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: NYT
November 21, 2005
If his name is unfamiliar, it may be because George M. Elsey is the last Washington aide infected with what Franklin D. Roosevelt archly called "a passion for anonymity." Mr. Elsey is certainly among the last men living who worked in the Roosevelt White House, as a young Naval reservist in the top-secret Map Room, transmitting communications and tracking troop positions in World War II.Now 87 and preparing to leave Washington after more than 60 years to be cl
Source: NYT
November 21, 2005
The files promise a collection of new evidence for victims of human rights abuses during a a 36-year civil conflict.Last summer, authorities from the Guatemalan human rights ombudsman's office, searching a munitions depot here, discovered what appear to be all the files of the National Police, an agency so inextricably linked to human rights abuses during this country's 36-year civil conflict that it was disbanded as part of the peace accords signed in 1996.
At
Source: NYT
November 19, 2005
A Turkish book publisher said Friday that the government was suing it for distributing a translated book that the government charges is critical of the Turkish identity, army and state and the founder of the republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
The publisher, Fatih Tas, the owner of Aram Publishing, could face three years in jail for issuing the book, "Spoils of War: The Human Cost of America's Arms Trade" by John Tirman, which focuses on military sales to Turkey. It was publ
Source: NYT
November 19, 2005
In their graphic and unflattering drawings of Japan's fellow Asians and in the unapologetic, often offensive contents of their speech bubbles, two $10 comic books reveal some of the sentiments underlying Japan's worsening relations with the rest of Asia.
They also point to Japan's longstanding unease with the rest of Asia and its own sense of identity, which is akin to Britain's apartness from the Continent. Much of Japan's history in the last century and a half has been guided by t
Source: NYT
November 19, 2005
President Roh Moo Hyun of South Korea urged Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan to stop visiting a nationalistic Japanese war memorial in a meeting here between the leaders on Friday, saying the visits raised fears of a revival of Japanese militarism.The bilateral talks, which took place on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting, took place just a month after Mr. Koizumi's latest trip to the Yasukuni Shrine, a memorial that co
Source: NYT
November 19, 2005
Congress agreed Friday to place a statue of civil rights leader Rosa Parks in the Capitol's Statuary Hall.
Parks, who died Oct. 24 at age 92, refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Ala., bus in 1955 -- an act of civil disobedience that helped spark the civil rights movement.
Both the House and the Senate approved by voice vote a bill placing the statue in the Capitol and sent the legislation to President Bush for his signature.
Source: NYT
November 19, 2005
A federal jury in Memphis yesterday found a former military colonel from El Salvador responsible for crimes against humanity during that country's civil war in the 1980's and ordered him to pay $6 million in damages.
The nine-member jury found that the colonel, Nicolás Carranza, had "command responsibility" for the torture of a Salvadoran who was forced to confess falsely to killing an American military adviser, Lt. Cmdr. Albert Schaufelberger, in 1983.
Source: BBC News
November 18, 2005
A man has invoked the 1689 Bill of Rights to fight a £60 parking fine from Worcester City Council at a tribunal. Robin de Crittenden, 67, of Willenhall, near Wolverhampton, argues the bill protects people from having to pay fines until convicted by a court. He said the challenge aimed "to put the politicians back in their kennels".
The National Parking Adjudication Service reserved judgment on the case but is expected to notify the parties
Source: AP
November 18, 2005
PHILADELPHIA The National Museum of American Jewish History is planning to build a new facility that could raise its profile and accommodate at least four times more visitors.
The museum, which is in the midst of a 100 (M) million dollar fundraising campaign, plans to acquire and raze a building on a prime corner of Independence Mall. That’s half a block from the museum’s current downtown site.With a more prominent location within a block of the Liberty Bell and
Source: Romanesko
November 18, 2005
Star-Telegram editors launched an investigation after a reader noticed that a Nov. 10 story by Ken Parish Perkins included a paragraph without attribution that appeared verbatim in Entertainment Weekly. Editors then found several stories and columns over about a two-year period in which the TV critic used either whole sentences or long phrases in sentences that were taken from other newspapers, magazines and Web sites verbatim without attribution.
Source: NYT
November 18, 2005
In late 1505, Pope Julius II asked the Swiss, an impoverished people at that time before bank secrecy, whose exports consisted mainly of their own sons, to dispatch 200 soldiers to Rome to serve as his personal palace guard.
