Breaking News
Highlights
- Will a New Bear Market Bring Eugenics Movement Back? New Study from Socionomics Institute Says It's Happened in the Past, Could Happen Again
- New York Times Washington correspondent Jodi Kantor to write book on Obamas
- Sweden sends back Maori remains
- Obama confronts history on Great Wall of China
- Watergate 'Gap' Mystery to be Solved?
- Soviet lessons from Afghanistan
- New Web Site Makes Internet Time Traveling Easier
- Ancients 'had heart disease too'
- U.S. Attends International Criminal Court Meeting for First Time
- Letter Lincoln Wrote to Boy After Inauguration for Sale
WEEK OF NOVEMBER 16, 2009
New York Times Washington correspondent Jodi Kantor to write book on Obamas
Forgotten 1958 Time Capsule on Display at University of Chicago Law School
Ancient Greek worshippers showed inclination towards the Sun
Dominican archaeologist closes in on Cleopatra, top Egyptologist says
"September 11 didn't change everything," says British academic
Commission Sends Schools Civil War History Lesson (Virginia)
Events planned to commemorate first major engagement of Civil War
Documents show secret messages from Moscow sparked German unification plans
Obama Administration Has Achieved More in Middle East Than Bush Did in Eight Years, State Dept. Says
Water pipeline of Peter the First epoch discovered under Moscow
Cheating bankers nothing new, 19th century 'Madoff medal' shows
U.S. Attends International Criminal Court Meeting for First Time
Body of Kidnapped British Journalist Reportedly Found in Lebanon 23 Years Later
West Virginia's Byrd becomes the longest-serving member of Congress
Emily Chang, CNN Reporter, Detained In Shanghai Over Obama-Mao T-Shirt
Jerusalem: To two faiths, a holy patch of land; to the world, a powder keg
Old African-American cemetery relocation takes slow, delicate work (Atlanta)
To cut deficit, Red Cross sells treasures amassed over decades
CBS News launching turn-of-decade look at America's position in the world
What happens to the archives of minority newspapers that go out of existence?
Families of first world war tank crew commemorate historic battle (France)
Metal Thieves Steal 1,500 Pound Cannon From Veteran's Cemetary (California)
Officials Discuss Plans to Bring Gitmo Detainees to Illinois
South Pole explorers to drill for Sir Ernest Shackleton's Whisky
Muslim academics and students are turning against Darwin's theory
Benito Mussolini regarded Adolf Hitler as a 'sentimentalist'
WEEK OF NOVEMBER 9, 2009
Human bones found at Saanich construction site may be 1,000 years old (Canada)
Giuliani: Obama Repeating 'Mistake of History' With Sept. 11 Trial Decision
How Old Is Old Enough? A Look at When Children are Considered Adults
Arms dealer involved in the Iran-Contra scandal returns, now selling his image
China Focuses on Territorial Issues as It Equates Tibet to U.S. Civil War South
Unseen colour 3D film of Queen's Coronation to be broadcast for first time (UK)
Thatcher death text sparks diplomatic flurry among Canadian Conservatives
Some Fear Bush Administration Could Become Target in 9/11 Trial
Troubled vet journeys back to Vietnam -- this time to offer helping hand
Documents Show U.S. Officials Worried Mullah Omar Was Growing Closer to Bin Laden in 1998
Court Rules CIA Did Not Violate Valerie Plame's First Amendment Rights
Politico reports that RNC's health plan has covered abortion since 1991
Great writers 'fail' US computer program designerd to assess student essays
Pakistani Army ran Muslim extremist training camps, says anti-terrorist expert
Turkey is to allow Kurdish television as peace process gathers pace
On display for the first time: Diary of British reporter who exposed Stalin's famine in Ukraine (UK)
Israel displays coins from Roman destruction of Jewish Temple 2,000 years ago
Silverware taken from USS Arizona during World War II pulled from auction
Researchers find 2 Japanese supersubmarines sunk by U.S. at end of WWII
George W. Bush Announces Programs for Bush Institute at Southern Methodist U.
Two German Killers Demanding Anonymity Sue Wikipedia's Parent
In Newark, NJ a rare treature trove of historical documents and assorted artifacts
At 75, Charles Manson still has the power to influence others
Japanese celebrate 20th anniversary of Emperor Akihito's coronation
Scalia uncomfortable saying if he'd support Brown v. Board of Education
France and Germany Use the Remembrance of a War to Promote Reconciliation
Obama 'risks Suez-like disaster' in Afghanistan, says key adviser
Bush Warns of 'Temptation' to Abandon Free-Market System in Wake of Recession
Radical Muslim Cleric Who Defended World Trade Center Bombers a Guest of NYC Mayor
Diocese protects oldest known European records in the United States (Florida)
Pope Benedict Urges Europeans to Keep Alive Their Christian Roots
MI figures out what went wrong in Lavon affair - 55 years later
Reagan Associates and Friends Commemorate the Fall of the Berlin Wall
President Bush outlining his vision for a unique public policy Institute
Archaeologists find mummy of young priestess from 300-450 AD in Peru
'Important troves of African-American historical materials' in Trouble
UMass Criticized for invitation to convicted terrorist, Ray Luc Levasseur
'Recapitation' of James Garfield Statue at Hiram College (Ohio)
70 years after WW2 erupted, a new battle for history rages in Europe
Britain’s last First World War veteran shuns Remembrance Day
Armistice Day memorial service: nation falls silent to honour war dead
Nicolas Sarkozy accused of rewriting history after Facebook slip
Rasmussen Report: 28% Say Today's Veterans Face More Challenges Than Vietnam Returnees
Tomb of Tutankhamun to undergo 5-year cleaning and restoration
Friday, November 20, 2009
Will a New Bear Market Bring Eugenics Movement Back? New Study from Socionomics Institute Says It's Happened in the Past, Could Happen Again
Source: Press Release (11-20-09)
A new study by The Socionomics Institute shows a link between bear markets and the rising popularity of eugenics movements over a span of 225 years.
"Although most people think that society has dumped eugenics on the trash heap of bad ideas," says analyst Alan Hall, "its core ideology of top-down reproductive control is likely to regain popularity in the upcoming bear market. There are already signs of resurgence."
For example, during the long bear market from 1966-1982, India sterilized more than 8 million poor people, China instituted its "One Child Policy," and sterilizations of Navajo Indians more than doubled from 1972-78. During the recent bear market that started in 2008, the more controlling aspects of eugenics have begun to reappear. In 2008, the Dutch Labor Party MP proposed forced sterilization of women deemed "unfit to procreate" (it didn't pass), and, in September 2009, Poland passed a law mandating that convicted pedophiles be castrated.
Hall finds that today's ideological undercurrents are similar to those of the early eugenics era, when popular culture and the educational system embraced the eugenics movement and many prominent people – such as Alexander Graham Bell, John Maynard Keynes, William Randolph Hearst, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Irving Fisher, George Bernard Shaw and Helen Keller – espoused compulsory reproductive control. Observing that today’s setup is similar, he identifies several popular beliefs, including environmentalism, that could form the rationale for eugenics-like campaigns in the future.
In his study for the November issue of The Socionomist, Hall explores the history of eugenics and explains how declining social mood morphed it into a method to control propagation by race and class. "The desire to improve the human condition is a positive, bull-market impulse," he writes, "but eugenics is about influencing or controlling others' reproductive choices. This reflects a desire for social control, a bear-market impulse."
In two charts, Hall shows parallels between the ebb and flow of the eugenics movement and the waves of social optimism and pessimism reflected in stock market prices. He argues that eugenics is history’s clearest lesson in how societies recast legitimate science, such as genetics, to justify class or race-based ideology during deep social-mood declines.
The eugenics movement began in the late 1800s and became a wildly popular ideology in the early 1900s. In 1893, a succession of ever-larger bear markets began. Each of these brought increasingly negative expressions of eugenics. Profoundly negative mood drove the third of these bear markets, which began in 1929 and culminated in the genocides of the 1930s and 1940s, the ultimate expression of eugenic ideology to date.
Hall argues that another bear market is due that will be larger than the 1929-1932 decline, based on Elliott wave analysis, which charts stock markets as wave patterns. Some possible results of a future depression in terms of eugenics? Euthanasia, Kervorkianism and tax breaks for signing a "Do Not Resuscitate" consent form.
* * * * *
About The Socionomics Institute
The Socionomics Institute, based in Gainesville, Ga., studies social mood and its role in driving cultural trends. The Institute’s analysis is published in the monthly research review, The Socionomist. Learn more at www.socionomics.net.
New York Times Washington correspondent Jodi Kantor to write book on Obamas
Source: The New York Observer (11-17-09)
New York Times Washington correspondent Jodi Kantor has secured a stunning seven-figure book deal this week with Little, Brown to write a volume on the Obamas.
The deal was the result of a heated citywide auction, and was brokered by independent lit agent Elyse Cheney. It comes on the heels of the 34-year-old reporter’s New York Times Magazine cover story on the Obamas’ marriage, which argued that “the Obamas mix politics and romance in a way that no first couple quite have before.”
It could not be determined whether Ms. Kantor has secured the Obamas’ cooperation, but the fact that her story featured an extensive interview with them in the Oval Office seemed to indicate that she is going into the project with a good working relationship with them.
Forgotten 1958 Time Capsule on Display at University of Chicago Law School
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education (11-19-09)
The University of Chicago Law School is displaying a collection of letters recovered from a time capsule that was sealed in a cornerstone in 1958, reports the Chicago Tribune.
The capsule was supposed to have been unsealed on May 28, 2008 — the 50th anniversary of the school's opening — and would have been forgotten altogether but for a discovery by an alumni-magazine reporter. The loss would have been a tremendous one; the capsule contained letters from Supreme Court justices and the physicist Edward Teller, among others.
A Chronicle article that we dug up from our archives reports that humans have been misplacing time capsules ever since they became objects of popular fascination. The vessels are sealed amid great fanfare, but their openings — assuming the capsules aren't forgotten — rarely arouse excitement.
One time capsule described in the article, "the Crypt of Civilization," located at Oglethorpe University, is to be opened in the year 8113. It contains, among other things, a can of Budweiser.
British Support for Afghan War Fades
Source: Time (11-19-09)
Uncertainty is one of the most corrosive elements in politics, and as days melt into weeks with no firm decision from President Barack Obama on whether the U.S. will increase troop levels in Afghanistan, the remaining British consensus on the issue is threatening to dissolve. Public support for Britain's contribution to the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan has curdled as the body count of British troops has spiraled, reaching 98 this year alone. An opinion poll taken earlier this month after an Afghan policeman shot dead five British soldiers at a checkpoint in Helmand province revealed that three-quarters of the British public want U.K. forces to withdraw within a year...
... His speech did little to revitalize flagging public support. The British public is skeptical about the central tenet of Brown's policy that engagement in the region prevents terrorism on British streets. According to a survey taken Nov. 13-16 by politicshome.com, a news website, 44% of Westminster insiders agreed that the West's involvement in Afghanistan had helped combat global terrorism, but only 21% of respondents outside the Westminster bubble shared this view...
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Sweden sends back Maori remains
Source: BBC (11-18-09)
Officials from two museums in Sweden have handed over the remains of five indigenous Maori people to their New Zealand counterparts.
The remains include one almost complete skeleton, a skull, and three other skeleton parts.
The ceremony was held at the Natural History Museum in Gothenburg.
Museums across Europe have been repatriating human remains taken from indigenous burial grounds during colonial times.
The formal handing over involved a traditional Maori ceremony, including songs and prayers.
Te Herekiekie Herewini, repatriation manager of the Museum of New Zealand (Te Papa Tongarewa), thanked the Natural History Museum and the Museum of World Culture, also based in Gothenburg, for returning the body parts.
"This is significant for Maori as it is believed that through the ancestors' return to their homeland, the dead and their living descendants will retrieve their dignity, and also close the hurt and misdeeds of the past," he said.
Obama confronts history on Great Wall of China
Source: Reuters (11-18-09)
BADALING, China (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama took a walk alone on the Great Wall on Wednesday, wrapping up a visit to China with a visit to the ancient fortifications that symbolize the country's history and separateness.
"It's magical. It reminds you of the sweep of history," Obama said, after breaking away from his tour guides to walk alone along the snowy parapets, hands jammed into his pockets against the cold and wind.
"It gives you a good perspective on a lot of the day-to-day things. They don't amount to much in the scope of history."...
... "My hope is that in the future, perhaps as a result of the beginning that we have made on this journey, that many, many Americans... will have an opportunity to come here," Nixon said in 1972, at the same steep, curving Badaling section of the wall.
Nixon hoped "that they will think back as I think back to the history of this great people, and that they will have an opportunity, as we have had an opportunity, to know the Chinese people, and know them better."..
Ancient Greek worshippers showed inclination towards the Sun
Source: Times Online (11-19-09)
The Ancient Greeks deliberately built their temples to face the rising Sun, according to research that promises to shed light on their religious practices and to resolve a longstanding archaeological controversy.
An investigation into temples built by Greek colonists in Sicily has found strong evidence that they were aligned to the East.
The findings, by Alun Salt, of the University of Leicester, suggest that Ancient Greek religion may have included ritual elements inspired by astronomy, as well as illuminating the national culture of settlers who founded communities beyond the mainland. The study could settle a long-running dispute among archaeologists and classicists about temple orientation.
Although it has long been known that most of these shrines face east, some academics have questioned whether this alignment reflected a deliberate plan. Critics of astronomical theories have pointed out that some temples face north, south or west, and argue that their orientation was not important to the Greeks.
Dr Salt’s research, however, indicates that the predominant east-west alignment is almost impossible to explain by chance, and probably followed a religious convention founded on astronomy. Temples laid out in accordance with astronomical phenomena could have highlighted the role of gods and goddesses as arbiters of nature, or helped priests to interpret celestial omens. They could also have helped in observations needed to calibrate the religious calendar.
D-Day piper to be honoured by the French
Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-17-09)
Bill Millin, now 86, tried to raise the morale of incoming troops with his tunes, as shells exploded overhead and machinegun fire raked Sword Beach.
The picture of the 21-year-old commando became one of the enduring images of the landings which paved the way to Hitler's defeat in the Second World War.
Now he is to be immortalised in a life-sized statue by the people of Colleville Montgomery, which he helped to liberate in 1944.
On Thursday a group of French officials are due to visit him near his home in Dawlish, Devon, to show him a model of the statue.
Dominican archaeologist closes in on Cleopatra, top Egyptologist says
Source: Dominican Today (11-18-09)
SANTO DOMINGO.- “That’s the mystery of the past, we’ve found doors as small as 20 by 20 centimeters which lead to great chambers,” revealed the Secretary General of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, regarding the search for Cleopatra’s tomb by a Dominican-Egyptian team.
Zahi Hawas is in the country to receive a decoration in the National Palace and a Doctorate degree from the Catholic University of Santo Domingo in the company of Dominican archaeologist Kathleen Martinez, who leads the team which searches for Cleopatra’s tomb.
“So far only 30 percent of archaeological artifacts and tombs have bee found,” Hawas said of the investigation in his country, despite the constant excavations by teams from around the world. “But with cameras we can now see what’s behind those magic walls.”
The Egyptian scholar said Egypt’s Government seeks to assure that the excavations are transparent and allow people around the world can observe the work. “We also use National Geographic so that everyone can see what we’re doing,” he said Wednesday morning in an interview on Telesistema Channel 11.
US Army Corps blamed for Katrina floods
Source: BBC (11-19-09)
A US judge has ruled that negligence by the US Army Corps of Engineers led to massive floods in parts of New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005.
The court upheld complaints by six residents and a business against the Corps over its maintenance of a navigational channel.
They were awarded damages totalling $720,000 (£431,000), and the ruling could lead to thousands more claims.
About 80% of New Orleans was flooded by Hurricane Katrina.
More than 1,800 people died on the US Gulf coast in the devastating storms.
The Corps is responsible for maintaining a system of canals and earthworks that protect New Orleans from storm surges.
US district judge Stanwood Duval ruled "negligent failure" to maintain the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet - a shipping channel - had led to flooding in the city's Lower 9th Ward and nearby St Bernard Parish.
Victorian railway lines found beside the Thames
Source: Stroud News and Journal (11-18-09)
HIDDEN Victorian railway lines have been found beside the Thames and Severn Canal at Thrupp.
The rails, unearthed during work to repair a leak in the watercourse, were probably used to transport coal to a nearby mill.
Dr Ray Wilson, honorary secretary of the Gloucestershire Society for Industrial Archaeology, said: "It is really exciting.
"We are seeing the physical remains of something which we imagined existed elsewhere but never knew existed at Thrupp.
"It helps us understand how the mills and the canal worked together."
"September 11 didn't change everything," says British academic
Source: Lee Ruddin (11-19-09)
These were the words of Steven Hurst, Senior Lecturer in Politics at Manchester Metropolitan University, at the launch of his book in London on Thursday evening.
Placing recent events in a broader historical context, The United States and Iraq since 1979: Hegemony, Oil and War (Edinburgh University Press) provides a theoretical framework that places the actions of the various US administrations in a wider process.
Using World Systems Theory, Hurst is the first to analyze the underlying factors of US policy towards the Persian Gulf over the past twenty-five years.
Commission Sends Schools Civil War History Lesson (Virginia)
Source: Media General News Service (NAT) (11-10-09)
More than 2,000 DVDs explaining the causes, conflicts and consequences of the Civil War have been mailed to all public schools in Virginia.
The three-hour history lesson was produced by a member of the Virginia Sesquicentennial of the American Civil War Commission who led the nation’s centennial commemoration.
“In the centennial, if we made a big mistake it was that we overlooked the young. We can’t do that again,“ said James I. Robertson, a history professor at Virginia Tech who in 1961 was appointed executive director of the U.S. Civil War Centennial Commission. “A nation that forgets the past has no future.“
Events planned to commemorate first major engagement of Civil War
Source: Culpeper Star Exponent (VA) (11-12-09)
Members of the Manassas City Council like the idea of commemorating the 150th anniversary of the First Battle of Manassas so much that they’re ready to give up $100,000 to make it happen in 2011.
The battle, fought July 21, 1861, was the first major engagement of the Civil War.
Creston M. Owen, chairman of the board of Virginia Civil War Events Inc., was before the board Monday asking for the money.
Owen’s outfit of volunteers is poised to begin organizing the nine-day commemoration that is set to include a Blue and Gray Ball at the Candy Factory, a re-enactment of the First Manassas battle, breakfast with the troops and concerts on the lawn of the Manassas Museum and at the battlefield.
200-year-old Trading Post Renovated in New Mexico
Source: Santa Fe New Mexican (NM) (11-14-09)
Historic preservation specialist Jeff Brown is hoping his work crews won't find the spot where legs and arms are buried at Pecos National Historical Park.
The appendages would be those amputated from Civil War soldiers in 1862 at a makeshift hospital housed in Kozlowski's Trading Post east of Santa Fe.
Finding the bony remains, while exciting, would slow down Brown's current project: a six-year renovation of the almost 2-century-old stage stop and tavern. The low-slung pink stucco building with faded turquoise trim along N.M. 63 was a popular stop on the Santa Fe Trail for decades.
Brown and crew will restore the adobe-and-pine building to its look from the 1940s and '50s, when E.E. "Buddy" Fogelson and his actress wife, Greer Garson, used the trading post as headquarters for their Forked Lightning Ranch.
Trust Targets Historic Civil War Parcel
Source: Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star (VA (11-17-09)
A key piece of the Chancellorsville Battlefield associated with Confederate Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson's 1863 flank attack is the next acquisition target of a Civil War preservation group.
The Civil War Preservation Trust yesterday announced a $2.1 million campaign to buy 85 acres, known as the Wagner Tract, along State Route 3 east of Wilderness Church.
The property includes 2,000 feet of frontage on the north shoulder of historic Orange Plank Road and lies within Chancellorsville Battlefield.
There, on May 2, 1863, Jackson led the flanking maneuver during bloody fighting that turned the tide of the battle in favor of the South.
"This land is arguably one of the most historically significant pieces of hallowed ground CWPT has ever saved, and we have just got to get it," said James Lighthizer, the organization's president.
Watergate 'Gap' Mystery to be Solved?
Source: ABC News (11-18-09)
A dark chapter in the history of the Watergate scandal surrounding former President Richard M. Nixon might soon be uncovered.
The National Archives announced today it will use forensic documentation technology to try and uncover the contents of two pages of handwritten notes taken by Nixon's chief of staff, H.R. "Bob" Haldeman.
Documents show secret messages from Moscow sparked German unification plans
Source: The National Security Archive (11-18-09)
Secret messages from senior Soviet officials to West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl after the fall of the Berlin Wall led directly to Kohl's famous "10 Points" speech on German unification, but the speech produced shock in both Moscow and Washington, according to documents from Soviet, German and American files posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive.
Published for the first time in English in the Archive's forthcoming book, "Masterpieces of History," the documents include highest-level conversations between President George H.W. Bush and Kohl; the text of the letter Kohl had delivered to Bush just as he announced the "10 Points" to the Bundestag on November 28, 1989; excerpts on Germany from the transcript of the Malta summit between Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev; Gorbachev's own incendiary meeting with the German foreign minister after Kohl's speech; and more.
The documents show the American administration's devotion to stability and "reserve" while the West German leader rushes to get out in front of the rapid changes in the East, at the same time that neither Bush nor Kohl expects unification to happen so quickly. Most strikingly, the documents and related accounts by Kohl's aide, Horst Teltschik, and Gorbachev's aide, Andrei Grachev, show that Kohl's famous "10 Points" speech was based in large part directly on secret messages from Moscow – but unbeknownst to Gorbachev.
'USA Today' Gets an Early Look at Bush Library Plans
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education (11-18-09)
The George W. Bush Presidential Library at Southern Methodist University will be a fairly contemporary structure whose clean lines call to mind the shapes of Georgian architecture without replicating its ornament and details, according to drawings that the former president and his wife, Laura Bush, are scheduled to release at a press conference this afternoon.
But USA Today had the drawings online Tuesday evening, along with an article that described "a lantern-shaped roof that will glow at night." The article said Mr. Bush was "thrilled with the plans."
The Dallas Morning News followed quickly, posting an interview in which Mrs. Bush said she "did not want this to be monumental like some other libraries are." She added: "We wanted it to be human in scale." Mrs. Bush is an SMU alumna.
Obama Administration Has Achieved More in Middle East Than Bush Did in Eight Years, State Dept. Says
Source: CNSNews (11-18-09)
The Obama administration has done more on the Israeli-Palestinian issue during its ten months in office than its predecessor did in eight years, a State Department spokesman claimed on Tuesday...
... Kelly contested the assertion that President Obama’s Mideast envoy George Mitchell had made little progress during his months on the job. “We are less than a year into this administration, and I think we’ve accomplished more over the last year than the previous administration did in eight years,” Kelly said.
Obama Meets With Half Brother in China
Source: CNSNews (11-18-09)
When President Barack Obama landed in Beijing on Monday on his first state visit to China, his first order of business was family business.
Before he headed to a formal dinner with China's President Hu Jintao, he set aside time to see his half brother, Mark Ndesandjo, and Ndesandjo's wife, who had flown up from the southern boomtown of Shenzhen where they live.
Describing the meeting Monday as "overwhelming" and "intense," Ndesandjo told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday that he had long anticipated the chance to welcome his famous brother to China.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Magazine closure ended two decades of gay media in Atlanta
Source: Project Q Atlanta (11-16-09)
With a simple three-sentence notice taped to the door, the publishers of Southern Voice and David magazine ended two decades of gay media in Atlanta on Monday.
The publications, owned along with several others by Window Media and Unite Media, abruptly closed their doors overnight Sunday, ending a months-long battle with federal receivership that imperiled the gay media company.
Laura Douglas-Brown, the paper’s editor since 2006 and an employee for nearly 13 years, says the closings are a significant loss for her personally and for metro Atlanta’s LGBT population.
