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This page features brief excerpts of news stories published by the mainstream media and, less frequently, blogs, alternative media, and even obviously biased sources. The excerpts are taken directly from the websites cited in each source note. Quotation marks are not used. Because most of our readers read the NYT we usually do not include the paper's stories in HIGHLIGHTS.

Monday, November 30, 2009

Demjanjuk trial shows double standards, lawyer says

Source: BBC (11-29-09)

A lawyer for John Demjanjuk, accused of helping to murder 27,900 Jews at a Nazi death camp, has accused German prosecutors of double standards.

Mr Demjanjuk, 89, denies he was a guard at Sobibor camp, in wartime Poland.

As the case began in Munich, his legal team said in previous cases Germans assigned to the camp had been cleared.

Doctors have said Mr Demjanjuk is in poor health, and asked that hearings be limited to two 90-minute sessions a day.

Posted on Monday, November 30, 2009 at 11:57 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Rwanda and France restore diplomatic relations

Source: BBC (11-30-09)

Rwanda and France have restored diplomatic relations three years after they were broken in a row over responsibility for the 1994 genocide.

Both governments said they had agreed to appoint ambassadors at the end of long negotiations.

The two nations fell out after a French judge said President Paul Kagame helped spark the genocide, and Rwanda accused France of arming the Hutu militias.

On Sunday Rwanda was also admitted to the Commonwealth.

Posted on Monday, November 30, 2009 at 11:54 PM | Comments (0) | Top

WWII plane recovered from Lake Michigan

Source: WGN 9 News (12-31-69)

A World War II Fighter Plane has been recovered from the bottom of Lake Michigan.

A crane pulled the plane out Monday at Waukegan Harbor, but the process has been going on for months.

It was back in 1945, when the F6F-3 Hellcat sank, during a training flight.

The pilot, Walter B. Elcock, now 89, barely survived the crash. While he couldn't make it to the recovery, his grandson, Hunter Brawley did.

Brawley recalls his grandfather telling him all about the plane crash as a kid and was excited to be at the recovery.

Posted on Monday, November 30, 2009 at 11:41 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Blair ordered MoD Iraq plan nine months before war

Source: Times (UK) (11-30-09)

Tony Blair ordered military chiefs secretly to prepare plans for an invasion of Iraq nine months before the start of the war, an inquiry into the conflict was told today.

Sir David Manning, the Prime Minister’s foreign policy adviser, said that Mr Blair asked the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to draw up options in June 2002 when he discovered that the United States was planning for war. The following month Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, offered three alternatives. The first “in-place package” involved using forces already in the region; the second “enhanced package” would provide additional maritime, aircraft and special forces; the third “discrete [separate] package” was to send 20,000 troops.

Mr Blair initially offered the “second package” when the MoD was asked to attend a planning conference with the US Central Command in September 2002.

However, after discussions between Mr Blair and Mr Hoon they decided to offer “package three” — the plan to send an army division to support the invasion — a month before the United Nations agreed resolution 1441 ordering Saddam Hussein to give up his weapons of mass destruction.

Posted on Monday, November 30, 2009 at 5:52 PM | Comments (0) | Top

British Library to return looted 12thC book

Source: Times (UK) (12-1-09)

A medieval book is to become the first item from a British national museum to be returned to its rightful owners under a new law governing looted artefacts.

The Benevento Missal, which was stolen from a cathedral in southern Italy soon after the Allies bombed the city during the Second World War, has been in the collection of the British Library (formerly the British Museum Library) since 1947. After a change in the law, it could be back in Italy within months, according to The Art Newspaper.

The missal’s return could also focus attention on other, more high-profile cases, such as the campaign to return the Elgin Marbles and the Benin Bronzes from the British Museum to Athens and Nigeria.

However, the new law would not affect the legal status of such items because the new Holocaust (Return of Cultural Objects) Act applies only to claims dating from the Nazi era.

Posted on Monday, November 30, 2009 at 5:48 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Did US promise Russia Nato wouldn't expand after German unification? New evidence suggests the answer is no, but there's plenty of ambiguity.

Source: Mary Elise Sarotte, a professor of international relations at the University of Southern California, in an NYT op ed (11-29-09)

TWENTY years ago, dictatorships across Central and Eastern Europe toppled. During this season of remembering, the focus has rightly been on celebration of the new freedoms gained by the inhabitants of those countries: to speak freely, to travel, to vote and to choose their own national futures and alliances. Yet the legacy of 1989 has difficult aspects as well, mostly centering on the origins and legitimacy of later NATO expansion to former East German and Warsaw Pact territory; acknowledgment of them by the United States could greatly improve American and Russian relations.

Moscow has long asserted that the Soviet Union allowed Germany to unify only in return for a pledge from Washington never to expand the Atlantic alliance. Former advisers to Presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush have transcended partisan differences in dismissing the Russian claim. An internal State Department review during the Clinton era concluded that no legally binding prohibition on NATO enlargement emerged from the era of German unification.

Since then, however, it has become possible to reconstruct what happened from first-hand evidence. Former Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany released the papers of his office, which inspired the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to publish many of his own. A number of other leaders and institutions also opened files in advance of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall: the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, Secretary of State James Baker, the German Foreign Ministry and the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office among them.

Posted on Monday, November 30, 2009 at 12:16 PM | Comments (0) | Top

World War Two hero's memorabilia to be auctioned

Source: Telegraph (UK) (12-31-69)

A suitcase filled with wartime mementoes belonging to a Battle of Britain hero has been opened by his daughter 50 years later.

Jozef Jeka, a Polish airman who fled to Britain after Germany invaded his homeland, was a World War Two pilot who won the Distinguished Flying Medal and many other awards for his exploits.

He was twice shot down by the enemy and was credited with eight kills, four probables and one flying bomb.

He married a British woman after the war and they had a daughter who he never met as he died in a 'deniable' Cold War CIA operation in 1958.

After his death his logbook, photographs, uniform, medals and other papers were packed into a suitcase and kept by his family. The case has only recently been opened for the first time by his daughter.

Posted on Monday, November 30, 2009 at 11:33 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Singer Pete Doherty booed off stage for singing Nazi anthem

Source: Telegraph (UK) (12-31-69)

Pete Doherty, the singer and songwriter, has been removed from the stage during a solo performance in Germany after he sang a Nazi anthem.

The lead singer of rock band Babyshambles began singing ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles', which was used as the national anthem under the Third Reich.

An outraged crowd at the on3 music festival in Munich began booing and shouting, but Doherty carried on singing five more songs before festival organisers ushered him from the stage.

Posted on Monday, November 30, 2009 at 11:30 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Peru apologises for abuse of African-origin citizens

Source: BBC News (12-31-69)

Peru has apologised for the first time to its citizens of African origin for centuries of "abuse, exclusion and discrimination".

The government said racially-motivated harassment still hindered the social and professional development of many African-Peruvians.

A public ceremony will be held to apologise to African-Peruvians, who make up 5-10% of the population.

Their ancestors were brought as slaves to the region by Spanish colonisers.

Women's and Social Development Minister Nidia Vilchez said the government wanted the apology to promote the "true integration of all Peru's multicultural population," Associated Press news agency reported.

The time of the ceremony was not mentioned in the declaration published in the official newspaper El Peruano.

Posted on Monday, November 30, 2009 at 11:12 AM | Comments (0) | Top

John Demjanjuk Nazi crimes trial starts in Munich

Source: BBC News (12-31-69)

John Demjanjuk, accused of helping to murder nearly 28,000 Jews at a Nazi death camp, has gone on trial in the German city of Munich.

Mr Demjanjuk, who is 89 and was deported from the US in May, entered the courtroom in a wheelchair. His eyes were closed but he seemed conscious.

He denies being a camp guard at Sobibor, in Nazi-occupied Poland.

The trial is expected to last until May and, if found guilty, Mr Demjanjuk could be sentenced to 15 years in jail.

The trial's first session was delayed for over an hour, as large numbers of people tried to gain access.

Posted on Monday, November 30, 2009 at 11:05 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Moving Beyond Khmer Rouge's Ghosts

Source: NYT (11-29-09)

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — The first trial to showcase the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge three decades ago concluded with the regime’s chief torturer still seemingly unable to grasp the magnitude of his actions. Yet despite that surprising end, the trial may have helped Cambodia begin to move beyond the horrors of its past...

... The case broke new ground as a hybrid of national and international justice systems with the support of the United Nations. In another innovation, it included the participation of some victims as “civil parties” represented in court by their own lawyers.

After a slow start, the trial began to draw the attention of a nation that for the past three decades has mostly hidden from the traumas of the Khmer Rouge years. Coinciding with the trial, a new textbook about the Khmer regime began distribution to the high schools, breaking a silence in the education system that has contributed to widespread ignorance.

Human rights groups and legal experts said they hoped the trial would act as an example to help reform Cambodia’s corrupt justice system and erode a culture of impunity, in which powerful people often act beyond the reach of the law.

“The Duch trial itself proceeded methodically and, in the end, was a success,” said Alex Hinton, director of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers University. “Duch received the fair trial his victims never had.”...

Posted on Monday, November 30, 2009 at 3:12 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Colorado History: The Massacre at Sand Creek

Source: Examiner (11-29-09)

145 years ago today, November 29, 1864, Colorado's Sand Creek Massacre took the lives of 160 Cheyenne and Arapahoe tribal members when the 1st and 3rd Colorado Calvary attacked. Under the leadership of Col. John Chivington, they opened fire on a peaceful camp of Native Americans in Southeastern Colorado and left only a handful of survivors.

About 40 tribal members and Native American supporters gathered in Denver to join in the 11th Annual Spiritual Healing Run/Walk which started at the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site in Eads.

Antoinette Red Woman, a descendent of those who were massacred, is quoted in the Denver Post as saying, 'This is Colorado and U.S.History.' She said, 'Everyone should know this happened.'

Posted on Monday, November 30, 2009 at 3:07 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Author shines light on the history of the memoir

Source: Dallas News (11-29-09)

In the 1920s, fiction outsold nonfiction 4-to-1; in the 1960s, the ratio was reversed. Ben Yagoda charts the genre of memoir-autobiography over its 2,000-year history to make sense of that change.

He begins with Julius Caesar and moves through St. Augustine, the unfortunate Peter Abelard, the humanist Aeneas Sylvius (Pope Pio II), the rogue-artist Benvenuto Cellini, the philosopher Rousseau and others before arriving at his principal focus, the American memoir. Yagoda maps the various subgenres: conversion narratives, the novel disguised as an autobiography, captivity narratives, slave memoirs, criminal narratives, women's autobiography, immigrant memoirs, travel-adventure-disaster memoirs, and our contemporary contribution, misery memoirs: tales of poverty, mental illness, addiction, gender and racial prejudice, war and sexual abuse...

... Yagoda astutely traces the rise of the autobiographical hoax. He notes that people read memoirs because they offer a kind of pseudo-intimacy, but the genre attracts readers only inasmuch as it claims to be true. If the claim is doubtful, interest collapses. He states and convincingly illustrates: "The past four decades will probably be remembered as the golden age of autobiographical fraud."

He does not speak here of memory lapses (a subject he treats brilliantly in Chapter 5), but of outright mendacity. Our hunger for the literal, our world of blogs and tweets, our dismissal of all bounds of privacy and seemliness, have reduced fiction to the status of "painting in the age of photography – a novelty item." But even photos, our former standard for truthful representation, can be Photoshopped. As Yagoda warns, "In any society where a particular currency has high value and is fairly easily fashioned, counterfeiters will quickly and inevitably emerge."

Posted on Monday, November 30, 2009 at 3:05 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Royal Society's 350th anniversary year begins

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-30-09)

Sir Isaac Newton's landmark account on how white light is comprised of the colours of the spectrum and Professor Stephen Hawking's early writing on black holes are among 60 papers to be put online.

More esoteric writings include a paper written by leading 18th century scientists confirming Mozart as a child genius, and a gruesome 1666 account of an early blood transfusion.

Asked to name his favourite, Lord Rees, president of the Royal Society, and a professor of cosmology and astrophysics at Cambridge University, said: "Given my own interest I would highlight Newton's paper about white light and prisms."

Posted on Monday, November 30, 2009 at 2:55 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Mysterious satellite channel broadcasts 'Saddam Channel' (Iraq)

Source: Yahoo News (11-29-09)

BAGHDAD – Turning on their TVs during the long holiday weekend, Iraqis were greeted by a familiar if unexpected face from their brutal past: Saddam Hussein.

The late Iraqi dictator is lauded on a mysterious satellite channel that began broadcasting on the Islamic calendar's anniversary of his 2006 execution.

No one seems to know who is bankrolling the so-called Saddam Channel, although the Iraqi government suspects it's Baathists whose political party Saddam once led. The Associated Press tracked down a man in Damascus, Syria named Mohammed Jarboua, who claimed to be its chairman.

The Saddam channel, he said, "didn't receive a penny from the Baathists" and is for Iraqis and other Arabs who "long for his rule."

Posted on Monday, November 30, 2009 at 2:53 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Government will not open Bhopal plant as memorial

Source: CNN (11-29-09)

(CNN) -- It was to be a somber memorial, a remembrance of those who perished in a lethal milky fog.

To mark the 25th anniversary of the world's worst industrial disaster, authorities planned to open up the now-dilapidated shell of the Union Carbide fertilizer plant, where in the wee hours of December 3, 1984, 40 tons of methyl isocyanate gas oozed out onto the sleeping city of Bhopal, India.

About 4,000 people died instantly in the toxic leak, an event that came to be marked each year with disputes over victims' rights and government accountability.

On this year's milestone anniversary, a new controversy has stirred.

The state government of Madhya Pradesh planned to temporarily open the long-silent plant -- surrounded by concrete barriers and barbed wire -- to the public. It was to be part of a series of events observing the tragedy.

Because everyone wanted to see, to know. For the same reason that a person visits a Nazi concentration camp or ground zero in New York.

"Everyone wants to see the world's worst industrial disaster," said S.R. Mohanty, the secretary for the Relief and Rehabilitation Department for the Bhopal gas tragedy.

It was going to be the government's way of reassuring its people that the plant no longer posed a threat to society.

But the move sparked protests from victim rights groups and environmental activists. Just days before the anniversary, government officials backed away from the plan they had recently announced...

Posted on Monday, November 30, 2009 at 2:50 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Remains of Missing Gulf War Pilot Hidden in Iraqi Sand for 18 Years

Source: Fox News (11-29-09)

WASHINGTON — The military says Capt. Michael "Scott" Speicher died when his fighter jet was shot down over Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War and was never captured or tortured.

But Speicher's family is unconvinced.

The Navy pilot's remains were identified earlier this year under about 18 inches of sand in the Iraqi desert.

In an exclusive interview with The Associated Press, the chief of POW/MIA analysis at the Defense Intelligence Agency describes a series of twists and the duplicity of Saddam Hussein's government led to a number of false leads and rumors about Speicher's survival.

Posted on Monday, November 30, 2009 at 2:24 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Obama Keeps Mum on Military Secrets

Source: The Daily Beast (11-25-09)

President Obama will withhold the release of millions of pages of military and intelligence documents even though the information was scheduled to be declassified at the end of the year. The decision runs counter to a White House that promised transparency and openness, the Boston Globe reports. The documents are all more than 25 years old, with some dating back to World War II. “The national-security bureaucracy is deeply entrenched and is not willing to give up some of the protections they feel they need for their documents," said a researcher at the National Security Archive. Critics fear that if Obama can extend deadlines at will, it sets a bad precedent for all future declassifications. “It is a bit of a test," said one Obama appointee. "You have an administration that has committed to certain things and tried to shape the direction, but then you have the bureaucracy which is very adept at resisting change.’’

Posted on Monday, November 30, 2009 at 2:16 AM | Comments (0) | Top

How English Heritage snubbed the Scientologist founder L Ron Hubbard (UK)

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-29-09)

The government agency, which runs the scheme, rejected the application by supporters of the founder of Scientology after its blue plaques panel decided that it was unconvinced about Mr Hubbard's "reputation".

The decision has frustrated the Hubbard Foundation, which had nominated him. In an unusual move, a foundation representative went to visit English Heritage officials, following the verdict, to find out more about why he had been rejected and how his case could be helped.

Under the rules of the scheme, no candidate can be reconsidered within 10 years of being rejected, but Mr Hubbard's backers say they do not consider the matter "closed" and are now proposing further talks in a bid to revive their cause.

The organisation, which is considered a cult by some, is based on the premise that the human race is descended from Thetans, an exiled race from another planet.

It was founded by Mr Hubbard, an American science fiction writer, in the 1950s, and now has millions of followers including the Hollywood actors Tom Cruise and John Travolta. From 1957 until 1959, Mr Hubbard based himself at Fitzroy House, in London's West End, and wrote many of his works there. It was a Scientology "church" until 1968, when it was sold. The organisation then bought it back around six years ago and the four-storey building, at 37 Fitzroy Street, is now open as a museum in Mr Hubbard's memory.

