became custom after the laws vanished and "contributed to the way whites look at blacks," even today.
See: Phyllis C. Murray,"There is Nothing New About Slavery."
Williams was black, and in 1936, the year he completed the red brick English-country-style residence, African-Americans were barred by restrictive covenants and prevailing biases from owning property in the best parts of the city.
Williams, a pre-eminent Southern California architect, lived instead in a modest house of his own design in Lafayette Square, one of the few upper-middle-class neighborhoods then open to blacks.
By the time he died in 1980, black celebrities were moving into Beverly Hills and Bel Air. The Landau House, meanwhile, named for the South African merchant who commissioned it, would continue passing from owner to owner, among them Bruce McNall, who built a vast fortune as a coin collector before going to prison for fraud, and Ronald O. Perelman, Revlon's chairman.
When it became clear that the 10,000-square-foot house would be an impediment to the expansion plans of its current owner, the elite prep school Harvard-Westlake, preservationists and neighborhood residents joined in demanding that it not be destroyed, and school officials promised to find a buyer willing to move it. They succeeded.
Mr. Irving is still remembered as the writer who nearly pulled off one of the most audacious scams in publishing: an "autobiography" of Howard Hughes, based on in-person interviews of the reclusive billionaire, which was in fact completely bogus.
"The Hoax," directed by Mr. Hallstrom, with a permed and sideburned Richard Gere as the 70's-era Mr. Irving, also stars Alfred Molina as Mr. Irving's co-writer and sidekick, Richard Suskind, and Marcia Gay Harden as Mr. Irving's wife Edith. Filmed over 49 days, mostly in and around New York City, the picture is set for release by Miramax Films next year.
But Mr. Irving is already complaining that the film takes so many creative liberties, that it will be "a hoax about a hoax."
Among the group's members was Samuel Alito. Though there's no evidence he was an active participant in the group, he boasted of his membership when applying for a job with the Reagan administration in the mid-1980s.
When the White House disclosed the application this month, liberal groups opposed to his nomination pounced on the connection. "The question for senators to consider and to ask is why Samuel Alito would brag about his membership in an organization known for its fervent hostility to the inclusion of women and minorities at Princeton," said Ralph G. Neas, president of People for the American Way.
Steve Schmidt, a White House spokesman, declined to comment. But former leaders of Concerned Alumni say they do not remember the group objecting to the inclusion of minorities, only to the university's affirmative action policies.
So what makes one Washington more valuable than another?
"When we were assessing, one couldn't help but seize on the fact that the Constable-Hamilton painting is unique," said Dara Mitchell, director of Sotheby's American paintings department. "There is not another one like it."
Painted in Philadelphia in 1797, it was commissioned by the New York merchant William Kerin Constable for Alexander Hamilton. Scholars say he may have given the work to Hamilton in gratitude for his support of a 1795 treaty that ended Britain's seizure of American ships trading with the West Indies.
The painting stayed in the Hamilton family until 1896, when it was bequeathed to the Lenox Library, which later merged with the Astor Library and the Tilden Trust to become the New York Public Library.
[Click on the Source link above for an interactive graphic.]
Among those courses are "Christianity's Influence in American History" and "Christianity and American Literature," both of which draw on textbooks published by Bob Jones University of Greenville, S.C., which describes itself as having stood for "the absolute authority of the Bible since 1927."
The plaintiffs, the Association of Christian Schools International, which represents more than 800 schools in California, and the Calvary Chapel Christian School of Murrieta, Calif., contend that their students are being discriminated against because of their religious beliefs. The university system counters that it has the right to set its own standards.
EXCERPTS:
"United States History for Christian Schools," written by Timothy Keesee and Mark Sidwell (Bob Jones University, 2001), says this about Thomas Jefferson.
American believers can appreciate Jefferson's rich contribution to the development of their nation, but they must beware of his view of Christ as a good teacher but not the incarnate son of God. As the Apostle John said, "Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son" (I John 2:22).
Slavery, which most historians look at politically or economically, is seen as "an excellent example of the far-reaching consequences of sin."
The sin in this case was greed - greed on the part of African tribal leaders, on the part of slave traders and on the part of slave owners, all of whom allowed their love for profit to outweigh their love for their fellow man. The consequences of such greed and racism extended across society and far into the future. It resulted in untold suffering-most obviously for the black race but for the white race as well. ... The Lord has never exaggerated in warning us of sin's devastating consequences - for us and for our descendants (Exodus 34:7).
The book also criticizes the progressive movement championed by Theodore Roosevelt, and the Progressives themselves.
On the whole, they believed that man is basically good and that human nature might be improved. ... Such a belief, of course, ignored the biblical teaching that man is sinful by nature (Ephesians 2:1-3). Progressives therefore also ignored the fact that the fallible men who built the corrupt institutions that they attacked were the same in nature as those who filled the political offices and staffed the regulatory agencies that were supposed to control the corruption.
The Hopewell Indians used sharp sticks and clamshells here 2,000 years ago to sculpture seven million cubic feet of dirt into a sprawling lunar observatory and the spiritual center of their far-flung empire.
Today it is an easy Par 3 flanked by sand traps shaped like kidney beans.
But now there is an eagerness among many people to see moonrises from the mounds the way the Indians did, a desire that has caused a conflict with the golf club.
The Newark Earthworks, which make up the world's largest ancient mound site, lingered in obscurity 30 miles east of Columbus until five years ago, when the country club announced plans for a new clubhouse. The design included a foundation that would have dug into the mounds.
Not only did the club not win permission for a new building, but its request led to an organized protest campaign, organized by local professors and American Indians. Some residents, newly aware of the landmark in their backyards, began to question whether the country club should exist at all.
"Playing golf on a Native American spiritual site is a fundamental desecration," said Richard Shiels, a history professor at Ohio State University's Newark campus who is leading the fight to expand public access.
