Breaking News
Highlights
- Historic win or not, Democrats could pay a price
- Sharpeville, 50 years later: a crime that still echoes
- British soldiers to march in Red Square with Russian troops for first time
- Larry Flynt to write history of presidents' sex lives
- New book claims Anne Frank entertained children in Auschwitz
- Famous Bataan Death March photo turns out to be mislabeled
- Mexican drug smugglers embrace bandit as patron saint
- Reality show contestants willing to kill in French TV re-creation of Milgram experiment
- In Afghanistan, lessons from the Soviet war
- Historians blast proposed Texas social studies curriculum
WEEK OF JUNE 30, 2008
Khmer Rouge minister seeks bail in crimes against humanity trial
New Public Military History Criticizes Pentagon on Post-Invasion Planning for Iraq
WEEK OF JUNE 23, 2008
Justice Antonin Scalia: Al Gore to blame for 2000 US election mess
Rare gold chalice from 1622 shipwreck found off Florida Keys
A 160m pound apology to the Maoris for shameful history of injustice
Some say the US is ignoring the commemoration of the slave trade's end
The Lincoln Museum In Fort Wayne To Close And Give Away Collection
Anti-Obama book to be released by conservative press that published Swift Boat smear book
Mexico: Pre-Columbian artifacts from Mexico seized ... some looted from nomadic caves
Archivist of Iraq insists Hoover Institution has no right to Iraq's documents
120 Israeli Leaders Urge Yad Vashem to Recognize Bergson Group
Sons of Confederate Vets face war between traditionalists, those aligned with racist groups
UK detectives hunt for Cold War killer who poisoned dissident with an umbrella tip in 1978 attack.
White Supremacists Report an Increase in Visits to Their Web Sites
WEEK OF JUNE 16, 2008
When Reining In an Imperial President Was the Conservatives' Cause
Veterans Rebut Swift Boat Charges Against Kerry in Answer to Challenge
Manassas battlefield study aims at protecting views of the past
Once All-Black, Banneker Celebrates Its 60th Anniversary (Loudoun County, VA)
Obama, inspired by Lincoln, might keep Defense Secty. Robert Gates
Call to honour El Salvador's rescuer of Jews after war role rediscovered
Obama Revives Kennedy-Era Excitement for Democrats Mikva, Minow
CIA failed to identify the storage bunkers for Soviet nuclear warheads in Cuban missile crisis
'Curveball' speaks, and a reputation as a disinformation agent remains intact
America's Sour Mood: Ratings of Bush, Cheney, Rice and Congress Sink to Worst Levels Ever
Immigration appeals board upholds deportation order for former Nazi guard living in Wisconsin
Sen. claims abuses at Abu Ghraib were not due to a few bad apples
White House May Keep Documents in E-Mail Flap Private, Judge Rules
Author who lionized Bush for his faith, out with a book that does the same for Obama
Call Conference To Plan War Crimes Trials Of Bush And Higher-Ups
5,000-year-old anthropomorphic figures found in Huaura, Peru
Titanic discoverer Robert Ballard called to find lost sarcophagus
Report: Ignorance of history is leading Americans to lose sense of national identity
WEEK OF JUNE 9, 2008
How war hero John McCain betrayed the Vietnamese peasant who saved his life
'68 Alumni Recall Loudoun's All-Black Douglass High (Virginia)
School rallies around dismissed Watts teacher deemed too 'Afro-centric.'
Fire marshal: Video shows person setting fire at Texas Governor's Mansion
Read All About It: Historical Newspaper Reproduction Business Goes National
1860s ledger retells how Lake Oswego [OR] School District began
Yemeni archeological sites must be protected, urge academics
Aussie dinosaur bone takes bite out of theory of continental drift
South Korea Education Ministry under fire for history textbook revision plan
Beautifully restored Beauvoir reopens on Jeff Davis' bicentennial
Citing History, Bush Suggests His Policies Will One Day Be Vindicated
WEEK OF JUNE 2, 2008
Is this Obama cartoon in the New Yorker playing on stereotypes?
Obama First in More Ways Than Any U.S. Presidential Candidate
Remembering Polish soldiers who trained in Niagara-on-the-Lake 90 years ago
Association of Art Museum Directors Asks Members to Stop Stealing
Army defuses WWII's 'largest bomb ever dropped on London': police
Iraq issues cards of stolen artifacts and passes them to Interpol
'Barack's voice was just like his father's - I thought he had come back from the dead'
Publicize presidential candidates' health records, historians say
he director of Angola's slave museum is fascinated by a cultural exchange
Confederate flag debuts the day Obama becomes presumptive nominee
Review criticizes secondary textbooks' take on Middle East, Islam
NYT has more news, less advertising than it did a decade ago
Cape Cod Lighthouse Thought Destroyed More Than 80 Years Ago Found in California
Pagan sect at Pakistan border lives amid conservative Muslims
Washington Post review dismisses new biography of John Mitchell
Who found Machu Picchu? How a German may have beaten the Americans to lost Inca city
New Zealand government apologizes to Vietnam War veterans for mistreatment, neglect
WEEK OF MAY 26, 2008
Monday, June 30, 2008
Ex-Chilean intelligence chief gets 2 life sentences
Source: McClatchy (6-30-08)
A Chilean judge sentenced the country's former intelligence chief, retired Gen. Manuel Contreras, to two life prison terms Monday for masterminding a double assassination that was one of the most notorious covert operations conducted by this country's military government.
The historic court decision, which can be appealed, holds Contreras responsible for the murders of Gen. Carlos Prats, the former army chief, and his wife in a 1974 bombing attack in the Argentine capital of Buenos Aires.
USS Cole attack 'plotter' charged
Source: BBC (6-30-08)
US military prosecutors have filed charges against the alleged mastermind of the 2000 attack on the USS Cole warship that left 17 sailors dead.
Saudi-born Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is being held at Guantanamo Bay, faces charges including murder and terrorism.
Mr Nashiri was arrested in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in October 2002 and has been held at Guantanamo since 2006.
He told a hearing at the US base in Cuba last year that he confessed to the attack because he had been tortured.
Khmer Rouge minister seeks bail in crimes against humanity trial
Source: Telegraph (UK) (6-30-08)
The former foreign minister of the Khmer Rouge regime faced court in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh yesterday, seeking bail ahead of his trial for crimes against humanity.
Looking frail, 82-year-old Ieng Sary, who is one of five senior architects of the ultra-Maoist regime currently in detention, said little to the packed courtroom.
His lawyer, Michael Karnavas, said that his client's physical and mental health required proper assessment to determine his ability to stand trial and that, in the meantime, he be allowed to stay at home or in hospital. The hearing was later adjourned when Ieng's lawyers said he was unable to continue.
Educated in Paris in the 1950s, Ieng was once known as the international "smiling face" of the notorious regime, which is held accountable for the deaths an estimated 1.7 million people who died from disease, starvation, forced labour and execution between 1975 and 1979.
McCain trying to link Carter to Obama
Source: AP (6-20-08)
Jimmy Carter has been among the country's most active retired presidents, but even the peripatetic Georgian might not have anticipated having his name bandied about in a presidential campaign 28 years after leaving the White House.
Sen. John McCain, who will carry the Republican presidential flag in this fall's campaign, has repeatedly invoked the former president's name on the campaign trail, and with it the less-than-stellar memories of his White House years. Some high-profile allies, including Texas Gov. Rick Perry and former GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney, have done so as well.
The goal: linking Barack Obama to Carter, another Democratic newcomer elected on the promise of hope and change but whose presidency was marred by economic turmoil, high energy costs and a foreign policy widely derided as weak.
US News cover story tackles myths of of the Revolution
Source: US News & World Report (6-30-08)
The latest scholarship on the war for independence casts new light on some well-told tales, including why patriots really fought—it wasn't always for the cause of liberty—and what turned a famous war hero into an infamous traitor.
King Arthur is propaganda, say French
Source: Telegraph (UK) (6-30-08)
French historians have accused the English of propagating the legend of King Arthur for "political reasons".
Even if a character who vaguely resembled the fabled leader did exist, he would probably have been a Welshman with strong connections to Brittany and whose sworn enemies were the Anglo-Saxons, they said.
The organisers of a conference and exhibition to be held at Rennes university in northern France next month said they will provide ample evidence that the Arthurian legend has continually been updated, often as a sop to English nationalists attempting to revive the Age of Chivalry.
The event, "King Arthur: A Legend in the Making", will highlight the argument that historians were joined by artists and writers in creating the "fiction" of the legend.
New Public Military History Criticizes Pentagon on Post-Invasion Planning for Iraq
Source: FoxNews.com (6-29-08)
WASHINGTON — A new report by Army historians levels heavy, unvarnished criticism against Pentagon leadership for its failure to plan beyond the initial invasion of Iraq.
"On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign" — which outlines the 18 months following the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime — said too much focus was placed on a military victory, and not enough on post-war planning, due in part to optimism by the White House and the Pentagon that civilian agencies would take care much of the country's post war rebuilding.
The unclassified report is set for official release Monday, but appeared on a Pentagon Web site over the weekend.
The 720-report — written by military historians Donald Wright and Colonel Timothy Reese — claims to provide "balanced" and "honest" account that is neither "triumphant nor defeatist."
"In many ways, On Point II is a book the Army did not expect to write because numerous observers, military leaders, and government officials believed, in the euphoria of early April 2003, that US objectives had been achieved and military forces could quickly redeploy out of Iraq. Clearly, those hopes were premature," the report says in its introduction.
It cites an incident where Gen. Tommy Franks surprised supervisors by restructuring the Baghdad-based command shortly after the invasion and saying that major fighting was over.
“The move was sudden and caught most of the senior commanders in Iraq unaware,” the report states. It also said the staff for the new headquarters was not initially “configured for the types of responsibilities it received," and could be changed "at the snap of your fingers."
In other criticism of the planning effort, the report says: "The transition to a new campaign was not well thought out, planned for, and prepared for before it began."
"Additionally, the assumptions about the nature of post-Saddam Iraq on which the transition was planned proved to be largely incorrect," it states.
The study points to errors that resulted in U.S. forces and their allies lacking an operational and strategic plan for success in Iraq, adding that also questions the focus of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on military modernization.
"The intense desire to continue DoD's transformation to smaller and lighter forces, to implement a perceived revolution in military affairs in the information age, and to savor the euphoria over seemingly easy successes in Afghanistan using those techniques seemed to outweigh searching through the past for insights into the future," the authors wrote in the report.
The study is the second in a series by Army historians. The first covered the start of combat through to the fall Saddam in April 2003.
You may read the report here (this file is very large and will take some time to download).
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Summer and Smoke, an American Cauldron
Source: NYT (6-29-08)
The Fourth of July is approaching and with it the promise, or threat, of another long, hot summer.
It serves as a reminder, as if there were any danger of forgetting, that of all the seasons, summer can be the cruelest....
It’s not surprising, then, that American literature is a catalogue of summer disturbances, especially the literature of the South, thanks to geography. Its swamplands and deltas bristle with heat-stoked tensions. In William Faulkner’s fiction, the “ardent and unheeding sun” pours down mercilessly on parched country roads and backwoods hollows. “Heat quivered up from the asphalt, giving to the familiar buildings about the square a nimbus quality,” Faulkner writes of a sleepy town in his novel “Light in August.” Elsewhere he describes the grim fates dealt in “the bloody September twilight.”
The same friction is found in Tennessee Williams’s plays, beginning with their sultry titles: “Summer and Smoke,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” No literary work captures the languid menace of summer better than “A Streetcar Named Desire,” its characters squeezed into a sweltering tenement in New Orleans, all gnawing at one another. “Temperature 100 on the nose, and she soaks herself in a hot tub,” Stanley Kowalski growls when his sister-in-law, Blanche, the corrupt hothouse orchid, hogs the only bathroom in his cramped, overheated apartment.
A Witness to Poland's History, Now Its Diplomatic Voice
Source: NYT (6-28-08)
A BUBBLY and witty presence, the tall, older gentleman with the cane does not instantly come across as an Auschwitz survivor, or a fighter in the Warsaw Uprising, or a imprisoned dissident under Communism.
In fact, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski is all those and more. Yet he is also the type of man who, on a busy day, stops to chat with the hotel maids and is sure to make them laugh before he goes on his way.
The world is unlikely to produce many more Wladyslaw Bartoszewskis (pronounced vwad-IH-swav bart-o-SHEV-skee), and that is probably a good thing, given the events he lived through and witnessed from an early age. But while his life may have been forged through immense suffering, it never managed to define his outlook.
“The optimists and the pessimists live identically long, but the optimists are considerably happier,” he said with an amused shrug, when asked about his famous good humor.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Scholar Looks for First Link in E-Mail Chain About Obama
Source: WaPo (6-28-08)
The e-mail landed in Danielle Allen's queue one winter morning as she was studying in her office at the Institute for Advanced Study, the renowned haven for some of the nation's most brilliant minds. The missive began: "THIS DEFINITELY WARRANTS LOOKING INTO."
Laid out before Allen, a razor-sharp, 36-year-old political theorist, was what purported to be a biographical sketch of Barack Obama that has become one of the most effective -- and baseless -- Internet attacks of the 2008 presidential season. The anonymous chain e-mail makes the false claim that Obama is concealing a radical Islamic background. By the time it reached Allen on Jan. 11, 2008, it had spread with viral efficiency for more than a year.
During that time, polls show the number of voters who mistakenly believe Obama is a Muslim rose -- from 8 percent to 13 percent between November 2007 and March 2008. And some cited this religious mis-affiliation when explaining their primary votes against him.
As the general-election campaign against Sen. John McCain has gotten underway, Obama's aides have made the smears a top target. They recently launched FightTheSmears.com to "aggressively push back with the truth," said Obama campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor, and go viral with it. The Web site urges supporters to upload their address books and send e-mails to all of their friends. "
But long before this, Allen had been obsessing about the origins of her e-mail at the institute, which is most famous for having been the research home of Albert Einstein. Allen studies the way voters in a democracy gather their information and act on what they learn. She was familiar, of course, with the false rumors of a secret love child that helped sink McCain's White House bid in 2000, and the Swift boat attacks that did the same to Democrat John Kerry in 2004. But the Obama e-mail was on another plane: The use of the Internet made it possible to launch anonymous attacks that could reach millions of voters in weeks or even days.
Occupation Plan for Iraq Faulted in Army History
Source: NYT (6-29-08)
Soon after American forces toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, Gen. Tommy R. Franks surprised senior Army officers by revamping the Baghdad-based military command.
The decision reflected the assumption by General Franks, the top American commander for the Iraq invasion, that the major fighting was over. But according to an Army history that is to be made public on Monday, the move put the military effort in the hands of a short-staffed headquarters led by a newly promoted three-star general, and was made over the objections of the Army’s vice chief of staff.
“The move was sudden and caught most of the senior commanders in Iraq unaware,” states the history, which adds that the new headquarters “was not configured for the types of responsibilities it received.”
An aide to General Franks said that the former commander had covered Iraq decisions in his book, and General Franks told Army historians that it was the Pentagon’s responsibility to make sure the new Iraq headquarters was properly established.
'Hanoi Hilton' jailer says he'd vote for McCain
Source: AP (6-27-08)
HAIPHONG, Vietnam - John McCain has an unusual endorsement — from the Vietnamese jailer who says he held him captive for about five years as a POW and now considers him a friend.
"If I were an American voter, I would vote for Mr. John McCain," Tran Trong Duyet said Friday, sitting in his living room in the northern city of Haiphong, surrounded by black-and-white photos of a much younger version of himself and former Vietnam War prisoners.
At the same time, he denies prisoners of war were tortured. Despite detailed POW accounts and physical wounds, Duyet claims the presumed Republican presidential nominee made up beatings and solitary confinement in an attempt to win votes.
His statements seem to echo the communist leadership's overall line on America: It insists the torture claims are fabricated, but that Vietnam now considers the U.S. a friend and wants to lay the past to rest. Duyet said one of the reasons he likes McCain for president is the candidate's willingness to forgive and look to the future.
Could the election of Obama doom affirmative action?
Source: AP (6-28-08)
Barack Obama's political success might claim an unintended victim: affirmative action, a much-debated policy that he supports.
Already weakened by several court rulings and state referendums, affirmative action now confronts a challenge to its very reason for existing. If Americans make a black person the leading contender for president, as nationwide polls suggest, how can racial prejudice be so prevalent and potent that it justifies special efforts to place minorities in coveted jobs and schools?
"The primary rationale for affirmative action is that America is institutionally racist and institutionally sexist," said Ward Connerly, the leader of state-by-state efforts to end what he and others consider policies of reverse discrimination. "That rationale is undercut in a major way when you look at the success of Senator Clinton and Senator Obama." Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York battled Obama to the end of the Democratic primary process.
Other critics of affirmative action agree. "Obama is further evidence that the great majority of Americans reject discrimination, reject prejudice," said Todd F. Gaziano, a scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation and a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Not so fast, say supporters of affirmative action. Just because Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and other minorities have reached the top of their professions does not mean that ordinary blacks, Latinos or women are free from day-to-day biases that deny them equal access to top schools or jobs, they say.
Aliens or asteroid: What was blast of 1,000 Hiroshimas?
Source: Times (UK) (6-28-08)
It set off a massive explosion that flattened millions of trees in the Siberian wilderness and lit up the sky as far away as Britain.
A century later the Tunguska event still provokes intense debate over a blast 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.
This week advocates of rival theories have been holding conferences in Moscow to try to answer the question of what took place in the forests along the Tunguska River on June 30, 1908.
Most argue that the explosion was a comet or asteroid smashing into Earth. A lack of physical evidence – not least a credible impact crater – has led others to contend that the cause was a sudden eruption of gas from deep within the surface of Earth. Some even argue that an alien spacecraft blew up, or that a black hole made a freak appearance.
A grand American tradition: The smear
Source: Chicago Tribune (6-28-08)
It's not what you heard in grade school history, of course, but it is somehow consoling to note how unbelievably vile politicians were early in the nation's history.
You probably don't remember "The Public Character and Conduct of John Adams," a letter written by Alexander Hamilton at the height of the 1800 presidential campaign.
There are "great and intrinsic defects in his character, which unfit him for the Office of Chief Magistrate," the Hamilton letter said of Adams. And that was the nice part.
Erratic. Egotistic. Petty. Mean. Hot-tempered. That's all there too.
Aaron Burr got his hands on the letter, which was private, gave it to the press, and eventually everyone heard about it.
Not a man to let a slight go without response, Adams called Hamilton "an intriguant … a man devoid of every principle. A bastard."
The passage of time didn't help much. Andrew Jackson's enemies accused him of adultery, cockfighting, gambling, slave trading, drunkenness, theft, lying and murder.
His mother, it was said, was a prostitute brought to the United States by British soldiers. She married a mulatto man, the story went, and Jackson was the first of several children.
Friday, June 27, 2008
Cutty Sark saviour steps in
Source: History Today (6-24-08)
A gift of £3.3million to save the historic Cutty Sark was announced this week (June 24th). The donation from shipping magnate Sammy Ofer closes the funding gap for the Cutty Sark Trust, allowing the 19th-century sailing ship to be restored by 2010. Andy Burnham, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, stated: ‘The Heritage Lottery Fund has given more than £23 million towards the repair bill, and £8 million in donations have already been received. Mr Ofer's philanthropic contribution will help ensure the complete conservation of this iconic vessel and beacon of our maritime heritage for generations to come.’
A family confronts its slave-trading past
Source: Seattle PI (6-24-08)
Here in Seattle, Elly DeWolfe Hale was far removed from her early American ancestors, a wealthy, illustrious family whose legacy still colors life in Bristol, R.I.
Then came a letter that unmasked a shameful secret:
Hale's storied forebears, the DeWolfs, weren't just distillers and merchants, they were human traffickers who built their fortune on the slave trade. In fact, as Hale and other relatives were to discover, the DeWolfs were the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history.
Over three generations -- even after the trade was outlawed in 1808 -- the DeWolfs shipped 10,000 Africans to the Americas to sell as slaves or conscript as labor for their sugar plantations in Cuba. About a half-million of the slaves' descendants are alive today.
Suddenly, Hale, who had grown up in Reno, Nev., and thought of herself as a modern, progressive child of the West, felt the national stain of slavery lapping at her heels.
Federal Prosecutors Agree to Release of Some Rosenberg Grand Jury Records After Petition from Archive and Historical Groups
Source: National Security Archive (6-27-08)
Washington, DC, June 26, 2008 - Responding to a petition filed in January by the National Security Archive and several leading U.S. historical associations for the release of grand jury records from the 1951 indictment of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, federal prosecutors in New York conceded that a substantial portion of the grand jury materials could be made public after more than 55 years.
In a court filing this week, the government said it would not oppose the release of transcripts and other materials for 35 of the 45 witnesses who testified before the grand jury that in 1951 indicted the Rosenbergs, who were accused of running an espionage ring that passed American atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, convicted of spying, and executed in 1953. The 35 witnesses are either deceased or consented to the disclosure. In its filing, the government agreed that the Rosenberg case is of "significant historical importance" and therefore the materials are covered by a special exception to the longstanding rule that grand jury records must remain secret indefinitely.
Waterloo flags find at Scott home
Source: BBC (6-17-08)
Flags from the battlefield at Waterloo have been found in a cupboard at the home of Sir Walter Scott.
The four banners, which date from 1815, were discovered by trustees sorting through Abbotsford, Scott's home near Melrose in Roxburghshire.
The novelist brought them from the scene of the battle, which he visited after hearing of Napoleon's defeat.
Scholars make finds in Nazi archive
Source: AP (6-26-08)
From prison brothels to slave labor camps, 15 scholars concluded a two-week probe Thursday of an untapped repository of millions of Nazi records, and hailed it as a rich vein of raw material that will deepen the study of the Holocaust.
It was the first concentrated academic sweep of the long-private archive administered by the International Tracing Service since it opened its doors last November to Holocaust survivors, victims relatives and historical researchers.
German historian Christel Trouve said the nameless millions of forced laborers began to take shape as individual people as she studied small labor camps — which existed in astonishing numbers.
Among the striking revelations was the identification of the man who rescued an 8-year-old boy in Buchenwald, Israel Meir Lau, who later became Israel's chief rabbi.
Mexicans urged to reclaim a piece of Texas
Source: Telegraph (UK) (6-26-08)
Mexicans are being encouraged to reclaim a piece of Texas, more than 150 years after they lost the Lone Star state to the United States.
Texan estate agents are heading south of the border to drum up the interest in buying cut-price land and property in the foreclosure-hit state.
Thanks to a rising Mexican peso and an economy which is growing faster than that of the US, a country that has previously been looked on by America as a source of cheap labour is now seen as a potential source of rich investors.
A "Texas for Sale" sign and cowgirl-clad models greeted visitors to a recent property fair in Monterrey, Mexico, at which hundreds of Mexicans looked over lists of potential investment opportunities.
Justice Antonin Scalia: Al Gore to blame for 2000 US election mess
Source: Telegraph (UK) (6-27-08)
The 2000 presidential election debacle was the fault of Al Gore, who should have followed Richard Nixon's 1960 example and conceded without legal action, according to the Supreme Court's leading conservative judge.
"Richard Nixon, when he lost to [John F.] Kennedy thought that the election had been stolen in Chicago, which was very likely true with the system at the time," Justice Antonin Scalia told The Telegraph.
"But he did not even think about bringing a court challenge. That was his prerogative. So you know if you don't like it, don't blame it on me.
"I didn't bring it into the courts. Mr Gore brought it into the courts.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
New Book One Minute to Midnight Reveals U.S. Intelligence Tracked Activation of Soviet Air Defenses During Missile Crisis
Source: National Security Archive (6-26-08)
American signals intelligence collectors tracked the activation of Soviet air defenses prior to the shootdown of a U.S. spy plane at the peak of the Cuban missile crisis, according to documents published on the Web today by the National Security Archive.
A new book by Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs shows that the destruction of the U-2 piloted by Major Rudolf Anderson, Jr. on October 27, 1962, was closely connected to the deployment of Soviet nuclear cruise missiles in the vicinity of the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo. Soviet generals feared that the spy plane had uncovered the forward launch position of the cruise missiles, just 15 miles from Guantanamo.
This is the fourth of five postings looking at the new material in One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War, which draws on the National Security Archive's long-standing documentary work on the Cuban missile crisis. The book provides new details about U.S. SIGINT (signals intelligence) activities in and around Cuba at the height of the missile crisis.
Next week, in the final installment from One Minute to Midnight, the National Security Archive will publish key primary sources behind the "Eyeball to Eyeball" confrontation between U.S. and Soviet ships that never happened.
Rare gold chalice from 1622 shipwreck found off Florida Keys
Source: http://www.mcclatchydc.com (6-26-08)
A rare gold chalice from a Spanish fleet that sank in 1622 was unearthed Tuesday morning by a treasure diver who couldn't believe his find.
''Oh, my God,'' diver Michael DeMar said, describing his discovery of the chalice on the site where the Spanish galleon Santa Margarita is believed to have gone down during a vicious storm.
Dented on a few sides and encrusted with marine growth, the chalice weighs more than a pound is etched with scrollwork and boasts decorative handles.
Coca Cola building makes Virginia landmark list
Source: WJZ (6-23-08)
Virginia has added 25 listings to its landmarks register, a catalog of historic sites and districts.
The latest listings include three former Confederate camp sites and two historic bridges. One includes the High Bridge, which spans the Appomattox River between Cumberland and Prince Edward counties.
Among the unusual listings is the Winchester Coca-Cola Bottling Works, a familiar sight along U.S. 11. The Art Deco plant was built in 1940 and operated for 36 years as a bottler and distributor.
Other additions include Clark Hall at the University of Virginia, Civil War camps in Prince William and Stafford counties, and the Commerce Street Industrial Historic District in Petersburg.
Record tourism could harm Easter Island statues
Source: CNN (6-24-08)
It's earth's most remote inhabited land, a South Pacific speck of volcanic rock so isolated the locals call it "Te Pito O Te Henua," or "The Navel of the World."
But Easter Island is a bellybutton experiencing a tourist boom -- and some are worried the onslaught of outsiders could take a toll on the very things they come to see, the gigantic stone heads known as Moais.
"More tourism, more deterioration. More visitors, more loss," said Susana Nahoe, an archaeologist who was a liaison between Chile's National Tourism Service and the island's scientific community before leaving the post two years ago, citing "differences in values."
"We are at the point now where, either we protect what we have or we lose it," she said.
Dig shows Paris is 3,000 years older than first thought
Source: Independent (UK) (6-26-08)
Paris has long been known to be a very old city but its history as a settlement has just been extended by more than 3,000 years.
An archaeological dig, whose findings were revealed yesterday, moves back Paris's first known human occupation to about 7600BC, in the Mesolithic period between the two stone ages.
An area about the size of a football field on the south-western edge of the city, close to the banks of the river Seine, has yielded thousands of flint arrowheads and fragments of animal bone. The site, between the Paris ring road and the city's helicopter port, is believed by archaeologists to have been used, nearly 10,000 years ago, as a kind of sorting and finishing station for flint pebbles washed up on the banks of the river. Once the dig is complete, the site will be occupied by a plant for sorting and recycling the refuse generated by the two million Parisians of the 21st century.
Re-viewing Hadrian
Source: Cronaca (6-23-08)
A cherished image of the Roman emperor Hadrian as a gentle, philosophical man wearing the robes of a Greek citizen has been shattered with one blow of a conservator's chisel at the British Museum.
The head, with its neatly trimmed beard and fringe of exquisitely crimped curls, is certainly Hadrian but it seems the body it has been attached to for almost 150 years belongs to somebody else. The statue, a unique piece that has been cited in many biographies of Hadrian as proof of his love for Greek culture and customs, and illustrated countless times, is an ingenious Victorian confection.
T. Boone Pickens Says No Deal on Swift Boat Bounty
Source: NYT (6-26-08)
T. Boone Pickens is not giving up his million dollars.
That’s how much he had offered to pay anyone who could disprove any of the accusations the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth made against Senator John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election – attacks Mr. Pickens, the billionaire Texas oilman, helped finance.
A group of Swift boat veterans sympathetic to Mr. Kerry sent Mr. Pickens a letter last week taking him up on the challenge. In 12 pages, plus a 42-page attachment of military records and other documents, they identified not just one but ten lies in the group’s campaign against Mr. Kerry. They offered to meet with him to provide Mr. Kerry’s journals and videotapes from Vietnam and a copy of his full military record certified by the Navy – a key demand of Mr. Pickens and veterans who believe Mr. Kerry lied about his service to win his military decorations.
Mr. Pickens replied with a one-page letter, thanking the veterans for their research and their service, but politely saying there had been a misunderstanding. “Key aspects of my offer of $1 million have not been accurately reported,” he wrote.
When he offered the reward at an American Spectator dinner in November, blogs sympathetic to Mr. Pickens reported that he challenged anyone to disprove “anything” the Swift boat group said.
In his letter, Mr. Pickens explained that his bet actually applied to only the television ads the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth bought, and not to their bestselling book or the media interviews that generated more attention than the ads themselves.
“In reviewing your material, none of the information you provide speaks specifically to the issues contained in the ads,” he wrote, “and, as a result, does not qualify for the $1 million.”
Justices Rule for Individual Gun Rights
Source: NYT (6-26-08)
Divided Supreme Court Strikes Down D.C. Gun Ban.
###
The 5-4 ruling was the first ever to directly address the meaning of the Second Amendment’s ambiguous text, but the decision left open the possibility that less restrictive state laws were permissible.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Warship's visit signals Japan-China breakthrough
Source: Times (UK) (6-25-08)
The first Japanese warship to visit China since the Second World War docked in a southern Chinese port yesterday in a symbolic breakthrough in relations between East Asia’s two biggest powers.
The 4,650-tonne destroyer Sazanami pulled into Zhanjiang, a Chinese naval port in the southern province of Guangdong, with a cargo of relief supplies for victims of last month’s Sichuan earthquake. The Sazanami and its 240 crew will stay in China for five days as part of a ground-breaking military exchange that also involved a Chinese missile destroyer visiting Japan in November — the first Chinese ship to do so since 1891.
The crew of the Sazanami, including members of a musical band, delivered 300 blankets and 2,600 emergency food items, the first aid to be delivered to China by Japan’s armed forces, known as the Self-Defence Force. They will also participate in several choreographed “friendship” events, including a concert and a reception aboard ship for Chinese naval officers, according to China’s official media.
A 160m pound apology to the Maoris for shameful history of injustice
Source: Independent (UK) (6-26-08)
New Zealand took a momentous step to address the historic grievances of its original Maori inhabitants yesterday, handing back nearly half a million acres of Crown forestry land in a settlement worth NZ$418m (£160m).
Hundreds of Maori, some wearing traditional feather cloaks, descended on the capital, Wellington, to watch the agreement being signed in parliament by the government and tribal leaders. Some wept during the ceremony, while others chanted, sang and blew conch shells.
The settlement is the biggest to emerge from long-running negotiations to restore land, forestry and fishery rights lost by indigenous tribes after the British settlement of New Zealand in the 19th century.
