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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: AFP
SOURCE: AFP (12-10-06)
Later, he fell out of favor as human rights abuses under his watch got out of hand, including the 1976 assassination in Washington of a former Chilean ambassador, and in 2004 US lawmakers helped build a case of fraud against him.
General Pinochet rose to fame on September 11, 1973, when he led an anti-Allende military coup with the complicity of Chilean right-wing forces and the US government.
Conservatives in Chile and Washington feared Allende's attempts to pave "a Chilean way toward Socialism" would usher in a pro-Soviet communist government.
Henry Kissinger, US secretary of state under then president Richard Nixon, made quite clear what US intentions were after Allende's election.
"The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves ... I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people," Kissinger said at the time.
Name of source: Christian Science Monitor
SOURCE: Christian Science Monitor (12-11-06)
Van and Bei - and 396 fellow villagers from across the country - are here on a two-day, all-expense-paid educational trip organized by the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), a leading research institution on the killing fields.
Mention Cambodia, and the first image that most Westerners think of is heaps of skulls. So it may sound peculiar that numerous survivors - and some perpetrators - themselves have yet to learn about the true extent of the killing fields. During the Khmer Rouge era, rural Cambodians were isolated and resigned to fates imposed by tyrannical overlords. Many still don't understand why they and their families were condemned to extreme suffering, let alone murder, by the Khmer Rouge who proclaimed themselves the liberators of the dispossessed. And governments since have done little to educate them about the period.
"Most survivors living in rural communities have only isolated memories of atrocities," explains Ly Sok Kheang, a researcher for DC-Cam, who is escorting the villagers around memorial sites. "Many don't even know what happened in neighboring provinces."...
Name of source: Guardian
SOURCE: Guardian (12-11-06)
The 14 Grenadians sentenced to death for the assassination of the former prime minister Maurice Bishop more than 20 years ago are due to have their case for an appeal heard by the Privy Council.
In 1983 Maurice Bishop, the socialist prime minister of Grenada, was killed during a coup, along with 10 others, following a violent split within his party. The deputy prime minister, Bernard Coard, Bishop's childhood friend turned rival, declared himself prime minister.
Six days later, President Ronald Reagan ordered the invasion of Grenada, claiming that 650 American students on the island were at risk. According to US figures, 45 Grenadians, 24 Cubans and 19 Americans were killed in the invasion.
SOURCE: Guardian (12-7-06)
Instead there is sage brush and dry, dusty earth. But this is no pristine wilderness. A hundred years ago, the Owens Valley had thriving agricultural communities that grew crops and raised livestock.
Then came the aqueduct, built to take the water from the Owens river to fuel the growth of Los Angeles, 250 miles to the south. The river - and the valley - were left dry, in what many claim was the greatest theft of water ever perpetrated.
But yesterday all that was due to change. A turn of a crank by the Los Angeles mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, would allow water from the Owens river to return to its original course. The ceremony brings to a close a chapter that has become an emblem for the rapacious growth that defined the rise of LA. It will also return life to the barren river and perhaps stimulate the local economy.
Name of source: WaPo
SOURCE: WaPo (12-11-06)
Every discovery about the device has raised new questions. Who built the device, and for what purpose? Why did the technology behind it disappear for the next thousand years? What does the device tell us about ancient Greek culture? And does the marvelous construction, and the precise knowledge of the movement of the sun and moon and Earth that it implies, tell us how the ancients grappled with ideas about determinism and human destiny?
"We have gear trains from the 9th century in Baghdad used for simpler displays of the solar and lunar motions relative to one another -- they use eight gears," said Fran?ois Charette, a historian of science in Germany who wrote an editorial accompanying a new study of the mechanism two weeks ago in the journal Nature. "In this case, we have more than 30 gears. To see it on a computer animation makes it mind-boggling. There is no doubt it was a technological masterpiece."
SOURCE: WaPo (12-7-06)
The leaks come from about 500,000 gallons of thick, bunker C fuel oil that remain trapped in the deteriorating hulk -- oil whose "catastrophic" release experts now think is inevitable.
Today, on the anniversary of the attack that plunged the United States into World War II, scientists at a federal research center in Gaithersburg are trying to predict when that might happen. In five years? Or 50? And to do that, they are building a model of the ship: not of plastic and glue, but of data.
The experts at the National Institute of Standards and Technology think it is the first mathematical model to simulate the deterioration of a sunken ship and could be used to predict the deterioration of hundreds of wrecks around the country.
Name of source: Ohio.com
SOURCE: Ohio.com (12-10-06)
The extensive earthen mounds and walls in southwest Ohio are unlikely a fortress, although they might have been used for social gatherings and religious ceremonies and astronomical viewings.
The site, atop a wooded bluff 235 feet above the Little Miami River in Warren County, was built 2,000 years ago by ancient Indians that archaeologists call Hopewells.
The intricate mounds stretch nearly 3 ½ miles and enclose about 100 acres atop a promontory on the east bank of the river in Washington Township.
The earthen walls are as high as 23 feet and as wide as 68 feet. The walls are divided by 67 crescent-shaped gateways. There are stone pavements in some places.
Some call Fort Ancient Ohio's Stonehenge and it is one of Ohio's top prehistoric sites.