The earthworks range in height from 3 to 14 feet and once sprawled over four square miles. They include an octagon large enough to hold four Roman Colosseums; two parallel mounds connect it to a circle that encloses 20 acres. Their construction required decades of labor.
The scores, which belonged to an anonymous Polish collector, include works by Verdi, Josef Rixner, Carl Robrecht, Heinrich Strecker and Franz von Suppé. Many are handwritten and bear the seal of the camp, a museum spokesman said. The scores are signed by prisoners who were in the orchestra, using their inmate numbers.
But now a historian from Ludwigshafen has provoked an uproar with his discovery that the same Du Bist Deutschland cry was used at Nazi rallies in the 1930s. Stefan Morz found photographs of a 1935 Nazi convention in which soldiers display a banner reading, in gothic script, Denn Du Bist Deutschland (Because You Are Germany).
The slogan was topped with the head of Adolf Hitler.
"Every time I see the slogan Du Bist Deutschland I am reminded of this rather disturbing parallel with the past," Mr Morz said.
Researchers are now trying to discover how widespread the slogan was, even if most agree it was not one of the Nazis' official mantras. Its intended effect then is believed to be similar to that of the modern version: "You have the potential to make this country great once again."
The backers of the modern campaign, several blue-chip media companies, expressed shock at the discovery but quickly distanced themselves from the Third Reich connection.
Indeed, one of the campaign's aims is to release today's Germans from the collective guilt and depression they still feel about the Nazi era, they said. The project's image has now been battered by that same legacy.
The remains of what is believed to be one of the oldest pubs in the country were found by construction workers at a development site in Parramatta.
Just a metre below the surface, workers unearthed the cellar belonging to the Wheatsheaf Hotel -- which stood on the corner of Marsden and Macquarie Sts from 1801 to 1808.
A second hotel -- The Shepherd and Flock Inn -- opened at the site in 1825 and continued trading until 1870.
Amazingly, the cellar's timber floor was still intact -- preserved after being water-logged and starved of oxygen. Several spigots -- brass taps put into barrels -- have also been found.
[Editor's note: See Roundup's Talking About History for more.]
However, he concedes that Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell did try to hamper election turnout by requiring the use of 80 pound stock paper for voter registration (he later backed down). And "46,000 provisional ballots went uncounted," he notes. (Another 92,000 ballots were rejected after voting machines reported they were unreadable.)
Click here to read the response of Bob Fitrakis, Harvey Wasserman.
"Sprawl: A Compact History" says that cities have sprawled for thousands of years: Indeed, outside the walls of ancient Rome was a place the Romans called suburbium, literally "below the walls" --- a place for businesses that couldn't operate within the city and for people who couldn't afford to live there.
Author Robert Bruegmann, an architecture historian and urban planner at the University of Illinois at Chicago, reports that suburbium has been with us for thousands of years, and that it must be a desirable place because we keep creating it again and again, all over the globe.
"Atlanta got the label of poster child of sprawl in the late 1990s, about 1995," Bruegmann said. "It really moved into undisputed first place as the world exemplar of sprawl." But he maintains that Atlanta is simply going through the same growing pains that seized London in the early 1800s, Chicago in the late 1800s and Los Angeles in the 1900s.
"If you look at that list of places what you realize is that, without exception, these are places that were growing the fastest, that were changing the fastest, that were creating wealth for the largest number of people," says Bruegmann.
He spoke by phone last week with the Journal-Constitution's Richard Halicks. Here is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Q. You chair the art history department and are a professor of architecture and urban planning. How much did the art history side of your training inform your analysis in this book?
A. Actually, a lot. One of the biggest surprises I had was that these debates about sprawl are usually couched in terms of objective, quantifiable matters like efficiency or agricultural production or pollution, things like that. But in fact, if you look at the anti-sprawl literature over time, you see that the thing that really gets people annoyed and angry, and has for centuries now, is aesthetics. That is really the emotional linchpin of a tremendous amount of anti-sprawl agitation.
[He refers to the book "Sprawl City: Race, Politics & Planning in Atlanta," published in 2000.] "Sprawl City" --- I was just looking at it a few minutes ago. It's heavily about race, because that's what the authors were preoccupied with. But if you look on almost any page, you see these words like "formless," "amorphous," "unplanned," all these things that are really about the aesthetic qualities of the place.
Q. You offer a startling thesis --- that sprawl happens. It certainly has negative aspects, but you describe it as a natural process?
A. Certainly there are major problems, as there were in London in the 19th century, Chicago in the late 19th century, Los Angeles in the 20th century, Atlanta at the turn of the 21st century --- sure those places had problems. But two things about that: One is, these are the kinds of problems that every city in the world wants to have --- that is, enormous growth and growth in wealth. And the other thing about them is that they always, in retrospect, look like golden eras. I've absolutely no doubt that, at the end of the 21st century, when people look back 50 years or a hundred years, Atlanta will be seen as one of the great lands of opportunity in urban history.
Q. Really? What makes you say so?
A. The reason these problems occur is that these cities are so attractive. These are places that tens of thousands of people come to every year, because they offer what people really want more than anything else. That is, they offer privacy, mobility and choice. By privacy I mean the ability to control your own environment, and one of the ways you can do that relatively easily is if you have your own plot of land and your own house. By mobility, I mean physical mobility and also social and economic mobility. And choice --- that means you can do a lot of different things. I think there's absolutely no doubt that these places we're talking about, these growth machines, Atlanta being one of them, fulfilled those needs, and people poured in from all over the world.
"It was irresponsible for Teen People to post an article describing these neo-Nazis as 'white separatists' without ever acknowledging that they are racists, admirers of Hitler, and Holocaust-deniers," said Dr. Rafael Medoff, director of the Wyman Institute. "Time Inc has done the right thing by removing the offensive article from the Teen People web site."