According to minutes of a meeting in June last year, obtained using Freedom of Information legislation, the blue plaques panel decided that "more time was needed to make an objective assessment of Hubbard's reputation". Panel members present at the meeting included Professor Andrew Motion, the former Poet Laureate.

The panel "also noted that [Hubbard] had no settled residence in London". However, other foreign personalities who only spent short periods of their life in the capital have been awarded plaques in their honour.

Blue plaques are considered a high accolade and have been erected outside the London homes of some of the world's greatest minds. Eligibility guidelines state that nominated figures must have been dead for 20 years or have passed the centenary of their birth, and must have made an "important positive contribution to human welfare or happiness". Mr Hubbard died in 1986...

Posted on Monday, November 30, 2009 at 1:53 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Why Ireland Is Running Out of Priests

Source: Time (11-29-09)

Wanted: Clean-living young people for a long career (women need not apply). Responsibilities: Varied. Spiritual guidance, visiting the sick, public relations, marriages (own marriage not permitted). Hours: On call at all times. Salary: None, bar basic monthly stipend.

He hasn't placed classified ads in the Irish press just yet, but according to Father Patrick Rushe, coordinator of vocations with the Catholic Church in Ireland, "we've done just about everything" else to attract young men to the priesthood. And yet, the call of service in one of Europe's most religious countries is falling on more deaf ears than ever.

Earlier this month, the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, made a grim prediction about the future of the church in Ireland: If more young priests aren't found quickly, the country's parishes may soon not have enough clergy to survive. He told the congregation at St. Mary's Pro-Cathedral in Dublin that his own diocese had 46 priests aged 80 or over, but only two under 35 years old. It's a similar story all over the island. According to a 2007 study of Catholic dioceses in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, about half of all priests are between the ages of 55 and 74.

Ireland's ties to the Catholic Church run deep. The ordination of a family member was once regarded as a moment of great prestige, especially in rural areas. Even as recently as 1990, over 80% of Irish people said they attended Mass at least once a week. But the country's relationship with the church began to change dramatically in the mid-1990s when Ireland's economy began to take off, ushering in years of unprecedented growth. Soon, disaffection replaced devotion among Ireland's newly rich younger generation. Most devastating of all, however, were the sex-abuse scandals involving pedophile priests that surfaced around the same time. Criticism over the handling of the case of Father Brendan Smyth — a priest who had sexually abused children for over 40 years — even led to the collapse of the Irish government in 1994. (Prime Minister Albert Reynolds was forced to stand down amid public anger over the lengthy delays in extraditing Smyth to Northern Ireland, where he was wanted on child abuse charges.)

But more was still to come. Last May, the government published the findings of a nine-year inquiry into child abuse at church-run schools, orphanages and hospitals from the 1930s to the 1990s. The report, which described "endemic sexual abuse" at boys' schools and the "daily terror" of physical abuse at other institutions, shook Ireland to its core and left the reputation of the church and the religious orders that ran its schools in tatters. Then, this week, another government inquiry found that the church and police colluded to cover up numerous cases of child sex abuse by priests in the Dublin archdiocese from 1975 to 2004, prompting the head of the Catholic church in Ireland, Cardinal Sean Brady, to apologize to the Irish people. "No one is above the law in this country," he said. There are now calls for similar inquiries to be held in every diocese in Ireland...

Posted on Monday, November 30, 2009 at 1:51 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Rwanda joins the Commonwealth

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-29-09)

Rwanda joined the Commonwealth on Sunday, becoming only the second country which was not formerly a British colony to be admitted to the group.

The small central African country applied last year to join the group of 54 nations, all of which - aside from Mozambique - have historic links to Britain dating back to the colonial era.

Rwanda's President Paul Kagame has lobbied hard for his country to join the Commonwealth as part of a policy of moving towards the Anglophone world and away from the influence of France.

Rwanda was both a Belgian and French colony, but Mr Kagame has a long-running dispute with Paris over its alleged complicity in the 1994 genocide, which only ended when Mr Kagame's rebel army took control of the country.

Posted on Sunday, November 29, 2009 at 4:56 PM | Comments (0) | Top

'1428' tells Sichuan quake survivors' stories

Source: CNN (11-29-09)

It was at 2:28 p.m. on May 12, 2008, when a devastating earthquake shattered the villages of China's Sichuan province, leaving 69,000 people dead and 15 million displaced.

Little more than a year after the quake, Du Haibin's film "1428" won the Orizzonti prize for Best Documentary at the 2009 Venice Film Festival.

Without judgment but with a deep compassion for their subjects, the filmmakers of "1428" bring us a myriad of individual stories of absurdity, confusion and grief.

Posted on Sunday, November 29, 2009 at 4:48 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Village of the 'cloned': Mystery of Brazil's 'Mengele' twins

Source: New York Post (11-29-09)

It's been an inexplicable phenomenon for decades: a remote Brazilian village full of blond-haired, blue-eyed twins. Dozens and dozens of twins, all with the clean-cut Aryan features that Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele wanted in his genetically altered master race.

Could Mengele -- who fled to South America in 1949 -- have had a hand in the bizarre outbreak of Germanic twins in Candido Godoi, Brazil?

That's the puzzle the National Geographic Channel tries to solve in its latest documentary, "Nazi Mystery: Twins from Brazil," which airs tonight at 9 p.m.

Posted on Sunday, November 29, 2009 at 4:39 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Mein Kampf a hit on Dhaka streets

Source: BBC (11-27-09)

Booksellers touting their wares amid the heavy traffic in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, have discovered an unusual best-seller.

Adolf Hitler's autobiography manifesto Mein Kampf is selling as well as Dan Brown's latest novel, The Lost Symbol.

The street vendors in Dhaka are found at every major road junction and intersection.

Most of the sellers are young boys and many compete with beggars to attract the attention of motorists.

Posted on Sunday, November 29, 2009 at 3:46 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Alleged Nazi Guard's Trial Marks End of an Era

Source: Fox News (11-29-09)

Nearly 65 years after the liberation of the concentration camps, an alleged accomplice in the Holocaust is to stand trial this week in Germany -- one of the last such cases and marking for some the end of Europe's darkest era.

German prosecutors will begin their case against John Demjanjuk Monday morning in Munich, bringing charges against a man, they say, volunteered to guard the Sobibor death camp in 1943 and was complicit in the murder of tens of thousands of Jews.

After years of highly public trials for the architects of the slaughter, held in Nuremberg, Germany, Jerusalem and elsewhere, Monday's hearing at a regional court in Munich is set to be the last time the story of the Holocaust will be played out so fully in a courtroom — the last time survivors of the mass murder will testify against a man suspected of being one of their families' willing executioners.

Posted on Sunday, November 29, 2009 at 3:36 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Senate Report Explores 2001 Escape by bin Laden From Afghan Mountains

Source: NYT (11-28-09)

As President Obama vows to “finish the job” in Afghanistan by sending more troops, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has completed a detailed look back at a crucial failure early in the battle against Al Qaeda: the escape of Osama bin Laden from American forces in the Afghan mountains of Tora Bora in December 2001.

“Removing the Al Qaeda leader from the battlefield eight years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat,” the committee’s report concludes. “But the decisions that opened the door for his escape to Pakistan allowed bin Laden to emerge as a potent symbolic figure who continues to attract a steady flow of money and inspire fanatics worldwide.”

The report, based in part on a little-noticed 2007 history of the Tora Bora episode by the military’s Special Operations Command, asserts that the consequences of not sending American troops in 2001 to block Mr. bin Laden’s escape into Pakistan are still being felt.

Posted on Sunday, November 29, 2009 at 1:25 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Obama Makes History: Thanksgiving Proclamation First Ever to Omit Direct Mention of God

Source: LifeSiteNews (11-27-09)

President Obama's brief proclamation of Thanksgiving Day on November 26 was unique among all recorded Thanksgiving proclamations by his predecessors: it is the first one that fails to directly acknowledge the existence of God.

The beneficence shown by God to America is a theme that traditionally defines the Thanksgiving holiday, and this theme is strongly emphasized in the original Thanksgiving Day proclamations and consistently acknowledged even by modern presidents.

Obama's unprecedented proclamation, however, only makes indirect mention of God by quoting George Washington, stating: "Today, we recall President George Washington, who proclaimed our first national day of public thanksgiving to be observed 'by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God.'"

The proclamation goes on to call Thanksgiving Day "a unique national tradition we all share" that unites people as "thankful for our common blessings." ...

... The second weakest reference to God in a Thanksgiving proclamation was issued in 1975 by Gerald Ford, who in his second year as President exhorted Americans to "reaffirm our belief in a dynamic spirit that will continue to nurture and guide us." But in his first address, Ford characterized Thanksgiving as a time "all Americans join in giving thanks to God for the blessings we share."

In 1969, President Richard Nixon's address referred to the "Source of all good" who "constantly bestows His blessings on mankind." In 1978, Jimmy Carter hailed the bounty provided by "Providence"; Ronald Reagan's 1982 proclamation mentioned "a divine plan" that established America...

Posted on Saturday, November 28, 2009 at 8:37 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler's Mercedes, the ultimate war trophy for a Russian collector

Source: Guardian (UK) (11-27-09)

Showing off his stunning collection of classic automobiles, Dmitry Lomakov explains why Russians love Nazi cars. "They are symbols of Russia's victory,'' he says. "For Russians the second world war isn't a historical event. For us it happened yesterday.''

Lomakov is the director of Moscow's museum of retro-automobiles whose collection in a freezing cold hanger includes three rare Nazi-owned vehicles. "Buying a Nazi car is like sticking one finger up to Hitler,'' he explains.

On the left of the entrance is Joseph Goebbels' Mercedes Benz 540K, bought by Lomakov's father in 1972 after he spotted it rusting in a garden in communist Latvia. Then there is Hermann Goering's jaw-droppingly sleek Horch-853 limousine. Next to that is Martin Boorman's comparatively modest Mercedes-Benz 320, used by his cook to transport sacks of potatoes. Earlier this week an anonymous Russian collector snapped up the ultimate trophy: a midnight blue Mercedes Benz 770K belonging to Hitler.

The five-ton armour-plated vehicle – licence plate number 1A 148461 – was part of Hitler's official fleet, and used by the Führer to criss-cross Europe during the second world war. (Hitler was photographed standing in it surrounded by adoring Sieg Heiling crowds.)

Michael Fröhlich, a Düsseldorf car dealer, brokered the deal. The mystery Russian purchased five other similar class vehicles, four of which once belonged to third reich leaders including the Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.

Posted on Saturday, November 28, 2009 at 8:36 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Argentine Dirty War Victims Cautiously Embrace Trials, Hope for More

Source: Truthout (11-28-09)

Buenos Aires, Argentina - In July 1977, when Ana Maria Careaga was just sixteen years old, she was kidnapped off a major intersection in Buenos Aires by forces from Argentina's last dictatorship. She was taken to what she later found out was "Club Atletico," a torture center and secret prison in a federal police station just blocks from the bustling downtown. According to court documents, for three and a half months, she was savagely tortured - beaten, hung by her wrists and ankles, and electrocuted. According to Careaga's testimony in court documents, her guards continued to beat her even after she told them she was pregnant.

On Tuesday, November 24, more than 33 years after the dictatorship took power and forcibly disappeared between 9,000 and 30,000 citizens like Careaga in Argentina's "Dirty War," 15 defendants accused of operating the Atletico and two other secret prisons appeared in court.

The defendants, mostly retired police officials, have been charged on an array of counts against 181 victims, including kidnapping, torture and murder. All of the crimes took place between 1976 and 1979, the most repressive period during the dictatorship's rule, which lasted until 1983...

... Though her day in court has finally come, Careaga has mixed emotions. Twenty six years after the return of democracy, she says "now we can have justice." But, she is frustrated that the defendants have not been charged for the crimes committed against all their suspected victims. "There are a lot of people who were kidnapped, but they aren't judging ... these repressors [for these crimes]."...

Posted on Saturday, November 28, 2009 at 8:21 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Big Break for Nazi Hunters (Brazil)

Source: The Daily Beast (11-28-09)

Nazi hunters have had what they’re describing as their best break in years after discovering immigration files in Brazil that are more than 50 years old. The files identify several hundred Germans who moved to Brazil in the decade after World War II ended. Though most are likely to now be dead, the German government plans to investigate the names. “The discovery will probably be our most important find in recent times,” said Kurt Schrimm, the top German justice official who hunts Nazi fugitives.

Posted on Saturday, November 28, 2009 at 8:14 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Some Indians Find It Tough to Go Home Again

Source: NYT (11-27-09)

NEW DELHI — When 7-year-old Shiva Ayyadurai left Mumbai with his family nearly 40 years ago, he promised himself he would return to India someday to help his country.

In June, Mr. Ayyadurai, now 45, moved from Boston to New Delhi hoping to make good on that promise. An entrepreneur and lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a fistful of American degrees, he was the first recruit of an ambitious government program to lure talented scientists of the so-called desi diaspora back to their homeland.

“It seemed perfect,” he said recently of the job opportunity.

It wasn’t.

As Mr. Ayyadurai sees it now, his Western business education met India’s notoriously inefficient, opaque government, and things went downhill from there. Within weeks, he and his boss were at loggerheads. Last month, his job offer was withdrawn. Mr. Ayyadurai has moved back to Boston.

In recent years, Mother India has welcomed back tens of thousands of former emigrants and their offspring. When he visited the United States this week, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh personally extended an invitation “to all Indian-Americans and nonresident Indians who wish to return home.” But, like Mr. Ayyadurai, many Indians who spent most of their lives in North America and Europe are finding they can’t go home again.

About 100,000 “returnees” will move from the United States to India in the next five years, estimates Vivek Wadhwa, a research associate at Harvard University who has studied the topic. These repats, as they are known, are drawn by India’s booming economic growth, the chance to wrestle with complex problems and the opportunity to learn more about their heritage. They are joining multinational companies, starting new businesses and even becoming part of India’s sleepy government bureaucracy.

But a study by Mr. Wadhwa and other academics found that 34 percent of repats found it difficult to return to India — compared to just 13 percent of Indian immigrants who found it difficult to settle in the United States. The repats complained about traffic, lack of infrastructure, bureaucracy and pollution.

For many returnees the cultural ties and chance to do good that drew them back are overshadowed by workplace cultures that feel unexpectedly foreign, and can be frustrating. Sometimes returnees discover that they share more in their attitudes and perspectives with other Americans or with the British than with other Indians. Some stay just a few months, some return to the West after a few years...

Posted on Saturday, November 28, 2009 at 8:03 PM | Comments (0) | Top

The Vikings raided, pillaged...and wrote love poems

Source: WSJ (11-28-09)

Mention the Vikings and most people will immediately think of horned helmets, blood eagles, and grizzled barbarians raiding and pillaging their way across the seven seas. It's a cliché, of course, but one embedded with an element of truth. During the early years of the Viking Age (circa 800–1100) the Vikings were engaged in a campaign of what we might now term "asymmetrical warfare," attacking religious targets in a savage attempt to assert their own culture against Charlemagne's expanding Christian empire.

Yet these warriors had an artistic side that's long been overlooked. They spun out intricately decorated shields, finely worked silver jewelry and woven wall tapestries depicting scenes from heathen mythology. And a mastery of poetry was a must for any young Viking who wanted to make a name for himself.

Most Viking poems praised the deeds of a king or patron, but a few of them even dwelled on love. Young Icelandic warrior-poets (or "skalds," as they were known) such as Gunnlaug Snaketongue, Kormak Ogmundarson, and Hallfred the Troublesome Poet, were documenting the ecstasies and despairs of romantic love as early as the late 10th century, some 200 years before the medieval troubadours we typically credit as being the world's first true Romantic poets...

Posted on Saturday, November 28, 2009 at 7:36 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Anger At Inquest For 7/7 Victims And Bombers (UK)

Source: Sky News (UK) (11-27-09)

Graham Foulkes, whose 22-year-old son David was killed in the London attacks, said the announcement came as a "real blow" and criticised its "insensitivity".

He was speaking after Lady Justice Hallett, a Court of Appeal judge, met with the families to explain she will hold a pre-inquest hearing early next year.

The full inquests are expected to follow in the autumn.

She told the families she had no choice but to hold the inquests of the four bombers at the same time as those of the victims.

Posted on Saturday, November 28, 2009 at 2:14 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Nelson Mandela 'fake foreword' in Congo president's book were his words

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-27-09)

The cover of Straight Speaking for Africa by President Denis Sassou-Nguesso proudly proclaims "Foreword by Nelson Mandela". Inside, Mr Mandela. 91, is purported to hail a man who came to power in a coup in 1979 and after losing elections regained power by winning a civil war as "one of our great African leaders".

But the anti-apartheid leader's foundation, which guards his legacy, last month threatened legal action over the "false claim".

"Mr Mandela has neither read the book nor written a foreword for it. We condemn this brazen abuse of Mr Mandela's name," Verne Harris, the foundation's acting chief executive, said at the time.

