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 Root (edited by Henry Louis Gates)
April 6, 2009
One hundred years ago today, a black man was the first to reach the
North Pole, but it took a while for Matthew Henson to get the credit
for that feat.
“I was in the lead that had overshot the mark a couple of miles,”
Matthew Henson told a reporter in March 1955, relating the moment
when, 46 years earlier, he knew he had conquered the world. “We went
back then, and I could see that my footprints were the first at the
spot.”
“The spot” was the geographic North Pole, the litera
Source: Marc A. Thiessen at the WaPo. The writer, a spokesman for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1995 to 2001, is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. He served in senior positions in the Pentagon and the White House from 2001 to 2009.
April 6, 2009
The White House announced this weekend that President Obama would soon lift restrictions on family travel and remittances to Cuba. A bipartisan group of 20 senators has gone further, introducing legislation to repeal the nearly half-century-old ban on travel to Cuba -- a first step toward lifting the U.S. embargo on the communist island. Before proceeding, lawmakers ought to consider the words of Ricardo Alarcón -- a top official in the Castro regime and longtime leader of Cuba's National Assemb
Source: At the website of thecuttingedgenews.com: Michael Zamczyk, who joined IBM in 1974 in the publishing group in California. Prior to retirement in 2003, he managed Business Controls, a multi billion dollar software division of IBM.
April 6, 2009
This continuing coverage and reaction arising from the just-released book, Nazi Nexus: America's Corporate Connection's to Hitler's Holocaust (Dialog Press).
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Since the publication of the book IBM and the Holocaust, I as a long-time IBM employee and now an IBM retiree, have been trying to get IBM to face its past and apologize for its complicity in helping Germany commit genocide. The best offer I have received thus far was the willingness for Samuel J. Palmisano, t
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 6, 2009
A trust has been launched to bring back the remains of India's last Mughal emperor and to trace his descendants, many of whom are believed to be living in poverty.
Calls for Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar's body to be returned to India and to be buried along with those of his royal ancestors have steadily grown since 2007's 150th anniversary of the Indian mutiny – when "sepoys" in British army regiments massacred their officers.
The rebellion was eventually put d
Source: Foxnews
April 6, 2009
By sidestepping the genocide issue -- a key tension point between Turks and Armenians and a rallying cry among Armenian-Americans -- President Obama says he is trying to be as "encouraging as possible."
President Obama on Monday declined to repeat his claim that the deaths of up to 1.5 million Armenians during World War I was a "genocide," stepping back from his campaign pledge to Armenian Americans that the "widely documented fact" would be fully comme
Source: AP
April 6, 2009
A Vietnamese military official says a mass grave containing the remains of 35 communist commandos killed during the Tet Offensive was found.
The colonel says officials discovered the grave after being tipped off by a former driver for the U.S.-backed South Vietnam government. He says it took three days of digging to find the bodies.
The Vietnamese soldiers were rounded up and killed by South Vietnamese forces after attacking a U.S. air base in 1968 during the offensive,
Source: Times (UK)
April 5, 2009
Did five, or even six, of the republican prisoners who were on hunger strike in the Maze prison in 1981 die to advance the political strategy of Sinn Fein?
Did Gerry Adams and other members of the IRA kitchen cabinet snub a conciliatory offer from Margaret Thatcher, then the British prime minister, which met the substance of the prisoners’ demands, just to ensure that Sinn Fein would win a crucial by-election to Westminster?
These are the explosive questions raised fo
Source: BBC
April 6, 2009
Many who fought Nazi Germany during World War II did so to defeat the vicious racism that left millions of Jews dead.
Yet the BBC's Document programme has seen evidence that black colonial soldiers - who made up around two-thirds of Free French forces - were deliberately removed from the unit that led the Allied advance into the French capital.
By the time France fell in June 1940, 17,000 of its black, mainly West African colonial troops, known as the Tirailleurs Sene
Source: New York Times
April 6, 2009
The earthquake in Abruzzo did not spare the region’s artistic patrimony, though government officials said Monday that it was too soon to determine the extent of the damage to historical buildings or works of art.
