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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
Meet Joe Enge.
Joe is an award-winning, 15-year veteran history teacher in Carson City who has, among other things, written two history textbooks and served on the 1997 task force which drew up Nevada’s history standards. But according to school district administrators, he’s a “bad” teacher.
You see, Joe has this crazy idea that American history should include our colonial period, as well as the Revolutionary War period. You know, where the Founding Fathers fought for independence from England and wrote the greatest governing document the world has ever known - the United States Constitution. You know, that period of time which gave us patriot heroes such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Tom Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, Sam Adams, Paul Revere, John Paul Jones, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Hancock.
And Joe has REALLY ticked off the local school district bureaucrats and the education establishment.
You see, unbeknownst to most parents in Carson City, the school district believes that high school American history should start with the Civil War era, not the days of America’s Founding. Indeed, the curriculum forced on history teachers at Carson High School ignores pre-Civil War history completely - other than a little optional “refresher” at the beginning of the school year or if you’re in an Advanced Placement class.
Joe Enge has fought the district’s History-Lite curriculum for the past three years by teaching ALL of his students ALL of America’s history, starting with the colonial period (remember the Pilgrims?).
In addition, Joe believes...get this...that the teacher should teach and the students should learn. He embraces and practices the “traditional” teacher-centered method of education, as opposed to the fashionable student-centered “discovery learning” method currently all the rage in San Francisco and Portland. What a trouble-maker.
So the school district wants to get rid of him.
Joe’s supervisors - including Carson High’s principal, Fred Perdomo - have given Joe unsatisfactory evaluations in retaliation for his refusal to teach a Founding-free version of American history. And although Joe’s a “tenured” teacher, three such bad evaluations would be grounds for running this maverick out of town on a rail (students would have to read Revolutionary War-era history to know just what this phrase means). So Joe challenged the administrative evaluations; however, the Carson City School District Superintendent, Mary Pierszynski, sided with the principal. Big surprise there.
Last month as part of a mediation effort, Ms. Pierszynski offered to buy Joe off by paying him one year’s salary if he’d quit. And considering the pure hell this one-man fight has put his family through, Joe actually considered it. But at the last minute, Pierszynski withdrew her offer, and now the dispute is moving to binding arbitration. Which means if Pierszynski’s ruling backing Perdomo’s evaluations stands, this Fulbright Scholar and Madison Fellowship award-winner will likely be tossed out on his kiester - and his Carson High students will finally be taught that American history began when Lincoln freed the slaves.
Of course, the teacher’s union could always ride in and defend this experienced, professional classroom educator. Yeah, right. Fat chance. You see, Joe has chosen not to join the teacher’s union, so these “principled” defenders of teaching professionals are more than happy to see the guy thrown to the wolves.
This entire episode is an outrage. Joe Enge is the kind of teacher we should WANT educating our kids. He loves history. He knows history. And he’s darned good at teaching history. Indeed, Enge’s spirit of resistance to this great injustice would make our Founding Fathers - who the Carson City School District would prefer to pretend never existed - proud. Especially Thomas Jefferson who (not that Carson City high school students would know it) once said, “The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive.”
It’s time for Superintendent Pierszynski, Principal Perdomo and the entire Carson City education establishment to call off the dogs and let professional American history teacher Joe Enge do what he’s been trained to do and has been successfully doing for 15 long years: TEACH AMERICAN HISTORY. The FULL American history, not the district’s “Reader’s Digest” version.
Please help keep American history IN ITS ENTIRETY alive at Carson High School by signing this petition urging the Carson City School District to allow Joe Enge to do what he’s been trained to do: Teach ALL of American history.
Chuck Muth
President
Citizen Outreach
President Bush's nominee for the Supreme Court, in a report written years before ubiquitous personal computers made electronic privacy the everyday concern it has become, warned of the potential for abuses by officials and companies collecting data on individuals.
Three decades before the Supreme Court decriminalized gay sex, Alito declared on behalf of his group of fellow Princeton students that "no private sexual act between consenting adults should be forbidden."
Alito also called for an end to discrimination against homosexuals in hiring.
As a federal appellate judge, Alito has built a scant record on gay-rights issues and a mixed one, at best, on privacy matters generally, in the view of civil-liberties advocates who are examining his opinions.
But they saw in the 1971 report a prescient thinker taking on issues ahead of their time, including the need for computer encryption, stronger oversight of domestic intelligence and curbs on the surveillance powers of states.
Alito is listed on the paper as the chairman of the conference, titled the Boundaries of Privacy in American Society, and author of the report's seven-page summary of findings. It was done for Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Alito was a senior acting as a "commissioner" for the undergraduates in his group.
It was still a good idea 127 years later. The city's old footprint corresponds closely to the small area that remained dry in the disastrous floods that came after Hurricane Katrina.
Indeed, the storm served up an unwelcome reminder that the city's expansive interior, pumped dry in the first few decades of the 20th century, is mostly reclaimed swampland. The killer storm essentially recreated what was here when Bienville founded the city in 1718.
"Of course the early settlers had it right," said Peirce Lewis, an urban geographer at Pennsylvania State University and author of "New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape," perhaps the definitive book about the effect of the city's topography on its history. "They worked with the river and the natural levees for almost 200 years."
Consider the 1878 map of New Orleans, drawn by civil engineer T.S. Hardee, which shows a city whose east-west dimensions are similar to today's. But most of the populated area in 1878 is confined to a strip of the east bank of the Mississippi River that runs from the Jefferson Parish line down to Poland Avenue in the Bywater.
And so, as the politicians, the civil rights leaders, the famous musicians and the ministers packed into a massive church here to honor Mrs. Parks with formal speeches, ordinary people also swapped stories about her as they went about their days, to work and back, on the bus.
Outside the Greater Grace Temple, thousands of people who had taken the day off from work waited to see a horse-drawn carriage carry Mrs. Parks's coffin toward a cemetery. In downtown offices, others brought televisions to watch more than six hours of remembrances and a call to action from a long line of dignitaries: the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the Rev. Joseph Lowery, the Rev. Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, former President Bill Clinton and on and on.
Mr. Clinton said Mrs. Parks had ignited "the most significant social movement in modern American history, to finish the work that spawned the Civil War and redeem the promise of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments."
Mr. Sharpton said she and her fellow civil rights pioneers "didn't talk a fight; they fought the fight."
Mr. Jackson dismissed the myth of Mrs. Parks as a simple seamstress who was just too tired to stand up one day. He said she was instead a militant and a freedom fighter.