Posted on Saturday, November 28, 2009 at 1:48 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Ivan the Terrible film 'slanders Russia' and should be banned, historian says

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-28-09)

Vyacheslav Manyagin has asked Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to outlaw the film, which he claims is an insult to Russian statehood.

The blockbuster, released earlier this month, has triggered an ill-tempered debate in religious and historical circles at a time when the Kremlin is encouraging Russians to take patriotic pride in their often brutal history.

In the film, Ivan the Terrible is shown as a murderous tyrant who puts himself above God and punishes his real and imagined enemies with cruel and unusual deaths.

In one scene, the Russian ruler has his disgraced military commanders torn apart by a bear. In another, he has the head of the Russian church murdered. In a third, his enforcers burn a church and its occupants to the ground.

"Imagine that they made a film in America about George Washington in which the first US president was portrayed as a bloodthirsty maniac," Mr Manyagin said. "This film slanders the Russian people and state."

Posted on Saturday, November 28, 2009 at 1:45 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Zulu warriors who defeated British to be honoured

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-27-09)

The catastrophic defeat at Isandlwana on the Natal border in South Africa on Jan 22, 1879 has largely been overshadowed in Britain by the dramatic defence of Rorke's Drift later the same day, which featured in the Sir Michael Caine film Zulu.

That battle, which pitted a tiny garrison of fewer than 140 men against 3,000 heavily armed Zulus, came to symbolise the Anglo-Zulu war but distracted attention from the battle five miles away at Isandlwana, where a 1,750-strong British force was overwhelmed by 20,000 Zulu warriors.

More than 1,300 of those defending the isolated position were massacred in what remained the most catastrophic loss of life for British forces until the First World War.

The Anglo-Zulu war was brought to a close in August 1879 with the capture and exile of the Zulu king, Cetshwayo, and the integration of the territory more fully into British controlled South Africa.

Now about 10,000 Zulu warriors who died in the war are finally to be given a formal monument, to be erected by state of KwaZulu Natal.

Posted on Saturday, November 28, 2009 at 1:41 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Mein Kampf a hit on Dhaka streets

Source: BBC (11-27-09)

Adolf Hitler's autobiography manifesto Mein Kampf is selling as well as Dan Brown's latest novel, The Lost Symbol.

The street vendors in Dhaka are found at every major road junction and intersection.

Most of the sellers are young boys and many compete with beggars to attract the attention of motorists.

Last week, Mein Kampf did unusually well because many bought the book to give it away as an Eid present.

Posted on Saturday, November 28, 2009 at 1:22 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Dig to start at Shakespeare site

Source: BBC (11-27-09)

The New Place, in Stratford-upon-Avon, was built in 1483 and is thought to be where the playwright died in 1616.

The building itself was demolished in 1759, but it is thought remains of the old house are still underground.

Archaeologists will start initial tests on the site on Tuesday and a full dig could be carried out next year.

The experts from Birmingham Archaeology will be searching for the foundations of the New Place and will be looking through the original wells and possibly rubbish pits.

Posted on Saturday, November 28, 2009 at 1:20 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Lenin Statue Vandalized by Ukrainian Nationalists in Kiev

Source: Artdaily.org (11-28-09)

Ukrainian nationalists hurled red paint at a restored monument to Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin moments after it was unveiled Friday, sparking a street brawl and revealing the bitter divisions over the legacy of communism in Ukraine.

The nationalist group, Freedom, said the protest was inspired by persistent debate over the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33, a major irritant in Kiev's relationship with its former Soviet overlord, Moscow.

It was the second time this year that vandals have targeted the more than 11-foot-tall (3.5-meter) granite statue of the Russian revolutionary on Kiev's central Shevchenko boulevard. In July, it was taken down for restoration after nationalists smashed its face with a hammer and tore off an arm.

Posted on Saturday, November 28, 2009 at 1:18 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Friday, November 27, 2009

Poland Imposes Strict Ban on Communist Symbols

Source: Fox News (11-27-09)

WARSAW, Poland — Poland's president has approved legislation that allows for people to be fined or even imprisoned for possessing or buying communist symbols, two decades after communist rule ended.

The new law says that people who posses, purchase or spread items or recordings containing communist symbols could be fined or be imprisoned for up two years.

The new law has drawn criticism from left-wing lawmakers and other observers who say it is ill-defined and will be hard to implement. The law does not list the banned symbols and it also exempts from punishment their use for artistic, educational or collectors' purposes.

Posted on Friday, November 27, 2009 at 7:07 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Protestant church officially apologizes for 17th century Native American massacre

Source: Yahoo News (11-27-09)

NEW YORK – Members of one of America's oldest Protestant churches officially apologized Friday — for the first time — for massacring and displacing Native Americans 400 years ago.

"We consumed your resources, dehumanized your people and disregarded your culture, along with your dreams, hopes and great love for this land," the Rev. Robert Chase told descendants from both sides. "With pain, we the Collegiate Church, remember our part in these events."

The minister spoke on Native American Heritage Day at a reconciliation ceremony of the Lenape tribe with the Collegiate Church, started in 1628 in then-New Amsterdam as the Reformed Dutch Church.

The rite was held in front of the Museum of the American Indian in lower Manhattan, where Dutch colonizers had built their fort near an Indian trail now called Broadway, just steps away from Wall Street.

Posted on Friday, November 27, 2009 at 7:05 PM | Comments (0) | Top

UK diplomat questions post of Jews on Iraq panel

Source: The Jerusalem Post (via OpEdNews) (11-25-09)

A British diplomat has criticized the appointment of two leading Jewish academics to the UK's Iraq Inquiry panel, stating it may upset the balance of the inquiry.

Sir Oliver Miles, a former British ambassador to Libya, told The Independent newspaper this week that the appointment of Sir Martin Gilbert, the renowned Holocaust historian and Winston Churchill biographer, and Sir Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies and vice-principal of King's College London, would be seen as "ammunition" that could be used to call the inquiry a "whitewash."

Miles said the two academics were Jewish and that Gilbert was an active Zionist. He also said they were both strong supporters of former prime minister Tony Blair and the Iraq war.

Posted on Friday, November 27, 2009 at 6:58 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Listening sessions intended to help national park service preserve World War II internment sites

Source: National Parks Traveler (11-27-09)

In 2010, the Park Service will accept grant applications for the second year under the Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program. Earlier this year, NPS gave out the program’s first grants – nearly $1 million in 2-for-1 matching funds to 19 projects in a dozen states. The money can be used to help study, acquire, preserve and protect dozens of locations where more than 110,000 men, women and children, most of them American citizens of Japanese ancestry, were detained and forcibly relocated after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Before beginning the next round of grants for 2010, NPS wants to hear public views about how the program went in its first year. This is to help ensure that the grants financially support projects that most represent the program’s intent: To educate the American public and leave a legacy for future generations by preserving both the physical confinement sites and the stories of Japanese Americans who were held there beginning in 1942.

Next week’s meetings will be held Monday, Nov. 30 through Friday, Dec. 4, in seven cities: Denver, Chicago, Seattle, Little Rock, Los Angeles, Honolulu and San Francisco. A list of locations, addresses, times and other information is below.

Congress established the grant program in 2006 to preserve and explain the places where Japanese Americans were rounded up and detained. It authorizes up to $38 million over the life of the grant program to identify, research, evaluate, interpret, protect, restore, repair and acquire historic internment sites.

Posted on Friday, November 27, 2009 at 6:53 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Nightmarish memories of the Nazis' Sobibor death camp

Source: BBC (11-27-09)

John Demjanjuk is due to stand trial in Germany accused of helping to murder more than 27,000 Jews at the Nazi death camp of Sobibor in occupied Poland. The BBC's Steve Rosenberg returns to the site of the camp with one man who survived its horrors.

In the Jewish cemetery in the town of Izbica, 84-year-old Philip Bialowitz shows me a battered gravestone among a tangle of bushes.

“ In Sobibor life was hell. But we took revenge. We escaped to tell the world what had happened ”

"This is the place where I was shot," he tells me. "I was brought here with a group of people and we were shot with machine-guns."

The Nazis murdered 4,000 Jews in the cemetery. Philip's mother was killed here. But her son had a remarkable escape. Lined up with other Jewish prisoners by the side of a freshly dug grave, he jumped in as soon as the bullets started to fly.

"I fell down and pretended I was dead. I made myself room to breathe. Many people were screaming. They were injured. I couldn't help them. I lay there a few hours covered in blood. Then I managed to get out."

A few months later, Philip was rearrested, together with his brother, his two sisters and his niece. This time they were not taken to the cemetery. They were transported to Sobibor.

"We knew that Sobibor was a death camp," Philip recalls. "We'd heard. So when they took us on the road to Sobibor we knew that this is the end of our life."

Sobibor was one of three secret killing factories built by the Nazis in eastern Poland. In 18 months, a quarter of a million Jews were transported here and murdered in the gas chambers. Their bodies were incinerated, their ashes buried in pits.

It is here that John Demjanjuk is accused of being a guard and of helping to kill 27,900 Jews. His trial begins next week in Munich. John Demjanjuk denies the charges. ..

... But one remarkable day the Jews of Sobibor fought back.

On 14 October 1943, the slave labourers launched an uprising. It was led by a Polish Jew, Leon Feldhendler, and a Russian Jewish POW, Sasha Pechersky.
Their escape plan exploited the Nazis' greed. Slave labourers, whose job it was to sort the clothes of murdered Jews, put aside the best items. These were then used to lure the SS guards into traps one by one.

"I was one of the messengers," remembers Philip. "I went up to a Gestapo and told him, 'I've been sent to tell you they found a very beautiful leather coat and boots for you. Come to the warehouse to try it on'. When they went in, they were killed with knives and axes."

The Jews killed 12 SS men before the plot was discovered...

Posted on Friday, November 27, 2009 at 6:49 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Is Time Running Out to Dig Up S Korea's Mass Graves?

Source: Time (11-27-09)

On a cold February night in 1951, South Korean troops moved swiftly to take a communist guerrilla stronghold on Bulgap Mountain, at a county called Hampyeong in the Korean peninsula's southwest corner. By the time they scaled the ridge, the rebels had fled. That's when the bloodshed began. Suspecting the villagers in the area had helped the enemy, the soldiers made them kneel in a trench, then shoved sharpened bamboo sticks down their throats and shot them.

Nearly 60 years later, excavators working for South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission have been unearthing remains there and at 11 other mass graves from the Korean War. By piecing together and acknowledging the massacres, they say, South Koreans can finally put a dark chapter in history to rest — and the evidence can help victims seek compensation from the government. The commission, however, does not have the power to arrest the perpetrators.

But time is running short, and the group, formed in 2005 under the liberal administration of Roh Moo Hyun, has run into political opposition. Starting in December, conservative President Lee Myung Bak, the National Assembly and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court will appoint the group's new leaders, who could choose to not renew its controversial mandate or diminish it. That wouldn't be a surprise; in the past two years, victims have lost three separate lawsuits demanding compensation from the government. "I lost my family at the hands of the government, but they have not compensated me at all for my suffering," says Jung Jung Hee, 76, who barely survived another massacre, also near Bulgap, during the war. "It's so unfair."

From 1950 to 1953, communist forces from North Korea and the military-run South fought one of the bloodiest civil wars of the 20th century, leaving more than 2 million civilians dead. Troops from both sides carried out mass executions. But after the Korean War ended, a succession of military dictators through the 1980s in the South suppressed the accounts; those who suggested South Korean forces might have executed innocents — and even family members who exhumed their relatives for proper burials — were harassed or arrested for being communist sympathizers.

For decades, historians have relied on written and oral accounts to pinpoint the killings, but it wasn't until the commission began gathering forensic evidence in 2005 that the scope of each massacre became clearer. The South Korean military, for example, claimed in reports that more than 1,000 "communist guerrillas" were killed at Bulgap Mountain that night in February. But the excavation tells a different story. Investigators found 133 intact skeletons bending their knees and clutching their fingers behind their skulls — 21 were under 16 years old and nonmilitary artifacts like toys and hairpins were found, indicating the people were civilians not involved in the fighting. "As we can see, the military reports were manipulated," says Park Sun Ju, chief of the excavating team. The group has also investigated American carpet bombings used to rout communist forces during the war, a practice it claims killed thousands of civilians...

Posted on Friday, November 27, 2009 at 6:47 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Iran seizes 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi's medal

Source: New York Daily News (11-27-09)

TEHRAN, Iran - Iranian authorities have confiscated Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi's medal, the human rights lawyer said Thursday, in a sign of the increasingly drastic steps Tehran is taking against any dissent.

In Norway, where the peace prize is awarded, the government said the confiscation of the gold medal was a shocking first in the history of the 108-year-old prize.

Ebadi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her efforts in promoting democracy. She has long faced harassment from Iranian authorities for her activities - including threats against her relatives and a raid on her office last year in which files were confiscated...

Posted on Friday, November 27, 2009 at 6:45 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Ohio Looks to Replace Statue of Gov. William Allen in US Capitol

Source: NYT (11-26-09)

CINCINNATI — For more than 100 years, Gov. William Allen and President James A. Garfield have represented Ohio in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the United States Capitol in Washington.

But Mr. Allen, it seems, held beliefs about race that are now embarrassing.

“He wasn’t pro-slavery, but he was not pro-civil rights,” said Tom Reider, research archivist for the Ohio Historical Society. “He did not favor extending suffrage to African-American males through the 15th Amendment.”

So the state has begun looking for an Ohioan to replace him, and there is no shortage of nominees. They include three presidents, Ulysses S. Grant, William McKinley and William Howard Taft; the Olympic athlete Jesse Owens; and William Ellsworth Hoy, a deaf baseball player at the turn of the 20th century and a member of the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame who was known as Dummy.

Posted on Friday, November 27, 2009 at 6:30 PM | Comments (0) | Top

StoryCorps Oral History Project calls for Day After Thanksgiving to be a 'Day of Listening'

Source: Google News (11-26-09)

WASHINGTON — Instead of rushing to stores the day after Thanksgiving, organizers of an oral history project are urging people to join the National Day of Listening.

The event began last year on the Friday after Thanksgiving. The New York-based StoryCorps project led thousands in interviewing their friends and loved ones about their lives and recording the conversations with home equipment.

The interviews can be uploaded to StoryCorps' Web site. Some will be broadcast on public radio stations.

Posted on Friday, November 27, 2009 at 6:25 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Mental State Cited in 9/11 Case

Source: WSJ (11-27-09)

WASHINGTON -- When five defendants are brought before a New York federal judge to face charges for the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the first question may be whether some of them are competent to stand trial at all.

Military lawyers for Ramzi Binalshibh, an accused organizer of the 9/11 plot, and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, the conspiracy's alleged paymaster, say their clients have mental disorders that make them unfit for trial, likely caused or exacerbated by years of harsh confinement in Central Intelligence Agency custody.

The issue already has arisen in military-commission proceedings at the military's detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. According to an August ruling by a military judge, prosecutors have made an "apparent concession" that Mr. Binalshibh "suffers from a delusional disorder-persecutory type" disorder. Mr. Binalshibh has been prescribed "a variety of psychotropic medications used to treat schizophrenia and/or bipolar disorder, including Haldol, Abilify, risperidone and Ativan," according to commission records...

... Much remains unknown about the prisoners' mental state, and prosecutors may have evidence to demonstrate their fitness that isn't currently public...

Posted on Friday, November 27, 2009 at 6:17 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Casualties of Hitler's sterilisation programme still suffer

Source: Times (UK) (11-26-09)

Making amends for the sins of previous generations is now ubiquitous. Kevin Rudd, the Australian Prime Minister, apologised ten days ago for the abuse of children who were sent to Australia between 1930 and 1967. Tony Blair made an equally profound gesture in 2006, in recognition of Britain’s role in the African slave trade, and it is 39 years since Willy Brandt, the Chancellor of West Germany, fell to his knees in Warsaw and declared Germany to be sorry for the Holocaust. Yet, despite all the hand wringing, some victims remain hidden in the shadows...

... It was in 1934 that the Nazis brought into force the “law for the prevention of genetic ill procreation”. For Hitler, the sterilisation of “genetically ill” people was a “humane deed” for mankind. “The passing pain of one century can and will release thousands of years from suffering,” he wrote in Mein Kampf. This “passing pain” was inflicted on about 400,000 people. The exact number is difficult to ascertain because many victims did not survive their ordeal.

Men and women were classified as genetically ill if they suffered from “hereditary mental retardation”, “schizophrenia”, “manic-depressive insanity”, but also if they were deaf or blind. People who were heavily disabled and some who were alcoholics could suffer compulsory sterilisation, with or without anaesthetic. To achieve this the Nazis established “genetic health tribunals” to arbitrate. Many victims were healthy, but had had the ill-luck to belong to a marginalised social class.

In Germany today those victims of Nazi eugenics are still fighting against being labelled “lebensunwert” — unworthy to live. Incredibly, the eugenic Nazi law still exists. The German Parliament suspended the “law for the prevention of genetic ill procreation” in 2007, but this did not eliminate it, only put it out of force. To some this may appear only a juristic formality, but Germany’s failure to abolish it has left the victims feeling isolated.

