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 22, 2007
BELGRADE, Serbia -- Decomposing corpses were dumped into a trash-filled ditch. Blindfolded and hands bound, three Albanian-Americans were led to its edge and shot in the head, their bodies joining the others.
The details, emerging for the first time at the trial of two former Serbian commandos, shed light on how the regime of late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic tried to conceal atrocities against ethnic Albanians in the 1998-99 Kosovo war.
Thousands were killed in
Source: AP
March 22, 2007
NEW YORK -- A prolonged debate over whether to preserve a 175-ton staircase that still stands at the World Trade Center site is threatening construction schedules for new office towers, rebuilding officials said this week.
The staircase, which several people used to escape the debris-filled complex in the moments after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, has been named one of the nation's most endangered places by a preservation group. It is the only remnant of the complex that is above street
Source: The Statesman (Accra, Ghana)
March 22, 2007
Last Friday, at a hotel, thousands of miles away in Bloomsbury, London, Ghana's Minister of Justice, Joe Ghartey said something that perhaps only a classroom of Ghanaians knew.
The young and very promising politician told his audience that Paa Grant, the founder and sponsor of the group that formalised the struggle for independence from 1947, Paa Grant was in fact first to have called for Positive Action, a phrase more associated with the man who did more with other's ideas than the
Source: AP
March 21, 2007
WASHINGTON -- The Smithsonian Institution's eight art museums are "drastically underfunded" and have "seldom lived up to their names," according to an external review released Wednesday.
The voluntary review by a panel of seven prominent museum directors gives recommendations to strengthen each museum and is similar to an external examination of the Smithsonian's science programs in 2003. The review was adopted by the Smithsonian Board of Regents in January, thou
Source: AP
March 22, 2007
NEW YORK -- For all his death-defying stunts, Harry Houdini couldn't escape the Grim Reaper: He died on Halloween 1926, apparently from a punch to the stomach that ruptured his appendix. But rumors that he was murdered have persisted for decades. Eighty-one years after Houdini's death, his great-nephew wants the escape artist's body exhumed to determine if enemies poisoned him for debunking their bogus claims of contact with the dead.
"It needs to be looked at," George Har
Source: Kyodo News
March 22, 2007
TOKYO -— Japanese and Chinese academics in a joint history study committee on March 20 agreed to take up contentious issues such as the 1937 Nanjing Massacre and visits by Japanese premiers to Yasukuni Shrine in their future discussions, Japanese panel members said.
But the committee members, during their two-day meeting in Tokyo through March 20, failed to discuss this time whether they will deal with the issue of Japan’s forcing women to provide sex for its soldiers before and dur
Source: Belfast (Ireland) Telegraph
March 17, 2007
The group lobbying for the re-routing out of the M3 motorway is hitting out at the removal of a series of ancient underground buildings from the site in the past week.
A team of archaeologists removed the souterrains this week, which date back to the early Christian era. ['Souterrain is a name given by archaeologists to a type of underground structure associated with the Atlantic Iron Age. Regional names include fogous and Pictish houses and they appear to have been brought northwa
Source: Press Release -- The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
March 22, 2007
“Let her paintings go!”
That’s the Passover eve appeal issued by fifty prominent attorneys and legal scholars to Polish museum authorities, urging the return of seven paintings that California artist Dina Babbitt was forced to paint in Auschwitz in 1943.
Mrs. Babbitt, 83, was forced by the infamous Nazi war criminal, Dr. Josef Mengele, to paint portraits of Gypsy prisoners on whom he was performing sadistic medical experiments. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, in P
Source: Laura Miller at Salon.com
March 21, 2007
"The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory," by J.M. Adovasio, Olga Soffer and Jake Page, promises to lay out everything the most current research has established about archaic women, and the truth is that it's pretty thin gruel. The authors can point out some embarrassing mistakes made by past experts and suggest some intriguing alternative interpretations of various facts and artifacts, but even so there's a lot of padding and extraneous material in this boo
Source: AP
March 22, 2007
BEIJING -- A $258 million restoration project is planned for an ancient town where the Great Wall meets the sea, state media reported Thursday.
The project will transform Shanhaiguan, built in 1381 during the Ming Dynasty as a strategic military post to help defend Beijing, the Xinhua News Agency said...
Xinhua said the district has already spent $93 million restoring watchtowers, gates and five memorial arches on the wall in Shanhaiguan.
