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: ABC.net.au
July 4, 2006
apan's Foreign Minister has become the nation's most senior politician to offer a prayer for former allied prisoners of the Japanese during the Second World War. However, he stopped short of apologising for Japan's harsh treatment of the prisoners.
Taro Aso is one of the candidates competing to replace Junichiro Koizumi as Prime Minister in a few months' time.
As Shane McLeod reports, in making a public prayer for prisoners of war, the minister may have been trying to d
Source: Al Jazeera
June 27, 2006
The photograph on the Jazeera web site shows quite clearly that it has been destroyed right down to the base. I doubt whether it would be simple to restore.The minaret of 'Ana is commonly attributed to the Uqaylids and the 5th/11th century, though its niches are nearly identical to those of the Baghdad Gate at Raqqa, and thus more probably of the 6th/12th century. It was situated on the island at 'Ana and belonged to the fourth phase of the congregational mosque. When
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
July 3, 2006
The provost of the University of Wisconsin at Madison announced last week that he would conduct a "review" of the teaching of an instructor at the university who believes that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were orchestrated by the U.S. government.
The provost's announcement came amid calls from state legislators to fire the instructor, Kevin Barrett, after he discussed his views on a local conservative radio talk show. Mr. B
Source: Reuters
July 3, 2006
Wartime Pope Pius XII's views on the Jews, one of the sorest points in Catholic-Jewish relations, could be in for an important reappraisal when archives from his years as Vatican prime minister are opened in Rome in September.The Vatican said on Friday it would open all files from the Pius XI papacy which ran from 1922 until just before the 1939 outbreak of World War Two. Critics say successor Pius XII, whose views as a Vatican official would be reflected in the files, did t
Source: Lexington Herald-Leader
July 3, 2006
Thomas Jefferson isn't about to start listening to an iPod, with telltale earbud wires dangling from under his three-cornered hat as he walks the streets of Colonial Williamsburg.But people far from the restored 18th-century capital of Virginia can use their portable audio players to hear costumed interpreter Bill Barker talk about portraying Jefferson or, in honor of the Fourth of July holiday, read the Declaration of Independence.
The world's largest liv
Source: NYT
July 2, 2006
IT'S a badly kept secret among scholars of American history that nothing much really happened on Thursday, July 4, 1776.
Although this date is emblazoned on the Declaration, the Colonies had actually voted for independence two days earlier; the document wasn't signed until a month later. When John Adams predicted that the "great anniversary festival" would be celebrated forever, from one end of the continent to the other, he was talking about July 2.
Indeed, t
Source: NYT
July 2, 2006
Critics of the Bush administration say that extraordinary secrecy has generated the rash of disclosures. "People in the government who believe something wrong or illegal is going on feel they have no recourse but to go to the press," said Jeffrey H. Smith, a former C.I.A. general counsel.
But some current and former intelligence officers express exasperation at what they see as journalists' arrogance in publishing in the face of government pleas for caution.
&
Source: The Guardian (London)
July 3, 2006
As Spain rouses from its collective amnesia about its civil war, the government is attempting to recover millions of documents on the conflict and the Republican exile that followed, dispersed throughout 12 countries including Britain, France, Mexico and the United States.
The archives, many of them private, contain everything from letters from prisoners and diplomatic correspondence to an odd Russian documentary apparently showing Pablo Picasso and the Communist party secretary gen
Source: NYT
July 1, 2006
If art can be considered a language, the British Museum can reasonably claim to be polyglot, thanks to its large and eclectic collection and its practiced interpretation of global cultures. It was with just such a mandate — to present the world to the world in the spirit of the Enlightenment — that it was founded in 1753.In the two centuries that followed, it profited handsomely from Britain's imperial reach and trading links, although it always emphasized the sc
Source: NYT
July 2, 2006
Jaap Penraat, an architect and industrial designer who helped 406 Jews sneak out of Nazi-occupied Netherlands and withstood torture to protect fellow members of the resistance, has died. He was 88.
Penraat died June 25 at his home in Catskill, N.Y., of esophageal cancer, said his daughter, Noelle Penraat.
Penraat was in his 20s when he began forging identity cards for Jews. He was arrested, imprisoned for several months and tortured, but refused to tell his captors anyt
Source: NYT
July 1, 2006
Just two days before a tight national election, a judge has ordered the arrest of former President Luis Echeverría on genocide charges in connection with his role during the massacre of student protesters here in 1968, overturning a lower court ruling.
