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
August 15, 2005
Cristeta Comerford yesterday became the first woman to be named White House executive chef after a lengthy selection process.Laura Bush, the first lady, said she was delighted that Ms. Comerford, who has been an assistant chef in the White House since the mid-90's, had accepted the job. "Her passion for cooking can be tasted in every bite of her delicious creations," Mrs. Bush said.
As a known quantity, Ms. Comerford, a naturalized citizen from the Phi
Source: Toronto Star
August 16, 2005
British spies asked Canada to help infiltrate the Cold War-era government of what is now the South American country of Guyana, a newly declassified study reveals.Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, better known as MI6, sought assistance in placing a Canadian as "special economic adviser" to Dr. Cheddi Jagan, prime minister of British Guiana in the 1950s, says the study.
"The British hoped that the Canadians might be able to provide an economist
Source: Straits Times (Singapore)
August 16, 2005
THE hand-wringing over the nuclear destruction of two Japanese cities that occurs every August is fully understandable. The anniversary reports, however, seldom mention that the Germans and the Japanese were in the race to build the A-bomb.If the war had started later or lasted a little longer, nuclear history might well have read differently.
On Aug 5, 1945, Professor Yoshitaka Mimura of Hiroshima Bunri University was explaining to a seminar for officers
Source: Straits Times (Singapore)
August 16, 2005
According to a survey published yesterday by the Mainichi Shimbun, 43 per cent of the Japanese people think the war waged by Japan was wrong, while only 29 per cent think it was 'unavoidable'.It also found three in four Japanese believe there was not enough public discussion about war responsibility.
The Japanese people's ambivalence towards WWII is also seen in their attitudes towards Class A war criminals.
Some of these war criminals were la
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation of American Scientists.
August 16, 2005
Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) caused a stir lately by alleging that a classified military intelligence data mining program codenamed ABLE DANGER had identified September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta as a threat as early as summer of 2000 and that the 9/11 Commission had been so informed but had chosen to suppress the information. Was he right? In an official statement on the matter, former Commission Chair and Vice Chair Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton disputed Weldon's account, a
Source: NYT
August 16, 2005
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi observed the 60th anniversary of Japan's defeat in World War II on Monday by apologizing for the country's past militarism in Asia and pledging to uphold its postwar pacifism.In a speech at a government-sponsored memorial service at the Nippon Budokan hall here, Mr. Koizumi also reached out directly to China and South Korea by saying that the three nations should work together "in maintaining peace and aiming at development in the
Source: NYT
August 16, 2005
MEDINA AZAHARA, Spain - To hear historians tell it, this buried city three miles west of Córdoba was the Versailles of the Middle Ages, a collection of estates and palaces teeming with treasures that dazzled the most jaded traveler or world-weary aristocrat. Pools of mercury could be shaken to spray beams of reflected sunlight across marble walls and ceilings of gold, according to contemporary records.
Doors carved of ivory and ebony led to sprawlin
Source: AP
August 16, 2005
A judge has ruled that a collection of rare, Civil War-era letters belong to the state rather than the man who has had them in his family for generations. The state sued after Charleston resident Thomas Willcox tried to auction off the letters. Willcox, who is a descendant of Confederate Gen. Evander Law, filed for bankruptcy soon after. The collection includes more than 440 letters detailing life in South Carolina between 1861 and 1863.Many letters are correspondence betwee
Source: CNN
August 16, 2005
POWELL, Wyoming Most of the buildings are gone. Not that there was much to them, anyway. Many were little more than tarpaper shacks when the first internees arrived at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, a World War II internment camp for Americans of Japanese ancestry.The desolate landscape that so harshly greeted new arrivals in the summer of 1942 looks much the way it did then, with a little more grass maybe, and a little less sagebrush.