Posted on Friday, November 27, 2009 at 5:52 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Catholic Church in Ireland given immunity for child sexual abuse cover-up, report shows

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-26-09)

Authorities enjoyed a cosy relationship with the Church and did not enforce the law as four archbishops, obsessed with secrecy and avoiding scandal, protected abusers and reputations at all costs, the report said..

Hundreds of crimes against children from the 1960s to the 1990s were not reported while police treated clergy as though they were above the law.

In a three-year inquiry, the Commission to Inquire into the Dublin Archdiocese uncovered a sickening tactic of ''don't ask, don't tell'' throughout the Church.

''The Commission has no doubt that clerical child sexual abuse was covered up by the Archdiocese of Dublin and other Church authorities,'' it said.

''The structures and rules of the Catholic Church facilitated that cover-up.

''The State authorities facilitated that cover-up by not fulfilling their responsibilities to ensure that the law was applied equally to all and allowing the Church institutions to be beyond the reach of the normal law enforcement processes.''

Posted on Friday, November 27, 2009 at 5:49 PM | Comments (0) | Top

The Queen plants tree for Bermuda's 400th anniversary celebration

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-27-09)

The Queen demonstrated her gardening skills as she planted a palm tree in the grounds of Government House on the latest stage of her visit to Bermuda.

With shovel in hand the Queen, who was wearing a paisley turquoise skirt and jacket and matching hat, patted down the earth around the sapling, while officials from the building in Hamilton looked on.

The Queen first visited Bermuda in 1953, just five months after her coronation.

Posted on Friday, November 27, 2009 at 1:52 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Khmer Rouge jail chief Duch demands acquittal

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-27-09)

Former Khmer Rouge prison chief Duch asked Cambodia's UN-backed war crimes court on Friday to acquit and release him on the final day of arguments in his trial.

Following a query by shocked judges, Duch's Cambodian lawyer Kar Savuth confirmed that Duch was asking to be acquitted on the grounds that he was not a senior member of the Khmer Rouge hierarchy.

International prosecutors earlier this week asked judges to impose a jail sentence of 40 years on Duch - a former maths teacher and born again Christian - for his role in the brutal 1975-1979 communist regime.

Posted on Friday, November 27, 2009 at 1:49 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Suspect in Nazi Trial Proud of His SS Service

Source: AP (11-27-09)

A man accused of murdering Dutch civilians as a member of a Waffen SS hit squad said at his trial Friday that he was proud about being chosen as a volunteer to fight for the Nazis.

Heinrich Boere, 88, made his first comments to the Aachen state court since his trial opened at the end of October. As part of that SS unit, he is charged with killing a bicycle-shop owner, a pharmacist and another civilian. He faces a possible sentence of life in prison if convicted.

Boere said he remembered his mother waking him up the night in 1940 that Germany invaded his hometown in the Netherlands and seeing Stuka dive-bombers overhead. Instead of fearing the German bombs, Boere, whose father was Dutch and mother German, said his family was elated as the attack unfolded.

Posted on Friday, November 27, 2009 at 1:44 PM | Comments (0) | Top

New group tries to convince Cheney to run in 2012

Source: CNN (11-27-09)

A new group wants former Vice President Dick Cheney back in the White House.

The organization - "Draft Dick Cheney 2012" - launched on Friday, and unveiled their new Web site. Their aim: To convince the former vice president to seek the Republican presidential nomination in the next race for the White House. But there may be a major roadblock to the group's pitch - Cheney himself.

The former vice president has been a frequent outspoken critic of the Obama administration's security policy. He recently suggested that Obama was "dithering" over deciding on adding more U.S. troops to Afghanistan. National polls suggest that the former vice president remains popular among conservatives and Republicans.

Posted on Friday, November 27, 2009 at 1:41 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Harnessing Darwin to Push an Ancient Intellectual Center to Evolve

Source: NYT (11-25-09)

ALEXANDRIA, Egypt — It is not that Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution are unknown here. But even among those who profess to know something about the subject, the common understanding is that Darwin said man came from monkeys.

Darwin, of course, did not say man came from monkeys. He said the two share a common ancestor. But to discuss Darwin anywhere is not just to explore the origin of man. It is inevitably to engage in a debate between religion and science. That is why, 150 years after Darwin published “On the Origin of Species,” the British Council, the cultural arm of the British government, decided to hold an international conference on Darwin in this conservative, Sunni Muslim nation.

It was a first.

“A lot of people say his theories are wrong, or go against religion,” said Martin Davidson, chief executive of the British Council. “His ideas provoke, but if we are going to understand each other, we have to discuss things that divide us.”

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 7:37 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Pictish throne built as part of new research project

Source: BBC (11-26-09)

A throne built to a design used by the ancient Picts has gone on display at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.

The seat was created by master furniture maker Adrian McCurdy who drew inspiration from stone carvings.

The Picts dominated Scotland north of the Firth of Clyde from the 4th to the 9th centuries AD.

Their symbol stones continue to intrigue historians.

The throne is part of a wider project investigating Scotland's early history.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 3:31 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Jesus 'may have visited England', says Scottish academic

Source: BBC (11-26-09)

Jesus Christ could have come to Britain to further his education, according to a Scottish academic.

Church of Scotland minister Dr Gordon Strachan makes the claim in a new film entitled And Did Those Feet.

The film examines the story of Jesus' supposed visit, which survives in the popular hymn Jerusalem.

Dr Strachan believes it is "plausible" Jesus came to England for his studies, as it was the forefront of learning 2,000 years ago.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 3:29 PM | Comments (2) | Top

Ukraine tears down controversial statue

Source: BBC (11-26-09)

A statue of a politician considered to be one of the main instigators of the man-made famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s, has been demolished.

The authorities tore down the statue of the Communist leader of Ukraine when it was part of the former Soviet Union, Hryhoriy Petrovsky.

It as carried out just days before Ukraine commemorates the victims of the famine, known as the Holodomor, or genocide.

President Viktor Yushchenko issued a decree ordering the removal of monuments to Soviet leaders, "in memory of the victims of the Holodomor".

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 3:25 PM | Comments (0) | Top

There was no happy Thanksgiving for the lost colonists of Roanoke Island

Source: National Parks Traveler (11-26-09)

At Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, the Park Service is partnering with the First Colony Foundation to shed light on a mystery that still fascinates us after more than four centuries: What happened to the lost Roanoke Colony? Archeologists working at the settlement site haven’t answered that question yet, but artifacts they’ve dug up tell us interesting things about life on Roanoke Island in the late 1580s.

The first English attempt to create a permanent settlement in the New World came to grief when Sir Walter Raleigh’s little colony on Roanoke Island in North Carolina’s Outer Banks vanished with scarcely a trace sometime between 1587 and 1590. What happened to those unfortunate men, women, and children struggling for a toehold in a vast wilderness far from home remains one of history’s most intriguing mysteries. Were the Roanoke colonists killed by Indians? Did cold and disease do them in? Did they starve to death? Did they lose hope of being rescued, wander off into the woods, and succumb to the many grave perils that lurked there?

Investigators haven’t had much to go on. When relief ships from England finally arrived in 1590, three years after the colonists were last seen, they found only an abandoned village and a few strange carvings on trees. Apparently left for searchers to find, they read “CROATOAN” and “CRO.” Exactly what that meant has never been determined. Indeed, the carvings themselves disappeared centuries ago, and we can’t even be sure where they once stood. Organic material tends to rot quickly in Roanoke Island’s acidic soil, and shoreline erosion has probably erased parts of the original settlement. When Europeans resettled the area many years later, little evidence of the settlement’s existence remained.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 3:25 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Barbados prehistoric carvings damaged

Source: Barbados Advocate (11-25-09)

THE lone collection of Prehistoric Amerindian carvings so far discovered on this island has been damaged.

“Unfortunately, these have not been looked after awfully well,” Archaeologist and Professor at the University of Sussex Professor Peter Drewett said while displaying pictures of carvings in the Spring Head cave.

He pointed out several modern carvings that have been placed on top of the prehistoric ones, some of which were scoured out with a knife.

“Fortunately we did record these detailed drawings prior to this latest range of damage to them,” he said.

Expressing his certainty that other caves would have had such markings, he stated that these had more than likely been eroded during the passage of time.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 3:24 PM | Comments (0) | Top

U. of Vermont Archaeologists search for War of 1812 hospital

Source: Nashua Telegraph (11-25-09)

BURLINGTON, Vt. (AP) — Archaeologists from the University of Vermont are searching for the remains of a War of 1812 hospital near Battery Park in Burlington.

The archaeologists are using a grant from the National Park Service’s American Battlefield Protection Program to try to learn more about the encampment where 5,000 soldiers were stationed. The war against Great Britain lasted from 1812 through 1815.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 3:22 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Revolutionary War skull to get military burial in Connecticut

Source: Google News (11-25-09)

MILFORD, Conn. — A Colonial-era skull believed to belong to a Revolutionary War soldier is set to be reburied in Connecticut with full military honors.

The unidentified skull was discovered in the 1840s when railroad tracks were being laid near where 46 soldiers died of smallpox. British troops had captured the soldiers in 1776 and abandoned them by what is now Milford Cemetery.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 3:21 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Ancient theatre under the Acropolis to be restored

Source: BBC (11-26-09)

A ruined theatre under the Acropolis, believed to be the birthplace of modern theatre, is to be partially restored.

The restoration of the Theatre of Dionysos will include extending and modernising surviving stone seats, but no new performances are planned there.

Works by playwrights such as Euripides and Sophocles premiered at the open air theatre more than 2,500 years ago.

Theatre first emerged as an artform in Athens in 6th Century BC, at a competition for playwrights held during the annual festival of Dionysos.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 3:20 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Call for 40-year term for ex-Khmer Rouge prison chief

Source: 11-25-09 (11-25-09)

Former Khmer Rouge prison chief Duch should be jailed for 40 years, a prosecutor has told Cambodia's UN-backed war crimes court.

Duch, whose real name is Kaing Guek Eav, had overseen the deaths of 15,000 people at Tuol Sleng jail in the 1970s, the court heard.

In a closing statement, Duch apologised to his victims but said he had not carried out the massacres alone.

The tribunal is not expected to give a verdict before early next year.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 3:18 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Argentina veterans divided over Falklands 'abuse' case

Source: BBC (11-25-09)

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 3:16 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Woman reveals she is Jewish child of the Holocaust (Poland)

Source: BBC (11-26-09)

Bogomila always suspected that her mother had a secret.

"She always looked frightened," Bogomila tells me. "My husband used to say, "Your mother is afraid of her own shadow."

This summer, her 67-year-old mother Barbara finally revealed her secret. She is a Jewish child of the Holocaust. Suddenly, at the age of 37, Bogomila realised she was Jewish, too.

DEATH CAMP SURVIVOR
On Friday, Steve Rosenberg speaks to a survivor of Sobibor, a Nazi extermination camp set up in the Lublin region of occupied Poland

"I was in shock," Bogomila admits. "I didn't sleep at all that night. I couldn't eat for the next two weeks."

I'm sitting with Barbara and Bogomila in the Jewish community centre in Lublin. Before World War II, more than 40,000 Jews lived in this city. The Holocaust changed everything.

"My whole family was killed by the Nazis," Barbara says.

"I survived because a Polish family agreed to hide me. When I was growing up I realised the Polish 'mother' couldn't be my real mother, she was too old. When I was 12 she told me the truth."

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 3:15 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Rassmussen Reports: 50% Still Blame Bush for Bad Economy

Source: Rasmussen Reports (11-25-09)

Voters are a bit less inclined this month to blame President Obama’s policies for the country’s current economic problems.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 50% of U.S. voters now say the problems are due to the recession which began under the Bush administration. Forty-two percent (42%) blame Obama’s policies, and eight percent (8%) are not sure.

In a survey at the end of last month, voters were inclined to assess blame a bit more evenly. Forty-nine percent (49%) pointed the finger at the Bush-era recession, while 45% said the nation’s economic problems were caused more by Obama’s policies.

Voters also have a little more confidence in the president’s economic judgment this month, although 57% still trust their own judgment more than Obama’s when it comes to the economic issues facing the nation. In late October, 62% felt that way.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 3:12 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Secret CIA 'magic' manual from Cold War era on sale

Source: BBC (11-26-09)

A CIA manual instructing US agents on the use of magic tricks during the Cold War has gone on sale.

It was written in 1953 by magician John Mulholland for a fee of $3,000 (£1,800) - considerable at the time.

It includes deceptions such as spiking drinks, pocketing small objects and tying shoelaces to communicate in code.

The CIA ordered copies destroyed in the 1970s, but one survived. It has been republished as The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 3:11 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Families of Military Suicides Seek White House Condolences

Source: NYT (11-25-09)

Since at least the time of Abraham Lincoln, presidents have sent letters of condolence to the families of service members killed in action, whether the deaths came by hostile fire or in an accident.

So after his son killed himself in Iraq in June, Gregg Keesling expected that his family would receive a letter from President Obama. What it got instead was a call from an Army official telling family members that they were not eligible because their son had committed suicide.

“We were shocked,” said Mr. Keesling, 52, of Indianapolis.

Under an unwritten policy that has existed at least since the Clinton administration, presidents have not sent letters to survivors of troops who took their own lives, even if it was at the war front, officials say. The roots of that policy, which has been passed from administration to administration via White House protocol officers, are murky and probably based in the view that suicide is not an honorable way to die, administration and military officials say...

... Presidential letters of condolence go to survivors of troops who died in action in a war theater. Though most suicides take place on posts in the United States, a significant number occur in Iraq and Afghanistan: at least 184 since 2001, according to Defense Department statistics...

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 3:03 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Chile's Mapuche Indians wage war against history

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-26-09)

In his prison cell in Concepción, a town 400 miles south of the Chilean capital Santiago, an indigenous leader dreams of recovering his ancestral lands.

The model for the "Mapuche nation" he foresees in the central southern region of Chile is based on the autonomous rule enjoyed by Basques and Catalans in Spain.

But the hurdles he faces are numerous, including governmental opposition that extends to imprisoning him and other militants, and a division among the Mapuche Indian communities about strategy.

The 41-year-old leader of the radical indigenous Auroca Malleco Coordination was one of nine militants imprisoned after a 2008 attack against a state prosecutor and police.

Chile charged several of them under anti-terrorist legislation dating from its 1973 to 1990 military dictatorship, which permitted lengthy preventative detention.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 3:03 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Republican candidates face 'Ronald Reagan' test

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-26-09)

A proposed litmus test of Republicans' conservative credentials has triggered warnings of a "disaster in the making" for the party just as it stands to make major gains from President Barack Obama's falling popularity.

The draft resolution would withhold central party funding for candidates in next year's midterm elections who failed to meet eight out of ten principles that supporters of the idea describe as fundamental to Ronald Reagan's rule.

They include supporting the Defence of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as being between a man and a woman, opposing amnesties for illegal immigrants, government interference in health care and hefty bailouts of the kind started by George W Bush and continued by President Barack Obama.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 3:00 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Alaska's Rural Schools Fight Off Extinction

Source: NYT (11-25-09)

NIKOLSKI, Alaska — This distant dot in the Aleutian Islands needed just 10 students for its school to dodge a fatal cut from the state budget. It reached across Alaska and beyond but could find only nine.

Built by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1939, the little Nikolski School will not be the last in Alaska to close. Four others have closed this fall and at least 30 more are at risk because of dwindling enrollment; one school in remote southeast Alaska survived only by advertising on Craigslist for families with school-aged children.

“We lose one or two every year,” said Eddy Jeans, the director of school finance for the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development.

As Alaska celebrates its 50th anniversary of statehood amid new political prominence and urban aspirations, it is confronting a legacy of loss in rural communities that are unlike any others in the United States.

Some of these communities, like Nikolski, are linked to the earliest human settlements in North America, yet are now buckling beneath the accumulated conflict of old versus new. Alaska Natives are increasingly leaving villages for cities. Young women, in particular, have departed, and birth rates, once disproportionately higher in villages, have dropped. Jobs for the young people who remain are declining. Village elders have fewer peers who share their dialects. Heating fuel, gasoline and groceries can be expensive and medical services minimal...

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 2:59 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Staffordshire treasure hoard valued at 3.28m GBP (UK)

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-26-09)

The Staffordshire Hoard, the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon treasure ever found, has been valued at £3.28 million, the British Museum said today.

The independent Treasure Valuation Committee reached the figure after meeting at the museum.

The money will be split equally between the finder Terry Herbert and the landowner Fred Johnson, the museum said.

The two men and the two museums which hope to acquire the hoard, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery and the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent, have all approved the valuation, a spokesman added.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 2:58 PM | Comments (0) | Top

She refused to give up her seat before Rosa Parks

Source: NYT (11-25-09)

On that supercharged day in 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Ala., she rode her way into history books, credited with helping to ignite the civil rights movement.

But there was another woman, named Claudette Colvin, who refused to be treated like a substandard citizen on one of those Montgomery buses — and she did it nine months before Mrs. Parks. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made his political debut fighting her arrest. Moreover, she was the star witness in the legal case that eventually forced bus desegregation.

