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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
Breaking News
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. Because most of our readers read the NYT we usually do not include the paper's stories in HIGHLIGHTS.
Name of source: Art Newspaper
SOURCE: Art Newspaper (1-13-06)
Mr Bogdanos is returning to his civilian work as assistant district attorney in Manhattan, a position he has held since 1988, and intends to trace antiquities smuggled from Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. There are also reports that he is negotiating with Hollywood studios to turn his recent book Thieves of Baghdad into a film.
Name of source: Independent Online (South Africa)
SOURCE: Independent Online (South Africa) (1-17-06)
The king was speaking at an event organised to commemorate the Battle of Isandlwana, between the British and the Zulu in 1879. Zulu historians and academics had gathered to discuss the history of Zulu kings and their role in past battles. He said the history now learnt at school was distorted and needed to be rewritten to highlight Zulu contributions.
Zwelithini urged the event organisers to take the day's discussions further by compiling a book to be launched in time to celebrate his birthday in July. "I would be very pleased if all these presentations and other researched work on Zulu history could be collated and published by July," he said.
Name of source: Wa Po
SOURCE: Wa Po (1-17-06)
"He was a very jovial fellow who would meet at the taverns, discussing the latest John Locke book or scientific breakthrough over a nice pint of beer," McGillin's owner Chris Mullins said.
Franklin was a businessman, inventor, revolutionary, athlete (he is a member of the United States Swim School Association Hall of Fame), diplomat, publisher, humorist, sage and regular guy. "He certainly is a multiplicity of persona, so one never knows which one is the real Franklin," says Gordon Wood, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian whose books include "The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin."
SOURCE: Wa Po (1-14-06)
The enthusiasm of the extremists for that vision is not disputed. However unlikely its realization, the ambition may help explain terrorist acts that often appear beyond understanding. When Osama bin Laden called the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon "a very small thing compared to this humiliation and contempt for more than 80 years," the reference was to the aftermath of World War I, when the last caliphate was suspended as European powers divided up the Middle East. Al Qaeda named its Internet newscast, which debuted in September, "The Voice of the Caliphate."
Yet the caliphate is also esteemed by many ordinary Muslims. For most, its revival is not an urgent concern. Public opinion polls show immediate issues such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and discrimination rank as more pressing. But Muslims regard themselves as members of the umma , or community of believers, that forms the heart of Islam. And as earthly head of that community, the caliph is cherished both as memory and ideal, interviews indicate.
SOURCE: Wa Po (1-13-06)
But while Cox was in the studio, J. Dennis Hastert was winning the cloakroom. With powerful backing from Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), Hastert -- a decidedly untelegenic, nuts-and-bolts pol from small-town Illinois -- was working the phones, cutting deals and forming alliances. Within hours, he locked down the most powerful job in Congress.
Though hundreds of the 435 House members probably have the ambition to lead the chamber, only a few have the right combination of personal relationships, tactical smarts and mettle to make it happen. Those who have what it takes routinely jump the line over much more senior colleagues in a way that was uncommon in earlier eras.
The first rule of leadership races, several lawmakers said, is that fortune favors the bold. Reps. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), the acting majority leader, barely waited for the ink to dry on DeLay's farewell letter earlier this month before jumping into the race for the second-ranking job.
Name of source: scotsman.com
SOURCE: scotsman.com (1-16-06)
Name of source: Richmond Times-Dispatch
SOURCE: Richmond Times-Dispatch (1-16-06)
Houston, of Brookline, grew up in Richmond, Va., the only child in middle class family. Houston said his parents did what they could to shield him from the indignities of segregation, such as driving him everywhere so he wouldn't be confined to the black section on public transportation.
But the effects of segregation were impossible to avoid. At department stores, Houston couldn't try on the clothing, though whites could. At the movies, he sat in an all-black section. He went to an all-black school with black teachers. A black couldn't even think of entering a white-owned restaurant. And the threat of severe retribution hung over anyone who considered retaliation for the inequality or racial epithets routinely directed at blacks.
"You just lived a totally separate existence," he said. "We all knew it was wrong. We deplored it."
Relief came at age 15, in 1959, when Houston entered the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Conn.
"I felt that I had escaped," he said. "My friends were all very jealous of me because I was getting away from it."
Name of source: BBC News
SOURCE: BBC News (1-16-06)
Ernest Johnson Jr, 55, fled his camp in North Carolina in 1969 after becoming disenchanted with the war in Vietnam.
Using the surname McQueen, he spent the next three decades in a number of states as a regular husband and father.
Mr Johnson, who suffers from prostate cancer, could face a jail sentence and a mandatory discharge from the Marines.
SOURCE: BBC News (1-14-06)
Hemingway is said to have drunk at The Compleat Angler between fishing trips around Bimini.
The site was a key tourist attraction.
"It's a tremendous pain to bear," Bimini Chief Councillor Natasha Bullard-Rolle said.
SOURCE: BBC News (1-13-06)
If true, it could imply Chinese mariners discovered and mapped America decades before Columbus' 1492 arrival. The map, which is being dated to check it was made in 1763, faces a lot of scepticism from experts.
See also this Economist version of the story and a rebuttal by an Asian historian.
SOURCE: BBC News (1-13-06)
For decades, scientists have argued over what killed the 2m-year-old Taung Child, found in 1924: the first ape-man fossil to be discovered in Africa.
Some scientists had believed the child was killed by leopards.
Prof Lee Berger challenged this, suggesting that the Taung child was attacked from above by a bird.
But until now, Prof Berger - an American palaeontologist working at South Africa's University of the Witwatersrand - was unable to find definitive proof for his hypothesis.
Scientists had missed the evidence right in front of their eyes, even though the Taung child (thought to belong to the humanlike species Australopithecus africanus) is believed to be the most photographed and observed fossil in history.
The injuries on the Taung child's skull mimic those of on the skull of a baboon killed by an eagle.
Prof Berger explained how birds such as eagles kill their prey and eat the brain, which is the most nutritious part of the animal.
SOURCE: BBC News (1-13-06)
SOURCE: BBC News (1-13-06)
North Belfast MP Nigel Dodds says cash is needed to bring back SS Nomadic, the last of the White Star ships.
The ship, built at Harland and Wolff the year before the Titanic, was used as a tender to take first-class passengers to and from the great liner.
It is currently in Le Harve, France, and will be auctioned on 26 January.
SOURCE: BBC News (1-13-06)
The Ashkenazis moved from the Mid-East to Italy and then to Eastern Europe, where their population exploded in the 13th Century, the scientists say.
The four women are thought to have lived in the Middle East about 1,000 years ago but they may not have lived anywhere near other, according to the study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.
However, they bequeathed genetic signatures to their descendents, which do not appear in non-Jews and are rare in Jews not of Ashkenazi origin.
Ashkenazi comes from an old Hebrew word for Germany.
Name of source: Oregonian
SOURCE: Oregonian (1-16-06)
Name of source: Press Release -- Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
SOURCE: Press Release -- Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) (1-16-06)
The newly formed SDS national organization was the idea of a student anti-war activist who contacted other student and veteran organizers.
Good joined the new SDS when Stonington High School (Connecticut) senior Pat Korte contacted him with the idea of linking nascent SDS chapters into a national structure.
"Although I have been an active participant in the anti-war and student activist movement, I have become frustrated with the groups collective inability to unify enough people under a common goal/vision to address the overall problems with our society. Historically, SDS was able to address many of the issues pertinent at the time through Tom Hayden's Port Huron Statement. This document has stood the test of time, thus several fellow activists from across the country and myself decided to form a national SDS movement, only to discover that chapters already exist! Because of this we decided to hold a national conference", said Korte.
At his request, members of Korte's informal network of student activists from across the country began contacting Good and very quickly the informal network was replaced by a national structure that now includes a website, discussion forum and mailing list, all of which are now based at studentsforademocraticsociety.org.
Korte, realizing that the original SDS suffered from not having alot of veteran activists, WHO UNDERSTOOD THE IDEA OF STUDENT POWER, reached out to some older activists, including several members of the 1960s era student organization, to help ground the project and provide logistical support.
The first original SDSer to come on board was Alan Haber, president of SDS 1960-62. Today, Haber speaks of "re-membering SDS" rather than eulogizing it. Never giving up on the Dream, Haber is looking forward to the "the next meeting of SDS". And the next meeting will be a national event linking any and all SDS chapters interested in taking part.
Today chapters exist at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island, at the New School in New York City, at the University of Michigan and at Eastern Michigan University. In the western part of the US chapters that sprang up independently in Santa Ana, California and at Reigs University in Denver, Colorado have signed on to the national organization.
Connecting these chapters and their organizers proved less difficult than Korte and Good initially thought. Technology was the key.
"We should reconnect our networks. We should reassert the continuity of the radical movements in American politics. The new technologies of communication and independent media make this more possible than ever", said SDS founder Alan Haber. Korte and Good took this advice and ran with it.
As the project coalesced, Good, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) contacted labor historian Paul Buhle, co-editor of a graphic history of the IWW ("Wobblies") and former SDSer from the Madison, Wisconsin, chapter. The timing was right on. Buhle, who teaches at Brown in Rhode Island, is working on a new project: a graphic (i.e. comic book) history of SDS from the perspective of the individual chapters. Working with artist Gary Dumm, Buhle looks to avoid the usual history of the SDS national office by focusing on the street activists and their local branches. Buhle is asking that members of the original SDS with stories to tell contact him via e-mail at pbuhle@studentsforademocraticsociety.org.
In addition to the book, Buhle has a personal interest in SDS. Describing himself for a recent article in Next Left Notes (www.nextleftnotes.net) he noted: "Founder and publisher of RADICAL AMERICA, Paul Buhle was active in Champaign-Urbana, Storrs and Madison SDS chapters, 1965-1969. He hasn't been all that happy since, but he teaches at Brown." In the piece on NLN Buhle talks about the historical parallels between the 1960s and the present noting that the US empire is over-extended, liberal Democrats are not the answer to vexing problems and the Port Huron Statement remains as vital today as it was in 1962 when Tom Hayden presented it to the third SDS national convention.
