This page features brief excerpts of stories published by the mainstream
media and, less frequently, blogs, alternative media, and even obviously
biased sources. The excerpts are taken directly from the websites cited in
each source note. Quotation marks are not used.
Source: The Jerusalem Post (via OpEdNews)
November 25, 2009
A British diplomat has criticized the appointment of two leading Jewish academics to the UK's Iraq Inquiry panel, stating it may upset the balance of the inquiry.
Sir Oliver Miles, a former British ambassador to Libya, told The Independent newspaper this week that the appointment of Sir Martin Gilbert, the renowned Holocaust historian and Winston Churchill biographer, and Sir Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies and vice-principal of King's College London, would be seen as &
Source: National Parks Traveler
November 27, 2009
In 2010, the Park Service will accept grant applications for the second year under the Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program. Earlier this year, NPS gave out the program’s first grants – nearly $1 million in 2-for-1 matching funds to 19 projects in a dozen states. The money can be used to help study, acquire, preserve and protect dozens of locations where more than 110,000 men, women and children, most of them American citizens of Japanese ancestry, were detained and forcibly relocat
Source: BBC
November 27, 2009
John Demjanjuk is due to stand trial in Germany accused of helping to murder more than 27,000 Jews at the Nazi death camp of Sobibor in occupied Poland. The BBC's Steve Rosenberg returns to the site of the camp with one man who survived its horrors.
In the Jewish cemetery in the town of Izbica, 84-year-old Philip Bialowitz shows me a battered gravestone among a tangle of bushes.
“ In Sobibor life was hell. But we took revenge. We escaped to tell the world what had happe
Source: Time
November 27, 2009
On a cold February night in 1951, South Korean troops moved swiftly to take a communist guerrilla stronghold on Bulgap Mountain, at a county called Hampyeong in the Korean peninsula's southwest corner. By the time they scaled the ridge, the rebels had fled. That's when the bloodshed began. Suspecting the villagers in the area had helped the enemy, the soldiers made them kneel in a trench, then shoved sharpened bamboo sticks down their throats and shot them.
Nearly 60 years later, ex
Source: New York Daily News
November 27, 2009
TEHRAN, Iran - Iranian authorities have confiscated Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi's medal, the human rights lawyer said Thursday, in a sign of the increasingly drastic steps Tehran is taking against any dissent.
In Norway, where the peace prize is awarded, the government said the confiscation of the gold medal was a shocking first in the history of the 108-year-old prize.
Ebadi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her efforts in promoting democracy. She has long fa
Source: NYT
November 26, 2009
CINCINNATI — For more than 100 years, Gov. William Allen and President James A. Garfield have represented Ohio in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the United States Capitol in Washington.
But Mr. Allen, it seems, held beliefs about race that are now embarrassing.
“He wasn’t pro-slavery, but he was not pro-civil rights,” said Tom Reider, research archivist for the Ohio Historical Society. “He did not favor extending suffrage to African-American males through the
Source: Google News
November 26, 2009
WASHINGTON — Instead of rushing to stores the day after Thanksgiving, organizers of an oral history project are urging people to join the National Day of Listening.
The event began last year on the Friday after Thanksgiving. The New York-based StoryCorps project led thousands in interviewing their friends and loved ones about their lives and recording the conversations with home equipment.
The interviews can be uploaded to StoryCorps' Web site. Some will be broadcast on
Source: WSJ
November 27, 2009
WASHINGTON -- When five defendants are brought before a New York federal judge to face charges for the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the first question may be whether some of them are competent to stand trial at all.
Military lawyers for Ramzi Binalshibh, an accused organizer of the 9/11 plot, and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, the conspiracy's alleged paymaster, say their clients have mental disorders that make them unfit for trial, likely caused or exacerbated by years of harsh confineme
Source: Times (UK)
November 26, 2009
Making amends for the sins of previous generations is now ubiquitous. Kevin Rudd, the Australian Prime Minister, apologised ten days ago for the abuse of children who were sent to Australia between 1930 and 1967. Tony Blair made an equally profound gesture in 2006, in recognition of Britain’s role in the African slave trade, and it is 39 years since Willy Brandt, the Chancellor of West Germany, fell to his knees in Warsaw and declared Germany to be sorry for the Holocaust. Yet, despite all the h
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 26, 2009
Authorities enjoyed a cosy relationship with the Church and did not enforce the law as four archbishops, obsessed with secrecy and avoiding scandal, protected abusers and reputations at all costs, the report said..
