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 Real News Project
January 8, 2007
Newly released internal CIA documents assert that former president George Herbert Walker Bush's oil company emerged from a 1950's collaboration with a covert CIA officer.
Bush has long denied allegations that he had connections to the intelligence community prior to 1976, when he became Central Intelligence Agency director under President Gerald Ford. At the time, he described his appointment as a 'real shocker.'
But the freshly uncovered memos contend that Bush maint
Source: BBC
January 8, 2007
The trial of a former Rwandan official accused of being a main perpetrator of the genocide is due to begin at the UN war crimes tribunal in Tanzania.
Colonel Tharcisse Renzaho, former prefect of the Rwandan capital, Kigali, faces charges of genocide and complicity in genocide.
Some 800,000 people, most of them Tutsis, were killed by Hutu extremists during the massacres in 1994.
Source: Times Online (UK)
January 8, 2007
For sale: the world’s smallest country, complete with its own passports, currency, stamps and national football team. Uninterrupted sea views and complete privacy assured. Oh, and more wind than you will ever want. Offers in the region of eight-digit sums considered.
After 40 years, the owners of the Principality of Sealand have put it on the market. They hope that investors will be lured by the island’s setting and its status as a tax haven.
But it is not exactly a d
Source: WaPo
January 8, 2007
BUENOS AIRES As they organize separate 25th anniversary ceremonies to remember their war over the Falkland Islands, Argentine and British officials have found that remembering is the easy part.
Resolving, however, is a much trickier proposition.
The windblown archipelago is once again claiming headlines here, climbing back near the top of Argentina's international agenda a quarter-century after its military surrendered the territory to Britain.
Last week Ar
Source: Reuters
January 7, 2007
Plans to export a version of France's most famous museum, the Louvre, to a resort in the oil-rich city of Abu Dhabi have sparked accusations the government is sacrificing cultural standards for profit.
The plan, backed by the Ministry of Culture, is part of a drive by the United Arab Emirates to create a luxury tourist destination and the contract to bring the Louvre to the Gulf is reported by French newspapers to be worth over 500 million euros ($655.2 million).
But th
Source: Independent (UK)
January 8, 2007
Unesco is threatening to place the Tower of London on its list of endangered World Heritage Sites because of the number of skyscrapers being planned for the surrounding area.
The fortress, which William the Conqueror started building in 1078 to dominate London, would be the only building in the developed world on the endangered list.
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has got until the end of the month to demonstrate to the UN agency's World Heritage Committee
Source: Christian Science Monitor
January 7, 2007
The hand of history in Eastern Europe continues to reach from the communist past - most dramatically in Sunday's resignation of Stanislaw Wielgus, Archbishop of Warsaw, a half hour before his inauguration as the central figure in the powerful Polish Catholic Church.
Mr. Wielgus, who for weeks denied working for the hated communist secret service, stepped down after evidence against him grew too extensive, outstripping even what many church colleagues assumed: Over 20 years, Wielgus
Source: Chicago Tribune
January 7, 2007
- As he seeks support for an escalating war in Iraq, President Bush is reaching forward for a place in history with hope that he will be recognized as a leader who confronted "the ideological struggle of the 21st Century," a conflict between freedom and terrorism.
And, as he contends with growing opposition to the war at home and in Congress, Bush is reaching back to the 20th Century for a parallel with his struggle today. The president has found his precedent in a leader
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
January 5, 2007
The Fort Pitt Preservation Society has floated an "alternative plan" aimed at preserving a big portion of the historic Music Bastion wall that would be buried by the ongoing $35 million state park renovation project.
The plan, unveiled at a morning news conference yesterday at the Hilton Pittsburgh hotel across the street from the 18-acre park, would preserve more than two-thirds of the moat and wall in its current configuration except for a 100-to-150-foot section at the
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 7, 2007
In its day it won two grands prix and reached speeds that would not be surpassed for decades. Now a racer conceived as a symbol of Nazi domination is about to set a new record, as the world's most expensive car.
The 15ft 1939 Auto Union D-type is expected to fetch about £6 million when it goes under the hammer at Christie's in Paris, surpassing the record £5.5 million paid for a 1931 Bugatti Royale at the Royal Albert Hall 20 years ago.