Soviet lessons from Afghanistan
Source: BBC (11-18-09)
All the most senior ministers were at the Afghan strategy meeting.
They knew things were not going well, but from their leader there was a whiff of panic.
"We just need to be sure that the final result does not look like a humiliating defeat: to have lost so many men and now abandoned it all... in short, we have to get out of there."
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev - the speaker of those words - was understandably alarmed.
It was June 1986, almost a year since he had taken the decision to start withdrawing Soviet troops from Afghanistan and hand over more responsibility to the government there.
But Soviet losses, already above 10,000, kept mounting.
With conflicting signals this week about the direction of Western policy in Afghanistan, there is a hint of the same kind of panic and indecision.
Soviet exit strategy
US President Barack Obama is still deciding whether to send in thousands of US reinforcements.
Yet the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown - facing ever-greater opposition to the Afghan war - has been highlighting possibilities for UK troops to pull back in some areas next year.
It is less than two weeks since he was saying: "We cannot, must not and will not walk away."
But as Mr Gorbachev found, getting out is at least as difficult as staying in...
1769 Thames toll bridge up for sale
Source: Yahoo News (11-18-09)
LONDON – A toll bridge built in 1769 across the River Thames will be auctioned next month, offering buyers a tax-free investment with a bit of historic charm.
The Swinford bridge brings in about 190,000 pounds (US$320,000) in toll payments from about 4 million vehicle crossings a year, and the bridge's owner can pocket all the income without paying tax.
The picturesque bridge in Oxfordshire, about 65 miles (105 kilometers) northwest of London, has a suggested price of 1.65 million pounds ($2.77 million). The property comes with a stone toll cottage and acres (hectares) of land.
AP report Obama confident of KSM conviction
Source: Google News (11-18-09)
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama predicted that professed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be convicted, as Attorney General Eric Holder defended putting him through the U.S. civilian legal system.
In one of a series of TV interviews during his trip to Asia, Obama said those offended by the legal privileges given to Mohammed by virtue of getting a civilian trial rather than a military tribunal won't find it "offensive at all when he's convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him."
Obama quickly added that he did not mean to suggest he was prejudging the outcome of Mohammed's trial. "I'm not going to be in that courtroom," he said. "That's the job of the prosecutors, the judge and the jury."
In interviews broadcast on NBC and CNN Wednesday, the president also said that experienced prosecutors in the case who specialize in terrorism have offered assurances that "we'll convict this person with the evidence they've got, going through our system."
Obama said the American people should have no concern about the capability of civilian courts to try suspected terrorists. Attorney General Eric Holder last week announced the decision to bring Mohammed and four others detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to trial at a lower Manhattan courthouse.
Archaeologists find pre-Columbian cemetery in Costa Rica
Source: Costa Rica Pages (11-16-09)
An indigenous cementery was uncovered within a two hectare plot of land in Guapiles, Costa Rica, about an hour and a half east of San Jose. The cementary, which was constructed by the Huetares tribe during the pre-Colombian era, was discovered while doing environmental studies that are required to obtain a construction permit for the building of a new high school in the area.
Researchers from the National Museum, led by archaeologist Francisco Corrales, proved the existence of a funeral complex divided into three sectors, two of which have been excavated and appear to be completly intact.
The archaeological site called Liceo, protects three tombs or mounds of stone used to cover a grave. Buried under the rocks, experts have already found an 59 ceramic artifacts, including funeral offerings and everyday objects.
According to Corrales, the cemetery was built by an indigenous group of the Huetares who inhabited the area between 300 and 800 AD. “During this phase, known as La Selva, these groups existed within a complex social organization that centered around a chief and then everything else structured into sectors,” he said. “The burial system we see here reveals the high level of development of those communities.”
Water pipeline of Peter the First epoch discovered under Moscow
Source: Russia-ic (11-17-09)
Building of a shopping mall was planned to be launched in November under Pushkinskaya Square. Instead of that archeological excavations were started and brought out lots of finds.
“We unearthed a most interesting construction of the epoch of Peter the First” – the chief archeologist of Moscow professor Alexander Veksler says. Thus, for example, we found a wooden water conduit, water wells, coins, and variety of household items”.
Celebrating Revolution With Roots in a Rumor (Prague)
Source: NYT (11-17-09)
PRAGUE — It was a revolution that began with a lie.
Vaclav Havel, the dissident who led the Velvet Revolution that overthrew Communism in Czechoslovakia, once declared that “truth and love must triumph over lies and hatred.” Yet the revolution — its name a reference to the clenched fist in the velvet glove — was set off by a false rumor that remains a mystery 20 years later.
On Tuesday, thousands of Czechs marched through the streets here, to the sound of wailing sirens and the growls of police dogs, eerily replicating a nonviolent student march on Nov. 17, 1989, in which the police rounded on demonstrators and rumors spread that a 19-year-old university student named Martin Smid had been brutally killed. Scores had indeed been violently beaten. But no one, in fact, had died.
Jan Urban, a dissident leader and journalist who helped to disseminate the lie that he, like many others, believed to be true at the time, recalled in an interview that news of the alleged death had spread quickly, helping to wake a nation out of its collective apathy and lighting the spark — eight days after the fall of the Berlin Wall — for the peaceful rebellion that culminated in the regime’s demise.
“Until that day, there had been a deal between the Communist regime and the people: ‘You shut up and we will take care of you,’ ” he said. “But the moment people had the impression that their kids were being killed, the deal was off. As a journalist, I am ashamed of the lie because it was a professional blunder. But I have no regrets because it helped bring four decades of Communism to an end.”
On Tuesday, Mr. Havel, President Vaclav Klaus and Prime Minister Jan Fischer joined the hundreds laying candles at the monument marking the clash. “The demonstration, the march set history into motion,” Mr. Havel said.
Yet two decades after a lie helped unleash a revolution, many Czechs remain uncertain not only about the truth of what unfolded in the heady days of November 1989, but also about the consequences of a revolution that some feel has failed to live up to its promises...
New Web Site Makes Internet Time Traveling Easier
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education (11-17-09)
Time traveling is coming to an Internet browser near you.
A new Web site called Memento Web will allow anyone curious about what the Internet used to look like to plug in a date and then browse the World Wide Web as it was on that day.
The site is already live with limited use. Users can enter a URL and the date on which they wish to see a version of the page the URL once called up.
That doesn't mean they'll get exactly what they were looking for. For example, a search for nytimes.com on November 17, 2006, returned a Web page dated December 8, 2007. Some searches don't work at all.
People behind the site, financed by a grant from the Library of Congress, said that they were still working on it and that they hoped to get more money to develop it further.
Michael Nelson, an associate professor in computer science at Old Dominion University, leads one of the teams behind the project. He said the tool made it easier to see Web sites that have been archived already by organizations such as Internet Archive or by sites like Wikipedia.
Ancient university buildings under threat (UK)
Source: Guardian (UK) (11-17-09)
Anthony Edwards wasn't perturbed when he first saw the hole. Given its position in the Regent House Combination Room in Cambridge's Old Schools, where for three centuries all the business of the university was conducted, it must, he assumed, have been dug to deal with a bout of woodworm, a plumbing problem, or something worthy of archaeological investigation.
It was a month later, as the professor walked down Kings Parade and spotted two friends with "faces like thunder", that he found out the truth: the gap cut in the dais floor in the corner of room first used in 1400, revealing the concrete ceiling of the room below, was not simply for access to the pipes or dry rot but was to make way for the installation of a lift.
Appalled, he set about getting a copy of the plans. He was not impressed. "The Regent House is the oldest, the most beautiful and most important room belonging to the university," Edwards, a fellow of Caius college and former senior proctor, says.
"In fact, it is historically the most important room in the universities of the English-speaking world. It is the cradle of Cambridge's democracy, our Westminster Hall...
... But the row throws a spotlight on the ongoing tension between the need to modernise universities' historic buildings, with their treacherous staircases, uneven floors and lack of IT infrastructure, and the desire to preserve their centuries-old beauty.
Although there are special considerations for how the access demands of the 2004 Disability Discrimination Act are applied to listed buildings, they are not exempt. Another reason for modernisation is simply the need to make older buildings fit for purpose, for instance so that the technology often central to learning today can be used...
13th Century castle is to be sold (Wales)
Source: BBC (11-18-09)
A 13th Century ruined castle is to be sold, with a starting price of £80,000.
Ewloe Castle, built by Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, is to to be auctioned with four other lots which are expected to fetch more than £500,000 in total.
Although privately owned, the castle is under the custodianship of Welsh historic monuments agency Cadw, and its character "must be preserved".
It stands close to the site where 200 Welshmen, led by the king of north Wales Owain Gwynedd, ambushed - and nearly killed - King Henry II in 1157.
Ancients 'had heart disease too'
Source: BBC (11-18-09)
Hardening of the arteries has been found in Egyptian mummies - suggesting that the risk factors for heart disease may be ancient, researchers say.
A team of US and Egyptian scientists carried out medical scans on 22 mummies from Cairo's Museum of Antiquities.
They found evidence of hardened arteries in three of them and possible heart disease in three more.
All the mummies were of high socio-economic status and would have had a rich diet.
Nabokov's unfinished work is published
Source: BBC (11-17-09)
When the famous Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977, he made it clear in his will that a manuscript he was working on should not be published.
In fact he instructed his wife Vera to burn the unfinished work.
Vera didn't destroy the work or publish it.
It was kept safely locked away in the vaults of a bank in Switzerland.
Germany arrests top Rwanda rebels
Source: BBC (11-17-09)
Police in Germany have arrested two Rwandan militia leaders on suspicion of crimes committed in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Ignace Murwanashyaka, the leader of the FDLR rebel group, and his aide Straton Musoni were held on suspicion of crimes against humanity and war crimes.
FDLR leaders fled to DR Congo after the Rwanda genocide in which some 800,000 people - mostly ethnic Tutsis - died.
The FDLR's presence in DR Congo has been at the heart of years of unrest.
Cheating bankers nothing new, 19th century 'Madoff medal' shows
Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-18-09)
Intense public anger at cheating bankers is nothing new, this macabre souvenir created to mark the hanging of the 'Bernard Madoff of the 19th century' shows.
The reworked George III penny was fashioned as a memento to the hanging of Henry Fauntleroy, who forged cheques at his bank Marsh, Sibbald & Co for more than a decade before he was found out and it collapsed with enormous debts.
Showing sentiments have changed little over the best part of two centuries, one side of the coin describes Fauntleroy as "The Robber of Widows & Orphans".
The other warns "all insolvent bilking [cheating] bankers" that "The Fate of Fauntleroy" awaits them.
'It's Magical': Obama Tours China's Great Wall
Source: Fox News (11-18-09)
White House aides were exultant after the president walked part of the Great Wall alone in a choreographed moment for photographers and "the shot" they had planned turned out perfectly.
President Barack Obama absorbed history's expanse Wednesday from atop the Great Wall of China, a manmade wonder of such enormity that Obama found himself putting daily life in perspective.
A must-see for presidents from President Richard Nixon on, the Great Wall was one of Obama's major sightseeing stops during his diplomatic tour of Asia.
Dressed in a winter jacket against a biting wind, Obama led a knot of people for a half-hour jaunt up the crenelated wall toward a watchtower, a restored section originally built 500 years ago
U.S. Attends International Criminal Court Meeting for First Time
Source: AP (11-18-09)
The U.S. attended a meeting of the International Criminal Court's management board for the first time Wednesday in a sign it has stopped shunning the world's only permanent war crimes tribunal.
The U.S. has not ratified the court's founding treaty, the Rome Statute, partly because of fears the court could become a forum for politically motivated prosecutions of U.S. troops.
He told The Associated Press his presence is a sign the Obama administration wants to "re-engage with the court" but said Monday while visiting Kenya that possible ratification by Washington of the Rome Statute is likely still years away.
Body of Kidnapped British Journalist Reportedly Found in Lebanon 23 Years Later
Source: The Times (UK) (11-18-09)
British investigators are hopeful that a body recovered from the eastern Bekaa Valley could be the remains of Alec Collett, a British journalist who was kidnapped and executed by a Palestinian group in 1986 during Lebanon’s civil war, the Times of London reported.
A military and forensic team led by the British embassy in Beirut is excavating an area near the village of Aitta al-Fuqar in the southern Bekaa Valley. The site was the location in the 1980s of a base belonging to Fatah – The Revolutionary Council, a radical and violent Palestinian group headed by Sabri al-Banna, better known by his nom de guerre Abu Nidal.
On Tuesday, the team unearthed the remains of two bodies, one of them an unidentified woman who reportedly was buried 20 years ago. The other body is undergoing DNA tests to see whether it is that of Collett, the Times of London reported.
Letter Lincoln Wrote to Boy After Inauguration for Sale
Source: AP (11-17-09)
A letter President Abraham Lincoln wrote to a boy whose friends didn't believe he had met the commander in chief is being sold in Philadelphia.
Lincoln sent the letter from the White House to 8-year-old George Patten two weeks after his March 1861 inauguration.
The youngster had been mocked by classmates for saying he'd met the 16th president with his father, a journalist. His teacher wrote Lincoln to uncover the truth.
Oldest U.S.-Born Person Dies at 114 in New York
Source: AP (11-18-09)
A 114-year-old woman believed to be the oldest native-born American and the third-oldest person in the world has died at a New York nursing home.
Olivia Patricia Thomas died Monday in the St. Francis Home of Williamsville, near Buffalo. She had lived there since 2004. She's being remembered as a dedicated gardener who loved to travel the world.
The Gerontology Research Group tracks supercentenarians and says Thomas was the oldest person born in the United States. She was born June 29, 1895.
Noteworthy Senate debates throughout U.S. history
Source: CNN (11-17-09)
The Senate is about to embark on what could be the showdown of the year as top Democrats work to push through sweeping health care legislation.
The legislative chamber, however, is no stranger to history-changing debate. Lawmakers need to look no further than their predecessors to see how it's done.
In 1991, Congress voted for the use of military force towards Iraq after the Saddam Hussein-led country went to war with Kuwait.
The action was the first time Congress voted for going to war since the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964, which officially began U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.
West Virginia's Byrd becomes the longest-serving member of Congress
Source: CNN (11-18-09)
When Robert Byrd came to Congress from West Virginia, a postage stamp cost 3 cents and kids were clamoring for a new toy called Mr. Potato Head.
On Wednesday, almost 57 years later, Byrd became the longest-serving member of Congress in history.
Two days before he turns 92, the eloquent legislator known for his encyclopedic knowledge of Senate rules and history surpasses Carl T. Hayden, the Arizona Democrat who served a total of 20,773 days in the U.S. House and Senate.
With his 20,774th day representing West Virginia -- six years in House and then nearly 51 years and counting in the Senate -- Byrd sets a record for longevity unlikely to be broken as the political climate turns toward term limits and growing public dissatisfaction with Congress.
Emily Chang, CNN Reporter, Detained In Shanghai Over Obama-Mao T-Shirt
Source: Huffington Post (11-17-09)
Orders to prevent sales of T-shirts showing Obama dressed like communist revolutionary Mao Zedong are in force during the president's visit -- and Chinese officials mean it, as a CNN reporter found out.
Correspondent Emily Chang reported that she went searching for Oba-Mao souvenirs at Shanghai's Yatai Xinyang market. Finding none, she pulled out a T-shirt she bought before the ban was imposed to record a report in the market.
Security guards pounced, telling her she did not have permission to film there and trying to grab the shirt, according to a report on CNN's Web site.
Chang was detained for two hours before being let go, with the shirt, the report said.
A cottage industry in T-shirts and other Oba-Mao trinkets catering mainly to foreign tourists has thrived in recent months. Bans such as the one that commercial regulators ordered in recent weeks are usually temporary. When U.S. or European government officials come to Beijing for trade talks, local markets typically remove copies of brand-name designer clothes -- until the foreign negotiators leave town.
Obama Tours Forbidden City
Source: CNSNews (11-17-09)
Beijing (AP) - Playing tourist on his first visit ever to China, President Barack Obama drew a chilly comparison between the Chinese capital and his Illinois hometown....
... Built in the 1400s, the Forbidden City once was home to 24 Chinese emperors who ruled the country for nearly 500 years, between 1420 and 1911. The former imperial palace is now known as the Palace Museum, and is open to Beijing's visitors.
"It's a testament to the greatness of Chinese history," Obama said while on tour. He pronounced it "a magnificent place to visit" and said he wanted to come back with his wife, first lady Michelle Obama, and their two daughters, Malia and Sasha. Mrs. Obama did not accompany the president on the trip.
Jerusalem: To two faiths, a holy patch of land; to the world, a powder keg
Source: The Washington Post (11-17-09)
JERUSALEM -- It is one of the most watched pieces of real estate in the world, 35 acres where an under-the-breath prayer or a whiff of a rumor can rouse warnings of war.
In both Judaism and Islam, the area known respectively as the Temple Mount and the Noble Sanctuary is considered a formative location. Jews believe it to be the site of Solomon's Temple and key biblical events. Muslims regard it as the spot where Muhammad was brought by the angel Gabriel before embarking on a trip to heaven to visit the other prophets.
It also remains a flash point, and a series of disturbances there this fall showed just how difficult it will be for Israelis and Palestinians to reach agreement on an area over which they negotiate not just as political entities but also as representatives of two faiths with an often-troubled relationship.
The recent round of clashes may have ebbed, but on any given day the depth of the standoff is apparent: Last week, Jordan's ambassador to the United States warned of the implications if, as Muslims often worry, Jewish extremists were to bomb one of the Muslim sites. Israeli Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom, meanwhile, reminded an audience in Jerusalem that his government would never share control of a city that is the object of daily Jewish prayer and the hoped-for site of a third temple. Under Muslim administration since the Crusades, the compound -- a largely open-air plaza that includes the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock -- is under Jordanian authority, an arrangement that Israel agreed to maintain after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and the creation of the Palestinian Authority in the 1990s.
The oversight from Amman, whose ruling Hashemite family is also the formal custodian of the preeminent mosques in Mecca and Medina, reflects how any agreement over Jerusalem will have to go beyond the bounds of what the Palestinians on their own can negotiate.
Israel: Specter of Meir Kahane continues to haunt politics
Source: LA Times (11-16-09)
Two decades after his party was banned from running for seats in the parliament, Rabbi Meir Kahane and his ideas are once more on its agenda.
Recently, right-wing legislator Michael Ben-Ari asked to hold a discussion in parliament in memory of Kahane, an American-born rabbi who had founded the Jewish Defense League before moving to Israel and founding the militantly nationalist Kach movement that advocated removal of Arabs from biblical Israel. In 1988, Israeli law was amended to bar candidates who incited racism from running for parliament. Kahane, who had held a seat for four years at the time, was banned, and the party was outlawed altogether in 1994.
Kahane was assassinated in New York in 1990; some still subscribe to his views.
Ben-Ari filed a motion for a memorial discussion in parliament to mark the assassination anniversary. A reporter spotted it on the list and queried parliament speaker Rubi (Reuven) Rivlin, who removed it, calling it a provocation. Ben-Ari has challenged Rivlin's decision and has brought it up before a parliamentary committee that will vote on it coming few days.
It turns out that other parties expressed keen interest in the issue -- but not Israeli political parties...
Prague marks Velvet Revolution
Source: BBC (11-17-09)
Czechs and Slovaks are marking the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution - which brought down the Communist government of the then-Czechoslovakia.
Past and present students will re-enact a Prague march that started the events.
The Communist Party announced it would relinquish power after hundreds of thousands demonstrated for 12 days.
The dissident playwright Vaclav Havel, who led the revolution before becoming president, is to attend a Prague rock concert as part of the celebrations.
Students are gathering in Prague's Albertov district - home to several faculties of Charles University - to retrace the steps of a march on 17 November 1989 that changed the course of Czechoslovak history.
Old African-American cemetery relocation takes slow, delicate work (Atlanta)
Source: Atlanta Journal (11-15-09)
Jeff Gardner delicately scrapes away a century of red clay and scoops a child's bones into a casket.
The archaeologist has spent the past two months carefully sifting through dirt, trying to preserve the remains of generations of Clayton County families.
Gardner thought he was looking for 270 historic African American graves buried behind Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.
He found more than 340 – and is still digging.
Gardner and his crew are moving the graves -- which date back to the mid-1800s -- from the middle of a landfill in College Park to a public cemetery in Riverdale.
'Ex Nazi' charged with 58 murders
Source: BBC (11-17-09)
German prosecutors have charged a 90-year-old alleged former Nazi SS member with the deaths of 58 Jewish forced labourers, officials say.
The man is accused of murdering the workers in Deutsch Schuetzen, an Austrian village, at the end of World War II.
The court has identified the suspect only as a "retiree from Duisburg".
The victims' remains were found in a mass grave in 1995 by the Austrian Jewish association.
Bishops reprise old abortion fight with higher stakes
Source: Politico (11-17-09)
Thirty-three years ago this fall, a bitter, race-tinged fight over abortion matched Roman Catholic bishops and the House against the nation’s first popularly elected black senator, Republican Ed Brooke of Massachusetts.
Now, with health care reform on the line, the same male-dominated church hierarchy is dictating to the first woman speaker of the House, Democrat Nancy Pelosi, a Catholic herself and past ally for the bishops on everything from human rights in China to tax credits for low-income families.
Beneath this stark picture is a much more diverse nation — and set of political actors.
Two Americas have evolved since the late Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) first attached his famous amendment in 1976 barring federal Medicaid dollars from being used to fund abortion services for poor women. Seventeen states, representing 40 percent of the nation’s population, have exercised the option to use their own money to provide abortion services for Medicaid beneficiaries. And in these same states, women generally are far more likely to rely on their private insurance plans to help pay for abortions.
At the same time, the anti-abortion lobby remains dominant in Congress, fathering “mini-Hydes” that go beyond Medicaid to affect millions of federal workers, the military, the American Indian health service, women in federal prisons and even Peace Corps volunteers.
The bishops can make a strong case that the anti-abortion language inserted into the House health care bill extends only this central principle: Federal health dollars can’t go to pay for abortions. And for 12 years, these same restrictions have applied not just to fees for abortion services but also to any federal contributions to health plans that cover elective abortions.
“We have 53 million people already under Medicaid, and now we’re going to add about 33 million uninsured?” asked Richard Doerflinger, an associate director with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “It applies to a new situation, but it is not qualitatively a new situation.”
Or is it?...
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Proposed Merger Threat to Black Colleges in Mississippi
Source: Inside Higher Ed (11-17-09)
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour on Monday proposed combining the state's three public black colleges into one of the institutions, Jackson State University. While Barbour said that campuses would continue to exist at what are now Alcorn State University and Mississippi Valley State University, the proposal marks the most dramatic state challenge in recent years to the continuation of some public black colleges -- and the move comes in the state whose higher education system was the subject of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that governs college desegregation.
Governor Barbour also proposed a merger of the Mississippi University for Women (which is no longer just for women, its name notwithstanding) into Mississippi State University. While his plan stressed that the various merged institutions would survive in some form, he also said that this major reorganization should result in the elimination of many programs, which supporters of black colleges fear will come largely from their institutions. The governor's budget statement said that all of the state's public colleges would see "a rationalization of class offerings.... Every university would be expected to reduce costs by consolidating or eliminating programs not pulling their financial weight." (The plan in total would turn eight universities in the state system into five.)...
... Chambers noted that mergers of black educational institutions in the South have not historically gone well for black students and educators. "What happens to the faculty at black colleges" when programs are consolidated? he asked. And if the consolidations result in smaller branch campuses where Alcorn State and Mississippi Valley are now full institutions, "how do you ensure that the same number of minority students end up in college? Why aren't they asking questions about minority enrollments?"...
... Any merger of black colleges in Mississippi would have particular political significance because of United States v. Fordice, a 1992 Supreme Court decision that found Mississippi had failed to desegregate its higher education system. The decision specifically encouraged the state to consider mergers and to cut down on duplication of academic programs as a means of desegregating -- but the decision did not order mergers.