In the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, tribal chiefs ceded sovereignty to the British Crown in exchange for retaining control of their land and natural resources. But much of that land was subsequently confiscated or illegally sold after the arrival of successive waves of white settlers.
In Stalin's bomb lab, dreams of preservation
Source: Yahoo News (6-19-08)
Behind a thicket of weeds and broken window panes, one of the former Soviet Union's dark secrets is the laboratory where captured German scientists worked to build an atomic bomb for Josef Stalin.
The Sukhumi Institute still exists, in a state of limbo. Limping along under semi-siege in Abkhazia, a breakaway region of Georgia whose existence the rest of the world does not recognize, its Cold War past has been all but forgotten.
Once, around 250 German specialists lived here with their families and built centrifuges to separate uranium isotopes. Now a money-making sideline for the few scientists who keep the institute's research going is designing household heaters.
Deputy director Vladimir Kunitsky does have ambitious hopes for the institute, which was nearly wrecked by the separatist war that engulfed this region on the shores of the Black Sea after the Soviet Union collapsed.
He would like to turn part of the former bomb laboratory into a sanatorium, combining cutting-edge treatments using radioactive sources and a beautiful location a short walk from the Black Sea.
"We are preserving some kind of potential," he said in his bare office, where the paint is peeling off the walls.
Group mulls future of ancient mounds site in Ohio
Source: Ap (6-24-08)
Ohio Historical Society officials are considering the possible transfer of a 2,000-year-old American Indian earthworks site in central Ohio to the National Park Service because more money is needed to maintain and manage the site.
On Friday, the society's Board of Trustees will meet to decide whether to authorize a study by the National Park Service on the benefits and costs involved in transferring ownership of the Newark Earthworks. The Columbus-based society owns the site that includes the Great Circle Earthworks, the Octagon Earthworks and the Wright Earthworks. The three major segments are the only preserved parts of the earthworks that once covered more than four square miles.
"The society does not currently have the resources to maintain and manage the site as it should," Executive Director William K. Laidlaw Jr. said in a statement. "With the earthworks being considered for World Heritage status, the need for improved access will increase."
McCain says only World War III would justify draft
Source: Reuters (6-25-08)
- Only World War III would prompt Republican presidential candidate John McCain to bring back the military draft, McCain said on Tuesday.
Many Americans are fearful the U.S. government will be forced to reinstitute the draft given the prolonged Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Asked about that possibility by a potential voter in Florida during a telephone "town hall meeting," McCain said: "I don't know what would make a draft happen unless we were in an all-out World War III."
The United States ended its last military draft in 1973 in the waning years of the Vietnam war, moving to an all-volunteer military force.
McCain, a Vietnam veteran, said the draft during that conflict weighed most heavily on lower-income Americans, and that this should not be repeated.
"I do not believe the draft is even practicable or desirable," McCain said.
Limestone mine dispute hangs over key Civil War battlefield
Source: AP (6-20-08)
The expansion of a limestone quarry at one of the nation's most endangered Civil War battlefields threatens a mecca for re-enactors of a key Union victory, the National Trust for Historic Preservation warns.
The Cedar Creek Civil War battlefield each year attracts thousands of history enthusiasts for one of the largest battle re-enactments in the nation. The battlefield is located in the northwest corner of Virginia near Middletown.
The National Park Service owns 3,500 acres of the original 15,000-acre battlefield and partners with the trust and the Cedar Creek Civil War Foundation to preserve hundreds more acres. The property also includes Belle Grove Plantation, a National Historic Landmark built in 1794.
The dispute involves the expansion of the quarry and what the trust said is a reversal over expansion of the mining by the foundation, which sponsors the annual re-enactments. The trust said the expansion would include blasting and heavy truck traffic that would threaten the battlefield and Belle Grove and subject visitors to clouds of dust and noise.
Group Hopes to Bring Lincoln Collection to Washington
Source: WaPo (6-24-08)
Four major Washington institutions are jointly pursuing an extensive collection of materials related to Abraham Lincoln and his times with hopes of bringing it to the capital.
The Library of Congress, the National Museum of American History, Ford's Theatre and President Lincoln's Cottage have formed a partnership to obtain the collection of the privately owned Lincoln Museum in Fort Wayne, Ind. The museum is closing next week after 77 years of operation.
The Fort Wayne museum was suffering from a lack of visibility and attendance, said Annette Moser, a spokeswoman for Lincoln Financial Group, the company that runs the foundation that owns the museum.
"The Lincoln Financial board decided they really wanted to make the collection more visible to a greater number of people. With the bicentennial of [Lincoln's birth] next year, it would be a great way of celebrating by gifting the collection," Moser said.
Russia: Fight is on to preserve gingerbread houses
Source: NYT (6-25-08)
TOMSK, Russia — The building at 32 Kartashov Street had had enough. It once served as home to a 19th-century merchant, a little log masterpiece with ornate doors and shutters carved like doilies and a structural swagger that said, “Look at me!”
But after the Soviet years, when the place became a woebegone flophouse, it was nearly dead. An engineer might have noted that its roof had wilted and that rot was chomping at its beams. The neglect, though, seemed to go deeper, as if the building had all but given up after realizing that no one in this Siberian city could even be bothered.
A city official named Nikolai Zakotnov came by 32 Kartashov one day and vowed to rescue it. Here would stand an example of how Tomsk could defend an architectural heritage that is as charming as it is unexpected.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Microbes Eating Away at Pieces of History
Source: NYT (6-24-08)
At Angkor Wat, the dancers’ feet are crumbling.
The palatial 12th-century Hindu temple, shrouded in the jungles of Cambodia, has played host to a thriving community of cyanobacteria ever since unsightly lichens were cleaned off its walls nearly 20 years ago. The microbes have not been good guests.
These bacteria (Gloeocapsa) not only stain the stone black, they also increase the water absorbed by the shale in morning monsoon rains and the heat absorbed when the sun comes out. The result, says Thomas Warscheid, a geomicrobiologist based in Germany, is a daily expansion and contraction cycle that cracks the temple’s facade and its internal structure. Dr. Warscheid, who has studied Angkor Wat for more than a decade, said in an interview that these pendulum swings had broken away parts of celestial dancer sculptures on the temple walls.
“It is getting worse — up to 60 or 70 percent of the temple is black,” he added.
Once chalked up to weathering, the damage at Angkor Wat is now seen as the result of a much more complex dynamic: the interaction of micro-organisms with the chemical and physical properties of the temple.
Orphans of forgotten Nazi massacre hope for justice
Source: Telegraph (UK) (6-25-08)
More than sixty years after Nazi soldiers committed one of France's worst wartime atrocities, orphans of the country's "forgotten massacre" hope that justice will finally be done when German investigators arrive next month.
On August 25 1944, when most of France rejoiced in the Allied liberation of Paris, Serge Martin's 10-year-old world was torn apart.
One of the 600 inhabitants of Maillé, 25 miles south of Tours in the Loire valley, he had spent the day in a nearby village with his grandparents.
But at home, his mother, father, brother and two sisters – one just six months old – were all murdered by retreating German troops.
Lech Walesa was a Communist spy, says new book
Source: Times (UK) (6-25-08)
Lech Walesa, the Polish shipyard worker with the trademark droopy moustache, is regarded as one of the heroes of modern Europe: the leader of the revolution that brought communist rule crashing down.
Now Poland is in uproar over an intriguing riddle: was communism actually destroyed by a communist agent? If so, why?
Two writers claim that Mr Walesa — the founder of the Solidarity movement, Nobel Peace prizewinner, former President of Poland - was a stooge of the communist secret police.
In The State Security Service and Lech Walesa, Slawomir Cenckiewicz and Piotr Gontarczyk make two central claims. The first is that Mr Walesa was an informer for the secret police between 1970 and 1976 under the codename “Bolek”. The second is that as President from 1990 to 1995 he borrowed his police file from the Interior Ministry archives and returned it with key pages missing.
Mr Walesa has already successfully contested in the courts that he was Bolek. His argument, backed by a handwriting expert, is that documents were faked by the secret police to discredit him with the Church hierarchy, to sabotage his relationship with the Polish-born Pope John Paul II and to influence the Nobel Peace Prize committee against making him a laureate.
Most of the documents found by the authors in the Institute for National Remembrance (IPN) are photocopies and many are unclear. It is certainly true that the secret police, the notorious SB, concocted material to compromise Mr Walesa. The short, fast-talking electrician was a profound embarrassment for the regime in the 1980s, largely because he embodied the romantic idea in the West that the Soviet empire could be brought to its knees by a simple worker.
In his autobiography Mr Walesa admits that he may have “signed something” after an interrogation in the early 1970s. There was never any possibility, he says, that he would co-operate with the SB, betraying fellow dissidents. The book tells a different story.
London mayor fumes over Iraq cigar case probe
Source: Breitbart (6-24-08)
London Mayor Boris Johnson poured scorn Tuesday on a "ludicrous" police investigation into how he came into possession of a cigar case belonging to former Iraqi deputy premier Tariq Aziz.
Johnson, who took office last month as the opposition Conservatives' most powerful politician, accused the governing Labour Party of triggering the probe, which he jokingly likened to a "war crime".
The former journalist admitted to having found the red leather cigar case among the bombed-out debris of Aziz's home while visiting Iraq as a reporter in 2003. He wrote about it at the time, and kept it as a trophy of his trip.
Little more was said about it -- until Labour aides unearthed the story during recent campaigning for London mayor, which saw a close-fought race between him and veteran Labour mayor Ken Livingstone.
"They found the article, and with bulging eyes they went to the Metropolitan Police and demanded that I be prosecuted," he wrote in The Daily Telegraph newspaper.
Some say the US is ignoring the commemoration of the slave trade's end
Source: Boston Globe (6-24-08)
Last year England lavishly celebrated the 200th anniversary of the abolishment of the slave trade. Although the system of purchasing human beings for money ended, slavery continued in British colonies. The country marked the bicentennial with a service at Westminster Abbey attended by the queen. The city of Liverpool, a former slave trading capital, opened the International Slavery Museum. Another British city, Bristol, spent almost $800,000 to commemorate the end of this lucrative business.
Thomas Jefferson's bill abolishing the slave trade in this country took effect Jan. 1, 1808. The institution of slavery itself didn't end for several decades.
Celebrations surrounding the end of the slave trade in this country are muted compared to England's. President Bush signed a bill in February creating a national commission on the abolition of the slave trade, but it included no funding for festivities. The 17-day Spoleto Festival in Charleston, S.C., commemorated the bicentennial in May by focusing on the black experience.
Columbia Noose Professor Likely to Be Fired for Plagiarism
Source: FoxNews.com (6-24-08)
NEW YORK — A black Columbia University professor who made headlines after a noose was found hanging on her door was suspended indefinitely for plagiarism and likely will be fired.
The termination of Madonna Constantine, a psychology professor with a focus in racial issues at Columbia’s Teachers College, is effective Dec. 31, 2008, pending an appeal.
"I can confirm that Madonna Constantine has been terminated subject to a hearing before a faculty committee," Teachers College spokesman Bill Anderson told FOXNews.com.
In a letter sent out Monday, Teachers College President Susan Fuhrman and university Provost Tom James said an investigation found that Constantine was guilty of plagiarism and of trying to cover it up by accusing those whose work she stole of plagiarism.
"The Faculty Advisory Committee (FAC) confirmed the administration's decision to accept ... the report's findings that professor Madonna Constantine had committed plagiarism and acted to obstruct the investigation," they said in the letter, sent Monday.
The "sanctions" imposed against the racial justice and psychology professor "were not only justified but required," the letter said.
"We are terminating Madonna Constantine's employment with Teachers College for cause subject to a hearing before a faculty committee," the administrators wrote.
Adolf Hitler told bad jokes about Nazi friends
Source: Telegraph (UK) (6-24-08)
Adolf Hitler took time out from running Nazi Germany to make jokes at the expense of his henchmen, a new book claims.
The dictator would often break from the serious nature of waging his campaign to "pull the legs" of his entourage of generals and hangers on.
His favourite victim was the Luftwaffe chief Herman Goering, who was notoriously fond of awarding himself medals and decorations.
According to the book by the last surviving member of his bunker, Hitler recounted how Mrs Goering found her husband waving a baton over his underwear in the bedroom and asked him what he was doing.
"He replied: "I am promoting my underpants to OVERpants"", Hitler then joked.
Survey Shows U.S. Religious Tolerance
Source: NYT (6-24-08)
Although a majority of Americans say religion is very important to them, nearly three-quarters of them say they believe that many faiths besides their own can lead to salvation, according to a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
The report, the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, reveals a broad trend toward tolerance and an ability among many Americans to hold beliefs that might contradict the doctrines of their professed faiths.
For example, 70 percent of Americans affiliated with a religion or denomination said they agreed that “many religions can lead to eternal life,” including majorities among Protestants and Catholics. Among evangelical Christians, 57 percent agreed with the statement, and among Catholics, 79 percent did.
Russia condemns rewriting of World War Two history
Source: International Herald Tribune (6-23-08)
BREST, Belarus: Russian President Dmitry Medvedev condemned on Sunday what he described as attempts to rewrite wartime history -- an attack the Kremlin said was aimed at Ukraine and the three Baltic states.
In a joint declaration marking the 1941 Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Medvedev and Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko denounced a "politicised approach to history".
Their countries "strongly condemn any attempt at rewriting history and revision of the results of World War Two," they said.
Ukraine and the Baltic states Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have challenged Moscow's view of history, saying their nationals suffered from Soviet as well as Nazi oppression, and a Kremlin spokesman said later the criticism was aimed at them.
Meeting in the Belarussian town of Brest, where Nazi forces first crossed the Soviet border on June 22, 1941, the two leaders said that "a selective, politicised approach to history should be set against honest, scientific debate."
"Only on this basis can Europe draw the lessons of history and avoid a tragic repetition of the errors of the past."
"This declaration is indeed a reaction to the actions of the countries in the Baltic and Ukraine, in which recently there has been the rehabilitation of the SS Halychyna division," the Kremlin spokesman told Reuters. "In other countries, Britain for example, Nazi criminals are arrested, not justified."
WARTIME GUERRILLAS
Russia has chided Ukraine for taking steps since the mid-1990s to grant some form of recognition as combatants to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), guerrillas who fought both Nazi and Soviet troops to secure an independent state.
The issue is contentious in Ukraine, where commemorations expose the country's split into the nationalist west and centre and the Russian-speaking east, more sympathetic to Moscow.
Historians say the UPA had 40,000 men in its ranks at its peak. Some Ukrainians donned Nazi uniforms in a unit known as SS Halychyna.
Russia has also complained about Baltic nationalists who resisted Soviet occupation. It became embroiled in a diplomatic row with Estonia last year over the removal of a statue of a Red Army soldier from Tallinn's city centre to a military cemetery.
Moscow also says Russian-speaking minorities in Estonia and Latvia have been denied basic rights against a background of strong anti-Russian sentiment.
Medvedev also reaffirmed Russia's support for steps to create a "union state" with Belarus -- planned since the mid-1990s but with little concrete progress so far.
Lukashenko, accused by Western countries of crushing fundamental rights, has championed the post-Soviet merger as the cornerstone of Belarus's foreign policy, but Moscow has cooled to the idea in recent years.
The Lincoln Museum In Fort Wayne To Close And Give Away Collection
Source: Civil War News (6-23-08)
By Kathryn Jorgensen
FORT WAYNE, Ind. – The Lincoln Financial Foundation will determine how to donate its extensive Lincoln Museum collection by the end of the year. In the meantime, the Fort Wayne museum will close on June 30.
A foundation spokesman said more than 30 organizations attended an April meeting to discuss disposition of the collection. Those interested in receiving the collection will submit proposals by June 16. The foundation will chose those that will continue in the process by late July.
The $20 million collection includes more than 18,000 books and pamphlets; 7,000 prints, 5,000 photographs, 350 documents signed by Abraham Lincoln, one of 13 copies of the Thirteenth Amendment signed by Lincoln, 79 three-dimensional objects and thousands of newspaper clippings and Lincoln-related items.
The foundation intends to donate the collection “to one or more of the nation’s major nonprofit institutions specializing in Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War.”
The spokesman said the foundation wants the recipient(s) to have a program that “ensures significant and meaningful public access to the collection.” The recipient must have demonstrated strength in exhibitions, programming, research and financial resources.
In deciding to close the museum, the foundation aims to make the collection more visible and accessible for the upcoming Lincoln Bicentennial through exhibit at another institution and by digitizing documents.
The Lincoln Financial Foundation is the charitable giving arm of Lincoln Financial Group, the marketing name for Lincoln National Corporation, which is traded on the New York Stock Exchange and headquartered near Philadelphia.
The museum’s roots go back to 1905 when Arthur Hall and other Fort Wayne businessmen founded The Lincoln National Life Insurance Company. According to company history, Hall admired Lincoln and asked Robert Todd Lincoln for a photograph the company might use on its letterhead.
Lincoln’s son gladly complied and sent “what I regard as a very good photograph of him.”
Hall repaid the Lincoln family in 1928 by creating the Lincoln Historical Research Foundation, dedicated to Lincoln’s life and legacy. Collection of Lincoln material began that year and The Lincoln Museum opened in 1931 in the insurance company’s basement.
A new museum was built in 1995. It now houses one of the largest collections dedicated to the life and times of Abraham Lincoln. Tens of thousands of people visited annually for exhibits, lectures and research.
The reading room will remain open for research through June 27. With the June 30 museum closing all programming, access to the Web site and online archives will cease.
Md. plantation attic holds 400 years of documents
Source: AP (6-23-08)
CENTREVILLE, Md. (AP) — For four centuries, they were the ultimate pack rats. Now a Maryland family's massive collection of letters, maps and printed bills has surfaced in the attic of a former plantation, providing a firsthand account of life from the 1660s through World War II.
"Historians are used to dealing with political records and military documents," said Adam Goodheart, a history professor at nearby Washington College. "But what they aren't used to is political letters and military documents kept right alongside bills for laundry or directions for building a washing machine."
Goodheart is working with state archivists and a crew of four student interns to collect the documents, which were found stuffed into boxes, barrels and peach baskets.
"Look at this: 'Negro woman, Sarah, about 27 years old, $25,'" Goodheart says, reading from a 19th century inventory. "It was as though this family never threw away a scrap of paper."
The documents include maps, letters, financial records, political posters, even a lock of hair from a letter dated Valentine's Day, 1801. There's a love poem from the 1830s (in which a young man graphically tells his sweetheart what he'd do if he sneaked into her room on a winter's night), along with war accounts and bills of sale from slaves and crops.
The papers come from several generations of the Emory family, prominent tobacco and wheat farmers who settled here on a land grant from Lord Baltimore in the 1660s.
The former Poplar Grove plantation is still in family hands, though the mansion now is used only as a hunting lodge. The documents were moldering in an attic until students touring the house started sorting through them this spring.
"I don't believe any of us knew these papers were there," said Mary Wood, an Emory cousin whose son inherited the plantation in 1998. "We didn't go there all that often, and when you do, you don't go up in people's attics and look around."
Washington College has had access to the plantation for years, but Goodheart said he assumed the papers in the attic weren't old or important.
They aren't in any particular order, and some are mouse-eaten tatters that look like something out of "The Da Vinci Code."
"You really get a sense of the range of America through these papers," said Edward Papenfuse, director of the Maryland State Archives, which will eventually house them.
Perhaps most strikingly, letters tell of a family's torn allegiances during the Civil War. The Emorys lived on Maryland's Eastern Shore, across Chesapeake Bay from Baltimore, where the plantation economy of the South ended and the abolitionist industrial North began.
It was a conflict the Emorys catalogued, anti-slavery petitions stacked alongside records of slaves sent to Natchez, Miss., and a packet of letters, still tied in silk ribbon, titled, "Correspondence with W.H. Emory and wife in regard to his resignation from U.S. Army, 1861."
The Emorys owned slaves, but some signed an 1832 petition to the Maryland legislature calling for the gradual eradication of slavery.
One family member, William H. Emory, was a colonel in the U.S. Army when the Civil War began. He wrote out a resignation of his post, then changed his mind and fought for the Union.
Two sons also fought in the Civil War — one for the Union, one for the Confederacy. Bundles of letters from all family members detail their divided feelings. The family kept not just personal letters, but political posters about the conflict.
"These are things that usually do not survive," Papenfuse said, pointing to a broadside blasting then-President Martin Van Buren for favoring voting rights for "every free negro." "After the heat of a campaign, this printed matter was thrown out or put to other uses, including the outhouse."
Not so at the Emory house, where even small scraps of paper were kept alongside military uniforms and other family heirlooms.
The collection also includes notes on an aspect of slavery historians know little about: the practice of renting slave labor to neighbors and plantations farther south.
"Scholars have not paid a great deal of attention to it, but this is something that helps recreate and draw back together the lives of these people who were considered chattel," Papenfuse said.
Relatives are also curious to know what historians find.
"I can't believe they didn't throw this stuff out," Wood said with a chuckle. "I mean, it's kind of weird. It's fascinating, though. I can't believe that something might come out of it."
Sarah Bryant's body returned from Afghanistan
Source: Times (UK) (6-24-08)
The body of the first female soldier to be killed in Afghanistan was returned to British soil poignantly draped in a Union flag.
In a moving repatriation ceremony six members of Corporal Sarah Bryant's unit struggled to contain their emotions as they slowly shouldered her coffin from a Hercules transport aircraft on to the sun lit runway at RAF Lyneham in Wiltshire.
The bodies of three SAS reservists, who died with the 26-year-old last week, also made their final journey home.
The coffins of Corporal Sean Reeve, 28, Lance Corporal Richard Larkin, 39, and Paul Stout, 31, were shielded from view because their pall bearers were fellow members of the Special Forces.
Even in death an air of secrecy surrounded their brave service.
Their coffins were taken to a chapel at the air base where a private service was held for the families of the four soldiers.
They then left RAF Lyneham in a convoy of hearses which was met by hundreds of mourners as it passed through the small market town of Wootton Bassett.
A floral tribute at the town's memorial read: "To an English rose and her comrades. Rest in peace."
Relatives of the soldiers joined local people who turned out to line the streets in silent tribute, many with their heads bowed, as each hearse passed by.
Among the crowd were veterans in uniform who saluted sombrely while the convoy made its way to John Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford for post-mortem examinations to be carried out.
Cumbrian-born Cpl Bryant, 26, who served with the Intelligence Corps, and the three SAS reservists, died when their lightly protected Snatch Land Rover was hit by a mine near Lashkar Gah in Afghanistan's southern Helmand Province on June 17.
In what her family described as an "amazing life" she had also served in Iraq and learned Pashtu so she could help train the Afghan security forces.
Soldiers on the ground say the death of the first British woman soldier in Afghanistan has had a deep impact on them.
A soldier friend of Cpl Bryant said: "I knew Sarah long before she joined up and she always wanted to join the Army. She was mad keen on the Intelligence Corps and wanted to be a hands on soldier.
"She was a truly lovely girl that always had a smile for everyone. I am absolutely gutted."
Her Army officer husband, Cpl Carl Bryant, who she married only two years ago, said he was left "devastated beyond words" by her death.
And her father, Des Feely, chose the words of Winston Churchill to sum up his feelings, saying: 'Never have so many owed so much to so few'.
The four deaths brought the total number of British fatalities in Afghanistan to 106 since operations began in 2001, including nine in a 10-day period this month.
Jordan hands over stolen Iraqi artifacts
Source: AP (6-23-08)
AMMAN, Jordan (AP) — Jordan turned over Sunday nearly 2,500 stolen Iraqi artifacts to Iraq's top antiquities official, in the latest effort to recover the war-torn nation's stolen heritage.
In the chaos following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, looters snatched some 15,000 priceless artifacts and smuggled them out of the country. In the last few months, Jordanian authorities seized 2,466 items as they were being taken across the border.
Samples of the silver coins, necklaces, ancient Sumerian scrolls, ceramic pots and other artifacts were displayed for journalists during a brief ceremony at the Jordanian Antiquities Department in Amman.
Iraq's acting state minister of tourism and archaeology, Mohammed Abbas al-Oreibi, told reporters the recovered antiquities will be packed and sent back to Iraq in the coming days.
So far, Iraq retrieved a total of 8,500 items — including some from Syria recently — out of the 15,000 antiquities stolen, he said.
Al-Oreibi said contacts were under way with Italy to recover some unspecified stolen antiquities. He declined to elaborate, but said that some of the looted Iraqi treasures were believed to be also in France, Spain, Turkey, Iran and some Persian Gulf states.
He said Iraq was setting up a special police unit to defend the country's numerous archaeological sites and prevent any further theft of its rich cultural heritage.
Widespread looting in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities following Saddam's ouster plundered the country's Babylonian, Sumerian and Assyrian collections spanning some 7,000 years of civilization in ancient Mesopotamia.
Iraqi and world culture officials have struggled to retrieve the treasures with little success because of fears they could be lost again amid the rampant violence and the difficulties in documenting the extent of the damage.
Some of the artifacts stolen from Iraq's National Museum in Baghdad by looters during the invasion have been returned, including in July 2006 a prized statue of an ancient king — the oldest known representation of the King Entemena of ancient Iraq.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Russia condemns rewriting of World War Two history
Source: Reuters (6-23-08)
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev condemned on Sunday what he described as attempts to rewrite wartime history -- an attack the Kremlin said was aimed at Ukraine and the three Baltic states.
In a joint declaration marking the 1941 Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Medvedev and Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko denounced a "politicised approach to history".
Their countries "strongly condemn any attempt at rewriting history and revision of the results of World War Two," they said.
Ukraine and the Baltic states Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have challenged Moscow's view of history, saying their nationals suffered from Soviet as well as Nazi oppression, and a Kremlin spokesman said later the criticism was aimed at them.
Meeting in the Belarussian town of Brest, where Nazi forces first crossed the Soviet border on June 22, 1941, the two leaders said that "a selective, politicised approach to history should be set against honest, scientific debate."
Anti-Obama book to be released by conservative press that published Swift Boat smear book
Source: Media Matters (liberal watchdog group) (6-23-08)
Reporting on the forthcoming book The Case Against Barack Obama (Regnery, 2008), authored by former Human Events writer and National Review Online staff reporter David Freddoso, a June 23 Politico article stated that Marjory Ross, the president and publisher of Regnery Publishing, "likens the goal of Freddoso's book to that of 'Unfit for Command' " (Regnery, August 2004), which was co-authored by Swift Vets and POWs for Truth co-founder John E. O'Neill and Jerome R. Corsi. As Media Matters for America has documented, Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry -- which Regnery touts as among its best-selling publications -- contains false and baseless attacks on Kerry's military service, as documented by Media Matters for America, and in numerous media reports. Media Matters also extensively documented numerous falsehoods put forth elsewhere by O'Neill and other members of Swift Vets and POWs for Truth (previously known as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth).
Regnery, which describes itself as "the nation's leading conservative publisher" and "central to the conservative movement today," has also published books by Dinesh D'Souza, David Horowitz, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, G. Gordon Liddy, Michelle Malkin, Oliver North, and Newt Gingrich.
From the June 23 Politico article:
The same publisher that distributed the 2004 best-seller that took aim at John Kerry's Vietnam service is planning a summer release of what's scheduled to be the first critical book on Barack Obama.
Conservative journalist David Freddoso's "The Case Against Barack Obama" will offer "a comprehensive, factual look at Obama," according to Regnery Publishing president and publisher Marjory Ross.
But the book's subtitle makes clear its perspective: "The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate."
Ross contends that the mainstream media has offered insufficient scrutiny of Obama and likens the goal of Freddoso's book to that of "Unfit for Command," the scathing assessment of Kerry's war record that rocketed to No. 1 on The New York Times best-seller list.
Mexico: Pre-Columbian artifacts from Mexico seized ... some looted from nomadic caves
Source: AP (6-21-08)
Mexico recovered more than 900 pre-Columbian artifacts seized from smugglers in the U.S. and Canada, including 800-year-old fiber sandals, spears and hunting bows looted from nomadic caves, officials said Friday.
The artifacts were seized over seven years by customs agents in Texas, Arizona and Toronto, said Alfonso de Maria y Campos, the director of Mexico's National Anthropology Institute. It took several years to recover the objects because of the bureaucracy involved in identifying them and proving they came from Mexico, he said.
The 929 artifacts include anthropomorphic figurines, miniature bowls, sculptures and clay jewelry from northern, central and western Mexico.
The mystery story of the Maya slowly reveals new twists
Source: USA Today (6-22-08)
Don't tell Indiana Jones, but most archaeologists pack spades, not bullwhips, and big discoveries usually come after lots of digging, not looting. Maya discoveries in Mexico that are rewriting the history of this classic civilization, for example, are coming from years of careful digging, not looted idols.
The classic Maya were part of a Central American civilization best known for stepped pyramids, beautiful carvings and murals and the widespread abandonment of cities around 900 A.D. in southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and El Salvador, leaving the Maya only the northern lowlands of the Yucatan peninsula. The conventional wisdom of this upheaval is that many Maya moved north at the time of this collapse, also colonizing the hilly "Puuc" region of the Yucatan for a short while, until those new cities collapsed as well.
But that story of the Maya is wrong, suggests archaeologist George Bey of Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss., who is co-leading an investigation of the abandoned city of Kiuic with Mexican archaeologist Tomas Gallareta of Mexico's National Institute of Archaeology and History. "Our work indicates that instead the Puuc region was occupied for almost 2,000 years before the collapse in the south," says Bey, by e-mail.
New gold rush
Source: Independent (UK) (6-23-08)
They've been talking about the gold in California's hills since 1849, when tens of thousands of pioneers rushed across the continent or even sailed round Cape Horn to join the fabled gold rush that transformed this remote rural backwater into the beating heart of the American dream.
Today, record gold prices, widespread economic turmoil, and the enduring optimism of America's entrepreneurial classes have combined to entice fresh swarms of prospectors to head west in search of hidden riches beneath the picturesque hills and ravines of the Golden State.
The "new 49ers," as today's wave of fortune-seekers are known, are a breed apart from their historic predecessors, driving trucks and SUVs down the dusty tracks first created by trains of horse-drawn wagons nearly 160 years ago. But they share with them a timeless predisposition for what veterans call gold fever. "It's like going to Vegas, except with this, we actually get to win something," said Mike Dunn, clutching almost an ounce of nuggets unearthed from the south fork of the Feather river last Sunday. "We've just hit a halo of gold, and this lot alone must be worth between $500 (£250) and $1,500. I've just about paid for my trip already."
Grade 10 history exam a 'killer' (Canada)
Source: http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette (6-21-08)
The Grade 10 provincial history exam has always been a pressure-cooker test for many students because they need to pass the course to graduate.
It might have been more stressful this year because several history teachers say Monday's provincial exam for the History of Quebec and Canada course was the toughest they've seen in years.
"We're seeing very high failure rates and we're worried about that," said Ken Elliott, director of educational services at the Lester B. Pearson School Board.
"If it's a universal problem and it's because it was too difficult, then we would hope that (the Education Department) would adjust the marks," Elliott said. "But ... that's speculation on my part." They are hearing similar feedback about the exam from other Montreal area boards, Elliott said.