Yet instead of being celebrated, Ms. Colvin has lived unheralded in the Bronx for decades, initially cast off by black leaders who feared she was not the right face for their battle, according to a new book that has plucked her from obscurity.

Last week Phillip Hoose won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for “Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice,” published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. The honor sent the little-selling title shooting up 500 spots on Amazon.com’s sales list and immediately thrust Ms. Colvin, 70, back into the cultural conversation....

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 2:58 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Iraq inquiry: deal might have been 'signed in blood' by Blair and Bush in 2002

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-26-09)

Tony Blair and George Bush might have “signed in blood” their agreement to topple Saddam Hussein a year before the Iraq war, according to Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain’s former ambassador to Washington.

Sir Christopher Meyer told the Iraq Inquiry that the two men spent an afternoon meeting in private at the former president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, in April 2002, which appeared to lead to a shift in the then Prime Minister’s stance on Iraq.

Sir Christopher, who was Britain's ambassador to the US between 1997 and 2003, was called to give evidence about the changing nature of British and American policy towards Iraq in the two years before the invasion of March 2003.

Before the September 11 attacks on the US, Iraq was a low priority for the Bush administration, which was already “running out of steam”, said Sir Christopher.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 2:55 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Mumbai terror attacks: India holds tearful first anniversary

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-26-09)

Mumbai has held tearful memorial events to mark the first anniversary of the attacks that killed 166 people and ratcheted up tensions with Pakistan.

While emotional onlookers waved Indian flags and banners with slogans such as "End The Violence", police commandos with new weapons and armoured cars tracked the route the 10 gunmen took for an attack that stunned the country.

The show of strength was in contrast to more emotional events across India's commercial capital.

Residents lit candles outside a Jewish centre, one of several sites from luxury hotels to the city's biggest railway station, that were targeted by 10 Pakistan-based militants in a rampage lasting three days.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 2:54 PM | Comments (0) | Top

South Korea Confirms Nearly 5,000 Wartime Executions

Source: AP (11-26-09)

South Korean soldiers and police executed nearly 5,000 citizens during the early months of the 1950-53 Korean War, fearing they could collaborate with invading North Korean troops, a government commission said Thursday.

The victims were members of the National Guidance League, or "Bodo" League, that the then-staunchly anti-communist government created to "re-educate" recanting leftists and others suspected of communist leanings.

Historians say officials met membership quotas by pressuring peasants into signing up with promises of rice rations or other benefits, with more than 300,000 people on the league's rolls.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 2:50 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Haiti Bans Former President Aristide's Party From 2010 Election

Source: AP (11-26-09)

Haiti's electoral council has banned the influential party of exiled former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from running in next year's legislative elections.

Fanmi Lavalas is among the 17 parties barred from February's elections because it submitted improper documents, provisional council spokesman Richardson Dumesle said Thursday.

Aristide, who has been living in exile in South Africa after he was overthrown during a 2004 rebellion, called the decision "an electoral coup d'etat" in an interview late Wednesday with Radio Metropole.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 2:48 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Web site posts what it says are half million text messages from 9/11

Source: CNN (11-26-09)

Newly released text messages reportedly from the morning of September 11, 2001, show panicked family members trying to contact loved ones and officials frantically trying to grasp what was happening.

More than half a million messages, released by whistleblower site Wikileaks, reveal the panic, horror and pain of what happened that morning in the words of those who experienced it.

Another text message references "a bomb detonation" in the World Trade Center and asks recipients of the message to report back assessments of their areas.

A minute later, firsthand reports started flooding in.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 2:45 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Thanksgiving Day: Pilgrims were a surprisingly worldly, tolerant lot

Source: The Christian Science Monitor (11-25-09)

Leiden, The Netherlands - The first Pilgrims of the first American Thanksgiving in 1621 were unusually devout – even by Puritan standards. They crossed the ocean on a conviction that "the Lord has more truth and light yet to break forth out of his holy Word," as pastor John Robinson said before they sailed from the Netherlands.

Yet the Pilgrim band that braved the Mayflower and shared deer and turkey with native Americans were also some of the most cosmopolitan and tolerant among the Puritan groups willing to brave the wilds of a new world.

Before going to Plymouth, the Mayflower group lived 11 years in the Dutch city of Leiden. Those years of exile in Leiden, where the Pilgrims worked, worshipped, and debated – amid hefty clashes of civilizations and belief in Europe – profoundly influenced their sensibilities in ways that have not been widely recognized.

The Pilgrims – unlike British Puritans who wanted to turn Massachusetts into a theocracy – sharply advocated church-state separation. They heretically believed that women should be allowed to speak in church. They were far more tolerant of other faiths and open to the idea that their theology, like all human dogma, might contain errors.

Pilgrim experiences "in the cosmopolitan Netherlands are a reason they are less rigid or dogmatic in their views about what people must and must not do," argues Jeremy Bangs, curator of the American Pilgrim Museum in Leiden and author of "Strangers and Pilgrims, Travellers and Sojourners: Leiden and the Foundations of Plymouth Plantation," a 900-page reappraisal published this year on the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims' arrival in Leiden.

"The pilgrims didn't have witchcraft hysteria, they didn't kill Quakers. These are big differences!" notes Mr. Bangs, a former curator of Plimoth Plantation whose work draws heavily from untapped Dutch and New England archives. "Pilgrim leaders were less prone to persecute…. The possibility that others may be right and they may be wrong is something influenced by their time living in an extraordinary community of other exiles in Holland."...

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 2:39 PM | Comments (0) | Top

"Nazi Twins" a Myth: Mengele Not Behind Brazil Boom?

Source: National Geographic (11-25-09)

Recent reports have held up a remote Brazilian town—filled with blonde, blue-eyed twins—as evidence of Mengele's postwar attempts to add to the ranks of an Aryan "master race."

But research announced today says Cândido Godói's "Nazi twins" are nothing more than a myth.

The outback town of about 7,000 has a twin rate nearly 1,000 percent higher than the global average.

The twins' fair features are no mystery—Cândido Godói (map) is largely populated by the descendents of German immigrants. But the frequency of twin births is a decades-old mystery.

Earlier this year Argentine historian Jorge Camarasa offered a bombshell of an explanation in his book Mengele: The Angel of Death in South America.

In World War II, Mengele, aka the Angel of Death, was mainly interested in twin research while serving as chief doctor at the Birkenau extermination camp in Poland.

According to Camarasa, Mengele likely continued his twin experiments in the 1960s while on the run in South America.

Mengele disguised himself as a roaming physician and veterinarian and gave pregnant women in Cândido Godói an ahead-of-its-time, twin-inducing mix of drugs or hormones, the historian suggests...

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 2:38 PM | Comments (0) | Top

BBC and museum launch world history project

Source: Times (UK) (11-26-09)

The British Museum and the BBC are collaborating on one of the most ambitious public history projects ever undertaken, with a programme of events and activities that has the potential to change the way that people all over the world think about the past.

Central to it is an online challenge for people to present heirlooms to museum curators and other experts who will examine how they feed into the story of civilisation. Mark Damazer, controller of Radio 4, described it as “an upmarket Antiques Roadshow without the cash”.

The anchor for the project is a landmark 100-part Radio 4 series called A History of the World in One Hundred Objects, written and presented by Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, which will begin on January 18. Subjects will include the Elgin Marbles, the Anglo-Saxon helmet from Sutton Hoo and a credit card, probably from Asia.

By emphasising objects Mr MacGregor will be able to tell a much more rounded history of the world than most people are used to. It will “recover the silent testimony of people who didn’t have writing or who were defeated by people who did and tell their story instead,” he said.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 10:57 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Peer challenged over CND and 'Soviet funds' (UK)

Source: Times (UK) (11-26-09)

Baroness Ashton of Upholland’s past came back to haunt her yesterday when the European Union’s new foreign affairs chief was forced to deny taking funds from the Soviet Union during her days as treasurer for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Lady Ashton, a surprise choice for her post, was challenged to deny that she had contact with Russian sources while she was in charge of its accounts at the height of the Cold War.

The Times has learnt that concerns about her CND involvement are felt across countries from the former Iron Curtain now in the EU and that MEPs plan to question her about it when she appears before them for the hearing to confirm her in her post.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 10:54 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Ex MI6 chief attacks Government on Afghanistan

Source: Times (UK) (11-26-09)

A former MI6 chief attacked the Government last night for failing to provide enough money for the war in Afghanistan.

Sir Richard Dearlove, who was head of the Secret Intelligence Service until 2004, also said the Government had had not made the case for the campaign and had failed to explain why thousands of British troops are fighting there.

He is the first former chief of the security and intelligence agencies to speak out about the mission in Afghanistan which has claimed nearly 100 British lives this year.

Sir Richard’s comments came in a Gresham College lecture in London, in which he told an audience of academics that “the question of why we are at war with the Taleban is one of national security”.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 10:51 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Chile's Mapuche Indians wage war against history

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-26-09)

The model for the "Mapuche nation" he foresees in the central southern region of Chile is based on the autonomous rule enjoyed by Basques and Catalans in Spain.

But the hurdles he faces are numerous, including governmental opposition that extends to imprisoning him and other militants, and a division among the Mapuche Indian communities about strategy.

"Recovering our land will cost us sweat, blood and tears," Llaitul said.

The 41-year-old leader of the radical indigenous Auroca Malleco Coordination was one of nine militants imprisoned after a 2008 attack against a state prosecutor and police.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 10:46 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Last echo of Nuremberg?

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-26-09)

On Monday the 89-year-old Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk faces charges in Munich that he helped murder 27,900 people in Sobibor, a Nazi death camp, between March and September 1943.

Although Demjanjuk lived in Germany for a short period after the war, he is effectively stateless as he never obtained German nationality and his US citizenship was stripped from him when he was found to have lied on immigration forms.

This makes the trial especially rare in Germany, which has tended to focus on its own nationals accused of war crimes, said Hans-Juergen Boemelburg, at the University of Giessen.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 10:44 AM | Comments (0) | Top

USSR meets YouTube in nostalgia project

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-26-09)

"Red Square is especially beautiful on this holiday morning!" he says. "On such days every Soviet citizen, whether in Moscow or far from the capital, in any corner of our country, has Red Square in his heart and mind."

This was 1974, but the clip from Soviet television can be found on a new Russian website that seeks to bring Communist nostalgia into the internet age with content ranging from anti-Western propaganda to comedy shows and Soviet sports victories.

The creators of CCCP-TV.ru, whose address resembles the Russian letters for "USSR", believe that millions of Russians will eventually use the site to get their fix of childhood memories.

Longing for Communist times is common in Russia, two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 10:41 AM | Comments (0) | Top

CIA used famous magician for his tricks during the Cold War

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-25-09)

John Mulholland was paid the then princely sum of $3,000 for tips on slipping a pill into the drink of the unsuspecting, tying shoelaces to give uncover signals and on the "surreptitious removal of objects by women".

Fortunately for posterity and today's budding spies, the agency's paper shredders were not as thorough in their work. Though it was believed every copy of his report had been destroyed in 1973, one survived and has been turned into a book, The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception.

The material, now unclassified, was unearthed, though they haven't said how, by Keith Melton, an espionage historian, and Bob Wallace, an author and former director of the CIA's Office of Technical Services.

Mulholland's guidance from the 1950s was part of a larger CIA effort, called MK-ULTRA, developed to counter Soviet mind-control and interrogation techniques.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 10:39 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Iraq war deal 'signed in blood' by Blair in 2002

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-26-09)

Sir Christopher Meyer told the Iraq Inquiry that the two men spent an afternoon meeting in private at the former president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, in April 2002, which appeared to lead to a shift in the then Prime Minister’s stance on Iraq.

Sir Christopher said: “I took no part in any of the discussions and there was a large chunk of that time when no adviser was there.

“The two men were alone in the ranch so I’m not entirely clear to this day what degree of convergence (on Iraq policy) was signed in blood, if you like, at the Crawford ranch.

“But there are clues in the speech Tony Blair gave the next day, which was the first time he had said in public ‘regime change’. He was trying to draw the lessons of 9/11 and apply them to the situation in Iraq which led - I think not inadvertently but deliberately - to a conflation of the threat posed by Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

“When I read that I thought ‘this represents a tightening of the UK/US alliance and a degree of convergence on the danger Saddam Hussein presented’.”

Sir Christopher, who was Britain's ambassador to the US between 1997 and 2003, was called to give evidence about the changing nature of British and American policy towards Iraq in the two years before the invasion of March 2003.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 10:35 AM | Comments (0) | Top

McCain: Obama Administration Giving 9/11 Mastermind 'His Wish' by Giving Him Civilian Trial in New York

Source: CNSNews (11-25-09)

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) told CNSNews.com that President Barack Obama was giving 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed “his wish” by giving him a trial in federal civilian court instead of trying him before a military tribunal.

McCain was asked on Nov. 19 whether the administration might have to produce Mohammed’s CIA interrogators if the terrorist’s defense lawyers call them as witnesses.

McCain said the answer was not clear because Obama had opened the civilian justice system to enemy combatants, a move that raised myriad problems and gave Khalid Sheik Mohammed, or KSM, what he wanted.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 2:39 AM | Comments (0) | Top

French Government Launches Debate on the French Identity

Source: CNSNews (11-25-09)

Paris (AP) - The Great Debate gets under way Wednesday, led off with a grand question: "For you, what does it mean to be French?"

This is neither a pompous academic exercise in France's elite schools nor a TV game show. It is the French government's effort to clarify -- with citizen participation -- the nation's values, increasingly fraught with tensions as customs brought in by immigrants, for instance, rub up against traditional French values.

France's immigration minister, Eric Besson, launched the national soul-searching, dubbed the Great Debate, earlier this month with a Web site where citizens can write about what they think it means to be French. Up to 32,000 contributions were posted in the first two weeks, according to the ministry.

On Wednesday, the first of hundreds of local debates that are planned over the next two months will take place, this one among officials of Montargis, south of Paris, and business leaders, members of associations as well as teachers and parents of students. Exceptionally, it is being held at the Immigration Ministry.

Talking points for the debates include French history, culture, religion or language. Ultimately, they are meant to address a handful of proposals such as the meaning of national symbols like the flag or whether youths should be obliged to sing the national anthem at least once a year -- and how to share values with immigrant citizens.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 2:38 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Obama's Mother's Dissertation Gets Star Treatment From Duke U. Press

Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education (11-25-09)

The scholarly book getting the most buzz at the American Anthropological Association's annual conference next week is likely to be a doctoral dissertation published 15 years after its author's death. Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia is by S. Ann Dunham, the mother of President Obama, a connection noted on the book's front cover. The publisher, Duke University Press, will unveil the book on December 3 at the conference, to be followed by a special session devoted to Dunham and her life and work.

I spoke with Dunham's daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng, who is President Obama's half-sister, about their mother's life and work and how the dissertation made it from her closet to print. Ms. Soetoro-Ng wrote a foreword to the book. She and Mr. Obama spent some time in Indonesia as children while Dunham worked as a development and microcredit consultant and did fieldwork for the dissertation.

The book runs about 300 pages and focuses on a blacksmithing village called Kajar, in the province of Yogyakarta on the island of Java. The work has been whittled down significantly from its original form, which ran more than a thousand pages and investigated the socioeconomics of several village-based handicrafts, including batik, pottery, and the making of puppets used in shadow theater...

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 2:02 AM | Comments (1) | Top

U.S. embassy hands 5,000 artifacts to Iraq Museum

Source: Azzaman (11-25-09)

The U.S. embassy in Baghdad has given 515 archaeological items to the Iraq Museum, Antiquities Department chief said.

Qais Rasheed said the treasures date to “various ancient periods” of Iraq’s history.

“The FBI and the American embassy in Baghdad passed the treasures to the Iraq Museum,” he said.

“The collection includes pottery pieces, cuneiform tablets, cylinder seals, precious stones and statues from different Mesopotamian epochs,” he added.

Thousands of artifacts are still missing from the museum whose exhibits were looted shortly after the 2003-U.S. invasion.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 1:57 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Memorial for victims of Stalin's brutal act (UK)

Source: Rochdale (11-24-09)

ROCHDALE has become the first town in the UK to honour the victims of a barbaric Soviet famine that claimed the lives of millions.

A memorial stone has been unveiled to mark the Holodomor genocide — an enforced starvation over 18 months between 1932 to 1933 which claimed the lives of at least seven million Ukrainians under Joseph Stalin’s regime.

The memorial stone was unveiled during a ceremony at the memorial gardens opposite Rochdale Town Hall on Friday.

Organised by Rochdale Council, Rochdale Friends of Lviv and the Ukrainian community, the ceremony was part of a tribute to commemorate the victims of the genocide – one of the most brutal acts carried out by the Soviet leader.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 1:49 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Mongolians destroy Great Wall of China

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-25-09)

Around 300 feet of the wall in a remote part of Inner Mongolia has been irreparably damaged by Mongolian gold prospectors.