The controversy began when Teen People announced that its upcoming February 2006 issue would include a feature story on "Prussian Blue," the 13 year-old twin sisters Lynx and Lamb Gaede. But the announcement described the twins' beliefs only as "white pride" and did not mention that they
wear Hitler t-shirts, deny the Holocaust, and frequently perform at neo-Nazi events. According to media reports, Teen People promised the twins it would refrain from using the words "hate," "supremacist," and "Nazi" in the article. In response to public protests, Time Inc, which publishes Teen People, announced that the upcoming story has been canceled.
But the Wyman Institute discovered that Teen People's web site was continuing to run a second sanitized story about the Gaede twins, which described their beliefs only as "white separatism" and did not explain that they are neo-Nazis and Holocaust-deniers.
In response to the Wyman Institute's protests, Time Inc has now removed the second story from the Teen People web site.
Dr. Medoff said: "During the 1930s, too many in the news media failed to report accurately on the violent and racist nature of Adolf Hitler and his followers. We dare not repeat that tragic mistake.
It is particularly important that publications which appeal to young people, such as Teen People, report fully and accurately on groups like Prussian Blue, which are poisoning the minds of America's youth with their racist hate."
Still, there are a few stories of inconclusive wars that left the United States in a more dignified position, including the continuing American presence in South Korea and the NATO peacekeeping mission in Bosnia. But even those stand in stark contrast to the happier legacy of total victory during World War II.
Alongside the dampening of hopes, there has also been a fair amount of historical revisionism regarding the darker tales of conflicts past: a considered sense that if the superpowers had made different decisions, things could have turned out more palatably, and that they still might in Iraq.
Maybe not surprisingly, Vietnam is the focus of some of the most interesting revisionism, including some of it immediately relevant to Iraq, where the intensive effort to train Iraqi security forces to defend their own country closely mirrors the "Vietnamization" program in South Vietnam. If Congress had not voted to kill the financing for South Vietnam and its armed forces in 1975, argues Melvin R. Laird in a heavily read article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, Saigon might never have fallen.
"Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by cutting off funding for our ally in 1975," wrote Mr. Laird, who was President Nixon's defense secretary from 1969 to 1973, when the United States pulled its hundreds of thousands of troops out of Vietnam.
In an interview, Mr. Laird conceded that the American departure from Vietnam was not a pretty sight. "Hell, the pictures of them getting in those helicopters were not good pictures," he said, referring to the chaotic evacuation of the American embassy two years after Vietnamization was complete, and a year after Nixon resigned. But on the basis of his what-if about Vietnam, Mr. Laird does not believe that all is lost in Iraq.
"There is a dignified way out, and I think that's the Iraqization of the forces over there," Mr. Laird said, "and I think we're on the right track on that."
Many analysts have disputed the core of that contention, saying that large swaths of the Iraqi security forces are so inept they may never be capable of defending their country against the insurgents without the American military backing them up. But Mr. Laird is not alone in his revisionist take and its potential application to Iraq.
William Stueck, a history professor at the University of Georgia who has written several books on Korea, calls himself a liberal but says he buys Mr. Laird's basic analysis of what went wrong with Vietnamization.
Korea reveals how easy it is to dismiss the effectiveness of local security forces prematurely, Mr. Stueck said. In 1951, Gen. Matthew Ridgeway felt deep frustration when Chinese offensives broke through parts of the line defended by poorly led South Korean troops.
But by the summer of 1952, with intensive training, the South Koreans were fighting more effectively, Mr. Stueck said. "Now, they needed backup" by Americans, he said. By 1972, he said, South Korean troops were responsible for 70 percent of the front line.
On more than 2,000 other iPods: George's Military History Podcast. And those are just the subscribers through iTunes.
His Web site has recorded more than 15,000 downloads since he debuted his weekly show on Labor Day weekend: "Bringing you the strangest anecdotes, most innovative technology, and most significant events in Military History." He has fans in more than 40 countries.
"I was shocked to learn that he's only 15 years old. I've been through enough college and graduate school to know it takes a lot of time, work and maturity to research and organize a 20-minute lecture and then defend it against questions," said one subscriber, Brian Liddicoat, 39, who has an MBA and is a real estate attorney in Northern California. "This guy sounds like a college professor with years of experience, not a high school student. This is high-quality podcasting, and military history is not a very forgiving subject: Military history buffs tend to get very particular on details."
Most historical accounts, however, say the flu originated in Kansas, at Fort Riley’s Camp Funston. The first reports of soldiers getting sick occurred in March. Historians also think American soldiers sent to Europe were the main carriers of the disease to that continent.
According to the 2004 book “The Great Influenza” by John M. Barry, the origin of the flu may have been January or February in Haskell County in southwest Kansas. It then spread to Camp Funston.
"This is the last chance. Nature is reclaiming the site; much of it looks like a jungle. If we don't do anything now, we won't be able to save it," said Meyer, adding that many tombs already were almost beyond repair.
As a result, Berlin's Jewish community is looking to the German government for its rescue. And, Meyer plans to propose that Weissensee be put forward as a candidate for UNESCO's list of world heritage sites, a move that virtually would guarantee future funding by the German government.
The city of Berlin has said it is too broke to pay for the restoration. But Mayor Klaus Wowereit said he would support Meyer's appeal for federal funds and for UNESCO recognition.
"This is not just a problem for the Jewish community," Meyer said. "It's a problem for Germany as a whole. The graveyard reflects a history of Jewish life in Germany that no longer exists."
Historians agree that the site, opened in 1880, is a national treasure because the musicians, scientists, poets and business people buried there show how integrated and important Jews were in German society before the Nazis wiped them out.