At the Commission scolaire de Montréal - the largest school board in the province - it's the same warning bell, said board spokesperson Alain Perron. Some schools have reported the average mark is 10- to 15-per-cent lower than last year, Perron said.
Shelby Steele says he thinks Obama CAN win
Source: Media Matters (6-23-08)
Shelby Steele, author of A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win (Free Press, December 2007), acknowledged that he thinks Sen. Barack Obama "can definitely win" the presidential election, despite the claim in the book's subtitle -- "Why He Can't Win" -- which he said was an "afterthought" that he "regret[ted]" and which he said did not represent the book's thesis.
Appearing on the June 22 edition of Fox News' Hannity's America, host Sean Hannity discussed with Steele Obama's "chances of making it all of the way to the White House," asking, "All right, so he can't win?" Steele responded: "He can win. I regret that subtitle," adding, "It was an afterthought. And I don't argue that in the book. He can definitely win. There is a powerful desire in American society today to see someone like him move to the White House."
From the June 22 edition of Fox News' Hannity's America:
HANNITY: As the first African-American presidential nominee, Democrat Barack Obama is no doubt running an historic campaign. But will that distinction help or hurt his chances of making it all of the way to the White House? Joining us now, author of a brand new book, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win, Shelby Steele. Shelby, good to see you, my friend. Thanks for being back with us.
STEELE: Good to be here.
HANNITY: All right, so he can't win?
STEELE: He can win. I regret that subtitle.
HANNITY: OK.
STEELE: It was an afterthought. And I don't argue that in the book. He can definitely win. There is a powerful desire in American society today to see someone like him move to the White House.
Archivist of Iraq insists Hoover Institution has no right to Iraq's documents
Source: Letter to IraqCrisis newsletter (6-21-08)
Saad Eskander,
Director General,
Iraqi National Library & Archives
An Open Letter to the Director of Hoover Institute
I have read Mr. Sousa's letter to Mr. Mark Greene, President of the Society of American Archivists (dated 06-06-08), Mr. Al-Jaberi's statement (dated 27-04-08) and the article published by Stanford University's official site regarding the illegally seized documents of the former Iraqi state and the archive of the Ba'ath Party (dated 18-06-08).
As the national archivist of Iraq, I would like to clarify several points regarding the issue of the illegally seized documents of the former Iraqi state and the archive of the Ba'ath Party.
120 Israeli Leaders Urge Yad Vashem to Recognize Bergson Group
Source: Press Release--David S. Wyman Foundation (6-23-08)
One hundred and twenty Israeli political and cultural leaders --including former Supreme Court justices, cabinet ministers, and cultural figures-- have signed a petition to Yad Vashem, Israel's central Holocaust institution and museum, urging it to add to its exhibits material about the Holocaust rescue activists known as the Bergson Group.
The petition was organized by the Washington,D.C.-based David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.
The Bergson Group was a maverick political action committee in the United States in the 1940s that used rallies and newspaper ads to pressure the Roosevelt administration to rescue Jews from Hitler. Its efforts played a key role in facilitating the rescue of more than 200,000 Jews during 1944-1945.
The signatories on the petition included former Supreme Court chief justice Meir Shamgar and fellow-justice Mishael Cheshin; political leaders from the left such as Meretz Party leader Yossi Beilin and former Education Minister Shulamit Aloni, as well as political leaders from the right such former Defense Minister Moshe Arens and former Justice Minister Dan Meridor; leading novelists and playwrights, among them A.B. Yehoshua, David Grossman, and Yehoshua Sobol; and senior historians such as Pulitzer Prize winner Saul Friedlander and Mordecai Paldiel, former head of Yad Vashem 's Department of the Righteous.
Run-down heritage sites embarrass the Greeks
Source: Guardian (6-23-08)
Extra staff have been dispatched to guard the great cultural gems of Greece as the government in Athens tries to deflect growing criticism of its handling of national treasures.
Amid unprecedented protests from tour guides, travel companies and tourists irritated by conditions at prime archaeological sites, the ruling conservatives last week rushed hundreds of additional personnel to staff museums and open-air antiquities.
"The situation at museums and sites around the country is bad," the culture minister, Michalis Liapis, conceded in parliament last week. "It has to be corrected."
The move follows embarrassing revelations over the upkeep of Greece's ancient wonders and mounting public disquiet, voiced mostly by foreigners in the local press, over visitor access to them.
Yesterday, the authoritative newspaper Sunday Vima disclosed that the Cycladic isle of Delos - the site of Apollo's mythological sanctuary and one of Greece's most important ancient venues - resembled an "archaeological rubbish dump". Recently, it emerged that many sites, including Delphi, Mycenae and the spectacular Bronze Age settlement of Akrotiri on the popular island of Santorini, were only partially open or permanently closed.
Amazon: Secret of the 'lost' tribe that wasn't
Source: Guardian (6-22-08)
They are the amazing pictures that were beamed around the globe: a handful of warriors from an 'undiscovered tribe' in the rainforest on the Brazilian-Peruvian border brandishing bows and arrows at the aircraft that photographed them.
Or so the story was told and sold. But it has now emerged that, far from being unknown, the tribe's existence has been noted since 1910 and the mission to photograph them was undertaken in order to prove that 'uncontacted' tribes still existed in an area endangered by the menace of the logging industry.
The disclosures have been made by the man behind the pictures, José Carlos Meirelles, 61, one of the handful of sertanistas – experts on indigenous tribes – working for the Brazilian Indian Protection Agency, Funai, which is dedicated to searching out remote tribes and protecting them.
In his first interviews since the disclosure of the tribe's existence, Meirelles described how he found the group, detailed how they lived and how he planned the publicity to protect them and other tribes in similar danger of losing the habitat in which they have flourished for hundreds of years.
Sons of Confederate Vets face war between traditionalists, those aligned with racist groups
Source: Chicago Sun-Times (6-18-08)
The Sons of Confederate Veterans, founded 112 years ago to protect all that is noble about the South, is itself racked by angry divisions these days.
Since the 1990s, clusters of Sons members have aligned themselves with "heritage groups" like the League of the South and the Council of Conservative Citizens, both considered hate groups by the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center. The center says the Sons itself may have been taken over by extremists.
"We had this group that looked like it had really radicalized to the right," said the poverty law center's Mark Potok. "But as we looked more closely, we realized that this was really a battle from within."
In response to just such charges, the Sons' Florida commander in 2002 sent interracial pornography to a female researcher at the center. John Adams later apologized, but he remains with the organization.
Today, he is co-chairman of the effort to install Confederate flags across Florida. The Sons say they intend to permanently install a giant one near the junction of Interstates 4 and 75 to counter what they consider increasing slights to Southern heritage.
UK detectives hunt for Cold War killer who poisoned dissident with an umbrella tip in 1978 attack.
Source: AP (6-20-08)
British detectives are back on the trail of a Cold War-era killer who used a poison-tipped umbrella to slay a communist defector.
British detectives acknowledged Friday that they had questioned suspects in the 1978 death of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov. The playwright and broadcaster was a stern critic of his country's communist regime in reports for the British Broadcasting Corp. and Radio Free Europe.
Markov was jabbed in the thigh with an umbrella tip as he waited for a bus on London's Waterloo Bridge. He developed a fever and died three days later. British government scientists later discovered the umbrella had been used to inject a pinhead-sized pellet of the poison ricin into Markov's leg.
Though no one has ever been charged with the killing, many suspected the KGB and Bulgarian secret police of involvement. KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky has previously said Russian authorities offered help to Bulgaria for the murder plot.
The case remained one of the most remarkable espionage-related deaths in London until the killing of ex-Russian security agent Alexander Litvinenko in November 2006. Litvinenko, a fierce Kremlin critic, died after he ingested the radioactive element, polonium-210, most likely from a cup of tea laced with the poison.
Police in London said the Markov case has never been closed, and that officers are following up a raft of new leads.
Philadelphia Set to Honor Darwin and Evolution
Source: NYT (6-23-08)
In the long-running culture war between evolution and creationism, Philadelphia is firing the latest shot.
Nine academic, scientific and cultural institutions around the city are holding a Year of Evolution, a series of exhibitions, seminars and lectures to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin next February, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his seminal work, “The Origin of Species.”
Events will include a talk by John E. Jones III, a federal judge who ruled in 2005 that teaching intelligent design — the belief that some aspects of nature are so complex that they must be the work of a higher power rather than of evolution — in public school science classes was unconstitutional.
The intent of the citywide event, said Janet M. Monge, one of the organizers, is to increase public understanding of evolution and science in general at a time when polls show that a majority of Americans believe God created man in his present form and that the number of people who accept the evolutionary model of human origins is declining.
Berlin Airlift: Germans look back _ and forward
Source: AP (6-22-08)
Germans who care about their relations with the United States are in an upbeat mood this week, looking both to the past and the future.
Thursday is the 60th anniversary of the start of the Berlin Airlift—the daring American-led operation to feed some 2 million West Berliners under Soviet blockade.
As they celebrate the event with fond reminiscences of American courage and generosity, many Germans are filled with excitement at the possibility of Barack Obama capturing the White House. German media have anointed the Democratic candidate the new John F. Kennedy, and see him as being more in sync with their views on the Iraq war and global warming.
Karsten Voigt, the conservative government's point man on U.S. relations, said this month that many Germans see in Obama a "mixture of Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy."
White Supremacists Report an Increase in Visits to Their Web Sites
Source: WaPo (6-22-08)
Sen. Barack Obama's historic victory in the Democratic primaries, celebrated in America and across much of the world as a symbol of racial progress and cultural unity, has also sparked an increase in racist and white supremacist activity, mainly on the Internet, according to leaders of hate groups and the organizations that track them.
Neo-Nazi, skinhead and segregationist groups have reported gains in numbers of visitors to their Web sites and in membership since the senator from Illinois secured the Democratic nomination June 3. His success has aroused a community of racists, experts said, concerned by the possibility of the country's first black president.
"I haven't seen this much anger in a long, long time," said Billy Roper, a 36-year-old who runs a group called White Revolution in Russellville, Ark. "Nothing has awakened normally complacent white Americans more than the prospect of America having an overtly nonwhite president."
3 in 10 Americans Admit to Race Bias
Source: WaPo (6-22-08)
As Sen. Barack Obama opens his campaign as the first African American on a major party presidential ticket, nearly half of all Americans say race relations in the country are in bad shape and three in 10 acknowledge feelings of racial prejudice, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Lingering racial bias affects the public's assessments of the Democrat from Illinois, but offsetting advantages and Sen. John McCain's age could be bigger factors in determining the next occupant of the White House.
Overall, 51 percent call the current state of race relations "excellent" or "good," about the same as said so five years ago. That is a relative thaw from more negative ratings in the 1990s, but the gap between whites and blacks on the issue is now the widest it has been in polls dating to early 1992.
More than six in 10 African Americans now rate race relations as "not so good" or "poor," while 53 percent of whites hold more positive views. Opinions are also divided along racial lines, though less so, on whether blacks face discrimination. There is more similarity on feelings of personal racial prejudice: Thirty percent of whites and 34 percent of blacks admit such sentiments.
At the same time, there is an overwhelming public openness to the idea of electing an African American to the presidency. In a Post-ABC News poll last month, nearly nine in 10 whites said they would be comfortable with a black president. While fewer whites, about two-thirds, said they would be "entirely comfortable" with it, that was more than double the percentage of all adults who said they would be so at ease with someone entering office for the first time at age 72, which McCain (R-Ariz.) would do should he prevail in November.
Inside a 9/11 Mastermind’s Interrogation
Source: NYT (6-22-08)
In a makeshift prison in the north of Poland, Al Qaeda’s engineer of mass murder faced off against his Central Intelligence Agency interrogator. It was 18 months after the 9/11 attacks, and the invasion of Iraq was giving Muslim extremists new motives for havoc. If anyone knew about the next plot, it was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
The interrogator, Deuce Martinez, a soft-spoken analyst who spoke no Arabic, had turned down a C.I.A. offer to be trained in waterboarding. He chose to leave the infliction of pain and panic to others, the gung-ho paramilitary types whom the more cerebral interrogators called “knuckledraggers.”
Mr. Martinez came in after the rough stuff, the ultimate good cop with the classic skills: an unimposing presence, inexhaustible patience and a willingness to listen to the gripes and musings of a pitiless killer in rambling, imperfect English. He achieved a rapport with Mr. Mohammed that astonished his fellow C.I.A. officers.
A canny opponent, Mr. Mohammed mixed disinformation and braggadocio with details of plots, past and planned. Eventually, he grew loquacious. “They’d have long talks about religion,” comparing notes on Islam and Mr. Martinez’s Catholicism, one C.I.A. officer recalled. And, the officer added, there was one other detail no one could have predicted: “He wrote poems to Deuce’s wife.”
How Golda Meir won the Yom Kippur war
Source: Times (UK) (6-22-08)
Israel’s iconic leader Golda Meir was blamed for her country’s near-defeat in the Yom Kippur war. But secret government files reveal that while the war hero Moshe Dayan considered surrender, it was Golda who pulled victory from the jaws of defeat.
###
Jim Webb--Veep for Obama?
Source: WSJ (6-21-08)
With his two Purple Hearts, three tattoos and spoiling-for-a-fight attitude, Sen. Jim Webb is emerging as the Democrats' point man on two of the most profound matters facing the electorate this November: national defense and the military.
A highly decorated war veteran who opposes the Iraq war, Sen. Webb is considered by many Democrats to be the best person to go into battle against another war hero, expected Republican nominee Sen. John McCain. The ex-Marine, who hails from the important swing state of Virginia, could also become Sen. Barack Obama's go-to person on national security, where the Democratic presidential candidate's résumé is weak compared with rival Sen. McCain's....
Descended from Scottish-Irish settlers who became pioneers in the Virginia mountains, Sen. Webb was born in Missouri into a military family that moved some 20 times during his childhood. He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1968 and went into the Marine Corps, where he served as a rifle platoon and company commander in Vietnam. He earned several medals for valor including the Navy Cross, one of the military's highest honors, in part for using his own body to shield a fellow soldier from an exploding grenade.
After returning to the U.S. due to combat injuries, he became a staffer for then-Navy Secretary John Warner (who's now the senior senator from Virginia).
He graduated from law school, and then cycled through a series of congressional and Defense Department jobs dealing with veterans' issues, culminating in his 1987 appointment as Secretary of the Navy, though he quit in anger in 1988 over funding cutbacks.
Ancient city found buried under land in Syria
Source: http://www.fwf.ac (6-23-08)
The discovery of an ancient city buried beneath the sands of modern-day Syria has provided evidence for a Hellenistic settlement that existed for more than six centuries extending into the time of the Roman Empire. The site provides a unique insight into the structures of a pre-Roman Hellenistic settlement. The project, funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF, sheds new light on city life in the Hellenistic period.
The Syrian deserts have long kept an important secret hidden deep beneath their sands – the remains of the pre-Roman Hellenistic settlement of Palmyra. Until now, the only evidence for the existence of such a settlement was to be found in historical writing. As part of an FWF-funded joint project, the Institute of Classical Archaeology at the University of Vienna, the German Archaeological Institute and the Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums in Syria have been the first to track down the location of this early city. Moreover, their findings are now producing a unique insight into the structures of a pre-Roman Hellenistic settlement.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
When Reining In an Imperial President Was the Conservatives' Cause
Source: Sam Tanenhaus in the NYT (6-22-08)
Odd though it may seem, ideological conservatives used to be fierce critics of “executive supremacy.” For instance, in 1940, when Franklin D. Roosevelt sought a precedent-breaking third term, the archconservative Herbert Hoover warned that Roosevelt was a virtual dictator whose growing “personal power over the last seven years” came at the expense of a “disastrous weakening of the legislative and judicial branches ” with Congress “reduced to a rubber stamp for the executive.”
As the cold war raged, conservatives opposed to the centrist policies of President Dwight D. Eisenhower backed a constitutional amendment granting Congress the authority to curtail presidential treaty-making powers. It came within a single vote of passage in the Senate in 1954.
The battle was also fought on the intellectual front. In his book “Congress and the American Tradition,” the conservative thinker James Burnham argued that the Founders had envisioned a government in which “the preponderating share of power was held and exercised by the legislature,” primarily the House, since its members were directly accountable to their local constituents, unlike presidents, who wielded power through Caesarist manipulations of “the mob.”
Why Sam Nunn keep getting mentioned as a possible veep
Source: NYT (6-22-08)
Few things are certain in presidential politics, but here are three: it will be expensive; it will get negative; and, at some point, former Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia will be mentioned as a possible Democratic running mate.
The latter has been true in every presidential election since 1984 with the exception of 1996 (when the running mate was the incumbent vice president, Al Gore). It might have even been true going back to 1976 except that year’s Democratic nominee — Jimmy Carter — was also from Georgia.
And sure enough, as running mate list-making enters its quadrennial high season, Mr. Nunn is being named again as the proverbial “Southern moderate-conservative with foreign policy expertise and gravitas” who could be a complement to a Northern Democratic nominee feared too liberal and inexperienced, in this case, Barack Obama.
Veterans Rebut Swift Boat Charges Against Kerry in Answer to Challenge
Source: NYT (6-22-08)
For most people, "Swift boat" has become a political verb, a synonym for the kind of attack that helped destroy the presidential campaign of Senator John Kerry in 2004.
But for a group of Vietnam veterans at the center of the attacks, it is still a fresh fight.
On Friday, the group, who served with Mr. Kerry in Vietnam, sent a letter to T. Boone Pickens, the billionaire Texas oilman who helped finance the 2004 attack advertisements, taking him up on a challenge he issued last November: that he would give $1 million to anyone who could disprove a single charge the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth made against Mr. Kerry.
The letter-writers served alongside Mr. Kerry during the events that the Swift boat group insisted he had embellished or made up to win his military decorations.
Identifying themselves as “patriotic, concerned veterans” they say the accusations of the Swift boat group damaged their reputations and deeply affected their families, “tarnished the sacrifices we made, called into question the medals we were awarded and challenged the very authenticity of our service.”
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Obama Polishes His Resume
Source: Annenberg Political Fact Check (6-21-08)
Obama has released his first post-primary ad, a 60-second spot that's airing in 18 battleground states. In effect, "Country I Love" is Obama's first ad of the general election campaign, and as such it invites scrutiny. (FactCheck will address McCain's first general election ads in a separate article.) We don't find this ad egregiously misleading, but it paints a picture of Obama's accomplishments that could leave viewers with a misimpression or two.
His description of his upbringing and work history are accurate. He describes the "strong values" he says he learned from his mother and her parents. But when Obama discusses his legislative accomplishments, he leaves out some important context.
The ad talks about laws that Obama "passed," but in fact, he sponsored only one of the three bills mentioned and cosponsored another. The third included provisions from some bills he'd sponsored earlier, but his name wasn't attached to the one that passed. And two of the three laws were accomplishments of the Illinois Legislature, not the U.S. Senate.
Friday, June 20, 2008
June Polls Don't Hold Up
Source: Times (UK) (6-20-08)
This week's polls showing Barack Obama with small, but significant, single-digit leads among likely voters are certainly welcomed by Democrats, but recent history hasn't been kind to early frontrunners.
In fact, only one of the last five June election-year polling averages has correctly predicted the popular vote winner in November - Bill Clinton in 1996. Even then, the polls missed his win-margin by more than 9 percent.
As hard as it may be to believe, Michael Dukakis (left) was leading the first George Bush by an average of 8.2 percent in June of 1988. Bush went on to win the general election by 7.8 points.
Mr Bush led the relatively unknown Bill Clinton by 4.9 percent In June of '92, but managed to lose in November by 5.6 percent.
June 1996 polls showed the incumbent President Clinton leading by a whopping 17 points, but even Bob Dole managed to close the gap to a more respectable 8.5 percent.
2000 was different only in that George W. Bush led by 4.7 percent in June, won the election, but lost the popular vote to Al Gore by 0.5 percent.
And finally, John Kerry led in the June 2004 polls by an average of 0.9 percent, but lost the popular vote, and the election, to the incumbent Bush by 2.4 points.
Scott McClellan: Bush should tell all on CIA leak
Source: AP (6-20-08)
A former White House spokesman told Congress on Friday that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney wanted him to say that Cheney's chief of staff wasn't involved in the leak of a CIA operative's identity, an assertion that turned out to be false.
Scott McClellan, Bush's spokesman from 2003-2006, said he had reservations about publicly clearing the name of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff at the time. Later, Libby was convicted of obstructing the investigation of the leak of Valerie Plame's CIA identity.
McClellan told the House Judiciary Committee that he doesn't know if a crime was committed. But he had harsh words for the White House, suggesting that the administration is continuing to cover up.
"This White House promised or assured the American people that at some point when this was behind us they would talk publicly about it," he said. "And they have refused to.
"And that's why I think more than any other reason we are here today and the suspicion still remains," McClellan told the panel.
Train route may be defeated by battlefield (NJ)
Source: http://www.app.com (6-19-08)
The Monmouth Junction route of the proposed Monmouth-Ocean-Middlesex rail line may have met its Waterloo in the Monmouth Battlefield State Park.
A May letter from the state Department of Environmental Protection's Division of Parks and Forestry gave a thumbs down to the Monmouth Junction route's proposed crossing of the famed Revolutionary War battle site.
The letter cites adverse effects from commuter trains on the park — which is crossed by rails where a freight train runs — and from more drivers using Route 522 to reach a proposed station in Manalapan near the park.
Georgia: Resaca Battlefield project marches on
Source: http://www.tfponline.com (6-2-08)
Gen. William T. Sherman’s Atlanta campaign was bad news for the Confederacy in 1864. But almost 150 years later, it’s good news for Georgia’s economy.
With Gov. Sonny Perdue’s final approval of $3 million in bonds last month, local and state officials believe the development of a Resaca Battlefield park near the Gordon-Whitfield county line is secured.
The facility will become a clearinghouse of Civil War information, and be complete before an influx in heritage tourists expected in 2011, the 150th anniversary of the war’s beginning.
Groundbreaking on the visitors center is expected late this summer.
“The Resaca battle was the beginning of the end of the Confederacy,” said John Culpepper, chairman of the Georgia Civil War Commission and Chickamauga city manager. “The war ended in Georgia.”
Manassas battlefield study aims at protecting views of the past
Source: http://www.examiner.com (6-19-08)
Preservationists say it is not enough to protect the grounds at Manassas National Battlefield Park without protecting its views as new development spreads in fast-growing Prince William County.
Researchers extensively photographed and mapped the home of the first major land battle of the Civil War for months, selecting 25 lookouts, including the 10 most pivotal ones to visitors, that they will attempt to preserve from new construction of roads, office parks and apartment buildings.
“When you are trying to visualize the battles, you don’t want to have those distractions,” said Bill Olson, vice chairman of the Prince William Conservation Alliance. “You don’t want to look out on traffic jams or cell phone towers just beyond the fringe of the battlefield.”
Visitors Can't Get Enough of Hitler Tours in Munich
Source: Fox News (6-20-08)
Tours chronicling the rise of notorious dictator Adolf Hitler have been met with a flurry of interest by foreign tourists in the southern German city of Munich, where Hitler nurtured the Nazi Party and mounted the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.
The guided walking tours showcase historical city sites where significant events in Hitler's life took place, many of which most Munich natives today are no longer aware of, including the world-famous Hofbraeuhaus beer hall, where Hitler gave his first public speech in 1918.
Born in Braunau, Austria, Hitler made Munich his home in 1913, before World War I.
Eric Loerke, 57, a U.S. national and longtime Munich resident, conducts the walks in English for tour guide firm Munichwalktours, with a maximum of 25 visitors on each Third Reich Tour.
Ancient Christian "Holy Wine" Factory Found in Egypt
Source: National Geographic News (6-18-08)
Two wine presses found in Egypt were likely part of the area's earliest winery, producing holy wine for export to Christians abroad, archaeologists say.
Egyptian archaeologists discovered the two presses with large crosses carved across them near St. Catherine's Monastery, a sixth-century A.D. complex near Mount Sinai on the Sinai Peninsula.
Holocaust Studies,but Not Sarkozy’s Way
Source: NYT (6-20-08)
The French Education Ministry has effectively scuttled a plan, proposed by President Nicolas Sarkozy in February, to require that every fifth grader study the life of one of the 11,000 French children killed in the Holocaust, the newspaper Le Monde reported. The plan had already been changed to suggest that each fifth-grade class study one dead French child; now classes will simply study the young Holocaust victims as a whole, including survivors. In fact, study of the Holocaust in general has been a part of the fifth-grade curriculum since 2002.
Hawaiian group demands restoration of the monarchy
Source: AP (6-19-08)
Surrounded by royal guards and the occasional tourist, Her Majesty Mahealani Kahau and her government ministers hold court every day under a tent outside the palace of Hawaii's last monarch, passing laws and discussing how to secure reparations for the Native Hawaiian people.
Kahau and her followers are members of the self-proclaimed Hawaiian Kingdom Government, which is devoted to restoring the Hawaiian monarchy overthrown in 1893. Nearly two months ago, they stormed the gates of the old Iolani Palace, and they have politely occupied the grounds ever since, operating like a government-in-exile.
"We're here to assume and resume what is already ours and what has always been ours," said Kahau, who is a descendant of Hawaii's last king and was elected "head of state" by the group.
Pentagon's 9/11 Memorial Puzzle
Source: WaPo (6-20-08)
When the nation's first major 9/11 memorial is dedicated on the grounds of the Pentagon's western side this September, it will change the iconic building into something it was not intended to be: a tourist destination.
Since the day the symbol of the country's military might was attacked nearly seven years ago, a great deal of effort has gone into further limiting public access to the site. It has been wrapped in barricades, elaborate security systems and signs prohibiting photography.
But just as the grief and sympathy that came after the Sept. 11 attacks eroded whatever psychological barrier existed between the public and the Pentagon, the memorial attempts to make that relationship a lasting physical reality. The Pentagon Memorial will allow the camera-wielding public free access 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Visitors will find a parklike open space that is intricately beautiful, meticulously crafted and almost entirely at odds with the monolith that serves as its backdrop.
By almost any measure, it is not a good location for a major attraction. The area is tangled with traffic during commuter hours. The public will be barred from parking near the site. And wayward tourists might find themselves in awkward encounters with officers of the Pentagon Force Protection Agency (PFPA), the hyper-vigilant security service that polices the Pentagon Reservation.
In short, said PFPA Director Steven E. Calvery, the Pentagon "was not designed to be a welcoming and nice place to visit, like the Mall."
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Big Brother is watching you, George Orwell
Source: Guardian (6-16-08)
Last week a Spanish pressure group claimed its government was infringing civil rights by putting more security cameras in public areas, especially motorways. The Association for the Defence of Fundamental Rights demanded they should be suspended while the Orwellian horror of the surveillance society is debated.
Quite what George Orwell himself would have made of it we will never know. But the writer of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the satire featuring the all-seeing eye of Big Brother, might perhaps have been amused to discover a security camera keeping watch over a plaza in Barcelona that bears his name.
The camera monitors any ne'er-do-wells in this rundown square in the inner-city Ciutat Vella area. Any Orwell pilgrims paying the plaza a visit might be a little disappointed. Instead of an imposing statue of a 20th-century literary giant, this rather down-at-heel square contains an odd-looking metal sculpture by Spanish surrealist Leandre Cristofol. The square was named after Orwell not because of his literary endeavours, but because he fought on the Republican side in the Spanish civil war.
Once All-Black, Banneker Celebrates Its 60th Anniversary (Loudoun County, VA)
Source: WaPo (6-19-08)
When Janet Wiggins was a student at Loudoun's all-black Banneker Elementary School in the 1950s, she used hand-me-down textbooks from white students. Her school didn't have a library, so she checked out books every couple of weeks from a bookmobile.
Banneker, founded in 1948 in the community of St. Louis near Middleburg and named after African American mathematician and astronomer Benjamin Banneker, was racially integrated in 1968. Today it is the only one of Loudoun's historically black elementary schools still operating. The others were demolished, vacated or converted to other purposes.
On Saturday, a few hundred alumni, students, parents and teachers assembled at Banneker to commemorate the school's 60th anniversary in a celebration that included tours, displays of historical photographs and the performance of an original musical about Benjamin Banneker, the man.
Arthur Lloyd, a 1958 graduate who attended the festivities, said the institution has come a long way.
Movement afoot to abolish Putnam County historian's job
Source: http://lohud.com (6-19-08)
Putnam County prides itself on its 196-year history and promotes tourism by touting its Revolutionary War roots.
But some Putnam officials now say the paid post of county historian is expendable. Eliminating it would require a charter change but would save the financially strapped county about $31,000 a year in part-time salary and benefits.
Under a proposal informally presented to the Legislature by the administration, the nine town and village historians would elect one of their own to serve unpaid, rotating stints as county historian.
Opponents say the underlying goal is to remove current County Historian Alan Warnecke, long a thorn in the side of County Executive Robert Bondi and the Legislature for his efforts to preserve and promote the late 18th-century Hill-Agor farm in Mahopac.
"They're trying to push him out and shut him up," said William McCormack of Mahopac Falls, a member of the now-defunct Lake MacGregor advisory board. In 2003, the county purchased the Hill-Agor farm as part of a 375-acre open-space acquisition that included a former airstrip and what is now the 18-hole Putnam National Golf Club.
China admits taking, burying US POW from Korea
Source: AP (6-19-08)
After decades of denials, the Chinese have acknowledged burying an American prisoner of war in China, telling the U.S. that a teenage soldier captured in the Korean War died a week after he "became mentally ill," according to documents provided to The Associated Press.
China had long insisted that all POW questions were answered at the conclusion of the war in 1953 and that no Americans were moved to Chinese territory from North Korea. The little-known case of Army Sgt. Richard G. Desautels, of Shoreham, Vt., opens another chapter in this story and raises the possibility that new details concerning the fate of other POWs may eventually surface.
Chinese authorities gave Pentagon officials intriguing new details about Desautels in a March 2003 meeting in Beijing, saying they had found "a complete record of 9-10 pages" in classified archives.
In South Africa, Chinese is the New Black
Source: WSJ (6-19-08)
A high court in South Africa ruled on Wednesday that Chinese-South Africans will be reclassified as “black,” a term that includes black Africans, Indians and others who were subject to discrimination under apartheid. As a result of this ruling, ethnically Chinese citizens will be able to benefit from government affirmative action policies aimed at undoing the effects of apartheid.
In 2006, the Chinese Association of South Africa sued the government, claiming that its members were being discriminated against because they were being treated as whites and thus failed to qualify for business contracts and job promotions reserved for victims of apartheid. The association successfully argued that, since Chinese-South Africans had been treated unequally under apartheid, they should be reclassified in order to redress wrongs of the past.
Kucinich says he will keep pushing for Bush's impeachment
Source: WaPo (6-19-08)
Democratic leaders worried about the impeachment obsession of Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) ain't seen nothing yet.
Kucinich tells us he's giving the House Judiciary Committee 30 days to act on his resolution proposing 35 articles of impeachment against President Bush before he raises even more hell on the House floor. This time, he says, he'll go back with perhaps 60 articles of impeachment.