Hopes were high after the storm passed. The former bank building that served as the Pass Christian Historical Society headquarters washed away, but its vault still stood. Workers opened it to find wet, sopping papers -- the ruined history of a seaside town. Most of the collection including town ledgers and old newspapers is lost.
"Apparently, the vault did not hold back water," said Lou Rizzardi, an alderman and historical society member in the town of 6,750. "So it penetrated. Things got damaged because of water."
All up and down the Mississippi Gulf Coast and into New Orleans, archivists and local historians are taking stock. They're worried about the future, but wondering also, what do they have left of their past after Katrina's 145 mph winds and a massive storm surge on August 29 splintered many communities and left others waterlogged.
Many are considering whether it is wise to keep such valuable documents in disaster-prone areas.
Just a few miles west of Pass Christian, the Hancock County Historical Society in Bay St. Louis fared much better with very little water damage and a vault that held, protecting thousands of documents, including family diaries and thousands of local photographs.
Charles Harry Gray, the executive director, was prepared in case disaster struck. Over the years he had been making copies of all of the group's most treasured documents, including 30,000 pictures. Not one single photograph or record was lost.
They are the pieces of Bay St. Louis' 306-year history that made the town of 8,230 what it is today, he said. Many of the copies were on computer disks and hard drives, others were sent to the University of Southern Mississippi, two hours north in Hattiesburg.
"It is imperative that you have copies in other locations because you never know what's going to happen, what the next catastrophe is going to be, and there certainly will be one," Gray said.
There were no copies in Pass Christian. Rizzardi said the hope for the town's past lies with a local plumber, Billy Bourdin, who kept 3,400 vintage pictures on computer disks as a hobby.
The actual photographs and his eight piles of newspaper clippings are gone, Bourdin said, but the disks survived.
But the third judge, Samuel A. Alito, disagreed, writing that the hotel had merely committed "minor inconsistencies" in its rules for filling jobs and that it would be wrong to allow "disgruntled employees to impose the costs of trial on employers who, although they have not acted with the intent to discriminate, may have treated their employees unfairly."
Alito's dissent prompted a rebuke from his normally congenial colleagues. The federal law that bans employment discrimination, the other two judges wrote, "would be eviscerated" if courts followed Alito's logic.
Bray v. Marriott attracted scarcely any attention at the time. But now that Alito has been nominated to the Supreme Court, it is part of a group of cases -- spanning gender bias, sexual harassment, age discrimination and disability and voting rights -- that his critics say reflects a narrow reading of civil rights laws.
According to a preliminary review of legal databases by The Washington Post, Alito has during 15 years as a judge on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit helped to decide scores of cases that touched on civil rights -- a far larger body of such opinions than Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. had produced before President Bush chose him for the Supreme Court four months ago. Alito's lengthy record on rights is emerging as a significant cleavage point between his supporters on the right and detractors on the left, even before activists on both sides have completed poring over his opinions.
In civil rights cases, Alito has agreed with the court's majority most of the time, The Post's review found. When he disagrees, he is not prone to inflammatory language or frontal challenges to Supreme Court precedent. Still, when he has taken a dissenting stance, Alito repeatedly has set a higher bar than his fellow judges for plaintiffs to prove that they were discriminated against -- and sometimes even to get a trial.
If carried out as advertised, the program would eliminate a cornerstone of the population control policies begun by Mao in the 1950\'s. The system of residence permits, known as hukou, ties every person to a locale and once made travel difficult without permission.
In practice, the system has been fading away for more than a decade. An estimated 200 million peasants have left the countryside to live in urban areas, some of them full time. Their access to urban services varies widely depending on local rules and the kind of employment they find.
In today\'s market-oriented economy, the once-comprehensive socialist benefits bestowed on urban residents carry far less weight. Most people rely on their own resources, or those of their employers, to pay for health care, housing and schooling.
\"This is an old-style way of managing a huge country and no longer makes sense with a market economy,\" said Qin Hui, a historian at Qinghua University in Beijing. \"If it\'s really going away, it is a significant turning point.\"
Mr. Qin said he expected that even if the system disappeared, local governments would retain administrative control over their populations. They would still set conditions on registration for urban residents and prevent the growth of slums.
\"The cities will become places where the relatively well off live,\" he said. \"Beijing is not going to look like New Delhi, or even like Bangkok.\"
Economic forces have eroded population controls in recent years. Shenzhen emerged from rice fields in the early 1980\'s to become one of China\'s most prosperous metropolitan areas, and nearly all of its 10 million residents were born elsewhere. Shanghai began the concept of a \"blue card\" for qualified migrant workers in the mid-1990\'s, giving them full access to housing and city services if they met criteria.
And it appears that civilian and military experts may never agree on exactly what happened at one of the world's most prized museums or on who should have protected these treasures.
Matthew Bogdanos, a Marine Reserve colonel and the U.S. military's lead investigator into the thefts, details the assault on the museum and its aftermath in his new book, Thieves of Baghdad (Bloomsbury, $29.95), written with thriller author William Patrick.
The book, released last week, is the civilian world's most detailed look at how the thefts unfolded and the behind-the-scenes efforts to recover the priceless antiquities.
The classics scholar-turned-attorney who has just returned to civilian life also describes the events in a report published in the current American Journal of Archaeology
In the book, Bogdanos, 48, tells the more personal story of the path he took to Baghdad from his family's lower Manhattan apartment after the World Trade Center fell on Sept. 11, 2001. A prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney's office — nicknamed "Pit Bull" because of his tenacity — he was best known for prosecuting Sean "Diddy" Combs on weapons charges stemming from a nightclub shooting. Combs was acquitted in March 2001.
All changed with 9/11. The four-year journey that followed took Bogdanos into active duty, through a stint tracking down Taliban records in Afghanistan and finally to his role as leader of the team investigating the museum thefts.
"We didn't have any expectations when we arrived at the museum. We just knew there was a problem to be fixed," he says.
Reacting to the report, Vietnamese foreign ministry spokesman Le Dung told AFP: "Everybody knows that the Tonkin Gulf event in 1964 was created by the then US administration, using it as a reason to extend war to the whole territory of Vietnam. This is a historic fact."
The NSA officials' report was used to justify the US Congress's historic Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave then-president Lyndon Johnson authority to sharply increase military operations in Vietnam without declaring war.
Hopes were high after the storm passed. The former bank building that served as the Pass Christian Historical Society's headquarters washed away, but its vault still stood. Workers opened it and found wet, sopping papers – the ruined history of a seaside town. Most of the collection including town ledgers and old newspapers was lost.