But the memories re
Source: LAT
August 16, 2005
According to the White House, one of three books Bush chose to read on his five-week vacation is "Salt: A World History" by Mark Kurlansky, who chronicled the rise and fall of what once was considered the world's most strategic commodity. The other two books he reportedly brought to Crawford are "Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar" by Edvard Radzinsky and "The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History" by John M. Barry.Bu
Source: Taipei Times
August 15, 2005
The British Foreign Office ordered the assassination in 1941 of one of India's most prominent freedom fighters, Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, according to documents presented by an Irish historian and reported by a television network yesterday. Eunan O'Halpin, a professor at Trinity College in Dublin, said he found the documents at the Public Records Office in London and presented the information at a lecture on Sunday in Calcutta, one day before the 59th anniversary of India's independence from
Source: Reuters
August 16, 2005
A black woman executed in 1945 for the murder of a white man she claimed held her as a slave and threatened to kill her if she left will receive a pardon, officials in Georgia said on Tuesday. Georgia's Board of Pardons and Paroles voted to grant the rare posthumous pardon to Lena Baker, who worked as a maid for Ernest Knight, after reviewing her case, which has been described by some historians as a legal lynching. She was the only woman to die in the southern state's electric chair.
Source: The Korea Times
8-16--05
School textbooks have changed tremendously since 1956 when the nation established a modern educational system after its liberation from Japanese colonial rule. The depiction of South Korea’s modern history has been revised with successive administrations and the nation’s political evolution toward democracy to include changes in orthography, new songs, scientific discoveries and the arts.In particular, history textbooks have been subject to frequent changes, as they carry ``
Source: Times Online (UK)
August 16, 2005
IT IS hardly surprising that the committee drafting Iraq’s constitution is having difficulty reaching agreement: for almost all its long history, Iraq has been held together only by force. In the past 400 years it has arguably known only 13 years, from 1945 to 1958, when it was independent, democratic and unified. Mesopotamia has been settled for at least 12,000 years. Between the 10th and 12th centuries Baghdad was capital of the Muslim world. The city’s destruction and the
Source: AFP
August 15, 2005
Elderly British veterans of World War II in East Asia, many of them former prisoners of war, gathered at the Imperial War Museum or the 60th anniversary of VJ Day.Prince Philip, husband of
Queen Elizabeth II, who served with the Royal Navy in the Pacific and witnessed the Japanese surrender on August 15, 1945, mingled with the 100-odd veterans as they recalled the years of conflict.
Philip, patron of the Burma Star Association, which represent
Source: Brooks Bulletin
August 15, 2005
British spies asked Canada to help infiltrate the Cold War-era government of what is now the South American country of Guyana, a newly declassified study reveals.
"The British hoped that the Canadians might be able to provide an economist who could moderate what they termed Jagan's 'extreme left-wing tendencies' and guide his policies along 'sound lines.' "The scheme, which never came to fruition, was just one episode in the cloak-dagger relationship between
Source: Armenia Liberty
August 15, 2005
A representative of the prestigious Duke University in the United States reiterated on Monday its calls for the release of a Turkish doctoral student who is standing trial in Armenia for allegedly trying to smuggle old books to Turkey. Armenian prosecutors, however, remained clearly unwilling to drop their unusually harsh charges brought against Yektan Turkyilmaz despite his insistence that he was unaware of Armenian laws regulating the export of objects that are deemed “cultural or historical v
Source: WP
August 15, 2005
Striking a conciliatory note on the 60th anniversary of Japan's defeat in World War II, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi reiterated an apology Monday for "the huge damage and suffering" caused by his nation's past military aggression and pledged it would never happen again.But other events here and abroad underscored the extraordinary divisiveness that lingers over Japanese hostilities six decades after the end of World War II. In contrast with the cordial relation
Source: Christian Science Monitor
August 15, 2005
Like pardons and executive orders, vetoes are among the cherished privileges of the Oval Office. Ike liked them. So did presidents Truman and Cleveland - and both Roosevelts. But apparently not George W. Bush. In fact, well into the fifth year of his presidency, he has yet to issue a single veto.Although the streak could end next month - Mr. Bush is threatening a veto if Congress eases his restrictions on federal funding for stem-cell research - the Bush era thus
Source: Japan Focus
August 13, 2005
"The Japanese media operate in an environment where free speech is guaranteed by the law and the Constitution, and where there is no overt government censorship." But Tessa Morris-Suzuki charges that "The NHK Affair ... has exposed the extent to which formal media freedoms are being hollowed out by a combination of corrosive forces." (The NHK Affair involves charges that the broadcast giant caved in to pressure from the government to make changes in a documentary about the &q