Swiss mercenaries once served in a number of European countries, most notably as the guard of the French kings, but the papal guard is the only one to have survived.
So this year the veterans of the guard throughout the valleys and mountains of Swi
Source: NYT
November 18, 2005
Some famous people never leave their hometowns. Some never go back. And some have tangled, breakup-filled, yet enduring love affairs. So it is with Muhammad Ali and Louisville.
This is the self-proclaimed Gateway to the South where Ali was born Cassius Clay 63 years ago, where he grew up in a modest bungalow on the all-black west side, where a color line determined where he could shop, eat and see movies.
But it was also here that a white police officer named Joe Martin
Source: Amazon.com
November 18, 2005
It was the year of books named after years, and our favorite of those, and of any history book in 2005, was Charles C. Mann's eye-opening survey of new discoveries about the vibrant civilizations in the Americas before the arrival of Europeans, 1491. The other books include: 2. A Great Improvisation : Franklin, France, and the Birth of America by Stacy Schiff
3. At Day's Close: Night in Times Past by A. Roger Ekirch
4. History on Trial : My D
Source: The Dougout (Blog)
November 17, 2005
This is the official history published by the U.S. Army's Center of Military History. The volumes produced in the United States Army in World War II series represent one of the most ambitious historical writing projects ever conducted. Popularly known as the "Green Books," the series itself constitutes but a fraction of the historical material available on World War II. A broad foundation of records and recollections, carefully documented and annotated in the footnotes of each volume,
Source: CNN
November 17, 2005
A diamond necklace believed to have been made for 18th century Russian empress Catherine the Great fetched over $1.5 million (euro1.3 million) at auction Thursday night in Geneva, but sold at just below the high-end estimate.Another record was set for the price of a single pearl, when the drop-shaped "La Regente" sold for 3.27 million francs ($2.5 million; euro2.1 million), three times the low-end estimate.
That pearl, which weighs over 30
Source: Armenian News Network/Groong
November 18, 2005
In what has already become a source of heated debate in Massachusetts,a Lincoln-Sudbury High School history teacher and student, along with another teacher and the Washington-based Assembly of Turkish American Associations, have filed a lawsuit against the state regarding the Department of Education's curriculum guide concerning the teaching
of genocide.
Lincoln-Sudbury High School history teacher Bill Schechter said in the original draft of the curriculum guide, composed in
Source: NBC17.com
November 18, 2005
The shipwreck believed to be the remains of Blackbeard's flagship was almost destroyed two months ago by Hurricane Ophelia. Now, archaeologists are scrambling to launch a major salvage effort before the wreck's secrets are lost to the sea.History records Blackbeard's flagship, the 40-gun Queen Anne's Revenge, ran aground near Beaufort Inlet in 1718. Archaeologists believe a treasure of information about the notorious pirate lies in a jumble of cannon and timber on the ocean
Source: The Toronto Star
November 17, 2005
Relics from the War of 1812 have sparked another cross-border row, this one over the fate of booty plundered from the White House when the British sacked Washington, D.C.
A Canadian filmmaker has launched a crusade to stop U.S. treasure hunters from scavenging the wreck of HMS Fantome, which many believe was returning to Halifax with loot from the White House and Capitol Building when she sank in a storm on Nov. 24, 1814."It is not beyond imagination to see
Source: AP
November 18, 2005
More than a quarter century after the laborious work began, the New Testament has finally been translated into Gullah, the creole language spoken by slaves and their descendants for generations along the sea islands of the Southeast coast.
Gullah is an oral language, so the translation was painstaking, beginning in 1979 with a team of Gullah speakers who worked with Pat and Claude Sharpe, translation consultants with Wycliffe Bible Translators.Many efforts have
Source: Yahoo News
November 18, 2005
Perhaps no era in human history has provided more cinematic fodder than Germany's Nazi reign. But until recently, most filmmakers have steered clear of any attempts to humanize the period's everyday German, especially the myriad Nazi followers.
The newest film to tackle Germany's Nazi past is Dennis Gansel's "Before the Fall" (Napola), which Picture This Entertainment opens Friday in Los Angeles, also engages the verboten with an evocative coming-of-age story told against