Its arrival in the auction room is th
Source: Observer (UK)
January 7, 2007
Millions of birds and animals were slaughtered in England and Wales under a Tudor law which is now being blamed for bringing many native species close to extinction.
While environmental change is generally held responsible for the damage to British wildlife, new research has revealed that the Tudors were actually responsible for reducing many native creatures to a critically endangered level. Species ranging from hedgehogs and water voles to choughs and dippers were systematically
Source: Independent (UK)
January 7, 2007
It was the first and most extreme ecological disaster. Easter Island, in the south Pacific, once lush with subtropical broadleaf forest, was left barren and vast seabird colonies were destroyed after the arrival of man.
But now there is new evidence that human beings may not have been responsible for the destruction after all. Although Easter Island has long been held to be the most important example of a traditional society destroying itself, it appears that the real culprits wer
Source: LAT
January 7, 2007
Nearly two years ago, John Evans did something no U.S. ambassador to Armenia before him had done: He used the word "genocide" — in public — to describe the deaths of about 1.2 million Armenians at the hands of Ottoman Turks.
It has long been a sore point with Armenian Americans that the U.S. government does not refer to the killings that began in 1915 as genocide, and Evans' use of the word did not signal a change in that policy. It did set off a slow-boiling controversy t
Source: LAT
January 6, 2007
THE National Geographic Society hailed it as one of the most significant archeological discoveries of our time, a 1,700-year-old text that portrayed Judas Iscariot as a hero, not a villain, for betraying Jesus.
The portrayal of Judas as a favored apostle who handed Jesus over to the Romans at his master's request made National Geographic's publication of "The Gospel of Judas" — and the companion TV documentary — a worldwide media event.
When the gospel was rel
Source: NYT
January 8, 2007
WARSAW, Jan. 7 — The newly appointed archbishop of Warsaw, Stanislaw Wielgus, abruptly resigned on Sunday at a Mass meant to celebrate his new position after having admitted two days earlier that he had worked with the Polish Communist-era secret police.
There is no direct evidence that Bishop Wielgus spied on any of his fellow clergy members. But the revelation and the resignation have shaken one of Europe’s largest concentrations of Catholics and refocused scrutiny on collaboratio
Source: Times Online (UK)
January 6, 2007
BERLIN -- There can be few marriages quite as strange or as burdened by history as that of the German politician Vera Lengsfeld and her former husband, who spied on her for the East German secret police. “I have forgiven him,” the 54-year-old former dissident said. But she made it clear that personal forgiveness was as complex as the uneasy unification of Germany.
This, after all, was no conventional marital betrayal — no fling with a neighbour or office romance. Every halfway poli
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 6, 2007
One of Rome's most famous landmarks, the Fountain of the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona, is to have emergency repairs after centuries of erosion by acid rain, limescale and pigeon droppings.
"We had to act immediately or face a red alert," said Annamaria Pandolfi, the head of an 18-man team that aims to restore Gian Lorenzo Bernini's largest outdoor sculpture to its proper glory.
Giant figures representing the world's four great rivers, the Plate, the Nile, the
Source: AP
January 6, 2007
Gun fragments, photos, combat plans and mountain hideouts. These are the latest tourist attractions offered in the formerly war-torn central American republic of El Salvador.
The country has been at peace since 1992, but the 12-year civil war left 76,000 dead, thousands injured and a violent legacy that some tourists find fascinating.
For a fee, former guerrillas will take visitors on tours of former battlefields or mountain hideouts, while museums display war memorabi
Source: AFP at Yahoo News
January 4, 2007
Libya is reportedly to build a statue showing Saddam Hussein, the former Iraqi leader executed in Baghdad on Saturday, on a gallows.
It did not say where the statue would be placed.
The official JANA news agency added the Saddam statue will be put up at the same time as another representing Omar al-Mukhtar, the Libyan resistance leader who fought the Italian military occupation and who was executed in 1931, also by hanging.
Source: NYT
January 7, 2007
AS university students clashed with the police in this country last May, attention focused not just on their demands to hold elections without government meddling but also on the names of the two leaders organizing the protests: Nixon Moreno and Stalin González.
Many Venezuelans had a good laugh at the names and went on with their business. What’s so odd, after all, about the occasional Nixon or Stalin in a nation where bestowing bizarre names on newborns has become a whimsically co