"We discovered what had happened a couple of months ago, while doing a national survey on the condition of the Great Wall," said Wang Dafang, the head of the regional cultural relics department.

"The place where it happened is remote and uninhabited. We might never have found out if the government had not commissioned the inspection survey," he added.

The damaged section was built by the Qin Dynasty between 220BC and 206BC. Only a tiny segment of the Qin wall remains, which was a reinforced earth barrier unlike the imposing stone structure built by the Ming Dynasty some twelve centuries later.

"Some people think the only part of the Great Wall that needs to be protected is in Beijing," said Mr Wang. "But although the Inner Mongolia wall is more modest, it carries the same significance."

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 1:44 AM | Comments (1) | Top

U.K. Officials Tell Inquiry Iraq Wasn't Main Worry

Source: WSJ (11-25-09)

LONDON -- Iran and Libya, not Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, were Britain's main security concerns before the invasion of Iraq, Foreign Office officials testified Wednesday at an inquiry probing Britain's role in the war.

William Ehrman, the Foreign Office's director of international security from 2000 to 2002, said "in terms of nuclear and missiles, I think Iran, North Korea and Libya were probably of greater concern than Iraq." The inquiry, billed as the most sweeping look yet at the conflict, was in its second day of hearing public evidence.

It is examining Britain's involvement in Iraq, beginning with the run-up to the 2003 invasion and concluding in July 2009.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 1:41 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Native American artifacts thousands of years old halt sewer installation in Warwick RI

Source: The Providence Journal (Rhode Island) (11-24-09)

WARWICK — The discovery of Native American artifacts dating back thousands of years –– plus the likelihood that there are many more beneath the streets of neighborhoods off Tidewater Drive –– have stalled an effort to bring sewers to the coastal area.

Archaeologists retained by the Warwick Sewer Authority have been unearthing a variety of artifacts in test trenches for more than three years and recently issued a report stating that the Mill Cove area was probably home to generations of Native Americans, with artifacts from about 3,000 years ago through the 1600s.

Given those findings and the need for far more extensive archaeological study before any sewer construction could begin, the WSA is exploring less-disruptive engineering methods while other city officials say that sewers may be out of the question for the neighborhoods just north of Warwick Neck.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 1:31 AM | Comments (0) | Top

How prisoners of war got crafty, making toys for children of their captors

Source: The News (UK) (11-23-09)

Imprisoned in a foreign country, hundreds of miles away from home, German soldiers would whittle away at wood making unique toys to pass the time.
Now these toys, which were made at East Cams prison camp in Portchester Road, Portchester, during the Second World War, have gone on display at a museum in Fareham.

The toys were made at the prison by prisoners of war, and they are now part of the Hampshire Hidden Treasures display at Westbury Manor Museum.

Some of the toys include a wooden figure of Winston Churchill, which lifts his walking stick when pushed along.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 1:30 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Argentina veterans divided over Falklands 'abuse' case

Source: BBC (11-25-09)

Seventy former Argentine army officers are accused of crimes against humanity for the alleged abuse, torture and, in one case, murder of their own troops during the 1982 war with Britain over the Falklands, or Malvinas, Islands. As the BBC's Angus Crawford reports, the case has divided Argentina's veteran community.

In 1982, Michael Savage was a student doing his military service, part of a force sent to invade the Falkland islands by the dictatorship then in power in Argentina.

One morning on patrol, his platoon came across a front line position.

"It was the coldest day of the war and, in the white snow, we saw a soldier staked to the ground, he was dying," he said.

I asked him who was responsible for staking out the young man.

He told me it was his own corporal.

Posted on Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 1:26 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

How FDR Tried To Make Thanksgiving Arrive Earlier

Source: NPR (11-25-09)

When a president's rendezvous with destiny puts him in a position to save his nation's economy from ruin, he probably can be forgiven for thinking it's all right to use his power to move the Thanksgiving Day holiday.

Rescheduling Thanksgiving Day is exactly what President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to do in 1939.

As NPR's Michelle Norris discussed on All Things Considered with Melanie Kirkpatrick who wrote a piece for Wednesday's Wall Street Journal, in 1939 FDR caused controversy by declaring that Thanksgiving would occur one week earlier.

Posted on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 6:21 PM | Comments (0) | Top

The History of the Presidential Turkey Pardon

Source: CBS (11-25-09)

Nothing a president does lends itself more easily to a punch line – deliberate or inadvertent - than the annual pardon of a Thanksgiving turkey.

"I think it's kind of funny, and it's an annual ritual," said President Clinton at his first turkey pardon ceremony in 1993.

He said the pardon was easy for him "because I've been around turkeys all my life." Upon realizing the double meaning of his statement, Mr. Clinton was quick to add: "I didn't mean it like that."

At the turkey pardon in 2001, President George W. Bush observed that "our guest of honor looks a little nervous. Nobody's told him yet that I'm going to give him a pardon."

Posted on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 4:35 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Wikileaks publishes 500,000 pager messages sent on 9/11

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-25-09)

The intercepted exchanges are being posted online "as live" by the controversial Wikileaks website, with messages appearing in the order they were sent during the day.

The release began at 8am GMT and will continue for 24 hours. The majority of the messages posted in the first four hours offer little illumination, with most either automatic alerts sent by computers or anodyne personal memos.

Wikileaks has not revealed how it obtained the records. The site has an impressive track record of securing and publishing confidential documents, but has been criticised for taking a reckless approach to privacy.

"The archive is a completely objective record of the defining moment of our time. We hope that its revelation will lead to a more nuanced understanding of the event and its tragic consequences," it wrote in a release announcing the project.

While Wikileaks states that "text pagers are usually carried by persons operating in an official capacity", personal messages sent by members of the public who owned pagers in September 2001 are also included in the records.

Posted on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 10:58 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Jesus may have visited Britain, film suggests

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-25-09)

The documentary, And Did Those Feet, explores the story behind the legend which survives in the hymn, for which William Blake wrote the words.

The legend claims Jesus visited several places in the West Country, such as the Roseland peninsula and Glastonbury, with his uncle, Joseph of Arimathaea.

In the film, the Scottish researcher Dr Strachan said it is plausible Jesus may have visited Britain to further his learning.

Ted Harrison, the film's director and producer, said: ''There is a very much closer connection between early Christianity and the classical Greek and Roman world than previously thought.

''If somebody was wanting to learn about the spirituality and thinking not just of the Jews but also the classical and Greek world he would have to come to Britain, which was the centre of learning at the time.

''But there is nothing specific by way of archaeological finds; Jesus's shoe has not turned up.''

Dr Strachan, a Church of Scotland minister who lives in Edinburgh, lectures on the history of architecture at Edinburgh University.

Posted on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 10:54 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Obama's delay 'is affecting British support'

Source: Times (UK) (11-25-09)

President Obama’s delay in authorising a US troop surge in Afghanistan had contributed to falling public support in Britain for the mission, Bob Ainsworth said yesterday.

The Defence Secretary said that as well as the “period of hiatus” in Washington, the deaths of British troops and the disputed Afghan elections had also played a part.

Mr Obama is preparing to announce his decision on troop numbers next week, it emerged yesterday, ending months of wrangling.

Mr Ainsworth’s comments came as the British Ambassador to Kabul entered the bitter debate in the Obama Administration by openly siding with General Stanley McChrystal’s request to send thousands more troops.

Posted on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 10:14 AM | Comments (0) | Top

40-year sentence demanded for Khmer Rouge torturer 'Comrade Duch'

Source: Times (UK) (11-25-09)

Cambodian prosecutors in the war crimes trial of the Khmer Rouge's former prison chief have demanded a 40 year jail sentence for the part he played in murdering thousands of Cambodians and spreading terror across Cambodia.

Kang Kek Ieu, known as Comrade Duch, was the director of the infamous Tuol Sleng prison, where thousands of Cambodians were sent to be tortured and killed at the height of Pol Pot's genocidal regime.

Duch encouraged the jail's interrogation teams to apply ever harsher torture techniques to their victims, including cutting off their fingers and toes, forcing them to eat their own excrement and literally bleeding them to death. The jail's chief executioner, Him Huy, told The Times that his boss used to like to watch the killers at work at Cheong Ek outside Phnom Penh, known as the Killing Fields, where prisoners were bludgeoned to death.

Under Duch's direction, 1,7000 men, women and children who had been accused of disloyalty were taken to Tuol Sleng – known as S-21 – to be interrogated until they implicated friends, relatives and even people they had never met in fantastical "plots" against the regime. Then they were killed. There was no reprieve; of the thousands who passed through the gates of S-21 between 1977 and 1979, only 15 emerged alive.

Posted on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 10:12 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Britain 'knew Saddam had destroyed WMD'

Source: Times (UK) (11-25-09)

Intelligence information that Saddam Hussein had dismantled his weapons of mass destruction programme was received by the Foreign Office days before Tony Blair ordered the invasion of Iraq, an inquiry into the war heard today.

The revelation on the second day of the Chilcot Inquiry will raise fresh questions about the justification for invading Iraq in March 2003.

The inquiry heard that the Foreign Office did not believe that Iraq had a large number of long-range missiles and that the claim that Saddam could launch a chemical or biological attack within 45 minutes related only to battlefield weapons and not those capable of reaching other countries.

Sir William Ehrman, a senior Foreign Office official, told the inquiry: “We were getting in the very final days before military action some [intelligence] on chemical and biological weapons that it was dismantled and [Iraq] might not have the munitions to deliver it.”

Posted on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 10:09 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Gordon Brown to push for royal Roman Catholics law change (UK)

Source: Times (UK) (11-25-09)

Gordon Brown today sparked controversy on the eve of the Commonwealth summit by suggesting he backs the sweeping away of 300-year-old laws that prevent Roman Catholics ascending to the Throne.

Mr Brown is also keen to change the ancient rule of primogeniture, which stipulates that men must always take precedence over a woman in line to the throne.

The Prime Minister is expected to raise the issue with heads of government in the "margins" of the Commonwealth summit that begins in Trinidad on Friday.

It is not a formal item on the agenda of the gathering, which will be dominated by climate change.

Posted on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 10:07 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Rediscovered painting of Charles I to be shown at National Gallery (UK)

Source: Times (UK) (11-25-09)

A German bomb devastated Bridgewater House, home of the Earls of Ellesmere and their magnificent art collection, on May 11, 1941. A monumental painting described yesterday by the director of the National Gallery as of huge importance was torn in 200 places by shrapnel and coated in dust.

For 68 years it was rolled up in storage, thought by its owner and experts alike to be ruined. But in February, Paul Delaroche’s Charles I Insulted by Cromwell’s Soldiers will go on display to complement an exhibition on the French artist at the National Gallery.

The painting belongs to the 7th Duke of Sutherland, who recently sold one of his Titians to the National Gallery and the National Galleries of Scotland. As part of the research for the exhibition Painting History: Delaroche and Lady Jane Grey, he let a team of conservators see the stored Delaroche. In June it was unrolled for the first time in more than half a century, at his home in the Scottish Borders.

Far from being destroyed the painting was “fully legible”, Nicholas Penny, the gallery’s director, said. The damage is mostly in the bottom half of the vast canvas and therefore away from the focal point of the work: the faces of Charles and his tormentors.

Posted on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 10:05 AM | Comments (0) | Top

"Islam non-existent in the world system until mid-1970s", says leading French academic

Source: Lee P Ruddin (11-25-09)

The world’s foremost expert on Political Islam, Gilles Kepel, gave a lecture on jihad on Tuesday evening.

Speaking at the London School of Economics (LSE), Kepel trailed the history and geography of the political-religious phenomenon.

Beginning and ending with Afghanistan, the former visiting professor at Columbia University explained how Political Islam plugged into the world system.

Kepel is the Philippe Roman Chair in History and International Affairs (2009-10) in LSE IDEAS, the centre for the study of international affairs, diplomacy and grand strategy.

Posted on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 9:50 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Efforts to Preserve Barack Obama's Ancestral Home

Source: Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter (press release) (11-23-09)

Barack Obama's family roots reach deep into central Indiana and soon an old farm house near Kempton in Tipton County may serve as a living tribute to the President's ancestors. The President's mother, Ann Dunham, was born and raised in Kansas, but her grandfather moved there from Indiana and a historic preservationist is now at work reconstructing some of the Obama family history.

A land grant shows the property was settled by Jacob Dunham in 1840. Jacob Dunham was Barack Obama's great-great-great-great grandfather. He is one of 11 Obama ancestors buried in the Kempton Cemetery.

The Dunham house was actually built by Barack Obama's great uncle Riley Dunham, who was also a politician. He served in the Indiana General Assembly.

You can read more in the WISH-TV web site at http://www.wishtv.com/dpp/news/local/north_central/Man-hopes-to-preserve-Ind-home-of-Obama%27s-family.

Posted on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 4:02 AM | Comments (0) | Top

New book exonerates Jefferson in DNA controversy

Source: Examiner (11-23-09)

The belief that Thomas Jefferson had an affair and fathered a child (or children) with slave Sally Hemings -- and that such an allegation was proven by DNA testing -- has become so pervasive in American popular culture that it is not only widely accepted but taught to students as historical fact. "In Defense Of Thomas Jefferson,” by William G. Hyland Jr., has just been published by St. Martins Press. In this startling and revelatory new book, William G. Hyland Jr. shows not only that the evidence against Jefferson is lacking, but that in fact he is entirely innocent of the charge of having sexual relations with Hemings.

For over two hundred years, Thomas Jefferson has been accused of a sexual relationship with Hemings, one of his slaves. According to DNA interpretive results conducted in 1998, it is now widely accepted that Jefferson fathered one or more of Sally’s children. Are the accusations true? And if so, could they be proved in a court of law?

Not only do the authors conclude that the charges are false, but for the first time ever the reader is introduced to the President's younger brother, Randolph Jefferson, as the DNA match for Sally’s children. Along with the most thorough examination of the Hemings controversy to date, new discoveries and details are revealed exonerating Jefferson from this old political scandal...

Posted on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 4:00 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Yosemite's Park History Includes Buffalo Soldiers

Source: Voice of America (11-24-09)

Yosemite National Park, in California's Sierra Nevada mountain range, was one of the nation's first wilderness parks, created in 1890. It has granite cliffs towering over deep valleys, spectacular waterfalls and ancient giant sequoia trees. It also holds a special place in African-American history.

As an interpretive specialist at Yosemite, Ranger Shelton Johnson tells visitors about the history of the park. While researching Yosemite's archives, he learned that for three years, around the turn of the twentieth century, black U.S. Army regiments patrolled the park.

Posted on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 3:50 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Saudi Arabia returns artifacts to Iraq

Source: Zawya (11-21-09)

RIYADH: The Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities (SCTA) handed over a number of Iraqi cultural artifacts smuggled to the Kingdom by an Arab expatriate recently.

The returned artifacts include statues of human beings and lions of varying sizes made of marble and other materials.

Hussein Abu Al-Hassan, assistant vice president of the SCTA, signed on Wednesday a statement returning five artifacts to the second secretary at the Iraqi Embassy in the Kingdom, Ahmad Al-Jarba, and attaché Abdullah Rashad.

This is the second time in two months the SCTA has returned stolen cultural properties to Iraq.

Posted on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 3:42 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Democrats Contemplate 1970s-era Jobs Program

Source: Huffington Post (11-23-09)

As desperate Democratic lawmakers cast about for ways to create jobs from Capitol Hill, a 1970s-era jobs program is getting a fresh look.

Known as CETA -- the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act -- the program provided direct government funding to hire temporary workers. At its peak in 1978, it had created 725,000 public service jobs and shaved roughly one point off the unemployment figure.

A one-point drop in the unemployment rate -- not to mention the ancillary benefit of hundreds of thousands of people having money to spend on other goods and services -- would give politicians something concrete to point to before the mid-term elections.

"That's certainly one of the options being discussed, the CETA program back in the 70s," House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told HuffPost in a recent interview, when asked if leadership was considering direct government hiring as a partial answer to the deepening unemployment.

Posted on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 3:28 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Toxic legacy of the Cold War (Ohio)

Source: LA Times (10-20-09)

Reporting from Fernald Preserve, Ohio - Amid the family farms and rolling terrain of southern Ohio, one hill stands out for its precise geometry.

The 65-foot-high mound stretching more than half a mile dominates a tract of northern hardwoods, prairie grasses and swampy ponds, known as the Fernald Preserve.

Contrary to appearances, there is nothing natural here. The high ground is filled with radioactive debris, scooped from the soil around a former uranium foundry that produced crucial parts for the nation's nuclear weapons program.

A $4.4-billion cleanup transformed Fernald from a dangerously contaminated factory complex into an environmental showcase. But it is "clean" only by the terms of a legal agreement. Its soils contain many times the natural amounts of radioactivity, and a plume of tainted water extends underground about a mile.

Nobody can ever safely live here, federal scientists say, and the site will have to be closely monitored essentially forever.

Fernald is part of the toxic legacy of the Cold War, one component in a vast complex of research labs, raw material mills, weapons production plants and other facilities that once supplied the nation's nuclear arsenal.

