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: Telegraph (UK)
July 1, 2008
A Second World War murder mystery featuring Winston Churchill, the British double agent Kim Philby and Joseph Stalin could be solved after the Polish government called for the body of a national hero to be exhumed.
General Wladyslaw Sikorski, the leader of Poland's wartime government in exile, died 65 years ago this month when his plane plunged into the sea off Gibraltar.
A British inquiry in 1943 found that the crash was caused by the plane's controls jamming. But rumo
Source: Neely Tucker in the WaPo
July 1, 2008
Zimbabwe, how it was before:
The smell of millet beer, the smoke from cooking fires, Oliver Mtukudzi singing at a club downtown, the grasses of the veld waving in the breeze. Drone of ceiling fans. Sadza meal, rolled up in the palm to eat. Rain, driving down so hard it explodes in the dust, sending up tiny showers of droplet shrapnel. Farms stretching for thousands of acres, people walking alongside the roads at first light, tourists drinking gin and tonics on safaris, elephants fla
Source: WaPo
July 1, 2008
A former CIA operative who says he tried to warn the agency about faulty intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs now contends that CIA officials also ignored evidence that Iran had suspended work on a nuclear bomb.
The onetime undercover agent, who has been barred by the CIA from using his real name, filed a motion in federal court late Friday asking the government to declassify legal documents describing what he says was a deliberate suppression of findings on Iran that were contrar
Source: WaPo
July 1, 2008
Millions of people around the world think they have heard Mahatma Gandhi speaking in English -- although it was actually Gandhi channeled through the voice of actor Ben Kingsley in the famous 1982 movie by Richard Attenborough.
But very few English speakers have heard Gandhi directly. That's because there were only two occasions when he was recorded speaking in English, according to his grandson and biographer Rajmohan Gandhi. One speech, about religious issues, was recorded in the
Source: AP
June 30, 2008
Scientists were fascinated by the ghostly find: a human skeleton buried in an Aztec temple with a clay, skull-shaped whistle in each bony hand.
But no one blew into the noisemakers for nearly 15 years.
When someone finally did, the shrill, windy screech made the spine tingle.
If death had a sound, this was it.
Source: http://www.masslive.com
June 29, 2008
A trove of Civil War-era memorabilia has made its way from the front lines, to a dusty trunk in an attic, to a university display and, finally, to one of the country's premier archives thanks to a donation by the Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co.
MassMutual gifted the historical collection of memorabilia and documents - including some signed by President Abraham Lincoln - to the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center's Military History Institute in Carlisle, Pa. A public anno
Source: http://www.newsobserver.com
June 30, 2008
A woolen flag with cotton stars flew the night Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson caught a bullet in the arm -- a quiet witness to one of history's great accidents.
You can see it inside a case on the third floor of the N.C. Museum of History, hanging over a Confederate ammunition chest recovered from a Johnston County farm: the flag carried by the regiment that inadvertently shot the man who was arguably the South's No. 2 general.
The museum just bought the flag for a
Source: National Security Archive
June 30, 2008
Near the end of the protracted negotiations that produced the historic Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) 40 years ago, U.S. government officials warned that countries could legally reach "nuclear pregnancy' under the Treaty and then withdraw and quickly acquire nukes, according to declassified U.S. government documents published on the Web today by the National Security Archive.
The documents detail the well-known resistance to the NPT from countries like India ("China
Source: AFP
June 27, 2008
Some 300 rare and valuable books confiscated from Iraq's
Jewish community by Saddam Hussein's regime have been secretly spirited into
Israel, an Israeli newspaper reported on Friday.
The books include a 1487 commentary on the biblical Book of Job and another
volume of biblical prophets printed in Venice in 1617, the Haaretz daily said.
The volumes are part of a massive collection of books confiscated by the secret
police of the executed Iraqi dictator and stored in security in
Source: McClatchy
June 30, 2008
A Chilean judge sentenced the country's former intelligence chief, retired Gen. Manuel Contreras, to two life prison terms Monday for masterminding a double assassination that was one of the most notorious covert operations conducted by this country's military government.
