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: WSJ
June 19, 2008
A high court in South Africa ruled on Wednesday that Chinese-South Africans will be reclassified as “black,” a term that includes black Africans, Indians and others who were subject to discrimination under apartheid. As a result of this ruling, ethnically Chinese citizens will be able to benefit from government affirmative action policies aimed at undoing the effects of apartheid.
In 2006, the Chinese Association of South Africa sued the government, claiming that its members were be
Source: WaPo
June 19, 2008
Democratic leaders worried about the impeachment obsession of Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) ain't seen nothing yet.
Kucinich tells us he's giving the House Judiciary Committee 30 days to act on his resolution proposing 35 articles of impeachment against President Bush before he raises even more hell on the House floor. This time, he says, he'll go back with perhaps 60 articles of impeachment.
"The minute the leadership said, 'This is dead on arrival,' I said that I
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 18, 2008
After 700 years, Dante Alighieri, Italy's most famous poet, will have his criminal record scrubbed clean.
Florence's city council has approved a motion revoking a sentence on Dante from 1302 which stated that he would be executed if he stepped foot in the city again.
The sentence forced Dante into exile and he spent the last 20 years of his life wandering through Italy, finally ending his days in Ravenna in 132
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Source: Time
June 18, 2008
There is a common misconception among Americans that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves with a stroke of his pen. Yet the Emancipation Proclamation, which went into effect on Jan. 1, 1863, did no such thing — or, at least, it didn't do a very good job of it. Two and a half years later, on June 19, 1865, Union soldiers sailed into Galveston, Texas, announced the end of the Civil War, and read aloud a general order freeing the quarter-million slaves residing in the state. It's likely that none of th
Source: International Herald Tribune
June 17, 2008
The yellow crates haunted Aditya Arya. A successful advertising photographer whose clients have ranged from India's luxury Oberoi Hotel chain to Russia's Bolshoi Ballet, Arya inherited the crates from a family friend, an old photojournalist named Kulwant Roy, in 1984. And for more than two decades, Arya had hauled the increasingly dusty trunks around a succession of studios, stashing them in out of the way corners and closets. He had a vague sense of what the crates contained - bundles of prints
Source: http://www.wral.com
June 18, 2008
The North Carolina Museum of History has acquired a Confederate battle flag associated with a major turning point of the Civil War – the death of Lt. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson.
The flag was carried by the 18th Regiment North Carolina Troops, which was responsible for the accidental shooting of the Confederate general at Chancellorsville, Va., on May 2, 1863. Severely injured by gunfire, Jackson died a week later of pneumonia.
The regiment's battle flag was captured by Union s
Source: CIA
March 25, 2008
Fifty years ago, the CIA embarked on a project to intercept Soviet and East German messages transmitted via underground cable. Intelligence was collected to determine the best place to hit the target, and then concrete planning for a new collection site was begun.
The tunnel was 1,476 feet in length and consumed 125 tons of steel liner plate and 1,000 cubic yards of grout . . . This was not a small operation!
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/19/secondworldwar
June 19, 2008
He was El Salvador's equivalent of Oskar Schindler, a man who was given a chance to do something about the Holocaust - and took it.
Now, six decades after José Castellanos helped to save 25,000 Jews by granting bogus nationality certificates, the story of the central American nation's consul general to Switzerland during the second world war has been rediscovered.
"The memory of our father is out of the desk, out of the drawers and on the table again," Frieda
Source: NYT
June 17, 2008
Did Senator John McCain overestimate the Nixon administration’s role in improving the conditions of the American prisoners of war in North Vietnam? The question has new relevance to those who liken the surge in Iraq to the latter stages of the Vietnam fight.
President Nixon’s first year in office, 1969, was a new day for the American POWs. Their captors scaled back their demands for propaganda statements, stopped torturing them as heavily, fed them better and even allowed them to in
Source: Bloomberg News
June 19, 2008
The lives of Abner Mikva and Newton
Minow have been intertwined since 1942, when they were 16 and
competed for the editorship of their Milwaukee high-school
newspaper. Now 82, they are still working together, energized
by their latest passion: Barack Obama.
``It's the first candidate I've been excited about since
Kennedy,'' Minow says, turning to Mikva. ``What about you?''
``Same here,'' says Mikva, patting his friend's hand.
