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: Washington Times
December 31, 2069
Despite threats of retaliatory action and national anger, Turkey appears to be stepping back from a prolonged clash with France over a French parliamentary bill on the 90-year-old Armenian massacres.
"The focus is on limiting the damage" after the French National Assembly voted on Thursday to make any denial of the Ottoman mass killings of Armenians a punishable offense, according to one diplomatic report.
France's leading politicians, including President Jacque
Source: AP
October 14, 2006
CHAVILLE, France A statue commemorating the World War I era massacre of Armenians was stolen, local authorities said on Saturday, two days after French lawmakers approved a controversial bill that would make it a crime to deny that mass killings of Armenians in Turkey amounted to genocide.
The bronze monument, installed in front of the train station in the Paris suburb of Chaville in 2002, went missing between Friday night and Saturday morning, said authorities for the Haut-de-S
Source: Houston Chronicle
October 14, 2006
Here's what history tells us about the Spanish conquest of Mexico: Armed with modern weapons and Old World diseases, several hundred Spanish soldiers toppled the Aztec empire in 1521. And by the end of the century, the invaders' guns, steel and germs had wiped out 90 percent of the natives.
It's a key piece of the "Black Legend," the tales of atrocities committed by the Spanish Inquisition and colonizers of the New World. But it may be just that legend, according to Rodol
Source: Times Online (UK)
October 14, 2006
One of the enduring secrets of the life of Samuel Pepys - what became of his 17-year-old inamorata Deb Willet after Mrs Pepys flung her out of the family home - has been solved by documents found in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
Pepys, whose nine-year diary provides an incomparable insight into life in late 17th-century England, took an instant shine to Deb, who was half his age, when she arrived to be a "waiting gentlewoman" to his wife Elizabeth. And she, the niece of
Source: Times Online (UK)
October 13, 2006
DICTATORS may decide the fate of their unhappy subjects but they are pretty poor at gunning down wild game.
That became plain yesterday as the personal cook of Erich Honecker spilled the beans on the way that the East German Communist leader cheated on his hunting expeditions.
Official photographs of Honecker’s catch in the 1970s and 1980s show hundreds of hares arranged in circles or a clutch of proud tyrants inspecting slaughtered stags.
In fact, says
Source: AP
October 13, 2006
Historians studying newly opened Vatican archives say the material strengthens views that the future wartime pontiff, Pius XII, was a sometimes indecisive diplomat.
Scholars will have to wait years before the Holy See opens its files on Pius XII, who has been accused of failing to speak out enough against the Holocaust. But historians who have studied just a fraction of the 30,000 files from the papacy of his predecessor, Pius XI, say the material is providing insights into the ma
Source: NYT
October 15, 2006
Married couples, whose numbers have been declining for decades as a proportion of American households, have finally slipped into a minority, according to an analysis of new census figures by The New York Times.
The American Community Survey, released this month by the Census Bureau, found that 49.7 percent, or 55.2 million, of the nation’s 111.1 million households in 2005 were made up of married couples — with and without children — just shy of a majority and down from more than 52
Source: NYT
October 14, 2006
Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature this week, went on television Friday to criticize the French parliamentary vote that would make it a crime to deny that the Ottoman Turks’ mass killing of Armenians constituted genocide.
In a telephone interview broadcast live on the private television network NTV, Mr. Pamuk, who faced criminal charges for his statements acknowledging the massacre, said France had acted against its own fundamental principles of
Source: NYT
October 15, 2006
Winifred Bennett, an amateur historian whose casual suggestion at the dinner table 10 years ago that DNA testing might establish whether Thomas Jefferson fathered children by his slave Sally Hemings helped rewrite history, unsettle families and raise enduring questions about sex, race and the American past, died on Oct. 7 at her home in Arlington, Va. She was 71.
The cause was kidney failure, said her daughter, Phoebe Bennett.
As a result of Mrs. Bennett’s idea, an inte
Source: NYT
October 15, 2006
Gerry E. Studds, the first openly gay member of Congress and a demanding advocate for New England fishermen and for gay rights, died early Saturday at Boston University Medical Center, his husband said.
The cause was a vascular illness that led Mr. Studds to collapse while walking his dog on Oct. 3 in Boston. He was 69.