There were more than 173,000 Jews living in Berlin in the early 1930s before Hitler came to power. By 1941, 100,000 had managed to flee; most of the rest were deported and murdered in the Holocaust. Just over 1,000 managed to survive underground in Berlin, and 12,000 live in Berlin today.
The police chief in what was then a small town of 7,000 was a young Zagreb-trained lawyer called Milivoj Asner. Now 92 and living in the southern Austrian city of Klagenfurt, Mr Asner both denies and indirectly confirms his role in the pogroms. "I was just the town police chief, dealing with traffic offences, petty crime, thievery," he told the Guardian. "I did not hate Jews as such. I have many Jewish friends."
But for Efraim Zuroff, the Israeli-American Nazi-hunter who has inherited the mission of the late Simon Wiesenthal, the Asner case is at the centre of his Operation Last Chance - his campaign, mainly in eastern and southern post-communist Europe, to bring ageing war crimes suspects to justice before they die. "As Simon would say," said Mr Zuroff, "he who ignores the murderers of the past paves the way for the murderers of the future. But it's very difficult in eastern Europe for these post-communist societies to face up to their complicity in genocide."
Since 1950, five of the eight other presidents who fell below 40% — Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush — lost their bids for re-election or opted not to run again. A sixth, Richard Nixon, was overwhelmed by the Watergate scandal and resigned.
Only two, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, turned things around. Both saw their approval ratings drop below 40% early in their presidencies, but each had time to recover and got elected to a second term.
The current President Bush's trouble arrived in his second term. Battered by high gasoline prices, declining public support for the Iraq war and lingering anger over the federal government's slow response to Hurricane Katrina, Bush saw his approval ratings slide to 39% in an Oct. 13-16 USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll, before climbing back to 40%-42% in four ensuing polls. In the most recent poll, taken Nov. 11-13, Bush's approval rating fell to 37%, the lowest the poll has recorded in his presidency.
Though he no longer has to think about re-election, Bush still has three years left in his presidency — time in which he'll work to improve the U.S. position in Iraq, hold the Republican majority in Congress in 2006, restart a stalled legislative agenda and try to build a legacy. Slumping approval ratings will make all of those tougher. Even as he sought the comfort of his Texas ranch for Thanksgiving this week, Iraq war protesters on nearby roads were a reminder of his troubles.
"What we call it, is Unthanksgiving," Bear Lincoln of the Wailikie Tribe told AFP as he waved burning sage to purify the area and ward off evil spirits.
Traditional Thanksgiving feasting in the United States is a tribute to the meal the original European Pilgrims shared with the Native Americans who helped them survive in the new land. But it is not a day of celebration for the Wailkikie tribe.
"It was the saddest day for us. It was a big mistake for us to help the Pilgrims survive that first winter. They betrayed us once they got their strength."
"They have been terrorists since they landed on the East Coast in 1492, and they they are still doing it today in Iraq and other countries," Lincoln said of the pilgrims and their legacy.
"We are reminding them we are still here, and still surviving," Lincoln, 51, added.
Five years later, Bush is advocating an expansive American role in spreading freedom and democracy around the world; but much of the country and even segments of the foreign policy elite have reverted to the more constricted views that Bush promoted during the 2000 campaign. That's the provocative finding of an extensive poll of Americans' foreign policy views conducted in October by the Pew Research Center and released last week.
In the '20s and '30s, isolationism prevailed both among foreign policy elites and the general public. From 1940 to the end of the Cold War, liberal internationalism was favored by elites and, to a great extent, the general public. But since the '90s, there has been a clash among all four views. After September 11, liberal internationalism and neoconservatism enjoyed a resurgence, but as the Pew poll shows, isolationism has made a vigorous comeback, especially among the general public.
Since 1964, polls--first Gallup, then Pew--have been asking Americans whether the"United States should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own." An affirmative answer is a good indication of isolationist sentiment and hostility to both liberal internationalism and neoconservatism. In 1964, for instance, Gallup found only 18 percent of Americans agreed, while 70 percent disagreed, with this statement. The number began to rise soon afterwards; by June 1995, with the end of Cold War and the Republican capture of Congress, it had risen to 41 percent.
In September 2001, as Americans learned the hard way of our connection to the rest of the world, the number fell to 30 percent. Americans once more saw themselves as having global responsibilities. But according to the current Pew poll, it has now risen to an all-time high of 42 percent. That represents a sharp shift, and according to the Pew numbers, most of it took place in the last year, as Americans have become thoroughly disillusioned with the Iraq war.
The institute investigates war crimes in the Communist era. The archive reveals details about the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981.
The plaza-style memorial across the street from the National Mall would honor Eisenhower's legacy of public service, joining the collection of nearby monuments to Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
"It was his total approach to domestic and international politics that set him apart," said Retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Carl Reddel, executive director of the Eisenhower Memorial Commission. "He's a much more profound figure than many realized."
The memorial site, selected earlier this year, was approved this month by the National Capital Memorial Advisory Commission. If it passes muster with two other advisory groups, the commission will formally recommend it to Congress next year.
Completion of the memorial itself remains at least five or six years away, Reddel said. There is no design yet, although planners envision both a physical structure and a "living element" that would offer programs explaining the president's role in history.
Mr Irving's lawyer has said the historian now no longer denies that gas chambers existed in Nazi death camps.
Mr Irving can appeal against the charges under Austrian law. No trial date has been set yet. He could face up to 10 years in jail if found guilty.
A court in Vienna ruled on Friday that Mr Irving must stay in custody as there was a risk he could abscond.
His lawyer Elmar Kresbach had offered to post bail.
Prosecutors this week charged Irving, 67, under an Austrian law that makes denying the Holocaust a crime. The charges stem from two speeches he gave in Austria in 1989 in which he allegedly denied the existence of the chambers. He faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted.