In L’Aquila, the regional capital, the earthquake caused “significant damage to monuments,” said Giuseppe Proietti, secretary general of the Italian Culture Ministry. The rear part of the apse of the Romanesque basilica of Santa Maria di Collemaggio, much of which was resto
Source: Time Magazine
April 6, 2009
You might not expect the arrival in Munich of a retired auto mechanic from Cleveland, Ohio, to excite much attention. But when John Demjanjuk finally lands in Germany, the nation's press will be waiting for him. Sentenced to death over 20 years ago by the Israeli authorities as a Nazi war criminal but later freed when fresh evidence undermined the basis of his conviction, Demjanjuk again expects to face charges, this time alleging that he helped to murder many thousands of Jews at a Nazi death c
Source: NYT
April 6, 2009
The earthquake in Abruzzo did not spare the region’s artistic patrimony, though government officials said Monday that it was too soon to determine the extent of the damage to historical buildings or works of art.
In L’Aquila, the regional capital, the earthquake caused “significant damage to monuments,” said Giuseppe Proietti, secretary general of the Italian Culture Ministry. The rear part of the apse of the Romanesque basilica of Santa Maria di Collemaggio, much of which was resto
Source: Times (UK)
April 6, 2009
The Khmer Rouge's most notorious prison chief told a Cambodia war crimes court today US policies in the 1970s contributed to the rise of Pol Pot's genocidal regime.
Kaing Guek Eav, or 'Duch,' the brutal director of the infamous torture centre S-21 said he believed the Khmer Rouge regime would have died out had the US not supported the right wing military government that removed Prince Norodom Sihanouk from power in a 1970 coup.
Duch, who is on trial charged with crime
Source: Deutsche Welle
April 4, 2009
Police said the protests, attended mostly by leftist parties and trade unionists, were peaceful. Three demonstrators were detained.
"We will not allow the NPD to misuse this place with its disgusting ideology," said Green Party chairwoman Claudia Roth, standing in front of the town hall.
Further protests are expected after a regional administrative court ruled on Friday that the City of Berlin could not block the neo-Nazi group from holding its party conventio
Source: History Today
April 6, 2009
A menu, due to be auctioned this month, has revealed Churchill’s dissatisfaction with the breakfast provided on board a BOAC flight to the United States, in June 1954. It was Sir Winston Churchill’s last flight to the United States as Prime Minister and he was accompanied by his Foreign Secretary Sir Antony Eden.
Unhappy with the existing menu, Churchill initially tried to write over the printed menu. His amended menu was too long, however, and he consequently wrote his own new menu
Source: BBC
April 6, 2009
Some 800,000 people were killed during the genocide, with many of the bodies thrown into Rwandan rivers.
Nearly 11,000 of them were eventually recovered from Lake Victoria in Uganda and buried by villagers.
Rwanda's ambassador to Uganda said they will now receive proper burials in three permanent mass graves.
Source: BBC
April 6, 2009
Schindler's list helped hundreds of Jewish workers escape death in the Holocaust during World War II.
It was found in research notes which belonged to the Australian author of Schindler's Ark - the basis for the Oscar-winning film, Schindler's List.
The document was found at the New South Wales Library in Sydney.
Source: NYT
April 2, 2009
The chief White House florist, Nancy Clarke, who has bedecked the Executive Mansion with roses, tulips, sweet peas and other blossoms since the Carter administration, is retiring at the end of May.
Mrs. Clarke, who has worked for six presidents, started as a volunteer in 1978 and joined the White House full time in 1981. She presides over a staff of three people and is responsible for decorating the West Wing, the East Wing and the first family’s private residence.
Source: NYT
April 4, 2009
HERE’S a scary thought in the midst of the financial crisis. Although there was a time when Argentina and the United States were serious economic rivals, that changed with the Great Depression. America recovered and became the world’s richest nation. Argentina ended up a mess.
How did such a reversal of fortune happen? In “False Economy: A Surprising Economic History of the World” (Riverhead, 321 pages), Alan Beattie writes that the answer had a lot to do with the two nations’ radic
Source: NYT
April 4, 2009
RIO DE JANEIRO — The lines of Argentines waiting to see the body of former President Raúl Alfonsín stretched for more than six city blocks in Buenos Aires last week. As day turned to night the lines only seemed to swell. Not even a rainstorm kept the public away....
Argentines, like most people, tend to worship their leading citizens more once they die. But that was only one reason Mr. Alfonsín, who steered Argentina from dictatorship to democracy but failed to right the economy, wa
Source: http://www.fredericksburg.com
March 28, 2009
It went unnoticed amid Thursday's media hullabaloo over designation of more wilderness lands, but Congress has reinvigorated battlefield preservation.
As part of the gigantic public-lands bill the U.S. House of Representatives passed this week, legislators reauthorized the American Battlefield Protection Program. The bipartisan measure awaits President Obama's signature at the White House on Monday.
Congressional renewal of the ABPP is crucial to local, state and federa