The historic court decision, which can be appealed, holds Contreras responsible for the murders of Gen. Carlos Prats, the former army chief, and his wife in a 1974 bombing attack in the Argentine capital of Buenos
Source: BBC
June 30, 2008
US military prosecutors have filed charges against the alleged mastermind of the 2000 attack on the USS Cole warship that left 17 sailors dead.
Saudi-born Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is being held at Guantanamo Bay, faces charges including murder and terrorism.
Mr Nashiri was arrested in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in October 2002 and has been held at Guantanamo since 2006.
He told a hearing at the US base in Cuba last year that he confessed to the atta
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 30, 2008
The former foreign minister of the Khmer Rouge regime faced court in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh yesterday, seeking bail ahead of his trial for crimes against humanity.
Looking frail, 82-year-old Ieng Sary, who is one of five senior architects of the ultra-Maoist regime currently in detention, said little to the packed courtroom.
His lawyer, Michael Karnavas, said that his client's physical and mental health required proper assessment to determine his ability to st
Source: AP
June 20, 2008
Jimmy Carter has been among the country's most active retired presidents, but even the peripatetic Georgian might not have anticipated having his name bandied about in a presidential campaign 28 years after leaving the White House.
Sen. John McCain, who will carry the Republican presidential flag in this fall's campaign, has repeatedly invoked the former president's name on the campaign trail, and with it the less-than-stellar memories of his White House years. Some high-profile all
Source: US News & World Report
June 30, 2008
The latest scholarship on the war for independence casts new light on some well-told tales, including why patriots really fought—it wasn't always for the cause of liberty—and what turned a famous war hero into an infamous traitor.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 30, 2008
French historians have accused the English of propagating the legend of King Arthur for "political reasons".
Even if a character who vaguely resembled the fabled leader did exist, he would probably have been a Welshman with strong connections to Brittany and whose sworn enemies were the Anglo-Saxons, they said.
The organisers of a conference and exhibition to be held at Rennes university in northern France next month said they will provide ample evidence that
Source: FoxNews.com
June 29, 2008
WASHINGTON — A new report by Army historians levels heavy, unvarnished criticism against Pentagon leadership for its failure to plan beyond the initial invasion of Iraq."On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign" — which outlines the 18 months following the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime — said too much focus was placed on a military victory, and not enough on post-war planning, due in part to optimism by the White House and the Pentagon that civilian agencies would take care muc
Source: NYT
June 29, 2008
The Fourth of July is approaching and with it the promise, or threat, of another long, hot summer.
It serves as a reminder, as if there were any danger of forgetting, that of all the seasons, summer can be the cruelest....
It’s not surprising, then, that American literature is a catalogue of summer disturbances, especially the literature of the South, thanks to geography. Its swamplands and deltas bristle with heat-stoked tensions. In William Faulkner’s fiction, the “ar
Source: NYT
June 28, 2008
A BUBBLY and witty presence, the tall, older gentleman with the cane does not instantly come across as an Auschwitz survivor, or a fighter in the Warsaw Uprising, or a imprisoned dissident under Communism.
In fact, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski is all those and more. Yet he is also the type of man who, on a busy day, stops to chat with the hotel maids and is sure to make them laugh before he goes on his way.
The world is unlikely to produce many more Wladyslaw Bartoszewskis (p
Source: WaPo
June 28, 2008
The e-mail landed in Danielle Allen's queue one winter morning as she was studying in her office at the Institute for Advanced Study, the renowned haven for some of the nation's most brilliant minds. The missive began: "THIS DEFINITELY WARRANTS LOOKING INTO."
Laid out before Allen, a razor-sharp, 36-year-old political theorist, was what purported to be a biographical sketch of Barack Obama that has become one of the most effective -- and baseless -- Internet attacks of the
Source: NYT
June 29, 2008
Soon after American forces toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, Gen. Tommy R. Franks surprised senior Army officers by revamping the Baghdad-based military command.
The decision reflected the assumption by General Franks, the top American commander for the Iraq invasion, that the major fighting was over. But according to an Army history that is to be made public on Monday, the move put the military effort in the hands of a short-staffed headquarters led by a newly promoted three-star gen