Posted on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 3:09 AM | Comments (0) | Top

CNSNews.com United Nations Says HIV Outbreak Peaked in 1996

Source: CNSNews (11-24-09)

Geneva (AP) - The number of people worldwide infected with the virus that causes AIDS -- about 33 million -- has remained virtually unchanged for the last two years, United Nations experts said Tuesday.

Officials say the global epidemic probably peaked in 1996 and that the disease looks stable in most regions, except for Africa. Last year, HIV infections in sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 72 percent of all 2.7 million new HIV cases worldwide.

Daniel Halperin, an AIDS expert at Harvard University, said it was good news the rate of new infections was dropping and that access to AIDS drugs was helping to cut the death rate. Earlier this year, the U.N. announced there are now 4 million people on lifesaving AIDS drugs worldwide, a 10-fold increase in five years.

Posted on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 3:00 AM | Comments (0) | Top

The politics of perceiving skin color

Source: Time (11-23-09)

Whether or not you agree with Barack Obama's politics may influence how dark- or light-skinned you think he is, according to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study, which set out to determine whether political views can skew skin color perception, included three experiments...In all three cases, people who agreed with the politician's views were more likely to pick lighter-skinned images of him; people who disagreed were more likely to pick darker-skinned images...

... While other factors may not have had much influence, when it came to biracial candidates at least, political views were strongly correlated with bias. In one study, participants were also shown photographs of John McCain. No bias toward lighter or darker skin tone in images of the former presidential candidate was evident, regardless of participants' politics. Yet when examining images of candidates of mixed ethnic backgrounds, bias was plain. "Across the three studies reported here," the researchers write, "we found that partisans not only 'darken' those with whom they disagree, but also 'lighten' those with whom they agree." The findings suggest that race bias is very much alive and well in the U.S., and more ingrained than we might like to believe. The researchers highlight several examples in which race, or more specifically "blackness" was emphasized to a public figure's detriment—the scandal over whether the Hillary Clinton campaign had deliberately darkened Obama's complexion in a video ad or, alas, when TIME ran a deliberately darkened photograph of O.J. Simpson on the cover following his arrest in 1994...

Posted on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 2:03 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Senator Robert Byrd Becomes Longest-Serving Member of Congress

Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH) (11-24-09)

On November 18, 2009, Senator Robert C. Byrd (D-WV) became the longest-serving member of Congress, having served in the House of Representatives (1953-1959) and the Senate (1959-present) for a total of 56 years, 10 months, and 16 days. He broke the record previously set by Carl T. Hayden (1912-1969). On June 12, 2006, Senator Byrd became the longest-serving senator in U.S. history.

Senator Byrd is considered the “father” of the Teaching American History Grants program at the U.S. Department of Education. Since its inception in fiscal year 2001, nearly $1 billion in federal dollars have been spent to raise student achievement by improving teachers’ knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of American history.

Beginning in 1980, and over the next ten years, Senator Byrd delivered more than one hundred floor speeches detailing the history of the U.S. Senate.

Courtesy of the U.S. Senate Historical Office, here is a list of some of Senator Byrd’s notable milestones and achievements.

U.S. Senate Institutional Records

Longest-serving member of Congress. (On November 18, 2009, Senator Byrd surpassed the service record of Carl T. Hayden to become the longest-serving member of Congress, with 20,774 days of service.)
Longest serving U.S. Senator in history. (Senator Byrd had served 17,327 days in the U.S. Senate on June 12, 2006–making him the longest serving U.S. Senator in history.)
Only person elected to nine full-terms in the U.S. Senate.
Since January 3, 1959, Senator Byrd has served with a total of 423 senators.
Presided over the shortest session of the U.S. Senate in history. (6/10ths of a second, February 27, 1989.)
Presided over the Senate for the longest continuous period in history. (21 hour, 8 minutes, March 7-8, 1960.)
Has served on a U.S. Senate Committee longer than other U.S. Senator in history. (U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee, January 14, 1959-present.)
Only U.S. Senator to preside over more than one Senate impeachment trial. (Judge Alcee Hastings, October 20, 1989; Judge Walter Nixon, November 3, 1989.)

U.S. Senate Voting Records

Has cast more roll call votes than any other U.S. Senator. (Cast record-breaking vote number 12,134 on April 27, 1990, and has remained top voter since that time.) As of November 17, 2009, Senator Byrd has cast 18,585 votes.
Cast 4,705 consecutive votes—the third highest consecutive vote total in U.S. Senate history. (Behind Senator William Proxmire [D-WI], with 10,252 consecutive votes, and Senator Charles Grassley [R-IA], who cast his 5,400th consecutive roll call vote on Feb. 9, 2009.)

U.S. Senate Leadership

Has held the most leadership positions in the U.S. Senate (secretary of the majority conference, majority whip, minority leader, majority leader, and president pro tempore.)

Posted on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 1:59 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Paris rediscovers its first medieval fortifications

Source: http://medievalnews.blogspot.com (11-25-09)

An excavation on the rue de Rivoli is currently uncovering the first Medieval city fortifications of Paris. This excavation by an Institut national des recherches archaeologiques preventives team has found a deep ditch on land isolated among a group of buildings. This earth and wood fortification comprised a ditch and a bank, which probably held in place a wooden palisade. The bank and the palissade were destroyed when the fortification was abandoned, and have left no traces. The ditch, however, was preserved under existing Paris buildings and has now been rediscovered.

Visible for about 20 metres, this V-shaped dry ditch is approximately 12 metres wide and 3 metres deep. Being the only fortification in the capital with no preserved built remains, it is the most poorly documented. Consequently it has sometimes been called the "Carolingian wall" and at other times the "11th century wall". It is the second city wall of Paris, situated between that built in Late Antiquity (early 4th century, on the Ile de la Cité) and that of Philip Augustus (around 1200, built on both banks). From the 10th century onwards, after the Viking invasions and particularly during the siege of Paris from 885-886, the right bank experienced significant economic and urban development and its protection thus became a necessity.

Posted on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 1:54 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Heir to Oswald boardinghouse shares its history

Source: Houston Chronicle (11-23-09)

DALLAS — Gladys Johnson didn't allow drinking.

If a liquor bottle or beer can was found inside a room, the landlady wouldn't issue a warning.

Patricia Puckett Hall's grandmother simply piled a tenant's belongings on the front porch, her method of informing the rule-breaker that he was no longer welcome at her Oak Cliff rooming house at 1026 N. Beckley Ave.

Hall, 57, loves the old place.

It's hers now — her inheritance, her responsibility.

Her childhood dwells within its walls, memories as timeless as the family portraits.

One autumn day in 1963, her two younger brothers got into a scuffle in the front yard where Johnson's grandchildren, who lived six blocks away, spent most of their free time.

A roomer witnessed the roughhousing and stepped in.

Hall, then 11, watched as he sat the boys on the porch, one on each side of him.

"I want to tell you something really important," Hall heard the slender young man say. "I want you to listen. You're brothers. You have to look out for each other."

Then, "don't ever do anything to harm another human being."

On Nov. 22, just weeks later, that quiet man, who rented a 6-by-13-foot room from Hall's grandmother, was arrested for assassinating President John F. Kennedy and gunning down a Dallas police officer...

Posted on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 1:44 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Otto von Bismarck received fan mail and marriage proposals

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-24-09)

Otto von Bismarck, the 'Iron Chancellor' who forged modern Germany, was the subject of thousands of letters of fan mail including marriage proposals from women devoted to the dashing leader.

More than 6,000 personal letters, which have been made available to scholars for the first time by the Bismarck Foundation in Friedrichsruh, were sent to the 19th century leader while in office and retirement.

Professing love and devotion to the Prussian leader, who died in 1898, they detail how many Germans saw Bismarck as a messiah figure long before the cult of Adolf Hitler.

"Bismarck, forever and forever and forever!" wrote one Prussian woman on a postcard showing a floral tea-cosy.

A married woman from the Saarland wrote to him saying: "I am unhappy in love but know that we could be wonderful together. I am a very good cook and stuffed pig's stomach is my speciality."

One doctor, concerned about Bismarck's circulation, addressed him as "Your Highness" and advised him to do "gymnastics in your bedchamber".

Posted on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Sunken Canadian stern-wheeler is an underwater time capsule

Source: LA Times (11-24-09)

Underwater archaeologists said Monday that they have found a virtual time capsule of life during Canada's Klondike Gold Rush: a sunken Yukon River stern-wheeler so well-preserved that researchers can document the last minutes of the five-man crew as well as their life aboard the primitive cargo-hauler.

The door of the steam boiler on the A.J. Goddard was open, and slightly charred wood found inside suggested the crew was trying to build up a head of steam, perhaps to break loose from an ice jam.

An ax remained on the deck after one crew member hefted it to chop the rope used to tow a barge, a sign of their frantic attempts to escape the ice floe.

Three men perished in the 1901 sinking, according to news reports at the time, and two were found clinging to the ship's wheelhouse in the icy lake.

Posted on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 8:13 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Google to Put Iraqi Artifacts Online

Source: The New York Times (11-24-09)

Amira Edan, the director of Iraq’s National Museum, says that soon she will no longer have to worry so much that the famous institution remains closed to the public for fear of violence.

People will just be able to Google it. “It’s really wonderful,” she said Tuesday.

Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, had just made a presentation inside the museum, announcing that his company would create a virtual copy of the museum’s collections at its own expense, and make images of four millenniums of archaeological treasures available online, free, by early next year.

Posted on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 8:11 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Sophisticated hunters not to blame for driving mammoths to extinction

Source: Guardian.CO.UK (11-19-09)

Woolly mammoths and other giant ice-age mammals faced extinction 2,000 years before deadly speartips were invented.

Woolly mammoths and other large, lumbering beasts faced extinction long before early humans perfected their skills as spearmakers, scientists say.

The prehistoric giants began their precipitous decline nearly 2,000 years before our ancestors turned stone fragments into sophisticated spearpoints at the end of the last ice age.

The animals, which included mammoths, elephant-sized mastodons and beavers the size of black bears, were probably picked off by more inept hunters who only much later developed specialised weapons when their prize catches became scarce.

Posted on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 8:04 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Appeal over Charles Darwin's missing Galapagos notes

Source: BBC (11-24-09)

An appeal has been launched to trace Charles Darwin's missing Galapagos notebook which provided crucial evidence for his theory of evolution.

English Heritage says the notebook, which helped him write On The Origin of Species, may have been stolen from his former Kent home in the 1970s or 80s.

In it he described encountering a giant tortoise and made notes on local birds.

English Heritage is putting Darwin's 15 notebooks online 150 years after On The Origin of Species was first published.

Posted on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 7:57 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Lech Walesa libel trial starts in Poland over spy claim

Source: BBC (11-24-09)

A libel trial has started in Poland over charges former President Lech Walesa once worked as a communist spy.

The court case pits the anti-communist leader against his one-time ally and successor as president, Lech Kaczynski.

The court case was adjourned until 18 December to allow more time for preparation.

Mr Walesa, now 66, is seeking a retraction of a claim made by Mr Kaczynski that he spied for the communist secret service in the 1970s.

Posted on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 7:54 PM | Comments (0) | Top

DR Congo 'warlords' deny atrocities at ICC trial

Source: BBC (11-24-09)

Two alleged Congolese militia leaders have denied war crimes at the start of their trial at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Germain Katanga and Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui are accused of directing an attack on the village of Bogoro in 2003 in which more than 200 people were killed.

They face charges of ordering attacks on civilians, sexual slavery, rape, and enlisting child soldiers.

Both deny the allegations and have expressed sympathy for the victims.

Posted on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 7:52 PM | Comments (0) | Top

High jumper banned by Nazis honoured in Germany

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-24-09)

A 95-year-old former British athletics champion banned by the Nazis from competing in the Olympics because she was Jewish has finally been recognised for her sporting achievements.

The German track and field association has honoured Gretel Bergmann for a 5ft 3in high jump she made in Stuttgart in June, 1936 - a record that was erased from the history books by the Nazis.

It said its recognition of her achievement after her snub by the Nazis was an "act of justice and a symbolic gesture of respect".

German athletics officials, who acknowledged that their gesture "can in no way make up" for the Nazis' actions in refusing to acknowledge her sporting prowess, have also asked for her to be included in the national sporting hall of fame.

Posted on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 7:49 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Obamas' First State Dinner Marks Departure From Previous Administration

Source: Fox News (11-24-09)

President Obama plans to have his cake and eat pumpkin pie too when he hosts his first White House state dinner Tuesday, providing the 320 guests expected to attend the lavish ceremony with fine dining from a top chef and entertainment by Oscar-winning musicians.

First lady Michelle Obama's staff, which has planned what could be Washington's hottest social event since the inauguration, has kept a tight lid on the details for the event in honor Indian Prime Minister Monmahon Singh and his wife.

All the courses will be placed on historic china from previous White House collections, including service plates from the Eisenhower administration's 1955 New Castle, Pa.'s Castleton China, Trenton, N.J., Lenox from the Clinton service and dinner plates from George W. Bush Kinston, N.C., Lenox, collection which was a gift of the White House Acquisition Trust.

The grand White House dinner for Singh marks a departure from the ones held by Obama's predecessor, George. W. Bush, who notably hosted Singh at a dinner in 2005. The Bushes rarely held formal state functions.

Posted on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 7:46 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Fox News: Obama Shatters Spending Record for First-Year Presidents

Source: Fox News (11-24-09)

President Obama has shattered the budget record for first-year presidents -- spending nearly double what his predecessor did when he came into office and far exceeding the first-year tabs for any other U.S. president in history.

In fiscal 2009 the federal government spent $3.52 trillion -- $2.8 trillion in 2000 dollars, which sets a benchmark for comparison. That fiscal year covered the last three-and-a-half months of George W. Bush's term and the first eight-and-a-half months of Obama's.

The last president to clock in under $1 trillion was Gerald Ford, who logged a $982 billion budget in 1975. Post-war Dwight Eisenhower even brought Uncle Sam's tab down to $556 billion in his first year, 1953.

Obama's first-year budget, adjusted for inflation, is about five times that. His 2009 budget is also close to 21 percent of that for Clinton's eight years in office -- Clinton's spending added up to $13.5 trillion over his two full terms. Bush spent $16.8 trillion from 2001-2008.

Posted on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 7:42 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Britain 'had no policy' to overthrow Saddam

Source: AAP (11-25-09)

BRITAIN and the US were at odds over whether to overthrow dictator Saddam Hussein two years before the pair teamed up to invade Iraq in 2003, an inquiry has heard.

Former senior British military and government officials told the first public hearings of Britain's latest Iraq war inquiry that while talks were under way in the US in 2001 about regime change, the UK preferred to toughen up UN sanctions against Iraq in an attempt to control Saddam.

At the time, President George Bush had just come to power and both Britain and US were reviewing their Iraq policies because they were struggling to contain Saddam and his ambitions to develop weapons of mass destruction.

Posted on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 7:41 PM | Comments (0) | Top

British Panel Begins Investigation Into Iraq War

Source: AP (11-24-09)

In the most sweeping inquiry on the Iraq war, a panel investigating Britain's role in the conflict began questioning witnesses Tuesday in hearings that critics hope will humble ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair and expose alleged deception in the buildup to fighting.

The panel, which opened with a moment of silence for those who died, will question dozens of officials over several months — including military officials and spy agency chiefs. It will also seek evidence from ex-White House staff.

Among the most prominent witnesses will be Blair, who will be questioned on whether he secretly backed U.S. President George W. Bush plan's for invasion a year before Parliament authorized military involvement in 2003. Critics of the conflict hope to take Blair to task for publicly promoting a policy of containment even at a moment he considered regime change inevitable.

Posted on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 7:39 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Historic Envelope Valued at $300,000 Up for Auction

Source: AP (11-24-09)

A New York gallery will auction off what is believed to be one of three known surviving historic envelopes postmarked on the first day of the Pony Express.

The envelope postmarked April 3, 1860, is valued at $300,000. It is among 63 items owned by 88-year-old Thurston Twigg-Smith that will be sold Dec. 5 by Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries in New York. Twigg-Smith is the former publisher of The Honolulu Advertiser in Hawaii.

It estimates the collection's value is $2.5 million or more.

Posted on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 7:35 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Czech Students Look Back at What Their Forebears Started

Source: Spiegel (11-20-09)

In Czechoslovakia, it all started with the students.

By late autumn of 1989, the Berlin Wall had already fallen, the border between Hungary and Austria had become porous and Poland had long since held largely free elections. But in Czechoslovakia, the communist government was still doing what it could to maintain a firm grip on the reins of power. It wasn't to last...

... 'Slave to Capitalism'

This week, the Czech Republic is marking the 20th anniversary of their Velvet Revolution. Many of the demonstrations are being recreated, thousands lit candles in downtown Prague in commemoration and Vaclav Havel, who emerged as the hero of the Revolution, is omnipresent. But how do the youth of that nation, whose forerunners were integral in bringing down the communist government, feel about the event today?