Duke Professor Publishes Book with Muhammad Images
Source: Inside Higher Ed (11-17-09)
Many advocates for free speech were outraged when Yale University Press, in publishing a book about the controversy over the Danish cartoons of Muhammad, refused to publish the cartoons themselves. Gary Hull, a Duke University professor, decided the best response would be to publish a book that included the controversial images, and through his new Voltaire Press, he has now done so. The book, Muhammad: The "Banned" Images, includes an introduction by Hull on "the basic choice between free speech and force, and the ethical issues involved in suppressing free scholarly discourse for the sake of multiculturalism," as well as a survey of the history of images of Muhammad.
30 Years After Murder, Is His Appeal Too Late?
Source: NYT (11-16-09)
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide whether it is too late for an Alabama man to argue that the murder that sent him to death row was not a capital crime when he committed it.
The inmate, Billy Joe Magwood, shot and killed Sheriff Neil Grantham in 1979 in front of the Coffee County jail. At the time, Alabama law imposed two requirements before the state’s judges could sentence defendants to death: the commission of one of 14 listed offenses and the existence of certain “aggravating circumstances.”
The murder of a peace officer like a sheriff was a listed offense. But Mr. Magwood’s crime did not satisfy the second requirement. The question before the Supreme Court is whether he took too long to raise the argument that he could not have lawfully been sentenced to death.
Although Mr. Magwood’s lawyers challenged his sentence on other grounds over the years, it was not until 1997 that they raised the question of whether his was a capital crime under Alabama law. In the meantime, a federal judge, acting on other grounds, ordered Mr. Magwood resentenced in 1985. He was again sentenced to death the next year...
Online Maps: Now Everyman Offers New Directions
Source: NYT (11-16-09)
SAN FRANCISCO — They don’t know it, but people who use Google’s online maps may be getting directions from Richard Hintz...
... Mr. Hintz is a foot soldier in an army of volunteer cartographers who are logging every detail of neighborhoods near and far into online atlases. From Petaluma to Peshawar, these amateurs are arming themselves with GPS devices and easy-to-use software to create digital maps where none were available before, or fixing mistakes and adding information to existing ones.
Like contributors to Wikipedia before them, they are democratizing a field that used to be the exclusive domain of professionals and specialists. And the information they gather is becoming increasingly valuable commercially...
... That is changing the dynamics of an industry that has been dominated by a handful of digital mapping companies like Tele Atlas and Navteq.
Google is increasingly bypassing those traditional map providers. It has relied on volunteers to create digital maps of 140 countries, including India, Pakistan and the Philippines, that are more complete than many maps created professionally...
To cut deficit, Red Cross sells treasures amassed over decades
Source: Google News (11-16-09)
WASHINGTON — Rose Percy has a long history with the American Red Cross. Complete with an extensive wardrobe and her own Tiffany jewelry, this 23-inch wax doll was first sold for $1,200 back in 1864 to benefit the U.S. Sanitary Commission — the precursor to one of best-known U.S. charities.
Now, Rose Percy, is on the auction block again.
On Tuesday, Percy will be sold in one of the first rounds of an extensive sale of treasures the American Red Cross has amassed over the decades. The current bid online: $5,000. The Red Cross also is selling a rare four-faced Cartier clock lamp, nurse uniforms from World War I and what could be the last Civil War-era flag of the forerunner U.S. Sanitary Commission.
"There's an opportunity for people to purchase a part of the Red Cross history and at the same time contribute to our humanitarian mission," said Red Cross spokesman Roger Lowe. At a time when many companies are cutting back on such vast archival collections, 128-year-old charity, he said, is asking itself, "Do I really need all of this?"
For the past two years, the charity whose core mission is disaster relief has been working feverishly to erase a $209 million operating deficit — a shortfall that now stands at $33.5 million. The national headquarters laid off a third of its 3,000 employees last year and made a rare appeal to Congress for help that produced a one-time, $100-million infusion. But the cost-cutting isn't over.
Medvedev rejects WWII history 'rewrites'
Source: UPI (11-16-09)
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev told sailors in Singapore Monday that perceived attempts to rewrite the history of World War II should be rejected.
Medvedev told the crew of the Russian cruiser Varyag that historians will always debate the past; however, there was no doubt that the eventual outcome of the war had been agreed upon by the allied powers at the time.
"We should keep an eye on such things -- not fighting different points of view, but protecting our interests and thwarting falsifications of history that could hamper the interests of the state," the Russian president said.
Russia's RIA Novosti news agency said Monday that the president's remarks referred to resentment over the Soviet Union's occupation of neighboring nations after the Red Army rolled into Germany.
Byrd Will Set Another Record
Source: NYT (11-16-09)
Senator Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, who is already the longest-serving senator in United States history, is set to cross yet another milestone of longevity in the legislative branch. On Wednesday, he’ll surpass Carl Hayden as the longest-serving member of Congress in history, combining terms in both the House and Senate.
Mr. Hayden, an Arizona Democrat, served in the House from 1912 to 1927 and in the Senate from 1927 to 1969 for a total of 56 years 319 days.
Mr. Byrd, whose 92nd birthday is Friday, served in the House from 1953 to 1959 and has been in the Senate ever since. He served as the Democratic leader from 1977 to 1989, about half of that time as the majority leader.
Expect numerous tributes in the Senate and in West Virginia, Gov. Joe Manchin and state lawmakers have scheduled a celebration on Wednesday at the State Capitol.
Defendant's Words May Help 9/11 Case
Source: WSJ (11-17-09)
Federal prosecutors trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, could get a big boost from evidence that helped to acquit another alleged conspirator.
In statements submitted to a military commission last year, Mr. Mohammed said Salim Hamdan was a barely literate functionary with no involvement in the Sept. 11 conspiracy or other al Qaeda plots, contrary to prosecutors' allegations. Mr. Mohammed explained that his role as an al Qaeda leader gave him broad knowledge of the terrorist network's personnel and operations.
"I personally was the executive director of 9/11, and Hamdan had no previous knowledge of the operation, or any other one," Mr. Mohammed wrote in response to the written questions. "Due to my work as...a military official in al Qaeda, my job is to oversee all the al Qaeda cells abroad," he added.
A second alleged Sept. 11 conspirator, Walid bin-Attash, also provided answers to interrogatories -- written questions from defense attorneys -- that corroborated Mr. Hamdan's version of events.
Attorney General Eric Holder announced last week that Mr. Mohammed, Mr. bin-Attash and three other alleged conspirators will be tried in a civilian criminal court in New York, rather than the military-commission proceedings initiated during the administration of former President George W. Bush.
How Is Obama's Extended Family Handling Reflective Fame?
Source: Slate (11-17-09)
Ever since President Obama moved into the White House, "the background players in his family drama—half-brothers, stepgrandmothers—are experiencing a disorienting measure of reflective fame," writes New York magazine. "They're doing their best to handle it, with varying degrees of grace." George Obama, the president's youngest half-brother, will be publishing a memoir and traveling to the United States for a publicity tour. But despite the reported six-figure advance, George still lives in a slum and constantly pushes interviewers to give him money in exchange for information. Tourists who arrive in Nairobi and are willing to pay $500 for a glimpse into Obama's past can go on a package deal called the "Obamaland Weekend Break," where they might get to visit Obama's octogenarian stepgrandmother. Sayid Obama, one of Obama's stepbrothers, has been acting more or less like a family spokesman but he is tired of dealing with the press and all the undercover birther activists who have gone to Kenya to try to prove the president was born there. But not everyone with Obama as a last name wants the world to know how they're related to the U.S. president. There are still an unknown number of Obamas out there who have somehow managed to evade the reflective glory.
CBS News launching turn-of-decade look at America's position in the world
Source: Google News (11-16-09)
NEW YORK — CBS News is planning an ambitious turn-of-decade look at America's position in the world that's also designed as an opening competitive shot at Diane Sawyer.
Called "CBS Reports: Where America Stands," the series will look at issues such as health care, the military, the economy and crime. Reporters will show what was happening 10 years ago and compare it to now, with predictions about how things will be like at the start of the 2020s.
The "CBS Evening News" will be the centerpiece for the reports. But "The Early Show," "Face the Nation" and the network's radio and online outlets will also participate, said Sean McManus, CBS News president.
"People really do want to know how safe we are and could we fight another war if we had to," McManus said. "How strong is our military? Is it stronger than it was 10 years ago? Is it weaker? And how prepared are we for the challenges of the next decade."
The series could run for a couple of months and get a real showcase on Katie Couric's newscast, he said.
What happens to the archives of minority newspapers that go out of existence?
Source: Poynter Online (11-17-09)
Over the years publications that target gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender audiences have come and gone -- witness today's tumult at Window Media LLC. A key newsweekly, The Washington Blade, may be no more after celebrating its 40th anniversary last month.
There's one very important angle that gets overlooked when minority media outlets go out of existence: archives. In today’s digital world, what happens to the online archives? Earlier this year the New York Blade shut down and all its online searchable back issues vanished. The same thing happened when Lesbian Gay New York (LGNY) declared bankruptcy -- years of issues that had been available and searchable online were gone. A new publication took up where LGNY left off -- Gay City News -- but what about all that community history, the public record of political and cultural matters? In the wake of the Washington Blade’s demise there are reports that another publication may arise, perhaps staffed with former Blade employees. I sure hope so – gay community publications have a vital role to play even in an era when major media outlets have pumped up their coverage of sexual minority issues. I also hope Window Media LLC's owners/shareholders will keep the Washington Blade, Southern Voice, South Florida Blade, etc. archives – online and otherwise -- available. Publisher, editors, writers -- and GLBT communities -- have a responsibility to ensure that such archives remain intact and widely accessible.
Preserving access to papers relating to Lord Palmerston and Mountbatten: the Broadlands Archives campaign
Source: History Today (11-17-09)
At the end of last week, the University of Southampton launched a campaign to raise the necessary funds to preserve public access in the UK to hundreds of thousands of papers and photographs relating to Lord Mountbatten and Lord Palmerston. The Broadlands Archives have been on loan to the University’s Hartley Library since 1989, where they were transferred from the home of Lord Romsey. They were inherited by Lord Romsey, Mountbatten's grandson, on Mountbatten's assassination by the IRA off the Irish coast on August 27th, 1979. The University now needs to raise 2.85 million to acquire the Broadlands Archives.
The archives are stored in more than 4,500 boxes and include documents which chart the major political, social, diplomatic and economic events of the 19th and 20th centuries. They include 1,200 letters dealing with foreign affairs and general government business from the Queen to Lord Palmerston (1784-1865), who served as Foreign Secretary, Home Secretary and Prime Minister during Queen Victoria’s reign.
There are also 250,000 papers and 50,000 photographs which chart the career of Earl Mountbatten of Burma (1900-1979). In particular, they cover his time as Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia Command (SACSEA) from 1943 to 1946, and as the last Viceroy of India in 1947 and 1948 and the first Governor-General of the newly independent Union of India. Correspondence from this time includes letters from Gandhi and there are also papers and photographs of Mountbatten’s wife Edwina, Countess Mountbatten.
Shakespeare Quartos Archive launched online
Source: Culture24 (11-17-09)
All 32 surviving quarto editions of Shakespeare's Hamlet have been collated in a free digital archive launched yesterday.
Shakespeare Quartos Archive allows scholars to compare early printed copies of the famous play in one place, without travelling between the world's great libraries.
The website's interactive format means high-quality page images can be annotated, searched and compared side by side for the first time.
The Transatlantic venture – funded by JISC in the UK and the National Endowment for the Humanities in the US – is being led by the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC.
GOP faces struggle to recapture House in 2010
Source: Taegan Goddard's Political Wire (11-17-09)
"A lack of competitive open-seat House races in 2010 could complicate Republican efforts to fully maximize a favorable national environment and make large seat gains after back-to-back elections where the political winds were blowing in the opposite direction," Roll Call reports.
"So far, 18 Members have announced they are not seeking re-election in 2010 and are running for other office instead -- but only six of those races are currently considered competitive. No Member has yet announced an outright retirement, which is unusual; at this point in the 2008 cycle, 14 Members had announced their retirement and five others were running for Senate."
The Fix: "Compare those numbers to 1994 when 40 of the 52 seats Democrats lost were in open seat races and you begin to see why the comparison between the two elections is somewhat ill-fitting. Watch to see how many more House Democrats decide to bail on a re-election race next November between now and January 2010; if that number stays below 15 or 20, Democrats have to feel good about holding the House in 2011."
David Segal: Naming the '00s
Source: NYT (11-14-09)
THERE are 46 days left in 2009, which means it is just about time to commence the beloved and enduring parlor game known as “Name That Decade.”
You know the rules — coin a pithy, reductive phrase that somehow encapsulates the multitude of events, trends, triumphs and calamities of the past 10 years. If you can also rope in some of the big personalities and consumer obsessions, that’s a bonus.
For the ’00s, it seems the trick will be finding a small package sturdy and flexible enough to capture so much upheaval and change. And worry — although in hindsight, it sure seems like we kept worrying about the wrong menace.
The decade began with a frenzy of fear about the Y2k millennium bug, which many technology experts said would sunder computers, crash jets and wreak havoc in every corner of the globe. As that non-emergency passed, a genuine threat quietly gathered in the form of a plot to fell the twin towers.
Later, we scoured Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, which we did not find. As we searched, we built weapons of financial chaos right here at home, with home mortgages, leverage and something called Collateral Debt Obligations.
Fortunes and a staggering number of jobs have vanished, inflicting misery in this country and others on a scale that would surely have exceeded the most garish of Saddam’s fantasies.
So: The Era of Misplaced Anxiety?
“How about the Decade of Disruptions?” suggests Walter Isaacson, the former editor of Time magazine and author of a biography of Benjamin Franklin. “We had coasted through the ’90s with irrational exuberance. Between the fall of the Berlin Wall until the fall of the twin towers, there was nothing unnerving us. It was the decade after the cold war and it seemed like we were done with global struggles.”
“Then we get to a decade that begins with 9/11 and we realize we will be involved with a global struggle. And the decade has various financial disruptions — the dot-com bubble, Enron — culminating in the one last year. It’s been a decade as bumpy as the ’90s were blithe.”
The upside of “disruption” is that it’s flexible enough to capture both the financial meltdown and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But what if you just want to focus on our money woes?
“This will be remembered as the era when the North went South,” offers Carmen Reinhart, economist and co-author of “This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.”
By North and South Ms. Reinhart isn’t referring to geography; she means developed economies and emerging economies.
“If you look at the 1990s, it was a decade of emerging market crises,” she said. “The big peso blowout in Mexico in 1994 and ’95. Asia erupts in the summer of ’97 and the Asian crisis runs into ’98.” And so on.
“Meanwhile, the North was in its Great Moderation phase,” Ms. Reinhart said. “If you look at academic discussion and even public perception, in the first seven years of this decade, people thought the North had beaten the business cycle. Not only did we convincingly show that we have not mastered the business cycle, but we’re having an emerging-market style of crisis. This is something we haven’t seen in the postwar era and it’s something that in the years of the Great Moderation we would have thought unthinkable.”
Actually, the Decade of the Unthinkable is pretty good, too. If nothing else pleasant can be said about the last 10 years, they sure weren’t dull.
“It’s been a tough decade for those of us in the future prediction business,” says the futurist Paul Saffo, who teaches at Stanford University. “Realities have consistently outpaced our wildest imaginings.”
Mr. Saffo said he had struggled to keep his forecasts a few paces ahead of the times, which appears to be the inspiration for his decade appellation of choice.
“Overshoot,” he says. “It’s been a decade of overshoot.”
Overshoot?
“In the ’90s,” he says, “we had all the indicators of the problems that were coming and in our complacency we did nothing. The environment, terrorism, financial markets.”
None of these problems came out of nowhere, he says. But because no one acted, “the problems, once they began, overshot the institutions that could have solved them.”
And this isn’t a problem that he thinks is going away. “Without a doubt, we’re seven billion people driving at light speed down a dark and foggy highway and we can’t see past the windshield.”...
Read More...
Families of first world war tank crew commemorate historic battle (France)
Source: Guardian (UK) (11-16-09)
Relatives of soldiers who were killed in one of the world's first major tank battles will make a pilgrimage to France this week to celebrate the men's bravery.
Historians have traced families of the crew of the MkIV D51 tank, better known as "Deborah", who died during the battle of Cambrai in the first world war.
Five of its eight crew died during the battle, and the tank itself was abandoned and buried before it was pinpointed by historians beneath a field near the village of Flesquieres and dug out in 1998.
On Friday the families of the five men who died and one who survived will visit the spot to remember the battle and honour the bravery of their forefathers.
Metal Thieves Steal 1,500 Pound Cannon From Veteran's Cemetary (California)
Source: Fox News 40 Sacramento (11-15-09)
VALLEJO - A huge cannon at a Vallejo's Sunrise Memorial Cemetary...taken by thieves. It was part of a memorial dedicated to veterans, but cops think thieves stole it for the scrap metal.
Francisco Lopez is a Veteran and a Historian. He says these metal thieves are only thinking about making money and not respecting our cemetaries. "These are unique treasures that are not available anywhere and they are relics of these soldiers times."
Officials Discuss Plans to Bring Gitmo Detainees to Illinois
Source: CNSNews.com (11-13-09)
Chicago (AP) - Gov. Pat Quinn and U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin on Sunday tried to build support and counter criticism of a proposal to sell a prison in rural northwestern Illinois to the federal government to house Guantanamo Bay detainees and other inmates.
Federal officials are expected to visit the maximum security Thomson Correctional Center, about 150 miles west of Chicago, on Monday.
Both Quinn and Durbin said the possibility of selling the prison to the federal government was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help create about 3,000 jobs, both at the prison and directly in surrounding communities in an area where unemployment has topped 10 percent.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Black Panthers denounce 'new' Panthers
Source: The Washington Times (11-16-09)
The New Black Panther Party catapulted itself to national attention during the November 2008 presidential election when two of its members, one brandishing a nightstick, were captured on videotape intimidating voters at a Philadelphia polling place.
But the original Black Panther Party, which famously advocated black power and preached self-defense through confrontation in the 1960s and 1970s, is not happy with the new upstart. It has condemned the New Black Panther Party and its tactics, saying the NBPP "stole" the party's name for its "own misguided purposes."
The Huey P. Newton Foundation Inc., created in 1993 and co-founded by Fredrika Newton, Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton's widow, said in a statement that the original party was "never a group of angry young militants full of fury toward the white establishment ... but operated on love for black people, not hatred of white people.
"As guardian of the true history of the Black Panther Party, the foundation, which includes former leading members of the party, denounces this group's exploitation of the party's name and history," the statement said. "Failing to find its own legitimacy in the black community, this band would graft the party's name upon itself, which we condemn.
"There is no New Black Panther Party," the statement said, describing the NBPP as "a small band of African Americans calling themselves the New Black Panthers." It said the NBPP has "no legitimate claim on the party's name" and that it "only pretends to walk in the footsteps of the party's true heroes."
The denouncement by the foundation, which now operates community-based literacy, voter outreach and health-related programs, is not the only challenge facing the NBPP...
U.S. Supreme Court declines 'Redskins' suit
Source: WSJ (11-17-09)
WASHINGTON -- The Washington Redskins ended their four-game losing streak Sunday. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court handed the professional football team another victory, declining to hear a petition alleging its use of the "Redskins" mascot is racially disparaging.
Suzan Harjo v. Pro-Football Inc., a case that began in 1992, centered on whether a dispute over a potentially offensive trademark can be dismissed if the challenge was not filed promptly. Though the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board ruled in 1999 that the name was disparaging and should be changed, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. later decided that the challengers had waited too long to file their petition. The Redskins first registered the mascot with the Patent and Trademark Office in 1967.
The Redskins acquired their controversial name in 1933, before they arrived in Washington.
Originally the "Boston Braves," then-owner George Preston Marshall renamed the Boston Redskins in honor of their head coach, William "Lone Star" Dietz, himself a Native American, according to team lawyers in a brief for the high court.
When the team moved to Washington in 1937, the name was tweaked to reflect its new hometown.
Groups of law and psychology professors have filed amicus briefs in the case, urging the court to prohibit dismissing trademark disputes based on timeliness questions if the name does public damage.
In this case, use of the "Redskins" epithet propagates a negative stereotype of Native Americans, the psychology professors argued.
South Pole explorers to drill for Sir Ernest Shackleton's Whisky
Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-15-09)
Explorers are planning to recover a rare batch of whisky lost during explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated voyage to the South Pole a century ago.
Two crates of the now extinct “Rare Old” brand of McKinlay and Co whisky have been buried in the Antarctic ice since Shackleton was forced to abandon his polar mission in 1909.
But Whyte & Mackay, the whisky giant that owns McKinlay and Co, has asked a team of New Zealand explorers heading out on a January expedition to return a sample of the drink for a series of experiments.
The team intends to utilise special drills to free the trapped crates and rescue a bottle from the wreckage, which is believed to have been discarded 97 miles from the pole.
If they cannot retrieve a full bottle, they are hoping to use a syringe to extract some of the contents.
The child of Auschwitz's Kommandant
Source: BBC (11-16-09)
Barbara Cherish is a child of the SS, and the burden lies heavily upon her.
She knew early in her life that her German father, Arthur Liebehenschel, was involved in something terrible, something the family did not discuss.
Only later, as an adult, did she discover he had run part of the Auschwitz concentration camp for five months during World War II.
The knowledge gnawed at her, but it took a life crisis - her divorce and the death of her sister - to spur her to delve into the past and piece together her father's story.
The result is a book in which she struggles to reconcile her love for the father she never knew with the knowledge of his crimes, which saw him sentenced to death in Poland after the war.
“ I do have mixed feelings because he was a complex person. Here's this good person that really tried everything he could to help the prisoners ”
Evidence for kings David and Solomon
Source: Times Online (11-16-09)
“King David and King Solomon lived merry, merry lives,
With many, many concubines and many, many wives.
But when old age crept after them, with many, many qualms,
King Solomon wrote the Proverbs and King David wrote the Psalms.”
There are several versions of this anonymous rhyme, but the problem, some biblical archaeologists argue, is that there is little evidence that either king existed: archaeological remains have been assigned to their reigns on the basis of cryptic verses in the Old Testament, and then used to “prove” the date of similar buildings at other sites.
Until 15 years ago, Professor Eric Cline notes in a new book, there was no extra-biblical documentary mention of even the House of David as ruling in Judea. The fragmentary Tel Dan Stele, found reused as building material at a site in what is now northern Israel in 1993-94, provided the first evidence outside the First Book of Kings.
Dating to about 842BC, the Tel Dan inscription describes the defeat of Joram, king of Israel, and Ahaziyahu, king of Judah, by a ruler of Aram-Damascus earlier in the 9th century BC. The Israelites had invaded his territory, located somewhere in Lebanon or southern Syria, but he “slew seventy kings, who harnessed thousands of chariots and thousands of horsemen. And I killed Joram son of Ahab, king of Israel, and I killed Ahaziyahu, son of Joram, king of the House of David.”
“However, we are still lacking any contemporary or near-contemporary inscriptions that mention Solomon: at the moment we do not have a single one,” Professor Cline says. “Moreover, there is still very little archaeological evidence for the existence of David.”
Yemen Finds Dreamland of Architecture
Source: NYT (11-15-09)
SANA, Yemen — It has been almost 800 years since Saleh Qaid Othaim’s house in the heart of the Old City was built from hand-cut stones and traditional alabaster decorations.
Yet on a recent morning, Mr. Othaim watched contentedly as a group of men renovated the place using exactly the same ancient methods and materials. Workers mixed the moist chocolate-brown masonry known as teen while a master builder supervised, a dagger hanging from his belt. There was no scaffolding, no helmets, no whine of machines: only the scraping of trowels and masonry, interrupted at last by the call to prayer in the high desert air.
“I don’t care how long it takes,” said Mr. Othaim, a government worker. “The most important thing is that it be done in a traditional way.”