"The minute the leadership said, 'This is dead on arrival,' I said that I hope they believe in life after death, because I'm coming back with it," Kucinich vowed in an interview. "It's not going to die."
Obama, inspired by Lincoln, might keep Defense Secty. Robert Gates
Source: Politico.com (6-19-08)
Joe KLEIN in the new Time magazine – “Obama says he wants to hire a Team of Rivals for his Cabinet. He should start by keeping Robert Gates”: “Barack Obama has never been shy about comparing himself to Abraham Lincoln. … Obama has said he admires Doris Kearns Goodwin's wonderful Lincoln biography, ‘Team of Rivals.’ ‘He talks about it all the time,’ says a top aide. He is particularly intrigued by the notion that Lincoln assembled all the Republicans who had run against him for President in his war Cabinet, some of whom disagreed with him vehemently and persistently. ‘The lesson is to not let your ego or grudges get in the way of hiring absolutely the best people,’ Obama told me. ‘I don't think the American people are fundamentally ideological. They're pragmatic ... and so I have an interest in casting a wide net, seeking out people with a wide range of expertise, including Republicans,’ for the highest positions in his government. … ‘I don't want to have people who just agree with me,’ he said. ‘I want people who are continually pushing me out of my comfort zone.’
“Obama said he'd be particularly interested in having high-ranking Republicans advising him on defense and national security. ‘I really admire the way the elder Bush negotiated the end of the cold war—with discipline, tough diplomacy and restraint ... and I'd be very interested in having those sorts of Republicans in my Administration, especially people who can expedite a responsible and orderly conclusion to the Iraq war—and who know how to keep the hammer down on al-Qaeda.’ When I asked him specifically if he would want to retain Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense, Obama said, ‘I'm not going to let you pin me down ... but I'd certainly be interested in the sort of people who served in the first Bush Administration.’ Gates was George H.W. Bush's CIA director—and he has been a superb Secretary of Defense … Associates say Gates might stay if he believed the security of the troops was at stake.”
A Brief History of Juneteenth
Source: Time (6-18-08)
There is a common misconception among Americans that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves with a stroke of his pen. Yet the Emancipation Proclamation, which went into effect on Jan. 1, 1863, did no such thing — or, at least, it didn't do a very good job of it. Two and a half years later, on June 19, 1865, Union soldiers sailed into Galveston, Texas, announced the end of the Civil War, and read aloud a general order freeing the quarter-million slaves residing in the state. It's likely that none of them had any idea that they had actually been freed more than two years before. It was truly a day of mass emancipation. It has become known as Juneteenth.
Since then, Juneteenth has been a day of celebration for many African Americans, a de facto second Independence Day commemorating the end of slavery and a first step toward inclusion in the greater American dream. It's a bittersweet holiday, "a time of celebration, but also a time of reflection, healing, and hopefully a time for the country to come together and deal with its slave legacy," says the Rev. Ronald V. Meyers, chairman of the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation. Meyers has worked for almost 15 years to get Juneteenth recognized by state legislatures. Currently, a little more than half of U.S. states acknowledge Juneteenth in some form or another, usually on the third Saturday of June.
Indian history in a yellow crate of negatives
Source: International Herald Tribune (6-17-08)
The yellow crates haunted Aditya Arya. A successful advertising photographer whose clients have ranged from India's luxury Oberoi Hotel chain to Russia's Bolshoi Ballet, Arya inherited the crates from a family friend, an old photojournalist named Kulwant Roy, in 1984. And for more than two decades, Arya had hauled the increasingly dusty trunks around a succession of studios, stashing them in out of the way corners and closets. He had a vague sense of what the crates contained - bundles of prints and negatives - and at least once a year his mother would nag him about them. But he was always too busy with his own assignments to spend time pouring over someone else's fading pictures.
Then, in December, Arya finally opened the crates. What he discovered is a remarkable photographic record of modern Indian history, including thousands of images from the last days of the Raj through the 1960s, many of which have never been published. The archive has excited historians who believe it may shed new light on key moments in India's independence movement. It has also attracted attention for the commercial value of its images of historical figures ranging from Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru to Jacqueline Kennedy.
"It is a real find," said Raghuraj Sing Chauhan, director of public relations and exhibitions at India's National Museum. "They are historically important for the freedom struggle because many of these are quite rare photos."
History museum gets noted Civil War flag
Source: http://www.wral.com (6-18-08)
The North Carolina Museum of History has acquired a Confederate battle flag associated with a major turning point of the Civil War – the death of Lt. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson.
The flag was carried by the 18th Regiment North Carolina Troops, which was responsible for the accidental shooting of the Confederate general at Chancellorsville, Va., on May 2, 1863. Severely injured by gunfire, Jackson died a week later of pneumonia.
The regiment's battle flag was captured by Union soldiers during the battle, and the Museum of History never knew of its existence until 1992, when the flag's eventual owner sent museum officials a letter.
Tom Walsh, a New Jersey college professor, loaned the historic banner to the museum in 1993, and it was conserved and appeared in a previous exhibit. Recently, Walsh offered to donate a partial value of the flag to the museum, and the museum purchased the remaining value last month.
Engineering the Berlin Tunnel
Source: CIA (3-25-08)
Fifty years ago, the CIA embarked on a project to intercept Soviet and East German messages transmitted via underground cable. Intelligence was collected to determine the best place to hit the target, and then concrete planning for a new collection site was begun.
The tunnel was 1,476 feet in length and consumed 125 tons of steel liner plate and 1,000 cubic yards of grout . . . This was not a small operation!
Call to honour El Salvador's rescuer of Jews after war role rediscovered
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/19/secondworldwar (6-19-08)
He was El Salvador's equivalent of Oskar Schindler, a man who was given a chance to do something about the Holocaust - and took it.
Now, six decades after José Castellanos helped to save 25,000 Jews by granting bogus nationality certificates, the story of the central American nation's consul general to Switzerland during the second world war has been rediscovered.
"The memory of our father is out of the desk, out of the drawers and on the table again," Frieda Garcia, one of the diplomat's daughters, told a news conference at El Salvador's embassy in Washington this week, amid calls for Castellanos to be honoured posthumously by Israel.
Castellanos, an army colonel, served as a diplomat in Liverpool and Hamburg before being posted to Geneva in 1942 where he befriended a Romanian Jew, Gyorgy Mandl.
To protect Mandl he appointed him to the fictitious post of first secretary and amended his name to the more Latino-sounding George Mandel-Mantello.
Does McCain's Vietnam View Explain Iraq?
Source: NYT (6-17-08)
Did Senator John McCain overestimate the Nixon administration’s role in improving the conditions of the American prisoners of war in North Vietnam? The question has new relevance to those who liken the surge in Iraq to the latter stages of the Vietnam fight.
President Nixon’s first year in office, 1969, was a new day for the American POWs. Their captors scaled back their demands for propaganda statements, stopped torturing them as heavily, fed them better and even allowed them to interact more with each other.
Mr. McCain, like many of his fellow prisoners, credited the Nixon administration with stepping up the pressure on their captors by unleashing new attacks on North Vietnam and publicizing reports about the mistreatment of prisoners.
“The tremendous effort mounted by the Nixon administration and millions of Americans in behalf of the prisoners of war in Vietnam is directly responsible for the radical improvements in the treatment of the Vietnam POWS beginning in late 1969,” Mr. McCain wrote in a paper written at the National War College a year after his release. “Many prisoners of war who returned to the United States in 1973 in all probability would never have survived if that change had not taken place.”
Historians, though, say the 1969 death of the North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh was probably a bigger factor.
“All we know is that the death of Ho Chi Minh that year was fundamental to a kind of reassessment of what they were doing,” said Stuart I. Rochester, a Pentagon historian and co-author of the definitive history of the POWs, “Honor Bound.” But, he said, many prisoners — mostly aviators like Mr. McCain — had faulted President Lyndon Johnson for limiting their bombing raids and leapt to praise Nixon for what they believed was a new determination to win the war. (In a 1999 memoir, Mr. McCain acknowledged that Ho Chi Minh’s death came at the same time, but still mainly credited Nixon.)
Obama Revives Kennedy-Era Excitement for Democrats Mikva, Minow
Source: Bloomberg News (6-19-08)
The lives of Abner Mikva and Newton Minow have been intertwined since 1942, when they were 16 and competed for the editorship of their Milwaukee high-school newspaper. Now 82, they are still working together, energized by their latest passion: Barack Obama.
``It's the first candidate I've been excited about since Kennedy,'' Minow says, turning to Mikva. ``What about you?'' ``Same here,'' says Mikva, patting his friend's hand. Over the past 50 years, the two men sitting in Minow's Chicago office have dominated the city's political and legal scene. Mikva was a state legislator and U.S. congressman before serving as a federal judge and counsel to President Bill Clinton. Minow was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission under John F. Kennedy and a Democratic activist stretching back to 1950s Illinois governor and presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson.
The two men have known Illinois Senator Obama, the 46- year-old presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, for more than two decades, and don't pretend to be objective about him. Mikva has manned phone banks, sits on his finance committee and has gone door-to-door campaigning in three states. Minow's children and grandchildren are involved with the campaign; great-nephew Adam Frankel is an Obama speechwriter.
For both, their first contact with Obama came while he was a student at Harvard Law School in the 1980s.
Key Figure in USS Liberty Inquiry Dies
Source: military.com (6-16-08)
Retired Navy Capt. Ward Boston, who in 2002 broke 35 years of silence to say the US Navy Board of Inquiry long cited to clear Israel of wrongdoing in attacking a US Navy ship during the Six Day War was a sham, died June 11 in California. He was 84.
Emma Boston, his wife of 60 years, told Military.com that Boston had been sick for about six weeks before his death and had been hospitalized. She said he ultimately died of pneumonia, which he contracted in the hospital.
"He was sharp as a tack right up until they put him under sedation" because of his difficulty breathing, she said.
In 1967, Boston was a Navy lawyer and assigned as the legal adviser to the board, which was convened within days of the June 8 attack by Israeli air and naval forces on the USS Liberty, an American surveillance ship floating in international waters in the Mediterranean....
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
BLM announces 'major' dinosaur find in Utah
Source: AP (6-17-08)
A newly discovered batch of well-preserved dinosaur bones, petrified trees and even freshwater clams in southeastern Utah could provide new clues about life in the region some 150 million years ago.
The Bureau of Land Management announced the find Monday, calling the quarry near Hanksville "a major dinosaur fossil discovery."
An excavation revealed at least four sauropods, which are long-necked, long-tailed plant-eating dinosaurs, and two carnivorous ones, according to the bureau. It may have also uncovered an herbivorous stegosaurus.
Ancient Egyptian official building uncovered in south
Source: Earth Times (6-17-08)
A US archaeological team uncovered an ancient Egyptian administrative building and silos dating back to the 17th dynasty (ca. 1665-1569 BC) along with an older columned hall in the southern Egyptian town of Edfu, Egypt's antiquities department announced Tuesday. With sixteen wooden columns, the layout of the mud-brick hall shows that it might been part of a governor's palace, Egypt's antiquities chief, Zahi Hawas said. The hall, which predates the silos, had been used by scribes for accounting, opening and receiving letters, Hawas explained. Pottery and seals that date back to the 13th dynasty (c. 1786-1665 BC) were discovered in the hall. A US archeological team from the University of Chicago carried out the excavation work. "Scarab seals found inside the hall are decorated with spiral patterns and hieroglyphic symbols including ankh sign, also known as key of life," said head of the American mission, Nadine Moeller. The discovery reflects the Egyptian political situation at the time when the small kingdom of Thebes controlled Upper Egypt, Moeller said.
CIA failed to identify the storage bunkers for Soviet nuclear warheads in Cuban missile crisis
Source: National Security Archive (6-18-08)
The CIA failed to identify the storage bunkers for Soviet nuclear warheads in Cuba during the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, despite obtaining numerous photographs of the sites, according to new materials -- including a selection of photos -- being published on the Web today by the National Security Archive.
The precise location of the Soviet nuclear storage bunkers at Bejucal and Managua is revealed for the first time in a new book by Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs based on interviews with Soviet veterans and raw U.S. intelligence film obtained from the National Archives. Declassified CIA documents show that U.S. intelligence analysts at the time concluded that the sites could not be used for the storage of nuclear weapons because of the lack of visible security measures such as guard posts and extra fencing.
This is the third of five postings looking at the new material in One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War, which draws on the National Security Archive's long-standing documentary work on the Cuban missile crisis. As part of this posting, Dobbs also tracks the dispersal of nuclear warheads from the Bejucal bunker to other sites in Cuba on the night of October 26-27, 1962, at the height of the crisis.
In coming weeks, the National Security Archive will publish more of the key primary sources behind One Minute to Midnight, including documents and other evidence on the "Eyeball to Eyeball" confrontation between U.S. and Soviet ships that never happened.
Fundraising underway for Montana History Museum
Source: http://www.montanasnewsstation.com (6-17-08)
A massive fundraising campaign for a new History Museum in Montana is now underway, spearheaded by former First Lady Betty Babcock and former Attorney General Joe Mazurek.
The Capital Hill Mall in Helena will be the location for the new Montana History Center.
Governor Brian Schweitzer announced in May that he signed a letter of intent to buy the Mall property for $6.5 million, but before the state writes any checks, a massive amount of funds need to be raised. He's challenged supporters of the museum to raise $13 million for the project by November 15th.
Refugee numbers at highest level in history: UN
Source: http://www.abc.net.au (6-18-08)
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) says there are more displaced people in the world than at any time in history, with Afghanistan and Iraq the leading countries of origin.
Launching its report in London, the UN agency said 67 million people have been forced out of their homes by conflict, persecution and natural disasters.
In recent years, resettlement in Afghanistan had seen numbers drop, but in 2007 the total cared for by the UNHCR jumped by 3 million people, and the UN says the number is likely to rise.
Ruins of ancient capital identified in Chengdu
Source: china.org.cn (6-18-08)
Ruins of two large palaces dating back to the Shang and Zhou dynasties have been found at the Jinsha relic site in Huangzhong Village at the western suburbs of Chengdu. They both date back 3,000 years and are considered to be one of Sichuan's most important archaeological finds, according to archaeologists from the Chengdu Institute of Archaeology. The new discovery has contributed toward the identification of a large palace site inside the Jinsha relic area.
Archaeologists have hailed the excavation as the most important archaeological find from the Jinsha Ruins since 2001, based on discussions and preliminary assessments by well-known archaeologists affiliated with the Chinese Society of Archaeology, Peking University and Sichuan University.
The newly excavated site dates to the same era as other ruins of ancient palaces discovered in 1999 and 2006-2007. They have similar structures and they are adjacent to each other, so researchers speculate that they all belong to the same large group of ancient palace buildings. All these buildings were well organized on a large scale, which implies that they were all available for the supreme rulers of the area during ancient times.
"We can identify the site of large ruined palaces in the Jinsha area based on this excavation," said Zhang Qing, an archeologist with the Chengdu Institute of Archaeology. The Huangzhong Village is 700 meters north of the sacrificial site of the Jinsha Ruins. Up to now, ten sites of large ancient buildings have been found in an area of 130 meters long and 90 meters wide of the Jinsha Ruins.
It is learned that the excavation at the Huangzhong began in April 2007, and has so far unearthed seven sites containing ancient buildings of the Shang and Western Zhou dynasties and four sites housing ancient kilns along with pottery pieces and jade wares.
The discovery aids in studying the conditions of the ancient kingdoms in the Jinsha area, according to Zhang Qing.
"The palaces found in Huangzhong Village will be restored," he said, "and archaeologists will also make comparative study of the palaces and others of the Shang and Zhou dynasties."
Dante's infernal crimes forgiven
Source: Telegraph (UK) (6-18-08)
After 700 years, Dante Alighieri, Italy's most famous poet, will have his criminal record scrubbed clean.
Florence's city council has approved a motion revoking a sentence on Dante from 1302 which stated that he would be executed if he stepped foot in the city again.
The sentence forced Dante into exile and he spent the last 20 years of his life wandering through Italy, finally ending his days in Ravenna in 132
Related Links
Who Was Dante?
Jordan to hand back to Iraq 2,466 looted artefacts
Source: Earth Times (6-18-08)
The Jordanian authorities said Wednesday that they planned to hand back to the Iraqi government 2,466 artefacts looted from Iraq since the US-led invasion. "The artefacts will be handed over on Sunday to the Iraqi Minister of Tourism and Antiquities Mohammad al-Oraibi, who is currently in Jordan to attend the Arab Tourism Council meeting," Jordanian Minister of Tourism and Antiquities Maha Khatib said.
The pieces were seized by the Jordanian customs authorities in 22 anti-smuggling operations, Khatib said.
Jordan has actively cooperated with the Interpol which supplied the Jordanian government with adequate information about the Iraqi antiquities which were stolen from museums inside Iraq after the downfall of the former Iraqi regime of President Saddam Hussein, she added.
Turkey opens secret archives on 1915 events
Source: Armenian News Network (6-18-08)
Turkish President Abdullah Gul said on
Tuesday that Turkey opened to researchers its most secret archives regarding the incidents of 1915.
Historic Bangladesh papers 'lost'
Source: BBC (6-18-08)
The Bangladesh proclamations of independence - drafted on paper during the war against Pakistan in 1971 - have gone missing, officials say.
Duke of Wellington joins fight to save Waterloo farmhouse
Source: Telegraph (UK) (6-18-08)
The 8th Duke of Wellington has joined leading military historians in a bid to save the farm that was pivotal to British victory at the Battle of Waterloo.
Copernicus book sells for more than $2.2M in NYC
Source: Salon (6-18-08)
A first edition of the Nicolaus Copernicus book that puts forth the theory that the sun — not the earth — is at the center of the universe has fetched more than $2.2 million at an auction, nearly double the expected price.
Lasting legacy of Brazil's Japanese
Source: http://www.cronaca.com (6-17-08)
One hundred years after the first Japanese immigrants arrived in Brazil, the country as a whole has been reflecting on an anniversary that has left a significant legacy.
Second generation Brazilian-Japanese are known as Nisei
Numbering an estimated 1.5 million, there are more people of Japanese descent in Brazil than anywhere in the world outside of Japan itself.
The celebrations are a chance to pay tribute to the pioneering immigrants that first arrived at the port of Santos near to Sao Paulo - and, the organisers say, to thank Brazilian society for making them welcome.
The 165 families who arrived here on 18 June 1908 came to escape poverty and lack of job opportunities in Japan, and to meet the demand for workers in Brazil's coffee plantations.
But there is plenty of evidence at the Museum of Japanese Immigration in Sao Paulo that this was not always a comfortable story.
'Curveball' speaks, and a reputation as a disinformation agent remains intact
Source: LAT (6-18-08)
Rafid Ahmed Alwan hoped for an easier life when he came here from Iraq nine years ago. He also hoped for a reward for his cooperation with German intelligence officers.
"For what I've done, I should be treated like a king," he said outside a cramped, low-rent apartment he shares with his family.
Instead, the Iraqi informant code-named Curveball has flipped burgers at McDonald's and Burger King, washed dishes in a Chinese restaurant and baked pretzels in an all-night bakery. He also has faced withering international scorn for peddling discredited intelligence that helped spur an invasion of his native country.
Now, in his first public comments, the 41-year-old engineer from Baghdad complains that the CIA and other spy agencies are blaming him for their mistakes.
I'm not guilty," Alwan said, insisting that he made no false claims. "Believe me, I'm not guilty."
It was intelligence attributed to Alwan -- as Curveball -- that the White House used in making its case that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. He described what turned out to be fictional mobile germ factories. The CIA belatedly branded him a liar.
After Curveball's role in the pre-invasion intelligence fiasco was disclosed by the Los Angeles Times four years ago, the con man behind the code name remained in the shadows. His security was protected and his identity concealed by the BND, Germany's Federal Intelligence Service.
But when a reporter knocked on his door one Sunday morning this year, Alwan seemed neither alarmed nor surprised. In a series of sometimes reluctant interviews that followed, he emerged as a defiant and pugnacious defender of his intelligence contributions and reputation.
"Everything that's been written about me isn't true," Alwan repeated.
Along with confirmation of Curveball's identity, however, have come fresh disclosures raising doubts about his honesty -- much of that new detail coming from friends, associates and past employers.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
America's Sour Mood: Ratings of Bush, Cheney, Rice and Congress Sink to Worst Levels Ever
Source: Harris Poll (6-17-08)
The latest Harris Poll finds the nation in a foul political mood. President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice all register their worst ratings ever. More people than ever also think the country is on the wrong track.
But this does not seem to help the Democrats. The Democratically-controlled Congress gets even worse ratings than the President and Vice-President, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s ratings have also fallen to their lowest point.
These are some of the results from the latest Harris Poll of 1,001 U.S. adults surveyed by telephone between June 4 and 8, 2008 by Harris Interactive (registered copyright).
Some key findings are:
President Bush’s latest ratings are 24 percent positive and fully 75 percent negative. Previously, his worst numbers were 26 percent positive and 72 percent negative in April of this year. His ratings are substantially worse than those of any president, except for Jimmy Carter (22%-77% in July 1980), since Harris first started measuring themin 1963.
Vice President Cheney’s ratings are even worse, 18 percent positive and 74 percent negative, compared to his previous low of 21 percent positive, 74 percent negative last July.
Secretary of State Rice’s ratings are much better than those of the President and Vice President, but also have fallen to their lowest point ever, 39 percent positive and 54 percent negative, compared to 42 percent positive and 51 percent negative last October.
Only 14 percent of the public think the things in the country are going in the right direction and fully 80 percent think they are on the wrong track. These compare to the previous worst numbers in President George W. Bush’s term, 75 percent thought things were on the wrong track in April. The highest number of people who said the country was on the wrong track was 81 percent in June of 1992 during the term of the first President Bush.
However, this dismal news for the administration has done nothing to help the Democrats. Most people seem to wish "a plague on all your houses". Congress, which of course is controlled by the Democrats, gets its worst ratings ever, only 13 percent positive and fully 83 percent negative. Its previous low point was in December of last year when it was rated 17 percent positive and 79 percent negative. And, Speaker Pelosi’s ratings have fallen to 24 percent positive, 57 percent negative compared to her previous low of 25 percent positive and 61 percent negative in February.
Clearly the economy and record gas prices are a big part of the problem. When asked, without being prompted or shown a list, which are the two most important issues for the government to address, the economy (38%) gets the most mentions, followed by the war (25%, but another 9% mention Iraq) and gas and oil prices (20%) Those mentioning gas and oil prices have jumped from only 1 percent in February and 10 percent in April to 20 percent now. The only other issue mentioned by more than 9 percent is health care (17%).
Immigration appeals board upholds deportation order for former Nazi guard living in Wisconsin
Source: AP (6-16-08)
A federal appeals board has upheld a deportation order for a Wisconsin man who served as a Nazi concentration camp guard during World War II, the Justice Department announced Monday.
The federal Board of Immigration Appeals upheld a deportation order issued in January 2007 against 83-year-old Josias Kumpf of Racine, who had served as a guard at the Trawniki training camp in Nazi-occupied Poland and the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin. The Board of Immigration Appeals is part of the Justice Department.
Last year's deportation order, issued by Chicago-based immigration Judge Jennie Giambastiani, called for Kumpf's removal to Germany, Austria or Serbia. Kumpf can still appeal the deportation order in the federal court system.
Sen. claims abuses at Abu Ghraib were not due to a few bad apples
Source: WaPo (6-17-08)
The Bush Administration has long maintained that the overtly cruel and abusive treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere was the conduct of a few "bad apples."
But a Senate investigation is tracking the rot to its source. And its findings add to the mounting evidence that the sometimes systematic torture of detainees at American hands was the result of decisions made at the highest levels of government -- and particularly within the office of the vice president.
Warren P. Strobel writes for McClatchy Newspapers: "A senior Pentagon official in July 2002 sought the advice of military psychologists to help design aggressive detainee interrogation techniques that would later be linked with prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and Abu Ghraib in Iraq, a Senate investigation has found.
"The revelation, part of a probe by the Senate Armed Services Committee that is to be unveiled during hearings Tuesday, provides dramatic new evidence that the use of the aggressive techniques was planned at the top levels of the Bush administration and were not the work of out-of-control, lower-ranking troops."
Senator Carl Levin, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, released new documentary evidence on the origins of the techniques at a hearing this morning.
In his opening statement, Levin asked: "[H]ow did it come about that American military personnel stripped detainees naked, put them in stress positions, used dogs to scare them, put leashes around their necks to humiliate them, hooded them, deprived them of sleep, and blasted music at them. Were these actions the result of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own? It would be a lot easier to accept if it were. But that's not the case. The truth is that senior officials in the United States government sought information on aggressive techniques, twisted the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. In the process, they damaged our ability to collect intelligence that could save lives."
The investigation appears to refute a key aspect of the administration's story.
In Khmer Rouge Trial, Victims Will Not Stand Idly By
Source: NYT (6-17-08)
If Sok Chear had her way, she would slice the elderly man into ribbons and pour salt into his wounds. She would beat him up and torture him and give him electric shocks to make him talk.
For Ly Monysar, even that would not be enough. “Only killing them will make me feel calm,” he said. “I want them to suffer the way I suffered. I say this from the heart.”
Sok Chear, an office worker, and Ly Monysar, a security guard, are two of the millions of Cambodians who suffered for four years in the late 1970s under the brutal Communist Khmer Rouge, which caused the deaths of 1.7 million people.
Three decades later, five aging former Khmer Rouge leaders are in custody and awaiting trial. And Sok Chear and Ly Monysar have an innovative role to play in the tribunal, where the first case is expected to begin this autumn.
They are two of hundreds of people who have applied to the court to be recognized officially as victims of the Khmer Rouge and to bring parallel civil cases against them.
'Nazi war criminal' spotted at Euro 2008 match
Source: Telegraph (UK) (6-17-08)
An internationally wanted 'Nazi war criminal' has been spotted supporting his national team at the Euro 2008 football championships in Austria.
Milivoj Asner is wanted by Interpol for alleged genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during his service as a police chief in Croatia during the Second World War, when the country was ruled by a Nazi puppet regime.
But Mr Asner, 95, who now lives a quiet and undisturbed life in Klagenfurt, Austria, has been seen taking leisurely walks, sipping wine with his wife Edeltrat and mingling with Croatian football fans prior to the matches of his country’s national team.
He is the number four on the most wanted list of the Nazi-hunters and Croatia has demanded his extradition.
Student wounded in Kent State shootings dies at 58
Source: AP (6-15-08)
Robert Stamps, one of nine Kent State students wounded in the Ohio National Guard shootings that killed four other students 38 years ago, died in Tallahassee, Fla., of complications from pneumonia, his wife said.
Stamps, an observer who was sympathetic to anti-war demonstrators, was struck in the lower back on May 4, 1970 while fleeing tear gas and gunfire during a protest against the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. He rode in the same ambulance as Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller, both of whom died from their wounds.
Stamps, 58, passed away Wednesday night, Teresa Sumrall said in an e-mail. He's the second of the nine wounded students to die. James Russell died last year at the age of 60, said Alan Canfora, another student who was wounded.
White House May Keep Documents in E-Mail Flap Private, Judge Rules
Source: WaPo (6-17-08)
The White House does not have to make public internal documents examining the potential disappearance of e-mails sent during some of the Bush administration's biggest controversies, a U.S. district judge ruled yesterday.
In a 39-page opinion, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said that the White House's Office of Administration is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), even though its top officials had complied with the public records law for more than two decades.
The Office of Administration, which performs a variety of services for the Executive Office of the President, announced it would no longer comply with the FOIA last August, three months after an independent watchdog group filed a lawsuit seeking to discover what happened to the e-mails, which may have vanished from White House computer archives.
Author who lionized Bush for his faith, out with a book that does the same for Obama
Source: Politico.com (6-16-08)
Politico's Ben Smith reports that Stephen Mansfield, whose sympathetic 'The Faith of George W. Bush' spent 15 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list in 2004, will be out this summer with 'The Faith of Barack Obama.' Ben says the book could help 'lend credibility to Senator Obama's bid to win Evangelical Christian voters away from the Republican Party: 'Its tone ranges from gently critical to gushing, and the author defends Obama-and even his controversial former minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright-from conservative critics, and portrays him as a compelling figure for Christian voters.
Related Links
Bush backer pens pro-Obama book - Yahoo! News
Call Conference To Plan War Crimes Trials Of Bush And Higher-Ups
Source: http://www.scoop.co.nz (6-16-08)
A conference to plan the prosecution of President Bush and other high administration officials for war crimes will be held September 13-14 at the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover .
"This is not intended to be a mere discussion of violations of law that have occurred," said convener Lawrence Velvel, dean and cofounder of the school. "It is, rather, intended to be a planning conference at which plans will be laid and necessary organizational structures set up, to pursue the guilty as long as necessary and, if need be, to the ends of the Earth."
"We must try to hold Bush administration leaders accountable in courts of justice," Velvel said. "And we must insist on appropriate punishments, including, if guilt is found, the hangings visited upon top German and Japanese war-criminals in the 1940s."
Velvel said past practice has been to allow U.S. officials responsible for war crimes in Viet Nam and elsewhere to enjoy immunity from prosecution upon leaving office. "President Johnson retired to his Texas ranch and his Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was named to head the World Bank; Richard Nixon retired to San Clemente and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was allowed to grow richer and richer," Velvel said.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Tony Schwartz, who helped create 1964 "Daisy Ad," dies
Source: AP (6-16-08)
Tony Schwartz, who helped create the infamous "daisy ad" that ran only once during the 1964 presidential race but changed political advertising forever, has died.
Schwartz, 84, died Sunday at his Manhattan home, said his daughter Kayla Schwartz-Burridge. He had been suffering from heart valve stenosis.
Schwartz, who started his career as a graphic designer, collaborated with a team from the Doyle Dean Bernbach ad agency to create the spot featuring a little girl counting aloud as she removed the petals of a daisy.
The scene then changed into a countdown to an atomic blast. President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Democratic incumbent seeking re-election, did the voiceover with the line, "We must either love each other, or we must die" _ a paraphrase of a famous W.H. Auden poem written to mark the start of World War II.
Related Links
KC Johnson: The Daisy Ad
5,000-year-old anthropomorphic figures found in Huaura, Peru
Source: Andina (6-8-08)
In the last days, a team of archaeologists headed by Ruth Shady has discovered a number of anthropomorphic figures believed to be some five thousand years old near the district of Vegueta in the province of Huaura on the coast north of Lima.
These relics have been unearthed in the archeological site of Vichama, or "hidden city", a place that belongs to the same civilization of Caral and which is located 159 kilometers north of Lima. Caral is considered the oldest city of America with around 5000 years old.
The figures represent a woman nursing and a person of high social status. It was reported that Carbon 14 dating will soon determine how old these relics are.
Titanic discoverer Robert Ballard called to find lost sarcophagus
Source: Times (UK) (6-14-08)
It has been a source of enduring fascination for archaeologists and amateur Egyptologists everywhere: what exactly happened to the sarcophagus of Menkaure, one of Egypt's greatest Pharaohs? Now, more than 170 years after it was found and lost, the mystery could be solved.