From 1973 to 1997, Mr. Studds (whose first name was pronounced GAIR-ee) represented the Massachusetts district where he grew up, covering Cape Cod and t
Source: NYT
October 15, 2006
IN May 1980, the pollster Richard Wirthlin huddled with his presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan, to plot a course through what looked like a daunting landscape for their party. Just over half the country told pollsters that they were Democrats or leaned that way, compared with just 30 percent that said they were Republicans — a gap that had held steady more or less since the New Deal.
The rest is political history. By winning over millions of white working-class Democrats, Mr. Rea
Source: National Security Archive
October 13, 2006
President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev almost achieved a deal 20 years ago at the 1986 Reykjavik summit to abolish nuclear weapons, but the agreement would have required "an exceptional level of trust" that neither side had yet developed, according to previously secret U.S. and Soviet documents posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive (www.nsarchive.org) of George Washington University and presented on October
Source: Wa Po
October 13, 2006
The Bush administration is one of the most disciplined in modern political history, with barely a peep heard in terms of dissenting voices.
But when some of its charter members leave the lofty confines of power, watch out.
It's almost like they wriggle free of the straitjacket, rip the masking tape off their mouths and finally feel free to reveal the inner machinations of Bush World.
Paul O'Neill was a garden-variety Treasury Secretary until he quit, later
Source: Wa Po
October 13, 2006
President Bush finds the world around him increasingly "unacceptable."
In speeches, statements and news conferences this year, the president has repeatedly declared a range of problems "unacceptable," including rising health costs, immigrants who live outside the law, North Korea's claimed nuclear test, genocide in Sudan and Iran's nuclear ambitions.
Bush's decision to lay down blunt new markers about the things he deems intolerable comes at an odd t
Source: NYT
October 13, 2006
The Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, whose exquisitely constructed, wistful prose explores the agonized dance between Muslims and the West and between past and present, on Thursday won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy said Mr. Pamuk’s “quest for the melancholic soul of his native city,” Istanbul, led him to discover “new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.”
Mr. Pamuk, 54, is Turkey’s best-known and be
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 13, 2006
A Catholic seminary in Rome has opened its wartime archives to shed light on a notorious Austrian bishop who supported the Nazis.
Bishop Alois Hudal, who died in 1963, was the director of the Pan-Germanic College of Santa Maria dell' Anima in Rome between 1923 and 1952. The college is the main training centre in Rome for German priests.
The priest openly declared his pro-Nazi views and has been labelled the "Black Bishop" by Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter w
Source: AP
October 12, 2006
An oak tree was still burning nearby when Margaret Hangan made her way across a wildfire-scorched landscape and spotted to her delight a set of flat-topped granite boulders that served as kitchen counters in an ancient village 2,000 years ago.
In the rocks were manmade oval depressions in which acorns were ground into flour.
"This place was happening," said Hangan, a U.S. Forest Service archaeologist. "They had water, food, grass for baskets — everything
Source: BBC
October 13, 2006
Brazilian church leaders have marked the 75th birthday of one of the world's best known landmarks - Rio de Janeiro's statue of Christ the Redeemer.
The site has been formally declared a Catholic sanctuary, which means that in future it can host religious ceremonies such as weddings and baptisms.
The statue's serene gaze over the city gives little hint of the Herculean effort that went into its construction.
Over 1,000 tons of materials had to be moved
Source: Norwich Bulletin
October 9, 2006
After an hour of hearing fifth-grade teacher Erin Rygielski teach about Christopher Columbus and his crew enslaving Arawak Indians, burning them and lopping off limbs, Shyanne Horner said she was shocked.
"The Indians had their own opinions and Columbus had his; why couldn't he just go back (to Europe)?" said Horner, 10, of Norwich, a student at John B. Stanton Elementary School. "Columbus changed everything."
Across the country, some teachers are sh
Source: Yahoo News
October 12, 2006
The government's plans to give posthumous pardons to soldiers executed during World War I advanced when they were backed by parliament's upper house.Families of 306 men from Britain and the Commonwealth have been campaigning for years to clear the names of their relatives executed during the 1914-1918 conflict.
Members of the unelected House of Lords backed the plans contained in an amendment to the Armed Forces bill as it passed through the committee stage of t
