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: National Security Archive
January 27, 2006
The nation's leading history and political science associations, along with a number of prominent scholars of the Presidency and the Vietnam War, yesterday filed an amicus brief in a lawsuit brought by University of California, Davis, Professor Larry Berman. The case involves Berman's effort to obtain release under the Freedom of Information Act of two almost 40-year-old CIA memos to President Johnson.Represented by Matthew W.S. Estes, the scholars seek to alert
Source: MSNBC
January 27, 2006
The flight, and the lost crewmembers, deserve proper recognition and authentic commemoration. Historians, reporters, and every citizen need to take the time this week to remember what really happened, and especially to make sure their memories are as close as humanly possible to what really did happen.If that happens, here's the way the mission may be remembered:
Few people actually saw the Challenger tragedy unfold live on television.
T
Source: Yahoo News
January 27, 2006
Sixty-one years after the liberation of the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz, the grimmest symbol of the murder of six million Jews in World War II, ceremonies across Europe marked the first international Holocaust remembrance day.They came amid a storm provoked by an Iranian plan to stage a conference questioning the Holocaust, which Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has described as a "myth."
At the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in southern Pol
Source: Boston Globe
January 26, 2006
It's a birthday bash being heard around the world. The cobblestoned and turreted city of Mozart's birth was the focal point for Friday's 250th anniversary celebrations -- but the sound of the master's music was being heard around the globe.Orchestras halls and opera houses worldwide planned performances of his works. Piano students scheduled Mozart marathons and puppeteers were planning jubilee performances as hundreds of cities across five continents toasted the musical gen
Source: Chicago Tribune
January 27, 2006
Salvador Guilliem dangles on a narrow beam over the sunken remains of a mural painted by Indians shortly after the Spanish Conquest. Guilliem, an archeologist, points out the newly excavated red, green and ochre flourishes in one of the earliest paintings to show the mixing of the two cultures. The vivid scene of animals real and mythical cavorting around the edge of lakes that once shimmered in Mexico City was painted by Aztec Indians in the early 1530s during a rare, brief
Source: AP
January 27, 2006
Abraham Lincoln's appearance and historical documents that note his especially clumsy gait have long caused researchers to puzzle over whether he may have had a genetic disorder called Marfan syndrome. Now, members of the president's family tree are wondering if Lincoln had a different, incurable hereditary disease called ataxia that affects the coordination it takes to walk, write, speak and swallow. Researchers at the University of Minnesota have discovered a gene mu
Source: Reuters
January 27, 2006
Author James Frey confessed to Oprah Winfrey on Thursday that he made up details about every character in his memoir ``A Million Little Pieces'' and the talk show host apologized to her viewers, saying she felt ``duped.''``I have been really embarrassed by this,'' said Winfrey, whose praise for Frey's book in September helped make it the top-selling book on nonfiction lists in the United States last year.
``I really feel duped,'' she told Frey on her tele
Source: Guardian (UK)
January 26, 2006
By a clear majority, the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe yesterday backed a controversial motion demanding that the continent's 46-member human rights watchdog formally condemns "the crimes of totalitarian communist regimes".More than 60 members of the body's 315-seat assembly, made up of MPs from Europe's parliaments, were due to speak in a debate on a report by the conservative Swedish MP Goran Lindblad, which argued that 15 years after the collap
Source: Newsweek
January 26, 2006
Last September, Russia and Germany signed a deal to build a $5 billion gas pipeline running 1,200 kilometers under the Baltic from Vyborg near St. Petersburg to Greifswald on Germany's northeastern coast. The pipeline's projected route passes close to two of Tershkov's dumps, in the Gotland and Bornholm basins. Environmentalists in Russia and the Baltic states fear that construction could disturb the submerged and rusting shells and poison the sea. "It is very dangerous to build the pipelin
Source: BBC News
January 23, 2006
Evidence has emerged that British undercover forces were involved in fomenting the conflict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots ten years before the 1974 partition of Cyprus. The new evidence found by BBC Radio 4's programme Document centres on the mystery of Ted Macey, a British army major who was abducted, presumed killed by Greek Cypriot paramilitaries.