Built from polished blue basalt to transport the king's earthly remains to the next world, the elaborately decorated vessel lay hidden inside the third-largest of Giza's renowned Pyramids for more than 4,000 years. In 1837 the British colonel Richard William Howard Vyse blasted his way into Menkaure's sepulchral chamber using gunpowder and discovered the stone casket.
The mummy was missing by that time — ancient Arabic graffiti indicated that the colonel was not the first to find the chamber — and he realised that his discovery could open the way for a new generation of grave robbers. "As the sarcophagus would have been destroyed had it remained in the Pyramid," he noted in his diaries, "I resolved to send it to the British Museum."
In a twist worthy of an Indiana Jones film, the sarcophagus was lost again the following year before it could reach British shores. The merchant ship Beatrice, which was carrying it and other antiquities found by the archaeologist, sank while sailing from Malta to Gibraltar — reportedly off the coast of Spain, near Alicante.
Now the Egyptian Government wants to recover it with the aid of underwater robots. Zahi Hawass, who heads Egypt's Supreme Council for Antiquities, told Spanish journalists that he was seeking financing from the National Geographic Society for the search.
To locate the Beatrice he has lined up the services of Robert Ballard, who found the Titanic using high-tech submersibles. The Egyptians have also privately suggested Franck Goddio, the French marine archaeologist who has discovered hundreds of artefacts from submerged parts of Alexandria.
Report: Ignorance of history is leading Americans to lose sense of national identity
Source: Press Release--Bradley Foundation (6-3-08)
The Bradley Project on America’s National Identity today released its Report, “E Pluribus Unum,”the product of a two-year study involving a number of our nation’s leading academics, public figures, journalists, educators and policy experts. The report examines four aspects of American life crucial to American identity: historical memory, civic education, assimilation, and national security.
The report finds that America is facing an identity crisis and calls for a national dialogue on America’s national identity. According to James Ceaser, professor of politics at the University of Virginia and a participant in the project, America’s understanding and appreciation of diversity is important but must be balanced by an emphasis on what we share. “In selecting the title E Pluribus Unum, the Project embraces the conviction that plurality and unity are not necessarily in tension with one another, but are supporting ideas of the same national experiment,” Ceaser said. “Plurality is only made safe when it when it is grounded in a deeper commitment to national unity. Unity is the precondition for healthy diversity.”
Stone of Destiny is fake, claims Alex Salmond (Scotland)
Source: Telegraph (UK) (6-16-08)
[First Minister] Alex Salmond dropped a cultural bombshell yesterday when he claimed that the Stone of Destiny, one of Scotland's most famous relics, was a medieval fake.
Scottish, English and British monarchs have been crowned on the ancient coronation stone since the ninth century.
It spent 700 years under the chair in Westminster Abbey after it was seized in 1296 by King Edward I, and was finally returned to Scotland 12 years ago.
It has since been viewed at Edinburgh Castle by tens of thousands of people, and is regarded as a symbol of Scottish independence.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
We may all be space aliens: study
Source: AFP (6-13-08)
Genetic material from outer space found in a meteorite in Australia may well have played a key role in the origin of life on Earth, according to a study to be published Sunday.
European and US scientists have proved for the first time that two bits of genetic coding, called nucleobases, contained in the meteor fragment, are truly extraterrestrial.
Previous studies had suggested that the space rocks, which hit Earth some 40 years ago, might have been contaminated upon impact.
Both of the molecules identified, uracil and xanthine, "are present in our DNA and RNA," said lead author Zita Martins, a researcher at Imperial College London.
How war hero John McCain betrayed the Vietnamese peasant who saved his life
Source: Daily Mail (3-23-08)
In all the tales of wartime courage peppering John McCain's presidential campaign trail, perhaps the most outstanding example of selfless heroism involves not the candidate but a humble Vietnamese peasant.
On October 26, 1967, Mai Van On ran from the safety of a bomb shelter at the height of an air raid and swam out into the lake where Lieutenant Commander McCain was drowning, tangled in his parachute cord after ejecting when his Skyhawk bomber was hit by a missile.
In an extraordinary act of compassion at a time when Vietnamese citizens were being killed by US aerial bombardments, he pulled a barely conscious McCain to the lake surface and, with the help of a neighbour, dragged him towards the shore.
And when a furious mob at the water's edge began to beat and stab the captured pilot, Mr On drove them back.
Nearly three decades later, a Vietnamese government commission confirmed he was indeed the rescuer and, in a 1996 meeting in Hanoi, McCain embraced and thanked Mr On and presented him with a Senate memento.
From that brief encounter to his death at the age of 88 two years ago, Mr On never heard from the senator again, and three years after their meeting, McCain published an autobiography that makes no mention of his apparent debt to Mr On.
It is a snub Mr On took to his death.
Maritime 'treasure trove' raised in English Channel
Source: BBC (6-13-08)
A treasure trove of artefacts is being recovered from what experts describe as one of the most important maritime discoveries since the Mary Rose.
The late 16th Century shipwreck hails from a pivotal point in England's military history.
The raised haul includes a 2m-long (7ft) cannon, which will give archaeologists an insight into Elizabeth I's naval might.
The wreck, discovered 30 years ago, is situated off the coast of Alderney.
Dr Mensun Bound, excavation leader and marine archaeologist from Oxford University, said: "This boat is really grade A in terms of archaeology - it is hard to find anything that really compares with it."
The excavation of the Elizabethan warship is being filmed for the BBC's Timewatch series.
Che Guevara, 4 decades later, gets a hometown statue
Source: McClatchy (6-14-08)
ROSARIO , Argentina - While Ernesto "Che" Guevara remains the most famous export of this sleepy city, his legacy here has long been a low-key one.
Except for a handful of businesses named in his honor, few markers alert visitors that the revolutionary leader was born here exactly 80 years ago before becoming one of the most mythic figures of the 20th century.
That changed Saturday when civic leaders inaugurated the first official monument honoring the revolutionary leader in Argentina , ending decades of government silence about the controversial figure.
A 13-foot-high bronze statue unveiled before hundreds of cheering admirers depicts the beret-wearing Guevara standing defiantly while facing toward Santa Clara , Cuba , where another statue of Guevara faces toward Argentina .
Learning to be Michelle Obama
Source: Boston Globe (6-15-08)
At Princeton, she came to terms with being a black achiever in a white world.
###
As Catherine Donnelly climbed the stairs to her dorm room at Princeton University over a quarter-century ago, the Louisiana freshman felt ready for whatever lay ahead. But then she met Michelle.
Her full name was Michelle LaVaughn Robinson. She was so tall that her head seemed to brush the sloping ceiling of the cramped fourth-floor room. She was Donnelly's new roommate. And she was black.
Well, this was new.
Growing up in the South, Donnelly had gone to school with a handful of black classmates, but living together was quite another thing. Donnelly quickly warmed to Robinson, with her big sense of humor and riveting stories. But she was worried that her mother, who Donnelly said had grown up in a racist family, would not react well. She was right.
When Donnelly's mother, now 71, learned the race of her daughter's roommate , she was beside herself. She called alumni friends to object. And the next morning she marched into the student housing office.
"I said I need to get my daughter's room changed right away," recalled Alice Brown, a retired schoolteacher, who has since come to regret her reaction. "I called my own mother and she said, 'Take Catherine out of school immediately. Bring her home.' I was very upset about the whole thing."
For 17-year-old Robinson - who is now Michelle Obama and the first African-American woman to face the real prospect of becoming first lady - the incident was a stunning beginning to a formative chapter in her life. It was a time when her views on race and American culture began to coalesce - views that have helped make her a compelling figure but also somewhat of a lightning rod during the campaign. Just last week the Barack Obama campaign took on an apparently baseless rumor that she had once been taped talking of white Americans as "whitey."
Europe Worries About a 1970s-Style Oil Shock
Source: NYT (6-15-08)
... “The historical memory of the first oil shock is much stronger for Europeans than for Americans,” Daniel Yergin, the chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, said. “For Americans, the memory is of gas lines. For Europeans, it was the end of their postwar economic miracle.”
He and other experts caution against overstating the comparison between 2008 and 1973. Europe, they say, is better equipped to absorb these kinds of shocks than it was 35 years ago — with a sturdy, shared currency, an independent central bank, and more flexible, open economies.
Still, with growth slowing at the same time that wages and prices rise, there are unsettling similarities.
“There is unrest among workers, who today, as in the 1970s, feel they have been shortchanged,” said Holger Schmieding, chief European economist at Bank of America in London. “They have to spend more money on fuel, so they have less to spend on other things, and they want to be compensated.”
Why This Court Keeps Rebuking This President
Source: NYT (6-15-08)
“The most important thing we do is not doing,” Justice Louis D. Brandeis once said of the Supreme Court’s abiding humility, its overwhelming preference to allow the people, through their elected representatives, to govern themselves.
And never is the court more reluctant to act than when faced with a challenge to the president during wartime. Consider the historical record.
The court has ruled against a president in a time of armed conflict no more than a handful of times, most famously in Youngstown Sheet and Tube v. Sawyer, when it held that Harry S. Truman lacked the constitutional authority to seize the nation’s steel mills to avert a strike during the Korean War. The invocation of two words — military necessity — by a commander in chief was usually all it took to silence a majority of the justices.
So it is extraordinary that during the Bush administration’s seven years, nearly all of them a time of war that began on Sept. 11, 2001, the court has been prompted to push back four times. Last week’s decision in Boumediene v. Bush, in which the court ruled that prisoners at Guantánamo Bay have a right to challenge their detentions in the federal courts, marks only the most recent rebuke.
“When viewed through the lens of history, it’s astounding,” says Neal Katyal, a law professor at Georgetown who argued against the government in one of those cases, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. So how are we to explain this shift from decades of deference to a willingness to check the president?
In 1974 Thesis, the Seeds of McCain's War Views
Source: NYT (6-15-08)
About a year after his release from a North Vietnamese prison camp, Cmdr. John S. McCain III sat down to address one of the most vexing questions confronting his fellow prisoners: Why did some choose to collaborate with the North Vietnamese?
Mr. McCain blamed American politics.
“The biggest factor in a man’s ability to perform credibly as a prisoner of war is a strong belief in the correctness of his nation’s foreign policy,” Mr. McCain wrote in a 1974 essay submitted to the National War College and never released to the public. Prisoners who questioned “the legality of the war” were “extremely easy marks for Communist propaganda,” he wrote.
Americans captured after 1968 had proven to be more susceptible to North Vietnamese pressure, he argued, because they “had been exposed to the divisive forces which had come into focus as a result of the antiwar movement in the United States.”
To insulate against such doubts, he recommended that the military should teach its recruits not only how to fight but also the reasons for American foreign policies like the containment of Southeast Asian communism — even though, Mr. McCain acknowledged, “a program of this nature could be construed as ‘brainwashing’ or ‘thought control’ and could come in for a great deal of criticism.”
Saturday, June 14, 2008
N. Korea Yields Slightly on Abductions
Source: NYT (6-14-08)
North Korea said Friday that it would reopen an investigation into abductions of Japanese citizens, reversing its longstanding position that the issue had been settled.
In return, Japan announced that it had agreed to lift some sanctions imposed on the North for its nuclear program, including the ban on travel between the countries, but that more serious sanctions would stay in place.
The Japanese announcement, which followed two days of bilateral talks in Beijing this week, was the first sign in years of even a slight thaw between the countries. Although both sides made very minor concessions, they offered a possible way to resolve the abductions dispute, which has long complicated the six-nation talks over the North’s nuclear weapons program and has strained the relations between the governments in Tokyo and Washington....
For decades, the North denied responsibility for the disappearance of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s, despite Japanese news reports that agents had been spotted on Japanese soil.
But during a visit to Pyongyang in 2002 by former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, the North’s leader, Kim Jong-il, admitted that North Korean agents had kidnapped 13 Japanese as part of a program to train Japanese-speaking spies.
In Illinois, Clues to Obama's Electability
Source: WaPo (6-14-08)
The rookie state senator from Chicago had driven 340 miles to explore southern Illinois, but Barb Brown could muster only 20 Democrats in this small town on the Mississippi River to have breakfast with him. She asked her niece and sister-in-law, who were helping in the kitchen, to come out to pad the audience.
"We tried to convince people that they needed to come out and meet with this senator from Chicago, who on top of everything else was African American," Brown, a circuit court clerk, said of the 1997 gathering. "We had people looking at us strangely."
As Sen. Barack Obama emerges as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, worries linger in his party over whether he can improve on his poor showing among many rural and blue-collar voters in the primaries. Clues to that question lie here, outside metro Chicago, in a 400-mile-long swath of corn and soybean fields that, in the coal country of its southern reaches, shares more with Kentucky and Missouri than Chicago.
Obama's courting of the region began soon after he was elected to the legislature in 1996. Southern Illinoisans interpreted the visits as a sign that he was already thinking about a future run for statewide office, but they also served as a self-education in the middle-American milieu that his Kansan grandparents hailed from but that he knew little of, having grown up in Hawaii and Indonesia and spent his adult years in big cities. Before mostly white audiences, Obama would joke about his name -- rhyming it with "yo mama" -- and test out his message about getting past divisions to solve problems.
Summer Camps Revive India's Ancient Sanskrit
Source: WaPo (6-14-08)
Hemant Singh Yadav, a lean and sprightly 15-year-old, was sent by his parents to a summer camp to learn to speak Sanskrit, or what he calls the language of the gods.
He had studied the 4,000-year-old classical Indian language at school for six years. He knew its grammar and could chant the ancient hymns. But he could not converse in it. During a two-week course at the camp, Sanskrit Samvad Shala, he had no choice: He was forbidden to speak any other language.
"At first I thought it was impossible. The teachers and attendants spoke to us only in Sanskrit, and I did not understand anything," said Hemant, one of the 150 students gathered inside a Hindu temple on the outskirts of New Delhi. "I knew big, heavy bookish words before, but not the simple ones. But now Sanskrit feels like an everyday language."
Such camps, run by volunteers from Hindu nationalist groups, are designed to promote a language long dismissed as dead, and to instill in Hindus religious and cultural pride. Many Sanskrit speakers, though, believe that the camps are a steppingstone to a higher goal: turning back the clock and making Sanskrit modern India's spoken language.
Manson family killer asks for mercy 40 years later
Source: LAT (6-14-08)
On an infamous summer night in 1969, young followers of Charles Manson entered a Benedict Canyon mansion and murdered five people gathered on the compound.
Actress Sharon Tate, 8 1/2 months pregnant with the son of director Roman Polanski, begged one of the knife-wielding killers to spare her life. The attacker was Susan Atkins, and her response was cold and unequivocal.
"She asked me to let her baby live," Atkins told parole officials in 1993. "I told her I didn't have mercy for her."
Almost 40 years later, it's Atkins who is asking for mercy.
Diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and confined to state prison on a life sentence, the 59-year-old is asking to be released from state prison on "compassionate" grounds.
By most accounts, Atkins, a former topless dancer who used to sing in her church choir, was one of Manson's fiercest disciples. After stabbing and killing Tate, prosecutors said Atkins tasted the actress' blood and used it to write "PIG" on the front door. During her trial, which took more than nine months, Atkins showed no remorse and maintained utter devotion to Manson, whom she called "Jesus Christ," "the devil" and "the soul." During sentencing, she taunted the court by saying, "You'd best lock your doors and watch your own kids."
Friday, June 13, 2008
Explorers find 1780 British warship in Lake Ontario
Source: AP (6-13-08)
A 22-gun British warship that sank during the American Revolution and has long been regarded as one of the "Holy Grail" shipwrecks in the Great Lakes has been discovered at the bottom of Lake Ontario, astonishingly well-preserved in the cold, deep water, explorers announced Friday.
Shipwreck enthusiasts Jim Kennard and Dan Scoville used side-scanning sonar and an unmanned submersible to locate the HMS Ontario, which was lost with barely a trace and as many as 130 people aboard during a gale in 1780.
The 80-foot sloop of war is the oldest shipwreck and the only fully intact British warship ever found in the Great Lakes, Scoville and Kennard said.
Researchers Excavate Petrified Rainforest in German City
Source: Spiegel Online (6-11-08)
Researchers in the decidedly un-tropical German city of Chemnitz are uncovering spectacular remains of a petrified rainforest. The forest was preserved under a thick layer of ash after a volcanic eruption 290 million years ago.
Roman horse skeletons, chariot dug up (Greece)
Source: http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun (6-12-08)
ARCHAEOLOGISTS have dug up the skeletons of 16 horses and a two-wheeled chariot in a grave dating back to the Roman Empire in north-east Greece, the culture ministry announced today.
Half of the horses were buried in pairs, whilst two human skeletons were also discovered in a dig near Lithohori, in the Kavala region.
Near to the remains of six of the horses archaeologists found a shield, weapons and various other accessories.
Tree Grown From Ancient Seed Found in Jewish Fortress
Source: LiveScience (6-13-08)
Scientists have grown a tree from what may be the oldest seed ever germinated.
The new sapling was sprouted from a 2,000-year-old date palm excavated in Masada, the site of a cliff-side fortress in Israel where ancient Jews are said to have killed themselves to avoid capture by Roman invaders.
Dubbed the "Methuselah Tree" after the oldest person in the Bible, the new plant has been growing steadily, and after 26 months, the tree was nearly four feet (1.2 meters) tall.
The species of tree, called the Judean date, (Phoenix dactylifera L.), is now extinct in Israel, but researchers are hoping that by reviving the plant they may be able to study its medicinal uses.
Ann Coulter: Bush One of 'Greatest Presidents' Ever
Source: Editor & Publisher (6-13-08)
Bucking conventional wisdom, Ann Coulter in her latest syndicated column calls President Bush a "great president" and predicts that "the man responsible for keeping Americans safe from another terrorist attack on American soil for nearly seven years now will go down in history as one of America's greatest presidents."
She adds: "It is unquestionable that Bush has made this country safe by keeping Islamic lunatics pinned down fighting our troops in Iraq.... Our servicemen must be baffled by the constant nay-saying coming from their own country....
"Monthly casualties in Iraq now come in slightly lower than a weekend with Anna Nicole Smith. According to a CNN report last week, for the entire month of May, there were only 19 troop deaths in Iraq. (Last year, five people on average were shot every day in Chicago.) With Iraqi deaths at an all-time low, Iraq is safer than Detroit -- although the Middle Eastern food is still better in Detroit."
Britain should get rid of the monarchy, says UN
Source: Telegraph (UK) (6-13-08)
The UN Human Rights Council said the UK must "consider holding a referendum on the desirability or otherwise of a written constitution, preferably republican".
The council has 29 members including Saudi Arabia, Cuba and Sri Lanka.
It was the Sri Lankan envoy who raised concerns over the British monarchy.
Tea bag to celebrate its century
Source: Telegraph (UK) (6-13-08)
A quintessentially British item accidentally invented by New York merchant Thomas Sullivan celebrates its centenary this month.
In June 1908, tea dealer Mr Sullivan was sending samples to potential customers when, to cut costs, he put a few pinches of loose leaves in several small silk pouches.
The confused clients received the samples and, unsure of the instructions, reputedly dunked them into hot water, and the tea bag was born.
Previously, all tea had to be painstakingly strained before it could comfortably be drunk.
British war grave found in northern France
Source: Telegraph (UK) (6-13-08)
British archaeologists have for the first time unearthed "absolute" proof of the remains of British soldiers at a recently-discovered mass World War I grave in northern France.
Two British Army buttons, a collar fastener and a British matchbox have been unearthed at the site of the grave in Fromelles, the British ministry of defence has announced.
New York museum returns ancestral remains
Source: Independent Online (South Africa) (6-12-08)
Members of the Tseycum First Nation visited the American Museum of Natural History in New York City this week to reclaim the remains of ancestors taken from their land about a century ago.
Swedish parliament refuses to recognize Armenian Genocide
Source: Pan Armenian Net (6-12-08)
The Swedish parliament, with a vote 245 to 37 , rejected a call for recognition of the 1915 genocide in the Ottoman Empire.
Irish reject EU's Lisbon Treaty
Source: Ireland.com | The Irish Times (6-13-08)
The Lisbon Treaty has been rejected by Irish voters, sparking a crisis for plans to reform European Union structures. A total of 53.4 per cent voted to reject the treaty, while 46.6 per cent voted in favour. All but 10 constituencies rejected the treaty, with a total of 752,451 voting in favour of Lisbon and 862,415 votes against. Turnout was 53.1 per cent.
Tallies from early on in the count this morning showed the No campaign appeared to be winning in most constituencies across the State, with significant majorities emerging from rural and urban working class areas in particular.
Luxembourg Premier and Finance Minister Jean-Claude Juncker said the defeat of the Lisbon Treaty represents a new "European crisis. ...Ireland said 'no' to the Lisbon Treaty,'' Juncker told reporters in Luxembourg today. "This is not good for Europe."
There is concern in other EU countries about the impact of the decision by Irish voters, and the French and German governments are expected to make a joint statement later today once the Irish result is known. Ireland was the only country to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.
A 'George Washington' for Europe
Source: BBC News | World | Europe (6-13-08)
From January 2009, the European Union will have its own president to chair EU summits and unite the views of 27 member states. Former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing has described the top job as Europe's "own George Washington". The race for the presidency is likely to go down to the wire at the December 2008 summit of the European Council of leaders. Although a decision will be made by majority voting, the 27 member states will be hoping that a unity candidate comes forward.
This interactive webpage from BBC News offers profiles of the nine most discussed names:
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Mexican archaeologists unearth ruins of Aztec palace
Source: International Herald Tribune (6-10-08)
Mexican archaeologists said Monday they have unearthed the remains of an Aztec palace once inhabited by the emperor Montezuma in the heart of what is now downtown Mexico City.
During a routine renovation project on a Colonial-era building, experts uncovered pieces of a wall as well as a basalt floor believed to have been part of a dark room where Montezuma meditated, archaeology team leader Elsa Hernandez said.
Montezuma's palace complex — known as the Casas Nuevas, or New Houses to distinguish them from his predecessors' palaces — is thought to have comprised five interconnected buildings containing the emperor's office, chambers for children and several wives and even a zoo, according to Hernandez.
French cut down D-Day 'Kilroy was here' trees
Source: Times (UK) (6-13-08)
The names “Thomas and Dorothy” were carved in the bark of one trunk. Another said “Bob and Carma”. Other trees were marked with soldiers’ home states - Iowa, Maine or Alabama - and several bore hearts and the names or initials of a wife or girlfriend.
The beech trees of Saint Pierre de Varengeville-Duclair forest bore a poignant testimony to the D-Day landings for more than six decades. Thousands of American soldiers stationed there after the liberation of Normandy spent their spare hours with a knife or bayonet creating a lasting reminder of their presence.
Although the trees grew and the graffiti swelled and twisted, this most peculiar memory of one of the 20th century’s defining moments remained visible - until now. Amid bureaucratic indifference and a dispute between officials and the forest owner, most of the trees have been felled, chopped up and turned into paper.
State Department purges watchdog group from mailing list
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, is published by the Federation of American Scientists (6-12-08)
Secrecy News was removed from the distribution list for the U.S. State Department history publication "Foreign Relations of the United States" (FRUS) after we reported on errors in several FRUS volumes on March 24 and 26, 2008.
click here and
here.
A spokesman for the State Department Historian's Office confirmed that officials had ordered the removal of Secrecy News from the FRUS mailing list in response to our critical coverage.
In an email message to the series editor yesterday, I asked the Historian's Office (HO) to reconsider its action. To do so would serve the best interests of FRUS, I suggested.
"I know that a sizable fraction of my Secrecy News mailing list (which now exceeds 13,500 self-selected subscribers) has an interest in FRUS publications. Many of those subscribers are unlikely to be part of other existing networks of academics and historians through which news of FRUS is disseminated," I wrote.
"I would also willingly publish any criticism of my own writing that HO personnel or HAC [Historical Advisory Committee] members felt was warranted," I added.
The request to reinstate Secrecy News on the FRUS mailing list awaits a decision by the State Department Historian, Dr. Marc J. Susser.
New research refutes myth of pure Scandinavian race
Source: http://healthsciences.ku (6-3-08)
A team of forensic scientists at the University of Copenhagen has studied human remains found in two ancient Danish burial grounds dating back to the iron age, and discovered a man who appears to be of arabian origin. The findings suggest that human beings were as genetically diverse 2000 years ago as they are today and indicate greater mobility among iron age populations than was previously thought. The findings also suggest that people in the Danish iron age did not live and die in small, isolated villages but, on the contrary, were in constant contact with the wider world.
Relics of three civilisations found
Source: http://www.thenews.com (6-9-08)
The remains of more than 2,400-year-old Buddhist era are nurturing silently under the lap of Margalla Hills as the murals of Buddha appeared on the walls of caves at Shah Allah Ditta.
At the distance of 15 kilometres from the main Golra intersection, the site needs immediate attention of the Department of Archaeology and Museums as it possesses not only the relics of Buddhist era but also 8th century AD Hindu period and the 300-year-old Aurangzeb period.
According to archaeologists, the cages belong to Buddhists where monks used to perform their religious rites in isolation and the emergence of murals on the wall support this view.
"The murals were not visible previously but with the passage of time the layers of smoke and dust over the walls washed out and the original came out," said Ansar Ahmed, an archaeologist.
Drinking Jugs Point the Way to an Archaeological Find
Source: WaPo (6-8-08)
When searching for 17th-century courthouses, it might be good to keep in mind spirits -- the alcoholic, not ghostly, kind.
Back then, around the 1670s, it seems councilmen and judges spent a fair amount of their time swilling liquor, so remnants of their wine bottles and beer tankards are easy to find. In fact, it was pieces of those stone and glass vessels that led a team of archaeologists to discover the original Charles County courthouse, the oldest government building in Maryland whose remnants could never be located -- until now.
"Oh, they drank at night when they were sitting around talking about the day, they drank on breaks and they might even have been doing it when they were in court," said Julia King, an anthropology professor at St. Mary's College of Maryland who led a group of students in searching for the courthouse. "You can see pieces of their glasses everywhere you turn."
'68 Alumni Recall Loudoun's All-Black Douglass High (Virginia)
Source: WaPo (6-11-08)
In the fall of 1964, 102 students enrolled as freshmen at all-black Douglass High School in Leesburg. By the end of senior year, most had dropped out.
Some were forced to leave school so they could tend to family farms. Others were called to a faraway war.
The resilient corps of 44 students who stayed at Douglass through the spring of 1968 lived through a graduation season of tumultuous change. In addition to the events that helped define that year for all Americans -- the Tet Offensive in Vietnam and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy -- 1968 marked the end of Virginia's policy of school segregation and the end of Douglass High's role as an African American institution.
Philadelphia owns up to more of its history of slavery
Source: AP (6-12-08)
Thousands of tourists watched last summer as archaeologists, working in the shadow of Independence Hall, unearthed remnants of the home where George Washington lived with his wife and several slaves. Now, the city's best-known Colonial-era church is dramatically bringing to light how slaves worshipped alongside parishioners like Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Betsy Ross.
Historians have long known that slaves attended Christ Church — and were baptized, married and buried there. But it has not been publicized much in Philadelphia, where all men were declared to be created equal. "I think it's the right time in our city's history, it's the right time in our nation's history," said Neil Ronk, a church historian and senior guide. "Maybe it can spark a discussion."
Namibia: Let's Not Move History, Party Leader Proposes
Source: http://allafrica.com (6-12-08)
The President of the opposition DTA wants the colonial monument of a German soldier on his horse in Windhoek to stay exactly where it is.
Government plans to move the statue from its prominent position next to the Alte Feste museum to make way for a new museum. Katuutire Kaura said in the National Assembly yesterday that he wanted the House to debate the plan to move the monument, "with the view of leaving it in place and to find another suitable spot for the new museum".
"An example of a good place for that Independence Memorial Museum would be the spot where the Old Location hospital was once situated," Kaura proposed. His notice of a motion drew loud murmurs and several interjections from the Swapo benches. "This is not even debateable," said Deputy Justice Minister Utoni Nujoma, son of founding president Sam Nujoma. "That (monument) is for the Germans," Presidential Affairs Minister Albert Kawana interjected. "You want to obliterate history," DTA leader Kaura responded. He told The Namibian afterwards that there was no reason to move the statue, as it was part of Namibia's history and a landmark tourist attraction.
School rallies around dismissed Watts teacher deemed too 'Afro-centric.'
Source: LAT (6-12-08)
Students and fellow educators are rallying behind a fired Jordan High School teacher they say was sacked for encouraging political activism among her students.
About 60 students rallied Wednesday at the Watts campus, while a colleague of the fired teacher said he and 15 other instructors planned to resign or transfer to other schools to protest the dismissal of Karen Salazar, a second-year English teacher.
The dust-up has gone digital as well. Salazar backers have posted videos on the website YouTube. The postings, which have attracted thousands of hits, intersperse music, outraged protesters and interviews, as well as statements from the outspoken educator.
"You embody what it means to be a warrior-scholar, a freedom-fighting intellectual," she told students through a bullhorn in one video. "You are part of the long legacy, the strong history, of fighting back."
In another instance, Salazar rips the Los Angeles Unified School District, saying, "This school system for too long has been not only denying them human rights, basic human rights, but doing it on purpose in order to keep them subservient, to subjugate them in society."
A union official said the critique against Salazar included a statement that her teaching was too "Afro-centric." An assistant principal, in his evaluation of a particular lesson, accused Salazar of brainwashing students, according to Salazar and others.
Her course materials include "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," which is approved for students. Salazar, 25, also sprinkles in lyrics of slain rapper Tupac Shakur and the poetry of Langston Hughes.
Europe's last executed witch to be cleared
Source: Telegraph (UK) (6-12-08)
Anna Goeldi, a maid in the small alpine region of Glarus, was beheaded in 1782 for being a witch after she confessed under torture to conversing with the devil and poisoning the daughter of the house.
But her name could now be cleared following a decision yesterday by local lawmakers to recommend a reversal of the conviction.
Campaigners claim she was the victim of a conspiracy between the eastern town's judical and Protestant church authorities.
Porcelain in British museums 'looted by Nazis'
Source: Telegraph (UK) (6-12-08)
Two pieces of fine 18th century porcelain currently housed in British museums and worth more than £10,000 apiece were looted by the Nazis, a Government-appointed panel has ruled.
They include a 12-inch wide Viennese dish described as "one of the most important examples of early Viennese porcelain in the British Museum collection".
The other is a "monteith", a bowl filled with water used to cool glasses, held at Cambridge University's Fitzwilliam Museum since 1960.
Gettysburg train station promised to Park Service
Source: http://www.eveningsun.com (6-10-08)
Gettysburg Borough officials intend to sell the Lincoln Train Station to the National Park Service, and they've set the minimum price for the historic structure at $722,000.
The sale is not yet final, but action taken by the Gettysburg Borough Council essentially excludes any other parties from negotiating a purchase of the property at 35 Carlisle St.