"Today, students of all backgrounds can be shown the need to mobilize, to help prevent the ongoing devastation of our world, to help empower the lowly as students learn to empower themselves, and to set out a vision of a really democratic society. There's the key. The Industrial Workers of the World had it long before. Decentralized democracy, democratic decision-making at all levels is the most radical idea ever hatched in North America and the only one with real lasting appeal", said Buhle who has joined the new SDS.
The new SDS plans to continue the independent radical tradition in America: political
education and demonstrating, advocating and organizing for democracy and justice, unions, civil liberties, peace and freedom. According to Korte the meetings this spring and summer will focus on building an infrastructure that facilitates these goals as the new SDS, like the old, is an organization of activists. Friends of peace and justice, those students who want a voice, a say in their own destiny, should visit www.studentsforademocraticsociety.org
where regular updates will be posted and contact information is now available.
SDS is an education and social action organization dedicated to increasing democracy in all phases of our common life. It seeks to promote the active participation of young people in the formation of a movement to build a society
free from poverty, ignorance, war, exploitation, racism and sexism.
Name of source: NYT
SOURCE: NYT (1-15-06)
But as the list expands each year, many, including Unesco staff members, are left wondering: is this rapid growth watering down the list's meaning? And by drawing both tourism and development that's often left unchecked, can the honor do as much harm as good to those places so anointed?
Although Mexico devotes more resources to the World Heritage efforts than many countries, the Yucatán provides lessons in what can happen after a site makes the list. Mexico's most emblematic site is probably the ancient Maya city of Chichén Itzá, which by the time it was inscribed was already overrun with tourists on day trips from Cancún, three hours to the east. The numbers grew after nomination, with peak months bringing more than 5,000 visitors a day, according to Yucatán government statistics.
Standing before Chichén Itzá's iconic Kukulcan pyramid is still stunning, to be sure, but watching the line of tour buses spewing forth American tourists outside is just as remarkable. Visitors emerge with stickers on their shirts identifying their bus numbers. Cheery guides with set scripts shepherd them through the gate, where they are given official admission wristbands.
Beyond the gates, souvenir hawkers are well trained. One regular, Ermenegildo Kahum Kem, knows how to say, "Nothing for your mother-in-law?" in five languages.
Unesco's manifesto sounded simple enough: It set up a World Heritage Convention in 1972 to protect cultural and natural sites of "outstanding universal value." The convention established a World Heritage Committee, a rotating group of 15 (now 21) nations, and a World Heritage Fund to provide oversight, technical assistance and loans. The World Heritage Center in Paris oversees the program, and the committee annually decides on new designations.
It has become clear, though, that for many sites, getting on the list might be more an end goal than the beginning of conservation efforts. Once the four- to five-year nomination process is over, Unesco generally doesn't provide funds or technical assistance from its 35-person staff (plus consultants), nor regular monitoring to ensure that the ambitious plans come to fruition.
SOURCE: NYT (1-17-06)
The Chinese map, which was drawn in 1763 but has a note on it saying it is a reproduction of a map dated 1418, presents the world as a globe with all the major continents rendered with an exactitude that European maps did not have for at least another century, after Columbus, Da Gama, Magellan, Dias and others had completed their renowned explorations.
But the map got a cool reception from some Chinese scholars and seems unlikely to persuade skeptics that Chinese seamen were the first to round the world.
Liu Gang, a partner in a well-known Beijing law firm and an amateur historian, said Monday that he bought the map for $500 in a Shanghai book store in 2001 and only subsequently discovered its value. He said he had consulted scholars in the field and had done extensive research of his own before deciding to present his findings to the public.
"The main issue is not the map itself," he said at a news conference. "It is the potential of the information in the map to change history."
At issue are the seven voyages of Zheng He, whose ships sailed the Pacific and Indian Oceans from 1405 to 1433. Historical records show that he explored Southeast Asia, India, the Persian Gulf and the east coast of Africa, using navigational techniques and ships that were far ahead of their time.
But a small group of scholars and hobbyists, led by Gavin Menzies, a former British Navy submarine commander, argue that Zheng He traveled much farther than most Chinese and Western scholars say. Notably, Mr. Menzies claims that Zheng He visited America in 1421, 71 years before Columbus arrived there.
His 2003 book, entitled "1421: The Year China Discovered America" (William Morrow/HarperCollins), laid out extensive but widely disputed evidence that Zheng He sailed to the east coast of today's United States in 1421 and may have left settlements in South America.
Mr. Menzies has welcomed Mr. Liu's map as evidence that his theory is correct, and the two have cooperated in efforts to demonstrate its authenticity. Strictly speaking, Mr. Liu credits Zheng He with having navigated and charted the Americas at least several years before Mr. Menzies says he sailed there, though both say that is a minor contradiction.
Zheng He's achievements have been the subject of speculation for years, partly because much of the historical record was destroyed when later Chinese emperors changed their minds about the wisdom of connecting with the outside world. Last year, China's Communist government commemorated the 600th anniversary of Zheng He's better known voyages, but Beijing has not actively promoted the idea that he sailed far beyond Asian and African shores.
If the map genuinely dates to 1418, it reveals knowledge of longitude and latitude and the basic shape of the world, including the fact that it is round, that could not have come from European sources and could have been derived only from Zheng He's voyages, Mr. Liu says.
He referred to 15th-century books and memorial inscriptions and 16th-century maps that credit earlier Chinese discoveries among a variety of indirect evidence to support his thesis.
But Mr. Liu acknowledged that he had no hard evidence of the existence of a 1418 map beyond the word of the mapmaker who said he made the copy in the late 18th century, a time when all of its cartographical achievements would have been commonplace.
Gong Yingyan, a historian at Zhejiang University and a leading map expert, argues that the map is too full of anachronisms to date from the 15th century.
He said, for example, that Chinese cartographers did not use the style of projection seen in Mr. Liu's map - the rendering of a three-dimensional globe on a flat sheet - until after Europeans introduced that technique to the Chinese much later.
The map's Chinese notes about the cultures, religious and racial features of people in the continents of the world also contain vocabulary that would have been unfamiliar to a reader in the early 15th century, he said. He cited the term the map uses for the Western God, which he said was not used until after the Jesuits arrived in China in the 16th century.
"I had high hopes when I first heard about the existence of such a map," Mr. Gong said. "But I can see now that it is an entirely ordinary map that proves nothing."
SOURCE: NYT (1-14-06)
But now as Mrs. King is recovering from a stroke that left her partly paralyzed and unable to speak, problems at the nonprofit institution, the King Center, have become so bad that some family members are pushing to sell its buildings.
SOURCE: NYT (1-13-06)
Name of source: Philadelphia Inquirer
SOURCE: Philadelphia Inquirer (1-15-06)
Now, nearly 130 years after the gallows floor dropped in the prison, Donahoe's great-great-granddaughter is leading a fight to persuade Pennsylvania to officially pardon the member of the infamous Molly Maguires known as "Yellow Jack."
He was not the cold-blooded killer of a mine boss in the 1870s, insists Margaret Mary Traynor. And at the very least, local and national scholars say, Donahoe never got a fair trial in the anthracite mining region, which considered him and other Irish immigrants thugs and miscreants.
The Molly Maguires were a group of Irish mine workers who tried to jump-start a labor movement. It was a violent time, when working the mines meant long, dangerous days for little pay.
In the process, people turned up dead. And the Molly Maguires were fingered for the crimes.
Donahoe was one of 20 men hanged for a series of headline-grabbing murders of mining officials in Schuylkill and Carbon Counties.
In October, the state Board of Pardons agreed to hold a hearing on the request - the first hurdle in the pardons process for Donahoe. A hearing is scheduled for March, and efforts to set the record straight about the Molly Maguires has drawn the attention of the state's political leaders. If successful, the pardon will be only the second awarded posthumously in Pennsylvania, officials believe.
Name of source: canada.com
SOURCE: canada.com (1-13-06)
The marks are believed to be decorations meant to enhance a man's appearance, or badges of honour for a group of great warriors or successful tradesmen. They are the first historical examples of ceremonial dental modification ever found in Europe, and although similar customs were practised in Asia and Africa over the centuries, the Swedish anthropologist who studied the Viking teeth is exploring the possibility that trips to Newfoundland and other parts of the New World a millennium ago introduced the Norsemen to tooth-carving styles being carried out at that time in the Americas.
Name of source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
SOURCE: Atlanta Journal-Constitution (1-14-06)
"When he got to Five Points, they were having a race riot," says his son, 77-year-old Mendel Romm Jr. of Buckhead. "They were pulling people off the streetcars and lynching them right there. My father was so scared he ran all the way home."
The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot is the closest thing to a race war that has ever happened in this city.
For four days that September, white mobs attacked black people in a fit of hysteria over exaggerated and erroneous reports of sex crimes against white women. Then blacks started fighting back. When the dust settled, at least two dozen people were dead, and Atlanta's reputation as a paragon of New South moderation had taken a beating in the eyes of the world.
Now a group of Atlantans wants to commemorate the riot — and try to learn from it — on the occasion of its centennial.
The Coalition to Remember the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot first met a year and a half ago in the fellowship hall of old Ebenezer Baptist, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s church. This weekend, as the nation celebrates the King holiday, the coalition is beginning a series of public events leading up to an exhibition at the King National Historic Site in May and a symposium at Georgia State University's Rialto Center for the Performing Arts in September.
Organizers say they aren't trying to shame Atlanta; they just want to deal with a significant but largely forgotten chapter of its past.
"Race relations are such an important part of this city," says Andy Ambrose, deputy director of the Atlanta History Center and co-curator of the exhibition. "It's important to explore all of that, positive and negative. Atlanta is more than what the slogans say."
From its initial meetings, the coalition has grown to include 150 participants from an array of local universities, cultural institutions, faith groups and governments.
Some of the participants had never heard of the riot before they were invited to get involved. That didn't surprise one of the group's leaders, Saudia Muwwakkil, spokeswoman for the King site. "They never taught us about this in school," the Atlanta native says.
That should change next year, when Georgia's revised public school curriculum will require that the riot be taught in eighth-grade social studies.
Name of source: Los Angeles Times
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times (-1-1)
Maria Altmann, who now lives in Los Angeles, fought a seven-year legal battle for the paintings, which have an estimated value of $150 million. The most valuable is the renowned 1907 portrait of Altmann's aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer, which one Klimt expert called "the most important painting that has ever been restituted" in a Nazi art case.