In 1964, Martin was a naval intelligence officer, sent to Cyprus to do an extraordinary job. Fighting
Source: Bloomberg News
January 25, 2006
Pennsylvania handed over Valley Forge National Historical Park, where George Washington's troops spent the winter of 1777-78, to the National Park Service 30 years ago. Governor Edward G. Rendell now says he may want it back. Plans to build a $100 million American Revolution museum at Valley Forge, 20 miles northwest of Philadelphia, are ``in crisis,'' Rendell said in a letter last month to Interior Department Secretary Gale Norton. The U.S. government should consider return
Source: National Geographic News
January 25, 2006
Drawing on evidence from animal remains—largely the bones of a mountain goat species called the Caucasian tur—scientists in the republic of Georgia have determined that Neandertals at a site were as capable hunters as the modern humans who later lived in the area. "[Neandertal] hunting patterns were indistinguishable in terms of the species they targeted and the ages of the animals they killed," said lead study author Daniel Adler, a paleoanthropologist
Source: Reuters
January 26, 2006
A South Korean appeals court on Thursday ordered two U.S. chemical firms to pay 63.1 billion won ($65.2 million) in damages to 20,000 of the country's Vietnam War veterans for exposure to defoliants such as Agent Orange. The Seoul High Court overturned two lower court decisions and found Dow Chemical Co. and Monsanto Co. negligent for manufacturing defoliants used by the U.S. military in the Vietnam War with an excess dioxin content, according to court papers.
&
Source: Toqueville Connection
January 26, 2006
A bitter row over a French law that recognises the "positive role" of colonialism appeared to be close to resolution Thursday after President Jacques Chirac asked for the controversial clause to be struck off the statute books.The president accepted advice from a parliamentary committee to resort to a rarely-used constitutional procedure in order to remove the offending article -- which appears in a government bill passed a year ago providing financial compensation
Source: Bangor Daily News
January 26, 2006
Ed Rice was home doing chores on Jan. 16 when an envelope arrived via FedEx. What he found inside, he said, made his jaw drop. Rice, the author of a book about legendary Indian Island baseball player Louis Sockalexis, who played in 94 games for the Cleveland Spiders from 1897 to 1899, now has what he believes to be the most compelling piece of evidence that Sockalexis was in fact the first American Indian to play major league baseball.Although Rice wrote "Baseball
Source: China View
January 25, 2006
Cliff paintings of hunters in rugged remote northwestern China appear to prove that Chinese were adept skiers as early as the Stone Age, Xinhua said Monday. The paintings in Altay, in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, "have been verified as humans hunting while skiing and, therefore, archaeologists can prove the Altay region to be a place of skiing some 100 to 200 centuries ago," the news agency said.
Wang Bo, a noted researcher with th
Source: Reuters
January 26, 2006
Filmmaker Steven Spielberg has torn open another old wound in Germany just as the country where the Holocaust was designed and the 1972 Olympics massacre happened prepares for the world's spotlight again. The American's new film "Munich" was launched in 400 cinemas across Germany on Thursday after weeks of intense media coverage that revived unwanted memories of the shockingly inept handling of events that led to the slaying of 11 Israeli athletes.
Mag
Source: CBC
January 26, 2006
German officials have announced a plan to build a new centre documenting the crimes of the Nazi secret service at the site of the group's former headquarters in Berlin.Representatives from the federal and Berlin's municipal government announced the new venture Wednesday, saying that they had chosen a local architecture firm to complete the project, estimated to cost nearly $25 million US.
Historian Andreas Nachama, former head of the Jewish Community in Berlin a
Source: Newsday
January 26, 2006
Bowing to a parent's complaint, school officials have stricken a book from an elementary school's Black History Month reading list because it contains a racial slur. "The teachers may see this as an example of something they can help fix, but we believe at fourth grade the children do not have the maturity to truly understand it," said parent Lisa Rex, whose complaint prompted the action.Published in 1995, "The Well" by Mildred Taylor is about a black fam
Source: Daily Telegraph (Australia)
January 26, 2006
Australian teachers have rejected Prime Minister John Howard's push to overhaul the teaching of history, saying his criticisms do not reflect what is happening in Australian schools.Kate Cameron, the immediate past national president of the History Teachers' Association, said Mr Howard of all people should know the Commonwealth had invested millions of dollars into the teaching of history.
She said the Prime Minister woould soon realise his claims that young peo