At Monday's council meeting, a 7-2 vote authorized President Dick Peterson to sign and deliver a letter of intent to the Park Service. The letter includes the minimum price, which borough finance director Mona Overton determined to be the borough's share of rehabilitating the deteriorating structure since it was given to the borough 10 years ago.
Fire marshal: Video shows person setting fire at Texas Governor's Mansion
Source: Dallas Morning News (6-12-08)
The state fire marshal confirmed Thursday that surveillance video shows a person igniting something and hurling it onto the front porch of the mansion moments before a four-alarm fire at the historic Texas Governor's Mansion.
State Fire Marshal Paul Maldonado said state and federal investigators were working to enhancing the video footage and the image of the individual’s face. Officials said Thursday the video would not be made public at this time.
Mr. Maldonado said the black-and-white and color video surveillance collected from the scene shows one individual coming onto the mansion grounds, lighting an incendiary material and throwing it onto the front porch.
“The fire progressed rapidly,” he said.
[HNN: Gov. Perry vows to rebuild the mansion.]
Canada Offers an Apology for Native Students’ Abuse
Source: NYT (6-12-08)
The government of Canada formally apologized on Wednesday to Native Canadians for forcing about 150,000 native children into government-financed residential schools where many suffered physical and sexual abuse.
The system of schools, which began shutting down in the 1970s, after decades of operations, was dedicated to eradicating the languages, traditions and cultural practices of Native Canadians and has been linked to the widespread incidence of alcoholism, suicide and family violence in many native communities.
“The treatment of children in Indian residential schools is a sad chapter in our history,” Stephen Harper, the prime minister of Canada, said in a speech in the House of Commons, where a small group of former students and native leaders sat in front of him. “Today, we recognize that this policy of assimilation was wrong, has caused great harm and has no place in our country.”
Read All About It: Historical Newspaper Reproduction Business Goes National
Source: http://www.wenportal.org (date uncertain) (6-12-08)
On April Fools Day 2007, Kenny Molzahn and Bill Downy formed Historical FishwrapT, a newspaper reproduction company based in Green Bay, Wisconsin. These two high school teachers were no fools in believing that the teaching tool that had been so effective in their own classrooms could inspire students and appeal to history buffs throughout the country.
Historical Fishwrap recently announced that its 16-page historical front-page reproduction newspapers will be carried in 40 Barnes & Noble megastores along with all Barnes & Noble stores in Wisconsin.
"And they took my suggestion to put these in the stores with high history book sales, which happens to be stores near military bases. So they are putting us in stores near Fort Hood, Fort Jackson, Camp Pendleton and others," said co-owner Kenny Molzahn.
Historical Fishwrap is also sold in 120 Hastings book stores from California to the Carolinas and over 100 independent book sellers supplied by Ingram Periodicals.
These newspapers are a history teacher's dream, a compilation of historically significant front-page accounts as they appeared on the day the news broke. Historical Fishwrap papers cover WWI, WWII and the Spanish-American War. The WWII papers include reproductions of original reports from a geographic variety of newspapers covering Hitler's Blitzkrieg of Poland, Pearl Harbor, Midway, D-Day and other momentous events. Another paper set is devoted to WWII Air Wars in the Pacific and European Theaters.
"We are sorry": Canadian PM apoligizes to First Nations peoples from floor of House of Commons for native residential schools
Source: The Globe and Mail (6-12-08)
The government of Canada built an educational system in which very young children were often forcibly removed from their homes, often taken far from their communities. Many were inadequately fed, clothed and housed. All were deprived of the care and nurturing of their parents, grandparents and communities. First Nations, Inuit and Métis languages and cultural practices were prohibited in these schools. Tragically, some of these children died while attending residential schools and others never returned home....
Prime Minister Stephen Harper had yet to utter a single word of Canada's apology to former Indian residential schools students when the cheering began. Native drumming and shouts turned into loud, simultaneous clapping. Raw emotion bursting for an apology decades overdue. There were many smiles. For the sexual and physical abuse that occurred at the schools, Canada apologized. For the efforts to wipe out aboriginal languages and culture in the name of assimilation, Mr. Harper expressed remorse. But aboriginal eyes in the now quiet House of Commons room began to tear when the Prime Minister acknowledged the ongoing, generational impacts of residential schools.
"We now recognize that, in separating children from their families, we undermined the ability of many to adequately parent their own children and sowed the seeds for generations to follow," he said. "Not only did you suffer these abuses as children, but as you became parents, you were powerless to protect your own children from suffering the same experience, and for this we are sorry."
1860s ledger retells how Lake Oswego [OR] School District began
Source: The Oregonian (6-12-08)
Three years after the Civil War ended and Lake Oswego, Ore., was simply Oswego, and the lake was Sucker Lake, folks here decided to start a school district.
Like all law-abiding school boards, they kept notes, but nobody knew the 140-year-old records existed until a school custodian found them tucked deep inside the school district's underground vault. The faded, cursive script written with an ink-dipped pen and occasional misspelled words stick to the highlights, but they reveal the struggles of an infant school district, including a clerk caught fudging records to mask his taking $126.
Lake Oswego historians were amazed at the find, which provides a detailed account of life in the 1800s. The records, dated 1868-1885, are believed to be the oldest Lake Oswego historical documents, said Clair Kellogg, Lake Oswego librarian, who oversees the local historical collection.
"Oh, my gosh," Kellogg exclaimed as she leafed though the worn ledger Wednesday. Also in the forgotten box were school registers listing students, their grades, attendance and financial information from the 1890s and early 1900s.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Muslim parents to blame for children turning to extremism
Source: Telegraph (6-11-08)
British Muslim parents are to blame for leaving their children open to the lure of Islamic extremism, according to an influential academic
Dr Farhan Nizami CBE, a key adviser on Islam to the Prince of Wales, accused British Muslims of failing to make sure their children learn to speak English or supporting them in their education.
He said this leaves them alienated from mainstream society and exposed to being groomed by radical Islamic groups.
It is the first time Dr Nizami, the director of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, which has links with Oxford University, has spoken out about the failure of Muslims to integrate with British society.
The academic institution, whose patron is the Prince of Wales, carries considerable influence and aims to build bridges between Islam and the West.
His comments come just weeks after the Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, warned that radical Islam is filling the "moral vacuum" created by the decline of Christian values in Britain.
Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, Dr Nizami said Muslims would never play a full role in British society until they improved their education, language and aspirations.
He warned that those who feel marginalised are most easily influenced by the rhetoric of extremism, and called on Muslim parents to do more to avert the danger of their children becoming fanatics.
"Muslim families have to realise the importance of education for their children and make an effort to push them into achieving more," Dr Nizami said.
"They need to make them aspire to things higher rather than just being self-employed and looking for small-jobs."
Despite the fears over the threat posed by foreign imams such as Abu Hamza and Omar Bakri, Dr Nizami claimed homegrown Muslims can be even more dangerous.
The four suicide bombers who murdered 52 people in London on July 7, 2005, were all born in Britain while the four Islamic terrorists jailed for plotting to blow up Bluewater and the Ministry of Sound with half a ton of fertiliser were all raised and schooled here.
Dr Nizami said: "The assumption that foreign imams equal something undesirable is not always true. In fact some of the more radical elements of British society are British-born. This is not an issue that needs to be seen in terms of religion, but in issues of alienation and deprivation."
He said education was key to preventing a new generation of Muslim extremists growing up in Britain.
"Immigrant communities have to do more to get integrated, particularly on issues of language and education," he said.
Dr Nizami, who is a British delegate at a conference on bridging the gap between Islam and the West, expressed concern at the poor academic achievements of Muslims in Britain, particularly those from Pakistan and Bangladesh.
"This is partly because of issues about their access to good state schools, but this is also because they receive poor family support," he said.
But on Tuesday some Muslim groups said it was unfair to point the finger of blame at parents, and that the Government should commit more funding to language lessons for immigrants while mosque leaders must ensure sermons are delivered in English.
Inayat Bunglawala, spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, said: "There is really no question regarding the central importance of parents taking an active interest in the better education of their children. But we need to be cautious of putting too much blame on parents for the actions of their children.
"As we have seen in the cases of the 7/7 bombers and terrorists who have been convicted since then, many of them were extremely adept at deceiving their closest family relatives about their intentions."
A spokesman for the Ramadhan Foundation, British's leading Muslim youth organisation, said: "There are systematic mistakes, with the Government cutting funding for people who want to learn English. The imams have also got to look at sermons being delivered in English."
The conference at which Dr Nizami spoke, held in Kuala Lumpur this week, heard that the divide between the Muslim world and the West continues to undermine constructive political, economic, social and religious engagement.
One of the world's leading Muslims told delegates that the former British prime minister, Tony Blair, is viewed with suspicion by the Arab world in his new role as a Middle East envoy.
Imam Feisal, leader of New York's Masjid al-Farah mosque said: "The perception exists that his being at the forefront of taking Britain into war has reduced his credibility in being able to be seen as an honest broker."
Meanwhile the Vatican warned on Tuesday that the West is in danger of becoming "obsessed" with Muslims.
Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, the Roman Catholic Church's leading expert on inter-faith dialogue, said discussions between different religious groups must not be "held hostage" by Islam.
His comments came just a day after a report commissioned by the Church of England found that the Government was "focusing intently" on Islam at the expense of Christianity, to which it only paid "lip service".
University introduces four-year degrees for weak students
Source: Telegraph (6-11-08)
A leading university has been forced to extend degree courses by 12 months because students are poorly educated.
Imperial College London has added a year to engineering degrees to teach the basic skills that students failed to learn at school and college.
Most of the first year is now spent going over remedial mathematics and science.
An admissions tutor at Imperial - ranked the world's fifth best university last year - said many "spoon-fed" students left sixth-form with a string of good A-levels, even though knowledge of core subjects was weak.
David Robb, senior lecturer in mechanical engineering, insisted A-levels were no longer rigorous enough to pick out the best students.
But in a blow to the Government, he also warned Imperial was not planning to offer places to teenagers who took new-style diploma qualifications, which will combine academic study with work-based training.
He said the university was "much more on the academic end and we would not consider that as a reasonable route into our courses".
The comments - in evidence to MPs on the Commons schools select committee - comes just days after Imperial confirmed it was introducing its own entrance test to identify the brightest applicants.
Mr Robb said four out of his top five students last year came from Singapore, where they were more likely to study further maths to a high standard.
He said: "We have actually had to extend most of our courses from three years to four years. Some of the first year is actually bringing them up to the level they should have been and hopefully also making them aware of their ability to survive outside of a school environment where they are spoon fed.
"Most science and engineering courses are going to four years if they haven't already done so."
Mr Robb was giving evidence to a select committee investigation on the state of the National Curriculum.
There are fears that the existing curriculum is no longer fit for purpose. Critics claim the pressure of targets and league tables prompts many schools to "teach to the test" - meaning pupils miss out on key subject knowledge.
Mr Robb said: "I have just spent two days marking examination papers and about 15 students had forgotten what the area of a circle was. We need students coming into our university who are really confident with their basic mathematical and physical principles."
He added: "Engineers have got to get things right. You can't say, 'this looks about right'. You have got to believe in those calculations. There are, bluntly, people's lives at stake. If you get the calculations wrong, engineers can kill."
He said the decline in standard of A-level standards had come despite a rise in the number of students gaining good grades.
In the mid-80s, B grades were considered a "standard entry requirement" to Imperial, he said.
But last year the university demanded straight As and was "totally oversubscribed".
"The A-level assessment at the moment is not providing the filter that we require," he said.
Ministers have already announced the introduction of an A* grade to pick out the brightest students. The best sixth-formers starting courses in September will be awarded the new elite grades.
But Mr Rob said: "When is the A** going to come in? If you look at the trend in A-grades it's going up every year. A-levels were originally designed as an entrance to university and it has now been distorted to a general education qualification.
"I'm not criticising but the knock-on effect is people have failed to realise we need it as a ranking mechanism and this last two years we have run into trouble on that."
Doubts Raised About Ancient Christian Shrine in Jordan
Source: AP (6-11-08)
Archaeologists in Jordan continued to say Tuesday they'd discovered a cave underneath one of the world's oldest churches that may have been an even more ancient site of Christian worship, but an outside expert expressed caution about the claim.
Archaeologist Abdel-Qader Hussein, head of the Rihab Center for Archaeological Studies, said this week that the cave was unearthed in the northern Jordanian city of Rihab after three months of excavation and shows evidence of early Christian rituals.
The cave is under St. Georgeous Church, built in A.D. 230.
If it predates the existing church, that would make it one of the oldest Christian shrines in the world, along with one unearthed in the Jordanian southern port of Aqaba in 1998 and another in Israel discovered in 2005.
Yemeni archeological sites must be protected, urge academics
Source: Yemen Observer (6-11-08)
Any official proved to be involved in archeology crimes must be removed from his position and charged with the crime of defiling Yemen’s historical identity and cultural heritage, stated one of the recommendations that participants agreed on during a symposium called “The Protection of Yemen’s Archeology and the Preservation of its Civilization Heritage,” organized by the Progress and Advancement Forum on Sunday.
Under the sponsorship of Yahya Mohammed Abdullah Saleh, Chairmen of the Forum, academics, intellectuals and media figures asked the establishment for a court specialized in archeology crimes, and called urged members of the antiquities’ protection bodies to impose disciplinary action against every official in the state, be they civilian or military, involved in any archeology-related crime.
The participants also recommended reviewing all pending issues related to archeology, which are still under judicial proceedings. “The government must give the issue of Yemen’s archeology protection a status of permanent priority. It is also urgent to restore all robbed antiquities that have been smuggled abroad, through internationally recognized means.
The Ministries of Culture, Tourism and Information, local administration, education and civil society organizations that participated in the forum, commissioned to prepare proposals for the draft amendments to some articles of the Protection Archeology Law. The protection law issued in 1994 and amended in 1997 as well as the new amendments, should submit to the government to complete the legal and constitutional procedures for approval.
The amendments must have stringent items criminalizing all who were found guilty of any crimes tampering archeology, distortion, smuggle, trade or concealment. “Such crimes classified as big crimes that require physical harsh and deterrent punishment,” confirmed the Forum’s participants.
The participants called for two new colleges, of Archeology and Tourism, to be set up in the provinces of Marib and Hadhramout to attract people from the two provinces and other provinces to study and train in archaeology and preservation. The establishment of the two colleges aims to raise younger generations’ awareness of historical monuments and cultural heritage of Yemen.
The Forum also requested the inclusion in the curricula of primary and secondary education subjects treating the importance of Yemeni archeology, taking into account the different age’s levels.
They also demanded primary education curricula on Yemeni archeology, inclusion of archaeology in the history curriculum at all Yemeni universities, and the establishment of archaeological trips for students from schools and universities.
Recommendations of the forum noted the need for media organizations, governmental press institutions and newspapers to make programs and activities aimed at sensitizing the community about the importance of archeology, cultural heritage and the history of Yemen. This is in order to promote and define them to the world, and expose all the damage of crimes against antiquities.
“This is priceless wealth, and we must work to identify, classify and index these artifacts in Yemen and account for them abroad, working to recover them according to international laws and norms,” Saleh said. “We also must provide appropriate material, scientific and human resources, possibilities to conduct exploration and research to discover as much as possible from Yemeni civilization and creativity,” he added.
The symposium was attended by Mohammed Abu Bakr al-Maflahi, Minister of Culture, Nabil al-Faqeeh, Minister of Tourism, Abdul-Aziz Bin Habtoor, Deputy of Education Minister, and Dr. Abdullah Bawazer, chairman of the General Authority of Antiquities and Museums.
Nepal's deposed king leaves palace for last time
Source: AFP (6-11-08)
Nepal's former king Gyanendra left his palace in Kathmandu late on Wednesday for the last time to live as a commoner in a former hunting lodge on the outskirts of the capital.
Gyanendra and his wife Komal Shah left in the back of a black Mercedes as hundreds of riot police surrounded the main gate of the sprawling Narayanhiti palace complex in the heart of the ancient temple-studded city.
Shouts of "long live the republic" rang out from a crowd of about 500 people who watched Gyanendra's departure while a few pro-royalists cried.
"Former king Gyanendra Shah and his wife Komal Shah have left the palace," police officer Bharat Lama told AFP.
New Book ONE MINUTE TO MIDNIGHT Reveals Accidental U-2 Flight Over Soviet Airspace During Missile Crisis
Source: National Security Archive (6-11-08)
Washington, DC, June 11, 2008 - An American spy plane went missing over the Soviet Union at the height of the Cuban missile crisis for one and a quarter hours without the Air Force informing either President Kennedy or Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, according to a new book by Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs (drawing on documents posted here today by the National Security Archive.)
The accidental intrusion into Soviet air space by a U-2 belonging to the Strategic Air Command on October 27, 1962, is still classified Top Secret by the Air Force and has received little attention from missile crisis historians. Dobbs discovered a map in the National Archives that reveals for the first time the precise route taken by Captain Charles Maultsby as he was chased by Soviet Mig Fighters over the Chukotka Peninsula.
This is the second of five postings looking at the new material in One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War, which draws on the National Security Archive's long-standing documentary work on the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Air Force was able to track Maultsby's flight route by intercepting Soviet Air Defense communications, but did not inform McNamara about the incident until Maultsby left Soviet air space, ran out of fuel, and glided home to Alaska. Khrushchev later expressed concern that the intruding U.S. plane could have been mistaken "for a nuclear bomber, which might push us to a fateful step."
In coming weeks, the National Security Archive will publish more of the key primary sources behind One Minute to Midnight. New postings will cover such episodes as the storage and handling of Soviet nuclear weapons on Cuba, and the "Eyeball to Eyeball" confrontation between U.S. and Soviet ships that never happened.
What Is Owed to Native Americans?
Source: WaPo (6-11-08)
A lawsuit over billions of dollars in royalties collected from oil and gas companies that leased Native American land has meandered through the court system for so long that a federal judge recently compared the case to Charles Dickens's "Bleak House," a tome about a long-running and convoluted legal dispute.
"The 'suit has, in course of time, become so complicated' that 'no two lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises,' " U.S. District Judge James Robertson wrote in a long January opinion, using Dickens's words to describe the 12-year odyssey of Cobell v. Kempthorne.
On Monday, Robertson began overseeing what is expected to be a two-week-long bench trial in a contentious saga that has seen numerous legal twists and political turns worthy of Dickens.
Robertson is hoping to answer the last key question in the legal battle: How much money, if any, is owed to hundreds of thousands of Native Americans who sued over alleged improper management of the gas and oil royalties by the Interior Department over the last 121 years? The plaintiffs are seeking at least $58 billion, according to court records.
Prince Charles pays off royal debt ... 350 years late
Source: AFP (6-10-08)
Heir to the throne Prince Charles on Tuesday paid off a family debt incurred more than 350 years ago -- but was spared the accumulated interest that could have run into tens of thousands of pounds.
Charles handed over 453 pounds and 15 pence (572 euros and 20 euro cents, 885 dollars and four cents) which King Charles II failed to pay to the Clothiers Company in Worcester, central England, in 1651.
The king had commissioned uniforms for his troops to fight the republican forces of Oliver Cromwell at the Battle of Worcester the same year.
The modern-day Charles handed over the cash on a visit to the former headquarters of the royalist troops in the Faithful City, so-called because it remained loyal to his ancestor during the English Civil War.
Aussie dinosaur bone takes bite out of theory of continental drift
Source: AFP (6-10-08)
A dinosaur bone discovered in Australia has defied prevailing wisdom about how the world's continents separated from a super-continent millions of years ago, a new study published on Tuesday said.
The 19-centimetre (eight-inch) bone was found in southeastern Australia but it comes from a very close cousin to Megaraptor, a flesh-ripping monster that lorded over swathes of South American some 90 million years ago.
The extraordinary similarity between the two giant theropods adds weight to a dissident view about the breakup of a super-continent, known as Gondwana, that formed the continents of the southern hemisphere, the authors say.
Sen. Jim Webb's rebel roots: An affinity for Confederacy
Source: Politico.com (6-10-08)
Barack Obama’s vice presidential vetting team will undoubtedly run across some quirky and potentially troublesome issues as it goes about the business of scouring the backgrounds of possible running mates. But it’s unlikely they’ll find one so curious as Virginia Democratic Sen. Jim Webb’s affinity for the cause of the Confederacy.
Webb is no mere student of the Civil War era. He’s an author, too, and he’s left a trail of writings and statements about one of the rawest and most sensitive topics in American history.
He has suggested many times that while the Confederacy is a symbol to many of the racist legacy of slavery and segregation, for others it simply reflects Southern pride. In a June 1990 speech in front of the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, posted on his personal website, he lauded the rebels’ “gallantry,” which he said “is still misunderstood by most Americans.”
Webb, a descendant of Confederate officers, also voiced sympathy for the notion of state sovereignty as it was understood in the early 1860s, and seemed to suggest that states were justified in trying to secede.
“Most Southern soldiers viewed the driving issue to be sovereignty rather than slavery,” he said. “Love of the Union was palpably stronger in the South than in the North before the war — just as overt patriotism is today — but it was tempered by a strong belief that state sovereignty existed prior to the Constitution and that it had never been surrendered.”
Historic trial replays in Hungary
Source: BBC (6-9-08)
An audio recording of the 1958 secret trial of Hungary's executed prime minister Imre Nagy is being played in public for the first time. It marks the 50th anniversary of Mr Nagy's trial for treason for his role in the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising.
The 52 hours of tapes began playing on Monday morning, and will continue in real time in a gallery in Budapest.
The 1956 revolution is seen by many Hungarians as one of the proudest moments in their history. Mr Nagy was prime minister during the Hungarian revolution, which was crushed by Soviet tanks after only 12 days.
President Bush regrets his legacy as man who wanted war
Source: Times (UK) (6-11-08)
President Bush has admitted to The Times that his gun-slinging rhetoric made the world believe that he was a “guy really anxious for war” in Iraq. He said that his aim now was to leave his successor a legacy of international diplomacy for tackling Iran.
In an exclusive interview, he expressed regret at the bitter divisions over the war and said that he was troubled about how his country had been misunderstood. “I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric.”
Phrases such as “bring them on” or “dead or alive”, he said, “indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace”. He said that he found it very painful “to put youngsters in harm’s way”. He added: “I try to meet with as many of the families as I can. And I have an obligation to comfort and console as best as I possibly can. I also have an obligation to make sure that those lives were not lost in vain.”
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
South Korea Education Ministry under fire for history textbook revision plan
Source: http://english.hani.co.kr (6-10-08)
Conservative business group proposed history textbook revisions in April and gov’t followed.
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The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology is drawing criticism for allegedly trying to become involved in the process of revising history textbooks, after its plans to hold a rare meeting with the textbook editors. The ministry’s plan came about following a strong call from conservative historians and businesses for revisions to middle and high school history textbooks.
The ministry sent an official letter to the publishers of the textbook “A Modern and Contemporary History of Korea” on June 9. The letter said: “A meeting of editors to revise the book ‘A Modern and Contemporary History of Korea’ for the school year 2009 will be held on June 12 at the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology,” according to the textbook’s editors. The letter was sent to the six publishing companies that were involved with the book’s publication, including Kumsung Publishing.
“In the area of social studies, there have been editorial meetings to revise terms used in the subjects of geography and world history. But this is the first time that the editors of ‘A Modern and Contemporary History of Korea’ will meet,” one of the publishing company officials said.
Another official from another of the textbook’s publishing companies said, “I haven’t been notified about the meeting agenda, but there is a lingering controversy over a demand made by the Korean Chamber of Commerce and Industry to revise it. I guess there may be discussions about that as well.”
In April, the KCCI requested that textbook revisions be made and submitted a proposal to the government that expressed the KCCI’s conservative bias. One of the statements contained within the proposal said, “It is doubtful that Korean people would have had the ability to establish their own country prior to the Japanese occupation.” The ministry then asked the publishing companies to consider to what extent they would accept the proposal.
In response, some of the publishing companies said they felt this was a rare request and was becoming a heavy burden to them.
A number of the textbook’s editors also said that the government had shown its willingness to reflect the KCCI’s arguments by acting as a broker (between the publishing companies).
One of the textbook’s editors said, “There is a lot of room for debate within the subject of history, depending on the viewpoint one takes. The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology’s attitude could be considered censorship of a certain historical perspective.”
An official with the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology said, “The June 12 meeting is not related to the KCCI’s proposal for (textbook) revisions. If there is misunderstanding about it, the ministry will consider canceling the meeting.”
The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology said, however, “A textbook revision is unavoidable this year because there are many national and social demands to be met. Textbook editors are reviewing the KCCI’s proposal for revisions and will make a decision about which parts will undergo revision by the end of June.”
Global Military Spending Soars 45 Percent in 10 Years
Source: AFP (6-9-08)
World military spending grew 45 percent in the past decade, with the United States accounting for nearly half of all expenditures, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said Monday.
Military spending grew six percent last year alone, according to SIPRI’s annual report.
In 2007, 1,339 billion dollars (851 billion euros) was spent on arms and other military expenditures, corresponding to 2.5 percent of global gross domestic product, or GDP, and 202 dollars for each of the world’s 6.6 billion people.
The United States spends by far the most towards military aims, dishing out 547 billion dollars last year, or 45 percent of global expenditure.
Britain, China, France and Japan — the next in line of big spenders — lag far behind, accounting for just four to five percent of world military costs each.
Sitting Bull's tribe to regain control of southern Badlands
Source: Independent (UK) (6-10-08)
Nearly 120 years after the last massacre of Native Americans by the United States cavalry at Wounded Knee, some of the lands confiscated from their descendants are to be returned to the Oglala Sioux.
Badlands National Park in South Dakota, which encompasses Wounded Knee, is one of the poorest parts of the US. It has few paved roads. Unemployment is shockingly high among the Sioux. Alcoholism is rampant and there are high rates of suicide and imprisonment of American Indians.
After decades of protests, the park service is now planning to return the southern part of the park to Indian control. It will take an act of Congress to approve, but is expected to occur next year. Though broadly welcomed by the Sioux residents, there are those who say the land should be returned to the original owners for private use rather than to the tribal council as a park.
Nuclear sub joins shipwreck hunt
Source: BBC (6-10-08)
The US naval fleet's smallest nuclear-powered submarine is to attempt to locate the wreck of a ship which sank off the Yorkshire coast in 1779.
The Bonhomme Richard - captained by Scottish-born sailor John Paul Jones - went down off Flamborough Head.
Jones is widely regarded as the founder of the modern day US navy.
History experts now hope to use modern technology to find the wreck, which has been the subject of a number of discovery attempts in recent years.
The 150ft-long nuclear-powered NR 1 submarine was first used in 1969.
A tribe reclaims its ancestors in New York
Source: International Herald Tribune (6-10-08)
A hushed group of people, nearly four dozen strong, slipped into the American Museum of Natural History, ahead of the crowds. Their cheeks were smeared with rust-colored dye, red and white woven bands encircled their heads.
They were at the end of a journey that had, in its way, taken years. Unlike the thousands of schoolchildren that filled the museum's halls Monday, these 46 visitors were there for an altogether different purpose: to take their ancestors home.
"Our people are humans; we aren't tokens," said Chief Vern Jacks, who heads the Tseycum First Nation, a tiny native tribe from northern Vancouver Island, in British Columbia.
With the museum's full consent, the Tseycum tribe will be repatriating the remains of 55 of their ancestors to Canada this week.
Barack Obama's victory stirs Mississippi ghosts
Source: LAT (6-10-08)
PHILADELPHIA, MISS. -- Some places are defined by a single event. Roswell, N.M., will always be known for space aliens, Dallas for assassination. And this little town in the Piney Woods of eastern Mississippi will forever be the site of one of the most brutal crimes of the civil rights era.
But Philadelphia -- situated in a county once dubbed Bloody Neshoba -- can now add a remarkable footnote to its most nefarious chapter: The rural county where three men were killed for trying to help black people vote has cast the majority of its ballots to put a black man in the White House.
Much has changed here since African Americans like Sylvia Campbell, now 74, were told they couldn't vote unless they correctly answered how many bubbles were in a bar of soap.
But much is the same. For all the excitement about Barack Obama and his history-making run for president, there is anxiety, too, because the present is still a hostage to the past. Everything in this slow town of one-way streets and more than 80 churches is viewed through the lens of race. Obama's success makes some people as anxious as it makes others proud.
"It's just the impossibility of it," Campbell said again and again of the presumed Democratic nominee. She had just come from a weeknight Bible study at her church, Mt. Zion United Methodist, which the Ku Klux Klan once burned down. "I know Mississippians. Barack Obama will never change the uneducated whites from the South. I don't care what he does. If he made some of them millionaires, he'll never change them."
Corsicans still remember the U.S. Air Force of World War II
Source: International Herald Tribune (6-9-08)
So many American planes and airmen were stationed on this French Mediterranean island during World War II that they called it the USS Corsica - an unsinkable aircraft carrier. Up and down its flat eastern shore stretched a string of 14 airfields, the jumping-off points for B-25 bombers and P-47 fighters that attacked German lines throughout Italy, southern France and Austria.
More than 50,000 American pilots, mechanics, nurses, doctors, cooks, truck drivers and others passed through Corsica after it was taken from its German occupiers in late 1943.
They are long gone, of course, and most of the airfields are, too, though a French Air Force base now sits on the site of one of them, outside this coastal town.
But six decades later, memories of them linger. Colonel Denis Charlot, who commands the 920 French Air Force personnel at Solenzara, shows a visitor a neatly folded American flag that the family of Edward Mogren, a Chicago native and B-25 pilot, presented to him during a visit last year. Mogren, who served with the 57th Bomb Wing on Corsica, died in 2003 at 82, and the flag was draped over his coffin.
New addition to Vicksburg battle history
Source: AP (6-9-08)
The Crawford Street home in which the Civil War defense of Vicksburg was planned has opened to the public but for the first time as a permanent asset of the National Park Service.
Pemberton's Headquarters, also known as the Willis-Cowan House, remains a work in progress - but will be open on Mondays from 9 a.m. until 4 p.m. in June and July.
The home, where Confederate Gen. John C. Pemberton also made the decision to surrender Vicksburg to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in July 1863, was a private home before, during and for many years after the war. It was purchased for federal preservation in 2003 and will be operated by the Vicksburg National Military Park.
Rep. Kucinich introduces Bush impeachment resolution
Source: AP (6-10-08)
Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a former Democratic presidential contender, said Monday he wants the House to consider a resolution to impeach President Bush.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi consistently has said impeachment was ''off the table.''
Kucinich, D-Ohio, read his proposed impeachment language in a floor speech. He contended Bush deceived the nation and violated his oath of office in leading the country into the Iraq war.
Kucinich introduced a resolution last year to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney. That resolution was killed, but only after Republicans initially voted in favor of taking up the measure to force a debate.
Ancient laborer burial ground excavated near Rome
Source: AP (6-9-08)
First-century burial grounds near Rome's main
airport are yielding a rare look into how ancient
longshoremen and other manual workers did backbreaking
jobs, archaeologists said Monday.
The necropolis near the town of Ponte Galeria came to
light last year when customs police noticed a
clandestine dig by grave robbers seeking valuable
ancient artifacts, Rome's archaeology office said.