The capital’s Old City is one of the world’s architectural gems, a thicket of unearthly medieval towers etched with white filigree and crowned with stained-glass windows. But more unusual than their mere survival is the fact that the traditional building arts continue to thrive here. Elsewhere in the Middle East, many older houses are being ripped down to make way for bland steel-and-glass high-rise buildings. The hyper-modern skyline of Dubai, United Arab Emirates, with its mismatched skyscrapers looking as if they were hurled down at the Persian Gulf from outer space, is being emulated in Beirut and other cities.
Yemen is different. For all its many woes — wars, a water crisis and the rise of Al Qaeda — the country’s adherence to ancient traditions often makes it feel like a refuge. Even outside the Old City, the bands and crescents of medieval Yemeni architecture can be seen on many newer buildings and homes, along with the translucent alabaster windows known as gammariyas...
Taking Aim at Student Muckrakers at Northwestern University
Source: NYT (11-15-09)
Since 1992, Prof. David Protess at the Medill school at Northwestern University has worked with undergraduate journalism students to investigate cases in which prosecutors appear to have taken aim at the wrong people. That might be about to happen again, only this time the students themselves would be the targets.
In one of the most recent cases, students working with the effort, which became the Medill Innocence Project in 1999, uncovered evidence that suggested Anthony McKinney had been wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for almost three decades for the murder of a security guard in 1978...
... And because of that investigative work — and perhaps work on other cases, which has led to the exoneration of 11 people, 5 of whom had been sentenced to death — the project and its students find themselves in the gun sights of Cook County prosecutors.
“I and some of my former classmates are now wondering if we are going to have to consider going to jail to protect our sources and our notes,” said Evan S. Benn, a writer and editor at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch who worked on the case in his final semester at Medill before graduating in 2004.
The prosecutors are seeking access to investigative materials, e-mail messages, course outlines, syllabuses, training materials and, yes, even grades, to explore the “bias, motive and interest” behind the students’ work..
Suspect Is Key to Pace in 9/11 Case
Source: WSJ (11-16-09)
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has said he was ready to confess to orchestrating the Sept. 11 attacks, a move that would make his case relatively easy for prosecutors. But if Mr. Mohammed decides to work with his American lawyers to stall the case, he has plenty of tools at his disposal, criminal lawyers say.
When Mr. Mohammed appeared before a U.S. military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in December, he said he and his four co-defendants wanted the proceedings over quickly. "We don't want to waste time," he told the judge. "We want to enter a plea."
Now the U.S. is scrapping military tribunals for the five men and bringing them before a civilian court in New York. If Mr. Mohammed acts to speed his own execution and await what he asserts is glorious martyrdom with a guilty plea in federal court, that would bypass a trial, eliminate the need to select a jury and lead to sentencing probably before the end of 2010.
"I think the most likely scenario is these guys don't make any bones about it and they confess their involvement," said Harry Schneider, a Seattle lawyer who helped defend Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's former driver, in a military commission. "They are proud of what they did."
"Typically, it takes a year from indictment to trial" in the Manhattan federal courts, said David Kelley, the Manhattan U.S. attorney during the George W. Bush administration. "This case is a lot more complex. There's going to be a lot of pretrial litigation, and that timeline may double."
Mr. Kelley, who was a leader of the Justice Department's 9/11 investigation and now is a partner with Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP, said "first and foremost" among the issues Mr. Mohammed could raise is the conduct of the government.
McCain asks staffers to hold their fire on Palin
Source: CNN (11-16-09)
John McCain asked former campaign staffers Friday to avoid engaging in a back-and-forth over claims made by former running mate Sarah Palin in her new book, CNN has confirmed.
On a conference call with senior campaign advisers, the former Republican presidential candidate asked them to hold back from responding – telling them, in effect, that "this too shall pass," according to sources familiar with the call.
On Friday, McCain conceded to the reality of the media firestorm surrounding Palin's charges against his team, and told them he understood if they felt the need to defend themselves. But the Arizona senator called for a minimalist approach, suggesting that his former aides avoid television appearances.
Muslim academics and students are turning against Darwin's theory
Source: Times (UK) (11-17-09)
Muslims in many countries are increasingly rejecting Darwin’s theory of evolution, under the influence of conservative elements in Islam, a science conference was told yesterday.
Nidhal Guessoum, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, told the conference, being held in Egypt by the British Council, that in too many places students and academics believed they had to make a “binary choice” between evolution and creationism, rather than understanding that one could believe both in God and in Darwin’s theory.
Dr Guessoum, who is a Sunni Muslim, said that in countries such as Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan and Malaysia, only 15 per cent of those surveyed believed Darwin’s theory to be “true” or “probably true”. This stand was equally prevalent among students and teachers, from high school to university. Most alarmingly, he claimed, science teachers were misrepresenting the facts and theories of evolution by mixing it with religious ideologies.
MI6 chiefs to give evidence at Iraq inquiry
Source: Times (UK) (11-17-09)
The past and present heads of MI6 will be among the first witnesses to give evidence at the official inquiry into the Iraq war.
Sir John Scarlett, who retired as Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service on November 1, and Sir John Sawers, his successor, are among 20 top advisers, diplomats and military figures required to attend.
Sir John was chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee which was responsible for the Government dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, published in September 2002, prior to the invasion of Iraq in March the following year.
Napoleon's hair on display in London
Source: History Today (11-16-09)
Last Thursday, Sir John Soane’s Museum in London announced that a gold mourning-ring belonging to Soane and containing a lock of Napoleon’s hair had been returned to the museum. The museum had previously tried to acquire the ring at an auction held by Christie’s in June. At the time, however, the museum was the under-bidder. With the support of The Art Fund and private donors the museum has now successfully purchased the ring for £41,000.
The ring originally belonged to Sir John Soane and was allegedly one of his most treasured private possessions. It featured on his will among the items to be kept ‘as heir looms in my family’. However, it eventually passed out of the family’s ownership and was deemed lost. When it went on sale in June, it was the first time that the museum had news of its whereabouts since Soane’s death in 1837.
The ring is hallmarked London 1822, the year after Napoleon’s death. It contains a lock of plaited brown hair, which was given to Sir John by Elizabeth Balcombe, the daughter of an official on St Helena who became close friends with the Emperor.
Indian heroine's letter unearthed
Source: BBC (11-16-09)
A previously undiscovered letter written by one of India's best known female rebels against British colonial rule has been found by academics.
The letter was written by Lakshmibai, Rani of Jhansi, shortly before the Indian mutiny - or first war of independence - in 1857.
It has been found in London in the archives of the British Library.
Rwanda genocide ruling overturned
Source: BBC (11-16-09)
The UN tribunal hearing cases from the 1994 Rwandan genocide has freed a man who had been sentenced to 22 years.
Protais Zigiranyirazo, the brother-in-law of ex-Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, had been found guilty of organising a massacre of 1,000 people.
But the appeals court judge said there had been serious errors in his trial and his conviction in 2008 violated "the most basic principles of justice".
Reporters say Mr Zigiranyirazo looked stunned and relieved by the ruling.
Where have all the protests gone? US students in limbo
Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-16-09)
When Hemnecher Amen, a student, joined a protest outside the White House recently, it was the latest visible opposition here to US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hardly anyone took any notice.
With the US military several years into two faraway wars, American students like Amen are taking to the streets less often - and to less effect - than their Vietnam-era predecessors who were the vanguard of the anti-war movement in the 1960s and early 1970s.
The economic and academic pressures on today's youth, intimidation by the authorities, online distractions and conflicted views about the "good" war in Afghanistan, not to mention other causes such as health care and slashed school budgets clawing for attention, have conspired to snuff out anti-war activism on campus, experts and students say.
Benito Mussolini regarded Adolf Hitler as a 'sentimentalist'
Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-16-09)
Benito Mussolini regarded Adolf Hitler as a teary-eyed "sentimentalist" but was jealous of the Nazi dictator's power and fame, diaries written by the Italian leader's mistress reveal.
Claretta Petacci's journals, which will be published this week, describe a meeting he had with the German leader in 1938 after British prime minister Neville Chamberlain agreed to Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland.
The diaries also show Mussolini was irritated by being regarded as a junior partner to Hitler, maintaining that his fascism and anti-Semitism dated back to the 1920s, before Hitler rose to prominence.
The book, Secret Mussolini, contains extracts from Petacci's diaries written between 1932 and 1938.
How the Nazis tried to take Christ out of Christmas
Source: The Times (UK) (11-17-09)
For the perfect Nazi Christmas you had to hang glittering swastikas and toy grenades from the pine tree in the living room and, in your freshly pressed uniform, belt out carols urging German women to make babies for the Führer rather than worship the Jewish Baby Jesus. Then came the moment to light the pagan candle-holders — hand-made by labourers at Dachau.
Hitler’s dream of a 1,000-year Reich came to an end long before the world was subjected to 1,000 of his Christmases but an exhibition in Cologne is highlighting how the Nazis, in particular Heinrich Himmler, tried to take Christ out of Christmas.
The Nazi version — removing lines about Christ and inserting a paean to snowy fields — remained in some songbooks and, outside churchgoing families, is the version sung by many Germans today. The same goes for carols referring to Virgin Birth and lullabies that invoke the Baby Jesus. The rewriting was supervised by the chief Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, who had the brief of changing the German calendar. Christmas was to be merged into a Julfest, a celebration of the winter solstice of light and of oneness with nature. It drew on pagan traditions and tried to squeeze religion out.
The plan was to break the emotional power of the Church. The star from the Christmas tree was replaced with a sun in case it could be interpreted as a Star of David, or if red, as a Bolshevik symbol. The name for the Christmas tree, Christbaum, was usurped in the press by fir tree, light tree or Jultree. The point of the Julfest was to remember Germanic ancestors and soldiers, although most Germans did their best, discreetly, to keep Christmas religious.
Palin: I Can't Be Blamed for GOP Losing Presidency in 2008
Source: Fox News (11-16-09)
Sarah Palin said she thinks the Republican ticket lost the 2008 presidential election because Americans were looking for change, and not because she undermined the campaign or was unprepared for the vice presidential seat.
In an interview with Oprah Winfrey that aired Monday, Palin said the economy tanked under a Republican administration and people wanted to try a different path.
As for her daughter's pregnancy, Palin described to Oprah the handling of the news that Bristol Palin was pregnant, saying that the then-17-year-old Bristol was embarrassed to see her pregnancy on the news. Palin said she tried to console Bristol and thought the campaign botched the message management on the pregnancy and thought that the realism of the situation should have been the message that shone through.
'Forgotten Australians' get apology
Source: CNN (11-16-09)
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd formally apologized on Monday to thousands of adults who, as impoverished British children, were brought to Australia with the promise of a better life but found abuse and forced labor.
The so-called Forgotten Australians -- children who came from British families struggling with severe poverty or from institutions in the UK -- were brought to Australia in a program that ended 40 years ago.
The program scarred generations of children who were placed in state institutions and orphanages. They later told of being kept in brutal conditions, being physically abused and being forced to work on farms.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Signs of man, Ice Age beast found together in Mexico
Source: USA Today (11-9-09)
Scientists have found evidence that cavemen near the U.S.-Mexican border were butchering gomphotheres, elephant-like beasts from the Ice Age that had been believed to be nearly extinct in North America by the time humans appeared there.
Researchers from the University of Arizona and Mexico's anthropology institute say they found the bones of two young gomphotheres — along with blades, a scraping tool and stone chips from making spear tips — at an 11,000-year-old site in Mexico's Sonora state.
The finding adds fuel to a debate over whether overhunting by humans helped drive prehistoric animals such as mastodons, North American horses and gomphotheres into extinction, said Vance Holliday, a University of Arizona archaeologist on the team.
Human bones found at Saanich construction site may be 1,000 years old (Canada)
Source: Times Colonist (Canada) (11-9-09)
Bones found at a Saanich lot where a new home is being built are believed to be the 1,000-year-old remains of an 18-year-old aboriginal person, but police say it is also possible the bones are from several individuals.
The discovery began with a false alarm when on Nov. 3, a dog nosing around at the construction site pulled out a bone from loosened earth where excavators had been working. Construction was stopped at that point and is still on hold. Saanich police took the bone to the Royal B.C. Museum where it was determined to be a rib bone of a cow that had likely died in the early 1900s.
An archaeologist reviewed the site and the next day three more bones were unearthed. They were also examined.
The Provincial Archaeology Branch is working closely with police to confirm the bones’ heritge and whether more bones may be at the site.
Search for Plant in WV Yields Rare Civil War Find
Source: WHSV (11-11-09)
A search for paw paws near Fort Boreman Historical Park has uncovered a rare artifact: a stone bearing the carved name of a Civil War soldier.
A search for paw paws near Fort Boreman Historical Park has uncovered a rare artifact: a stone bearing the carved name of a Civil War soldier.
Civil War historians Brian Kesterson and Terry McVey found the stone October 26.
During the war, Fort Boreman was a Union encampment.
Kesterson says the inscription "A.P. Jones 1861" was carved into the stone, along with a soldier on a horse that indicated Jones was a member of a cavalry unit.
A return to glory
Source: The Boston Globe (11-15-09)
The latest restoration of USS Constitution is undoing historically incorrect changes, bringing the ship ever closer to its 1812 splendor.
The only living veteran of the War of 1812” -- as USS Constitution Commander William Bullard described the old warship when he turned over his post this summer -- is having a makeover. Actually, “Old Ironsides” has gone through many looks since its launch 212 years ago. Some, such as the two-story barnlike structure built on its upper deck in 1882 and used for offices, were far removed from the iconic appearance attached to the ship today.
Restoration efforts beginning in the late 1920s have helped Constitution regain its look and dignity. In the mid-1990s, work restored the ship’s structural integrity, enabling it to sail under its own power for the first time in 116 years. The current three-year rehabilitation, which ends next year, will have similarly dramatic results. “When we’re done, Constitution will look as close to her 1812 configuration as it has since 1927,” says Richard Whelan, director of the Naval History and Heritage Command Detachment Boston, which oversees the ship’s maintenance.
Statue of Sir Tasker is unveiled (Wales)
Source: BBC (11-15-09)
A statue honouring the late Victoria Cross holder and former Welsh Rugby Union president Sir Tasker Watkins has been unveiled by his daughter.
The 9ft (2.7m) bronze sculpture takes pride of place on the walkway leading into the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff.
Lady Mair Griffith-Williams performed the ceremony in front of a distinguished audience.
Sir Tasker, whose wartime bravery earned him the Victoria Cross at the age of 25 in 1944, died two years ago.
Glencoe Massacre orders displayed (Scotland)
Source: BBC (11-15-09)
A 300-year-old document which led to one of the most infamous episodes in Scottish history is to go on display.
The signed order for the Massacre of Glencoe will form the centrepiece of an exhibition to mark the end of the Year of Homecoming.
It will be among nine cultural treasures which will be displayed in the National Library of Scotland from this week.
Thirty eight members of the MacDonald clan were killed in the massacre.
Serbian Orthodox patriarch dies
Source: BBC (11-15-09)
The head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Pavle, has died in Belgrade, the Church has announced.
The patriarch, 95, became leader of the Church in 1990. He was admitted to the city's military hospital two years ago.
Though he reportedly suffered from heart and lung conditions, the Church did not specify the cause of death.
Denholm Elliott PoW Shakespeare book to be auctioned
Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-15-09)
The family of the actor Denholm Elliott is auctioning an archive of his memorabilia including a book of Shakespeare’s plays sent to him at a prisoner of war camp in Germany during the Second World War.
Elliott first developed an interest in acting while an RAF prisoner of war when he read and re-read the book sent to the camp in Selesia by the Red Cross.
He staged amateur dramatics and on his release he pursued an acting career in London before making his film debut in 1949.
Four Plays Of Shakespeare is among the memorabilia from his family expected to fetch more than £15,000 at auction in London. The book still carries the distinctive prison camp stamp, Stalag VIII B.
Giuliani: Obama Repeating 'Mistake of History' With Sept. 11 Trial Decision
Source: Fox News (11-15-09)
The mayor who oversaw rescue efforts in the wake of the attacks on lower Manhattan tells 'Fox News Sunday' the president is only granting the 'wish' of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad at the expense of the American people and that the conspirators should be tried in a military tribunal.
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani accused the Obama administration of "repeating the mistake of history" by bringing the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks and his accomplices to New York for a civilian trial, saying the administration has definitively reverted to a "pre-9/11 approach."
Giuliani said the biggest problem is that the United States is treating terrorists as it did after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which was followed by a string of other terrorist attacks on Americans overseas and finally by the Sept. 11 massacre.
Army Will Search for More WWII Bombs at Orlando School
Source: Fox News (11-15-09)
ORLANDO, Fla. — The Army Corps of Engineers will be returning to an Orlando middle school to search for World War II explosives that might be buried there.
The federal agency will inspect part of the Odyssey Middle School campus where 15 portable classrooms are being removed because of declining enrollment. Corps officials hadn't been able to search that area with metal detectors and other bomb finding technology before.
More than 400 pounds of World War II-era bombs and munitions were unearthed from the grounds around the middle school over the winter holidays last year. Part of the school grounds had been used by the Army in the 1940s to train bombardiers for combat.
Sweden Returns 22 Looted Human Skulls to Hawaii
Source: Fox News (11-14-09)
STOCKHOLM — With a solemn ceremony in Stockholm's antiquities museum, Sweden on Saturday marked the return of 22 skulls looted from a native Hawaiian community mainly in the 17th century.
The symbolic ceremony — attended by guests from Hawaii and the Nordic countries' own indigenous Sami population — was part of Sweden's increased efforts to return indigenous remains collected by scientists across the world in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The Swedish government in 2005 ordered its museums to search through their collections, and has since returned more than 20 human remains, mainly to Australia.
The Hawaiian skulls had been returned privately earlier Saturday so that the Hawaiian delegates could perform a ritual according to traditional customs.
Museum director Lars Amreus said he hoped the return would help "fulfill the spiritual circle" of those whose graves had been violated by the Swedish scientists.
"We know that they were collected, although by today's standards: they were looted," Amreus said.
How America Backs Pakistani Spies
Source: The Daily Beast (11-15-09)
The CIA has given hundreds of millions of dollars to support Pakistan's spy network since the September 11 attacks, contributing as much as a third of the foreign agency's annual budget, the Los Angeles Times reported Sunday. Additionally, a secret State Department program pays Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency tens of millions of dollars for capturing or killing wanted militants, officials tell the newspaper. All of this money has some in the U.S. government concerned because of fears that the ISI also supports Taliban extremists. "There really are two ISIs," a former CIA operative said. "On the counterterrorism side, those guys were in lock-step with us," the former operative said. "And then there was the 'long-beard' side. Those are the ones who created the Taliban..."
Native American History Month
Source: DVIDS (11-14-09)
BAGHDAD – The contributions of Native Americans to American history, as well as the military, are quintessentially, well, American.
November marks Native American History Month and is intended to celebrate and commemorate the rich culture of the various Indian nations, said Sgt. 1st Class Tamatha Denton, from New York.
"The theme for this year is 'Understanding American Indian Heritage Now and Then,'" she said. "We're touching on military service all the way back from the Revolutionary War to the global war on terrorism."
This year observance for Multi-National Division Baghdad Soldiers, here, will have storytellers relating the history of Native American military service as well as traditional foods. Stories will include the famous code talkers of World War II, whose secret code, transmitted in the Navajo language, confounded the Japanese and was never decoded. Also touched upon will be more modern heroes such as Spc. Lori Piestewa, who was the first Native American woman to die in combat when her convoy came under attack outside Nasiriyah during the opening month of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003.
The participation of Native Americans in the U.S. military is long and storied, with 25 Medal of Honor winners, Denton explained.
"Their involvement in U.S. military service is higher per capita than any other ethnic group in the United States," she said. "That speaks volumes."
Forest People May Lose Home in Kenyan Plan
Source: NYT (11-14-09)
MARASHONI, Kenya — With the stroke of a pen, the last of Kenya’s honey hunters may soon be homeless.
Since time immemorial, the Ogiek have been Kenya’s traditional forest dwellers. They have stalked antelope with homemade bows, made medicine from leaves and trapped bees to produce honey, the golden elixir of the woods. They have struggled to survive the press of modernity, and many times they have been persecuted, driven from their forests and belittled as “dorobo,” a word meaning roughly people with no cattle. Somehow, they have always managed to survive.
Now, though, the little-known Ogiek, among East Africa’s last bona fide hunters and gatherers, face their gravest test yet. The Kenyan government is gearing up to evict tens of thousands of settlers, illegal or not, from the Mau Forest, the Ogiek’s ancestral home and a critical water source for this entire country. The question is: Will the few thousand remaining Ogiek be given a reprieve or given the boot?
“Tell Obama and his men to help us,” pleaded Daniel M. Kobei, an Ogiek leader, who still seems almost stunned that the Ogiek may have to leave a forest they have battled for decades to conserve. “It’s not that we’re special, but this forest is our home.”...
... To the Ogiek, all this is sadly familiar. Though they are among the oldest communities in East Africa, many were marched off their land by British colonists in the 1930s and herded into “native reserves” where countless Ogiek died from diseases they had no natural resistance to, like malaria. The British felled their forests and planted pine trees, good for commercial logging, though in the Ogiek’s eyes, for little else.
The persecution continued after Kenya’s independence in 1963, with the Kenyan police burning down Ogiek huts to drive the people out of the woods. In the 1990s, the government began handing out thousands of acres in the Mau Forest to political friends, which squeezed the Ogiek even further. The Ogiek sued in Kenyan courts, and the Ford Foundation helped pay their legal bills, but their forest continued to melt away...
Unusual Partners Study Divisive Jerusalem Site
Source: NYT (11-14-09)
JERUSALEM — At the heart of this contested city, the holy site known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary, has become, for many, the epicenter of the conflict between Israel, the Palestinians and the wider Muslim world.
The mere mention of the place stirs passions and memories of centuries of bloodshed. Its alternative names evoke the depth of religious devotion and the competing claims.
Many of those contradictions are encapsulated in a new book, “Where Heaven and Earth Meet: Jerusalem’s Sacred Esplanade,” to be published here on Monday. The book is a collection of essays by renowned scholars on the history, archaeology, aesthetics and politics of the place that Jews revere as the location of their two ancient temples, and that now houses the Al Aksa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam.
The illustrated 400-page book, in English, appears at a time of heightened tensions over the coveted site. Most extraordinarily, its authors and co-sponsors include Israeli and Palestinian experts and institutions, giving an unfettered platform to Muslims, Christians and Jews...
... Yet the board of Al-Quds University recently decided to boycott Israeli academic institutions to protest Israel’s policies and because peace talks have stalled.
Mr. Abu Sway said that projects already under way were allowed to be completed, and that the Palestinian chapters of the book were submitted long before the boycott took hold.
The book was years in the making and required exceptional tact on the part of the co-editors, Oleg Grabar of Princeton University, and Benjamin Kedar of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Mr. Kedar came up with the neutral term “sacred esplanade” in the title. “It was the compromise,” he said. “It should be acceptable to all.”
Israel captured East Jerusalem, including the Old City, formerly controlled by Jordan, in the 1967 war. Since then, a fragile status quo has been preserved at the compound. The civil administration remains in the hands of the Waqf, the Muslim religious endowment, while overall security is the responsibility of the Israeli police. Israel claims sovereignty over all of Jerusalem, while the Palestinians demand that the eastern part be recognized as the capital of a future independent state. ..
Portrait of 9/11 'Jackal' Emerges as He Awaits Trial
Source: NYT (11-14-09)
WASHINGTON — Not long after he was rousted from bed and seized in a predawn raid in Pakistan in March 2003, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed gave his captors two demands: He wanted a lawyer, and he wanted to be taken to New York.
After a nearly seven-year odyssey that took him to secret Central Intelligence Agency jails in Europe and an American military prison in Cuba, Mr. Mohammed is finally likely to get his wish.
He will be the most senior leader of Al Qaeda to date held to account for the mass murder of nearly 3,000 Americans, facing trial in Manhattan while his boss, Osama bin Laden, continues to elude a worldwide dragnet.