"Apparently, the vault did not hold back water," said Lou Rizzardi, an alderman and historical society member in the town of 6,750. "So it penetrated. Things got damaged because of water."
Up and down the Mississippi Gulf Coast and into New Orleans, archivists and local historians are taking stock.
They're worried about the future, but wondering also: What do they have left of their past after Katrina's 145 mph winds and a massive storm surge on Aug. 29 splintered many communities and left others waterlogged.
Many are considering whether it is wise to keep such valuable documents in disaster-prone areas.
“We are proud to have acquired the home of one of America’s legendary historic figures,” said Whitney Hatch, director of TPL’s New England office. “Webster Farm is significant, both in New Hampshire and nationally, and protecting it for future generations will protect an important part of American history.”
The 141-acre farm near Franklin, which has nearly a mile of frontage on the Merrimack River, was included earlier this year on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s list of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places.
“Today’s announcement marks a critical step toward the preservation of this important site,” said Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. “In his day, Daniel Webster was widely respected for his passionate, articulate defense of the Union. The farm he loved deserves to be treated with the same kind of respect. Without the commitment of local preservationists and the Trust for Public Land, this national treasure — part of New Hampshire’s rich history — may have been lost forever.”
TPL has acquired the farm from a commercial developer at a cost of $1.75 million and is temporarily holding it off the market. TPL and a local non-profit organization, the Webster Farm Preservation Association (WFPA), will now begin an effort to raise funds to permanently protect the farm, along with Webster’s home and several historic buildings on the land. The total needed to complete the project is $2.4 million, which will include immediate stabilization of the buildings and ongoing stewardship funds for the land and buildings.
A neighboring farm family, the Fifes, will eventually purchase the farmland and will work with TPL to establish permanent agricultural easements on the Webster property as well as on some of their own adjacent farmland. TPL and WFPA are working on a proposal for future use of the buildings consistent with their historical significance.
The New Hampshire Land and Communication Heritage Investment Program (LCHIP) previously announced that it will contribute $750,000 to the conservation effort. Rachel Rouillard, LCHIP’s executive director, said, “The Webster Farm is our state’s most important at-risk resource. This site has real significance to the entire state, and no other currently endangered site in New Hampshire has deeper history, greater cultural importance or more precious natural resource value.”
The only other known Revolutionary War-era field kitchen is at Valley Forge, Pa., where two were discovered, archaeologists said. "We weren't sure what we had," said Tom Bodor, director of cultural resources at The Ottery Group, a Maryland-based firm hired to conduct an archaeological survey of areas on the VIMS campus.
The field kitchen was laid out in a ring about 16 feet across. Soldiers dug out earthen fire boxes and piled the soil in the middle of the ring, said Chris Sperling, an Ottery Group archaeologist who has been working on site since February.
Sperling made the connection from the 11 fire boxes archaeologists found in a circle - yards from a Revolutionary War trench - to a temporary field kitchen after conducting some preliminary research over the Internet.
SUNKEN SECRET, which claims to uncover "new evidence about an enduring mystery." It's the story of the sinking of a "Norwegian ferry sabotaged in a daring resistance operation during WWII." The ferry was thought to be carrying heavy water useful in the creation of a Nazi nuclear bomb.
The press release ...
This new documentary involves one of the last remaining puzzles from World War II. It’s known that in the late 1930s the German army began a top secret research program to develop nuclear weapons after scientists in Berlin performed the first experiments showing that the atom could be split, unleashing immense power. But they would never finish the job. Just why has always been a mystery. In search of clues to solve this, NOVA follows a team of underwater archaeologists to the icy depths of a lake in Norway as they uncover startling new evidence by recovering the cargo of The Hydro, a sunken Norwegian ferry sabotaged in a daring resistance operation during WWII (Feb. 1944). They want to know what’s really inside them, because they may contain the key to the only weapon that could have won the war for Hitler – a Nazi nuclear bomb. The prevailing version is that the Nazis were using heavy water to develop nuclear weapons, and, thanks to brave Norwegian resistance efforts and British intelligence, this act kept Hitler from getting the bomb first by destroying the barrels of heavy water destined for the Nazi’s secret atomic bomb project. But was the intelligence wrong? Was this act worth it? How close were the Nazis really to having the atomic bomb? Analysis of one of those drums helps to solve a six-decade-long mystery about the role the Allies played in preventing a Nazi nuclear bomb.
NCH SUMMARY
On 23 February 2004, Russian citizen Rakhim Esenov (?1926-), writer, historian and freelance correspondent for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, in bad health, was detained by Security Service officers in the capital Ashgabat. He was believed to be at risk of torture.
Esenov was accused of "smuggling" into Turkmenistan 800 copies of his historical novel Ventsenosny Skitalets (The Crowned Wanderer; written around 1994, banned from publication in Turkmenistan for about ten years, eventually published in Moscow in 2003). The novel was set in the sixteenth-century Mogul (Mughal) Empire (1526-1803 CE) and centered on Bayram Khan, a Turkmen poet, philosopher and army general who saved the empire from falling apart in 1556-60. In February 1997, President Saparmurad Niyazov publicly criticized Esenov's "historical errors" for the latter's (correct) portrayal of Bayram Khan as a Shia rather than a Sunni Muslim. Esenov refused to make the "corrections" the president demanded. He was charged with "inciting social, national and religious hatred". On 9 March 2004, he was released after submitting a written undertaking to remain in Turkmenistan. The charges against him were not dropped. If convicted, he faces up to four years' imprisonment.
[Sources: Amnesty International, Urgent Action 90/04 (2 March 2004); idem, Report 2005 (London 2005) 260; Human Rights Watch, World Report
2005 (Washington) (2005) 436; Index on Censorship, 2/04: 146; International PEN, Rapid Action Network 06/04 (5 & 17 March 2004); idem, Half-Yearly Caselist to 31 December 2004 (London 2005): 66; PEN Writers in Prison, Historian's Investigation for Banned History Book Continues (London 2 November 2005); S. Seidelin, & S. Hamilton, eds., IFLA/FAIFE World Report 2005: Libraries, National Security, Freedom of Information Laws and Social Responsibilities (Copenhagen 2005) 323.]