Most of the 300 skeletons unearthed were male, and
many of them showed signs of years of heavy work:
joint and tendon inflammation, compressed vertebrae,
hernias and spinal problems, archaeologists said.
Sandy sediment helped preserve the remains well.
Were African-Americans at Iwo Jima?
Source: Time.com (6-10-08)
Sixty-three years after U.S. forces vanquished the Japanese and planted their flag on Iwo Jima's Mount Suribachi, the remote outpost in the Volcano Islands is the focus of another pitched battle. This time, acclaimed film directors Clint Eastwood and Spike Lee are engaging in verbal warfare over the verisimilitude of Eastwood's two films about the epic clash, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. Lee has claimed that by soft-pedaling African-American contributions to the battle, Eastwood is misrepresenting history.
"Clint Eastwood made two films about Iwo Jima that ran for more than four hours total, and there was not one Negro actor on the screen," Lee said at the Cannes Film Festival. "In his version of Iwo Jima, Negro soldiers did not exist." Eastwood's counter: "Has he ever studied history? [African-American soldiers] didn't raise the flag," he said. "If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, they'd say, "This guy's lost his mind.'" Eastwood also told Lee to "shut his face," prompting Lee to amplify the racism charge: "[Eastwood] is not my father and we're not on a plantation, either," he fumed. "I'm not making this up. I know history."
History, as it turns out, is on both their sides. Lee is correct that African-Americans played an instrumental role in World War II, in which more than 1 million black servicemen helped defeat the Axis Powers. Those efforts include significant contributions to the fight for Iwo Jima. An estimated 700 to 900 African-American soldiers participated in the epic island battle, many of whom were Marines trained in segregated boot camps at Montford Point, within Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.
Those soldiers were restricted from front-line combat duty, but they played integral noncombat roles. Under enemy fire, they piloted amphibious truck units during perilous shore landings, unloaded and shuttled ammunition to the front lines, helped bury the dead, and weathered Japanese onslaughts on their positions even after the island had been declared secure. According to Christopher Moore, the author of a book about African-Americans' myriad contributions during World War II, "thousands" more helped fashion the airstrips from which U.S. B-29 aircrafts could launch and return from air assaults on Tokyo, about 760 miles northwest. Hosting that air base, Moore says, was Iwo Jima's primary strategic importance.
Eastwood's portrayal of the specific battle is, if narrow, also essentially accurate. Flags Of Our Fathers zeroes in on the soldiers who hoisted the U.S. flag atop Mount Suribachi, and this task, memorialized in a famous staged photograph, was accomplished by five white servicemen and a sixth, Ira Hayes, of Pima Indian descent. (His other entry in the Iwo Jima category, Letters from Iwo Jima, is told largely from the perspective of Japanese soldiers.)
Eastwood is also correct that black soldiers represented a small fraction of the total force deployed on the island. That argument doesn't placate Yvonne Latty, a New York University professor and author of a book about African-American veterans. Black soldiers "had the most dangerous job," she says. "If you were going to show the soldiers' landing, you'd need to show [African-Americans] on the beach." In Flags of Our Fathers, which shows the landing in significant detail, African-Americans appear only in fleeting cutaway shots and in a photograph during the film's closing credits.
Moore lauds Eastwood's rendering of the battle, but laments the limited role accorded to African-Americans. "Without black labor," he says, "we would've seen a much different ending to the war."
Beautifully restored Beauvoir reopens on Jeff Davis' bicentennial
Source: The Vicksburg Post (6-8-08)
BILOXI - Bert Hayes-Davis stood on the porch at Beauvoir and phoned his wife, Carol, in Colorado Springs. Hurricane winds were picking up in the Gulf, and Hayes-Davis told his wife, "I hope a hurricane never hits it."
He was the last member of the Davis family to stand on that porch, the last of the descendants of President Jefferson Davis to leave the ancestral home on the Mississippi Coast before Hurricane Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005.
Last Tuesday, June 3, the 200th anniversary of the birth of Jefferson Davis, his great-great-grandson, Bert Hayes-Davis, stood on the rebuilt porch and told a crowd of thousands, "We saw the worst. We've gotten the best. What a birthday present."
Though much of the Coast was destroyed by Katrina, after the winds subsided and the waters receded, the house was still standing. The outbuildings were gone, the roof damaged, the porch blown away, many of the artifacts lost forever - but Beauvoir was still there.
More than $4.5 million dollars later, and with the help of untold volunteer man-hours from people from all over the United States, the house stands restored, looking as it did the day Jefferson Davis left it for the last time in 1889.
Beauvoir is again the jewel of the Coast.
Monday, June 9, 2008
Deep-Sea Explorers Fight Spain for Treasure
Source: AP (6-9-08)
There's no end in sight for the treasure dispute between U.S.-based deep-sea explorers and the Spanish government.
Odyssey Marine Exploration of Tampa, Fla., is battling Spain in federal court over the ownership of an estimated $500 million of coins and other artifacts. The treasure was rescued last year from what is believed to be a 19th-century Spanish shipwreck.
Attorneys for both sides told a federal magistrate judge Monday that they are still exchanging information and may be doing that well into the fall or later.
That means it will be at least next year before the case makes it to trial.
Ancient Christian Shrine Possibly Found in Jordan
Source: AP (6-9-08)
Archaeologists in Jordan say they have discovered a catacomb underneath one of the world's oldest churches that may be an even more ancient site of Christian worship.
Archaeologist Abdel-Qader Hussein, head of the Rihab Center for Archaeological Studies, says the catacombs were unearthed in the northern Jordanian city of Rihab after three months of excavation and show evidence of early Christian rituals.
Shortly after the death of Jesus Christ, disciples founded churches in the area, many of them underground to escape persecution.
Germany and Italy in dispute over Second World War slaves
Source: Telegraph (UK) (6-8-08)
Former Second World War allies Germany and Italy are battling each other over compensation claims by former slave labourers.
The wrangling has been prompted by a ruling last week in Italy's top civilian court that Germany must pay compensation to Italian soldiers it forced into working for Hitler's regime.
In 1943, Italy declared a truce with the Allies and the Nazis seized an estimated 600,000 Italian soldiers.
But yesterday, Manfred Gentz, from the Remembrance, Responsibility and Future Foundation, which was set up in 2000 with £4billion from the German state and business to compensate slave labourers, said there was no money for the Italian soldiers, whose claims could reach £48 million.
Citing History, Bush Suggests His Policies Will One Day Be Vindicated
Source: WaPo (6-9-08)
Meet George W. Bush, time traveler.
He's in Poland in 1939 as Nazi tanks advance on Warsaw, then flying with his Navy-pilot father to battle imperial Japan. He's alongside Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, William McKinley on his deathbed and Franklin D. Roosevelt on D-Day. He lingers with Harry S. Truman, another U.S. president deeply unpopular in his time.
President Bush leaps forward as well, envisioning a distant future in which Iraq is a tranquil democracy, Palestinians live peaceably alongside Israelis and terrorism is a tactic of the past.
"Imagine if a president had stood before the first graduating class of this academy five decades ago and told the Cadet Wing that by the end of the 20th century, the Soviet Union would be no more, communism would stand discredited and the vast majority of the world's nations would be democracies," Bush urged graduates at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs nearly two weeks ago.
As the door begins to close on his tenure, Bush is increasingly drawing on selected events of the past to argue that history will vindicate him on Iraq, terrorism, trade and other controversial issues.
The 'Obama Before Obama'
Source: WaPo (6-7-08)
LOUISA, Va. -- Planted in the lawn at the courthouse on West Main Street here is a gray historical marker that draws little attention. It proudly proclaims that the country's first black elected official was native son John Mercer Langston, born in this central Virginia county, the son of a wealthy white planter and an emancipated slave of Indian and black ancestry.
History seems to whisper more often than it shouts. Langston was one of the most extraordinary men of the 19th century, and yet his achievements -- prominent abolitionist, first black congressman from Virginia, founder of what would become the Howard University law school -- have largely been forgotten. In the arc of American advancement toward black political empowerment, Langston represents the symbolic beginning. Elected township clerk of Brownhelm, Ohio, on April 2, 1855, he became, by many accounts, the first "Negro" elevated to public office by popular vote.
It took 153 years to get from John Mercer Langston to Barack Hussein Obama, a journey that endured the dashed hopes of Reconstruction and the oppression of Jim Crow to arrive at a moment that has stunned even those optimistic about America's racial progress. An underdog black politician has secured a major party's presidential nomination in a country where less than 4 percent of its elected officials are African Americans?
Sunday, June 8, 2008
The net is finally closing on El Principe, the Pinochet henchman who brutally killed Chile's most famous musician
Source: Guardian (6-7-08)
It would have strained credulity to imagine during the orgy of terror unleashed by the US-backed coup on the other 9/11, in 1973. But 35 years after Richard Nixon gave the green light to the Chilean military to drown Salvador Allende's elected socialist government in blood, the net is finally closing on the man who personally machine-gunned to death one of the outstanding political songwriters of the 20th century.
This week, Judge Juan Eduardo Fuentes agreed to re-open the investigation into the murder of Victor Jara, Chile's most famous musician, killed by an army officer in the Estadio Chile stadium in Santiago, where he had been interned, beaten and tortured with 5,000 other "subversives" in the wake of General Pinochet's fascist takeover.
Last month, Fuentes closed the Jara case after finding a retired army colonel, Mario Manriquez, guilty of the murder as commanding officer at the stadium after the 1973 coup, while accepting that Manriquez had not pulled the trigger.
A pre-dawn fire that nearly destroyed the Texas Governor's Mansion appears to have been intentionally set.
Source: Dallas Morning News (7-8-08)
State Fire Marshal Paul Maldonado said Sunday that investigators have evidence that an arsonist targeted the 152-year-old building. They have made no arrests, and don't have a suspect.
An official close to the investigation said agents determined the fire was a criminal act after reviewing footage from security cameras. A national response team from the U.S. Department of Justice arrives Monday to help dig through the wreckage for clues.
No one was injured in the four-alarm blaze, which engulfed the historic landmark and sent orange flames billowing from the front door and second story terrace.
Is this Obama cartoon in the New Yorker playing on stereotypes?
Source: Ari Kelman, an associate professor of history at UC Davis, at the blog, Edge of the American West (6-7-08)
To me, the image [above] looks an awful lot like an anthropomorphic chimpanzee (sorry for the lousy screen cap). But that’s silly, of course, because it’s Barack Obama! Brought to you by the New Yorker! Right on the magazine’s home page! Actually, the image is a tease for a video about drawing the presidential candidates, including a meditation on Obama’s efforts to cast himself as post-racial. Still, it strikes me that this caricature — and perhaps the video as well — suggests one or more of the following: 1) I’m too sensitive. 2) Editors at the New Yorker aren’t sensitive enough. 3) Having an African-American man run for president will present extraordinary, and likely salutary, challenges for our culture. To be clear, 1, 2, and 3 are in no way mutually exclusive.
Oglala Sioux could regain Badlands national parkland
Source: LAT (6-8-08)
BADLANDS NATIONAL PARK, S.D. -- The southern half of this swath of grasslands and chiseled pink spires looks untouched from a distance. Closer up, the scars of history are easy to see.
Unexploded bombs lie in ravines, a reminder of when the military confiscated the land from the Oglala Sioux tribe during World War II and turned it into an artillery range. Poachers who have stolen thousands of fossils over the years have left gouges in the landscape. On a plateau, a solitary makeshift hut sits ringed by empty Coke cans and shaving cream canisters. It is the only remnant of a three-year occupation by militant tribal activists who had demanded that the land be returned.
Now the National Park Service is contemplating doing just that: giving the 133,000-acre southern half of Badlands National Park back to the tribe. The northern half, which has a paved road and a visitor center, would remain with the park system.
Where Whites Draw the Line
Source: NYT (6-8-08)
How black is too black?
Millions of African-Americans celebrated Barack Obama’s historic victory, seeing in it a reflection — sudden and shocking — of their own expanded horizons. But whether Mr. Obama captures the White House in November will depend on how he is seen by white Americans. Indeed, some people argue that one of the reasons Mr. Obama was able to defeat Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was that a large number of white voters saw him as “postracial.”
In other words, Mr. Obama was black, but not too black.
But where is the line? Does it change over time? And if it is definable, then how black can Mr. Obama be before he alienates white voters? Or, to pose the question more cynically, how black do the Republicans have to make him to win?
Social observers say a common hallmark of African-Americans who have achieved the greatest success, whether in business, entertainment or politics — Oprah Winfrey, Magic Johnson and Mr. Obama — is that they do not convey a sense of black grievance.
Clearly, Mr. Obama understands this. Until his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, forced race into the political debate, Mr. Obama rarely dwelt on it. He gave his groundbreaking speech on race only in response to the Wright controversy.
Hamilton Home Heads to a Greener Address
Source: NYT (6-7-08)
No matter that Alexander Hamilton’s country home, the Grange, is 206 years old. Until now, it had been in a perfectly contemporary Manhattan real estate bind: not enough space.
What to do? Move, of course.
So on Saturday, the two-story, 298-ton wood-frame house will be rolled conspicuously — and slowly — from its cramped site on Convent Avenue to an appropriately verdant new location a block away in St. Nicholas Park, facing West 141st Street. That is as close as it can get these days to the rural setting for which it was originally designed.
Once new foundations are completed, a yearlong, $8.4 million restoration and reconstruction will undo decades of unsympathetic alterations to the house, known formally as the Hamilton Grange National Memorial.
Stephen Spaulding, chief of the architectural preservation division in the National Park Service’s Northeast region, said the 500-foot move on Saturday should take three to six hours.
But in a sense, the journey has taken almost half a century. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy authorized the Interior Department to assume ownership of the house on the condition that it be moved to a suitable location.
The Long Road to a Clinton Exit
Source: NYT (6-8-08)
By the time the campaign tracked down the small-city Indiana mayor, Bill Clinton was in a lather. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton had lost the North Carolina primary that evening and was eager to offset it with a win in Indiana. But a vote-counting delay in one county threatened to rob her of a prime-time victory speech.
The Clinton campaign called a supporter for help. “I’ve got an angry president here and a candidate who wants to know whether or not she won,” a local campaign representative told the mayor, Thomas McDermott Jr. of Hammond, Ind. Mr. McDermott could hear Mr. Clinton railing in the background. “It’s not very often you basically have a former president yelling at you to get the numbers out,” he recalled.
The yelling was for naught. Mr. McDermott said he had no control over the vote count and, in the end, the late results cemented a negative narrative for an evening dominated by the North Carolina defeat with little attention focused on the eventual Indiana victory. The night of May 6 became the moment that Mrs. Clinton’s desperate comeback bid for the Democratic presidential nomination finally crashed against the reality of delegate math. All she had left was the perception of momentum, and suddenly, that was gone.
Hers was a campaign of destiny that fell achingly short, garnering nearly 18 million votes in her quest to become the first woman to hold the presidency. “Although we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest ceiling this time, thanks to you, it’s got about 18 million cracks in it,” Mrs. Clinton said as she ended her campaign on Saturday.
Obama First in More Ways Than Any U.S. Presidential Candidate
Source: Bloomberg News (6-7-08)
Barack Obama's political career boasts a long list of firsts. He is the first presumptive presidential nominee to be a native of Hawaii and the president of the Harvard Law Review. He's also the first candidate with more than 1 million contributors.
Obama, an Illinois senator, is the first presumptive presidential nominee in modern times to have a father who wasn't a U.S. citizen, the first to earn an undergraduate degree from Columbia University in New York and the first to have attended Occidental College in Los Angeles.
``Obama's nomination would be historic in almost every respect that you can think of,'' said presidential historian Michael Beschloss.
Obama has also chalked up many near-firsts in the race for the White House. He is the fourth Illinois elected official to clinch a party presidential nomination; if elected he would be the first since Abraham Lincoln. Ronald Reagan was born in Illinois and was governor of California. Obama is the only first-term senator to lead a major party since Warren Harding in 1920.
Friday, June 6, 2008
Remembering Polish soldiers who trained in Niagara-on-the-Lake 90 years ago
Source: The Standard (6-4-08)
NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE — The small plot of graves is immediately distinguishable from the others in St. Vincent de Paul cemetery.
Surrounded by a small iron fence, the 25 graves bear the emblem of a white eagle, the symbol of a free Poland. The names — Michael Byszewski, Jozef Dolwa, Jan Siatkowski — also set them apart.
In these graves, Henry Radecki said, are some of the bravest men in Poland’s history.
The soldiers were newly emigrated Polish-Americans when they travelled from the U.S. to Niagara-on-the-Lake to train for an independent Polish army during the First World War. Poland didn’t even exist at the time, having been occupied for 123 years by other countries.
About 20,000 trainees filed through Niagara-on-the-Lake from 1917 to 1919, sleeping in barns and crude barracks, outnumbering the town’s residents. The men in the 25 graves died in the Spanish influenza pandemic.
Each year, local Poles march from downtown Niagara-on-the-Lake to the cemetery plots, commemorating not only the spirit of the volunteers but the liberation of their motherland. This year is the 90th anniversary.
“The cemetery is a symbol only,” said Radecki, a retired sociology professor, war veteran and Polish immigrant who helps maintain the plots.
Yakama museum curator sentenced for artifact thefts
Source: seattlepi.com (6-6-08)
YAKIMA, Wash. -- A former Yakama Indian museum curator was given a nine-month sentence and her daughter a six-month prison term for stealing beaded bags and other artifacts from the museum.
At the Thursday federal court sentencing in Yakima, the 58-year-old woman, Marilyn Skahan-Malatare, and her 30-year-old daughter, Colette Julia Malatare, also were ordered to pay about $1,200 in restitution.
They were indicted in January and accused of embezzling and stealing artifacts worth $160,000. In a plea bargain in March they each pleaded guilty to one count of theft and embezzlement.
All of about 70 items known to have been taken have been recovered from the curator's home and pawn shops. Most had been donated by 1920s movie actor Nipo Strongheart, an adopted member of the Yakama Nation.
Association of Art Museum Directors Asks Members to Stop Stealing
Source: www.mediabistro.com (6-6-08)
Well here's kind of a funny one. So the Association of Art Museum Directors has assembled a big batch of museum directors from all over the country to put together a new set of guidelines and publish a report called "Acquisition of Archaeological Materials and Ancient Art." (PDF) Basically, it boils down to this message: "We need to stop stealing stuff." Apparently tired of museums getting raided by federal agents with guns, having to return pieces to the foreign countries they belong to, and seeing their names associated with employees who may or may not have been involved in slightly-less-than-legal dealings, the AAMD decided that it was high time to nip this behavior in the bud. This news, of course, came much to the chagrin of tomb robbers and cat burglars, all of whom rely on this market to put food on the table for their hungry tomb robbing, cat burglaring children. Our thoughts are with you during this difficult time, dear thieves. Here's a bit from Newsday:
The guidelines announced Wednesday by the Association of Art Museum Directors say that member museums should normally not acquire an ancient work of art unless research proves that the work was outside the country where it was discovered in 1970 or was legally exported from its country of discovery after 1970.
Objects without documentation going back that far are more likely to have been stolen or illegally dug up and smuggled out of their country of origin.
We love how flexible this all is. "...should not normally acquire..." That's a great line. "...should not normally acquire...unless it's really, really shiny."
Army defuses WWII's 'largest bomb ever dropped on London': police
Source: AFP (6-6-08)
A massive unexploded World War II bomb discovered in an east London river was defused by a specialist army team Friday, police said.
The discovery of the 2,200-pound (1,000-kilogramme) device, said by police to be "the largest bomb ever to be dropped on London" forced the closure of several rail services and part of the Underground.
The bomb was dredged from a river by a mechanical digger near Bromley-by-Bow Underground station on Monday, during work to clear a site for the 2012 Olympic Games.
Royal Engineers finally made the "Hermann" bomb safe, a day after it began to tick during efforts to defuse it, the Metropolitan Police said.
Iraq issues cards of stolen artifacts and passes them to Interpol
Source: http://www.iraqupdates.com (6-6-08)
More than five years after their disappearance, the Antiquities Department issues special identification cards of all artifacts that were looted from Iraq Museum shortly after the 2003 U.S. invasion.
The museum’s procurement manager, Muna Hassan, said more than 10,000 cards have been printed and passed to Interpol, the International Criminal Police Organization.
The department hopes the presence of these cards will make it easy for police across the world to identify the treasures.
It also says the fact that the Interpol is informed is bound to make it extremely difficult for smugglers to trade in these artifacts.
No Graduation Walk For Confederate Flag-Wavers
Source: http://wcco.com (6-4-08)
Flying the Confederate flag has long been controversial in Southern states but now it's causing a heated debate at Kennedy High School in Bloomington, Minn. Three seniors who displayed the flag will not be allowed to attend their graduation ceremony Wednesday evening.
"It was sitting like that in the parking lot," said Justin Thompson, as he held a Confederate flag that was hanging from a pole inside a pick-up truck bed.
On Tuesday, three seniors, each with a rebel flag on the back of their pick-ups, parked at Kennedy High School.
"I'm just a country type of person, country music, big trucks and everything, that's basically all it means to me," said Thompson.
"And then I found out later that day that it had been taken off when I got called down to the office," said Dan Fredin, who displayed the flag.
'Barack's voice was just like his father's - I thought he had come back from the dead'
Source: Guardian (6-6-08)
As Lake Victoria disappeared to the south, the road rose and fell, winding gently through the boulder-strewn hills of far western Kenya. Men rode heavy single-speed bicycles with sacks of charcoal strapped to the back; women walked, buckets of bananas balanced perfectly on their heads. Where a sign pointed the route to the Senator Obama Secondary School - Motto: Endeavour to excel - the asphalt gave way to bumpy red dirt. An American flag hung in front of the New Apostolic Church, providing a further clue to the identity of the village's favourite son.
A few miles further on, an 86-year-old woman sat on a plastic chair under a mango tree outside her simple three-bedroom house with a pale-blue corrugated iron roof. Television crews waited their turn to interview her. As chickens squawked, and cows grazed nearby, Sarah Obama appeared perplexed as to what the media fuss was all about.
"It's just a job, a government job," said "Mama Sarah", step-grandmother of the man who this week became the Democratic candidate in the US presidential race, during a recent visit. "I am not going to make a big deal out of it or pretend that it's anything really great."
Her comments would surely amuse Barack Obama, who first met his "granny" in his 20s when he came to Kenya in search of his roots. For while they show a refreshing modesty and honesty in a presidential campaign full of hyperbole, they also hint at the distance travelled by the Obama family over just three generations.
The story begins a few metres away from where Mama Sarah was sitting. There, an unpainted concrete headstone marks the resting place of her husband, Hussein Onyango Obama, herbalist, farmer and village elder. As Mama Sarah recounted in Barack Obama's 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father, Hussein was one of the first people in the village to wear trousers and a shirt rather than the traditional goatskin.
Machu Picchu ruin 'found earlier'
Source: BBC (6-6-08)
A team of historians says the lost city of the Incas, Machu Picchu, in Peru was discovered more than 40 years earlier than previously thought and ransacked.
Thursday, June 5, 2008
British Atlantis
Source: History Today (6-5-08)
A marine archaeological dig has started off the Suffolk coast to locate a prosperous medieval city swallowed by the sea. A research team from the University of Southampton began their search at Dunwich on June 5th using acoustic imaging technology. The group, which is funded by English Heritage and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, hope to find evidence of 16 large buildings, including a monastery and palace, dating from the 14th century. The prosperous Middle Ages port was submerged five centuries ago following coastal erosion.
The Soviet Plan to Destroy Guantanamo Naval Base
Source: National Security Archive (6-4-08)
Soviet nuclear-tipped cruise missiles were ready to destroy the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo had the U.S. military persuaded President Kennedy to invade Cuba during the missile crisis in 1962, according to a new book by Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs (citing documents and interviews posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive, www.nsarchive.org).
The documents show that U.S. intelligence listed the Soviet weapons as "unidentified artillery" pieces, when they were actually cruise missiles armed with Hiroshima-sized nuclear devices. They were deployed to within 15 miles of the Guantanamo base on the same day -- October 27, 1962 -- that the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended an all-out U.S. invasion of Cuba to destroy the Soviet missile bases. President Kennedy rejected the advice of his military advisers in favor of a diplomatic solution to the crisis that included a secret understanding between his brother and the Soviet ambassador.
The new book, One Minute to Midnight, draws on the National Security Archive's long-standing documentary work on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Dobbs conducted extensive interviews with Soviet combat veterans and discovered previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence documents that explode the myth of successful crisis management and offer new insights into how a U.S. president makes decisions at a time of grave international crisis.
Over the next five weeks, the National Security Archive will publish more of the key primary sources behind One Minute to Midnight. These postings will include such episodes as the storage and handling of Soviet nuclear weapons on Cuba and the "Eyeball to Eyeball" confrontation between U.S. and Soviet ships that never happened.
Senate Panel Accuses Bush of Iraq Exaggerations
Source: NYT (6-5-08)
A long-delayed Senate report endorsed by Democrats and some Republicans has concluded that President Bush and his aides built the public case for war against Iraq by exaggerating available intelligence and by ignoring disagreements among spy agencies about Iraq’s weapons programs and Saddam Hussein’s links to Al Qaeda.
The report was released Thursday after years of partisan squabbling, and it marks the close of five years of investigations by the Senate Intelligence Committee into the use, abuse and faulty assessments of intelligence leading up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
That some Bush administration claims about the Iraqi threat turned out to be false is hardly new. But the report, based on a detailed review of public statements by Mr. Bush and other officials, is the most comprehensive effort to date to assess whether policymakers systematically painted a more dire picture about Iraq than was justified by available intelligence.
Related Links
National Security Archive: SENATE COMMITTEE ISSUES REPORTS ON PRE-WAR IRAQ INTEL
NBC features rare color video of RFK's last campaign
Source: NBC News (6-5-08)
Today is the 40th anniversary of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination in Los Angeles.[Brian Williams reports.]
Related Story
Photos taken after Robert F. Kennedy assassination released: The Los Angeles Fire Department(LAFD) on Thursday released new photos taken moments after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, 40 years after the death of the former senator and younger brother of President John F. Kennedy.
Kennedy was shot to death in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968 during his presidential nominating campaign. He had just finished a speech at the Ambassador Hotel after winning the California primary when he was shot in a crowded passageway by assassin Sirhan Sirhan.
The newly released photos were taken by Harold Burba, a photographer of the LAFD who was in the Ambassador Hotel pantry after the shooting.
WWII vet who earned Medal of Honor at 17 dies
Source: AP (6-5-08)
Jack Lucas, who at 14 lied his way into military service during World War II and became the youngest Marine to receive the Medal of Honor, died Thursday in a Hattiesburg, Miss., hospital. He was 80.
Lucas had been battling cancer. Ponda Lee at Moore Funeral Service said the funeral home was told he died before dawn.
Jacklyn "Jack" Lucas was just six days past his 17th birthday in February 1945 when his heroism at Iwo Jima earned him the nation's highest military honor. He used his body to shield three fellow squad members from two grenades, and was nearly killed when one exploded.
Equity in U.S. homes plunges to WWII levels
Source: NBC (6-5-08)
Nearly 8.5 million homeowners now have negative or no equity in their homes — a level not seen since the 1940s. Experts say equity levels will tumble further as home prices erode.
Publicize presidential candidates' health records, historians say
Source: LAT (6-5-08)
If elected president, Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, would be the oldest president to take office. That's why it was a big deal two weeks ago when McCain's personal doctors proclaimed him to be in excellent health. The assessment on McCain's health, however, was released in a tightly controlled news conference in which reporters were not provided with copies of McCain's medical records and were granted limited information in order, McCain's doctors said, to protect McCain's privacy. For example, his doctors wouldn't say whether McCain had tests to assess his cognitive status.
That's just not good enough, say two medical historians in an editorial published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. They say it's time for the nation to create a congressionally appointed, bipartisan, unbiased panel of medical, ethical and legal scholars to review the health history of all presidents, vice presidents and presidential candidates. The reports from this commission would be submitted to the White House and Congress and made public.
Polls show that Americans believe good health is essential to the president's performance. But the authors of the report, from the University of Michigan, say that history shows the public is often in the dark about the health of the country's chief executive. Moreover, the fact that Americans are living longer and are more comfortable electing age-70-and-older officials increases the need for more candor on the part of those elected officials. The recently tightened health-privacy rights afforded to all Americans, they say, simply shouldn't apply to the nation's top dogs.
Ordinary people acting as their own historians
Source: Christian Science Monitor (6-4-08)
Like most people, Hedrick Ellis grew up listening to his parents and grand parents tell family stories. As a teenager, he often tuned them out, but this year, eager to keep those memories alive, he hired a personal historian to interview his father and mother.
"You hear these stories over the years, but nobody ever really gets around to writing them down," says Mr. Ellis, of Arlington, Mass. "This seemed like an easy and practical way of capturing them."
In this age of the memoir, not all fascinating lives belong to notable individuals. Across the country, people like Mr. Ellis are part of a growing cottage industry of amateurs and professionals eager to preserve the experiences of older generations. Armed with notebooks, tape recorders and video cameras, they are coaxing a lifetime of memories from beloved relatives.
"We're seeing an increase both in the number of people who want to do personal historian work and an increase in the number of elders who want to be sure their stories are handed down," says Paula Stahel, president of the Association of Personal Historians.
he director of Angola's slave museum is fascinated by a cultural exchange
Source: http://www.dailypress.com/news/local/williamsburg/dp-local_wangola_0605jun05,0,3949747.story (6-5-08)
The director of Angola's slavery museum visited The Mariners' Museum in Newport News and Jamestown on Tuesday as part of his trip through the United States arranged by the State Department. In Chicago, he saw a woman re-enact Angolan Queen Njinga, who led her people in revolt against Portuguese slave traders in the 1640s, and at Jamestown he saw museum space devoted to her story.
"Our relationship with the United States can't be based exclusively on trade exchanges and the commercial. Americans buy our petroleum — at a good price right now — and we recently bought 10 Boeing planes, but we also have all these human links," he said. "A cultural exchange will make for a more fair and long-lasting relationship."
His three-week trek has also carried him to South Carolina and to Cincinnati's museum about the Underground Railroad.
On Monday he was surprised by the detail at Colonial Williamsburg, from the live scenes of slavery stories to the reconstructed slave quarters to the small plots of land slaves were allowed to cultivate for their own food.
"I don't know if I'll be able to sleep tonight. I'll be afraid to awake in a different era," Souindoula said.
Vigil for Tiananmen Dead Draws Fewer in Hong Kong
Source: NYT (6-5-08)
A somewhat smaller crowd than in previous years turned out here on Wednesday evening for the annual candlelight vigil commemorating the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square, the participation depressed by a growing reluctance among many Hong Kong residents to confront Beijing officials on human rights issues.
Enthusiasm for the Olympic Games in Beijing, sympathy for victims of the May 12 earthquake in Sichuan Province and growing prosperity because of China’s economic boom have combined to weaken Hong Kong’s once-vigorous protest movement.
