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: AP
March 18, 2009
CALGARY, Alberta — Former President George W. Bush, making his first public speech since leaving office in January, says he wants Barack Obama to succeed and that it's "essential" to support the new leader...
Bush also said he plans to write a book that will ask people to consider what they would do if they had to protect the United States as president. "It's going to be (about) the 12 toughest decisions I had to make," he said.
"I want people t
Source: Washington Post/House Divided (blog)
March 18, 2009
Battlefields in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, Texas, Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi are in the top 10 most endangered in the country, according to the Civil War Preservation Trust which released the names at a press conference this morning.
Although being named most endangered might be considered a negative, it actually is embraced by the various sites because the Trust has a proven ability to bring media attention to what are often little known sites or unrecognized threats
Source: AP
March 18, 2009
Even 20 years later, the shooting, chaos and death of the final assault on Tiananmen Square remain vivid in the mind of former soldier Zhang Shijun. Today, he has become one of the few to publicly voice regret.
In bearing witness about his role in the military crackdown on the 1989 student demonstrations in Beijing, Zhang says he hopes to add momentum to calls for an investigation and reassessment of the protest movement — and to further its ultimate goal of a democratic China.
Source: McClatchy
March 17, 2009
A top White House official threatened Tuesday to use a congressional rule to force some controversial proposals through the Senate by eliminating the Republicans' power to block legislation.
Peter Orszag, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, said the Obama administration would prefer not to use the budget "reconciliation" process that allows measures to pass the Senate on simple majority votes.
Orszag said he wouldn't rule it out, h
Source: IHT
March 18, 2009
Tariq Ramadan, a respected Swiss academic and Muslim scholar, had a job all lined up at the University of Notre Dame in 2004, but the Bush administration prevented him from entering the country. Government officials said he had contributed to a charity believed to have connections to terrorism.
Now, in a move leading up to that hearing, a coalition of academic and civil liberties groups is calling on the Obama administration to break with the Bush administration’s policies on blocki
Source: BBC
March 17, 2009
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has cut seven years off the prison sentence of former Bosnian Serb leader Momcilo Krajisnik.
Appeals Chamber judges overturned Krajisnik's convictions for the murder, extermination and persecution of non-Serbs during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.
But he must still serve 20 years in jail for the deportation, forcible transfer and persecution of civilians.
Krajisnik was a close aide to ex-Bosnian Ser
Source: AP
March 18, 2009
An Iraqi official says authorities believe they have found another mass grave from Saddam Hussein's regime in southern Iraq.
The director of the local human rights commission, Mahdi al-Timimi, says local villagers found two skulls, bones and old clothes in the oil-rich Nahran Omar area northeast of Basra.
He told reporters Wednesday that excavation for more remains will start the following day.
The victims are believed to have been killed in 1991, when Sadd
Source: Deutsche Welle
March 17, 2009
The DuMont Media Group in Cologne has become the first newspaper consortium to publish a historical account of its own activities in the Third Reich. The work is a portrait of a dark age for freedom of the press. The study was written by historian Manfred Pohl and entitled M. DuMont Schauberg: A Newspaper Publisher's Fight for Independence Under the Nazi Dictatorship.
Commissioned by Dumont itself, the study was officially launched in Berlin on Monday, March 16.
Th
Source: Spiegel Online
March 17, 2009
No issue divides Turks more than the country's alleged creeping Islamization. Early last week, the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (Tubitak) sparked an international controversy after it prevented the publication of a cover story about Charles Darwin's evolution theory in Bilim ve Teknik (Science and Technology), one of the country's leading science journals. The publication's editor-in-chief, 41-year-old Cigdem Atakuman, claims she was fired as a result of the incident.
Source: IHT
March 17, 2009
The Italian government has successfully brokered deals with American museums and private collectors for the return of what it says are looted antiquities. But it is finding the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, an art museum in Copenhagen, harder to crack.
Talks with the Glyptotek have dragged on for months, even though "the presuppositions for the negotiations are identical to those that were carried out with the Americans," said Maurizio Fiorilli, a lawyer for the Italian state in
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
March 18, 2009
Their achievement stands as one of the greatest military triumphs in history.