There was no immediate response from the Austrian government, but Wilfried Seipel, director of Vienna's museum for fine arts, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, told the Austrian Press Assn. that although "a precious asset of the Austrian Gallery has been lost," the decision "should be accepted."
Under an agreement between the Austrian government and Altmann, the arbitration court's decision will be the last word.
"This is really David and Goliath," said Jane Kallir, co-director of the Galerie St. Etienne in New York, which staged the first U.S. exhibition of Klimt's work in 1959. She hailed the court ruling against the Austrian government as a surprising but significant move. "Klimt's paintings are extraordinarily rare, and most of the major ones are in Austria."
Name of source: The Herald (Glasgow)
SOURCE: The Herald (Glasgow) (1-17-06)
Dr Nathan Abrams, history lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, has already begun to map the history of a number of small but resilient Jewish communities which have existed in various areas from the late 1800s to the present day.
He said: "Despite the information I have already been able to glean, I believe there is still much to discover. Jewish communities in Scotland remain somewhat of a mystery. I would very much like to hear from people who may have memories or memorabilia, no matter how trivial, which could help with my book."
...
Anyone who has relevant information, memories or memorabilia should contact Abrams by e-mailing: n. abrams@abdn. ac. uk
Name of source: Chicago Sun Times
SOURCE: Chicago Sun Times (1-17-06)
Ben Franklin was much more than that, of course. Take your choice: scientist, diplomat, inventor, civic booster, publishing magnate, politician, writer, celebrity, ladies' man and the most famous kite flier in history.
[See Roundup: Talking About History for more.]
Name of source: Guardian (UK)
SOURCE: Guardian (UK) (1-16-06)
The statement follows a series of inflammatory remarks by Iran's hawkish president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has described the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis in the second world war as a myth and called for Israel to be "wiped off the map". He has also suggested an alternative Jewish state should be set up in Europe or Alaska.
An Iranian foreign ministry spokesman said the proposed conference would examine the Holocaust's "scientific aspects and its repercussions". The description echoes Mr Ahmadinejad's characterisation of Holocaust denial earlier this month as a "scientific debate".
It is not clear who will attend. But following a chorus of anti-Zionist rhetoric since the president was elected last June, the announcement will trigger suspicions that the aim is to deny that the Holocaust happened. Last month, Mr Ahmadinejad dismissed it as a concoction invented to justify Israel's existence in the heart of the Muslim world. His comments drew widespread condemnation. At a meeting with President George Bush last week, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, described Mr Ahmadinejad's position on the Holocaust as unacceptable.
At a rare news conference on Saturday, however, the Iranian president was unrepentant. He described Mrs Merkel and Mr Bush as terrorists and war criminals, who would soon be put on trial for their support of Israel.
Describing the Holocaust as a question that had to be cleared up by scholars, he added: "My question was very clear. On the pretext of the killing of Jews in Europe, are they supporting the aggression and massacres [of Israel]? They will not intimidate me. Instead they have to answer me. If you started this killing of the Jews, you have to make amends yourself. This is very clear. It's based on laws and legal considerations. If you committed a mistake or a crime, why should others pay for it? Those who murdered [the Jews] should permit them to go back to their own fatherlands. That should be the end of it. You shouldn't say that nobody is permitted to say anything about this."
Mr Ahmadinejad initially provoked an international storm by calling for Israel's removal for the map last October.
His remarks repeated what had been official Iranian policy since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Support for the Palestinian cause is a central pillar in the ideology of Iran's Islamic regime, which regards Israel's existence as an affront to Muslims.
However, Mr Ahmadinejad has surpassed previous Iranian leaders in consistently attacking what he sees as the intellectual and moral basis for Israel's existence. Under his more liberal predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, anti-Zionist rhetoric was toned down. Iranian officials said they would respect a Middle East peace settlement as long as it was acceptable to the Palestinians.
Name of source: pacificnews.org
SOURCE: pacificnews.org (1-14-06)
Quang X. Pham, a Vietnamese American author, is asking for help from Vietnamese American list serve for representation on the upcoming conference:
First of all, this conference dwarfs the Oakland Museum's effort. Most likely C-SPAN will have live coverage and archive the presentations on its web site. I had written several emails and spoken with a key staffer at the Kennedy Library, essentially asking her to include Vietnamese perspectives. She never bothered to reply except to tell me the dates and to keep an eye out for a press release. As far as the Joiner Center (UMass/Boston) it's not in this in this league either. Its antiwar position is clear.
Secondly, there has to be a good reason to protest. What are we protesting? Are the organizers using tax payer money to host a fair and balanced educational forum? Many distinguished journalists, politicians, scholars, veterans and others didn't make the cut either.
Lastly, what can we advise/offer as a solution? Who would be qualified to speak on behalf of Vietnamese Americans? Are age, accent, health and privacy prohibitive factors? Would it matter if their positions on the war vastly differ?
Besides penning some Op-Eds, I'm contemplating going to Boston as a free-lancer for several newspapers (English and [translated to] Vietnamese) and web sites. I may also post observations on my BLOG which is accessible from my web site. If I have a business schedule conflict, I may just TIVO and watch the same old clan reason why over 3 million Vietnamese, 58,400 Americans and countless others in the aftermath of the war had to die.
Best regards,
Quang X. Pham
www.asenseofduty.com
Reply from Jean Libby, Viet-Am Review
Subject: Fwd: RE: The American War in Vietnam Redux - Sans Vietnamese
Dear Quang, these are great questions and ideas to get something going for Vietnamese representation at the Kennedy Library symposium. You are the person to spearhead because you have spoken recently at both the National Archives and a Presidential Library.
Your question: is there someone who can represent Vietnamese Americans? I say yes, and that person is Nguyen Ngoc Bich, of Virginia. He has historical knowledge, scholarly credentials, international reputation (recently the only Vietnamese American at a gathering in Paris to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the end of the war), excellent bilingual skills, and consummate style. He was in both Washington D.C. with the Embassy and the Republic of Vietnam during the war.
The issue is inclusion of the position of the Vietnamese allies of the United States.
This history is quickly being lost in the spin that the Republic of Vietnam was not an entity worth fighting for, did not have leaders and people who understood and wanted democracy. The history of the Vietnam War in the United States is presented by the winners as an independence movement. Americans grow up now believing this, it's in all the textbooks.
Is there anyone listed on the program who believed in democracy for Vietnam? Certainly not Kissinger, who sold the people down the Seine River for a photo-op and release of only American prisoners. He will want to make the Paris Peace Accords of 1973 his historical legacy by glorifying his betrayal of the Republic of Vietnam.
Certainly not Ted Sorensen and Jack Valenti, who covered the tracks too well, and whose primary interest is to protect the historical reputations of their presidents.
What about the American journalists who told the world that the communists were winning during the Tet Offensive, when the opposite military and political position was correct. They are crediting themselves with ending the war, and they do it by denigrating the Republic of Vietnam military and political leadership and falsely presenting the people as welcoming Ho Chi Minh's armies and ideology.
The issues can be summarized as presentation of the Vietnam War as an American War, which serves the interests of the Communist regime and the antiwar Americans.
Quang, you have run up against the gatekeeper of the Presidential libraries. Delay, wait, "be reasonable," until it is too late to change anything. This is exactly what the Community Advisory delegation to the Oakland Museum faced in asking for Vietnamese American inclusion in the exhibit after Mimi Nguyen was summarily fired for proposing this inclusion in writing. The smiling faces are sometimes more treacherous than the obstinate ones. Neither had any intention of inclusion.
Inclusion in the Presidential conference can be approached from the outside or the inside. If anyone could have changed it from the inside, it would be you, with your recent experience as an invited speaker to both the National Archives and the Nixon Library. But you got the classic brushoff.
Therefore, what is the best way to get public recognition that without inclusion of the history of the Republic of Viet Nam presented by themselves, it will be historically hollow?
All in exactly two months' time? The only people who can do this are bloggers who get read. Unfortunately this costs a bit of money, but not a lot. Your blog has to be able to be Googled on its topics. It has to leave the realm of personal expression and be found, quickly, online. I have just looked at yours (which I put onto a link on my site, http://vietamreview.blogharbor.com ) and it was hard to navigate into. It needs its own url, which you don't get with free hosts.
I have just joined an organization called the Online News Association. Perhaps this one can help you get read, online, with the important things you have to say.
This list serve has a lot of journalists with websites. Let's all link into Quang X. Pham's blog, which is at A Sense of Duty and get the information and opinions out there. Knowledgeable people can submit materials, too. His email is just below.
People will be reading journalist blogs about the conference while it is occurring more than print news.
Thank you, Quang X. Pham, for leading this inquiry.
Jean Libby
Jean Libby is a retired U.S. History instructor (college level) who is active in supporting the Vietnamese American community with this blog and other activities. She is the editor for the dissident poet Nguyen Chi Thien for his upcoming publication of stories of prison conditions in the "Hanoi Hilton" by the Council for Southeast Asia Studies at Yale University.
Name of source: USA Today
SOURCE: USA Today (1-13-06)
Organizers of a King memorial hope to break ground on the National Mall in November, placing the civil rights leader in the same class as Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They are accelerating their efforts to raise enough money to begin construction and complete the project in 2008, the 40th anniversary of King's death.
"We want to create a sense of urgency," says Harry Johnson Sr., president of the Washington-based Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation.
The memorial, to be located on 4 acres adjacent to the FDR memorial, will be midway between the Jefferson Memorial and the Lincoln Memorial where King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963. It will include waterfalls and a granite boulder from which an image of King emerges.
When built, the memorial will be the first on the Mall dedicated to a non-president and an African-American.
The memorial "is tantamount to the recognition of the people who made the second American Revolution," says Ron Walters, director of the African American Leadership Institute and a politics professor at the University of Maryland. "We're beginning to get away from looking at Martin Luther King as just a black hero."
King has become a "national icon," says Eric Foner, a historian at Columbia University in New York who specializes in race relations. "It's hard to think of another private citizen being in a position to get this kind of recognition." He says the memorial, though a symbol, is "tremendously significant."