Even Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, the highest official of the Roman Catholic Church in China and a vociferous critic of Beijing’s rights record, has moderated his tone in recent weeks.
Confederate flag debuts the day Obama becomes presumptive nominee
Source: http://www.tampabay.com (6-5-08)
They are two events linked mostly by a single, jarring coincidence.
On the same Tuesday that Barack Obama became the first African-American to win the Democratic nomination for president, local activists raised a Confederate flag the size of a semitrailer truck at the intersection of Interstates 75 and 4.
Some might suggest an indirect connection — that supporters of Confederate history, angry that their heritage has been overlooked in the rush to celebrate multicultural achievement, wanted an in-your-face way to grab the area's attention.
And they would be right.
"We've been marginalized and put off and ostracized for the last 20 years," said Marion Lambert, a Tampa member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. He said he didn't plan specifically to raise the flag on Obama's big day but doesn't mind the juxtaposition. "We're using this ultimate weapon we have been given by a society which ostracized it."
Egypt uncovers 'missing' pyramid of a pharaoh
Source: AP (6-5-08)
Egyptian archaeologists unveiled on Thursday a 4,000-year-old "missing pyramid" that is believed to have been discovered by an archaeologist almost 200 years ago and never seen again.
Zahi Hawass, Egypt's antiquities chief, said the pyramid appears to have been built by King Menkauhor, an obscure pharaoh who ruled for only eight years.
In 1842, German archaeologist Karl Richard Lepsius mentioned it among his finds at Saqqara, referring to it as number 29 and calling it the "Headless Pyramid" because only its base remains. But the desert sands covered the discovery, and no archaeologist since has been able to find Menkauhor's resting place.
"We have filled the gap of the missing pyramid," Hawass told reporters on a tour of the discoveries at Saqqara, the necropolis and burial site of the rulers of ancient Memphis, the capital of Egypt's Old Kingdom, about 12 miles south of Cairo.
Review criticizes secondary textbooks' take on Middle East, Islam
Source: Education Week (6-5-08)
Middle and high school history textbooks generally paint a positive or benign picture of Islam that tends to clash with confrontational images students might see or read in the news, according to a review by the American Textbook Council, financed, in part, by the Searle Freedom Foundation, the Achelis Foundation, and the Stuart Family Foundation.
Nearly seven years after the 9/11 attacks highlighted the need for Americans to learn more about the Middle East and Islam, there is more content in the subject, but publishers continue to fail in giving key topics careful and complete treatment, the review concludes. "Deficiencies about Islam in textbooks copyrighted before 2001 persist [in newly published texts] and in some cases have grown worse," the report says. "Biases persist. Silences are profound and intentional."
The review compares content in the secondary school texts with accounts by scholars in what it terms "authoritative histories" of Islam. The texts, for example, describe jihad, generally translated as "holy war," as a sacred struggle for justice. Coverage of the Crusades, the review says, paints Christians solely as "violent attackers" and Muslims as victims. Moreover, it says, students don't learn about modern aggression among Muslim groups, such as the Taliban, or the power struggles between Sunni and Shia sects in Iraq.
The review suggests that groups such as the Council on Islamic Education have exerted too much influence on the textbook-adoption process, pressuring state review committees to incorporate "doctored" versions of history.
Idealism lost in '68 is reborn in L.A. classroom
Source: LAT (6-5-08)
The laughter went flat. The smiles froze before they had time to disappear. In the back of the Ambassador Hotel ballroom, David Steiner couldn't tell what was happening. But a change in mood raced through the crowd like an electrical charge, arcing from face to face.
Sen. Robert F. Kennedy had just finished his victory speech after winning the California primary and exited through a door near the podium. It was just after midnight on June 5, 1968.
At 25, Steiner, who left his job at the Justice Department to join the campaign, had never before felt so giddy with purpose.
Now an awful energy emerged from the closed door. He felt a rush of dread.
Steiner ran toward the door and found himself suddenly smashed against it in the pandemonium. Women in straw boater hats cried. Men covered their mouths in shock. Steiner tried to pry the door open. But the crowd pushed against him. He saw one woman go under, another shoved hard against the wall.
Bury Lenin's body, says Gorbachev
Source: Independent (UK) (6-5-08)
The embalmed body of the Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin should be moved from its mausoleum in Red Square and given a standard burial, the former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev said yesterday.
Lenin's body has been on public display in a glass case since his death in 1924. His continuing presence in the symbolic heart of Moscow has been a source of controversy since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Lenin led the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to found the first Communist state, which lasted for 74 years until Mr Gorbachev presided over the break-up of the USSR. Mr Gorbachev, 77, said: "My view is [that] we should not be occupied right now with grave-digging. But we will necessarily come to a time when the mausoleum will have lost its meaning and we will bury [Lenin], give him up to the earth as his family had wanted. I think the time will come."
The fate of Lenin is an emotional question in modern Russia, where the Communists are the second-biggest political party. The Orthodox Church has called for the former leader to be buried but the Communists says the father of the Soviet Union should stay put.
The first post-Soviet leader, Boris Yeltsin, spoke in favour of removing the mausoleum but strong pro-Communist sentiment prevented him from doing so. In the end, he avoided taking a decision. Vladimir Putin also fudged the issue, saying it was emotive and hard to tackle. His successor, President Dmitry Medvedev, has not yet made his position clear.
World War II US D-Day invasion tank unearthed in France
Source: Telegraph (UK) (6-4-08)
An American tank that formed part of the 1944 D-Day invasion force was discovered buried under a street in northern France.
French bomb disposal experts were brought in to ensure the military vehicle posed no danger before it was dug out from its muddy grave in near perfect condition.
Council workers came across the M5 tank as they carried out routine repairs to the road in Chartres, 55 miles south-west of Paris.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
NYT has more news, less advertising than it did a decade ago
Source: Romenesko (6-4-08)
Matt Pressman did some measuring and found out that on May 6, 2008, there were 2,524 square inches of column space devoted to news in the New York Times, and 3,359 inches of ad space. A decade earlier, there were 5,549 square inches of ads, but only 2,188 square inches of news. "So criticize The New York Times for its bogus trend stories, questionable judgment, or occasional acts of plagiarism," he writes. "But please don't accuse it of skimping on the news."
The History of The Internet Is Being Written By Vanity Fair
Source: WaPo (6-4-08)
They say that history is written by the victorious, which begs the question as to how Al Gore and Friendster manage to get center stage in a history of the Internet.
Vanity Fair writes a rambling eight-part 22 page story on history of the Internet called "How The Web Was Won" for its latest edition. The article pays tribute to Internet pioneers, including Al Gore, as well as some of the companies that have defined the commercial Internet (Amazon, Ebay, PayPal, Ning, MySpace, Friendster, YouTube).
It's going to be fairly easy to nitpick the list of companies included in the photo slideshow. No Google, for example. No Firefox, Yahoo or Microsoft. Nary a word on Facebook. Or any non-U.S. companies for that matter. And the history of computer networking and the Internet is, necessarily, somewhat abridged and leaves a lot of people out (I think one of the best quick reads on the history of the Internet is Andy Kessler's How We Got Here if you are looking for something a little meatier).
Cape Cod Lighthouse Thought Destroyed More Than 80 Years Ago Found in California
Source: Fox News (6-4-08)
A Cape Cod lighthouse thought to be destroyed more than 80 years ago has reappeared — in California.
Local historians for decades believed the 30-foot-tall lighthouse that once overlooked Wellfleet Harbor had been demolished in 1925.
But researchers learned the fate of the cast iron tower last year. Colleen MacNeney, whose parents have snapped pictures of every lighthouse in the country, reported the find in this month's edition of Lighthouse Digest.
MacNeney told the Cape Cod Times that it was her most exciting discovery.
The structure is now at Point Montara at the southern end of San Francisco Bay.
MacNeney says she came across correspondence that proved the lighthouse, first built in 1881, had been moved by the Coast Guard from Wellfleet to Yerba Buena, Calif., and eventually to its current location at Point Montara.
Germany: Wax Hitler Is Defended
Source: AP (6-4-08)
Madame Tussauds defended a decision to include a wax likeness of Hitler in its new museum, scheduled to open in Berlin in July. Mayor Klaus Wowereit of Berlin had urged the museum to consider carefully whether to include Hitler and, if it did, to make sure that he not be depicted as a cult figure. The museum argued that it would not make sense to ignore Hitler’s role in German history. His rule “stands for an important, though also appalling, turning point in the development of modern Europe,” the museum said.
From Greek mythology, Obama learned a lesson
Source: AP (6-4-08)
To understand how Barack Obama won the
presidential primary, you have to look at what he
learned when he lost.
Obama defeated Hillary Rodham Clinton solidly in the
Iowa caucuses in January, but five days later she beat
him, painfully and unexpectedly, in New Hampshire.
That loss showed him that toppling the royal family of
Democratic politics would not come easily.
"I think this was meant to be," Obama said privately
the next day, recalls adviser David Axelrod. "I think
we were flying too close to the sun, like Icarus. When
you're fighting for change, it's not supposed to be
easy."
In Greek mythology, Icarus' father gives him wax wings
that empower him to fly, but warns of the danger in
soaring too high. Obama got similar warnings. When he
arrived in Washington, Senate dean Robert Byrd
cautioned him not to be in too much of a rush to leave
for the White House.
But like Icarus, Obama wouldn't heed his elder's
advice. Icarus would crash into the sea. Obama would
learn from his own crash in New Hampshire and make
history.
WWII Bomb shuts down Tube in London
Source: BBC (6-2-08)
Thousands of commuters faced severe delays on the London Underground after an unexploded World War II bomb was found near a Tube station.
The bomb was found in a river at Sugar House Lane, near Bromley-by-Bow station, at about 1151 BST on Monday.
Parts of the District Line were suspended from 1640 BST to 1720 BST while the Army investigated the device.
The Hammersmith and City Line was also suspended for a short time between Barking and Whitechapel.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Democratic Primary Fight Is Like No Other, Ever
Source: NYT (6-3-08)
The 2008 Democratic primary battle between Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, which concludes Tuesday with contests in Montana and South Dakota, has developed such a reliable story line that pundits can recite it in their sleep.
The first black and first woman with solid chances to win the White House have nearly split the Democratic Party, with his coalition of young voters, affluent liberals and blacks against her coalition of women, older voters, Hispanics and working-class whites. Mr. Obama appears on track to a narrow nomination victory if he can win over just a small fraction of the roughly 200 superdelegates who remain undecided.
But that numbing familiarity cannot obscure what makes this nomination fight singular. In its cost, duration, competitiveness and breadth of citizen involvement, it stands alone in the history of American presidential politics.
“We’ve had higher rates of participation, not just by voting but by volunteering and giving, than any other,” said Michael J. Malbin, executive director of the Campaign Finance Institute and a onetime Congressional aide to Dick Cheney when he was a congressman. “And there’s nothing that’s remotely close.”
Millions of Brits have Aussie ancestors
Source: Reuters (6-3-08)
As many as one in four Britons may have ancestors who moved to Australia -- of their own free will -- in the 19th and early 20th centuries, online records show.
Despite the much-publicised transportation of criminals to Australia, most Britons who went there in the 1800s did so voluntarily, according to the records.
The names of almost nine million people who travelled to, and within, the country over almost 100 years are revealed in a database billed as one of the most comprehensive ever.
More than 2.2 million of the three million free settlers who travelled to Australia during this time were British, the records for ancestry.co.uk found.
Japan searches for soldiers' remains on Aleutian island
Source: AP (6-3-08)
The searchers dug for days, ignoring blisters and sore muscles to look for remains of Japanese soldiers buried in mass graves on the Aleutian island of Attu following one of the bloodiest battles of World War II.
But old bullets and bits of barbed wire were all that emerged from beneath the grassy tundra _ until the end of the two-week mission by U.S. and Japanese representatives who traveled to the remote resting place of nearly 2,500 soldiers.
Neolithic men were prepared to fight for their women
Source: Telegraph (UK) (6-3-08)
Neolithic age men fought over women too, according to a study that provides the most ancient evidence of the lengths men will go to in the hunt for partners.
Many archaeologists have argued that women have long motivated cycles of violence and blood feuds throughout history but there has really been no solid archaeological evidence to support this view.
Now a relatively new method has been used to work out the origins of the victims tossed into a mass grave of skeletons, and so distinguish one tribe from another, revealing that neighbouring tribes were prepared to kill their male rivals to secure their women some 7000 years ago.
Pagan sect at Pakistan border lives amid conservative Muslims
Source: http://www.mcclatchydc.com (6-2-08)
On the northwest tip of Pakistan, bordering Afghanistan's Nuristan province, the inaccessible Chitral district has long been thought to be a possible refuge for Osama bin Laden. With the high peaks of the Hindu Kush range and its narrow valleys, it's easy to dodge through secret mountain routes between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Chitral is also the home of the Kalasha, a unique pagan civilization that's lived in the area for 2,000 years or more, now boxed in by an increasingly militant Islam. Thinly populated, Chitral covers 5,800 square miles, with war-torn Afghanistan to the north and west and the extremist strongholds of Swat and Dir to the south.
According to locals, bin Laden lived with a Kalasha family in Chitral for some time during his first Afghan jihad, against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. With his now much more severe ideology, the al Qaida leader wouldn't be able to easily live among these polytheistic people, whose men and women mix freely.
Last month, the Kalasha celebrated their spring festival, Joshi, with a verve and passion that few cultures could match, ancient or modern. Men and women danced tirelessly to a pounding, primeval drumbeat, haunting singing and rituals so old that their meaning is almost lost.
Monday, June 2, 2008
New profile of Bill Clinton in Vanity Fair is damning
Source: Todd Purdum in Vanity Fair (7-1-08)
Old friends and longtime aides are wringing their hands over Bill Clinton’s post–White House escapades, from the dubious (and secretive) business associations to the media blowups that have bruised his wife’s campaign, to the private-jetting around with a skirt-chasing, scandal-tinged posse. Some point to Clinton’s medical traumas; others blame sheer selfishness, and the absence of anyone who can say “no.” Exploring Clintonworld, the author asks if the former president will be consumed by his own worst self.
Related Links
Media Matters: Vanity Fair finds no "proof" of Clinton affairs -- but spreads rumors anyway
Washington Post review dismisses new biography of John Mitchell
Source: Lincoln Caplan in the WaPo (6-1-08)
[Lincoln Caplan, the author of "The Tenth Justice: The Solicitor General and the Rule of Law" and other books, is managing partner of SeaChange Capital Partners.]
... The Strong Man, by James Rosen, a Fox News Washington correspondent and a contributing editor to Playboy, displays wide-ranging and obsessive reporting, especially about the Watergate story. The book seeks to accomplish what a Mitchell memoir could not. It may seem strange to say that Rosen aims to vindicate the lawman-turned-convict, since the author affirms Mitchell's guilt and even details crimes "he got away with," but Rosen's purpose is wholesale revision: He presses the thesis that Mitchell should be recognized as a distinguished, if tragic, American figure.
To the author, Mitchell was a victim repeatedly wronged -- by a petty cabal of men in the White House who schemed to make him the fall guy for Watergate; by a conspiracy among the press, politicians and prosecutors, for whom Rosen reserves his harshest words because, in his view, they shared a baseless ardor to put Mitchell away; and, most of all, by the two people at the center of his life, the grandiose, self-pitying Nixon and Mitchell's unhinged, headline-grabbing second wife, Martha. Rosen doesn't really explain her hold on Mitchell, but he recounts how she used her weird celebrity to intrude repeatedly on matters of state.
Billed as a biography, The Strong Man reads more like a polemic. Rosen elevates Mitchell's standing at the bar (his bond practice, this book unpersuasively insists, put him "among the nation's most elite lawyers"). The author exaggerates the good that Mitchell did as attorney general ("to ensure racial progress he did more than any executive branch official of the twentieth century," Rosen claims -- overlooking, among others, Burke Marshall, the Kennedy-Johnson civil rights chief who led the effort to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act). Rosen does this to boost the credibility of his restoration project, but his hype accomplishes the opposite.
About Watergate, however, Rosen tells a relentless, intricate, sometimes engrossing tale. John Dean comes across as a duplicitous manipulator, Jeb Magruder as a spineless liar, Gordon Liddy as a maniacal soldier of misfortune. It was their Gemstone plan for intelligence operations against the Democrats in 1972, Rosen relates, that led to the Watergate break-in for which Mitchell was held responsible. Three times, in Rosen's narrative, they wouldn't take "no" for an answer when they vainly sought the approval of "the strong man."
Mitchell's most famous utterance was about The Washington Post's late, great publisher. When he was called by Carl Bernstein in September 1972 for comment the night before the newspaper ran a story alleging that he controlled an illegal slush fund used to spy on Nixon's political opponents, Mitchell snapped: "Katie Graham's gonna get her tit caught in a big, fat wringer if that's published. Good Christ! That's the most sickening thing I ever heard."
In the annals of Watergate, the slush-fund story was the beginning of the end. In a 2005 Vanity Fair article, Bernstein recalled that when he learned that Mitchell was one of the keepers of the secret fund used to pay the Watergate burglars, he turned to Bob Woodward and said: "Oh my God, this president is going to be impeached." In her memoir, Personal History, Katharine Graham said she was "shocked" that the attorney general's response was "so personal and offensive." But Rosen contends that Mitchell's distress was genuine and justified because the Post story was "dead wrong." Mitchell "never knew about, let alone 'controlled,' any secret fund used to finance 'intelligence operations' against the Democrats," he writes.
Perhaps Rosen has his own definitions of "control," "secret" and "intelligence operations." Otherwise, his revisionism, at this point, has crossed over to an alternate universe. A month after the Post story, Mitchell's successor as head of CREEP, Clark MacGregor, admitted there was a cash fund from which five men, including Mitchell, were authorized to get money. In his acclaimed book Nightmare, J. Anthony Lukas reported that Mitchell approved the use of $250,000 for gathering "intelligence" on the Democratic Party. Rosen acknowledges that most historians share Lukas's line. He takes another.
McClellan: Bush Should Have Fired Rove
Source: AP (6-2-08)
President Bush broke his promise to the country by refusing to fire aide Karl Rove for leaking a CIA agent's identity, said Scott McClellan, the president's chief spokesman for almost three years.
"I think the president should have stood by his word and that meant Karl should have left," McClellan said Sunday in a broadcast interview about his new tell-all book, a scathing rebuke of the White House under Bush's leadership.
McClellan now acknowledges he felt burned by Rove, Bush's top political adviser, and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff. He said Rove and Libby assured him they were not involved in leaking CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity, and he repeated those assurances to reporters.
In fact, both men had discussed Plame's identity with reporters, as confirmed in a later criminal investigation. Rove's lawyer maintains Rove never volunteered that information or actively sought to have it published. Libby resigned from office, but Rove remained and eventually stepped down on his own terms in August 2007.
Who found Machu Picchu? How a German may have beaten the Americans to lost Inca city
Source: Independent (UK) (6-2-08)
When Peruvian locals led Hiram Bingham to Machu Picchu in 1911, it was a discovery which would make the Yale professor famous, highly respected and richer.
Bingham went on to become a governor of Connecticut and member of the US senate, and his book on Machu Picchu became a bestseller. Such was his prominence in early 20th century archaeology, that some have speculated that Bingham was the inspiration for the character of Indiana Jones.
But Bingham's claim to be the first to discover Peru's lost city of the Incas is looking more than a little doubtful. Detailed investigations by a US historian have revealed that Machu Picchu was, in fact, discovered over 40 years earlier by a German businessman.
Little is known about Augusto R Berns, an obscure entrepreneur now largely lost to history, but documents unearthed in US and Peruvian archives by the American historian Paolo Greer, reveal that Berns discovered Peru's most famous archaeological site in the late 1860s before setting up a company specifically to loot Machu Picchu and its immediate surroundings.
3 Czech Friends, Cast as Heroes and as Murderers
Source: NYT (6-2-08)
To some Czechs, it was the greatest escape of the cold war. But here in central Europe, where history is often rewritten, there are many others who view the five young Czechs as reckless murderers, even though they dodged 24,000 Soviet soldiers and the East German police for 28 days through snow-covered forests to reach the freedom of West Berlin in 1953.
In October of that year, the five men battled their way across the Iron Curtain heading for the American sector of a divided Berlin. They wanted to join American troops in what they thought would be a global conflagration between Western democracies and Soviet Communism.
To get there, the five — the brothers Josef and Ctirad Masin and their childhood friends Milan Paumer, Zbynek Janata and Vaclav Sveda — hijacked cars, stole submachine guns, drugged adversaries with chloroform, broke into police stations and killed six people, including a police officer whose throat was slit with a Boy Scout knife.
The journey that they thought would take five days took four weeks, and they braved starvation, frostbite and bullet wounds. Three of the men eventually reached West Berlin, where they were debriefed by the Central Intelligence Agency. Then they joined the United States Army in hopes of liberating communist Czechoslovakia. The other two — Mr. Janata and Mr. Sveda — were captured by the East German police and executed.
Peace activists in Japan are girding for a fight to save the war-renouncing clause of the constitution
Source: Japan Focus (5-25-08)
While much of Japan was enjoying the extended holiday of Golden Week this year, supporters of Article 9, the war-renouncing clause of Japan’s constitution, were hard at work. The first Global Article 9 Conference to Abolish War drew 15,000 people to its plenary session and concert outside of Tokyo on May 4th, while 7,000 gathered on May 5th to participate in a day of symposiums and workshops. The crowds far surpassed the expectations of the organizers, who hastily staged an ad hoc rally in a nearby park for several thousand people who were unable to get into the main arena on the first day.
An affiliated conference in Hiroshima on May 5th drew 1,100 participants, and on May 6th another large arena in Osaka was filled with 8,000 people while 2,500 attended a fourth conference in Sendai. Overall, organizers counted more than 30,000 admissions to the series of events.
New Zealand government apologizes to Vietnam War veterans for mistreatment, neglect
Source: International Herald Tribune (5-28-08)
WELLINGTON, New Zealand: The New Zealand government made a formal apology to the nation's Vietnam War veterans Wednesday for mistreatment and neglect — 36 years after they withdrew from the conflict.
Nearly 3,900 New Zealand troops were sent to fight in Vietnam — 37 were killed and 187 wounded. Since the war ended, hundreds more have suffered from or died of illnesses, particularly cancers increasingly linked to the use of the defoliant Agent Orange.
The government "apologizes formally to veterans and their families for the history of pain and suffering experienced by many of them," Prime Minister Helen Clark told Parliament. "It is time for reconciliation."
Searchers find Japanese remains on Attu Island
Source: The Anchorage Daily News (6-1-08)
The searchers dug for days, ignoring blisters and sore muscles, to look for remains of some of the more than 2,000 Japanese soldiers buried in mass graves on the Aleutian island of Attu after a bloody World War II battle.
But old bullets and bits of barbed wire were all that emerged from beneath the grassy tundra -- until the end of the two-week mission by U.S. and Japanese representatives who traveled to the remote resting place of nearly 2,500 soldiers. On May 23, searchers struck their shovels on decaying wood boxes and found the well-preserved bones of two Japanese soldiers likely buried by their comrades during the 1943 Battle of Attu.
Grave at Fromelles unearths political minefield
Source: The Age (5-31-08)
The unearthing of human remains in the German-dug mass grave in Fromelles may ease the heartbreak of some soldiers' families, but it has sparked a monumental political headache for the Australian and British armies.
With up to 400 Australian and British soldiers apparently buried together in the pits beside Pheasant's Wood, how will we navigate and reconcile the two nations' different responses to and expectations of the find?
While both are party to a postwar agreement — that they won't launch specific searches; that their war dead remain where they fell — it is different when "compelling" evidence is found to justify individual investigations.
However, it does not mean that the bodies, when found, will be repatriated. Indeed, at Fromelles on Thursday, Major General Mike O'Brien made very clear that, despite some media headlines, no diggers will be repatriated — no matter what the outcome of investigations.
The invisible impeachment
Source: Politico.com (6-1-08)
As the Democratic primary season nears a close, the candidates have talked about dozens of policies, fended off a host of attacks and studiously avoided one topic: the impeachment of President Clinton.
Whether that’s a product of self-control or self-preservation, the tactical decision by Hillary Rodham Clinton’s opponents to steer clear of any direct reference to what may have been the defining moment of the Clinton White House seems remarkable given the duration and intensity of the 2008 primary campaign.
While Republicans signaled early that it would be a major issue should she win the nomination, it has been a forbidden topic for her primary rivals since early 2007, when David Geffen, a former Clinton ally and a Hollywood supporter of Barack Obama, felt the wrath of the Clinton camp — and received a scolding from the Obama campaign — after raising it in an interview.
The reasons for the silence are both obvious and subtle.
Raising it could do more harm than good — particularly in a Democratic primary — since most party activists still view the painful saga as an act of supreme hypocrisy and partisan overreach by congressional Republicans.
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Mideast oil changed world
Source: Chicago Tribune (6-1-08)
When the price of oil roared to record highs last week, it was duly noted. But another milestone passed almost unremarked: Monday was the 100th anniversary of the discovery of oil in the Middle East.
Britons William Knox D'Arcy and George Reynolds are not exactly household names in America, but it was D'Arcy's money and gambler's nerve, and Reynolds' hardheaded persistence that brought in the first gusher in what is today Iran.
The discovery would change the world. Over the next century, as America and the Middle East became locked in an extraordinary embrace, the flow of cheap, abundant oil would bring wealth and war; it would fuel mighty economies, determine the destinies of nations, and shape the everyday lives of almost everyone on the planet.
Bhutto Dealt Nuclear Secrets to N. Korea, Book Says
Source: WaPo (6-1-08)
Former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, on a state visit to North Korea in 1993, smuggled in critical data on uranium enrichment -- a route to making a nuclear weapon -- to help facilitate a missile deal with Pyongyang, according to a new book by a journalist who knew the slain politician well.
The assertion is based on conversations that the author, Shyam Bhatia, had with Bhutto in 2003, in which she said she would tell him a secret "so significant that I had to promise never to reveal it, at least not during her lifetime," Bhatia writes in "Goodbye, Shahzadi," which was published in India last month.
Bhutto was slain in December while campaigning to win back the prime minister's post.
The account, if verified, could advance the timeline for North Korea's interest in uranium enrichment. David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a research organization on nuclear weapons programs, said the assertion "makes sense," because there were signs of "funny procurements" in the late 1980s by North Korea that suggested a nascent effort to assemble a uranium enrichment project.
Canada examines abuses of church-run schools
Source: Salon (6-1-08)
A truth and reconciliation commission is examining a decades-long government policy that required Canadian Indians to attend schools where students were forced to lose their cultural identity and routinely were subjected to abuse.
The commission's five-year mandate began Sunday and its work starts Monday. Members will eventually travel across Canada to hear stories from former students, teachers and others. The goal is to give survivors a forum to tell their stories and educate Canadians about a grim period in the country's history.
"It's the darkest, most tragic chapter in Canadian history and virtually no one knows about this," Phil Fontaine, the national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, told The Associated Press.
From the 19th century until the 1970s, more than 150,000 aboriginal children were required to attend state-funded Christian schools in a painful attempt to rid them of their native cultures and languages and integrate them into Canadian society.
Bush Mulls Making Pearl Harbor a National Monument
Source: Fox News (6-1-08)
President Bush has asked his defense and interior secretaries to look into designating Pearl Harbor and other historic World War II sites in the Pacific a national monument.
A May 29 presidential memo to Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said such status could offer the sites additional protection.
"These objects of historical and scientific interest may tell the broader story of the war, the sacrifices made by America and its allies, and the heroism and determination that laid the groundwork for victory in the Pacific and triumph in World War II," Bush said.
The letter, posted on the White House Web site, doesn't say what specific places Bush has in mind aside from Pearl Harbor.
DNA Offers Clues to Greenland’s First Inhabitants
Source: NYT (5-30-08)
A swatch of hair, so thick and tangled it could have belonged to man or bear, has provided answers about a mysterious culture and its origins half a world away.
The culture is that of the first people to have occupied Greenland some 4,500 years ago. Known to archaeologists as the first Paleo-Eskimo culture, it gave way to a second Paleo-Eskimo culture some 2,500 years ago and then 700 years ago to the Thule culture of the present-day Inuit peoples. Some archaeologists suggested that each culture might have descended from its predecessor, but proof required obtaining DNA from the earlier cultures and comparing it with that of the Inuit.
Eske Willerslev, an expert on ancient DNA at the University of Copenhagen, recently spent two months in the frozen wastes of northern Greenland. Dr. Willerslev wore a full body suit while digging so as not to contaminate samples with his own DNA. But human remains from the early culture are hard to find, and archaeologists have speculated that the dead were laid on the sea ice.
Debate Over Plans to Fly 'World's Largest' Confederate Flag Over Busy Tampa Intersection
Source: Fox News (5-31-08)
A giant Confederate battle flag may soon be flying near a Tampa highway intersection.
A Confederate heritage group called the Sons of Confederate Veterans plans to fly the 30-by-50 flag atop a 139-foot pole, the highest the FAA will allow.
The group, which bills its Confederate flag as the "world's largest," expects to have it in place by 2009, The St. Petersburg Times reported.
The group has building permits but still needs $30,000 to complete the project, which will be located on private property at the intersection of Interstates 4 and 75.
Fight Over Land Use at Valley Forge
Source: NYT (5-30-08)
A local planning board has approved a proposal to build a $250 million visitor center and conference facilities on privately owned land in Valley Forge National Historical Park. Opponents say the decision increases the risk of commercial development in other scenic and historic national parks.
The Planning Commission of Lower Providence Township, about 15 miles northwest of Philadelphia, voted unanimously late Wednesday in favor of the project, the American Revolution Center.
The center, on 78 acres inside the park, will include a 142,000-square-foot museum commemorating the American War of Independence, a 145,000-square-foot conference complex with as many as 99 rooms for overnight guests, and parking for 600 cars.
Baghdad Jews Have Become a Fearful Few
Source: NYT (6-1-08)
“I have no future here to stay.”
Written in broken English but with perfect clarity, the message is a stark and plaintive assessment from one of the last Jews of Babylon.
The community of Jews in Baghdad is now all but vanished in a land where their heritage recedes back to Abraham of Ur, to Jonah’s prophesying to Nineveh, and to Nebuchadnezzar’s sending Jews into exile here more than 2,500 years ago.
Just over half a century ago, Iraq’s Jews numbered more than 130,000. But now, in the city that was once the community’s heart, they cannot muster even a minyan, the 10 Jewish men required to perform some of the most important rituals of their faith. They are scared even to publicize their exact number, which was recently estimated at seven by the Jewish Agency for Israel, and at eight by one Christian cleric. That is not enough to read the Torah in public, if there were anywhere in public they would dare to read it, and too few to recite a proper Kaddish for the dead.
In Memory Of Bobby
Source: CBS News (6-1-08)
Robert Francis Kennedy … RFK … was assassinated 40 years ago this coming week. Few Americans will ever forget the shock of that night, and what it would mean. Among those working in Bobby Kennedy's presidential campaign was Jeff Greenfield, now our Senior Political Correspondent. He offers a very personal recollection of a man who spoke to so many in so many different ways.
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