HISTORIAN'S INVESTIGATION FOR BANNED HISTORY BOOK CONTINUES
Turkmenistan - 2 November 2005
Source: English Section of International PEN Writers in Prison
(http://www.englishpen.org/writersinprison/)
Violation(s): Detention
Person(s) affected: Rakhim Esenov
The English Section of International PEN wishes to draw attention to the case of Rakhim Esenov, a novelist, historian and freelance correspondent for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). Esenov remains under investigation in Turkmenistan on the charge of "inciting social, national and religious hatred using the mass media"
with his novel Ventsenosny Skitalets (The Crowned Wanderer). If convicted, he faces up to four years' imprisonment.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION:
The Crowned Wanderer is set in the 16th century Moghul Empire and centres on Bayram Khan, a poet, philosopher and army general who is said to have saved Turkmenistan from fragmentation. It had been banned from publication in Turkmenistan for 10 years by President Saparmurad Niyazov. Niyazov had publicly denounced it as "historically inaccurate" in 1997 and demanded that corrections be made - a demand that Esenov refused to meet. This is believed to be related to Esenov's portrayal of Khan as a Shia rather than a Sunni Muslim. This offence carries a four-year prison sentence under Article 177 parts 1 and 2 of the Turkmen Criminal Code.
Rakhim Esenov was summoned to the Ministry of National Security (MNB) on 23 February 2004. He was reportedly accused of "smuggling" 800 copies of his novel into Turkmenistan. The book has been banned for 10 years from the publishing houses in Turkmenistan and Rakhim Esenov was only able to get it published in Moscow, in 2003. The books were delivered to his apartment in the capital, Ashgabat, in January, but customs officers removed them after a few days, alleging that they had been imported illegally.
Esenov, 78, already in poor health following a heart attack only two days prior to his arrest, suffered a stroke during interrogation and was taken to hospital. Two days later he was interrogated again and was then transferred to the hospital's intensive care unit, under the strict control of the MNB. On 26 February 2004 Esenov was formally arrested and moved to an MNB prison.
Esenov was also accused of failing to report details of a telephone conversation with former Turkmen Minister of Foreign Affairs Avdy Kuliev to the authorities. Kuliev, a key opposition figure and a staunch critic of the Niyazov regime, is currently living in exile in Moscow following a crackdown on the opposition in November 2002 which began after gunmen fired on Niyazov's car in the capital, Ashgabat.
Esenov was finally released on 9 March 2004 after submitting a written undertaking to remain in Turkmenistan. However, the charges against him were not dropped, and the results of an investigation are still pending. He remains unable to leave the capital Ashgabat, has been ordered to cease working for RFE/RL and remains under surveillance. He is in dire need of medical attention that is not available in Turkmenistan, and is unable to travel to Moscow to receive the treatment he needs.
SUGGESTED ACTION:
Please send appeals:
**Emphasising Turkmenistan's international legal obligations to ensure freedom of expression;
**Expressing concern that Esenov has been targeted for the peaceful exercise of this right - both in the context of The Crowned Wanderer and for his work with RFE/RL;
**Calling for all charges against him to be dropped and for the banning order against his book to be withdrawn;
**Requesting that he be allowed to return to his profession as a journalist, and for the harassment of RFE/RL journalists in particular to come to an end;
**Calling for the return of his right to freedom of movement, thus enabling him to receive essential medical treatment abroad.
APPEALS TO:
President Saparmurad Niyazov
**744000 g. Ashgabat
**Apparat Prezidenta
**Prezidentu Turkmenistana Niyazovu S.A.
**Turkmenistan
**Fax: +993 12 35 51 12
**[Salutation: Dear President]
To ensure that appeals are current and credible, please do not continue to write appeals on this case after 60 days from the date of the posting unless an update has been issued.
The appointment last week of Robert Lindgren to lead the small, 175-year old liberal arts college about 15 miles north of Richmond is the latest example of a trend in higher education: Schools are looking for more than a scholar these days when they hire a president.
For years, college presidents - including four of the first six at Randolph-Macon - were often clergymen. Gradually, the pipeline shifted to scholars in such fields as classics and English and, more recently, to scientists. But almost always, candidates were teachers and deans promoted through the academic ranks.
Now as the complexity of running a college and the pressures of fundraising have intensified, schools have become less picky about their presidents' scholarly credentials. Increasingly, they are looking to candidates from the business and fundraising worlds - prompting concern from some faculty about priorities.
In a Chronicle of Higher Education survey of nearly 1,400 four-year college presidents that was released this week, 22 percent described their previous job as nonacademic university vice president or a similar post.
A broader American Council on Education survey found 30 percent of college presidents in 2001 had never held a faculty position, up from 25 percent in 1986. About 15 percent came from outside academia, up from under 9 percent in 1998. Those numbers have likely increased since.
Beginning at dawn, people began lining up around the cavernous Greater Grace Temple, in Mrs. Park's adopted hometown, and the line still wrapped around two blocks as the services got under way.
"The world knows of Rosa Parks because of a simple single act of dignity and courage that struck a lethal blow to the foundations of legal bigotry," former President Bill Clinton, the first of many featured speakers, said at the service.
When Mrs. Parks, a seamstress in Montgomery, Ala., refused to give up her seat to a white man on a city bus, "in a region where gentlemen are supposed to give up their seats for ladies," he said, "she was just taking the next step on her own road to freedom."
In doing so, Mr. Clinton said, she "ignited the most significant social movement in modern American history."
Mr. Clinton noted that Mrs. Parks was a petite woman, and said it brought to his mind Abraham Lincoln's remark upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
"So this is the little lady who started the great war," Mr. Clinton quoted Mr. Lincoln as saying.
"This time the war was fought by Martin Luther King's rules, civil disobedience and peaceful resistance," Mr. Clinton said. "But a war nonetheless for one America in which the law of the land means the same thing for everybody."
"This university was built by slaves and free blacks," said Chancellor James Moeser. "We need to be candid about that, acknowledge their contributions."
The University of North Carolina, chartered in 1789, is among several universities, banks and financial firms that have tried to set the record straight on their historical ties to the slave trade.
North Carolina archivists were researching the university's first 100 years when they found records that confirmed slaves helped construct campus buildings. Other records showed that both faculty and university board members owned slaves.
Some of that research is on display in "Slavery and the Making of the University: Celebrating Our Unsung Heroes, Bond and Free." The on-campus exhibit includes photographs, letters and documents such as bills of sale for slaves.
The Senate floor debate preceding and following the closed session featured unusually blunt statements on the quality of intelligence oversight of a sort not usually voiced in official proceedings.