Name of source: LAT
SOURCE: LAT (12-10-06)
A popular instructor, Meldrum has written or edited five books, written dozens of articles in academic journals, and ranged across the American West and Canada for his field research. Famed primatologist Jane Goodall wrote a blurb for his latest book, which she said "brings a much-needed level of scientific analysis" to a raging debate.
The problem is the debate: Is Bigfoot real?
Meldrum, a tenured associate professor of anatomy, is in pursuit of the legendary ape-man also known as Sasquatch.
Some of his colleagues are not amused. They liken Meldrum's research to a hunt for Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, and 20 of them signed a letter earlier this year expressing worry that Idaho State "may be perceived as a university that endorses fringe science over fundamental scientific perspectives that have withstood critical inquiry."
Name of source: Telegraph (UK)
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (12-10-06)
Three decades on, however, it has taken him nearly a year of legal battling to clear his name, after he was retrospectively branded a "communist secret agent" by Poland's Right-wing government.
In a move that nearly wrecked his reputation as a respected journalist, Mr Malcuzynski received a letter from Poland's National Remembrance Institute, a government agency, which presides over communist-era secret police files.
It informed him that there was "no doubt" he had passed on "operationally useful" information to Poland's communist-era authorities.
"Suddenly the contracts for television appearances dried up," he said.
During a subsequent court case, however, it emerged that the secret policeman had fabricated evidence about the journalist.
Yet according to critics of Poland's government, headed by the twins Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski as president and prime minister respectively, hundreds of thousands of other Poles are in a plight similar to Mr Malcuzynski's.
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (12-8-06)
Adam's family glued around 9,000 of his drawings into 57 albums and in the process hid hundreds of sketches, plans and letters on the back of the paper which he used for his designs.
Some of the hidden material has now been revealed for the first time since the early 19th century with the aid of a technique involving digital photography and computer software.
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (12-8-06)
James Beatson described life on the Western Front after finding the tattered journal of a German officer that had somehow found its way into the British trenches in 1915.
In the months before his own death on the Somme, he conducted an imaginary conversation with the author, and penned his own descriptions of the horrors of the First World War.
In one passage, Beatson, from Edinburgh, wrote: "Are you dead Heinrich? Fate has labelled you a Prussian and me British, but I would do a long pilgrimage to lay flowers on the grave that holds your body." Of the second battle of Ypres, he said: "The ground is full of dead bodies of rats... the fellows had some furious fun at night baiting the rats. There is a plague of the repulsive vermin... slow, fat, waddling monsters.
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (12-7-06)
A hundred items from the so-called Hoard of Bactrian Gold – a trove of stunning artefacts from the first century AD – are now on public display in the Guimet museum near the Eiffel tower. The delicate masterpieces include granite or turquoise encrusted necklaces, goblets, cupids, dolphins, dragons, and a thumb-sized ram figurine.
The exhibition, Afghanistan – the Refound Treasures, displays 228 objects dating from 2000 BC to the third century AD. They form part of a hoard of 21,618 items of gold, ivory and precious stone unearthed by archaeologists in 1979 from six Bactrian tombs at a site in Tillya Tepe, in the north of Afghanistan.
Name of source: NYT
SOURCE: NYT (12-10-06)
Billed as the “moon shot of anthropology,” the Genographic Project intends to collect 100,000 indigenous DNA samples. But for four months, the project has been on hold here as it scrambles to address questions raised by a group that oversees research involving Alaska natives.
At issue is whether scientists who need DNA from aboriginal populations to fashion a window on the past are underselling the risks to present-day donors. Geographic origin stories told by DNA can clash with long-held beliefs, threatening a world view some indigenous leaders see as vital to preserving their culture.
They argue that genetic ancestry information could also jeopardize land rights and other benefits that are based on the notion that their people have lived in a place since the beginning of time.
SOURCE: NYT (12-11-06)
The 1967 story in the Times was written by the late R.W. Apple and dealt a thunderous blow to the Johnson administration's claim that the war was being won.
Weyand, now 90 and living in Hawaii, agreed to reveal his identity in time for a public memorial that is to be held in Apple's honor.
Weyand was serving as commander of III Corps in the Mekong Delta when he was quoted in Apple's story. The general went on to serve as the Army Chief of Staff. He oversaw the withdrawal of US forces rom Vietnam.
William Westmoreland derided the Times's story in '67. He said none of his generals would have stated the war was unwinnable.
Excerpt:
THE article was headlined “Vietnam: The Signs of Stalemate,” and it appeared on the front page of this paper on Aug. 7, 1967. Written by R. W. Apple Jr., it was a bombshell that resonated in both Washington and Saigon, caused consternation in the United States Army and the intelligence community and gradually altered perceptions of American success or failure for the remainder of the Vietnam War.
Over nearly four decades, dozens of historians and journalists asked Johnny (as he was known) and me, because I did a similar story for CBS, to identify our source for that report, and we steadfastly declined to name him. But now, the source has come forward to release us from our pledge of confidentiality.
In 1967, when I was a CBS News correspondent in Vietnam, I met an American general at a cocktail party in Saigon. He whispered to me: “Westy just doesn’t get it. The war is unwinnable. We’ve reached a stalemate and we should find a dignified way out.” He was referring to Gen. William Westmoreland, the commander of United States forces in Vietnam.