Hundreds of crimes against children from the 1960s to the 1990s were not reported while police treated clergy as though they were above the law.
In a three-year inquiry, the Commission to Inquire into the Dublin Archdiocese uncovered a sickening tactic of ''d
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 27, 2009
The Queen demonstrated her gardening skills as she planted a palm tree in the grounds of Government House on the latest stage of her visit to Bermuda.
With shovel in hand the Queen, who was wearing a paisley turquoise skirt and jacket and matching hat, patted down the earth around the sapling, while officials from the building in Hamilton looked on.
The Queen first visited Bermuda in 1953, just five months after her coronation.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 27, 2009
Former Khmer Rouge prison chief Duch asked Cambodia's UN-backed war crimes court on Friday to acquit and release him on the final day of arguments in his trial.
Following a query by shocked judges, Duch's Cambodian lawyer Kar Savuth confirmed that Duch was asking to be acquitted on the grounds that he was not a senior member of the Khmer Rouge hierarchy.
International prosecutors earlier this week asked judges to impose a jail sentence of 40 years on Duch - a former m
Source: AP
November 27, 2009
A man accused of murdering Dutch civilians as a member of a Waffen SS hit squad said at his trial Friday that he was proud about being chosen as a volunteer to fight for the Nazis.
Heinrich Boere, 88, made his first comments to the Aachen state court since his trial opened at the end of October. As part of that SS unit, he is charged with killing a bicycle-shop owner, a pharmacist and another civilian. He faces a possible sentence of life in prison if convicted.
Boere s
Source: CNN
November 27, 2009
A new group wants former Vice President Dick Cheney back in the White House.
The organization - "Draft Dick Cheney 2012" - launched on Friday, and unveiled their new Web site. Their aim: To convince the former vice president to seek the Republican presidential nomination in the next race for the White House. But there may be a major roadblock to the group's pitch - Cheney himself.
The former vice president has been a frequent outspoken critic of the Obama admi
Source: NYT
November 25, 2009
On that supercharged day in 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Ala., she rode her way into history books, credited with helping to ignite the civil rights movement.
But there was another woman, named Claudette Colvin, who refused to be treated like a substandard citizen on one of those Montgomery buses — and she did it nine months before Mrs. Parks. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made his political debut fighting her arrest
Source: NYT
November 25, 2009
ALEXANDRIA, Egypt — It is not that Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution are unknown here. But even among those who profess to know something about the subject, the common understanding is that Darwin said man came from monkeys.
Darwin, of course, did not say man came from monkeys. He said the two share a common ancestor. But to discuss Darwin anywhere is not just to explore the origin of man. It is inevitably to engage in a debate between religion and science. That is why, 150
Source: BBC
November 26, 2009
A throne built to a design used by the ancient Picts has gone on display at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.
The seat was created by master furniture maker Adrian McCurdy who drew inspiration from stone carvings.
The Picts dominated Scotland north of the Firth of Clyde from the 4th to the 9th centuries AD.
Their symbol stones continue to intrigue historians.
The throne is part of a wider project investigating Scotland's early hi
Source: BBC
November 26, 2009
Jesus Christ could have come to Britain to further his education, according to a Scottish academic.
Church of Scotland minister Dr Gordon Strachan makes the claim in a new film entitled And Did Those Feet.
The film examines the story of Jesus' supposed visit, which survives in the popular hymn Jerusalem.
Dr Strachan believes it is "plausible" Jesus came to England for his studies, as it was the forefront of learning 2,000 years ago.
Source: BBC
November 26, 2009
A statue of a politician considered to be one of the main instigators of the man-made famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s, has been demolished.
The authorities tore down the statue of the Communist leader of Ukraine when it was part of the former Soviet Union, Hryhoriy Petrovsky.
It as carried out just days before Ukraine commemorates the victims of the famine, known as the Holodomor, or genocide.
President Viktor Yushchenko issue
Source: National Parks Traveler
November 26, 2009
At Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, the Park Service is partnering with the First Colony Foundation to shed light on a mystery that still fascinates us after more than four centuries: What happened to the lost Roanoke Colony? Archeologists working at the settlement site haven’t answered that question yet, but artifacts they’ve dug up tell us interesting things about life on Roanoke Island in the late 1580s.
The first English attempt to create a permanent settlement in the New Wo