Irving's attorney, Elmar Kresbach, said Thursday the historian has told him he now believes that Nazi gas chambers existed.
``He changed some of the views he is so famous for,'' Kresbach told The Associated Press. ``He told me: 'Look, there was a certain period when I drew conclusions from individual sources which are maybe provocative or could be misinterpreted or could be even wrong.'''
He said additional research Irving carried out after Soviet archives were opened to scholars persuaded him that his former beliefs were ``not really worthwhile to hold up,'' Kresbach said.
Irving's new position was met with skepticism from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which works to track down former Nazis before they die.
James's biographer, Leon Edel, explained his vituperativeness toward New York - so out of character for this master of evasion and indirection - as a reflection of James's dismay at the vast changes he found in the Edenic city of his childhood. But for Colm Toibin, author of "The Master," the acclaimed biographical novel about James published last year, James's anger at the city has another meaning. It reflects his sexual ambivalence, and perhaps offers a clue to the nature of "the obscure hurt" that James claimed he suffered in his youth, which kept him out of the Civil War, but may also have paralyzed him emotionally.
The New York of his boyhood was, James wrote, "an earlier, quieter world, a New York of better manners and better morals and homelier beliefs," a place where he and his brother William could wander free "to stretch our legs and fill our lungs without prejudice."
But then in 1855, when Henry was 12, his father uprooted the family, first to Switzerland, then to Paris, London, Newport, then back again to Europe. For Henry it was a time of dismal upheaval. In a telephone interview from Dublin, Mr. Toibin called it "a very serious psychological break."
Mr. Toibin suggested that the uprooting occurred in a crucial year when James was going through puberty. "Before the move, there was the uncomplicated business of being a child," he said.
And after?
Mr. Toibin does not define James as homosexual. His sexuality was complex. "We can say with certainty he was not heterosexual," he said. But the uprooting "caused an area of him to freeze."
Mr. Karabel writes that until the 1920's, Harvard, Yale and Princeton, "like the most prestigious universities of other nations," admitted students "almost entirely on the basis of academic criteria." Applicants "were required to take an examination, and those who passed were admitted." Though the exams exhibited a distinct class bias (Latin and Greek, after all, were not taught at most public schools), he says that "the system was meritocratic in an elemental way: if you met the academic requirements, you were admitted, regardless of social background."
This all changed after World War I, he argues, as it became "clear that a system of selection focused solely on scholastic performance would lead to the admission of increasing numbers of Jewish students, most of them of eastern European background."
The recently declassified papers, from the first days of the Nixon presidency in 1969 until the end of 1974, show that Nixon wanted an alternative to the option of full-scale nuclear war - a plan for a gentler war, one that could ultimately vanquish the Soviet Union while avoiding the worst-case situation.
The papers provided a glimpse behind the scenes at efforts to find choices other than "the horror option," as the national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, called the worst-case scripts for all-out nuclear war that were then in place.
Qualms about causing so much death were hardly the only motivation. American officials worried that their nuclear threat lacked credibility because it was so awful that adversaries questioned whether the United States would ever use it.
In a 1969 diary entry, Nixon's chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, recalled the president's taking part in an exercise that day aboard the Boeing 707 outfitted to conduct nuclear warfare from the air.
"It was pretty scary," Mr. Haldeman wrote. The president asked many questions about "kill results," he wrote, adding about his boss: "Obviously worries about the lightly tossed-about millions of deaths."
The two men--John William Rooney and his friend, Marshall Lawrence Pierce--are suspected of stealing many documents between 1974 and 1988. The loss of the papers became known when the archives curator discovered they were put on sale at Sotheby’s. A quick search revealed the theft along with the others.
The two men, if they are convicted, could end in jail for up to three years. While many papers have been returned to France, others are still to be found.
PARIS, 24 nov 2005 (AFP) - Deux Américains qui avaient pillé les Archives nationales à Paris, y dérobant notamment un exemplaire du Traité de Fontainebleau (1814), ont été renvoyés mercredi devant le tribunal correctionnel de Paris, a-t-on appris jeudi de sources proches du dossier.
John William Rooney, 74 ans, historien, ancien professeur d'histoire et spécialiste de la Restauration française, et son ami Marshall Lawrence Pierce, 44 ans, sont renvoyés pour"recel de biens provenant d'un vol" conformément aux réquisitions du parquet. Le délit de"vol" est prescrit car les faits se sont déroulés entre 1974 et 1988.
L'affaire avait débuté en mai 1996 lorsque la conservatrice des Archives nationales à Paris avait repéré dans le catalogue d'une vente publique chez Sotheby's un exemplaire du traité de Fontainebleau, mis en vente par M. Pierce. Dans ce document du 11 avril 1814, Napoléon 1er renonçait à l'Empire, acceptant l'exil à l'île d'Elbe. Après une plainte contre X des autorités françaises, le FBI avait retiré de la vente le traité ainsi que des lettres de ratification qui l'accompagnaient.
Par la suite, les recherches aux Archives nationales de Paris ont démontré que nombre d'autres documents, qui se trouvaient dans des cartons consultés par M. Rooney, avaient disparu. Au total, plusieurs dizaines de documents ont disparu et la plupart n'ont jamais été retrouvés.
Le traité, qui a été conservé pendant plusieurs années dans les bureaux du FBI à New York, avait été restitué en grande pompe à l'ambassade des Etats-Unis en avril 2002 au juge français chargé de l'enquête Gérard Caddéo. Le procès pourrait se tenir dans le courant de l'année 2006 à Paris.
Officials said the compromise, still being worked out and requiring approval from the Met's board and the Italian government, could resolve Italy's longstanding claims to some of the Met's most prized antiquities, which include a 15-piece Hellenistic silver set and an urn from the sixth century B.C. decorated by the Greek painter Euphronios.