The reception was crowded and noisy, and I asked whether I could meet with him at another time. “O.K., but no cameras,” he replied. Might I bring another reporter with me? “O.K., but one only.” I had advised CBS News in New York that I probably had an important story to report but that it would be what we used to call a standupper on camera with no film. The reaction was decidedly cool. Had Walter Cronkite or Mike Wallace been available, such a report might have led “The CBS Evening News.” On the other hand, I guessed — correctly — that once it appeared in The Times, the universal scream would be for me to match it.
So I ambled up Tu Do Street to Johnny’s office and invited him to come along. We took a helicopter ride into the Mekong Delta and then spent two hours with one of the more erudite general officers either of us had ever met in Vietnam.
The general pledged us to absolute confidentiality. Later, when Johnny and I compared notes to ensure we had understood him correctly, both of us were stunned. His article was published 24 hours later. Mine, in the era before satellites, reached CBS News in New York days later. Here, in essence, is how we quoted the general for our reports:
“ ‘I’ve destroyed a single division three times,’ a senior American general said the other day. ‘I’ve chased main-force units all over the country and the impact was zilch. It meant nothing to the people. Unless a more positive and more stirring theme than simple anti-communism can be found, the war appears likely to go on until someone gets tired and quits, which could take generations.’ ” The report enraged President Lyndon Johnson, General Westmoreland and, as I recall it, Gen. Earle Wheeler, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Johnson then initiated action to call up an additional 205,000 troops for the coming war against the North Vietnamese. But the action was negated by the misleading perception many of us had that the Communists achieved a major victory in the Tet offensive, which began on Jan. 30, 1968....
SOURCE: NYT (12-10-06)
Gen. Augusto Pinochet in 1975, during his rule.
Dr. Juan Ignacio Vergara, head of the medical team that had been treating him, said his condition degenerated sharply a week after he underwent an angioplasty after an acute heart attack.
General Pinochet seized power on Sept. 11, 1973, in a bloody military coup that toppled the Marxist government of President Salvador Allende. He then led the country into an era of robust economic growth. But during his rule, more than 3,200 people were executed or disappeared, and scores of thousands more were detained and tortured or exiled.
SOURCE: NYT (12-9-06)
SOURCE: NYT (12-9-06)
The documentary, on China’s main national network, uses the word rise constantly, including its title, “Rise of the Great Powers.” It endorses the idea that China should study the experiences of nations and empires it once condemned as aggressors bent on exploitation.
“Our China, the Chinese people, the Chinese race has become revitalized and is again stepping onto the world stage,” Qian Chengdan, a professor at Beijing University and the intellectual father of the television series, said in an online dialogue about the documentary on Sina.com, a leading Web site.
“It is extremely important for today’s China to be able to draw some lessons from the experiences of others,” he said.
The series, which took three years to make, emanated from a Politburo study session in 2003. It is not a jingoistic call to arms. It mentions China only in passing, and it never explicitly addresses the reality that China has already become a big power.
Yet its version of history, which partly tracks the work done by Paul Kennedy in his 1980s bestseller, “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,” differs markedly from that of the textbooks still in use in many schools.
Its stentorian narrator and epic soundtrack present the emergence of the nine countries, from Portugal in the 15th century to the United States in the 20th, and cites numerous achievements worthy of emulation: Spain had a risk-taking queen; Britain’s nimble navy secured vital commodities overseas; the United States regulated markets and fought for national unity.
The documentary also emphasizes historical themes that coincide with policies Chinese leaders promote at home. Social stability, industrial investment, peaceful foreign relations and national unity are presented as more vital than, say, military strength, political liberalization or the rule of law.
In the 90 minutes devoted to examining the rise of the United States, Lincoln is accorded a prominent part for his efforts to “preserve national unity” during the Civil War. China has made reunification with Taiwan a top national priority. Franklin D. Roosevelt wins praise for creating a bigger role for the government in managing the market economy but gets less attention for his wartime leadership.
Government officials minimize the importance of the series. He Yafei, an assistant foreign minister, said in an interview that he had watched only “one or two episodes.” He said the documentary should not signal changes in China’s thinking about projecting power, saying that colonialism and exploitation “would go nowhere in today’s world.”...
SOURCE: NYT (12-9-06)
Her death was announced yesterday by the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, where she was a senior fellow. The cause was congestive heart failure, said her personal assistant, Tammy Jagyur.
Ms. Kirkpatrick was the first American woman to serve as United Nations ambassador. She was the only woman, and the only Democrat, in President Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council. No woman had ever been so close to the center of presidential power without actually residing in the White House.
“When she put her feet under the desk of the Oval Office, the president listened,” said William P. Clark Jr., Mr. Reagan’s national security adviser during 1982 and 1983. “And he usually agreed with her.”
SOURCE: NYT (12-8-06)
The Latin American School of Medical Sciences, on a sprawling former naval base on the outskirts of this capital, teaches its students medicine Cuban style. That means poking at cadavers, peering into aging microscopes and discussing the revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power 48 years ago.
Cuban-trained doctors must be able not only to diagnose an ulcer and treat hypertension but also to expound on the principles put forward by “el comandante.”