Yet the boastful, calculating and fiercely independent Mr. Mohammed has never neatly fit the mold of Qaeda chieftain. He has little use for the high-minded moralizing of some of his associates, and for years before the Sept. 11 attacks, he refused to swear an oath of loyalty to Mr. bin Laden — figuring that if the Qaeda leader canceled the Sept. 11 plot, he would not have to obey the order.
A detailed portrait of the life and worldview of Mr. Mohammed, 44, has emerged in the years since his capture, filled in by declassified C.I.A. documents, interrogation transcripts, the report of the Sept. 11 commission and his own testimony at a military tribunal. And the most significant terrorism trial in American history will be a grand stage for a man who describes himself as a “jackal,” consumed with a zeal for perpetual battle against the United States...
... It was not until the mid-1990s that American counterterrorism experts began to understand Mr. Mohammed’s significance to the cause of global jihad, after a thwarted plot to blow up 12 American commercial aircraft in midair. The so-called Bojinka plot, hatched in a Manila apartment with his nephew, the World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef, was Mr. Mohammed’s first inspiration for using airliners as ballistic missiles against civilian targets, according to the 9/11 commission report and recently declassified C.I.A. documents.
In 1996, Mr. Mohammed traveled to Afghanistan to sell Mr. bin Laden on an idea: simultaneously hijacking 10 aircraft and flying them into different prominent civilian targets in the United States. He would be on the one plane not to crash, and after the plane landed would emerge and deliver a speech condemning American policy on Israel...
U.S. Soldiers Among First to Tour Ancient Iraqi Temple
Source: Fox News (11-14-09)
The Ziggurat of Ur has stood for 4,000 years in the desert near Nasiriyah in southeastern Iraq, but this unique historical site had been almost completely off limits to visitors under Saddam Hussein.
All that has changed since the old regime was overthrown in 2003, and now, U.S. soldiers are some of the site's most receptive visitors.
The temple-pyramid is part of the ruins of an ancient Sumerian city.
Dhair Muhsen, an Iraqi tour guide, said Hussein made it difficult for tourists to visit the sites, setting up strict checkpoints with Iraqi soldiers and telling people they couldn't take pictures.
The majority of people who visit the site now are U.S. soldiers, who are bussed over to the site from nearby Camp Adder.
Venice Mourns Flight of Residents From City's Heart
Source: NYT (11-14-09)
VENICE — At high noon on Saturday, a gondola bearing a hot-pink plywood coffin decked with yellow flowers made its way down the Grand Canal. Onlookers watched from the shore and shouted greetings from the Rialto Bridge before the boat alighted nearby in front of the Venice city hall.
Part photo opportunity, part political theater, the spectacle was the centerpiece of a fake funeral for the city of Venice. A group of prankster-provocateurs organized it to protest the fact that the number of residents in Venice’s historic center has dropped below 60,000, down from 74,000 in 1993, as rising rents and hordes of tourists have pushed thousands to the mainland.
As a result, locals feel like an endangered species. “We’re going to turn into a city of ghosts if something isn’t done soon,” said Matteo Secchi, a local hotelier and a spokesman for Venessia, the group that organized the funeral. “In 30 years there might be zero Venetians left.”
Dressed in black the day before the funeral, Mr. Secchi, 40, was standing near a pharmacy with an electronic population ticker in the window. It read 59,992.
The city, however, places the number at 60,025 for Venice proper, plus another 30,000 in the surrounding islands. In a statement, Venice’s housing commissioner, Mara Rumiz, compared the stunt to “a funeral for a father who is still alive, which in general brings a bit of bad luck.” Still, it is a long way down from 108,300 residents in 1971. And it pales in comparison with the 18 million tourists who visit Venice each year.
Some local residents think the funeral is overdue. “They came too late,” said Massimo Zane, 52, as he stood at his fish stand in the Rialto market. “We’re already dead.”
When his father opened the stand 40 years ago, “we had rows of people lined up two deep,” he said. Not so today. “There are just a few retired people here. I’m sorry for them. Life is expensive.”
How Old Is Old Enough? A Look at When Children are Considered Adults
Source: NYT (11-14-09)
THIS past week the Supreme Court heard arguments about whether children should ever be sentenced to life without parole for crimes that don’t involve murder.
At the heart of the argument lies a vexing question: When should a person be treated as an adult?
The answer, generally, is 18 — the age when the United States, and the rest of the world, considers young people capable of accepting responsibility for their actions. But there are countless deviations from this benchmark, both around the world (the bar mitzvah, for instance), and within the United States...
... And if you think separating the men from the boys (or the women from the girls) is difficult today, tracing the history of America’s conception of childhood just complicates things further.
In the 19th century, teenagers were expected to raise their own children and work in the fields. This was true even though 19th-century teenagers were physically and intellectually less advanced than teenagers today. Thanks to better nutrition and more formal schooling, today’s children generally reach puberty earlier and are, at least in theory, more informed about the world around them.
In other words, the only thing that is consistent about our notions of when a child becomes an adult is our inconsistency, says Steven Mintz, a historian at Columbia University...
... In Florida, for instance, the state got tough on teenage criminals when juvenile crime rates jumped during the 1990s, threatening not only residents and visitors, but Florida’s bedrock tourism industry itself. Two such juvenile offenders, one who raped a woman when he was 13, and another who committed armed robbery at 16, brought the appeals heard by the Supreme Court last week...
... Over the years attempts have been made to align these various ages of majority. The voting age was lowered during the Vietnam War, for example, largely because Americans were uncomfortable with a democracy that forced 18-year-olds to die for their country but denied them suffrage...
Historian rules out skull as Ned Kelly's (Australia)
Source: The Border Mail (AU) (11-14-09)
BEECHWORTH’S noted Ned Kelly historian Ian Jones says the skull handed to Victorian authorities for DNA authentication this week is not likely the famous bushranger’s.
Mr Jones said the skull was likely Ernest Knox’s, who was executed at Old Melbourne Gaol 14 years after Kelly.
“His initials are EK (the same as Edward Kelly) and it appears the grave that was dug up in 1929 as Ned Kelly’s grave was Ernest Knox’s,” Mr Jones said.
Mr Jones first saw the skull in 1972.
He said the facial features seemed too long and that a cast of the skull taken for reconstruction was very similar to the face of Knox.
And Mr Jones said Kelly’s true skull would have to be in two pieces.
That was unlike the one West Australian man Tom Baxter has presented to authorities.
“Ned’s skull has to be in two pieces because they, doctors and students, removed his head, and took his body apart and his organs out after the execution,” Mr Jones said.
“It was reported at the time that they were going to be able to tell us all about the intelligence of this famous bushranger.
“The only reason a group like that would remove the head is to examine the brain and unless you saw the skull in half the only way you can get the brain out is a teaspoon, which is not going to be much good for research.”
Mr Jones said he still held out hope Kelly’s skull would one day be found.
Rare WWII Japanese doll finds home in Kansas
Source: Kansas City (11-13-09)
When Bob Enright first showed Kevin Corbett a small doll a sailor took off a Japanese kamikaze pilot whose plane struck a ship in World War II, he knew it was special.
“Bob said people had given him advice, saying sell the doll,” Corbett said. “He asked me what I thought and I told him not to listen to anyone; it was something special, something culturally significant.” ...
... The next day, he received a reply from Ellen Schattschneider, who teaches anthropology at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. She has done extensive research on the dolls, which are called mascot dolls—masukotto ningyo in Japanese—and has written a book, “Facing the Dead: Japan and its Dolls in the Mirror of War.”
Schattschneider’s interest in the dolls developed while researching special ceremonies in northeastern Japan, in which the soul of an unmarried person who has died is married, in effect, to a beautiful bride doll.
On her Web site, www.pacificwrecks.com/history/doll/, she wrote that mascot dolls mayhave developed from amulets carried by samurai.
“This appears to be an example of the widespread belief in Japan that dolls have a kind of soul (tamashi) and can carry the identity or essence of a person who has made or owned them,” she said.
By World War II, Japanese women and girls made small dolls for soldiers out of scraps of kimono or other cloth. The dolls were thought to bring soldiers good luck.
The doll in Corbett’s possession was given to a kamikaze or tokkotai soldier who flew planes into U.S. Navy ships.
Schattschneider said the dolls “were given to keep the kamikaze company during their terribly lonely final journeys.”
The dolls are rare because many were destroyed in the suicide missions. There is one other known doll in the United States and a handful in Japan.
9/11 Trial Poses Unparalleled Legal Obstacles
Source: NYT (11-13-09)
WASHINGTON — How do you defend one of the most notorious terrorist figures in history?
One step, legal analysts say, may be to ask for a change of venue.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s lawyers, whoever they are, will no doubt question whether he can get a fair trial from a jury sitting, as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. noted, in a Manhattan courthouse “just blocks away from where the Twin Towers once stood.”
Then will come the inevitable challenges to interrogation methods used on Mr. Mohammed during more than six years in detention. The government has acknowledged waterboarding him 183 times to extract information about the Sept. 11 attacks, which he eventually admitted planning.
Finally, if Mr. Mohammed is convicted, defense lawyers will most likely plead for jurors in New York, historically more cautious about capital punishment than much of the rest of country, to spare the sentence of execution and send him to prison for the rest of his life instead...
... Mr. Mohammed and his four co-defendants in military custody have admitted their active involvement in plotting the Sept. 11 attacks and have boasted of their success in killing 3,000 people.
Once the Justice Department brings formal terrorism charges against him, Mr. Mohammed could seek to enter a guilty plea, just as he has tried to do in military custody.
But legal analysts were not convinced that he would go that route and said that he might instead seek to martyr himself in the eyes of Muslim extremists through a grand and lengthy trial...
The Army opens a broad new probe into Arlington
Source: Salon (11-13-09)
In the wake of a Salon investigation, the Army Friday announced a broad investigation into “lost accountability” at some graves at Arlington National Cemetery, along with shoddy record keeping and other issues at the cemetery.
Army Secretary John McHugh ordered the inquiry after a series of articles in Salon showed the cemetery found an unknown casket in a grave in 2003, covered it up with dirt and quietly walked away, and also buried another service member in the wrong plot in 2008 on top of a soldier already in that grave. In that second case, the cemetery also failed to alert family members when they dug up and moved remains to fix the problem. The Salon reports suggested these kinds of errors could be widespread, since the cemetery has failed to implement a computer system to track burials as other cemeteries have, despite nearly a decade of work and nearly $6 million spent on the effort.
“As the final resting place of our nation’s heroes, any questions about the integrity or accountability of (Arlington’s) operations should be examined in a manner befitting their service and sacrifice,” McHugh said in a statement. He directed the Army inspector general to spearhead this new inquiry.
The Army on Friday also released the results of a previous inquiry sparked by Salon’s first report on the unknown casket quietly covered up in 2003. The Army says “non-invasive geophysical analysis … strongly suggest[s]” that the unknown casket is either a husband or a wife who died years apart that should have been buried together in a nearby grave. (Spouses are stacked together in one grave at Arlington.)...
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Google, Authors, Publishers Offer Revised Book Pact
Source: WSJ (11-14-09)
Google Inc. and two author and publisher groups submitted a narrower version of a legal settlement that would allow Google to distribute millions of digital books online, hoping to mollify the Justice Department and other critics who blasted the original settlement as overly broad and anticompetitive.
The revised settlement will only cover books that were either registered with the U.S. Copyright Office or published in the U.K., Australia, or Canada.
The new agreement also addresses concerns about orphan works, or books whose right holders are unknown, while keeping them in the settlement. The fixes include limiting what is done with the revenue generated from those works and appointing an independent fiduciary to look out for the interests of those rights holders.
Newsweek: The Surprising Lessons of Vietnam
Source: Newsweek (11-16-09)
Stanley Karnow is the author of Vietnam: A History, generally regarded as the standard popular account of the Vietnam War. This past summer, Karnow, 84, picked up the phone to hear the voice of an old friend, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. The two men had first met when Holbrooke was a young Foreign Service officer in Vietnam in the mid-1960s and Karnow was a reporter covering the war. Holbrooke, who is now the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, was calling from Kabul. The two friends chatted for a while, then Holbrooke said, "Let me pass you to General McChrystal." Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, came on the line. His question was simple but pregnant: "Is there anything we learned in Vietnam that we can apply to Afghanistan?" Karnow's reply was just as simple: "The main thing I learned is that we never should have been there in the first place."
Words of wisdom, but not all that useful to General McChrystal. Like it or not, he is already in Afghanistan, along with roughly 68,000 American and 35,000 European troops. McChrystal has been charged by President Obama with presenting a strategy for victory, generally defined as standing up the Afghan Army to beat back the Taliban and deny sanctuary to Al Qaeda. An avid reader of history, McChrystal has read Karnow's book, but he has also read many others. One that he has read—and reread—is a 1999 book called A Better War, written by Lewis Sorley, a retired Army lieutenant colonel. Sorley argues that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the United States could have won in Vietnam—if only the U.S. Congress hadn't cut off military aid to South Vietnam.
Not surprisingly, the Sorley book is getting a lot of attention at the upper levels of the Pentagon and at McChrystal's headquarters in Kabul. Told that NEWSWEEK was looking into the parallels between the Sorley book and General McChrystal's situation in Afghanistan, a senior Marine general exclaimed, "You're on to something there!" (Like other senior military officials contacted by NEWSWEEK, the general declined to be quoted praising a book that argues, though not in so many words, that the military was stabbed in the back by its civilian leaders.)
Arms dealer involved in the Iran-Contra scandal returns, now selling his image
Source: NYT (11-13-09)
CAIRO
He was a small man, with a very neatly trimmed black mustache, seated in a corner, leaning forward on his walking stick, smiling, sipping Scotch from a glass that seemed too large for his frail hands. His face brightened with a smile as he reminisced about the dictator’s wife who once locked herself in the bathroom of his private jet and the star-studded, five-day extravaganza he threw for his 50th birthday.
Oh, the memories of a fallen billionaire arms trader.
“My personal philosophy is I don’t regret matters that happen, good or bad,” said the man, Adnan M. Khashoggi, who is 74 years old and these days prefers to be remembered as “Mr. Fix It,” rather than the arms dealer involved in the Iran-Contra scandal. “I just accept this as my destiny. It’s a personal attitude.”
Mr. Khashoggi has been linked to — but never convicted in — almost every major scandal of the late 20th century: Wedtech, B.C.C.I., the indictment of the Marcoses in the Philippines, as well as Iran-Contra. He is a favorite of conspiracy buffs, who have connected him to such things as the death of Princess Diana (her boyfriend at the time, Dodi al-Fayed, was his nephew) and to voting irregularities in Florida in the 2000 presidential election (a former employee was a local election official).
Now, he is trying to make a comeback. After a lifetime spent using his connections to make deals for himself, he is working as a consultant, selling his connections.
Instead of commissions he gets “incentive pay.” He flies commercial now (at his clients’ expense), which is a big change for a man who once had his own DC-8, and he lives in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the only property he still owned after the collapse of his empire. But he is far from broke, or at least manages to appear far from broke, which has always been the magic of Mr. Khashoggi.
“It is all part of the mechanism for impressing people, with your talk, with your views and with your appearance,” he said of his once-profligate ways...
Obama Says U.S. Seeks to Build Stronger Ties to China
Source: NYT (11-13-09)
TOKYO — The United States is not threatened by a rising China, President Obama said Saturday, but will seek to strengthen its ties with Beijing even as it maintains close ties with traditional allies like Japan.
In a wide-ranging speech on his first trip to Asia as president, Mr. Obama drew on his own background to reassure the people of the fast-growing continent that even as the United States seemed preoccupied with conflicts in the Middle East and other regions, it was increasingly “a nation of the Pacific.”...
... “My own life is part of that story,” he said. “I am an American president who was born in Hawaii and lived in Indonesia as a boy. My sister Maya was born in Jakarta and later married a Chinese-Canadian. My mother spent nearly a decade working in the villages of Southeast Asia, helping women buy a sewing machine or an education that might give them a foothold in the world economy.”
“So,” he added, “the Pacific rim has helped shape my view of the world.” He even spoke of his first trip to Japan as a boy—“As a child, I was more focused on the matcha ice cream,” he said.
That drew laughs from the audience, which gave him a standing ovation both before and after his speech.
China Focuses on Territorial Issues as It Equates Tibet to U.S. Civil War South
Source: NYT (11-13-09)
BEIJING — The Chinese government had a special message for President Obama on Thursday: He is black, he admires Abraham Lincoln, so he, of all people, should sympathize with Beijing’s effort to prevent Tibet from seceding and sliding back into what it was before its liberation by Chinese troops: a feudalistic, slaveholding society headed by the Dalai Lama.
“He is a black president, and he understands the slavery abolition movement and Lincoln’s major significance for that movement,” Qin Gang, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said at a news conference.
Mr. Qin added: “Thus, on this issue we hope that President Obama, more than any other foreign leader, can better, more deeply grasp China’s stance on protecting national sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
For many Americans, Mr. Qin’s analogy might sound like a stretch, but it revealed which issues Chinese leaders see as among their top priorities, ones that Mr. Obama will no doubt have to grapple with after he arrives in China on Sunday for his first trip here.
While much attention will be focused on broad international issues like trade and currency values, climate change and the ailing world economy, questions of sovereignty and territory remain an obsession of Chinese foreign policy. Some scholars and analysts see this as an expression of an aggressive expansionism that will only deepen as China moves toward superpower status. Others argue that China is driven more by the need to recover territory wrested from it during the decades it was known as the Sick Man of Asia, when pieces of it were humiliatingly annexed by European powers and Japan...
Turkey Seeks Kurdish Reconciliation
Source: WSJ (11-14-09)
ANKARA -- Turkey's government laid out long-awaited plans Friday to reconcile with the country's large Kurdish minority and end a separatist war that has cost tens of thousands of lives, prompting the main opposition party to storm out of parliament in protest.
The heated debate was symbolic of the sensitivities of the Kurdish issue in Turkey, which has only recently begun to be debated openly and impartially.
Opponents accused the government of pandering to terrorists. Many also fear that its "democratic initiative" is part of a wider plan by the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, which has Islamist roots, to dismantle a secular, centralized state model in which the military for decades played a controlling role. Opponents see acknowledgement of Turkish military abuses against Kurds as an attempt to undermine the military.
Under the plan outlined Friday, Turkey would get a new constitution to replace the current one, which was drafted by a military junta in the early 1980s. Private broadcasting in the Kurdish language would be made legal, adding to the public Kurdish-language channel launched in January. The government would also establish an independent body to deal with complaints against the security forces. Villages given Turkish language names since the 1950s would get their former Kurdish names back.
Rare gold coin sparks legal row (UK)
Source: BBC (11-14-09)
The discovery of a rare 15th Century gold coin in Powys has triggered a legal row.
The coin, from the reign of Henry IV, was unearthed by contractor Shaun Bufton on 28 April while he was working on a new water pipeline in Newtown.
But archaeologists failed to return it to him.
Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust said it had made a mistake in not returning the coin and it regretted not having told him what was happening.
When it was minted in about 1400, Henry IV had just become king and Owain Glyndwr's rebellion was under way in Wales.
Unseen colour 3D film of Queen's Coronation to be broadcast for first time (UK)
Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-11-09)
Unseen colour 3D newsreel of the Queen’s Coronation, which was lost in an archive for more than 50 years, is to be broadcast for the first time.
The 17-minute footage, thought to be the first in the world to be filmed in colour 3D, was discovered in a tin labelled “Royal Review 1953” in the British Film Institute (BFI).
It had been passed in the 1960s to BFI by Dixons, the electrical retailers, with a letter which said: “We give you this film for your safe keeping in the national archives.”
Anger at Stephen Fry's claims about Princess Margaret
Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-13-09)
With thousands of followers on Twitter, the social networking website, Stephen Fry has come to be regarded as a modern oracle.
The actor and comedian has, however, upset friends of the late Princess Margaret by accusing her of anti-Semitism.
At the HarperCollins History Lecture at the Royal Institute of British Architects, Fry claimed that the Queen's sister had been shocked when he told her at a dinner party that he had Jewish ancestors. Fry, who is a great chum of the Prince of Wales, alleged that she expressed her horror by shouting to everybody else at her table: "He's a Jew. He's a Jew."
Australian officials to test Ned Kelly skull
Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-13-09)
Ned Kelly, the infamous Australian bush ranger, may finally be able to rest in peace after a skull believed to belong to the outlaw was handed to authorities for forensic testing.
Kelly's skull has been missing ever since it was stolen from a display cabinet at the Old Melbourne Gaol in 1978, just yards from where Kelly was hanged in 1880 for killing a policeman. The crime went unsolved and the whereabouts of the skull became one of Australia's greatest mysteries.
Then, earlier this week on the 129th anniversary of Kelly's hanging, Tom Baxter, a farmer from Western Australia, delivered a skull to the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, claiming it was the same one that was stolen from the jail more than 30 years ago.
Thatcher death text sparks diplomatic flurry among Canadian Conservatives
Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-13-09)
A text message reading "Thatcher has died" set off a diplomatic flurry among members of Canada's parliament at a black tie dinner this week, local media reported on Thursday.
Stephen Harper, Canada's conservative prime minister, was quickly informed that Baroness Thatcher, the 84-year-old former British Prime Minister, had passed away.
Upon learning the "news" via mobile or Blackberry at a soiree honouring Canadian military families on Tuesday, some 2,000 shocked Conservatives and their advisors reportedly huddled to discuss a reaction.
It turned out the message was sent by John Baird, the transport minister, from his home in Toronto to a person at the gala dinner to say that his beloved 16-year-old gray tabby cat, named for Lady Thatcher, had died.
Australia to say sorry to abused British child migrants
Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-14-09)
An apology is to be made to the victims of child migration schemes who were shipped from Britain to Australia, where many suffered abuse and neglect.
On Monday, the Australian government will say sorry to the thousands of children deported there during the twentieth century.
Meanwhile, Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, will this week say he is to look into what can be done to make amends to all the children who were shipped to Australia, Canada and other former colonies, in schemes undertaken by successive governments up until 1967.
Bush Attorney General: 9/11 Trial Offers Jihadists Platform
Source: Fox News (11-14-09)
Michael Mukasey, the final attorney general in the Bush administration, defended military tribunals, asserting that they were created for this kind of case and noting that they were used during and after World War II.
Holder said he decided to seek justice against the suspects in federal court rather than a military tribunal because the attacks targeted civilians on U.S. soil. But Mukasey and other critics say the attack was an act of war that should be prosecuted in a military tribunal.
Mukasey said it's unlikely that Mohammed will be acquitted because of his confession and other evidence linking him to the attack. But he added that same evidence could present problems in federal court.
Some Fear Bush Administration Could Become Target in 9/11 Trial
Source: Fox News (11-14-09)
Some critics say a civilian trial -- instead of a military tribunal -- for self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his accomplices could end up targeting the Bush administration and its anti-terror policies.
One of those five defendants, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, has been at the center of the debate over those Bush-era polices, in particular the harsh interrogation techniques used on Mohammed and others in an effort to obtain information on Al Qaeda and any additional attacks.
Supporters of trying the detainees in military tribunals note that the tribunals have relaxed standards for presenting evidence and offer minimized risk of disclosing government anti-terror secrets.
JFK's last autograph nets big bucks at auction
Source: CNN (11-14-09)
What could be the last autograph signed by President Kennedy was sold recently at an auction of itmes linked to his assassination in Texas.
Kennedy reportedly signed the front page of the Dallas Morning News, which contained a photo of him and the first lady and a preview of their arrival that day in Dallas.
A Dallas woman handed the president the newspaper and he signed it for her, according to Heritage Auctions, the company that sold the item. The date of his assassination, which came about two hours later, was on the front page of that paper near his signature.
The newspaper was purchased by Joe Maddalena, president and owner of Profiles in History in Calabassas, California for $39,000.
9/11 family members welcome, criticize civilian trials
Source: CNN (11-13-09)
Some family members of 9/11 victims welcomed the announcement that five Guantanamo Bay detainees with alleged ties to the attacks will be tried in a New York civilian court, while others blasted the decision.