But in an interview, Philippe de Montebello, the Met's director, underscored that Italy would have to provide "incontrovertible evidence" to the museum that the works it claims were illegally excavated in Italy. "If we are convinced by the evidence, we will take appropriate action," he said.
Only city leaders and two sculptors have been unable to satisfy the community's collective memory of what the civil rights leader looked like, even though King was among the most famous people of the 20th century.
"How you perceive a person, especially a person such as Dr. King, depends on at what point in time and at what era in his life and in what medium you actually met him - if you met him as a minister in a church, if you met him as an activist on the street, or if he was sitting in a restaurant or at your dinner table," city council member Lamont Wiggins said.
A city block-sized memorial park anchored by a sculpture of King was proposed several years ago in Rocky Mount. The city of 56,000 about an hour east of Raleigh has long prided itself on its association with King.
On Nov. 27, 1962, the civil rights leader addressed 2,000 people in the gym of Booker T. Washington High School, first using the now-famous words he rephrased the following August in his speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.
"And so, my friends of Rocky Mount, I have a dream tonight," he said. "That one day, right here in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will meet at the table of brotherhood."
But when it comes to Thanksgiving, Florida historians have been saying the same thing for years: It happened first in the Sunshine State — with salt pork, sea biscuits and garbanzo beans.
In the 1560s, French and Spanish settlers arrived separately on Florida's northern coast, and each celebrated with prayer and a thanksgiving feast. The Spanish gathering at St. Augustine even featured guests from a local American Indian tribe.
"They were thanking God, they had food, they said prayers," said Paul George, a history professor at Miami-Dade College. "They were the first ones to essentially give us a recorded celebration."
It wasn't until 1621, more than 50 years later, that Pilgrims came to Plymouth, Mass., and held the feast that was later dubbed the first Thanksgiving.
But the Florida celebrations didn't become widely known until the second half of the 20th century, long after Abraham Lincoln's 1863 declaration that the last Thursday in November would be the national day of Thanksgiving.
Michael Gannon, a University of Florida professor, upset New Englanders in the 1980s when he started pointing out that a book he wrote decades earlier established that the first Thanksgiving took place in St. Augustine on Sept. 8. 1565.
They called him the Grinch who stole Thanksgiving.
But no one really disputed that Pedro Menendez de Aviles, a Spanish explorer, invited the Timucua Indians to dinner in St. Augustine in 1565 after a thanksgiving Mass celebrating the explorers' safe arrival.
Each of the articles is available online in full-text, and also in pdf format. You'll find lots of provocative reading if you're interested in the Japanese American internment of World War II and its relevance to current debates on antiterrorism policy and racial profiling.
"We talk about the principal of Congregational church government here as something that's so foundational to the way that Americans think about institutions today," said Peggy Bendroth, executive director of the American Congregational Association, which maintains the Congregational Library in Boston.
"And we want to be careful and not say that Congregationalism is the source of all American democracy, but I think it is really possible to say that it was in Congregational churches in New England where that principle of the consent of the governed took root," she added.
Jon Butler, a professor of religious studies and dean of the graduate school of arts and sciences at Yale University, differed.
"The origins of democracy in America are very complex, and they certainly don't depend on the Puritan tradition," said Butler, who acknowledged that some other historians would disagree. "Puritanism didn't care to recognize one of the core ideas of democracy, the importance of individualism. They were forever shunning people in their congregations, issuing judgments.... They were exclusive instead of inclusive."
Nixon and Kissinger sought alternatives to the massive Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) options which targeted up to 4000 nuclear weapons on Soviet military and industrial installations. During the 1960s, the SIOP had become a set of plans with five major preemptive and retaliatory options for massive nuclear strikes against the Soviet Union and other communist countries. The SIOP options were:
* a preemptive strike against Soviet bloc nuclear targets (the ALPHA task) only. In 1971, this strike required some 3200 bombs and missile warheads to destroy 1700 installations
* a preemptive strike against Soviet bloc nuclear (ALPHA task) and non-nuclear (BRAVO task) military targets; in 1971, this strike required some 3500 programmed weapons to destroy 2200 installations.
* a preemptive strike against bloc military (ALPHA and BRAVO) and war-supporting urban-industrial (CHARLIE task) targets; in 1971 this could have involved some 4200 programmed weapons targeting 6500 installations
* a retaliatory strike against bloc ALPHA, BRAVO, and CHARLIE target categories; in 1971 this required some 4000 programmed weapon targeting 6400 installations
* a retaliatory strike against bloc ALPHA and BRAVO military targets; in 1971, this option required 3200 programmed weapons to destroy 2100 installations.
The SIOP also included "withholds", e.g., attacks on command centers could be withheld to make it possible to communicate with authorities in the Soviet Union or China. Attacks on entire countries, e.g. China, Poland, or Romania, could also be withheld if they were not in the war or for other political or military reasons. Some 600 weapons were slated for a maximal China-only nuclear strike on military and industrial targets.
The massive SIOP attacks would have killed millions and Nixon and Kissinger were startled, even worried, by their scale when they first heard a SIOP briefing on January 27, 1969, only a week after the inauguration. Nixon's chief of staff later reported that the president "Obviously worries about the lightly tossed about millions of deaths." Concerned that threats of apocalyptic nuclear attacks lacked credibility, during the years that followed Kissinger sought plans for the limited use of strategic nuclear weapons. In this way, he wanted to avoid the "risk of our being paralyzed in a crisis because of the lack of plans short of an all-out SIOP response."
This electronic briefing book documents the Nixon White House's search for useable nuclear threats. Nixon issued an order to the bureaucracy in January 1974 calling for new war plans but elements of the national security bureaucracy were unenthusiastic doubting that nuclear weapons could be used in small numbers without touching off a conflagration. This briefing book also publishes for the first time Secretary of Defense's Nuclear Weapons Employment Policy (NUWEP) which provided guidance to war planners based on the new concepts of controlled escalation.