It was President Castro himself who in the late 1990s came up with the idea for this place, which gives potential doctors from throughout the Americas and Africa not just the A B C’s of medicine but also the basic philosophy behind offering good health care to the struggling masses.
SOURCE: NYT (12-6-06)
It was in March 2001, when the Taliban and their sponsors in Al Qaeda were at the zenith of their power in Afghanistan, that militiamen, acting on an edict to take down the “gods of the infidels,” laid explosives at the base and the shoulders of the two Buddhas and blew them to pieces. To the outraged outside world, the act encapsulated the horrors of the Islamic fundamentalist government. Even Genghis Khan, who laid waste to this valley’s towns and population in the 13th century, had left the Buddhas standing.
Five years after the Taliban were ousted from power, Bamiyan’s Buddhist relics are once again the focus of debate: Is it possible to restore the great Buddhas? And, if so, can the extraordinary investment that would be required be justified in a country crippled by poverty and a continued Taliban insurgency in the south and that is, after all, overwhelmingly Muslim?
SOURCE: NYT (12-6-06)
Mr. Bloomberg was regarding a ghostly head floating at the edge of a 154-year-old portrait of Hamilton Fish by Thomas Hicks that hangs outside the mayoral bullpen at City Hall. Though the head is transparent enough to be an apparition, it probably is just a bust.
The point is, you can’t tell.
Details, color and life in the painting have been hidden by pollutants, dirt, varnishes and the smoke of smoke-filled rooms. And that is true of much of City Hall’s historical portrait collection, 108 paintings from the late 18th century through the 20th, almost unrivaled as an ensemble, with several masterpieces.
Today, the mayor will announce a fund-raising campaign to conserve the portraits. The restoration work itself, by Kenneth S. Moser, has begun, and six portraits have already been refurbished. The announcement is to highlight the fact that the CIT Group, a financial company, and its chairman and chief executive, Jeffrey M. Peek, will pay the cost of conserving five paintings.
SOURCE: NYT (12-6-06)
Thursday, the 65th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, is no different.
Veterans will lead a solemn tribute at the National Museum of the Pacific War, where a middle school choir will sing the National Anthem, a Pearl Harbor survivor will address the crowd and a 21-gun salute will echo through downtown before taps is sounded.
But there's a special twist to this year's observance.
Thursday is the long-scheduled competitive sale of $9 million in Texas Historical Commission bonds to expand the museum, the George Bush Gallery and Nimitz Steamboat Hotel so the tragedy of Pearl Harbor and the ensuing Pacific battles won't be forgotten.
The bond sale falling on Pearl Harbor Day is "pure coincidence," said Texas Public Finance Authority Director Kim Edwards. The authority usually convenes the first Thursday of the month, she told the Houston Chronicle.
Name of source: Observer (UK)
SOURCE: Observer (UK) (12-10-06)
Dominic Grieve, the shadow Attorney General, told The Observer that people who slapped others or scuffled with youths while trying to stop crimes being committed should not be prosecuted. His words mark a clear break with David Cameron's 'hug a hoodie' rhetoric. Asked about family breakdowns, he said the strict Victorian approach to family life had, in some ways, been successful, adding that parents must be responsible for their children and communities.
'You can argue that our Victorian forebears succeeded in achieving something very unusual between the 1850s and 1900 in changing public attitudes by - dare one use the word - instilling moral codes. I don't want to suggest this was an ideal society, but it was one where a sense of moral values and of the responsibility people owed to each other did seem to be pervasive. There was a much greater sense of shame in respect of transgressions.'
Name of source: AP
SOURCE: AP (12-8-06)
Nearly four decades after the Summer of Love, residents and merchants frustrated with what they regard as blight are turning to the city for help or taking revitalization into their own hands.
But other residents of the Tenderloin district and Haight-Ashbury contend a crackdown would rob their neighborhoods of their identity and violate everything San Francisco stands for.
Joey Cain, a board member of the Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood Council, complained that those who would drive the vagrants from the neighborhood are turning their backs on the Haight's "historic obligation" to shelter the downtrodden.
This is, after all, the city that proved so appealing to the Beats, the hippies and practically every other brand of noncomformist.
Haight-Ashbury was the very capital of the Summer of Love in 1967, when young people flocked for the music, sexual freedom and drug culture. They are still coming, panhandling on corners and sleeping under the trees in nearby Golden Gate Park.
SOURCE: AP (12-8-06)
A total of 488 communities have been erased from the latest version of Georgia's official map, victims of too few people and too many letters of type.
Georgia's Department of Transportation, which drew the new map, said that the goal was to make it clearer and less cluttered and that many of the dropped communities were mere "placeholders," generally with fewer than 2,500 people. Some are unincorporated and so small they are not even recognized by the Census Bureau.
The state began handing out the new map at rest stops and welcome centers over the summer.
Gone are such places as Dewy Rose, Hemp, Experiment, Retreat, Wooster, Sharp Top and Chattoogaville, a spot in far northwestern Georgia that consists of little more than a two-truck volunteer fire department, a few farmhouses and a country store where locals fill up their gas tanks.
"We're not under obligation to show every single community," department spokeswoman Karlene Barron said. "While we want to, there's a balancing act. And the map was getting illegible."