But others -- including members of the September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, some of whom spoke to reporters by phone on Friday -- said a civilian trial allows for transparency, noting that families of the victims could attend. Their access to a military trial would be more limited, they said.
Dozens of family members of 9/11 victims have signed a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, who announced the trial decision; President Obama; and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates opposing a civilian trial for the alleged plotters
Troubled vet journeys back to Vietnam -- this time to offer helping hand
Source: CNN (11-14-09)
He is a former Marine who has lived with battleground nightmares for 40 years and now plans a return to the land that haunts him.
But Kevin Roberts' decision is not fueled by remorse. Nor is it about healing a life defined by 13 stinging months in Vietnam. Rather, late-in-life altruism has led him to volunteer to build houses for poor families residing along Vietnam's Mekong River.
Next week, he'll pick up a hammer and saw for the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Work Project 2009, an annual weeklong affordable housing project led by the former president. Roberts will join a team of about 20 volunteers who will construct houses in Ke Sat village, just outside Hanoi, November 15-21.
AP: "Palin's book goes rogue on some facts"
Source: AP (11-14-09)
Sarah Palin's new book reprises familiar claims from the 2008 presidential campaign that haven't become any truer over time.
Ignoring substantial parts of her record if not the facts, she depicts herself as a frugal traveler on the taxpayer's dime, a reformer without ties to powerful interests and a politician roguishly indifferent to high ambition.
Palin goes adrift, at times, on more contemporary issues, too. She criticizes President Barack Obama for pushing through a bailout package that actually was achieved by his Republican predecessor George W. Bush — a package she seemed to support at the time.
Friday, November 13, 2009
Documents Show U.S. Officials Worried Mullah Omar Was Growing Closer to Bin Laden in 1998
Source: The National Security Archive (11-13-09)
Three years before al Qaeda's attacks on the United States on 9/11, U.S. officials detected an alarming shift in the ideological stance of Taliban leader Mullah Omar toward pan-Islamism – a change that portended a burgeoning alliance between the Afghan regime and Osama bin Laden. The report that Omar might be falling under bin Laden's "influence" is contained in a December 1998 U.S. Embassy cable from Islamabad, Pakistan, one of a number of recently declassified government documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive and published here today on the eighth anniversary of the Taliban's expulsion from Kabul.
The new documents provide other revealing insights into the inner workings of the notoriously opaque Taliban which underscore the challenges and potential opportunities that continue to confront U.S. policy-makers today. For example, while the organization in the late 1990s showed a troubling inclination toward radical Islamic thinking on issues beyond its usually more parochial concerns, it also displayed a pragmatic and even opportunistic side, recruiting troops from a variety of political perspectives including local communists. And although the documents describe Mullah Omar as highly authoritarian and adept at keeping his political rivals off-balance, the organization had evidenced a surprising diversity of viewpoints within its upper ranks, which suggested possible weak spots in the organization's control.
Russian Orthodox and Catholic church may end 950-year rift
Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-13-09)
Relations between the Vatican and the Russian Orthodox Church have been tense for centuries, but in a sign that relations are finally thawing, Archbishop Ilarion, who heads the Russian Orthodox Church’s foreign relations department, said that both sides wanted a meeting, although he emphasised that problems remained.
Ilarion spoke of a rapprochement under Pope Benedict XVI that would allow for a meeting with the new Russian Orthodox Patriarch, Kiril, who took up his office in February after the death of the previous patriarch.
“There have been visits at a high level,” said Illarion. “We are moving towards the moment when it will become possible to prepare a meeting between the Pope and the Moscow patriarch.”
He added that in recent years there had been “noticeable improvements” in relations between the two churches.
“The progress in relations between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church began after Benedict XVI became pope. He is…a person who does not aim to grow the Catholic Church in traditional Orthodox regions.”
Some observers had hinted a meeting between the two Church leaders was forthcoming, but many issues still stand in the way of bridging the split, which dates from 1054 when Patriarch of Constantinople was excommunicated from the Catholic Church.
The breach heralded the Great Schism that finally divided the Christian churches of East and West – which had long had political and theological differences, including the wording of the Nicene Creed – and led to the creation of the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church.
Court Rules CIA Did Not Violate Valerie Plame's First Amendment Rights
Source: Truthout (11-13-09)
By now, most people can admit to the fact that former covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson had a decades long career with the spy agency before high-level officials in the Bush administration leaked her undercover status to reporters six years ago.
That is, most people except for Valerie Plame Wilson.
On Thursday, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, ruled that the CIA did not violate Wilson’s First Amendment rights when it refused to allow the former covert CIA operative to reveal that she worked for the agency prior to 2002 in her memoir, “Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House.”
The ruling means that a chunk of Wilson's memoir will remain classified and she is still barred from acknowledging that she was employed by the agency prior to January 2002.
Politico reports that RNC's health plan has covered abortion since 1991
Source: Politico (11-13-09)
The Republican National Committee will no longer offer employees an insurance plan that covers abortion after POLITICO reported Thursday that the anti-abortion RNC's policy has covered the procedure since 1991.
"Money from our loyal donors should not be used for this purpose," Chairman Michael Steele said in a statement. "I don't know why this policy existed in the past, but it will not exist under my administration. Consider this issue settled."
How the Nazis Stole Christmas
Source: Spiegel Online (11-13-09)
It all started innocently enough. Back in the mid-1970s, Rita Breuer began collecting old German Christmas ornaments after her husband expressed the desire for a good old-fashioned Christmas tree like his grandmother used to have. Breuer, who hails from the small town of Olpe, 60 kilometers from Cologne, scoured flea markets and raided friends' attics in the search for baubles and came to accumulate quite a collection which included not only tree ornaments, but also Advent calendars, cribs and Christmas cards.
But then something strange happened. Breuer, who was now being helped in her quest by her daughter Judith, came across more and more objects that didn't fit with the usual peaceful image of Christmas, lsuch as World War I-era miniature soldiers, bombs and hand grenades designed to hang on the tree. The Breuers started to get interested in how Christmas had been abused for propaganda purposes over the years, most blatantly by the Nazis. Their hobby turned into a full-fledged amateur research project.
Now, more than 30 years after Rita Breuer first began collecting Christmas knickknacks, selected objects from the family collection have gone on show at the National Socialism Documentation Center in Cologne. The exhibition, which looks at the history of Christmas and propaganda from the 19th century until the present day, focuses on how the Nazis misused Christmas for their own foul purposes and tried to turn it into a "Germanic" winter solstice festival.
Germany's neighbors try to redeem their 1989 negativity
Source: Deutsche Welle (11-11-09)
Germans have often noted British tourists' World War II obsession with a mixture of bemusement and dismay. But recent revelations have shown that this preoccupation, usually expressed in the un-threatening confines of comedy, was also the British prime minister's deep personal phobia at the time of Germany's reunification.
While USA and, surprisingly, the Soviet Union, largely welcomed the moment of redemption and euphoria that ushered in the end of a black century, Germany's non-superpower neighbors were prey to old fears.
"It is still an uncomfortable thought," Professor Paul Nolte, who teaches history at the Free University in Berlin, told Deutsche Welle, "That something that Germans were so happy about, and that unified Europe, could have been rejected by our closest partners. We ask ourselves, 'How could anyone have been against it?' "
At the end of October this year, France followed Britain in releasing its foreign policy archives from 1989 and 1990 in the run-up to the reunification of Germany. Although the files will not precipitate a major reassessment of history, they illustrate the depth of fear among western leaders who were publicly celebrating the victory of democratic freedom over communism.
Great writers 'fail' US computer program designerd to assess student essays
Source: BBC (11-12-09)
Winston Churchill's iconic "fight them on the beaches" speech did not make the grade when it was marked by a computer system, exam experts have said.
And extracts from modern classics such as Lord of the Flies by William Golding and a novel by Ernest Hemingway also failed to impress the computer.
All were marked down by a US program designed to assess students' essays.
UK exam boards and the qualifications development agency are experimenting with similar procedures.
At the moment, in the UK, computers are used only to mark some GCSE multiple-choice exam papers, in which there are right and wrong answers.
But exam boards are working on systems which would allow pupils to sit their exams online and for them to be marked by computer...
... As for William Golding, an extract from Lord of the Flies was criticised as having "inaccurate and erratic sentence structure".
Ernest Hemingway's The End of Something was also marked as not up to standard.
In this case, the writer was said to have "shown lack of care in style of writing and vocabulary"...
Changing times in Russia
Source: BBC (11-13-09)
At the time of writing this, it is just after 1500 (GMT+2) in Kaliningrad. People in this west Russian exclave, between Poland and Lithuania, still have a few more hours of work before heading home for their dinner.
In Kamchatka, in the far east of Russia, people have long since left work and had their dinner. In fact it is 0100 (GMT+12), and the majority are probably fast asleep in their beds.
In between the two ends of this, the world's largest country, lie another nine time zones.
President Medvedev said, when he raised the issue in his state of the nation speech, that Russians had "traditionally been accustomed to feeling a pride" in how many time zones the country had "because to us it seemed a vivid illustration of the greatness of our motherland".
Pakistani Army ran Muslim extremist training camps, says anti-terrorist expert
Source: Times (UK) (11-14-09)
The Pakistani Army ran training camps for a Muslim extremist group, at least until recently, with the acceptance of the US Central Intelligence Agency, according to France’s foremost anti-terrorist expert.
Jean-Louis Bruguière, who retired in 2007 after 15 years as chief investigating judge for counter-terrorism, reached this conclusion after interrogating a French militant who had been trained by Lashkar-e-Taiba and arrested in Australia in 2003.
In a book in his counter-terrorism years, Mr Bruguière says that Lashkar-e-Taiba, which was set up to fight India over disputed Kashmir territory, had become part of the international Islamic network of al-Qaeda.
Turkey is to allow Kurdish television as peace process gathers pace
Source: Times (UK) (11-14-09)
Turkey’s Government has unveiled a “historic” offer to end its 25-year armed conflict with Kurdish fighters that has cost more than 40,000 lives.
Besir Atalay, the Interior Minister, told parliament that he intended to end permanently the conflict with separatists, who are thought to have about 6,000 fighters. “Our slogan is more freedom for everybody,” Mr Atalay said yesterday, outlining what he described as “an open-ended process” to “end terrorism and raise the level of democracy”.
One of the first steps would be to lift a ban on private television channels broadcasting in Kurdish. The Government would then end a ban on political campaigning in the language, and permit the restoration of Kurdish names to towns and villages given Turkish names since the 1950s. A committee will be established to address Kurdish concerns that they suffer discrimination.
On display for the first time: Diary of British reporter who exposed Stalin's famine in Ukraine (UK)
Source: Yahoo News (11-13-09)
LONDON – The diaries of a British reporter who risked his reputation to expose the horrors of Stalin's murderous famine in Ukraine were put on public display for the first time Friday.
Welsh journalist Gareth Jones sneaked into Ukraine in March of 1933, at the height of a famine engineered by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Millions of people starved to death between 1932 and 1933 as the Soviet secret police emptied the countryside of grain and livestock as part of a campaign to force peasants into collective farms.
Jones' reporting was one of the first attempts to bring the disaster to the world's attention.
"Famine Grips Russia — Millions Dying" read the front page of the New York Evening Post on March 29, 1933. "Famine on a colossal scale, impending death of millions from hunger, murderous terror ... this is the summary of Mr. Jones's firsthand observations," the paper said.
As starvation and cannibalism spread across Ukraine, Soviet authorities exported more than a million tons of grain to the West, using the money to build factories and arm its military.
Historians say that between 4 million and 5 million Ukrainians perished in what is sometimes referred to as the Great Famine.
Israel displays coins from Roman destruction of Jewish Temple 2,000 years ago
Source: Yahoo News (11-11-09)
JERUSALEM – Israel displayed for the first time Wednesday a collection of rare coins charred and burned from the Roman destruction of the Jewish Temple nearly 2,000 years ago.
About 70 coins were found in an excavation at the foot of a key Jerusalem holy site. They give a rare glimpse into the period of the Jewish revolt that eventually led to the destruction of the Second Jewish Temple in A.D. 70, said Hava Katz, curator of the exhibition.
The Jews rebelled against the Roman Empire and took over Jerusalem in A.D. 66. After laying siege to Jerusalem, the Romans breached the city walls and wiped out the rebellion, demolishing the Jewish Temple, the holiest site in Judaism.
The coins sit inside a glass case, some melted down to unrecognizable chunks of pockmarked and carbonized bronze from the flames that destroyed the Temple.
Silverware taken from USS Arizona during World War II pulled from auction
Source: Star Bulletin (Hawaii) (11-12-09)
Silverware from the sunken ship apparently was kept by a Navy diver after salvaging
Lime-encrusted silverware taken from the officers' mess aboard the USS Arizona during World War II have been pulled from an auction.
Cowan's Auctions, a Cincinnati resale house specializing in American historical and military items, had planned to sell the 24 pieces on Dec. 9, with initial estimates of $15,000 to $20,000. But when Navy attorneys got wind of the planned sale, they put pressure on the auction house.
A Navy spokesman, Bill Doughty, noting that lawyers were reviewing the matter, explained that "U.S. Navy craft and their associated contents remain the property of the U.S. Navy unless expressly abandoned or title is transferred by appropriate U.S. government authority."
Property rights are established in the U.S. Constitution and international maritime law.
"USS Arizona is considered one of our nation's most sacred and hallowed historical sites," Doughty said. "Many of the 1,177 crewmen who died on Dec. 7, 1941, aboard the ship are entombed in the ship at the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor. We cherish the memory of the sailors who sacrificed in World War II. The significance of USS Arizona should never be diminished or cheapened."
Five 9/11 suspects to be charged in NY
Source: Politico (11-13-09)
The confessed mastermind of the September 11th terrorist attacks will face charges in the city he targeted.
The Obama administration has decided that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other terrorism suspects now detained at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay will be charged in civilian court.
Two Obama administration officials confirmed plans to transfer Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men to New York City from the prison at Guantanamo Bay to face charges in a civilian federal court. The five are currently charged before a military commission proceeding at Guantanamo Bay prison that was suspended as the Obama administration considered where to try them.
Attorney General Eric Holder is scheduled to announce the decision at 11 am.
McCain Aide Denies Palin Book Claim
Source: The Daily Beast (11-13-09)
Sarah Palin's book Going Rogue isn't out until Tuesday but leaked excerpts reported by the Associated Press are already setting off denials from John McCain's old campaign staff. In response to the Palin's reported claim that she received a bill from the McCain campaign to pay for expenses related to her own vetting process, a McCain official told CNN that the story is "one hundred percent untrue." The official added: "All those bills are from her personal attorney Thomas Van Flein, mostly relating to the Troopergate investigation and other ethics investigations. It is not legal to pay for those investigations out of general election funds, even if the campaign was so inclined." A spokeswoman for Palin, Meg Stapleton, wouldn't confirm whether the claim was even in the book as it is still embargoed before its release.
Researchers find 2 Japanese supersubmarines sunk by U.S. at end of WWII
Source: Chicago Tribune (11-13-09)
U.S. researchers said Thursday they have located the remains of two high-tech Japanese submarines that were scuttled by the U.S. Navy off Hawaii in 1946 to prevent the technology from falling into the hands of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the Cold War.
One of the vessels was the largest non-nuclear sub ever built and had the ability to sail 1 1/2 times around the globe without refueling. Called the I-14, the behemoth was 400 feet long, 40 feet high, and carried a crew of 144. It was designed to launch two folding-wing bombers on kamikaze missions against U.S. cities such as New York and Washington, D.C., although the end of the war prevented such attacks.
The second was an attack submarine called the I-201, whose design foreshadowed the sleek submarines of today, and which was thought to be twice as fast as any American subs. It never fought in the war either.
George W. Bush Announces Programs for Bush Institute at Southern Methodist U.
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education (11-12-09)
Former President George W. Bush, speaking today in Dallas, listed education, economic growth, freedom, and global health as the policy areas that will be the focus of a future institute bearing his name at Southern Methodist University, The Dallas Morning News reported. The institute will be part of the $300-million presidential center, which will include a library and museum. In his comments today, Mr. Bush attempted to ease faculty concerns that the institute would be too partisan, saying it will be "independent and nonpartisan." The university also announced that James W. Guthrie, an education professor and director of the Peabody Center for Education Policy at Vanderbilt University, will join Southern Methodist's faculty and become the institute's first senior scholar.
George W. Bush Chooses UVa. For Oral History Project
Source: Talking Points Memo (11-12-09)
Former President George W. Bush has chosen the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia to conduct a "comprehensive oral history of his presidency."
The Miller Center and Bush's foundation announced the George W. Bush Oral History Project this morning, saying the university's scholars will do 100 interviews with the Bush Cabinet and outside advisers during the 5-year project.
Two German Killers Demanding Anonymity Sue Wikipedia's Parent
Source: NYT (11-12-09)
Wolfgang Werlé and Manfred Lauber became infamous for killing a German actor in 1990. Now they are suing to force Wikipedia to forget them.
The legal fight pits German privacy law against the American First Amendment. German courts allow the suppression of a criminal’s name in news accounts once he has paid his debt to society, noted Alexander H. Stopp, the lawyer for the two men, who are now out of prison.
“They should be able to go on and be resocialized, and lead a life without being publicly stigmatized” for their crime, Mr. Stopp said. “A criminal has a right to privacy, too, and a right to be left alone.”
9/11 Mastermind to NYC for Civilian Trial
Source: CBS (11-13-09)
Self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other Guantanamo Bay detainees will be sent to New York to face trial in a civilian federal court, a law enforcement official told CBS News Friday.
Attorney General Eric Holder plans to announce the decision later in the morning, a White House official told the Associated Press. The official is not authorized to discuss the decision before the announcement, so spoke on condition of anonymity.
Without confirming details of the decision, President Barack Obama said it was a legal and national security matter. "I am absolutely convinced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be subjected to the most exacting demands of justice," Mr. Obama said at a joint news conference in Tokyo with Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama.
In Newark, NJ a rare treature trove of historical documents and assorted artifacts
Source: NJ (11-12-09)
NEWARK -- One of the artifacts brought out from behind the heavy, six-inch doors of a basement vault in Newark is an oil portrait of Arthur T. Vanderbilt, New Jersey’s chief justice from 1948-1957.
Still stored there are original letters from the Olmsted Brothers, famed park designers, and even original art-deco door knockers, shaped as human figures and once gripped by Newark visitors to an "Egyptian-style" courthouse razed in 1907.
The black-doored vaults along a darkened corridor inside the Essex County Hall of Records in Newark provide a home for historical documents and assorted artifacts that were once scattered in offices throughout the county.
The items — many of them portals into the lives of the Essex County of old — have been digitally captured within the past year, making for quite a picture show in the offices of Frank J. DelGaudio, the county risk manager in charge of records modernization.
"We can just pull up anything back to 1682," DelGaudio said.
Report offers snapshot of union labor today
Source: SF Gate (via OpEdNews) (11-11-09)
Today's typical union member is a woman working in the public sector, whereas 25 years ago it might have been a man with a factory job, according to a report that looks at the changing face of organized labor.
The report, published by the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, starts its analysis in 1983, when federal surveys first started collecting details about union members.
By analyzing those records, author John Schmitt found that more than 45 percent of today's unionized workers are women, up from 35 percent in 1983...
... Union membership in absolute and percentage terms has declined over the last quarter century.
Schmitt said that in 1983, 20.5 million people, or 23.3 percent of the U.S. workforce, was unionized.
In 2008, 17.8 million people, or 13.7 percent of the labor force, worked under union contracts.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
At 75, Charles Manson still has the power to influence others
Source: CNN (11-12-09)
At 75, Charles Manson has spent more than half his life in prison for masterminding the notorious Helter Skelter killing spree that left actress Sharon Tate and six others dead in Los Angeles during the summer of 1969.
Manson spent his 75th birthday this week at the state prison in Corcoran, California, where he is isolated from the rest of the prison population. Some records indicate that Manson was born on November 12, but Manson's current associates and California corrections records indicate his birthday was on Wednesday, November 11.
While his appearance has changed significantly from the wide-eyed cult leader who appeared on the cover of Life magazine in 1969, Manson continues to wield influence over some who consider him a wizened messenger.
"Don't ask, don't tell" repeal coming next year?
Source: Salon (11-11-09)
LGBT activists -- and progressives generally, regardless of sexuality -- have been waiting for months now to hear about a timetable for repealing the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, which forbids gays from openly serving. And with good reason; ending the ban was, after all, a campaign promise of President Obama's.
If Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., is to be believed -- and given his own sexuality and his stature among Congressional Democrats, on issues like this one, he generally is -- we now have an idea of that timeline.
On Wednesday, Frank told the Advocate's Kerry Eleveld that a repeal is likely to be a part of the Department of Defense authorization bill taken up in Congress next year. "'Don’t ask, don’t tell' was always going to be part of the military authorization," Frank said.
Sniff test to preserve old books
Source: BBC (11-12-09)
The key to preserving the old, degrading paper of treasured, ageing books is contained in the smell of their pages, say scientists.
Researchers report in the journal Analytical Chemistry that a new "sniff test" can measure degradation of old books and historical documents.
Japanese celebrate 20th anniversary of Emperor Akihito's coronation
Source: Yahoo News (11-12-09)
TOKYO – Tens of thousands of well-wishers gathered outside Japan's moat-ringed Imperial Palace — many shouting "Banzai," a traditional wish for long life — to mark Thursday's 20th anniversary of Emperor Akihito's coronation to the world's oldest throne.
Parades, concerts and speeches by leading athletes, actors, businesspeople and politicians marked the festivities that lasted most of the day.
But in unusually somber comments of his own, Akihito appealed for future generations to learn from the war-marred reign of his father, the late Emperor Hirohito.
In a rare news conference before the anniversary, the 75-year-old monarch said he is concerned that Japanese will forget their past.
Japan's Chrysanthemum Throne — the world's oldest hereditary monarchy — has undergone major changes since the country's surrender ended World War II in 1945, when Hirohito was officially considered a living god and loyalty to the throne was used to rally the nation behind the war.
Seeking Revival, City to Buy Land in Coney Island
Source: NYT (11-11-09)
After a year of ultimatums, threats and stop-and-go talks, the Bloomberg administration has agreed to pay $95.6 million to a developer for seven acres in the heart of Coney Island, according to executives on both sides of the negotiations. It is a crucial step forward for the city’s vision of turning the faded and mostly dormant seaside amusement district into an exciting destination reminiscent of its heyday.
The city’s deal with the developer, Joseph J. Sitt, capped a long standoff between the two sides, with each claiming it had the best plan for the revival of the fabled playground, but neither able to bring its plan to fruition in a deadly real estate market.
The city will announce the deal on Thursday, but the reality of a revived Coney Island remains a long way off.
New history rules for Canadian immigrants
Source: UPI (11-11-09)
Canada is unveiling a new study guide for would-be citizens that requires much more knowledge of the country's military history, a federal minister said.
At an Ottawa news conference Tuesday timed for the observance of Remembrance Day Wednesday, Immigration and Citizenship Minister Jason Kenney said the new immigration test will require knowledge of Canada's military achievements in both World Wars, Korea and a myriad of peacekeeping missions, Sun Media reported.
"I think it's scandalous that someone could become a Canadian not knowing what the poppy represents," Kenney said of the 1.5-inch red plastic lapel pins sold each year to commemorate the thousands of World War I Allied soldiers buried in a French cemetery rife with poppies.
Scalia uncomfortable saying if he'd support Brown v. Board of Education
Source: NYT (11-9-09)
If there is a topic Justice Antonin Scalia does not relish discussing, it is how he would have voted in Brown v. Board of Education had he been on the Supreme Court when it was decided in 1954.