One of the studies in this briefing book includes data, as of 1971, on the nearly 13,000 U.S. nuclear weapons deployed overseas, with a breakdown of their regional locations (e.g., Europe, Pacific) and weapons types (see document 4, page 35).
Nearly surrounded by pricey subdivisions, the cinderblock Yates Grocery and Farm Supply sells neither anymore. As if things weren't bad enough, style maven Martha Stewart has chosen this Raleigh suburb to build a signature neighborhood of houses designed after her homes in Maine and New York.
Holding court near a potbellied stove, the 69-year-old man in the suspenders and NASCAR shirt laments that his old customers have been replaced by fast-talking, SUV-driving Northerners who don't seem to be able to read a STOP sign.
''It's all gone,'' Yates, pausing for another spit of tobacco juice, says of the Southern town of his youth. ''Everything is completely different from what it used to be.''
Things are indeed changing in the South. And so is the notion of what it means to be ''Southern.''
In this most maligned and mused-upon of American regions, the term conjures a variety of images. Magnolias, front porch swings and sweet tea for some; football, stock cars and fried chicken for others; lynchings, burning crosses and civil rights marches for still others.
We've had the Solid South, the Old South and the New South.
But are we heading toward a ''No South''?
The duo, known as "Prussian Blue," are 13 year-old twin sisters Lynx and Lamb Gaede, who wear Hitler t-shirts, deny the Holocaust, and frequently perform at neo-Nazi events. According to media reports, Teen People was planning to run a feature profile them in its February issue, but had promised to refrain from using the words "hate," "supremacist," and "Nazi" in the article. A web site preview of the article referred to the twins' beliefs only as "white pride." The upcoming article and the preview have been withdrawn, according to the magazine's publisher, Time Inc. (New York Post, Nov. 23, 2005)
But the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies has determined that Teen People is continuing to run another sanitized story about the Gaede twins on its web site--
See: http://www.teenpeople.com/teenpeople/article/0,22196,1130390,00.shtml
The Wyman Institute is urging Time Inc to withdraw this story.
Wyman Institute director Dr. Rafael Medoff said: "Time Inc. did the right thing by canceling the upcoming story whitewashing these neo-Nazi singers. But that wise decision is undermined by the continued presence on the Teen People web site of another article that fails to identify the Gaede sisters as racists and Holocaust-deniers. During the 1930s, too many in the news media failed to report accurately on the violent and racist nature of Adolf Hitler and his followers. We dare not repeat that tragic mistake."
Visitors to the "Teen People Plus" section of Teen People's web site still find a November 15, 2005 article about the twins which calls them only "white separatists" and fails to use the words "hate," "supremacist," or "Nazi." The article does not explain what it means by "white separatists," does not identify the girls as racists, and makes no mention of their admiration for Hitler or their denial of the Holocaust. It says they have "performed at separatist rallies all over the country," without explaining the racist and neo-Nazi nature of those rallies. A poll attached to the article asks readers only, "Do you think the girls are embracing this message because of their parents?" --without explaining what "this message" is.
A Web-based teaser for the February story originally called the hatemongering duo "aspiring musicians" and compared them to wide-eyed sensations Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen.
The only hint that 13-year-old Lynx and Lamb Gaede praise Hitler, call the Holocaust an "exaggeration" and count former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke among their fans was a watered-down description of their message as "white pride."
"The last thing we need is to celebrate hate in this country," said Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, who helped lead a Monday demonstration outside the office of Teen People's parent company Time Warner. "I'm absolutely thrilled it's not running."
Time's initial response to the protest was the added mention of the girls' white separatist mom, National Vanguard member April Gaede, in the Web-based teaser.
Hours later, the company yanked the entire project.
To enforce the agreement, I sent 20,000 U.S. soldiers to Bosnia as part of a 60,000-troop NATO peacekeeping force, because it was the only way to ensure that the Dayton Agreement was more than words on a page. For three winters, the people of Sarajevo had inspired us all with their courage in the face of snipers, hunger and bitter cold. After the genocide of 1995, when more than 7,000 men were murdered in Srebrenica, it was clear that only NATO under America's leadership could ensure peace.
Still, a large majority of the American public opposed my decision. Some expected heavy casualties; some feared another round of war, with Bosnia split in two and the need for our troops never-ending. On the day before the Dayton Agreement was to take effect, the House of Representatives voted three-to-one against an American troop deployment to Bosnia. Despite this opposition, I felt the United States had to act in order to stop the atrocities and try to bring peace and stability to the region.
Ten years later, the people of Bosnia have validated those who stood with them. Dayton ended the war. It will not resume. The region is now stable and peaceful, and the brutal killings are only a memory, albeit a painful one for the many families who lost loved ones. In 10 years there have been no American or NATO casualties from hostile action and troop levels are now down to 7,000 overall, of which fewer than 200 are American.
Bosnia is one country. It does have two distinct entities, one Serb and one a Croat-Muslim Federation, but movement is unimpeded across the boundary line and there are no troops or roadblocks on that line. The country has a single currency and a single economy. Bosnia had more than 400,000 people under arms in 1995; today it has fewer than 10,000. Just under half the displaced people have returned, many of them to areas where they constitute a minority. Almost no one dared to predict these successes a decade ago.
To be sure, Dayton was not a perfect peace. It is hard to imagine such a thing. But it achieved vital national security interests. It ended the worst war in Europe in half a century, which threatened the peaceful integration of Europe after the Cold War. It, and subsequent events in Kosovo, laid the basis for a multiethnic state, which has lived in peace for a decade with its neighbors. It triggered the events that led to the dictator Slobodan Milosevic's removal and trial at The Hague for war crimes....