SOURCE: AP (12-11-06)
While Pinochet's relatives mourned his death Sunday from heart failure at age 91, his many opponents celebrated with champagne and lamented that he escaped justice for the torture and killings that marked his 17 years in power after a bloody 1973 coup.
Police surrounded key buildings and intersections Monday to prevent more of the violent protests that spread past midnight to several working class districts.
Deputy Interior Minister Felipe said 43 police officers were injured and 99 demonstrators were arrested in the clashes, which were blamed on a small contingent of the thousands of demonstrators who jammed streets to denounce Pinochet's legacy.
SOURCE: AP (12-11-06)
At a news conference with the Greek culture minister, museum director Michael Brand said they had"reached an agreement in principle on the return of two objects."
SOURCE: AP (12-11-06)
The conference,"Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision," was initiated by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has described the Holocaust as a"myth" and called for Israel to be wiped off the map. Even before it opened, the gathering was condemned by Germany, the United States and Israel.
The organizers, the Foreign Ministry's Institute for Political and International Studies, say the two-day conference has drawn 67 foreign researchers from 30 countries.
In his opening speech, the institute's chief, Rasoul Mousavi, said the conference provided an opportunity to discuss"questions" about the Holocaust away from Western taboos and the restrictions imposed on scholars in Europe.
In Germany, Austria and France, it is illegal to deny the Holocaust.
SOURCE: AP (11-10-06)
The injury derailed Hall's dream of becoming a Foreign Service officer because the State Department wouldn't hire amputees, but it didn't prevent her from becoming one of the most celebrated spies of World War II.
On Tuesday, the French and British ambassadors plan to honor Hall, who died in 1982 at age 78, at a ceremony at the home of French Ambassador Jean-David Levitte in Washington.
SOURCE: AP (12-8-06)
Asked how he wants history to remember him, he said simply, "Better than the local press."
With a couple of dozen troops from each military service and a few civilian Pentagon employees seated behind him on stage in the Pentagon's main auditorium, Mr. Rumsfeld spoke to an audience of several hundred people. With a broad grin, he strode into the room to a cascade of applause and a few approving yelps.
"I suspect this will be among my last public remarks as secretary of defense," he said. His last full day will be Dec. 17.
SOURCE: AP (12-6-06)
The new law, adopted more than 17 years after the collapse of the communist regime, requires the publication of all files identifying public figures -- politicians, senior public officials, magistrates, clergymen and journalists -- as former communist secret agents.
Researchers believe that the secret files could shed light on the 1981 assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II and the murder in London of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov, who was working for the British Broadcasting Corp.'s Bulgarian Service.
The legislation includes no sanctions for the former agents, such as stripping them of public office, but only makes their past public.
SOURCE: AP (12-7-06)
The Japanese veteran gripped Rauschkolb's arm with his left hand and briefly hesitated, as if he was searching for the right words. Then he said, "I'm sorry."
On Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese Imperial Navy navigator Maeda guided his Kate bomber to Pearl Harbor and fired a torpedo that helped sink the USS West Virginia.
Rauschkolb, a Navy signalman, stood on the West Virginia's port side as a series of Japanese planes pummeled the battleship with torpedoes and bombs. The West Virginia lost 106 men in the assault.
"He may have been shooting at me," Rauschkolb said as he shook Maeda's hand.
Name of source: IHT
SOURCE: IHT (12-8-06)
Evelyn Davis, 68, one of Hardy's eight children, said her father died Thursday at a nursing home in Aberdeen. He would have been 114 on Jan. 6.
"He had been doing great. He didn't suffer and he wasn't sick — he died of old age," said Davis, of Aberdeen. "He knew everybody and those he knew, he always knew them when they came in to visit."
Robert Young, senior consultant for gerontology for Guinness World Records, said research by his group, National Public Radio and others had been unable to locate any other surviving black WWI veterans. He said only about 10 to 12 American veterans of that war remain.
Name of source: Breitbart
SOURCE: Breitbart (12-11-06)
The authenticity of the tomb of Saint Paul, who was beheaded in 67 A.D. in Rome,"is of no doubt", according to Italian Cardinal Andrea Cordero Lanza di Montezemolo, archpriest of the basilica.
SOURCE: Breitbart (12-11-06)
The price tag is a record for a work by Churchill, who was a keen artist.
He gave it to United States General George Marshall, the wartime chief of staff, as a symbol of Anglo-US solidarity in 1953.
SOURCE: Breitbart (12-8-06)
Now 15 years later, no celebration or demonstration was held in Moscow."What's there to celebrate on this anniversary?" asked Natalia Kokoreva, a 60-year-old retiree in the Russian capital.
"With the fall of the USSR, my life went downhill," said Evgueni, 49, a Moscow street sweeper."Before, I lived well, I could go on vacation, I went to the mountains. Now I can't even go visit my brother in Tver," a city about 250 kilometers (155 miles) north of Moscow.
Name of source: Reuters
SOURCE: Reuters (12-11-06)
Nobody knows who this man was: all they know is that he wore dark gray trousers, a pale shirt, probably lace-up shoes and pale brown socks, which remained surprisingly intact during years buried in the damp earth.
It's not much to go on.
"How many men were wearing gray trousers back then?" a researcher asked as he picked up a small piece of linen and examined it."About two-thirds of the population."