Sen. Jay Rockefeller, Vice Chair of the Intelligence Committee, said the Bush White House had orchestrated a deliberate evasion of oversight responsibilities by the Republican majority.
"It is apparent to me that the White House has sent down the edict to the majority... that the Congress is not to carry out its oversight responsibilities in detention, interrogation, and rendition matters, ... as it would bring uncomfortable attention to the legal decisions and opinions coming from the White House and the Justice Department in the operation of various programs," Sen. Rockefeller said.
"We have agreed to do what we already agreed to do," replied Sen. Pat Roberts, the Intelligence Committee Chair, "that is, to complete as best we can phase II of the Intelligence Committee's review of prewar intelligence in reference to Iraq."
A task force of six Senators will report by November 14 on the anticipated completion date of the Intelligence Committee review.
See the full text of the November 1 Senate floor debate before and after the historic closed session here:
http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2005_cr/s110105.html
"Since 1929, the Senate has held 53 secret sessions, generally for reasons of national security," according to a 2004 report on the subject by the Congressional Research Service, whose availability on the FAS web site was noted repeatedly on CNN during the course of the secret Senate session.
See "Secret Sessions of Congress: A Brief Historical Overview,"
updated October 21, 2004:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/RS20145.pdf
The historical account in question is a two-year span during World War I in which anywhere from 600,000 to 1.5 million Armenians were deported by the Turkish government and killed or allowed to die. While these events are generally accepted as historical fact, the particulars are controversial.
The Massachusetts curriculum used to include some materials that depicted the events in Armenia as genocide and some that did not characterize it as such. However, the latter documents have been removed from the curriculum.
The lawsuit filed last Wednesday maintains that the Massachusetts Department of Education, and its commissioner, David P. Driscoll, violated students’ First Amendment rights when it removed the materials arguing that the deportations did not constitute genocide.
Officials at the Department of Education could not be reached for comment.
One of the plaintiffs, Lawrence Aaronson, is a history teacher at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. Another plaintiff, William Schechter, teaches at Lincoln-Sudbury High School.
Steven L. Contursi, president of Rare Coin Wholesalers, bought the set of 19th century gold, silver and copper coins from an anonymous owner described only as "a West Coast business executive," according to Donn Pearlman, the buyer's publicist.
"It's the largest single transaction for a single item ever in coin history," Contursi said. "It sounds like a lot of money, but when you put it into perspective, it seems like a good price. There are paintings going for millions."
The coins were last purchased for more than $4 million in 2001. At face value, they range from a copper half cent to a $10 gold piece, Pearlman said. A collectibles firm brokered the purchase Tuesday.
In 1836, then President Andrew Jackson presented the King Ph'ra Nang Klao (Rama III) of Siam, now Thailand, with the diplomatic gift. The Broadway musical "The King and I" fictionalized the king's son, Rama IV, who inherited the coins.
Girls named the ‘Piccadilly Commandos’ who frequented clubs such as Woolly Lamb and the Clipper Club and plied their trade around Leicester Square provoked complaints from the American hierarchy in 1942. Admiral Sir Edward Evans, of the Civil Defence Service, passed these sentiments on to the Metropolitan Police and wrote: ‘Of course the American soldiers are encouraged by these young sluts, many of whom should be serving in the forces. At night the Square, with its garden, is apparently given over to vicious debauchery.’ Police authorities considered the reports were extravagant and the soldiers being drunk exacerbated the problems in London’s West End. However, by 1943, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden was concerned about the issue and a conference was organised with the Americans but the issue lost impetus when it was referred to another committee.
Ostensibly white people who always thought of themselves as 100 percent European find they have substantial African ancestry. People who regard themselves as black sometimes discover that the African ancestry is a minority portion of their DNA.
These results are forcing people to re-examine the arbitrary calculations our culture uses to decide who is "white" and who is "black."
As with many things racial, this story begins in the slave-era South, where sex among slaves, masters and mistresses got started as soon as the first slave ship sailed into Jamestown Harbor in 1619. By the time of the American Revolution, there was a visible class of light-skinned black people who no longer looked or sounded African. Free mulattos, emancipated by guilt-ridden fathers, may have accounted for up to three-quarters of the tiny free-black population before the Revolution.
By the eve of the Civil War, the swarming numbers of mixed-race slaves on Southern plantations had become a source of constant anguish to planters' wives, who knew quite well where those racially ambiguous children were coming from.
Faced with widespread fear that racial distinctions were losing significance, the South decided to define the problem away. People with any ascertainable black ancestry at all were defined as black under the law and stripped of basic rights. The "one drop" laws defined as black even people who were blond and blue-eyed and appeared white.
The test results underscore what anthropologists have said for eons: racial distinctions as applied in this country are social categories and not scientific concepts. In addition, those categories draw hard, sharp distinctions among groups of people who are more alike than they are different. The ultimate point is that none of us really know who we are, ancestrally speaking. All we ever really know is what our parents and grandparents have told us.
Still, the former Washington Post reporter who shared a Pulitzer Prize for helping to expose the Nixon administration's wrongdoing says some parallels can be drawn between the two investigations, particularly the way both helped uncover extended dishonesty in the White House.
"We are obviously watching and the press is beginning to document the implosion of a presidency," Bernstein said.
"How destructive that implosion is going to be, ultimately, we don't know yet.
"But what the Plame leak investigation has unveiled is what the press should have been focusing on long before and without let up--how we went to war, the dishonesty involved in that process in terms of what the president and vice-president told the American people and the Congress, and the routine smearing by members of the Bush administration of people who questioned their actions and motives."
“They’re compromising the value of the degree of honest students by not distinguishing between the plagiarism and the honest works,” says Matrka. He has spent lunch hours poring over hundreds of pages of theses in the university’s library and writing university officials and accreditors on a one-man quest to spur an investigation by those better qualified than he is to judge plagiarism. “I’m no expert – I’m one guy over there poking around the library. I just want them to look into it and remove these from the public record, because you’ve tainted all of us by leaving them there.”
My mother divorced my father when I was 2 and she met my stepfather, who was a police officer in Manhattan Beach. They had five children after me. In addition, my stepfather has three older children. In the combined family, I'm the only one of the nine children he didn't father. I always remember wanting him to love me. I was always trying excessively hard to please him. I would do anything for him.
My stepbrothers and stepsisters and a half-brother and half-sister went to McMartin. So did I. I only remember being happy there. I never had any bad feelings about the school—no bad auras or vibes or anything. Even to this day, talking about it or seeing pictures or artwork that I did at McMartin never brings any bad feelings. All my memories are positive.