Foner says the memorial may reflect a change in the last two decades in the nation's capital, where some slaves helped build the U.S. Capitol and others were sold on Pennsylvania Avenue. In 1983, when a federal holiday was proposed to honor King, President Reagan initially opposed it. Last year, the Senate issued the first congressional apology to African-Americans by passing a resolution that laments its failure to stop lynching.
The memorial was the brainchild of activists from Alpha Phi Alpha, an African-American fraternity of which King was a member. They've campaigned for it for two decades.
Before bulldozers can arrive, organizers must raise $66 million of the expected $100 million cost. So far, they have raised $43.5 million, although Congress has pledged $10 million in matching funds and several big corporate donors will soon step in, says Rica Orszag, the project's spokeswoman.
The memorial, which Congress authorized in 1996, has been beset by delays and a languid pace of donations. Organizers have repeatedly failed to reach fundraising targets, although hefty donations have come from celebrities including filmmaker George Lucas ($1 million) and corporations, including General Motors ($10 million), Tommy Hilfiger Corp. ($5 million) and the National Basketball Association ($3 million.)
"I'm just waiting to see if it will happen," says John Hope Franklin, 90, a professor emeritus of history at Duke University. "I've been disillusioned so many times before. It's 2006, and there's nothing in the nation's capital to show what happened to African-Americans. Nothing."
SOURCE: USA Today (1-16-06)
The recommendations — which were to be presented to Mayor Ray Nagin on Tuesday — also call for creating new artistic districts, increasing the teaching of arts in schools and setting aside 2% of eligible capital bonds for public sculptures, murals and other artwork.
The ideas are part of a broad rebuilding plan being rolled out by the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, a panel appointed by Nagin after Hurricane Katrina hit on Aug. 29.
The panel is coming up with a variety of ideas on how to rebuild the city — from abandoning some residential sections of the city to overhauling schools and city government.
On the cultural side, the commission's recommendations tackle a long-standing complaint: that New Orleans has done a miserable job in promoting itself as the birthplace of jazz, the quintessential American form of art.
Many important buildings in jazz history have fallen into disrepair or tumbled down. Even the home of Louis Armstrong was allowed to be demolished.
The report also endorses a plan to preserve several old buildings on Rampart Street associated with Armstrong, Buddy Bolden, Sidney Bechet and other jazz greats and turn them into a jazz park.
The old brick buildings, some of the only buildings left in New Orleans with ties to Armstrong, are largely in a state of neglect and a lack of signs on them leaves tourists passing by without realizing their importance.
"In Vienna every place Beethoven looked at, it's marked by something," said jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, the co-chairman of the commission's cultural committee.
The report says the most immediate concern is recovering from Katrina. The storm's flooding and winds hit musicians, community theaters, dance studios, artists, night clubs, second-line bands and Mardi Gras Indian tribes particularly hard.
"We're not going to sit here and pretend that what we're doing is more important than levees, but we all know that without its culture, New Orleans isn't New Orleans," said Cesar Burgos, chairman of the cultural committee.
An estimated 11,000 people working in the cultural sector have lost their jobs and the ranks of musicians are down from more than 2,500 before Katrina to about 250. Uninsured damages to the cultural sector are estimated at about $80 million, the report says.
"We're still not open because we don't have the musicians," said Deborah Guidry, an assistant manager at Preservation Hall, the French Quarter jazz mecca.
But Jason Berry, a New Orleans writer and jazz historian, questioned building a major museum dedicated only to music. He champions a museum in honor to the entire city, especially if many neighborhoods are razed. He also worries about repopulating New Orleans.
"Poor people made the culture of this city from the ground up and they are the ones who have been displaced," Berry said. "The report begs the question: How do we get those people back?"
Name of source: Press Release -- George Mason University's Center for History and New Media (CHNM)
SOURCE: Press Release -- George Mason University's Center for History and New Media (CHNM) (1-16-06)
The goal is both to foster some positive legacies by allowing the people affected by these storms to tell their stories and to assist historians and archivists in preserving the record of current events.
First-hand accounts, on-scene images, blog postings, podcasts, and other audio files are some of the materials being collected. Digital technology offers people the opportunity to record experiences in the moment, but many of those digital recordings are quickly discarded. Hurricanearchive.org seeks to save those creations in a permanent database for scholars and a wide audience for generations to come. Contributors also may phone 504- 208-3883 to record their stories.
The University of New Orleans and the Center for History and New Media, CHNM, at George Mason University created this digital history project in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History and Gulf area partners, with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Hurricanearchive.org builds on prior work to collect and preserve history online, especially through CHNM’s ECHO (http://echo.gmu.edu) science and technology history project and the September 11 Digital Archive (http://www.911digitalarchive.org), which gathered more than 150,000 digital objects related to the attacks. The Library of Congress permanently houses those materials. Both projects are part of a growing practice of using the Internet to preserve the past through "digital memory banks."
Stories:
“As with every other hurricane I decided to stay thinking it was a false alarm.” Click here.
“When the power returned Monday night we saw the news coverage of New Orleans, the city that I had come to love in the ten years that I lived there looked like it would never be livable again.” Click here.
“No words could adequately describe what I actually saw in Pass Christian. After his visit, my brother-in-law Trey reported that “the walls were blown out.” I couldn't grasp what he meant until I saw it, and discovered he meant just what he said: there are large sections of walls that are just gone - the interior sheetrock is gone; the exterior siding is gone.” Click here.
“The first thing we did when we arrived for cleanup was try to figure out what furniture could be saved. Then I started pushing mud off of the patio. There was 3-4 inches of that muck everywhere.” Click here.
Images:
A Subway sandwich shop once stood here in New Orleans: Click here.
Homeowners discover the rubble left where their home stood in Pass Christian, MS: Click here.
A gas station in Port Arthur, Texas attempts to remain open after Hurricane Rita: Click here.
A child walks through rubble in Slidell, LA: Click here.
A New Orleanian cleans out their refridgerator after a 2-month absence: Click here.
A home stands isolated by water after a levee broke in Montegut, Terrebonne Parish, LA: Click here.
About CHNM
CHNM maintains a wide range of online history projects directed at diverse topics and audiences, making them available at no cost through its website. CHNM combines cutting edge digital media with the latest and best historical scholarship to promote an inclusive and democratic understanding of the past as well as a broad historical literacy. Since 1994, the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University (http://chnm.gmu.edu) has used digital media and computer technology to democratize history to incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past.
About University of New Orleans
The University of New Orleans (UNO) is Louisiana's premier urban university. Facing massive challenges following Hurricane Katrina, UNO resumed its Fall 2005 semester in early October with a combination of on-line and on-site courses offered on satellite campuses. UNO was the only New Orleans university to reopen in 2005. Building upon its rich academic research tradition, UNO sponsors a group of projects to identify, record, and alleviate the effects of Katrina on the citizens of Louisiana. An important goal of the university is to provide appropriate physical and electronic venues for storing and disseminating the collected data as the Gulf Coast rebuilds.
Name of source: News Channel 8 (Bethesda, Maryland)
SOURCE: News Channel 8 (Bethesda, Maryland) (1-16-06)
A slave cabin that was once home to Josiah Henson has been deeded to the Maryland National Capital Parks and Planning Commission. Henson was the inspirational model for Harriet Beecher Stowe's title character in the abolitionist novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
As a slave, Henson was once the property of the 500 acre Riley family farm in what is now Bethesda. Henson lived and worked on the farm for more than 30 years before being sent to Kentucky. When he was unable to buy his freedom under an old agreement with his owner, he went fled to Canada with his wife and family.
Public officials have acquired the one acre site for $1 million. It will be preserved as an interpretive park.
Name of source: Las Vegas Sun
SOURCE: Las Vegas Sun (1-16-06)
The ruling, which is not binding, indirectly supported the family's claims that the pictures were stolen by the Nazis. Lawyers for both the family and the government have said they would abide by the court's recommendation to end a seven-year legal struggle over who owns the paintings, estimated to be worth at least $150 million.
A decision to return the paintings would represent one of the costliest settlements since Austria's government started more than a decade ago returning valuable art objects looted by the Nazis.
"The conditions of the federal law over the return ... are fulfilled," said the court ruling, reported by the Austria Press Agency. A formal announcement of the court decision, which APA said was reached Sunday, was expected Tuesday.
Austrian government officials were not immediately available for comment.
E. Randol Schoenberg, the lawyer for 90-year-old Maria Altmann, the California woman claiming the paintings, said the decision fulfilled all her hopes and expectations.
"It will make Mrs. Altmann very happy," he told the Austria Press Agency.
The paintings include a gold leaf-clad portrait of Altmann's aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer, one of the most reproduced pictures of all time. The portrait was commissioned by Bloch-Bauer's family.
Lawyers for the Austrian government and Altmann have fought since 1998 over rights to the portrait and four other pictures - a lesser-known Bloch-Bauer portrait as well as "Apfelbaum" ("Apple Tree"), "Buchenwald/Birkenwald ("Beech Forest/Birch Forest) and "Haeuser in Unterach am Attersee" (Houses in Unterach on Attersee Lake").
Altmann's now-deceased relatives owned all five paintings before the Nazis came to power.
Bloch-Bauer died in 1925 and all of the five disputed pictures remained in her family. Her husband fled to Switzerland after the Nazis took over Austria in 1938. The pictures were then taken by the Nazis and the Austrian Gallery was made the formal owner.
Attorneys for Austria have argued Altmann's aunt clearly intended to give the works to the Austrian Gallery, where they are now displayed. In any case, they say, the conflict should be settled in an Austrian court.
The two sides began mediation in March, following a U.S. Supreme Court decision that Altmann could sue the Austrian government.
The case stems from a 1998 law passed in Austria. The law required federal museums to review search their holdings for any works seized by the Nazis after they took over Austria, and to determine whether the works were obtained by the museums without remuneration.
Altmann's lawyer Schoenberg contended the five works of art were looted by the Nazis, and as such, U.S. law mandates their return to the original owners.
Name of source: Baltimore Sun
SOURCE: Baltimore Sun (1-16-06)
And, of course, in Los Angeles and Memphis, the cities where the year's turbulence was punctuated with the sound of an assassin's bullets cutting down Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King.
King would have turned 77 today. He died at a time when youth was paramount, but it still seems hard to believe that he was only 39 when killed. For those of a certain age, it seems hard to believe that he is now part of history, no longer of current events.