The nameless man, and scores of others like him who disappeared decades ago, offer a poignant reminder of the disputes keeping Turkish and Greek communities apart on this east Mediterranean island.
Cyprus has been divided since a Turkish invasion in 1974 which followed a brief coup by Greek Cypriot extremists seeking union with Greece.
SOURCE: Reuters (12-6-06)
Christie's auctioneers said the bulbs disappeared after the tussle over U.S. patent number 223,898, but were discovered by chance in 2002 in the attic of a house in the United States in their original wooden case complete with the original key.
According to Web sites devoted to the U.S. inventor and businessman, the 1890 case between Edison Electric Light Company and United States Electric Light Company was one of the world's most important technology infringement cases.
SOURCE: Reuters (12-7-06)
A 130-strong team of drillers, hardened frontiersmen who live in barracks set in sparse fir forests, have so far drilled 12 exploration wells.
They are helping fulfill President Vladimir Putin's strategy to wean Russia of its dependence European markets. Vankor's oil will go east, via a new pipeline being built to China and the Pacific.
Set in the frozen tundra, the Vankor field has recoverable reserves of 2.5 billion barrels, enough to supply booming Asian markets for decades to come.
Name of source: Toronto Star
SOURCE: Toronto Star (12-11-06)
Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow in defence policy at the Council on Foreign Relations concedes there are similarities. But he cautions against taking them too far. Vietnam was "a people's war," he notes, a class-based insurgency against a ruling regime. Iraq, by comparison, is a "communal civil war," a battle in which sectarian factions are fighting for survival.
And there will not be a repeat of the Fall of Saigon in Baghdad, he says. There are no mechanized divisions advancing on the city.
But there will be an "Iraq Syndrome," he stresses — just as there was a "Vietnam Syndrome" that followed the Vietnam War, a cooling period during which Americans will be loath to endorse the kind of "forceful foreign policy" that leads to expensive and bloody military adventures.
Prof. John Mueller of Ohio State University agrees. He says the syndrome will take hold "big time." In fact, it's already taking hold.
"The attitude to North Korea has mellowed, even when they exploded a weapon," he notes. "As for Iran, the idea of (America) doing anything militarily seems to be declining."
At the Boston conference this year, the similarities between the Iraq and Vietnam wars — and the lessons from the latter — were on everyone's mind.
Many of the key historical figures attended: Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, Walter Cronkite, Kennedy confidante Ted Sorenson, LBJ's former aide Jack Valenti and the war's most famous reporter, David Halberstam.
Halberstam, whose pinpoint-accurate dispatches from the front as a 28-year-old reporter for The New York Times infuriated the Kennedy White House, vigorously warned of what he called, "The Lying Machine."
"Washington had created — and it is something that we have to deal with any time we talk about Vietnam ... a great lying machine.
"And what is a lying machine?" said Halberstam, tall and muscular at 72. "A lying machine exists on a major issue when an administration has a policy that does not, for historic reasons, work out, but where the administration believes it is important to continue it — for a variety of domestic political reasons — and to pretend that it works. So it forces its employees at the top to be disingenuous and punishes those government employees who dare to tell the truth ...."
Critics of the Iraq war have long claimed the Bush administration has been nothing if not disingenuous and that the war itself was launched on a lie: that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
Name of source: Radio Free Europe
SOURCE: Radio Free Europe (12-11-06)
Iranian officials' assault on one of the most thoroughly documented campaigns of mass murder in history appears aimed at undermining the legitimacy of Israel and focusing attention on the Palestinian exodus.
Mottaki today challenged claimants that the Holocaust occurred to explain "why Palestinians should be made to pay for the crimes of the Nazis."
Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev noted that such an approach flies in the face of international awareness and sensitivity to the tragedy.
"Unfortunately, the regime in Tehran has decided to give official sanction, official endorsement, to Holocaust denial," Regev said. "It was only last year that the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling for an international day of remembrance and commemoration to the victims of the Holocaust and that resolution specifically condemned Holocaust denial."
The forum is organized by the Foreign Ministry's Institute for Political and International Studies (IPIS), which calls it a scientific forum to assess the magnitude of the Holocaust.
The conference was initiated by Iran's president, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, who has called the Holocaust "a myth."
Iran does not recognize the state of Israel, and Ahmadinejad has suggested that the Holocaust was invented to justify Israel's existence in the Middle East. He has also called for Israel to be "wiped from the map."
Municipal and national officials in Iran indirectly sponsored a recent cartoon contest on the Holocaust that was also condemned by many in the international community.
Reports claim that the participants will include a French professor who denies the existence of the gas chambers, Robert Faurisson; Austrian Holocaust revisionist Frederick Toeben; and a white supremacist and former Klu Klux Klan leader who once represented the southern U.S. state of Louisiana, David Duke.
Iranian media report that about 60 researchers from 30 countries will deliver speeches with titles like "Holocaust, Figures, Statistics, And Realities," "Historical Documents On The Holocaust," and "Nazism, Holocaust, And The Zionists."
Name of source: LA Times
SOURCE: LA Times (12-6-06)
Long ago shuttered, the original Allensworth now is a state historic park, cherished by families and church groups who see it as a hardscrabble monument to California's black history.