The thing I remember about the case was how it took over the whole city and consumed our whole family. My parents would ask questions: "Did the teachers ever do things to you?" They talked about Ray Buckey, whom I had never met. I don't even have any recollection of him attending the school when I was going there.
The first time I went to CII [Children's Institute International, now known as Children's Institute, Inc., a respected century-old L.A. County child welfare organization where approximately 400 former McMartin children were interviewed and given genital exams, and where many were diagnosed as abuse victims], we drove there, our whole family. I remember waiting … for hours while my brothers and sisters were being interviewed. I don't remember how many days or if it was just one day, but my memory tells me it was weeks, it seemed so long. It was an ordeal. I remember thinking to myself, "I'm not going to get out of here unless I tell them what they want to hear."
Anytime I would give them an answer that they didn't like, they would ask again and encourage me to give them the answer they were looking for. It was really obvious what they wanted. I know the types of language they used on me: things like I was smart, or I could help the other kids who were scared.
I felt uncomfortable and a little ashamed that I was being dishonest. But at the same time, being the type of person I was, whatever my parents wanted me to do, I would do. And I thought they wanted me to help protect my little brother and sister who went to McMartin.
Twenty young teens, the Grade 10 students from Manotick's St. Mark High School we've challenged to reconnect with their own and Canada's past, were stunned to silence by the flickering black-and-white images that haunt a small corner of exhibit space in the Canadian War Museum's First World War gallery.
The film shows men, some not much older than these 14- and 15-year-olds, reduced to quivering wrecks, their minds trapped in a nightmare we can only imagine.
Not all the human havoc of the First World War is marked by crosses or measured in scar tissue. The strategies of war-making lagged far behind the technological means of waging it in 1914, which meant soldiers were ordered to race insanely across rutted fields into the teeth of machine guns when they weren't huddling in trenches beneath a curtain of shellfire.
Modern warfare caused unprecedented combat stress, and men succumbed to it in such numbers that the military brass eventually had to recognize the fits of trembling and incapacitation as something other than cowardice or malingering.
They called it shell-shock, and its effects, captured on film, is what made our students gather in a grave knot, transfixed. Images of men in the throes of induced madness would give anyone pause, but for these students, it seems, there was something more.
For the past few weeks, they have been turning dry history into warm flesh by a simple act of will. Their research has begun to give relevance to stories that had once seemed as long ago and far away as fairy tales. They have seen handwritten records of the wounds, diseases and hardships that befell the handful of men they've chosen to research, all close relatives of classmates. They've seen the soldiers' pictures, put faces to facts, made connections that require more than mere logic. They have begun to refer to their research subjects "our soldiers" or "our guys."
But as he relaxed -- and the mob of assembled reporters and photographers got their high spirits under control -- Gibson slowly began to fill in the blanks on his new movie, which so far has been almost as obscure as its historic backdrop: the ancient Maya empire that rose, thrived and mysteriously collapsed centuries before the Spanish conquistadors planted their boots in the New World.
Gibson has reasons for keeping a relatively low profile. The last time most of the world caught sight of him, roughly two years ago, he was smack in the middle of a hurricane's eye surrounding his film "The Passion of the Christ," which went on to become a monster worldwide hit.
By comparison, "Apocalypto" had been shrouded in secrecy until a Friday news conference at this antique port city, which, fittingly, is where the conqueror Hernan Cortes landed in the early 1500s en route to demolishing the Aztec empire.
Civilizations rise and fall, often for similar reasons, Gibson observed during the course of his roughly one-hour encounter with the mostly Mexican journalists.
"I'm hoping that by focusing on this civilization we're able to be introspective about ourselves," said Gibson, who co-wrote the movie and is directing, producing and thus far financing it by himself. He is not acting in the movie.
Gibson said that the plot of "Apocalypto" -- a Greek word that translates as "new beginning" -- concerns an Indian family man who "has to overcome tremendous odds to preserve what he values the most." The movie will employ relatively unknown actors along with hundreds of extras and will utilize Mayan dialect.
Gibson hopes that one effect may be to bolster a threatened idiom that is frequently treated with disrespect, in Latin America. "My hope is that it [the movie] makes this language cool again and that they [indigenous people] speak it with pride," he said.
The Stasi put former high-and middle-ranking Nazis to work as spies, Henry Leide said, quoting secret Stasi files as yet unseen by the public.
Leide, who is on the committee responsible for the Stasi archives, traced the careers of 35 of Hitler's close followers and discovered that they had found unlikely refuge in the ranks of the Communist secret police.
His book, Nazi Criminals and The Secret Service: The German Democratic Republic's Secret Way of Dealing with The Past, details the individual careers of men such as Hans Sommer, an SS officer given a "second chance" by the Stasi. Sommer was behind the bombings of seven synagogues in Paris in 1941.
After the Second World War, Sommer spent years spying on Right-wing politicians in Germany and later went to Italy to do the same.
Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent are suing Random House for lifting "the whole architecture" of the research that went into their 1982 non-fiction book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.
Lawyers on both sides of the case met yesterday but would not comment on how the trial might affect sales of the novel or the distribution of a major Hollywood adaptation which Sony Pictures planned to release in May.
Random House said a "substantial" part of the claim had been dropped as a result of the talks.
The short but turbulent history of the Loyalist Volunteer Force mixed bouts of savage blood-letting with bizarre and unpredictable political gestures.
The organisation was created when a faction of the UVF in Portadown rejected the decision of their leaders in Belfast to declare a ceasefire in 1994.
Under the leadership of the local paramilitary warlord Billy Wright, the LVF committed itself to the traditional loyalist belief that the nationalist community could be terrified into demanding an end to IRA violence by a campaign of random murder directed against it.
The UVF leadership was furious at Billy Wright's act of rebellion - but they were wary of his reputation for savage, clinical efficiency as a killer and also of his popularity.
When the UVF tried to order him out of Ulster, thousands of Protestants turned out at a rally called to support him. The seeds were laid for future conflict between the UVF and the LVF.
After resting undisturbed on the lake bottom for 75 years, the steamboat George J. Whelan came to life Thursday for nine divers, who were clearly excited about their opportunity.
"You can dive a whole lifetime and never be the first one on [a wreck]," said Wayne Rush, who drove two hours from Port Allegany, Pa., for the dive.
Rush was the first of the divers to reach the Whelan in 145 feet of water eight miles from shore.