How King will go down in history is an ongoing struggle. One of the major protagonists is Taylor Branch, the Mount Washington resident who is now publishing At Canaan's Edge. The third installment of his massive King trilogy, it covers the last several years of King's life, 1965-1968. More than a biography, these books are what Branch calls an account of "America in the King Years."
In this and his previous volumes - Pillar of Fire and Parting the Waters - Branch makes clear that the civil rights movement that orbited about King's powerful nucleus was not the simple morality play it is often portrayed as today. It was a confused journey that took many paths as courageous and conflicted men and women, battling a brutal and often deadly enemy, improvised like jazz musicians on the far reaches of an avant-garde riff.
As such, the civil rights movement provides fodder for an array of potential portrayals - from the anger of those who see the current state of racial inequality in America and say that its fundamental missions are unfulfilled, to the opposite, those who say that the movement met its goals and that any attempt to further such an agenda today means abandoning the movement's goal of a colorblind America.
"There is an old adage," Columbia University historian Eric Foner says of his trade. "All history is contemporary history. In other words, you write for the moment you are living in. That does not mean you are trying to distort, but the assumptions you use are the assumptions of your own time."
Ronald Walters, director of the African American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland, College Park, says this is evident in the way King is memorialized. "I think what has happened to the memory of King is that Americans have slowly but surely shaped a vision of King that they can be comfortable with," he says.
Walters points to the part of the speech King gave at the 1963 march on Washington that is always heard on the commemoration of his birthday, the "I have a dream" part - what Walters calls "the mystical aspect" of the speech.
"The real reason for that speech is very seldom played: somebody coming to Washington to demand the cashing of a check marked 'insufficient funds,' the criticism of the extent of racism in American society," Walters says. "Those things are tossed by the wayside while the mystical vision is played over and over again."
The part that Walters refers to comes early in King's speech. Few Americans have probably ever heard it.
"In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check," King said, describing "the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence" as "a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir."
"It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned," King went on. "Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."
Jane Dailey, a Johns Hopkins University historian, says too much attention is paid to that speech.
"King said a lot of other things," she says. "His memory tends to get distorted by the over-reliance on that one text, which is actually much less revolutionary than some of his other texts."
Says Foner: "Unfortunately, on Martin Luther King Day, King dies in 1963 because all people remember is the march on Washington. He actually dies in Memphis leading a strike of sanitation workers. Poverty and economic justice, the redistribution of wealth - that's what King was talking about then.
"If you consider that a part of the civil rights movement, then it becomes a more radical challenge to the structure of American society and it didn't succeed nearly as much as people like to believe," he says. "The battle over the memory of the civil rights movement is really a battle over defining what that movement was."
Jonathan Holloway, a historian at Yale University, says the narrative currently institutionalized ends in victory. "It is a story of American exceptionalism, that we the people rose up, really over ourselves, and chose the high ground, joined with King to make all these great things happen," he says. "That really couldn't be any further from the truth."
The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, with its black/white dividing line determining who was most victimized by the storm, brought race back into the national conversation at a volume rarely heard since civil rights days. King is regularly on record decrying not only the South's Jim Crow laws that he successfully fought, but also the economic condition of American blacks of the type revealed by Katrina.
It was after the 1965 Voting Rights act signaled victory in the Jim Crow battle that King turned his focus primarily to economic issues, which led him to shine a light on the condition of blacks in the North with a lengthy campaign in Chicago. These are the problems that many say remain unsolved.
Name of source: International Herald Tribune
SOURCE: International Herald Tribune (1-16-06)
Next month, the head of a United Nations administrative team is expected to arrive and set up shop in Cambodia. Foreign and Cambodian judges, prosecutors and staff are being selected now for the mixed international tribunal.
Diplomats and analysts who have been skeptical over nearly a decade of negotiations and delays now expect to see some measure of judicial accounting for the 1.7 million people who lost their lives from 1975 to 1979.
"From a technical point of view, we are almost there," said Craig Etcheson, an expert and researcher on the Khmer Rouge regime. "I guess it's what you might call a rolling start."
At a military headquarters here on the southwestern outskirts of Phnom Penh, not far from a killing field where thousands of bodies were buried, a large, empty building filled with dust and sunlight is being furnished as a courthouse.
There are still, as always, possibilities for delay, and nobody is rushing to take the plastic slipcovers off the 540 blue chairs in the hearing room. At one point, for example, an infestation of termites in the roof of the National Assembly building caused months of delay in the approval of a trial format.
But most of the $56.3 million budget has been secured now, and some time soon, analysts say, the clock will start ticking on a three-part time frame: a year for investigations, a year for the trial and a year for appeals.
A decision has been made to aim for a small pool of senior figures and not to seek to indict the many thousands of people involved in the deaths of nearly a quarter of the country's population.
The top leader, Pol Pot, died in 1998. A half dozen names are most often mentioned as likely defendants; two of these are in custody and the others are living freely among the survivors of the regime they led.
Although Cambodia's current leadership includes a number of former middle-ranking Khmer Rouge officials, experts say there is no reason to believe that Prime Minister Hun Sen was culpable.
"We have investigated that back and forth and up and down, and there's just no evidence that he was involved in any prosecutable crimes during the period of jurisdiction for the tribunal," Etcheson said. "He looks clean."
Experts say the evidence against the likely defendants is substantial, though mostly indirect. A private Cambodian organization, the Documentation Center of Cambodia, has compiled tens of thousands of documents, interviewed hundreds of witnesses and identified thousands of mass graves.
The center has set aside rooms in its headquarters for prosecutors and defense lawyers to study its archives and is putting together a rapid response team to provide any requested materials. "We are ready," said the center's director, Youk Chhang.
Sean Visoth, the tribunal's coordinator, said that at its peak it would employ a staff of 200 Cambodians and 100 foreigners designated by the United Nations. Under the mixed structure of the tribunal, his deputy will be a representative of the United Nations, Michelle Lee, who is scheduled to arrive here next month.
Visoth, who survived the Khmer Rouge years doing hard labor, said the trial had three goals: to offer justice to the victims and survivors, to prevent similar atrocities in the future and to give the younger generation a clear picture of what happened.
Interviews and polls in recent years have shown that most people are eager for a trial, although, according to the historian David Chandler, "There is no real concept of accountability in Cambodia."
In interviews with rural people, the notion of justice often seems to be equated with revenge, and a proverb is sometimes cited: "Do not answer hatred with hatred."
In a village near Kantork, a woman making rice cakes by the side of the road, Phoung Vuthy, 53, laughed when she heard those words. "Don't tell me that stuff," she said. "I hate them. I lost my husband and never had a chance to have children. I want to see them punished."
Her sister, Phoung Im, who said she was about 71, said, "We want to see a trial now. When will the Khmer Rouge be put on trial? I heard there will be a trial. When? When?"
But even now, as the process gets under way, it remains controversial among advocates of justice and human rights. The years of wrangling between the United Nations and the Cambodian government produced an awkward hybrid format that raises questions about the quality of justice on offer.
The sentiment among many diplomats here can be summed up, in the words of one of them, as: "The only thing worse than no trial would be a trial that is a farce."
Unlike the UN tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, this one will include local judges and prosecutors who, critics say, are ill trained and subject to political manipulation. Under a complicated "supermajority" formula, the Cambodians will be in the majority, but their international counterparts will have veto power over any disputed decisions.
A recent wave of convictions of Hun Sen's political opponents on libel and related charges has highlighted the role of the courts in Cambodia as a political arm of the prime minister.
"Clearly the way the judiciary is being used as an instrument against critics now is a real problem," said Brad Adams, the Asia director for Human Rights Watch, the New York-based monitoring group. "It shows the problems for the trials and the problem for the United Nations to be mixed up with these people."
There is no real answer to the question of whether to proceed with a flawed formula, experts say. Only the outcome will show whether the process did more good than harm in its handling of one of the great atrocities of the past century.
"Some people want a perfect trial," said Youk Chhang on a recent visit to the building where the aging Khmer Rouge leaders may be made to answer for their actions.
"But this is what we have, and let's make the best of it," he said. "Sometimes you have to be optimistic for a change."
KANTORK, Cambodia Twenty-seven years after the brutal Khmer Rouge regime was driven from power, it appears that at least some of its leaders may soon be put on trial for causing the deaths of nearly one-fourth of the Cambodian population.
Under an agreement between the United Nations and the government here, a courtroom is being prepared, technical staffs are beginning their work and staff is being hired.
Next month, the head of a United Nations administrative team is expected to arrive and set up shop in Cambodia. Foreign and Cambodian judges, prosecutors and staff are being selected now for the mixed international tribunal.
Diplomats and analysts who have been skeptical over nearly a decade of negotiations and delays now expect to see some measure of judicial accounting for the 1.7 million people who lost their lives from 1975 to 1979.
"From a technical point of view, we are almost there," said Craig Etcheson, an expert and researcher on the Khmer Rouge regime. "I guess it's what you might call a rolling start."
At a military headquarters here on the southwestern outskirts of Phnom Penh, not far from a killing field where thousands of bodies were buried, a large, empty building filled with dust and sunlight is being furnished as a courthouse.
There are still, as always, possibilities for delay, and nobody is rushing to take the plastic slipcovers off the 540 blue chairs in the hearing room. At one point, for example, an infestation of termites in the roof of the National Assembly building caused months of delay in the approval of a trial format.
But most of the $56.3 million budget has been secured now, and some time soon, analysts say, the clock will start ticking on a three-part time frame: a year for investigations, a year for the trial and a year for appeals.
A decision has been made to aim for a small pool of senior figures and not to seek to indict the many thousands of people involved in the deaths of nearly a quarter of the country's population.
The top leader, Pol Pot, died in 1998. A half dozen names are most often mentioned as likely defendants; two of these are in custody and the others are living freely among the survivors of the regime they led.
Although Cambodia's current leadership includes a number of former middle-ranking Khmer Rouge officials, experts say there is no reason to believe that Prime Minister Hun Sen was culpable.
"We have investigated that back and forth and up and down, and there's just no evidence that he was involved in any prosecutable crimes during the period of jurisdiction for the tribunal," Etcheson said. "He looks clean."