China in recent ye
Source: AP
March 22, 2007
A huge column in the garden of an ancient Roman villa at Pompeii was toppled in what officials said Wednesday was an act of vandalism.
"This isn't a simple act of vandalism, which, while bad enough, could be explained by ignorance," superintendent Giovanni Guzzo said, calling it "an act of intimidation."
Spokeswoman Francesca de Lucia said the force needed to topple the large column, which broke into at least five pieces, suggested that the perpetrat
Source: Radio New Zealand News
March 23, 2007
The bones of 14 Maori housed in an American museum are to be returned to New Zealand.
Dr John Terrell, curator of Chicago's Pacific Anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History, said it had been considering returning the bones for the past two or three years, but only made the final decision on Monday.
He told Prime Minister Helen Clark of the decision when she visited the museum on Thursday as part of a week-long trip to the United States.
Dr Terrel
Source: AP
March 22, 2007
NEW LONDON, Tex. -- The world's greatest tragedies always have given way to stories of hope, heartache, despair and determination to overcome. The London School explosion that happened 70 years ago is no different.
Walter Cronkite, one of the 20th Century's most well-known reporters, called March 18, 1937, the "day a generation died." It is an apt description of the loss of nearly three-fifths of that school's students and teachers.
"We weren't allowed to
Source: Washington Times
March 22, 2007
Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine says he will approve a $400,000 amendment that would fund the cash-strapped Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, ending its recent struggle to secure state assistance.
The cash infusion will help cover the museum's 2007-08 general operating budget, which includes staffing. The annual price tag to run the museum is estimated at $2.1 million.
Museum officials hope that a combination of budget cuts and emergency fundraising effort
Source: Boston Globe Editorial
March 21, 2007
PEOPLE WAITED in a milelong line to see the USS John F. Kennedy when it docked for a weekend at the North Jetty in South Boston earlier this month. The 82,000-ton aircraft carrier, soon to be decommissioned, had barely departed before cries went up to bring it back permanently as a floating museum.
The idea is intriguing, but no one should be planning a nautical outing anytime soon. The Navy doesn't abide hasty reuses for its decommissioned warships. And it doesn't appear to be nost
Source: NYT
March 18, 2007
BUTLER, Ga. -- The cool, busy lobby of the Taylor County courthouse features a bulletin board, a Dr Pepper vending machine and two framed rosters honoring local veterans of World War II. It is easy to spot the slight difference in wording that justifies displaying two plaques instead of one.
This list says “Whites,” and that list says “Colored.”
County officials explain that the segregated plaques continue to hang because state law says no publicly owned memorial dedica
Source: AP
March 22, 2007
SEOUL, South Korea -- South Korea said Thursday it would build a park in memory of victims of the U.S. Army's mass killing of South Korean refugees at the village of No Gun Ri.
The park will be built at the scene of the 1950 attack during the Korean War, said Choi Jeong-pil, an official with a government commission on the shootings...
The No Gun Ri killings were documented in a Pulitzer Prize-winning story by The Associated Press in 1999, which prompted a 16-month Penta
Source: AP
March 21, 2007
GUATEMALA CITY -- A newly created international council of experts will oversee and protect extensive police archives exposing atrocities committed during Guatemala's 36-year civil war, a top human rights official said Wednesday.
The official, Sergio Morales, said the so-called International Consultative Council will include archive specialists from Argentina, Uruguay and the U.S., including Kate Doyle of the Washington-based National Security Archive, a private, nonpartisan researc
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, is published by the Federation of American Scientists
March 22, 2007
In what is being characterized by subordinates as an act of
"managerial dementia," the Director of the Congressional
Research Service this week prohibited all public distribution of
CRS products without prior approval from senior agency
officials.
"I have concluded that prior approval should now be required at
the division or office level before products are distributed to
members of the public," wrote CRS Director Daniel
Source: AP
March 21, 2007
NORFOLK, Va. -- Queen Elizabeth II and her husband Prince Philip will visit Virginia May 3-4 to help commemorate the founding of Jamestown 400 years ago...
They also will attend the Kentucky Derby on May 5, then spend time in Washington May 6-8...She also is expected to visit Virginia's current Capitol, in Richmond.
As two years and $99 million in renovations to the state's seat of government Thomas Jefferson designed 200 years ago near completion, a new urgency has tak
