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: CNN
December 27, 2005
The impeachment of former President Clinton is in a gray area of history, too long ago to be a current event, too recent to be judged in perspective.
Yet history is already judging Clinton in the place where millions of students get their information about him -- textbooks.
Seven years after he was impeached in a scandal of sex, perjury and bitter politics, Clinton has become a fixture in major high school texts.The impeachment is portra
Source: Wa Po
December 26, 2005
Partisan political calculations are shaping a clash of visions of how New Orleans should be rebuilt, says presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, who heads the Theodore Roosevelt Center at the city's Tulane University.
Bush's decision "to keep Katrina under the radar screen" and "dribble out aid" is driven by a fear of overseeing a costly foreign war and a massive domestic initiative simultaneously, Brinkley said, just as Vietnam and the Great Society program c
Source: NYT
December 26, 2005
A Turkish court has opened a case against an Armenian-Turkish journalist for his comments on a six-month sentence it gave him earlier for denigrating Turkish identity, lawyers involved in bringing the case said Sunday.
The Istanbul court was acting after a group of nationalist lawyers asked the court to file a case against Hrant Dink, editor in chief of the bilingual Turkish and Armenian weekly Agos, and three Agos journalists, saying that the journalists ''tried to influence the j
Source: NYT
December 23, 2005
A week after Orhan Pamuk, Turkey's top novelist, went on trial, charged with insults to the Turkish identity, an Istanbul court convicted two other intellectuals on the same charges. Zulkuf Kisanak, who compiled stories of forced evacuations of Kurdish villages by the Turkish military in his book "Lost Villages," received a $2,200 fine. Aziz Ozer, a publisher whose magazine carried articles titled "80 Years of the Turkish Republic, 80 Years of Fascism" and "No to a Partn
Source: NYT
December 26, 2005
PORTO. A chance discovery in recent months during renovations of a building in this Atlantic port city has revealed a dark secret from Portugal's past: a 16th-century synagogue.
Built when Portugal's Jews had been forced to convert to Catholicism or risk being burned at the stake, the house of worship was hidden behind a false wall in a four-story house that the Rev. Agostinho Jardim Moreira, a Roman Catholic priest, was converting into a home for some older parishioners.
Source: NYT
December 23, 2005
WITH his latest film, "Munich," Steven Spielberg forgoes the emotional bullying and pop thrills that come so easily to him to tell the story of a campaign of vengeance that Israel purportedly brought against Palestinian terrorists in the wake of the 1972 Olympics. An unsparingly brutal look at two peoples all but drowning in a sea of their own blood, "Munich" is by far the toughest film of the director's career and the most anguished. Mr. Spielberg has been pummeling audience
Source: NYT
December 25, 2005
While David Horowitz insists his campaign for intellectual diversity is nonpartisan, it is fueled, in large measure, by studies that show the number of Democratic professors is generally much larger than the number of Republicans. A survey in 2003 by researchers at Santa Clara University found the ratio of Democrats to Republicans on college faculties ranged from 3 to 1 in economics to 30 to 1 in anthropology. In a debate with Mr. Horowitz last summer, Russell Ja
Source: LAT
December 24, 2005
Louse-borne diseases such as typhus and trench fever devastated Napoleon's army during his ill-fated invasion of Russia in 1812, killing nearly a third of his army, according to a study by French researchers. Napoleon invaded Russia with half a million men that summer but escaped with only a few thousand. Twenty-five thousand French soldiers escaped to Vilnius, Lithuania, during the retreat, but only 3,000 survived to continue the retreat. The rest were buried in
Source: LAT
December 24, 2005
The last paragraph of a letter discovered by a Newport Beach attorney sheds new light on Upton Sinclair. "This letter is for yourself alone," it read. "Stick it away in your safe, and some time in the far distant future the world may know the real truth about the matter. I am here trying to make plain my own part in the story."
The story was "Boston," Sinclair's 1920s novelized condemnation of the trial and execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanze
Source: Chicago Sun Times
December 24, 2005
Truman K. Gibson Jr., a Chicago attorney who had been the last surviving member of the World War II-era "black Cabinet" of Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S Truman, died Friday at Mercy Hospital after an illness of five weeks. He was 93.