Experts say the evidence against the likely defendants is substantial, though mostly indirect. A private Cambodian organization, the Documentation Center of Cambodia, has compiled tens of thousands of documents, interviewed hundreds of witnesses and identified thousands of mass graves.
The center has set aside rooms in its headquarters for prosecutors and defense lawyers to study its archives and is putting together a rapid response team to provide any requested materials. "We are ready," said the center's director, Youk Chhang.
Sean Visoth, the tribunal's coordinator, said that at its peak it would employ a staff of 200 Cambodians and 100 foreigners designated by the United Nations. Under the mixed structure of the tribunal, his deputy will be a representative of the United Nations, Michelle Lee, who is scheduled to arrive here next month.
Visoth, who survived the Khmer Rouge years doing hard labor, said the trial had three goals: to offer justice to the victims and survivors, to prevent similar atrocities in the future and to give the younger generation a clear picture of what happened.
Interviews and polls in recent years have shown that most people are eager for a trial, although, according to the historian David Chandler, "There is no real concept of accountability in Cambodia."
In interviews with rural people, the notion of justice often seems to be equated with revenge, and a proverb is sometimes cited: "Do not answer hatred with hatred."
In a village near Kantork, a woman making rice cakes by the side of the road, Phoung Vuthy, 53, laughed when she heard those words. "Don't tell me that stuff," she said. "I hate them. I lost my husband and never had a chance to have children. I want to see them punished."
Her sister, Phoung Im, who said she was about 71, said, "We want to see a trial now. When will the Khmer Rouge be put on trial? I heard there will be a trial. When? When?"
But even now, as the process gets under way, it remains controversial among advocates of justice and human rights. The years of wrangling between the United Nations and the Cambodian government produced an awkward hybrid format that raises questions about the quality of justice on offer.
The sentiment among many diplomats here can be summed up, in the words of one of them, as: "The only thing worse than no trial would be a trial that is a farce."
Unlike the UN tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, this one will include local judges and prosecutors who, critics say, are ill trained and subject to political manipulation. Under a complicated "supermajority" formula, the Cambodians will be in the majority, but their international counterparts will have veto power over any disputed decisions.
A recent wave of convictions of Hun Sen's political opponents on libel and related charges has highlighted the role of the courts in Cambodia as a political arm of the prime minister.
"Clearly the way the judiciary is being used as an instrument against critics now is a real problem," said Brad Adams, the Asia director for Human Rights Watch, the New York-based monitoring group. "It shows the problems for the trials and the problem for the United Nations to be mixed up with these people."
There is no real answer to the question of whether to proceed with a flawed formula, experts say. Only the outcome will show whether the process did more good than harm in its handling of one of the great atrocities of the past century.
"Some people want a perfect trial," said Youk Chhang on a recent visit to the building where the aging Khmer Rouge leaders may be made to answer for their actions.
"But this is what we have, and let's make the best of it," he said. "Sometimes you have to be optimistic for a change."
KANTORK, Cambodia Twenty-seven years after the brutal Khmer Rouge regime was driven from power, it appears that at least some of its leaders may soon be put on trial for causing the deaths of nearly one-fourth of the Cambodian population.
Under an agreement between the United Nations and the government here, a courtroom is being prepared, technical staffs are beginning their work and staff is being hired.
Next month, the head of a United Nations administrative team is expected to arrive and set up shop in Cambodia. Foreign and Cambodian judges, prosecutors and staff are being selected now for the mixed international tribunal.
Diplomats and analysts who have been skeptical over nearly a decade of negotiations and delays now expect to see some measure of judicial accounting for the 1.7 million people who lost their lives from 1975 to 1979.
"From a technical point of view, we are almost there," said Craig Etcheson, an expert and researcher on the Khmer Rouge regime. "I guess it's what you might call a rolling start."
At a military headquarters here on the southwestern outskirts of Phnom Penh, not far from a killing field where thousands of bodies were buried, a large, empty building filled with dust and sunlight is being furnished as a courthouse.
There are still, as always, possibilities for delay, and nobody is rushing to take the plastic slipcovers off the 540 blue chairs in the hearing room. At one point, for example, an infestation of termites in the roof of the National Assembly building caused months of delay in the approval of a trial format.
But most of the $56.3 million budget has been secured now, and some time soon, analysts say, the clock will start ticking on a three-part time frame: a year for investigations, a year for the trial and a year for appeals.
A decision has been made to aim for a small pool of senior figures and not to seek to indict the many thousands of people involved in the deaths of nearly a quarter of the country's population.
The top leader, Pol Pot, died in 1998. A half dozen names are most often mentioned as likely defendants; two of these are in custody and the others are living freely among the survivors of the regime they led.
Although Cambodia's current leadership includes a number of former middle-ranking Khmer Rouge officials, experts say there is no reason to believe that Prime Minister Hun Sen was culpable.
"We have investigated that back and forth and up and down, and there's just no evidence that he was involved in any prosecutable crimes during the period of jurisdiction for the tribunal," Etcheson said. "He looks clean."
Experts say the evidence against the likely defendants is substantial, though mostly indirect. A private Cambodian organization, the Documentation Center of Cambodia, has compiled tens of thousands of documents, interviewed hundreds of witnesses and identified thousands of mass graves.
The center has set aside rooms in its headquarters for prosecutors and defense lawyers to study its archives and is putting together a rapid response team to provide any requested materials. "We are ready," said the center's director, Youk Chhang.
Sean Visoth, the tribunal's coordinator, said that at its peak it would employ a staff of 200 Cambodians and 100 foreigners designated by the United Nations. Under the mixed structure of the tribunal, his deputy will be a representative of the United Nations, Michelle Lee, who is scheduled to arrive here next month.
Visoth, who survived the Khmer Rouge years doing hard labor, said the trial had three goals: to offer justice to the victims and survivors, to prevent similar atrocities in the future and to give the younger generation a clear picture of what happened.
Interviews and polls in recent years have shown that most people are eager for a trial, although, according to the historian David Chandler, "There is no real concept of accountability in Cambodia."
In interviews with rural people, the notion of justice often seems to be equated with revenge, and a proverb is sometimes cited: "Do not answer hatred with hatred."
In a village near Kantork, a woman making rice cakes by the side of the road, Phoung Vuthy, 53, laughed when she heard those words. "Don't tell me that stuff," she said. "I hate them. I lost my husband and never had a chance to have children. I want to see them punished."
Her sister, Phoung Im, who said she was about 71, said, "We want to see a trial now. When will the Khmer Rouge be put on trial? I heard there will be a trial. When? When?"
But even now, as the process gets under way, it remains controversial among advocates of justice and human rights. The years of wrangling between the United Nations and the Cambodian government produced an awkward hybrid format that raises questions about the quality of justice on offer.
The sentiment among many diplomats here can be summed up, in the words of one of them, as: "The only thing worse than no trial would be a trial that is a farce."
Unlike the UN tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, this one will include local judges and prosecutors who, critics say, are ill trained and subject to political manipulation. Under a complicated "supermajority" formula, the Cambodians will be in the majority, but their international counterparts will have veto power over any disputed decisions.
A recent wave of convictions of Hun Sen's political opponents on libel and related charges has highlighted the role of the courts in Cambodia as a political arm of the prime minister.
"Clearly the way the judiciary is being used as an instrument against critics now is a real problem," said Brad Adams, the Asia director for Human Rights Watch, the New York-based monitoring group. "It shows the problems for the trials and the problem for the United Nations to be mixed up with these people."
There is no real answer to the question of whether to proceed with a flawed formula, experts say. Only the outcome will show whether the process did more good than harm in its handling of one of the great atrocities of the past century.
"Some people want a perfect trial," said Youk Chhang on a recent visit to the building where the aging Khmer Rouge leaders may be made to answer for their actions.
"But this is what we have, and let's make the best of it," he said. "Sometimes you have to be optimistic for a change."
KANTORK, Cambodia Twenty-seven years after the brutal Khmer Rouge regime was driven from power, it appears that at least some of its leaders may soon be put on trial for causing the deaths of nearly one-fourth of the Cambodian population.
Under an agreement between the United Nations and the government here, a courtroom is being prepared, technical staffs are beginning their work and staff is being hired.
Next month, the head of a United Nations administrative team is expected to arrive and set up shop in Cambodia. Foreign and Cambodian judges, prosecutors and staff are being selected now for the mixed international tribunal.
Diplomats and analysts who have been skeptical over nearly a decade of negotiations and delays now expect to see some measure of judicial accounting for the 1.7 million people who lost their lives from 1975 to 1979.
"From a technical point of view, we are almost there," said Craig Etcheson, an expert and researcher on the Khmer Rouge regime. "I guess it's what you might call a rolling start."
At a military headquarters here on the southwestern outskirts of Phnom Penh, not far from a killing field where thousands of bodies were buried, a large, empty building filled with dust and sunlight is being furnished as a courthouse.
There are still, as always, possibilities for delay, and nobody is rushing to take the plastic slipcovers off the 540 blue chairs in the hearing room. At one point, for example, an infestation of termites in the roof of the National Assembly building caused months of delay in the approval of a trial format.
But most of the $56.3 million budget has been secured now, and some time soon, analysts say, the clock will start ticking on a three-part time frame: a year for investigations, a year for the trial and a year for appeals.
A decision has been made to aim for a small pool of senior figures and not to seek to indict the many thousands of people involved in the deaths of nearly a quarter of the country's population.
The top leader, Pol Pot, died in 1998. A half dozen names are most often mentioned as likely defendants; two of these are in custody and the others are living freely among the survivors of the regime they led.
Although Cambodia's current leadership includes a number of former middle-ranking Khmer Rouge officials, experts say there is no reason to believe that Prime Minister Hun Sen was culpable.
"We have investigated that back and forth and up and down, and there's just no evidence that he was involved in any prosecutable crimes during the period of jurisdiction for the tribunal," Etcheson said. "He looks clean."
Experts say the evidence against the likely defendants is substantial, though mostly indirect. A private Cambodian organization, the Documentation Center of Cambodia, has compiled tens of thousands of documents, interviewed hundreds of witnesses and identified thousands of mass graves.
Name of source: UPI
SOURCE: UPI (1-16-06)
It lessens the historical saliency of King for younger kids, said Robert Brown, assistant dean of undergraduate education at Emory University in Atlanta.