The arrest of Mr. Echeverría, who is 84 and in poor health, came after two failed attempts by a special prosecutor to charge him with the deaths and disappearances of dozens of students and leftist dissidents in the late 1960's and ea
Source: The Times (London)
July 3, 2006
Homer could have been a woman, according to a forthcoming book by a specialist in oral literature.
Historian and linguist Andrew Dalby is challenging the accepted gender of one of the most influential writers of all time -- the poet who created the Greek epics The Iliad and The Odyssey in the seventh century BC.
Dr Dalby said: ''There is no direct evidence of the poet's identity and therefore no justification for the customary assumption that the two epics were composed by a
Source: Independent (UK)
July 2, 2006
A 13-year-old schoolgirl who kept a poignant and ultimately tragic diary that recounts what it was like to grow up in Stalin's Soviet Union has been hailed as Russia's answer to Anne Frank.
The diaries of teenager Nina Lugovskaya, called I Want to Live: The Diaries of a Young Girl in Stalin's Russia, are to be published in English on Thursday after lying in a KGB file for over half a century. They offer an unusually perceptive view of the Soviet Union in the 1930s, combined with in
Source: Wyatt Earp pal's roaming days ended in Ohio
July 2, 2006
More than 147,000 people rest in Green Lawn Cemetery, but only one was friend and bodyguard to legendary lawman Wyatt Earp. Hidden in an unmarked grave for 108 years, Daniel G. Tipton is an enigma in stories of Earp, his posse and their legendary gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Ariz.
But three historians traced Tipton's path to the cemetery's shaded greens on Columbus' West Side.
Yesterday, they met there to honor Tipton at his final resting place in section 45 of Gr
Source: asahi.com
June 26, 2006
At 84 years of age, Toyo Ishii wants to set the record straight about a period in the immediate aftermath of World War II that is almost forgotten.
Ishii, who worked as a nurse for the Imperial Japanese Army at a medical college in Tokyo, told health authorities about sites in Tokyo's Shinjuku Ward that she says contain the remains of soldiers killed in the war as well as foreign nationals.
Ishii said the burial sites are in the ward's Toyama district, where a number
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 1, 2006
A proposal by Japan's nationalist foreign minister for a service to commemorate PoWs who died in Japan was in tatters yesterday when it emerged that ambassadors from Allied nations would not attend.
Taro Aso, whose family firm used British and Australian PoWs as slave labour during the Second World War, is understood to have invited the British, Dutch, Australian and United States ambassadors to the Juganji Shrine in Osaka for a ceremony on Monday.
But yesterday his off
Source: Thomas Mann paper published by AFSCME 2910
June 19, 2006
Colleagues at the Library of Congress (LC) report that LC administrators are seeking to scale back cataloging and as a result there has been a firestorm of protest within the national library community. In his essay, "What is Going on at the Library of Congress?"
Reference librarian Thomas Mann argues that systematic subject access to book collections available on site remains an essential mission to support scholarship, despite the unsound claims that the "digital age&quo
Source: Press Release -- National Coalition for History
June 30, 2006
If you are a historian, archivist, genealogical researcher, or other user of a National Archives and Records Administration facility, you need to act. And you need to act today or next week at the latest!
PLEASE CONTACT BOTH YOUR U.S. SENATORS and ask them to add $22 million to NARA's budget over the House recommendation -- this figure includes $2 million needed to repair the Main Archives building that just this week suffered flood damage; funds to make up the $12 million shortfal
Source: BBC
June 30, 2006
The son of the British commander at the Somme has defended his father on the eve of the battle's 90th anniversary.
Field Marshal Douglas Haig's role in the World War I battle has made him a controversial military figure.
Haig - buried at Dryburgh Abbey in the Borders - was a hero at the end of the war but subsequently branded by some historians as a "butcher".
His son George Alexander Eugene Douglas Haig, 2nd Earl Haig, has spoken out to "s
Source: National Geographic News
June 30, 2006
A 17th-century well discovered last year in Jamestown, Virginia, could reveal rich details about the environmental health of the Chesapeake Bay 400 years ago, say archaeologists who are excavating the site.
The well may have been dug under the orders of Captain John Smith, whose disciplined leadership helped establish Jamestown as England's first permanent colony in the New World."We are going under the idea that it is quite possibly John Smith's wel