But they fear that despite the state's protection, the settlement named after the charismatic military man is in peril. A 12,000-cow dairy operation is proposed for property just across the tracks, angering park supporters who say foul odors and flies will plague the remote spot and dishonor a noble experiment in self-determination.
"If it weren't a black historic site, it wouldn't have to endure these kinds of attacks," said Victor Carter, a 55-year-old African American accountant from Bakersfield who noted that previous proposals had been fended off — for a turkey farm and a dump for restaurant grease.
The owner of the 2,000 acres in the vast rolling plain of the San Joaquin Valley, Sam Etchegaray, is a Basque farmer who immigrated to the United States from France in 1963. He and his sons have said in local hearings that, far from dishonoring the legacy of Allensworth, the dairy operation would create 60 jobs and give a $20-million boost to the local economy, ushering impoverished minorities into the middle class.
On Tuesday, before a crowd of more than 100 mostly African American advocates who trooped in from as far as Los Angeles and the Bay Area, Tulare County supervisors voted to put off a decision for at least two weeks to research several technical issues that had been raised by an attorney for a San Francisco-based public-interest law firm.
They made no statement on whether they supported a proposal by state parks officials — also aired Tuesday — to negotiate with Etchegaray for his development rights.
In the end, though, some Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park supporters in the crowd were encouraged by supervisors' reluctance to vote on the spot for yet another dairy operation in a job-hungry, rural area where cows slightly outnumber residents and where more milk is produced than in any other U.S. county.
"I'm more hopeful than when I came through that door this morning," said Beverly Blake, who drove about 200 miles from Los Angeles.
In the years just after its founding, Allensworth drew more than 300 families, fervent believers in self-reliance who built a hotel, a general store, a school, a church, and a society as formal as any of the day's urban, middle-class areas. Adults were referred to as Mr., Mrs. or Miss. Some of the colonel's colleagues kept their military titles, even down to the relatively humdrum "Sergeant."
Stories still are told about Mrs. Josephine Hackett, an Allensworth mother who would not permit her daughter to go out in public wearing unironed hair ribbons.
Allensworth, who as a slave was sold in retaliation for learning to read, sneaked into a Union encampment during the Civil War and ended up retiring from the Army with the highest rank ever earned by a black man at that point. Along the way, he became a Baptist minister, a lecturer and a visionary who promised to name a planned man-made lake in his new town after his friend, Booker T. Washington.
The lake never came to pass. Allensworth died in an accident in 1914. His town hit hard times when the railroad depot was moved to nearby Alpaugh — a decision some saw as a racist slap in the face but others attributed to Allensworth's increasingly dire water shortages. His plan for a California version of Alabama's Tuskegee Institute also failed to catch on, either in the Legislature or in the black community.
"This town wasn't completely embraced by the African American community at the time," said Ken Kramasz, the park ranger who oversees Allensworth. "A lot of people didn't want to open the door to more segregation."
In an area that had been alfalfa fields, only three of the town's original buildings remain. Nineteen have been reconstructed, with architects drawing from plans and photographs of the day.
With white patches of alkali soil showing through the scrub outside, the colonel's prefabricated frame house reflects his refined sensibilities. A portrait of the young Ludwig van Beethoven hangs near the piano in the parlor, and the mahogany-trimmed walls are painted forest green.
"There was a glee club and a debate society and the first free-circulation library in Tulare County," Kramasz said. "There was quite a cultured society here."
Today, visitors trickle in, totaling 1,000 or more during four or five celebrations that are held annually.
"Even with that size crowd, I've never seen so much as a beer can thrown on the ground," Kramasz said. "It's kind of a spiritual place." Charles Allen, a 74-year-old retired postal worker, feels that as strongly as anyone. A frequent visitor to the park, he moved from Los Angeles to the present-day Allensworth, an unincorporated, impoverished community next to the park.
Name of source: Livescience.com
SOURCE: Livescience.com (12-7-06)
Two separate pits, one containing the remains of two infants and the other of a single baby, were discovered at the same Stone Age camp of Krems-Wachtberg in Lower Austria. Both graves were decorated with beads and covered in red ochre, a pigment commonly used by prehistoric peoples as a grave offering when they buried adults.
Using radiocarbon dating, archaeologists from the Prehistoric Commission of the Austrian Academy of Sciences put the remains at about 27,000 years old.
"Nothing comparable to these burials of such young Upper Paleolithic individuals has been found before," study co-author Christine Neugebauer-Maresch wrote in a recent edition of the journal Nature.
The discovery could challenge the long-held belief that—since child burials seem to be so rare—infants in this period were treated with a degree of indifference, the researchers said.
Name of source: http://www.ynetnews.com
SOURCE: http://www.ynetnews.com (12-6-06)
The most popular t-shirt offered on the online shopping site is a shirt with the inscription "My grandparents went to Auschwitz and all I got was this lousy t-shirt" printed on the front.
Also printed on the shirt is the gruesome inscription "Arbeit Macht Frei", which was the inscription that met deportees at the gates of the German concentration camps.
Following recent complaints by Holocaust survivors and their families offended by the inscriptions on the T-shirts, the Anti-Defamation League contacted the proprietors of the site asking them to remove the dubious merchandise.
Name of source: NBC News
SOURCE: NBC News (12-7-06)
That's because Levealle was too busy talking and giving interviews about another infamous event in American history.