All of King's speeches and papers are owned by his family, which has gone to court several times since the 1990s to protect its copyright.
When King was killed, his family was left without much money. The family earns income from licensing his image and charging fees for the use of his speeches, the newspaper said.
The family's Web site says videotapes and audiotapes of the speech can be purchased for $10. Many schools, however, don't know what materials are available.
Many schools use the text --often taken in violation of the copyright from the Internet. The King family, however, wants teachers to use the speech and has not pursued legal action against educators, said Clayborne Carson, director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute.
Name of source: CNN
SOURCE: CNN (1-13-06)
A pizza parlor on Thursday became the first establishment in Westerville's uptown business district to legally serve a beer since 1875.
"Here's to a new tradition in Westerville," local jeweler Bill Morgan said as he raised his plastic cup of Budweiser at Michael's Pizza.
Name of source:
Horowitz, who backs the passage of an Academic Bill of Rights, charges that the website story is inaccurate and misleading.
He sent the following message to HNN, which included the Inside Higher Education story on this Breaking News page.
On Wednesday, InsiderHigherEd.com ran a hit piece on the hearings in Pennsylvania and myself in particular. The author Scott Jaschik is a good enough journalist so that the interivew which he did with me (and which someone else might not have done) does serve as a check on the pettiness and maliciousness of the union people who called him to attack me. My reply is at this moment buried in the letters to the editor (which are revealing in themselves). One professor who challenges our student's claim describes how he showed Farentheit 9/11 in class as though it were a text on the origins of the war, without assigning (say) the Spinsanity analysis which showed the film is a tissue of misrepresentations and outright falsehoods. I have asked Jaschik who is the editor of InsideHigherEd to post my reply. For our readers here it is:From:"David Horowitz"
To:"scott jaschik"
Date: Wednesday, January 11, 2006 7:30 PMTo the editor:
The questions to me which occupy the entire InsideHigherEd report on the academic freedom hearings at Temple took up two minutes of the eight hours or so of testimony. This is no way to report an event that will affect higher education not only in Pennsylvania but throughout the country. Readers interested in the actual issues can find them aired at www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org.
It is misleading to conflate the two stories about classroom incidents in the way your article does. The Farentheit 9/11 story which is described as" central" to my case doesn't appear in my hour presentation or anywhere in anyone's testimony in favor of the Bill. It was brought by a hostile Democrat who got it from a newspaper story that is a year old. In the case of the leftwing student, I merely posted an article he wrote about his case on our website. I would have posted a reply from his professor if the professor had submitted one. The real point of this particular story is that I defend both conservative and leftwing students. So I have no vested interest in inventing stories like the Farenheit 9/11 claim, because my agenda with the Academic Bill of Rights is not to attack"leftwing bias" as my critics claim, but to take politics out of the classroom whether the politics comes from the left or the right.
The AFT's Jamie Horwitz claims that"much of what [Horowitz] has said previously has been exposed to be lies or distortions..." What is his proof that I have ever lied? ("Distortions" is so subjective in politically contentious zones as to be meaningless.) Jamie Horwitz has no evidence or proof that I have ever lied. I guess that makes him a liar by his own standards. His organization is on record lying about the Academic Bill of Rights, as is the entire business meeting of the American Historical Association (not a single member of which has stepped forward to claim the $10,000 reward I offered if they could prove their claim that the Bill would"impose a political standard" on curricula and hirings). Since the Bill can be read by anyone, all 70 of these historians are liars too, by the same standard.
Obviously unless I sit in on the class where these incidents are alleged by students to have taken place or the professor admits that he or she called George Bush a moron or criticized the war in Iraq that was not in a class on the presidency or the war in Iraq, I can't prove that this happened. But these very incidents have been described to me by hundreds of students. Are they all lying? Is that the claim of Jamie Horwitz and his friends?
The fact is that my opponents in Philadelphia had no case to make against our claims, except to throw smoke in the eyes of those not present. with these little sideshows. We will continue. And in the end we will prevail because everyone familiar with today's campuses knows that professors do vent their anger on political issues in their classrooms in ways that are unprofessional and that are also violations of students' academic freedom.
David Horowitz
Name of source: Inside Higher Ed
SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed (1-11-06)
Many faculty leaders have worried that this week’s hearings by a Pennsylvania legislative committee would turn into just the kind of professorial inquisition that they have feared the “Academic Bill of Rights” might set off.
But as hearings ended in Philadelphia Tuesday, critics of the Academic Bill of Rights were saying that they had scored key points. David Horowitz, the conservative activist who has led the push for the hearings in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, admitted that he had no evidence to back up two of the stories he has told multiple times to back up his charges that political bias is rampant in higher education.
In an interview after the hearing, Horowitz said that his acknowledgements were inconsequential, and he complained about “nit picking” by his critics. But while Horowitz was declaring the hearings “a great victory” for his cause, he lost some powerful stories. For example, Horowitz has said several times that a biology professor at Pennsylvania State University used a class session just before the 2004 election to show the Michael Moore documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, but he acknowledged Tuesday that he didn’t have any proof that this took place.
In a phone interview, Horowitz said that he had heard about the alleged incident from a legislative staffer and that there was no evidence to back up the claim. He added, however, that “everybody who is familiar with universities knows that there is a widespread practice of professors venting about foreign policy even when their classes aren’t about foreign policy” and that the lack of evidence on Penn State doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem....
he other example Horowitz was forced to back down on Tuesday is from the opposite end of the political spectrum. He has several times cited the example of a student in California who supports abortion rights and who said that he was punished with a low grade by a professor who opposed abortion. Asked about this example, Horowitz said that he had no evidence to back up the student’s claim.
In the interview, he said that he didn’t have the resources to look into all the complaints that he publicizes. “I can’t investigate every story,” he said.
RESPONSE BY DAVID HOROWITZ
On Wednesday, InsiderHigherEd.com ran a hit piece on the hearings in Pennsylvania and myself in particular. The author Scott Jaschik is a good enough journalist so that the interivew which he did with me (and which someone else might not have done) does serve as a check on the pettiness and maliciousness of the union people who called him to attack me. My reply is at this moment buried in the letters to the editor (which are revealing in themselves). One professor who challenges our student's claim describes how he showed Farentheit 9/11 in class as though it were a text on the origins of the war, without assigning (say) the Spinsanity analysis which showed the film is a tissue of misrepresentations and outright falsehoods. I have asked Jaschik who is the editor of InsideHigherEd to post my reply. For our readers here it is:
From:"David Horowitz"
To:"scott jaschik"
Date: Wednesday, January 11, 2006 7:30 PM
To the editor:
The questions to me which occupy the entire InsideHigherEd report on the academic freedom hearings at Temple took up two minutes of the eight hours or so of testimony. This is no way to report an event that will affect higher education not only in Pennsylvania but throughout the country. Readers interested in the actual issues can find them aired at www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org.
It is misleading to conflate the two stories about classroom incidents in the way your article does. The Farentheit 9/11 story which is described as" central" to my case doesn't appear in my hour presentation or anywhere in anyone's testimony in favor of the Bill. It was brought by a hostile Democrat who got it from a newspaper story that is a year old. In the case of the leftwing student, I merely posted an article he wrote about his case on our website. I would have posted a reply from his professor if the professor had submitted one. The real point of this particular story is that I defend both conservative and leftwing students. So I have no vested interest in inventing stories like the Farenheit 9/11 claim, because my agenda with the Academic Bill of Rights is not to attack"leftwing bias" as my critics claim, but to take politics out of the classroom whether the politics comes from the left or the right.
The AFT's Jamie Horwitz claims that"much of what [Horowitz] has said previously has been exposed to be lies or distortions..." What is his proof that I have ever lied? ("Distortions" is so subjective in politically contentious zones as to be meaningless.) Jamie Horwitz has no evidence or proof that I have ever lied. I guess that makes him a liar by his own standards. His organization is on record lying about the Academic Bill of Rights, as is the entire business meeting of the American Historical Association (not a single member of which has stepped forward to claim the $10,000 reward I offered if they could prove their claim that the Bill would"impose a political standard" on curricula and hirings). Since the Bill can be read by anyone, all 70 of these historians are liars too, by the same standard.
Obviously unless I sit in on the class where these incidents are alleged by students to have taken place or the professor admits that he or she called George Bush a moron or criticized the war in Iraq that was not in a class on the presidency or the war in Iraq, I can't prove that this happened. But these very incidents have been described to me by hundreds of students. Are they all lying? Is that the claim of Jamie Horwitz and his friends?
The fact is that my opponents in Philadelphia had no case to make against our claims, except to throw smoke in the eyes of those not present. with these little sideshows. We will continue. And in the end we will prevail because everyone familiar with today's campuses knows that professors do vent their anger on political issues in their classrooms in ways that are unprofessional and that are also violations of students' academic freedom.
David Horowitz
SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed (1-13-06)
Alito, a 1972 graduate of Princeton, listed his membership in this group in a 1985 application for a political appointment in the Reagan administration’s Justice Department, but he testified on Wednesday that he has no memory of joining the group and that he would not have done so if he had known about its positions. Alito said during his Wednesday hearing, “I would never be a member of an organization that took those positions.”
This week, after a review of several CAP documents requested by Sen. Edward Kennedy could not prove that Alito had been a member of the group, many political commentators said that he was effectively able to wash his hands of this matter.
But the existence of CAP, which ended in 1986, still looms large on the minds of alumni, professors and students, especially after it became a national news story this week.
“Certainly, Princeton had a vicious, alumni attack machine in CAP,” said Stephen Dujack, a 1976 graduate of the university and a writer based in Alexandria, Va. “But I don’t know that CAP was reflective of the overall climate on campus — or just the opinions of a bunch of white guys afraid of losing power.”
He noted that during his time attending the university in the 1970s, gay students often held parties that were attended by straight students who supported their rights.
Asheesh K. Siddique, a junior studying history, thinks that CAP’s presence on campus was actually a good thing for Princeton. “CAP was formed because Princeton was trying to shed its disappointing past by making extensive efforts to be more welcoming to minorities and women,” he said. “CAP was resisting those efforts, but those efforts were the right thing to do. All that CAP meant was that a bunch of backward alumni were upset that the university had decided to shape up and reform itself. That reflects badly on CAP’s members, not Princeton.”