The scholars had varying levels of optimism about the near-term prospects for democracy in the region. But all agreed that political scientists and popular writers tend to lean too heavily on religious and cultural explanations for the persistence of tyranny in Arab countries and in the broader Islamic world.
The tenets and institutions of Islam are not necessarily a serious barrier to democracy, said Feriha Perekli, a graduate student in Middle Eastern studies and linguistics at Indiana University at Bloomington. The Islamic tradition of consultative governance is theoretically compatible with modern democratic institutions, she said.
It is more useful, Ms. Perekli said, to look not at religion but at the institutional structures of Arab countries. Borrowing a model developed by Richard Snyder, an associate professor of political science at Brown University, Ms. Perekli argued that most Arab nations today lack the structural conditions that typically foreshadow the emergence of democracy.
First, she said, in most Middle Eastern countries the military is tightly bound to the state. In countries such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan, she said, the top military officials are typically close relatives of the monarchs.
Second, the countries' domestic elites are not highly alienated. Most Middle Eastern regimes, she said, have effectively co-opted their countries' economic elites and have permitted just enough freedom in civil society to provide a safety valve for elite discontent.
Finally, there is no coherent opposition with mass popular support. The divisions between secular and Islamist reform movements, Ms. Perekli said, have prevented the emergence of such a coherent opposition.
Until those three structural conditions change, Ms. Perekli argued, there is not likely to be a successful democratic upheaval. "This is not an optimistic picture," she said.
Started in 1995 as part of the A&E Television network, the History Channel has become a cable-television staple. Mr. Mattson describes the channel as "the leading institution that popularizes history in the United States."
But to make history popular, Mr. Mattson says, the History Channel emphasizes scandals and conspiracy theories instead of historical debates and modern relevance. A History Channel memorandum about selecting commentators for shows reveals that the network prefers insights from attractive experts over respected ones, he explains.
"Entertainment over veracity, good looks over good history -- such are the operational principles of historical explanation in an age of entertainment," Mr. Mattson writes.
History becomes bizarre on the History Channel, he says. Without the omniscient narrator's endorsement or judgment, conspiracies and ghost stories share equal time with legitimate theories and real history.
Technology shows like Modern Marvels seem more like infomercials than analysis of technology's effect on society. An episode on air-conditioning, for example, features sound bites from public-relations executives at air-conditioning companies. The actor Tim Allen, promoting his new line of home-improvement equipment, appears on a show about power tools.
Mr. Mattson detects a larger trend in the History Channel's use of facts and trivia. The channel packages history in "bite-sized morsels for a bored and jaded audience," he writes, and in many ways, it's "no different from CNN."
The Iraqi newspaper al-Zaman reports that the artefacts, which date back to the era of the Sumerian civilisation around 4,000 years ago, were stolen by civilians, who returned them on Tuesday after hearing appeals from the Iraqi authorities and fatwas (religious edicts) issued by Shiite Imams calling on people to protect the country's archaeological assets.
The 39 candidates were the finalists that a five-member screening committee presented to Hall of Fame officials last July after reviewing a five-year study into the Negro Leagues and pre-Negro League baseball.
"Holding the election is extremely important," said Jeff Idelson, vice president of communication and education at the Hall of Fame. "It verifies the research that has been completed over the last five years.
"The myth about how good Negro League players were can now be factually supported from the research."
In 2001, the screening committee, which former Commissioner Fay Vincent served on as a non-voting chair, took a mandate from the Hall of Fame, sifted through Hall-backed research done on black baseball from 1860 to 1960, discussed the data and came up with its candidates for possible induction.
The initial research, which has drew praise for its depth and scope, got a jump start in 2000 with a $250,000 grant from Major League Baseball, said Dale Petroskey, president of the Hall of Fame.
"It's right in our strike zone; baseball history is what we do at the Baseball Hall of Fame," Petroskey said. "We thought there was a real need to know more about the Negro Leagues and the pre-Negro Leagues.
"And once and for all, we have statistics to judge players on."
With the money, the Hall of Fame assembled a 50-person research team in February 2001 that put black baseball under a microscope. The study, which will be published in the next year to 18 months, went to Vincent's screening committee earlier this year, and the committee came up with the finalists.
On its list are more than a handful of players whom Negro League historians have long argued should have been in Cooperstown when the first wave of black players was inducted.
After four times delaying a vote on Bruno Gollnisch, number two in France's extreme right National Front, the parliament's legal affairs committee voted overwhelmingly not to give him protection as a member of the European parliament (MEP) from court proceedings.
Gollnisch was charged over his comments at a press conference last year which trod a fine line on the edge of French laws against calling into question crimes against humanity.
The committee chairwoman, British MEP Diana Wallis, said her panel felt that the way Gollnisch had acted "was not fairly and fully and squarely within the member's exercise of his duties as a member of this parliament."
"We are not in any way entering into a debate on the nature of the charge in France or the nature of the law in France," she said.
Speaking in Lyon, France, in October 2004, Gollnisch said: "I do not deny the existence of deadly gas chambers. But I'm not a specialist on this issue, and I think we have to let the historians debate it."
He did not contest the "hundreds of thousands, the millions of deaths" during the Holocaust, but added: "As to the way those people died, a debate should take place."
Four days later, then French justice minister Dominique Perben, who is now transport minister and intends to run against Gollnisch in 2007 municipal elections, ordered police in Lyon to launch an inquiry.
They found he had no case to answer but Perben insisted charges be laid.
The trial of Gollnisch, who claims he is being persecuted by Perben, was scheduled for September but was pushed back until November 29 so that parliament could rule on his immunity.
The EU assembly will vote on the committee's recommendation in full session next week. In the unlikely event that it votes against the committee's advice, the case against Gollnisch would probably have to be dropped.