Rush and the others said the boat was in impeccable condition, with all of its portholes open. During their brief examination, they said they saw kerosene lanterns, fire extinguishers and porcelain light fixtures, more than enough to pique their interest.
"Next summer, I'll be out here every chance I get," said diver Dan Kuzdale of Dunkirk.
Lake Erie has at least 1,750 shipwrecks, according to Great Lakes shipwreck historian Mike Walker. He said other estimates put the total at closer to 3,000.
Only about 300 have been located, he said, and serious divers in the area are likely to have made multiple trips to most of them.
"The Holy Grail for divers in the Great Lakes is a virgin wreck," he said, noting that the cold, fresh water helps preserve wrecks for hundreds of years. "That boat is literally sitting the way it went down."
But that could soon change because of comic books.
One million copies of the first of a series of nine comic books on Mandela's life will be distributed Monday in newspapers and to secondary schools throughout the country. One million copies will be printed of each of the nine volumes, which cover different stages of his life. The first edition, about his childhood, was unveiled yesterday.
"You know you are really famous when [you become] a comic character," Mandela said at a ceremony to launch the comic at his Nelson Mandela Foundation in Johannesburg.
The drawings are straightforward, far from the stylized renderings of a comic book character such as Batman. The colors are earthy and dark. And the story stays true to Mandela's life.
"The current generation of youth knows that Mandela was our president and that he was in jail, but that's it," said Nic Buchanan, the creator of the comic books. "They don't know their own history. We celebrated democracy and the miracle, but the building stones of a progressive and enlightened society needs work."
As four young black artists wearing headphones stooped over their computers or worked on pen-and-ink drawings for coming volumes, Buchanan said in an interview in his studio this week that he decided to take a "realistic approach to the drawings so that they didn't detract from the severity of the situation. History is the message here."
Plans for elaborate commemorations were toned down after the Indian Ocean quake in 2004, which killed over 200,000.
Lisbon's Archbishop Jose Policarpo oversaw the pealing of the church bells, which rang out at 0930GMT, the estimated time that the earthquake struck in 1755.
As the bells tolled, the archbishop presided over a Catholic Mass in a ruined 14th century convent destroyed in the quake.
Geologists suspect that the 1755 reached a magnitude of 8.5 on the modern Richter scale.
These once-thriving breweries, operated by hard-working farmers who grew barley and hops in the summertime and spent winters tending the open fires under their brew kettles, now are almost forgotten.
But all that could change if a plan moves forward to re-create a working brewery from this period at Old World Wisconsin, the state's largest historic site whose mission is to give visitors a glimpse of rural life as it existed for the state's pioneer families.
"Breweries were such an important part of the rural landscape of 19th-century Wisconsin," said Marty Perkins, Old World's interpretation curator. "It was such a distinctive industry and so strong a presence in that time that we need to give this serious consideration."
Old World Director Peter Arnold presented the proposal, along with several others for adding new attractions at the site, to the state Historical Society's Board of Curators this month. The historical society, which owns and operates the site, would need to approve the proposal and include it in its next capital fund-raising campaign for it to become a reality.
But Perkins noted that building such a brewery at Old World Wisconsin in the Town of Eagle has been talked about since the site opened in 1976.
A small group of area brewery historians, who have been researching old breweries for decades and are working with Old World officials to re-create one there, believe the facility would give the historic site a unique year-round attraction that would give visitors a new appreciation for - and possibly an authentic taste of - Wisconsin's brewing history.
Yet news that the son of an Italian immigrant father, someone who grew up in a suburban New Jersey parish where he served as a lector and later married, doesn't carry quite the power it might have in the days when Kennedys ran for the White House.
Catholics have become part of the nation's political mainstream -- far removed from the blatant anti-Catholic prejudice that once permeated American culture. They are as divided as other Americans on abortion and other social issues that will be a focus of Alito's confirmation hearings -- making an outpouring of religious pride for the conservative jurist less likely.
''The Catholic community is not going out dancing in the streets of Boston tonight because of this nomination,'' said James Davidson, a Purdue University sociologist who researches religion and Supreme Court justices. ''But it still represents a significant development in American religious history.''
Protestants have been so dominant on the court that half of the justices have come from just three denominations: the Episcopal, Presbyterian and Congregational churches, he said.
Only two Protestants would remain on the Supreme Court -- David Souter and John Paul Stevens. The two other justices -- Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer -- are Jewish.
Analysts said Alito, as the fifth Catholic, was a less controversial religious choice than Harriet Miers, whose adult acceptance of born-again Christianity was dissected for clues about how she would vote on abortion. President Bush helped make religion a central issue in her failed nomination, saying it was a factor in selecting her for the high court.
The Supreme Court's 7-to-2 majority for abortion rights, as expressed in the 1973 Roe v. Wade opinion, had eroded to the vanishing point. The center of gravity was held by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, whose position was difficult to parse and appeared to be evolving toward an uncertain destination.
The question facing Judge Alito and his colleagues on a three-judge appellate panel was the validity of a 1989 Pennsylvania law that placed various obstacles in the path of women seeking abortions.
All three judges agreed that most of the provisions were constitutional, as the Supreme Court itself eventually did. But on one important point, a requirement that a married woman notify her husband before obtaining an abortion, Judge Alito found himself at odds with his two colleagues, and ultimately with the Supreme Court's ruling, which sparked a debate on the high court that remains unresolved today.
While Judge Alito, 55, has built a reputation for decency, he has also compiled a conservative record that is coming under intense scrutiny from activists on the left and the right who understand his potential for shifting the balance on the bench.
As a federal appeals court judge for 15 years, Judge Alito has amassed a more extensive paper record than either John G. Roberts Jr., who sailed through his confirmation as chief justice, or Harriet E. Miers, the White House counsel, who withdrew after withering attacks on her credentials and conservative bona fides.
Judge Alito's jurisprudence has been methodical, cautious, respectful of precedent and solidly conservative, legal scholars said. In cases involving the great issues of the day - abortion, the death penalty and the separation of church and state - Judge Alito has typically taken the conservative side.
Like Justice Scalia, Judge Alito is an Italian-American from Trenton, whose jurisprudence is indisputably conservative. But while Justice Scalia is known for his caustic writing and argumentative manner, Judge Alito is described by clerks, lawyers and former schoolmates as a man who takes extraordinary care to be gentle with others and is quick to help a struggling lawyer arguing before his court.
Forgotten until now. The recent theft and recovery of three statues from the basement have prompted antiquity officials in Egypt to redouble an effort already under way to complete the first comprehensive inventory of artifacts in the basement.