The question came up last month at the University of Arizona in what was billed as a conversation between Justice Scalia and Justice Stephen G. Breyer. The discussion, between the court’s two primary intellectual antagonists, bore the relationship to a conversation that a fistfight does to a handshake. The justices know how to get under each other’s skin, and they punctuated their debate with exasperation, eye-rolling and venomous sarcasm.
The Brown decision, which said the 14th Amendment prohibited segregation in public schools, is hard to square with Justice Scalia’s commitment to originalism, the theory of constitutional interpretation that says judges must apply the original understanding of the constitutional text.
Brown presents originalists with a problem. The weight of the historical evidence is that the people who drafted, proposed and ratified the 14th Amendment from 1866 to 1868 did not believe themselves to be doing away with segregated schools.
Yet Brown is widely thought to be a moral triumph. A theory of constitutional interpretation that cannot account for Brown is suspect if not discredited.
Originalists hate the subject. Justice Scalia has called it “waving the bloody shirt of Brown.”
The Last of China's 'Lotus-Feet' Ladies
Source: WSJ (11-13-09)
LIUYI VILLAGE, YUNNAN PROVINCE -- In a courtyard of her crumbling house, Wu Liuying lifts her favorite pair of shoes from a dusty cardboard box. Hand-sewn from navy-blue cloth, embroidered with pink flowers, they are no bigger than a small child's slippers.
But they slip easily over the gnarled shrunken feet of the 90-year-old Ms. Wu. From the age of 5, her feet were bound tightly with cotton strips, warping them. The four smallest toes folded under the sole, which was squeezed into a high arch, creating a crevasse between the heel and the ball of the foot.
Hers was among the last of countless generations of Chinese women who bound their feet in search of an idealized form of beauty. Though banned in 1912 after the Qing dynasty fell and the Nationalists established a republic, the practice lingered, especially in remote areas of China. A 1928 census in rural Shanxi province found that 18% of women had bound feet; binding also hung on in Liuyi, in the frontier province of Yunnan.
"When the Nationalists came here we would undo our feet in the daytime," says Ms. Wu. "Then, in the night, we would bind them again."
In time the Communist government, which took power in 1949, succeeded in stigmatizing foot-binding as backward and shameful. Today, like Ms. Wu's tumbledown house -- where cobwebs cloak the rotted eaves -- the millennium-old custom is slipping into history. Few of the elderly survivors care to try to explain to their grandchildren how they came to wear such dainty shoes, the agony they endured and what exactly was so sexy about a 10-centimeter foot that -- being hard to clean -- usually gave off a tangy smell and was prone to decay.
"It's out of fashion now," says Ms. Wu...
Bible That Vanished on Kristallnacht Is Heading Home
Source: NYT (11-9-09)
On Nov. 9, 1938, a two-volume black-leather-clad Hebrew Bible vanished from a library in Vienna after that city’s Jewish community came under assault from soldiers during Kristallnacht, the start of the Nazi pogrom against Jews.
As is the case with much art looted during World War II, the Bible’s location during the following few decades was mostly unknown.
But last winter, the two volumes, printed 493 years ago, were smuggled into New York City, according to federal authorities, who noticed them advertised in a catalog of a New York auction house and confiscated them.
On Monday afternoon, at a repatriation ceremony at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan, the historic Bible began its journey home, 71 years to the day after it was seized.
France and Germany Use the Remembrance of a War to Promote Reconciliation
Source: NYT (11-11-09)
PARIS — For the first time since the armistice that ended World War I with Germany’s defeat in 1918, a German leader joined French officials here to mark the moment the guns fell silent on the Western Front after a war that killed millions.
Obama 'risks Suez-like disaster' in Afghanistan, says key adviser
Source: Guardian (UK) (11-12-09)
A key adviser to Nato forces warned today that Barack Obama risks a Suez-style debacle in Afghanistan if he fails to deploy enough extra troops and opts instead for a messy compromise.
David Kilcullen, one of the world's leading authorities on counter-insurgency and an adviser to the British government as well as the US state department, said Obama's delay in reaching a decision over extra troops had been "messy". He said it not only worried US allies but created uncertainty the Taliban could exploit.
Speaking in an interview with the Guardian, he compared the president to someone "pontificating" over whether to send enough firefighters into a burning building to put a fire out.
He was speaking as Obama left Washington for a nine-day trip to Asia without announcing a decision on troop numbers. The options being considered by the US have been narrowed down to four: sending 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 or 40,000, the latter the figure requested by the Nato commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal. These would be on top of 68,000 US troops already deployed.
Obama breaking foreign travel records
Source: Taegan Goddard's Political Wire (11-12-09)
CBS News reports President Obama's trip to Asia will bring his total to 8 foreign trips and 20 countries since becoming president.
"The only other president to come close to Mr. Obama's first-year-in-office globe-trotting numbers is President George H. W. Bush, who took 7 foreign trips to 14 countries."
In addition, as Politico notes, Obama is stopping in Alaska on his way to Asia. It's the only state he hasn't been to since he declared his run for president.
Activists break West Bank barrier
Source: BBC (11-9-09)
Palestinians and foreign peace activists have broken apart a section of the West Bank barrier.
They used ropes and at least one truck to pull down some of the concrete blocks forming the Israeli-built wall.
The activists carried out the protest to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The barrier, which separates Israel from the West Bank, is a mixture of fences, barbed wire, ditches and concrete slabs up to 8m (26ft) high.
Australia 'Nazi case' extradition
Source: BBC (11-12-09)
The Australian government has approved the extradition of an 88-year-old alleged former Nazi to Hungary to face accusations of murder.
Charles Zentai is accused of killing Jewish teenager Peter Balazs in Budapest in 1944.
At the time, Mr Zentai was a warrant officer in the Hungarian army, then allied to Nazi Germany.
Hungary has two months to complete the extradition. Mr Zentai's family say they will try to overturn the decision.
African slavery apology 'needed'
Source: BBC (11-12-09)
Traditional African rulers should apologise for the role they played in the slave trade, a Nigerian rights group has said in a letter to chiefs.
The letter said some collaborated or actively sold off their subjects.
The group said it was time for African leaders to copy the US and the UK who have already said they were sorry.
It urged Nigeria's traditional rulers to apologise on behalf of their forefathers and "put a final seal to the history of slave trade", AFP news agency reports.
Warhol artwork sells for $43.8m
Source: BBC (11-12-09)
Andy Warhol artwork 200 One Dollar Bills has sold in New York for $43.8m (£26.5m) - the second highest auction price for a work by the pop artist.
The 1962 silk screen print, which shows 200 life-sized images of dollar bills, had a pre-sale estimate of $8m to $12m (£4.8m to £7.3m) at Sotheby's.
The contemporary sale fetched $134.4m (£81.3m) with 52 out of 54 lots sold.
Warhol's 1963 painting Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I) sold for a record $71.7m (£43.4m) in 2007.
Mona Lisa 'had eyebrows'
Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-12-09)
The Mona Lisa originally had eyebrows, according to a French art expert who has analysed Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece with a special camera.
Pascal Cotte said da Vinci built the painting up in layers, the last being a special glaze whose optical properties increased the illusion of a three-dimensional face. Above the glaze Da Vinci painted details such as the eyebrows.
He has uncovered a host of secrets about the Mona Lisa using a 240 megapixel camera. It can measure light so sensitively as to see through the top paint surface and uncover the layers below.
Cotte's work is explained in an exhibition, The Secrets of the Mona Lisa, that opens at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester on Saturday.
Bush Warns of 'Temptation' to Abandon Free-Market System in Wake of Recession
Source: Fox News (11-12-09)
The former president, outlining his vision for a policy institute to bear his name at Southern Methodist University, calls the decision to back the $700 billion bank bailout one of the "most difficult" of his presidency. But he warns that policymakers may be taking government intervention too far in the wake of the rescue package.
Former President George W. Bush on Thursday warned that Washington is in danger of taking the country away from free-market principles in the wake of the recession, as he defended his decision to approve a Wall Street bailout package in the final months of his term.
The former president said the Bush Institute will keep economic growth and free-market principles as a focal point, along with issues like education, global health and "human freedom."
Poland Evacuates 3,000 People After WWII Bomb Found
Source: AP (11-12-09)
Police say they have evacuated 3,000 people in Wroclaw, a city in southwestern Poland, after discovering a World War II-era bomb.
Wroclaw police spokesman Pawel Petrykowski says workers found the 1,100-pound bomb Thursday during construction of a new music hall that will go up near the Wroclaw Opera House.
Petrykowski said the area was evacuated, residents were asked to avoid the area and a special crane was brought in to remove the bomb.
Radical Muslim Cleric Who Defended World Trade Center Bombers a Guest of NYC Mayor
Source: Fox News (11-12-09)
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg welcomed to City Hall an "unindicted co-conspirator" in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, later claiming he didn't know the radical Muslim cleric had been invited, the New York Post reported.
Siraj Wahhaj has called the FBI and CIA the "real terrorists," defended the convicted World Trade Center attack plotters and said his hope is that all Americans will become Muslim.
In 1995, Wahhaj was identified as one of 170 who are "unindicted co-conspirators" in the World Trade Center bombing two years earlier, the Post said. He has denied involvement in the conspiracy.
Diocese protects oldest known European records in the United States (Florida)
Source: Yahoo News (11-11-09)
ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. – Sister Catherine Bitzer slowly opened a file box and carefully removed a brittle page, scarred by years of neglectful storage, mold and insects. At 415 years old, the marriage record written by a Roman Catholic priest is still readable and is one of the oldest known European records from the United States.
It's among thousands of artifacts detailing the lives of the Spanish soldiers, missionaries and merchants who settled St. Augustine, the nation's oldest permanent city. The church kept the only official records, a role that today is filled by government.
After being scattered from Florida and surviving destruction for centuries, they are now safe in a newly renovated waterproof, fireproof and climate-controlled building at the Diocese of St. Augustine, said Bitzer, the archivist of the diocese.
Michael Gannon, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Florida, calls the archives "a pocketful of miracles." He tracked down most of the documents, which had traveled to Cuba, back to St. Augustine and then Notre Dame, Ind.
Pope Benedict Urges Europeans to Keep Alive Their Christian Roots
Source: Yahoo News (11-11-09)
VATICAN CITY – Pope Benedict XVI has urged Europeans to defend their continent's religious and cultural heritage.
The pope told pilgrims Wednesday that all those who hold the future of Europe dear to their hearts should "rediscover, appreciate and defend the rich cultural and religious heritage" of past centuries.
Benedict has been urging Europeans to keep alive their Christian roots, saying that Christian values are fundamental for the survival of societies. How to reinvigorate the faith in an increasingly secular Europe is a central theme of Benedict's papacy.
A Chronicle of Gaza, in Kitsch Form
Source: The American Task Force on Palestine (11-10-09)
“I can offer you a discount on the headbands,” said Tareq Abu Dayyeh, souvenir-store owner. “They’re just like the kind used by suicide bombers.”
He was making a sales pitch at his Chairman Arafat Shop, one of Gaza’s oddest commercial outlets. A battery-powered, dancing Osama bin Laden doll occupies a shelf above Barack Obama coffee mugs emblazoned with a misspelling of the U.S. president’s middle name: “Abu Hussain Palestine Loves You.” A plastic Virgin Mary and Jordan River holy water share space with plaques depicting the Dome of the Rock, the foremost Muslim shrine in Jerusalem.
The green flags of the Islamic party Hamas, which took over the Gaza Strip in 2007, stand next to the yellow banners of Fatah, the bitter rival that Hamas expelled. Che Guevara, the Cuban revolutionary leader, appears on T-shirts.
“We have something for everybody, believe me,” said Mr. Abu Dayyeh, 31, who started working in the store in 1994 when his father founded it.
Since then, the shop has been a one-stop barometer of Palestinian fortunes, selling kitsch that chronicles war, political infighting and Gaza’s isolation since 2006, when Israel began to blockade the coastal strip.
When the store opened, it was called the PLO Flag Shop, and the souvenirs reflected hope. Yasir Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, had returned from exile to take control of parts of Gaza and the West Bank. Peace seemed to be on the horizon and in tribute the shop displayed little crossed Israeli and Palestinian flag pins and key chains, Israeli flags and menorahs, the candelabra that is a symbol of Judaism.
A big seller was an inflatable vinyl pillow imprinted with Mr. Arafat’s smiling face. One that was purchased in 1995 deflated after a few months.
Israeli-themed mementos fell out of favor in the late 1990s as peace talks foundered, the Israeli settlements expanded and Hamas carried out a suicide-bomb campaign inside Israel. Posters of Saddam Hussein, who supported Palestinian liberation, were the rage.
“When things were good, everyone thought that Gaza was going to become the next Singapore; instead, it became the next hell,” Mr. Abu Dayyeh said, adding that he would take 5 shekels, or $1.33, for a Saddam poster now.
Arafat celebrated five years after death
Source: The American Task Force on Palestine (11-11-09)
More than 13,000 Palestinians gathered in Ramallah on Wednesday to mark the fifth anniversary of the death of former Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.
Large crowds packed into the Presidential Compound to hear a memorial from President Mahmoud Abbas, who donned a white ball cap emblazoned with the flag of Palestine and a black and white kuffeyeh as he addressed the crowd for what many anticipated to be a historic speech. Rumors spread before the event that Abbas would announce his resignation, precipitating the dissolution of the Palestinian Authority...
... Addressing allegations of repeatedly bowing to US pressure, Abbas said "We have paid a heavy toll to protect our independence in decision making, and to promote the PLO, and we will never allow anybody to destroy our achievements," though he did not lay out a plan for the continuation of Palestinian achievements.
"Our revolution is the longest in history, and it might be the last revolution in the world. We want to get rid of occupation, and we want a just solution for refugees' problem in accordance with the UN resolution 194. As long as 1967 territories are occupied, we have the right to demand removal of settlements because they are illegal," he said.
MI figures out what went wrong in Lavon affair - 55 years later
Source: The American Task Force on Palestine (11-11-09)
Fifty-five years after the notorious failure of an Israeli sabotage operation in Egypt, Military Intelligence has finally gotten around to figuring out what went wrong. The answer? Pretty much everything.
An educational presentation about the 1954 Lavon affair prepared by the MI history and heritage division found that MI had not sufficiently trained the members of the sabotage unit, who were mostly amateurs and included several Egyptian Jews, and had failed to give them cover stories, plan escape routes or otherwise plan for the possibility that they would be caught.
"First and foremost, this is the story of the failure of Military Intelligence, starting with the choice of targets for the network's sabotage operations, the operational planning and the superficial and sloppy training, and ending with the method of execution, which totally failed to carry out the pointless mission, which had no chance of reaching the strategic goal its operators had set: the cancellation of the planned British evacuation of the Suez Canal," stated the MI analysis.
Palace of Japan's warrior queen discovered
Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-11-09)
The building covering nearly 300 square metres was located close to the city of Sakurai and the former Japanese capital of Nara, 300 miles south-west of Tokyo.
Built on stilts, the structure was found beside three other aligned buildings, leading archaeologists to believe it is the site of Himiko's Yamatai palace.
"A building cluster that is placed in such a well-planned manner is unprecedented in Japan at that period in time," Hironobu Ishino, director of the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Archaeology, told Kyodo News.
The discovery coincided with celebrations today to mark the 20th anniversary of the enthronement of the present emperor.
Queen Himiko is a popular character in Japanese history. She was apparently able to wield great power in the Yamatai Kingdom from around the end of the second century. Legends handed down from the time describe her as "being skilled with magic".
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars posts struggle
Source: USA Today (11-11-09)
GALESBURG, Ill. — The future of VFW Post 2257 might hinge on the life span of its worn-out, 50-year-old boiler and attendance at weekly bingo games this winter.
Like many Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion posts, Post 2257 in this western Illinois city of 31,000 people is struggling to survive as older members die and younger veterans decide not to join. Nationally, the number of VFW posts declined from 8,374 in 2007 to 7,915 as of June, spokesman Jerry Newberry says. The American Legion has 14,150 posts, down from 14,260 two years ago, spokesman John Raughter says.
More than a building is at stake here and at other troubled posts, says quartermaster Mike Lummis, who keeps the books for Post 2257. VFW and American Legion posts, both founded to fight for veterans' benefits and promote patriotism, quickly became havens where veterans could talk with peers about experiences and problems, members say. Beyond the physical posts, both groups have long been vital presences in communities, marching proudly in parades, placing flags in cemeteries and sponsoring scholarships and Little League teams.
Some younger vets buy into the misconception "that all this organization is is a bunch of old warriors sitting around blowing smoke and in a lot of places drinking beer and telling war stories," Lummis says. "Well, that's not correct at all" — especially at Post 2257, where zoning rules bar alcohol sales.
"We look after our fellow vets whose lives were never the same and the ones fighting in the current wars and the wars that will come," Lummis says.
As national membership in the VFW dips — down from a peak of 2.5 million in 1992 to 1.5 million as of June — VFW posts have to change, Newberry says. Local posts are encouraged to welcome female vets, offer family friendly programs such as child care and to make veterans who are having trouble with civilian life feel comfortable. "You have to give them a reason to join," he says...
Reagan Associates and Friends Commemorate the Fall of the Berlin Wall
Source: Politico Playbook (11-11-09)
About 600 people turned out last night for the event at the Library of Congress, including Reagan alumni, veterans of Bush 41, senators, ambassadors, former Congress members, judges and press luminaries like CNN’s Sam Feist. Rick Fowler, manager of the Beach Boys, who have a long association with President Ronald Reagan, also attended. Defense Secretary Robert Gates gave a tough, pro-Reagan speech that emphasized the message of peace through strength. It was one of the biggest gatherings ever of Reagan administration alumni, and a prelude to the Reagan Centennial activities that will begin soon in advance of RR’s 100th birthday, on February 6, 2011. During the reception, guests were able to view a display Melissa Gillers and her team brought from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, Calif. Items on display include the original speech cards President Reagan used to deliver his "tear down this wall" speech, and the suit and cuff links he wore during the speech. On loan from Fred Ryan: an original piece of the Wall, on which President Reagan wrote: “Tear down this wall.” Guests also saw the original INF Treaty, on loan from the State Dept, and the pen Secretary Gorbachev used to sign it. James Hadley Billington, the Librarian of Congress, welcomed the audience. Then Fred Ryan introduced Secretary Gates.
President Bush outlining his vision for a unique public policy Institute
Source: Politico Playbook (11-11-09)
TOMORROW IN DALLAS, 2 p.m. CT: “Former President George W. Bush will give a keynote address at Southern Methodist University on Thursday, November 12, 2009, outlining his vision for a unique public policy Institute that will link scholarly research with practical results. Former First Lady Laura Bush will also speak about her involvement with the Institute and its upcoming programs. The George W. Bush Institute will be part of the George W. Bush Presidential Center, which will also include the President’s Library, Museum and Archives. The George W. Bush Presidential Center will become the first presidential library complex to house a policy Institute. In their speeches on Thursday, the former President and First Lady will outline the initial areas of focus for the George W. Bush Institute and announce several programs that will begin on the SMU campus and around the world in the spring of 2010.”
Services remember world war dead
Source: BBC (11-11-09)
Services of commemoration are being held around the world to mark Armistice Day, the end of World War I in 1918.
At a speech at Arlington National Cemetery, US President Barack Obama said no tribute could match the service and sacrifice of the armed forces.
Earlier, Angela Merkel became the first German chancellor to mark the day by attending French events in Paris.
In London, the Queen, politicians and British Armed Forces chiefs recalled the passing of the WWI generation.
Mr Obama laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery, where America's war dead are buried.
He praised the "extraordinary bravery and service" of the armed forces past and present.
"To the veterans, the fallen and their families - there is no tribute, no commemoration, no praise that can truly match the magnitude of your service and your sacrifice," he said.
Archaeologists find mummy of young priestess from 300-450 AD in Peru
Source: Thaindian News (11-9-09)
An archaeological excavation has uncovered the mummy of a young priestess, a member of the elite, with several precious items dating from the period of 300-450 AD in Cahuachi, Peru.
According to a report in Travel Culture History News, the mummy was found inside a series of rooms between the Great Pyramid and what is known as the Orange Pyramid.
The building would have formed a small temple that had 4 columns holding up its roof.
Giuseppe Orefici, director of the Nasca Project, said that the archaeologists had to remove a layer or reeds and ropes that covered the burial.
The body appeared to have been painted and found with an additional vertebra added.
She also had slightly deformed forearms, apparently something self-inflicted by having the arms extended vertically for long periods of time - perhaps as a result of a praying.
She was wrapped in finely woven fabric that had patterns of orcas (killer whales) found in the southern pacific and contained obsidian arrow heads.
'Important troves of African-American historical materials' in Trouble
Source: Inside Higher Ed (11-11-09)
One of the most important troves of African-American historical materials became the subject of national ire and hand wringing this week, when the student newspaper at Howard University reported that the university library’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center -- considered one of the foremost repositories of artifacts and manuscripts related to black history -- could close due to an inadequate budget and a shortage of staff.
The article prompted a stream of upset phone calls, e-mails, blog posts -- including an item in The Root, a Web magazine founded by Henry Louis Gates Jr., decrying the news. It also prompted an e-mail to the paper from Alvin Thornton, Howard’s associate provost for academic affairs, emphasizing that the university has no plans to close the research center.
Thomas C. Battle, the retiring director of Moorland-Spingarn, whose comments had touched off the speculation over the research center’s, told Inside Higher Ed that his comments had indeed been misinterpreted, and that he did not believe the center would close.
Still, Battle said, the center is in trouble. He said it has been understaffed since the early 1990s, when budget cuts and restructuring caused the center to reduce its staff by more than half. Since then, the staff has continued to shrink incrementally, culminating with several key staffers accepting buyouts this year...
UMass Criticized for invitation to convicted terrorist, Ray Luc Levasseur
Source: Boston.com (11-10-09)
Governor Deval Patrick today assailed the speaking invitation that a group of UMass Amherst faculty extended to a convicted terrorist, even after criticism from state and university leaders scuttled earlier plans for a speech.
"I am more than a little disappointed about this invitation having been extended,'' Patrick said at a State House news conference. I fully get the point, and respect the idea of free speech. But I think it is a reflection of profound insensitivity to continue to try and have this former terrorist on the campus.
Ray Luc Levasseur, the founder and former leader of the radical revolutionary group United Freedom Front, is scheduled to speak Thursday night. An earlier invitation for him to speak at a library symposium was canceled last week amid pressure from Patrick's office and from family members of victims of his group's attacks, which included the April 1976 blast on the third floor of the Suffolk County Courthouse that injured two dozen people...
... Levasseur was released from federal prison in Atlanta in 2004 after serving 18 years for his involvement in the radical group, which plotted a series of bombings and bank robberies along the East Coast between 1976 and 1984.
In 1989, after the longest criminal trial in Massachusetts history, Levasseur avoided additional jail time when he was acquitted by a federal jury of attempting to overthrow the government by force.
The group's followers were also convicted in the murder of a New Jersey state trooper, Phil Lamonaco, and linked to a 1982 shootout with Massachusetts state troopers. Police groups and the trooper's widow have pledged to protest Levasseur's speech.
Levasseur originally was invited to the university on the 20th anniversary of his 1989 acquittal to speak at a forum discussing response to social and political unrest during the 1960s.
'Recapitation' of James Garfield Statue at Hiram College (Ohio)
Source: Inside Higher Ed (11-11-09)
Hiram College this week held a "recapitation" ceremony to celebrate the return of the head on a statue of President James A. Garfield. Garfield was a student, instructor and administrator at the college before his ill-fated presidency. A statue honoring him was unveiled on campus in May and was mysteriously decapitated days later. The head was found and returned anonymously to local police officers.
German children: What do they know about the Berlin Wall?
Source: The Christian Science Monitor (11-10-09)
Frankfurt, Germany - Yesterday, Marlene Muehlmann saw the Berlin Wall tumble down.
Along with tens of thousands of young people from around the world, she decorated one of 1,000 giant dominoes erected along the strip that once divided East and West Germany and then toppled to commemorate the end of the cold war.