As an advocate for African- American soldiers in the War Department from 1940 through 1945, Mr. Gibson fought tirelessly to break down the segregation that ruled the U.S. Army, to persuade the military leadership to commit black
Source: NYT Book Review
December 25, 2005
Bowing to domestic and international pressure, the Brazilian government has begun releasing intelligence files compiled by the former military dictatorship on government opponents, including victims of torture and those who disappeared. A preliminary list of people whose activities were monitored by military intelligence during the dictatorship, which ruled from 1964 to 1985, has already been made public. As of Jan. 1, those people will be allowed to examine thei
Source: NYT
December 24, 2005
The 112 families led by Chief Little Shell lost their North Dakota homeland to the government in 1892 when a chief of the Pembina Chippewa signed away their rights to it, without their authority and in their absence. The Little Shell had left home, in the Turtle Mountain area, to go hunting, and an Indian agent forced the other Chippewa to accept the Ten Cent Treaty - so called by Indians because it bought about 10 million acres of Chippewa land, including that of the Little Shell, for a million
Source: NYT
December 24, 2005
The attorney general should be immune from lawsuits for ordering wiretaps of Americans without permission from a court, Samuel A. Alito Jr., President Bush's Supreme Court nominee, wrote in a memorandum in 1984 as a government lawyer in the Reagan administration.
The memorandum, released yesterday by the National Archives, made recommendations concerning a lawsuit against former Attorney General John N. Mitchell over a wiretap he had authorized without a court's permission in 1970.
Source: NYT
December 25, 2005
The Islamist organization that is the largest de facto opposition group in Egypt's Parliament said Saturday that its leader had not meant to say that the Holocaust never happened when he called it a myth this week.
The office of Muhammad Mehdi Akef, the supreme guide of the group, the Muslim Brotherhood, said that his initial remark, on Thursday, had been intended to make a point about Western attitudes toward democracy and the Palestinians. In that message, Mr. Akef said, "Wes
Source: Wa Po
December 25, 2005
STURBRIDGE, Mass. -- Historical fact: In the 1830s, many rural New Englanders followed a religion so strait-laced that they did not celebrate Christmas.
Accordingly, at Old Sturbridge Village -- an outdoor museum where an 1830s town has been re-created down to the cider mill and the Gloucester Old Spots pigs -- they used to ignore the holiday as well.
Used to. Until, in the past few years, attendance started to slip. "How many times can you tell the story, 'They
Source: Sun-Sentinel
December 23, 2005
When Christmas Eve comes, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), will track Santa Claus during his annual flight.
NORAD is responsible for handling the air defense of the North America continent. But it has also been tracking Santa's movements on Christmas Eve for the past 50 years.NORAD uses four high-tech systems to track Santa -- radar, satellites, Santa Cams and jet fighter aircraft.
The satellites have infrared sensor
Source: CNN
December 23, 2005
A rare German gun that may have belonged to Adolph Hitler -- allegedly taken as a souvenir 60 years ago when U.S. forces captured one of his secret hideaways -- could fetch thousands of dollars in an online auction next month, organizers said.
No one knows for sure whether Hitler owned the Krieghoff Drilling combination shotgun and rifle engraved with the initials "A.H." It is to be sold by Midwest Exchange, a Bloomington pawn shop, at auction at
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
December 23, 2005
On a rocky hillside in Nazareth, the town where Jesus grew up and spent much of his life, a familiar scene is taking shape. In the courtyard of a stone stable, surrounded by rough-hewn wooden farming implements, a young man and his wife are comforting their newborn son. They are dressed in simple, handwoven tunics, and the baby is lying on a bed of fresh straw in an animal's trough.
It is as if they had been transported back in time 2,000 years to the birth of Christ and the simple
Source: Haaretz
December 23, 2005
If the central sewage line for Jerusalem's Old City, which runs down the slope of the village of Silwan, had not gotten blocked a year ago, it would probably have been many years before we would have discovered the real dimensions of the historic Pool of Siloam from the Second Temple Period.
The pool, whose present small dimensions date from Byzantine times, is the outlet for the spring water coursing through the ancient Hezekiah's tunnel. It was once huge - three to four dunams.
Source: Japan Times
December 23, 2005
The Japanese government is considering convening a second meeting of a joint Japanese-South Korean history study group in January, government sources said Friday.
The panel will set up a smaller group to examine the issue of history textbooks, in addition to its three current subgroups: one dealing with ancient history, another on medieval history and a third on contemporary history.The government hopes the new round of talks will improve ties between the two co