"For the last 100 years, curators sat down to drink tea, but they did not do their jobs," said Zahi Hawass, the general secretary of the Supreme Council of Antiquities. "How many artifacts are in the basement? It was awful."
Step through a small, Hobbit-sized door, down a steep flight of stairs and through a locked gate. The basement is a maze of arched passageways and bare light bulbs hanging from decaying wires. It is packed with wooden crates, hundreds of them, sometimes piled floor to ceiling.
Cobwebs cling to ancient pottery and tablets engraved with hieroglyphics. Six hundred coffins and 170 mummies have been found so far. No one knows what may have been stolen over the years. Last year, officials reported that 38 golden bracelets from Roman times had vanished from the basement, apparently six years earlier.
"It is an accumulation of 100 years of neglect," said Dr. Ali Radwan, a professor of Egyptology at Cairo University who took a recent tour of the basement. "It is not appropriate for a country like Egypt to have such miserable storage for its history."
The Egyptian Museum is a 104-year-old repository of the some the world's most famous antiquities. Inside, there are the mummified remains of pharaohs, like Ramses II, who died in 1212 B.C. There are the treasures of the young Pharaoh Tutankhamen, the golden chariot and the golden mask.
Built and designed by the French, the two-story building in central Tahrir Square has changed little over the decades. It remains crowded with an estimated 120,000 items, most of which have also never been properly inventoried, museum officials said. And even the exhibition areas can be haphazardly arranged: some of the labels date to colonial times, and some items are not labeled at all.
The measure, expected to be approved on Tuesday by consensus, rejects any denial that the Holocaust took place. It also urges members to "inculcate" future generations with the lessons on the genocide so it would not be repeated in the future.
"I feel moved and privileged to present this historic resolution today, as an Israeli, a Jew, a human being and the child of Holocaust victims," Israel's U.N. ambassador, Dan Gillerman, told the 191-member General Assembly.
The General Assembly has often been accused of anti-Semitism and persistent concentration on the plight of Palestinians. The Holocaust was largely ignored until January when the assembly held a session to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the death camps.
U.S. Ambassador John Bolton recalled that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said last week that Israel should be "wiped off the map."
"When a President or a member state can brazenly and hatefully call for a second Holocaust by suggesting that Israel, the Jewish homeland, should be wiped off the map, it is clear that not all have learned the lessons of the Holocaust and that much work remains to be done," Bolton said.
The resolution, first proposed by the United States, Israel, Russia, Australia, and Canada was co-sponsored by nearly 100 nations from every continent.
"A symbol of the victory of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War will appear in the renovated Pobeda [Victory] Square," Mr Savenko said, the official news agency reported.
The statue could not be returned to its former place in the city's Victory Square because of architectural considerations following a renovation of the square, he added.
On Dec. 1, 1955, Parks is an ordinary 42-year-old seamstress in downtown Montgomery, Alabama. She leaves work and gets on the Cleveland Avenue bus to go home. When the whites-only section fills up, the bus driver yells at Parks to give up her seat to a white man. She refuses and is arrested. Simply by sitting on a bus, Parks sets off the year-long Montgomery bus boycott that galvanizes national attention, brings Martin Luther King Jr. to the start of his journey as a civil rights leader and creates a model of nonviolent protest against racial segregation.
There's no denying the appeal of this story. But this telling of the tale does a disservice to Parks and twists the history of the civil rights movement. Her story is about more than one bus ride. And the civil rights movement is more than one moment of defiance.
Historian Henry Leide drew on Stasi files that have not been opened to the general public since the fall of communism in 1989 to trace the often well-paid careers of 35 of Hitler's men who found a reprieve in the secret police.
The case of SS officer Hans Sommer is not exceptional, according to the book titled "Nazi Criminals and the Secret Service: The German Democratic Republic's Secret Ways of Dealing With the Past."
Sommer was instrumental in the bombing of seven synagogues in Paris in October 1941. But after World War II, he spent years spying on right-wing politicians for the new regime in East Germany, and was later posted to Italy where he continued to do the same.
Many Nazis were tried after the war but some were saved by the StasiBildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Many Nazis were tried after the war but some were saved by the StasiOfficially, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) adopted a resolutely anti-fascist stance and in the years following World War II its courts condemned more than 8,000 former Nazis.
The Waldheim trial in Saxony in 1950, for example, saw 32 former Nazi operatives sentenced to death.
The proposal calls for January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, to be recognized as the day which the UN marks as Holocaust Day. In recent years, a few European states have set an annual date on their calendar to commemorate the Holocaust.
As part of the UN proposal, all member states will be called upon to develop an educational curriculum meant to instill the memory of the Holocaust among the coming generations in order to prevent future instances of genocide.
Peter Hug, a historian whose inquiry was sponsored by the Swiss authorities, said his country "was a pillar of support for the apartheid government".
According to his report, which also found evidence of Germany's role in bolstering the white regime, the Swiss government was aware of illegal deals but "tolerated them in silence, supported some of them actively or criticised them only half-heartedly".
The most alarming aspect of the co-operation was the involvement in South Africa's secret atomic weapons programme, said Mr Hug.
Between the 1970s and 1993 Pretoria built six nuclear weapons and partially assembled a seventh. The Swiss firms Gebruder Sulzer AG and VAT Buchs supplied vital components.
"The fissionable material needed for this originated from the uranium enrichment that South Africa had built up with technical support from Switzerland, Germany and other countries.
"Swiss industry got around the arms embargo that the UN had imposed on South Africa in grand style," said Mr Hug, a historian at the University of Bern.
His report cited a deal worth at least 100 million Swiss francs (£44 million) which was brokered in 1977 and involved the supply of "highly sensitive technology".
Mr Hug said that Swiss industry violated the UN arms embargo and even flouted rules on arms exports defined by Switzerland.
In the mid-1980s most western countries, including the United States, imposed sweeping embargoes to try to bring an end to the policies of white domination.
But Switzerland refused to join the ban, arguing that it was incompatible with its neutrality and would have few practical results other than worsening the population's plight.
Shortly before 8 p.m., the coffin bearing Rosa Parks, the accidental matriarch of the civil rights movement who died last Monday at 92, arrived at the Capitol and was carried by a military guard to lie in the Rotunda.
A seamstress by trade, Mrs. Parks became the first woman ever accorded such a tribute and just the 31st person over all since 1852, a list that includes Abraham Lincoln and nine other presidents.