For Pearl Harbor survivors, the 65th anniversary of the attack represents a chance to reflect on the defining moment of their lives.
For Leavelle, Pearl Harbor would be only the first of two Sundays that would change his life, and the course of American history....
Leavelle left the Navy shortly after Pearl Harbor and headed for Dallas -- and his second date with destiny.
November 22, 1963: Lee Harvey Oswald assassinates President John F. Kennedy, then guns down Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit less than an hour later.
Homicide detective Jim Leavelle is the first to interrogate the suspect.
“Of course he denied any connection to it whatsoever,” recalls Leavelle.
Within a few hours, detectives tie Oswald to the JFK assassination. The ensuing media frenzy forces police to move Oswald out of police headquarters on Sunday, Nov. 24
“I said, ‘Lee, if anybody shoots at you, I hope they're as good a shot as you are,’” remembers Leavelle. “He kind of smiled and said, ‘Nobody’s going to shoot at me.’”
Wearing a light suit and hat, Leavelle is handcuffed to Oswald when Jack Ruby fires his fatal shot on live television. A photographer captures the moment in a Pulitzer prize-winning picture that makes Leavelle famous around the world.
Name of source: Yahoo
SOURCE: Yahoo (12-7-06)
"Little Foot," a fossil with both ape-like and human features, was found in the 1990s thanks to remarkable luck and diligent work.
It was first dated to between 3.0 and 3.5 million years old, and later to more than 4.1 million years.
Those dates generated huge excitement.
For one thing, they threw up a South African contemporary to "Lucy," the famous Australopithecus afarensis fossil found in Ethiopia's Awash Valley in 1974 and, until then, chief contender for the title of ancestor of mankind.
But a paper published in the US journal Science on Thursday says Little Foot's age is likely to be around 2.2 million years. If so, rather than being man's direct ancestor, Little Foot is more likely to have been a distant cousin.
Name of source: http://starbulletin.com
SOURCE: http://starbulletin.com (12-7-06)
"I was standing in front of my locker changing clothes," the 86-year-old said, "when the bombs started falling."
Had Cook taken a bit longer in the shower, he would have been killed along with 1,177 of his Arizona shipmates. The 1,760-pound armor piercing ordnance that sank the Arizona ignited its forward ammunition magazine near the showers.
From the mundane to the most important details, Pearl Harbor survivors retain vivid images of that day 65 years ago, when Japanese airplanes dotted the sky above Oahu, their bombs blowing up massive ships out of existence.
And their memories show that at least among the rank and file, everyone was expecting a normal day.
"I was there in front of my locker in my white shorts and I grabbed my wallet out of locker," Cook said yesterday. "I had $60 in it that I had won in a crap game the night before."
Name of source: Salt Lake Tribune
SOURCE: Salt Lake Tribune (12-7-06)
Toward the end of the occupation of his nation, Japanese Emperor Hirohito announced he would formally apologize to U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur for Japan's actions during World War II - including the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor.
Lennox Tierney was there, on the fifth floor of the Dai-Ichi Insurance Building in Tokyo, where MacArthur held court from 1945 to 1949, on the day Hirohito arrived. Now 93 years old, Tierney fears a brutishness he saw in MacArthur that day is being repeated by Americans involved in today's wars.
But these days, he says, the country can ill-afford such behavior.
In the years that followed the war, MacArthur came to be thought of as an expert in Japanese culture, but that's not what Tierney says he saw in the eminent general.
"He was culturally stupid," says Tierney, Japan's commissioner for arts and monuments during the occupation, now a semiretired professor and museum curator living in Holladay.
"Apology is a very important thing in Japan," said Tierney. "With us, we don't apologize unless we get caught with our hand in the cookie jar, but for the Japanese, there is a very strong sense of what an apology means."
But when the emperor arrived at his office, MacArthur refused to admit him or acknowledge him, Tierney said.
Name of source: Times Online (UK)
SOURCE: Times Online (UK) (12-7-06)
It is a macabre dilemma. Should one give new life to a Nazi camp that has become synonymous with evil? Or should one let the camp crumble gently? Should Auschwitz become an overgrown site for mourners or a tourist destination? The International Auschwitz Council meeting this week decided that it was possible to strike a balance. Auschwitz remains a museum as well as a crime scene and, as such, should be more accessible to those wanting to learn about the Holocaust.
“It is the oldest exhibition about the shoah [Holocaust] in the world,” Mr Cywinski said. “We really must change.” ...
Name of source: Independent (UK)
SOURCE: Independent (UK) (12-7-06)
Tate galleries have launched a campaign to buy The Blue Rigi, a late-period watercolour by the great British artist JMW Turner. The work was sold at auction in June to an anonymous bidder who paid £5.8m - three times the expected price. The new owner was required under British laws to apply for an export licence to remove the work from UK.
The body responsible for considering the application, the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest, awarded the painting a starred rating - the highest level of protection - and recommended the export be deferred.
The Culture Minister, David Lammy, responded by imposing a temporary export ban on the painting, giving organisations until March 2007 to match the price paid at auction in the summer to keep it in the UK. Unfortunately, Tate has only £2m to put towards the purchase, and is looking to the publicly funded National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund, an independent charity, to make up the difference.