Over the past 50 years, the two men sittin
Source: military.com
June 16, 2008
Retired Navy Capt. Ward Boston, who in 2002 broke 35 years of silence to say the US Navy Board of Inquiry long cited to clear Israel of wrongdoing in attacking a US Navy ship during the Six Day War was a sham, died June 11 in California. He was 84.
Emma Boston, his wife of 60 years, told Military.com that Boston had been sick for about six weeks before his death and had been hospitalized. She said he ultimately died of pneumonia, which he contracted in the hospital.
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Source: AP
June 17, 2008
A newly discovered batch of well-preserved dinosaur bones, petrified trees and even freshwater clams in southeastern Utah could provide new clues about life in the region some 150 million years ago.
The Bureau of Land Management announced the find Monday, calling the quarry near Hanksville "a major dinosaur fossil discovery."
An excavation revealed at least four sauropods, which are long-necked, long-tailed plant-eating dinosaurs, and two carnivorous ones, accordin
Source: Earth Times
June 17, 2008
A US archaeological team uncovered an ancient Egyptian administrative building and silos dating back to the 17th dynasty (ca. 1665-1569 BC) along with an older columned hall in the southern Egyptian town of Edfu, Egypt's antiquities department announced Tuesday. With sixteen wooden columns, the layout of the mud-brick hall shows that it might been part of a governor's palace, Egypt's antiquities chief, Zahi Hawas said. The hall, which predates the silos, had been used by scribes for accounting,
Source: National Security Archive
June 18, 2008
The CIA failed to identify the storage bunkers for Soviet nuclear warheads in Cuba during the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, despite obtaining numerous photographs of the sites, according to new materials -- including a selection of photos -- being published on the Web today by the National Security Archive.
The precise location of the Soviet nuclear storage bunkers at Bejucal and Managua is revealed for the first time in a new book by Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs base
Source: http://www.montanasnewsstation.com
June 17, 2008
A massive fundraising campaign for a new History Museum in Montana is now underway, spearheaded by former First Lady Betty Babcock and former Attorney General Joe Mazurek.
The Capital Hill Mall in Helena will be the location for the new Montana History Center.
Governor Brian Schweitzer announced in May that he signed a letter of intent to buy the Mall property for $6.5 million, but before the state writes any checks, a massive amount of funds need to be raised. He's cha
Source: http://www.abc.net.au
June 18, 2008
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) says there are more displaced people in the world than at any time in history, with Afghanistan and Iraq the leading countries of origin.
Launching its report in London, the UN agency said 67 million people have been forced out of their homes by conflict, persecution and natural disasters.
In recent years, resettlement in Afghanistan had seen numbers drop, but in 2007 the total cared for by the UNHCR jumped by 3
Source: china.org.cn
June 18, 2008
Ruins of two large palaces dating back to the Shang and Zhou dynasties have been found at the Jinsha relic site in Huangzhong Village at the western suburbs of Chengdu. They both date back 3,000 years and are considered to be one of Sichuan's most important archaeological finds, according to archaeologists from the Chengdu Institute of Archaeology. The new discovery has contributed toward the identification of a large palace site inside the Jinsha relic area.
Archaeologists have hai
Source: Earth Times
June 18, 2008
The Jordanian authorities said Wednesday that they planned to hand back to the Iraqi government 2,466 artefacts looted from Iraq since the US-led invasion. "The artefacts will be handed over on Sunday to the Iraqi Minister of Tourism and Antiquities Mohammad al-Oraibi, who is currently in Jordan to attend the Arab Tourism Council meeting," Jordanian Minister of Tourism and Antiquities Maha Khatib said.
The pieces were seized by the Jordanian customs authorities in 22 anti-
Source: Armenian News Network
June 18, 2008
Turkish President Abdullah Gul said on
Tuesday that Turkey opened to researchers its most secret archives regarding the incidents of 1915."Keeping record of history is not a business of politicians and/or parliaments. It should be a business of historians and scholars,"
Gul told the 11th International Congress on "Social and Economic History of Turkey" held at Ankara's Bilkent University.
Source: BBC
June 18, 2008
The Bangladesh proclamations of independence - drafted on paper during the war against Pakistan in 1971 - have gone missing, officials say.Officials say it was only discovered they were missing when the government handed over important artefacts to the national archive in April.
The documents were drafted on behalf of imprisoned Bangladeshi independence leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in 1971.
Some former government officials say that the independence