Name of source: Independent (UK)
SOURCE: Independent (UK) (1-13-06)
The experiment, in determining whether any of the participants are related to the explorer, is designed to clarify the disputed origins of the man who made landfall in America in 1492. While historians have mostly reckoned he was born in Genoa in 1451, a counter-lobby argues that he was the Catalan Cristofol Colom, who airbrushed his past to conceal activities as a pirate and conspirator against the king.
Some 120 Catalans are to donate samples of saliva next week to a team of geneticists headed by Jose Antonio Lorente Acosta, head of the Laboratory of Genetic Identification at Granada University. Similar tests on another 180 sharing the name Colom will follow in Mallorca and Valencia. Investigators will compare the results with DNA from Columbus' illegitimate son Hernando, whose remains lie in Seville cathedral.
"We are not looking for descendants of Columbus, but a common ancestor who may be the link between the Admiral and today's Coloms. If we find a Y chromosome (the only one that males inherit by the paternal line) we could say they were related," a spokesman for Mr Acosta said this week.
The first historian to suggest Columbus was Catalan was a Peruvian, Luis Ulloa Cisneros, who published his theory in Paris in 1927. Linguists favour the idea, saying that Columbus used Catalan - or something like it - rather than Italian or Castilian Spanish in his writings, and gave many of his discoveries in the New World Catalan names. One historian reckons most of the places named by Colombus can be linked directly to the Balearic island of Ibiza.
Historians speculate that Columbus may have been a Catalan noble who joined a failed uprising against King Joan II of Aragon, father of King Ferdinand, and took orders from the French in acts of piracy, including the sinking of Portuguese galleons. Finding he had backed the losing side, Columbus expunged his former identity and hispanicised his name to avoid reprisals and keep support for his planned voyage.
Valladolid, north of Madrid, will host quincentenary commemorations of the explorer's death in May, by which time investigators in Catalonia hope to be able to confirm his nationality.
Name of source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation of American Scientists.
SOURCE: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation of American Scientists. (1-12-06)
Never mind the low comedy of AID Administrator Andrew Natsios, who told Americans in 2003 that Iraqi reconstruction would cost taxpayers no more than $1.7 billion (Secrecy News, 12/08/05).
Now it appears that even estimates in the hundreds of billions of dollars may "underestimate the War's true costs to America by a wide margin," according to a new study by economists Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate.
The authors survey the direct and indirect costs of the Iraq war and its aftermath, acknowledging the methodological difficulties involved.
"Even taking a conservative approach, we have been surprised at how large [the costs] are. We can state, with some degree of confidence, that they exceed a trillion dollars," Bilmes and Stiglitz write.
"Would the American people have had a different attitude towards going to war had they known the total cost? Would they have thought that there might be better ways of advancing the cause of democracy or even protecting themselves against an attack, that would cost but a fraction of these amounts?"
"In the end, we may have decided that a trillion dollars spent on the War in Iraq was better than all of these alternatives. But at least it would have been a more informed decision than the one that was made. And recognizing the risks, we might have conducted the War in a manner different from the way we did," the authors conclude.
Their paper was reported in the Boston Globe on January 8.
See "The Economic Costs of the Iraq War: An Appraisal Three Years After the Beginning of the Conflict" by Linda Bilmes and Joseph E.
Stiglitz, January 2006.
Name of source: The Guardian (London)
SOURCE: The Guardian (London) (1-11-06)
The bill would recognise the 200,000 soldiers of the Italian Social Republic as "military combatants", but would make no difference to the state benefits enjoyed by several thousand of the former members still alive.
But the controversial move by Silvio Berlusconi's government will reopen old wounds, raising painful questions about the Italians' view of their past and which side they feel they were really on in the second world war. After Italy capitulated to the allies in 1943 the Germans withdrew to the north and installed the country's ousted fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, at the head of a so-called Italian Social Republic.
With its capital at Salo, on the shores of Lake Garda, his dictatorship enjoyed an increasingly tenuous existence from November 1943 until April 1945. Harassed by the growing partisan movement, the Germans and their diehard fascist allies hit back with ferocious reprisals, often carried out by irregulars whose former members would also be covered by the law.
The lawlessness of Mussolini's beleaguered state provided the historical background for Pier Paolo Pasolini's savagely brutal 1976 movie Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom, which is banned in many parts of the world.
Name of source: Chronicle of Higher Education
SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education (1-13-06)
Name of source: WSJ
SOURCE: WSJ (1-13-06)
Sounds like news to us, and that's exactly what is reported this week by Stephen Hayes in the Weekly Standard magazine. Yet the rest of the press has ignored the story, and for that matter the Bush Administration has also been dumb. The explanation for the latter may be that Mr. Hayes also scores the Administration for failing to do more to translate and analyze the trove of documents it's collected from the Saddam era.
Mr. Hayes reports that, from 1999 through 2002, "elite Iraqi military units" trained roughly 8,000 terrorists at three different camps—in Samarra and Ramadi in the Sunni Triangle, as well as at Salman Pak, where American forces in 2003 found the fuselage of an aircraft that might have been used for training.
Name of source: San Antonio Express-News
SOURCE: San Antonio Express-News (1-13-06)
Some opponents of the flyover are calling for a boycott of the march, while others plan to attend with bandanas over their mouths and black and yellow ribbons around their arms in a show of protest.
Two fighter jets from the 99th Flying Training Squadron at Randolph AFB will zoom over Pittman-Sullivan Park at noon at the end of the nearly three-mile march from Martin Luther King Drive to Iowa Street.
While some say the flyover will provide a patriotic flair to the march during a time of war, others say it will represent support for the war — something King would not approve of.
The Rev. Herman Price, chairman of the city's MLK Commission, said the flyover was meant to honor King, and he is dismayed by the divisiveness it has caused.
"It all depends on how you look at it," Price said Thursday. "They say the planes represent war and bombs and death, but at the same time those planes can also represent our freedom and peace."
But City Councilwoman Patti Radle, who objected to the flyover in a letter to the editor in Wednesday's Express-News, doesn't see it that way.
"War is a different system working for peace. Martin Luther King was not part of that system," she said.
Name of source: Camille Jackson at tolerance.org
SOURCE: Camille Jackson at tolerance.org (1-12-06)
Some will not be able to tell the site is full of hateful rhetoric aimed at discrediting King and his legacy, or that one of its goals is to have the national holiday in King's honor repealed.
One parent, who oversees a website for her daughter's middle school, spent enough time on martinlutherking.org to find its insidious underbelly.
"It is cleverly designed to appeal to and attract students. It promotes itself as a 'valuable resource for teachers and students' featuring 'historical trivia, articles and photos,'" the parent told Tolerance.org in an e-mail. "It's full of junk information, misinformation, rap lyrics to attract kids, and denigrating fliers it advises kids to photocopy and hand out at school. Hundreds of thousands of children will probably see it...."
The King hate site retrieved by Google is owned by former Klan member Don Black, founder of Stormfront, an Internet-based hate group.
The Icon
Every year white supremacists use Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday to kick off a new year of hate. In many Southern states, mid-January is usually attached to a Confederate holiday, such as Robert E. Lee's birthday. Those looking to celebrate the Confederacy resent King's holiday, and many hate groups across the country hold public and private anti-MLK rallies.
One such group, North East White Pride, has planned to "protest this fake holiday the Saturday before [in Boston] so the hard working white men and women of the Northeast can come out," according to the group's online forum.
"Remember, MLK was a drug addict, a liar, a commie, wife beater, whoremonger, plagiarist and of course a filthy nigger. Why should he get a holiday? Just to keep the niggers from rioting," writes the North East White Pride forum administrator.
"Why are people still targeting him? One reason: He's been so iconicized and romanticized. They assume they can defame the icon, and he was the icon," says Georgette Norman, director of the Rosa Parks Museum, based in Montgomery, Ala., where King led the bus boycott.
Joe Roy of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project, which monitors hate groups across the country, says "there'll probably be a number of anti-MLK rallies. It's a favorite [holiday] among hate groups."
He notes two reasons: Hate group members often have the day off from work, and the rallies attract new recruits.
A Teachable Moment
Parental involvement is the best way to counteract such hateful activity on the Internet, according to Roy.
The middle-school mother, outraged by Stormfront's hate site masquerading as a legitimate resource, chose to contact the technology coordinator at her daughter's school to block the website from school computers. She also contacted Google and other search engines about such listings.
In the past, Google has added a disclaimer about "offensive search results" when users search for the word "Jew."
"I don't know how realistic it is to hope that the schools can block this site entirely," the middle school mother wrote, vowing to stay vigilant.
Norman of the Rosa Parks Museum has a slightly different approach toward mitigating anti-King hate.
"These are teachable moments that give us far more to think about and discuss and exposes what work still needs to be done," she says. "That's far more salient for me as a teacher."
Name of source: cronaca.com
SOURCE: cronaca.com (1-11-06)
According to the Greek culture ministry, Heidelberg University was "disposed" to give back the heel of a male depicted in the frieze which originally adorned the Parthenon.
It said the assurance had been given to the Greek prime minister, Kostas Karamanlis, by the university's vice chancellor Angelos Haniotis, who is of Greek origin.
SOURCE: cronaca.com (1-12-06)
President Vicente Fox will personally ask for its return at a summit of Latin American and European leaders in Vienna in May if there is no progress before then.
"If we are still without results at the time of the May meeting in Austria, we will reiterate via the president our request to the government that this be resolved," Derbez said.
Fox already asked Austrian President Heinz Fischer during a visit to Mexico in 2005 to return the piece. Many Mexicans consider the headdress their country's single most important relic.
The artifact is nearly a yard (metre) wide and made from more than 450 elegant, vivid green feathers of the quetzal bird mounted in a jewel and gold encrusted crown.
SOURCE: cronaca.com (1-13-06)
"In terms of the rest of Florida, we've never seen anything that's been the same," said state archaeologist Ryan Wheeler. "It's a very unusual mode of burial". . .
The remains, about five centuries old, are likely those of ancestors of the Tequesta tribe that met Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon in 1513, Wheeler said.
The tribe probably kept the bones above ground for some time before mass-burying them - scooping out soil in the fissures or deep natural grooves, burying the bones and then covering the grave, Wheeler said.