"I knew everything already, how the border was," says Marlene, a 9th-grader who lives in Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg, not far from where the wall was. "The parents in half the class had something to do with it." She knew that her mother had been barred from taking her high school exam because of her parents' church activities. She knew, too, that her friend's grandfather was put in jail when he tried to escape, only to be denounced by a friend. [Editor's note: The original misstated how her mother left East Germany.]...
... In the Black Forest village of Ichenheim, near the French border, Tobias Geiser knew little of his country's eastern half until his teacher sent him on a historical scavenger hunt. After months of interviews, he and fellow students built a Trivial Pursuit of sorts about the German Democratic Republic's (GDR) history.
His verdict? "The wall still exists in people's heads," says Tobias, whose project won third place in a national history competition "We hope that that can happen if the economy in the east improves."
Study: Kids have rosy view of east
Last year, a study stunned Germans by revealing not only how little youths know of the GDR, but how many still view it as a cozy, socially just society. Two decades after unification, children's views of their country's second dictatorship still hinges on whether they grew up in the east or in the west.
"We still have a country that's divided into two," says Monika Deutz-Schroeder, co-author of "Social Paradise or Stasi State? The GDR seen by schoolchildren – an East-West comparison."
Conducted with 5,219 schoolchildren in Berlin, Brandenburg, Bavaria, and North Rhine Westphalia, Ms. Deutz-Schroeder's survey showed the disparities: Only 57 percent of young people from East Germany approved of the Federal Republic's political system as opposed to 83 percent from West Germany...
... History minus the ideology
Experts tend to agree that too little time is devoted to teaching GDR history – but note that it typically takes two decades for history to be absorbed and taught without ideological twists.
"Until the wall came down, there was no GDR history that wasn't ideologically tainted," Professor Moser says. "We need teaching materials."
Kerry warns against revisionist Vietnam history
Source: Boston.com (11-10-09)
Senator John F. Kerry, who came to national prominence when he testified before Congress as a Vietnam war hero turned anti-war activist, is now warning against those pushing for a troop surge in Afghanistan by asserting that the same could have turned the tide in Vietnam.
"Let me be clear: more than 58,000 American troops died because they were sent into battle based on false assumptions, flawed goals, and faulty strategies. Yes, we adopted smarter tactics near the end, but by then the die was cast. History has definitively branded Vietnam for the mistake it was no one should believe that the deaths of nearly 60,000 Americans and at least 1.5 million Vietnamese were somehow not quite enough," Kerry, who is now chairman of the same committee he addressed in 1971, writes in the Nov. 16 issue of Newsweek magazine.
The Massachusetts Democrat, who is among those cautioning President Obama against sending the full allotment of 40,000 additional US troops sought by the top commander in Afghanistan, says there are some similarities with Vietnam.
Honor our Veterans by recording their histories
Source: The Putnam Standard and Citizen's Newspaper (11-10-09)
The Veterans Administration and the Library of Congress Veterans History Project have a special message for all Americans this Veterans Day - Honor our Veterans. Record their histories!
By recording the oral histories of our Veterans, we preserve the human face of American history for generations to come and honor those men and women who swore to protect and defend the United States.
The Veterans History Project (VHP) collects and preserves the remembrances of American war veterans and civilian workers who supported them.
These collections of first-hand accounts are archived in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress for use by researchers and to serve as an inspiration for generations to come.
70 years after WW2 erupted, a new battle for history rages in Europe
Source: Guardian (UK) (11-11-09)
The simulated screeching of the Stukas over Warsaw almost has you ducking for cover. The thump of marching jackboots portends terror. The melancholy piano of Chopin tugs at Polish heartstrings.
In the Museum of the Warsaw Rising, the sound effects are powerful, the visuals compelling, the tragedy forcefully conveyed. The story of the Polish capital's suicidal rebellion in 1944 against the Nazi occupation is vividly told through interactive, multi-media installations that play on the emotions as much as they engage the intellect.
Critics complain that it treats the past like a Disneyland theme park and avoids important and troubling questions. But it is the first such modern museum in Poland, devoted to the 63-day insurrection in August and September 1944 that left 200,000 dead and incurred a terrible revenge when the Nazis methodically razed Warsaw.
The museum is the first to reconstruct the events of a famous, but neglected, chapter in the history of the second world war. And it is a box-office sensation.
Textbook sheds light on Khmer Rouge era (Cambodia)
Source: BBC (11-10-09)
Even though it was not a school day, dozens of them made their way in to Sisowath High School in the centre of Phnom Penh for a presentation ceremony.
School and government officials were formally handing out the new Khmer Rouge history book, a scene that will be repeated across the country in the closing months of this year.
Three decades have passed since the fall of the Khmer Rouge government. Yet only now are Cambodian schoolchildren finally starting to learn about what happened during the Pol Pot era.
As many as two million people died in the late 1970s from forced labour, malnutrition and the summary execution of so-called "enemies of the revolution".
But the subject was conspicuous by its absence from the high school curriculum until the new textbook received official approval.
Tracing your family's military past (UK)
Source: BBC (11-11-09)
The death of the "last Tommy", Harry Patch, in July put an end to first-hand memories of the World War I trenches. But if Armistice Day pricks your curiosity about what your ancestors did in the world wars, there are many avenues of archives to explore.
And according to Anthony Richards, archivist at the Imperial War Museum, interest in researching family military history is now more popular than ever. A major aspect of genealogy is often the involvement of family members in one or other of the two world wars.
Once you have details of a relative's military unit - a particular regiment for example - the next step is again to access the National Archives and obtain that unit's regimental war diaries.
These were kept by each battalion's adjutant - a staff officer who assists the commanding officer in issuing orders and also keeps records of its activities.
Is Iraq the next holiday hotspot?
Source: BBC (11-11-09)
After more than six years of conflict Iraq seems an unlikely place for a holiday. But could its status as the birthplace of civilisation see tourists flocking?
For most travellers it will, undoubtedly, be years before Iraq becomes a destination of choice. But as the country stabilises its advocates believe its potential is beginning to emerge.
At one time Iraq was a regular stop for British travellers. Early flights to imperial India refuelled in the port city of Basra. But the fact that all the country's major cities have been ravaged by years of warfare now make it a more difficult sell.
Even so, for the first time in a decade, the head of Iraq's tourism board is in London to attend the World Travel Market to promote the country as a holiday destination.
Missing link dinosaur discovered
Source: BBC (11-11-09)
Researchers have discovered a fossil skeleton that appears to link the earliest dinosaurs with the large plant-eating sauropods.
This could help to bridge an evolutionary gap between the two-legged common ancestors of dinosaurs and the four-legged giants, such as diplodocus.
The remarkably complete skeleton shows that the creature was bipedal but occasionally walked on all four legs.
The team reports its discovery in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B.
The quest to regain Egypt's antiquities
Source: BBC (11-11-09)
Later this month Egyptian archaeologists will travel to the Louvre Museum in Paris to collect five ancient fresco fragments stolen from a tomb in the Valley of the Kings in the 1980s, but there are many other "stolen" antiquities which they also want back, reports the BBC's Yolande Knell in Cairo.
Thousands of artefacts were spirited out of Egypt during the period of colonial rule and afterwards by archaeologists, adventurers and thieves.
According to a 1972 United Nations agreement, artefacts are the property of their country of origin and pieces smuggled out must be returned.
Lost images of pre-war Jewish life unearthed
Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-11-09)
Hanukkah dinner in Odessa, bathers in the Baltic Sea, a tailor in front of his shop in Serbia - just some of the 25,000 images of pre-war Jewish life garnered from the private collections of survivors for a new exhibition.
With the number of those who lived through the Holocaust fast dwindling, researchers scoured cities across Europe, the Balkans, the former Soviet Union and Baltic states, to glean as much as they could about the lives of Jewish families in the years before World War II.
The resulting collection of stories and around 300 photographs - selected from the thousands that were copied and preserved - is now on display in the northern Austrian city of Linz, where Hitler also attended school.
Since 2000, experts from Serotta's Vienna-based organisation Centropa have interviewed 1,350 elderly Jews living in 15 different European countries and copied around 25,000 old photographs.
UN declares July 18 Nelson Mandela Day
Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-11-09)
The United Nations has declared July 18 "Nelson Mandela International Day" to mark the South African anti-apartheid leader's contribution to peace.
A resolution adopted by consensus by the 192-member world body calls for commemorations every year starting in 2010 on July 18 - Mandela's birthday - to recognise the Nobel Peace Prize laureate's contribution to resolving conflicts and promoting race relations, human rights and reconciliation.
Mandela, 91, led the fight against apartheid in South Africa as head of the African National Congress' armed wing. He was convicted of sabotage and other crimes and served 27 years in prison. When he was freed in 1990, he supported reconciliation and helped lead South Africa's transition toward multi-racial democracy.
Mandela became the country's first president to win in a fully democratic election and led South Africa from 1994-99. He is celebrated today as an international statesman and continues to speak out on human rights and other global issues.
Britain’s last First World War veteran shuns Remembrance Day
Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-11-09)
Britain’s last surviving First World War veteran has shunned Remembrance Day commemorations in Australia because he does not agree with the glorification of war, his family has said.
In July Claude Choules, 108, became Britain’s sole survivor from the 1914-1918 war, following the death of Harry Patch, aged 111.
Mr Choules, who lives in a nursing home in Perth, served on HMS Revenge during a 41-year naval career that spanned both world wars, witnessing the surrender of the German Imperial Navy in 1918 and the scuttling of the fleet in Scapa Flow.
But his daughter Daphne Edinger said he had been scarred by his experiences and chose not to celebrate the Armistice or other veterans’ days.
Armistice Day memorial service: nation falls silent to honour war dead
Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-11-09)
The nation fell silent at 11am today as the passing of the First World War generation was marked at a moving Westminster Abbey memorial service for Armistice Day.
The Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, senior politicians and the heads of the Armed Forces gathered for the ceremony in central London.
The Very Rev Dr John Hall, Dean of Westminster, opened the service by recalling the moment exactly 91 years ago when the guns fell silent in Europe.
Germany, France Mark End of WWI in Joint Ceremony
Source: AP (11-11-09)
For the first time since World War I, the leaders of Germany and France appeared together at a ceremony Wednesday to commemorate the end of the conflict, saying it is now time to celebrate their countries' reconciliation and friendship.
Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel together laid a wreath of flowers at the tomb and symbolically relit the perpetual flame above it to mark the 91st anniversary of the end of World War I.
The last of 8.4 million French who fought in the war that tore Europe apart died in March 2008, and Sarkozy wanted to use the Armistice commemoration to look to the future with the nation that was vanquished but which, with France, now has a central role in the European Union.
Navajo Code Talkers to Walk in NYC Veterans Day Parade
Source: AP (11-11-09)
The famed Navajo Code Talkers, the elite Marine unit whose unbreakable code stymied the Japanese in World War II, fear their legacy will die with them.
Only about 50 of the 400 Code Talkers are believed to be still alive, most living in the Navajo Nation reservation that spans Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. Many are frail or ill, with little time left to tell the world about their wartime contribution.
But on Wednesday, 13 of the Code Talkers are coming to New York City to participate for the first time in the nation's largest Veterans Day parade.
Kalashnikov gun designer turns 90
Source: CNN (11-11-09)
Red Army tank commander Sgt. Mikhail Kalashnikov invented his first machine gun in 1942, during the Second World War, as he sat in a hospital bed recovering from a wound that he got in western Russia.
But as Russians say, the first blintz always comes out wrong. His first model had inborn flaws and defects, and is now on display in an arms museum bearing his name.
It took him several more years to develop and fine-tune what later became an internationally recognized perfect killing instrument -- the AK-47. AK is a Russian acronym for 'Kalashnikov's machine gun,' and 47 stands for the year it was invented.
On Tuesday the legendary weapons designer turned 90. It was a day celebrated in Russia on a scale akin to a national holiday.
History 'being cut from timetables' (UK)
Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-10-09)
Thousands of pupils are now getting only two years worth of teaching in the subject at secondary level, instead of the expected three, it was claimed.
Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, admitted that teachers should have the “flexibility” to cut the amount of time devoted to certain subjects.
But David Laws, the Liberal Democrat children’s spokesman, said the move was a "disgrace".
"Ed Balls is giving the green light to schools to allow pupils to dump crucial subjects such as history as early as age 13," he said.
"Pupils already have the freedom to stop studying key subjects such as modern languages and history at age 14 - and Ed Balls' latest move is a step too far. The teaching of history is a crucial part of providing a broad and balanced curriculum which informs young people about the World in which they live.
"Dropping this subject at age 13 is bound to leave many young people ignorant about key events and issues in British and World history.
Power for U.S. From Russia's Old Nuclear Weapons
Source: NYT (11-9-09)
MOSCOW — What’s powering your home appliances?
For about 10 percent of electricity in the United States, it’s fuel from dismantled nuclear bombs, including Russian ones.
“It’s a great, easy source” of fuel, said Marina V. Alekseyenkova, an analyst at Renaissance Capital and an expert in the Russian nuclear industry that has profited from the arrangement since the end of the cold war.
But if more diluted weapons-grade uranium isn’t secured soon, the pipeline could run dry, with ramifications for consumers, as well as some American utilities and their Russian suppliers.
Already nervous about a supply gap, utilities operating America’s 104 nuclear reactors are paying as much attention to President Obama’s efforts to conclude a new arms treaty as the Nobel Peace Prize committee did.
In the last two decades, nuclear disarmament has become an integral part of the electricity industry, little known to most Americans.
Nicolas Sarkozy accused of rewriting history after Facebook slip
Source: Guardian (UK) (11-9-09)
It started out as a personal account by a world leader of where he was when the wall came down. The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, posted a photograph of himself taking a pickaxe to the Berlin Wall on his Facebook page, describing how he rushed to Berlin on 9 November 1989, and crossed through Checkpoint Charlie on the first day the gates opened.
But today, Sarkozy was accused of rewriting history by French journalists who had studied reports from the time and found no evidence that he was in Berlin on the day the wall fell. Some suggested he was not in the city until a week later...
Vanished Persian Army Said Found in Desert
Source: Discovery News (via OpEdNews.com) (11-8-09)
The remains of a mighty Persian army said to have drowned in the sands of the western Egyptian desert 2,500 years ago might have been finally located, solving one of archaeology's biggest outstanding mysteries, according to Italian researchers.
Bronze weapons, a silver bracelet, an earring and hundreds of human bones found in the vast desolate wilderness of the Sahara desert have raised hopes of finally finding the lost army of Persian King Cambyses II. The 50,000 warriors were said to be buried by a cataclysmic sandstorm in 525 B.C.
"We have found the first archaeological evidence of a story reported by the Greek historian Herodotus," Dario Del Bufalo, a member of the expedition from the University of Lecce, told Discovery News.
According to Herodotus (484-425 B.C.), Cambyses, the son of Cyrus the Great, sent 50,000 soldiers from Thebes to attack the Oasis of Siwa and destroy the oracle at the Temple of Amun after the priests there refused to legitimize his claim to Egypt.
Obama Wants to Visit Hiroshima, Nagasaki in Future
Source: VOA News (11-10-09)
President Barack Obama says he wants to visit the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sometime during his presidency, but will not have time when he travels to Japan later this week.
In an interview with Japanese broadcaster NHK, Mr. Obama said he would be honored to have the opportunity to visit the two cities that were devastated by U.S. atomic bombs at the end of World War II.
If he does, Mr. Obama will be the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Rasmussen Report: 28% Say Today's Veterans Face More Challenges Than Vietnam Returnees
Source: Rasmussen Reports (11-9-09)
Twenty-eight percent (28%) of adults nationwide believe that veterans of today’s conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan face more challenges when they return home than veterans of the Vietnam War.
However, the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that another 24% believe veterans of today’s conflicts face fewer challenges when they arrive home compared to those who served in Vietnam.
The plurality (42%) believes the challenges veterans from both eras have faced are about the same.
Twenty-seven percent (27%) of those who have served in the military say today’s veterans have it worse, while nearly the same number (28%) say they face fewer challenges than those who fought in Vietnam.
Korean navies exchange fire
Source: CNN (11-10-09)
Seoul, South Korea (CNN) -- North and South Korea said their naval forces clashed Tuesday in disputed waters, and each blamed the other for what is the first such violent incident in seven years...
... North and South Korea have been bitterly divided since the 1950-53 war between them ended without a peace treaty.
There was, however, an armistice with the U.N. Command establishing the Northern Limit Line (NLL), a demarcation on the Yellow Sea designed to avert clashes at sea. But the two nations dispute the exact location of the sea border, and North Korea does not observe the line.
Clashes have occurred before in the Yellow Sea, especially during crab fishing season, according to the defense news Web site Globalsecurity.org. Since 2001, North Korean vessels have crossed the NLL 65 times -- 22 were this year -- though most of these incidents do not turn violent.
The first clash since the Korean War that turned deadly took place in June 1999 when a North Korean ship was sunk. And in 2002, a series of North Korean incursions sparked an exchange that killed six South Korean sailors and wounded nine others.
Tomb of Tutankhamun to undergo 5-year cleaning and restoration
Source: Yahoo News (11-10-09)
CAIRO – Egypt's famous Tomb of Tutankhamun will undergo a five-year project to clean and restore the lavish wall paintings in the underground chambers of the boy king whose golden mask and artifacts have long awed the world.
The project to restore the country's most famous tomb is the latest collaboration between Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities and the Los Angeles-based Getty Conservation Institute, which in the past restored nearby tombs and designed airtight cases to display Egypt's mummies.
Since the small, four-roomed tomb and its famous golden burial mask were discovered in 1922 by British archaeologist Howard Carter, observers have noted strange brown spots marring the wall paintings.
D.C. Sniper's Last Day
Source: The Daily Beast (11-10-09)
With his final appeal rejected by the Supreme Court on Monday, the mastermind behind the D.C. sniper attacks is scheduled to be executed Tuesday, barring a last-minute commutation of his sentence from Virginia Governor Tim Kaine. John Allen Muhammad, working with his young accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo, killed 10 people in the D.C. metro area in 2002 in a series of sniper attacks that terrorized the populace and garnered national interest. The two were captured on October 24 of that year at a Maryland rest stop. Some relatives of Muhammad's victims plan on watching the execution, while Virginia activist group Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty has planned statewide vigils. Muhammad's lawyers have appealed to Gov. Kaine for a commutation to life in prison on grounds of mental illness.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Hindenburg airship beer auctioned
Source: BBC (11-10-09)
A blackened bottle of beer found in the wreck of the Hindenburg zeppelin is expected to fetch thousands of pounds at auction.
The bottle was found by a fire-fighter cleaning up the American airfield where the German airship exploded in 1932.
The bottle will be the most expensive ever bought if it meets its estimated price of £5,000 ($8,337) on Saturday.
The airship was engulfed by flames as it landed in New Jersey, killing 38 people and injuring 60.
For Taliban Fighters, a Fading Memorial
Source: NYT (11-9-09)
TARAKHEL, Afghanistan — The locals call the place “The Taliban Cemetery,” a weed-clotted memorial to the men who died for the movement during its fiercest campaigns in the years before 9/11.
The graveyard, next to this tiny village north of Kabul, sits a few miles from what was once the front line against the rebels who fought the Taliban after the group captured Kabul in 1996. Those rebels, then known as the Northern Alliance, finally overran the Taliban and captured Kabul — with American help — in November 2001.
Eight years after the last fighter was buried here, the cemetery has fallen into decrepitude. Many of the gravestones are broken and smashed — the vandalism, the villagers say, of a marauding anti-Taliban militia. Weeds and rocks and tattered prayer flags obscure much of what is left. The villagers of Tarakhel, though Taliban enthusiasts, have given up trying to care for the place.
But with a little digging and scraping, the Taliban cemetery reveals itself, and the time that it preserved. Together, the surviving graves offer a history of the Taliban’s early years, and of the tumultuous era when young jihadists from around the world traveled to Afghanistan to train and fight.
There are perhaps two hundred men buried here, not just Afghans but Arabs, Chechens, Indians and Pakistanis. There is even the body of a young man from Great Britain.
“The Arabs are buried over there,” said Mohammed Zahir, sweeping his finger toward a swath of broken earth at the rear of the cemetery. Mr. Zahir, who lives in Tarakhel, wandered over when he spotted a foreigner walking among the tombs.
The Arab fighters, Mr. Zahir said, were killed in the first American bombardment in October 2001. A United Nations truck brought their bodies here and dumped them. The villagers of Tarakhel gave the dead hurried burials, in unmarked graves; they feared the gunmen of the Northern Alliance would dig up and desecrate the corpses if they discovered them. As it was, they came and smashed many of the tombstones.
“They were animals that day,” Mr. Zahir said.
Yet many of the gravestones are intact, preserving the stories of the men underground: their names, the places they were born, the days when they died. Each of the dead here, over the years, got his own granite tombstone, a gift from the Taliban warlords who ran the country then...
Long Island Fishing License Comes With a Colonial Catch
Source: WSJ (11-10-09)
EAST HAMPTON, N.Y. -- Stuart Vorpahl has waged a lonely battle since 1984 against the state of New York over his right to fish. For refusing to obtain a commercial fishing license, he has been arrested at least four times, once on a dock after a police officer seized 490 pounds of fluke and two lobsters from his 40-foot trawler.
Now, others here on Long Island's East End are joining the 69-year-old Mr. Vorpahl's cause. And they are supporting his argument, based on a 313-year-old colonial-era document, called the Dongan Patent, that conferred responsibility for town land and waterways on locally elected trustees.
"I keep telling everyone, 'Your right to go fishing is right here!'" he shouts, holding up a copy of the document in his kitchen cluttered with files and books on the subject. "But the courts don't want to open this can of worms."
All of his cases over the years were dismissed or ended in mistrials, largely without the judges considering the merits of the Dongan Patent. In one instance, the court was unable to form a jury because Mr. Vorpahl is too well-known. His family has lived for centuries pulling striped bass from these waters.
But this time looks different.
US Congress Has History of Reversing Cuts
Source: WSJ (11-11-09)
In 1997, Congress passed a budget law that mandated tough curbs on Medicare spending, setting up formulas to reduce doctor payments if broad spending targets were exceeded. But when the formula began taking a serious bite out of doctor reimbursements in 2002, Congress acted to reverse the cuts -- a step it has repeated five times since then.
That history shows why some critics believe billions of dollars in budget savings Congress is promising through its health-care overhaul might never materialize.
Under both Democrats and Republicans, Congress repeatedly has waived curbs it has tried to place on spending. It has given back other savings from the 1997 law to hospitals, skilled nursing facilities and other providers, most notably in 1999. More recently, Congress has twice switched off a cost-saving trigger that was contained in a 2003 bill establishing a Medicare prescription-drug benefit. Congress also frequently has waived budget resolution limits, as well as pay-as-you-go rules requiring offsets for tax cuts and entitlement spending.
The House bill passed last weekend trims government spending in several areas by more than $400 billion, through a combination of cuts falling largely on pharmaceutical makers, private health insurance companies and hospitals.
"Congress is notorious for passing Medicare savings, and then after the cuts take place and the political groups get activated, we restore all the money," said Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.). "The [new] cuts will never take place. ...In the next few years, they'll all be given back" with some exceptions.
Bill Clinton Presses Senators to Pass Health Bill
Source: WSJ (11-11-09)
WASHINGTON -- Former President Bill Clinton came to Capitol Hill Tuesday to underline for Democrats the political consequences of failing to pass a health overhaul, saying doing nothing was the worst outcome.
Mr. Clinton spoke as both sides in the Senate braced for a battle on the floor. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) said Tuesday that once Senate debate begins, Republicans would offer "a lot of amendments" on subjects from abortion to immigration to a government-run insurance plan.
"This is a big bill," Mr. McConnell told reporters. "The majority seeks to take over one-sixth of our economy."
The appearance by Mr. Clinton, whose own attempt at a health bill failed 15 years ago, reflected the urgency Democrats feel to maintain the momentum behind the bill following its narrow House passage Saturday and signs of a tempestuous debate ahead in the Senate.
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