It is, frankly, inconceivable to imagine anything as big or audacious as D-Day being attempted ever again: more than 300,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen in a bloody dawn attack which liberated France and Europe and changed the world.
These days, their average age is 84. But the people they liberated from Nazi rule will never forget them - which is why, to this day, the veterans of the D-Day
Source: Guardian (UK)
March 18, 2009
Tonight sees the unveiling of a belated 200th-birthday present to Charles Darwin in London's Natural History Museum - a sculpture consisting of a 5mm section of a 200-year-old oak tree, including trunk, roots and branches, installed on the ceiling. Sculptor Tania Kovats dreamed up her work in a camper-van in Patagonia (on a trip round South America, during which she used Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle "as a travel guide - and a surprisingly fresh one").
Source: Independent (UK)
March 18, 2009
The future of the New Zealand explorer Sir Edmund Hillary's Auckland home remains unclear after it was sold at auction today.
The house at 278A Remuera Road went to the bid of Auckland estate agent Graham Wall, who purchased it on behalf of clients he would not name.
The selling price of $1.9m was just below the house's government valuation of $1.93m. Planning restrictions allow only one unit to be built on the 1738sq m site.
The 198sq m house was built
Source: Telegraph (UK)
March 18, 2009
For more than six decades scholars have believed the scrolls originated with a different, ascetic Jewish sect called the Essenes.
The Essenes are said to have lived in the 1st Century, in mountains in Palestine, where they recorded religious practices on parchments.
But Rachel Elior, a professor of Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, claims the 930 scrolls were written by the Sadducees, a group of Jewish priests living in Jerusalem, and that the E
Source: Spiegel Online
March 17, 2009
Some 300 Latvian veterans of the Waffen SS and their supporters marched through Riga on Monday to commemorate their comrades who fought the Soviet Union in Adolf Hitler's fanatical combat unit during World War II.
Supporters regard the Latvians who fought in the Waffen SS as liberators from the Soviet occupation in the war. Russia and many ethnic Russians in Latvia regard the annual commemorative marches as a glorification of fascism.
The demonstration went ahead in de
Source: History Today
March 17, 2009
Susan Hibbert is believed to have been the last British witness to the signing of the German surrender in Reims, in May 1945. She died at the beginning of last month, on February 2nd, aged 84. An obituary was notably published on the website of The Telegraph. The surrender was signed in the temporary headquarters of General Dwight Eisenhower, commander-in-chief of the Allied Forces, in a room in what was Reims’ technical college. At the time, Hibbert was a British staff sergeant in the Auxiliary
Source: National Security Archive
March 17, 2009
Following a stunning breakthrough in a 25-year-old case of political terror in Guatemala, the National Security Archive today is posting declassified U.S. documents about the disappearance of Edgar Fernando García, a student leader and trade union activist captured by Guatemalan security forces in 1984. The documents show that García's capture was an organized political abduction orchestrated at the highest levels of the Guatemalan government.
The dormant case was brought back to li
Source: Politico.com
March 17, 2009
Vice President Joe Biden’s discussed the economy in stark terms at a Democratic National Committee fundraiser Monday night, in contrast with the upbeat tone coming from the White House over the past few days.
In a 20-minute speech in the lobby of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Biden said President Obama "has inherited the most difficult first 100 days of any president, I would argue, including Franklin Roosevelt."
“Let me explain what I mean by that," he ad
Source: Telegraph (UK)
March 16, 2009
Britain's most ancient fishing trap has been discovered off the coastline of Wales after research carried out on Google Earth.
The 853ft (260m) long construction is thought to have been built 1,000 years ago, around the time of the Domesday Book, using large rocks placed on a river bed.
Source: http://www.gettysburgtimes.com
March 13, 2009
Battlefield tree removal in Gettysburg is officially underway this year, with the clearing of 19 acres of woodland along the Baltimore Pike.
Non-historic trees were removed near Colgrove Avenue just south of town, adjacent to the new Battlefield Visitor Center.
The project is part of a multi-year plan to transform the 6,000-acre Gettysburg National Military Park to its Civil War-era appearance.