"Being a slave to capitalism is no different from being a slave to communism." That is what Jana Kajnarová's mother tells her. Kajnarová, who now lives in Berlin, says that nostalgia for the old communist system is particularly strong among the older generation.

"My mother -- who is sick and who is not sufficiently cared for by the state -- was happier 20 years ago," she told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "And many of the pensioners from my hometown Varnsdorf agree with her. Under communism, people worked with the certainty that one day they wouldn't have to work anymore," the 25-year-old adds. "Now, you just don't have that kind of security."

Kajnarová also admits to being disillusioned with the current government, saying that at the moment she believes the Czech Republic doesn't really have a real democracy. "There is simply no real opposition party good enough to pose a threat to (current Czech President) Václav Klaus," she says. Kajnarová goes on to describe the current government as a "farce."

'I Can Travel as Much as I Want'

However as much as Kajnarová can understand that point of view of pensioners in her hometown, and as much as she is disappointed with the Czech government, she still believes that things are better than they were before the Velvet Revolution. "I keep reminding (my mother) that we are free now, that I can travel as much as I want."

This attitude is one shared by many other Czech students this century, as a recent study by Czech polling agency CVVM, published in the Aktuálne newspaper, demonstrates. Czech youth view the fall of Communism as a wholly positive development, according to the survey. A study on attitudes toward the end of communism released by the Washington D.C.-based Pew Global Attitudes Project earlier this month indicates that almost 90 percent of Czechs aged between 18 and 29 approve of a system with multiple political parties. Eighty percent approve of the free market economy...

Posted on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 2:08 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Police using 300 year-old law to target gang violence

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-23-09)

Officers in London are targeting youth violence with the so-called Joint Enterprise law which allows them to charge any suspects present at an incident with the same offence as those directly involved.

It means a youth who encourages or watches another gang member kill someone could also be charged with murder.

Detective Superintendent Simon Morgan, of the Metropolitan Police, said: "Standing by is not a defence.

"Anybody and everybody that is involved in an incident of violence, we will look to identify them and if the evidence is there, we will look to prosecute them."

But the move has met criticism, including the Law Commission which warned it is being used to scoop up anyone present at the time of an attack instead of focusing on those responsible.

Posted on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 2:06 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Thousands Demand Closure of Fort Benning's School of the Americas

Source: Truthout (11-22-09)

This weekend, thousands of people gathered at the gates of Ft. Benning to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the killings of 14-year-old Celia Ramos, her mother Elba Ramos and the six Jesuit priests with whom she worked at the Central American University in San Salvador.

Nearly 5,000 people are gathered in the pouring rain according to Larry White, a protester who spoke to Truthout. Earlier in the day, following a rally featuring a performance by the Indigo Girls, activists participated in the yearly "presente march," ending at Ft. Benning. During the march, activists carried crosses with the names of the victims of brutal repression in Central America. According to White, 50 of the marchers left the permitted route and are being threatened with arrest.

Posted on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 2:05 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Europe's largest rondel enclosures unearthed in Bohemia

Source: Ceske Noviny (Czeck Republic) (11-9-09)

After examining 40 hectares on land, the experts gathered hundreds of thousands of finds. The most important ones include the four rondel enclosures.

The enclosures, of a circle or oval shape and usually of 50 to 200 metres in diameter, appeared in Europe in the Neolithic period. Their inner space was not inhabited. Experts believe they might have served for cult, military or trade purposes.

Over 100 rondel enclosures have been uncovered in Europe to date, including several in the Czech Republic.

Two of the enclosures that archaeologists have uncovered near Kolin are 214 and 230 meters in diameter. The former was surrounded by four ditches, the biggest being 4.5m deep and 14m long, Sumberova said.

Posted on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 1:48 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Ancient stone moved from archaeological site in Cyprus

Source: Cyprus Mail (11-11-09)

POLICE ARE investigating what they believe to be the attempted theft of a giant 2,000-year-old standing stone (tripiti), which was been removed from the archaeological site in Pissouri.

Although police later found the stone in a nearby field, it is believed that thieves intended to return with proper equipment to transport the massive monument.

“This attempted theft is an act of mindless vandalism, of contempt for the people of Cyprus and the community this ancient monument belongs to,” said one concerned local, who asked to remain anonymous.

“It was a site of considerable beauty and archaeological interest,” he added.

Archaeologists believe that these stones were the height of olive oil extraction technology 2,000 years ago, before the superior Roman screw-press was invented.

Posted on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 1:47 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Indus Valley's civilisation 'had first sophisticated exchange system'

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-17-09)

According to a new study of clay pots and ceramic tablets discovered almost 70 years ago in Harappa, now in Pakistan, the people of the Indus Valley had a detailed system of commodity value, weights and measures.

Dr Bryan Wells, a researcher based at India's Institute of Mathematical Sciences, told The Daily Telegraph he had begun work on his thesis ten years ago when he first saw photographs of the clay pots with markings which appeared to be in proportion to their relative size.

But he was not able to test his thesis until he visited New Delhi earlier this month where the original pots are stored in one of the city's Mughal era forts. The three pots each had different markings, the smallest with a 'V' to indicate 'measure' and three long strokes. The medium vessel had six strokes and the largest had seven.

When he measured them he found they were in proportionate capacity: 3:6:7.

The inscriptions on the pots matched those on bas relief ceramic tablets which he believes are tokens of exchange for fixed measures of grain or other commodities.

Posted on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 1:44 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Valley in Jordan irrigated for 13,000 years

Source: Physorg.com (11-18-09)

Archaeologist Eva Kaptijn has given up digging in favour of gathering. With her colleagues, she has been applying an intensive field exploration technique: 15 metres apart, the researchers would walk forward for 50 metres. On the outward leg, they’d pick up all the earthenware and, on the way back, all of the other material. This resulted in more than 100,000 finds, varying from about 13,000 years to just a few decades old. Based on further research on the finds and where they were located, Kaptijn succeeded in working out the extent of habitation in the Zerqa Valley in Jordan over the past millennia.

The area where she undertook her research is also called the Zerqa Triangle; it is bounded by the River Zerqa and forms part of the Jordan Valley. The area covers roughly 72 square kilometres. Kaptijn discovered that the triangle had been inhabited, on and off, for thousands of years, but that this habitation was always highly dependent on the irrigation methods used by those who lived there. While the soil in the valley is very rich, there was usually not enough rainfall to cultivate plants without some additional irrigation.

Posted on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 1:43 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Early humans may have been 'hobbits', scientists say

Source: Cornell Daily Sun (11-18-09)

In a strange case of science imitating art, one hobbit has again become the center of a heated and ongoing conflict.

Since its 2003 discovery on the Indonesian island of Flores, the Homo floresiensis (nicknamed hobbit because it only grew to be about three feet tall) has caused scientists across the world to debate whether the find is a new species or simply a variation of the modern human. The difference could signal a major paradigm shift in the study of primitive humans.

Although several partial H. floresiensis skeletons have been identified, the majority of the attention has been given to a specimen called LB1 (the first to be discovered) because it is the most complete skeleton and the only one that has an entire cranium.

The earliest known hobbit lived approximately 18,000 years ago, although archaeological records of ancient tools suggest that hobbits may have been alive as early as 12,000 years ago. Until the discovery of LB1, scientists had widely believed that the last non-modern humans were the Neanderthals, which became extinct around 24,000 years ago. If hobbits are indeed a new species, they will replace Neanderthals as the most recent non-modern humans.

Posted on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 1:42 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Hunters' remains earliest known in Scotland

Source: Hamilton Advertiser (11-19-09)

SCOTLAND’S foremost amateur archaeologist, Tam Ward of Biggar Archaeology Group, was guest speaker at the November meeting of Lanark and District Archaeological Society.

The subject of Tam's talk was about the excavation work at Howburn Farm, near Elsrickle, which turned out to be the most important dig in Scotland this year.

Tam related how the site had been discovered through diligent field walking. Initially, Tam thought the site was early Neolithic but a talk with an expert in pre-history revealed the amazing fact that some of the tools that Tam and his team had discovered were about 16,000 years old (later Paleolithic). This was quite a revelation as nothing this early had ever been found in Scotland. What was also staggering was the fact that the people who came to Howburn actually walked across the area known now as the North Sea. The route would have been via the Dogger Bank which is the only bit left of the land route from Northern Europe. About 9000 years ago this route became flooded with the melting of the glaciers and the collapse of the Norwegian Trench which led to a devastating tsunami affecting Northern Europe.

Posted on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 1:41 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Ancient hunters not to blame for driving mammoths to extinction

Source: Guardian (UK) (11-19-09)

Woolly mammoths and other large, lumbering beasts faced extinction long before early humans perfected their skills as spearmakers, scientists say.

The prehistoric giants began their precipitous decline nearly 2,000 years before our ancestors turned stone fragments into sophisticated spearpoints at the end of the last ice age.

The animals, which included mammoths, elephant-sized mastodons and beavers the size of black bears, were probably picked off by more inept hunters who only much later developed specialised weapons when their prize catches became scarce.

"Some people thought humans arrived and decimated the populations of these animals in a few hundred years, but what we've found is not consistent with that rapid 'blitzkrieg' overkill of large animals," said Jacquelyn Gill, a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who led the research team.

Archaeological evidence shows that humans developed advanced spearheads around 13,000 years ago. The Clovis people of North America crafted speartips with deep grooves that made wounds bleed freely. With these, hunters did not have to kill their prey on the spot, but could wait for the beasts to bleed to death.

Posted on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 1:40 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Pope John Paul II 'whipped himself in remorse for sins'

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-23-09)

The Pope, who died five years ago, is being considered for sainthood by the Catholic Church.

As part of the Vatican's investigation thousands of documents have been collected and examined by officials from the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.

Among them is the testimony of Tobiana Sobodka, a Polish nun of the Sacred Heart of Jesus order, who worked for Pope John Paul in his private Vatican apartments and at his summer residence in Castel Gandolfo near Rome.

Sister Sobodka said: "Several times he (Pope John Paul) would put himself through bodily penance.

"We would hear it – we were in the next room at Castel Gandolfo. You could hear the sound of the blows when he flagellate himself. He did it when he was still capable of moving on his own."

Posted on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 1:16 AM | Comments (1) | Top

Aerial Images by Daring Allies Revealing Hitler's Weapons

Source: Kompas (11-23-09)

KOMPAS.com - Precise as a hole punch through a sheet of paper, craters surround a Nazi doodlebug factory in an extraordinary image showing the devastation wreaked by an Allied bombing raid.

The date is September 2, 1944 and the place Peenemunde, a village on the Baltic, where the terrifying weapons Adolf Hitler hoped would win the war for Germany were designed and tested. The image is astonishing enough, but how it was taken is even more startling.

For it comes from an archive of aerial photographs snapped by daring pilots - sometimes flying as low as 50ft - during secret reconnaissance missions in the Second World War. Others in the collection convey the human suffering experienced amid the fighting, including rare shots of a Nazi slave labour camp and of the notorious Colditz prisoner of war camp.

Until now the pictures have been kept behind closed doors. But they are revealed to the public for the first time today via the internet amid a painstaking cataloguing process. Alan Williams, manager of the National Collection of Aerial Photography which houses the photos, said: 'The archive literally shows the world at war.'

Long before the days of Google Earth, the highly skilled airmen who took them flew alone, by day and night, in unarmed Spitfires relying on their wits as they risked their lives to capture the images on their plane-mounted cameras. Sometimes their planes were painted pink, as the unusual colour proved very good at hiding the aircraft against a background of low cloud. For high altitude missions, the planes were painted a dark shade of blue...

Posted on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 1:15 AM | Comments (1) | Top

Demjanjuk trial to hear testimony from the dead

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-23-09)

Munich prosecutors who built the case against former death camp guard Mr Demjanjuk, 89, put 23 witnesses on their list, some of them from Russia and Ukraine.

But all members of the list are dead. It means that Demjanjuk, charged with assisting in 27,900 murders during his time as an SS guard at the extermination camp of Sobibor in occupied Poland, will be judged on records such as his identity card and on the statements of the dead.

His lawyer Guenther Maull said the defence would contest the witness statements may have been made under pressure from Soviet KGB interrogators. "The men were questioned 30 years ago at least in part in the Soviet Union and possibly under pressure," he said. "Whether their statements have any value as evidence is questionable."

Posted on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 1:15 AM | Comments (1) | Top

New Executive Order Aims to Avoid Declass Deadline

Source: Secrecy News (11-23-09)

Development of a new executive order on classification of national security information is now proceeding at an accelerated pace in order to preempt a deadline that would require the declassification of millions of pages of historical records next month.

A revised draft executive order was circulated to executive branch agencies by the Office of Management and Budget on November 16, with agency comments due back today, November 23. A final order is likely to be issued by the end of this year.

There is an incentive to complete the development of the executive order before December 31, 2009 because of a deadline for declassification of historical records that falls on that date. Under the current Bush executive order, classified records that are at least 25 years old and that have been referred from one agency to another because they involve multiple agency interests are supposed to be automatically declassified at the end of this year. (See E.O. 13292, section 3.3(e)(3)).

But in order to meet this December deadline, several agencies would have to forgo a review of the affected historical records, which they are unwilling to do. And so it seems they will simply be excused from compliance. But in order to modify the deadline in the Bush order, it will be necessary to issue another executive order. If the comprehensive new Obama order on classification policy (which would assign processing of such records to a National Declassification Center that does not yet exist) is not ready for release by December 31, then another stand-alone order would have to be issued, canceling or extending the looming deadline. And officials are reluctant to issue such an order since they say it would be awkward for the avowedly pro-openness Obama Administration to relax or annul a declassification requirement that was imposed by the ultra-secret Bush Administration.

In fact, the whole process has become an awkward mix of exaggerated and deflated expectations. The failure of the Bush Administration’s declassification deadline to take hold this year does not augur well for new, more ambitious efforts to advance classification reform. If the “automatic declassification” procedures that were prescribed in prior executive orders are not “automatic” after all, and if binding deadlines can be extended more or less at will, then any new declassification requirements in the Obama order will be similarly subject to doubt or defiance.

The latest draft executive order has not yet become publicly available, though officials said they expected it to leak, as did a previous draft dated August 4. “It includes some notable differences” from the earlier draft, said one official. But another official said “It’s basically the same as the draft you already have.” (See “Draft Order Would Set New Limits on Classification,” Secrecy News, September 29, 2009.)

Ironically, today’s classification system seems to function more effectively in preventing public access to aging archival records than it does with respect to certain present-day information.

Thus, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told reporters on November 12, “I have been appalled by the amount of leaking that has been going on” about classified Administration deliberations on Afghanistan policy and other matters.

But from a different point of view, others may be appalled that Secretary Gates’ own Department still retains classification restrictions on historical records dating back to the Korean War, and even from World War II, and that it otherwise resists modernization and correction of the cold war classification system.

Some general background on the national security classification system from the Congressional Research Service can be found in “Security Classification Policy and Procedure: E.O. 12958, as Amended” (pdf), November 3, 2009.

Posted on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 12:52 AM | Comments (1) | Top

Another mystery grave at Arlington

Source: Salon (11-22-09)

An engineering technician who works on burials at Arlington National Cemetery provided a startling sworn statement about misplaced remains at the cemetery to an Army investigating officer in late July.

The Army launched an internal investigation last summer after Salon began exposing burial errors at the cemetery, including a fiasco in May 2003 in which the cemetery went to bury a Navy captain in grave 449 of section 68 of the cemetery, only to find unknown, unmarked remains already there.

“Have there been any other discoveries of casketed remains in what could be considered unoccupied, unmarked gravesites?” the investigating officer asked the technician, who was under oath. The Army released that sworn statement Nov. 13, along with the rest of the investigation.

“Yes,” the technician answered. The technician then divulged that in January of this year, workers also went to bury someone in grave 1186 in section 42 of the cemetery – supposedly an empty grave – only to find another unmarked casket there also. “There was a casket in the plot that the operator had excavated when preparing for the daily funeral at site 1186,” he told the officer. (The Army blacked out most of the cemetery workers' names in the report.)

Five days later, the officer interviewed another cemetery employee involved in burials. “Do you have any knowledge of equipment operators discovering a casket in section 42 in January 2009?” the officer asked, referencing the grave that was supposed to be empty at that time. “Yes,” the employee responded.

The officer asked what the employee saw in that grave, 1186, after workers had begun digging in the supposedly empty plot. The employee responded, “A half open grave with a casket.”

Posted on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 12:46 AM | Comments (1) | Top

Son Objects to Moving Camus's Remains

Source: NYT (11-22-09)

President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to transfer the remains of the writer Albert Camus to one of the most hallowed burial places in France, but the plan has run into opposition from the Nobel laureate’s son, who does not think his father would have wanted the honor.

Camus’s son, Jean, says interring his father’s remains at the Panthéon, the Paris monument to some of the great men and women of France, would be contrary to his father’s wishes and does not want to have his legacy put to work in the service of the state, Le Monde quoted an unidentified intimate of Mr. Camus’s as saying.

Jean Camus’s sister, Catherine Camus, who manages her father’s estate, is prepared to give her approval and has spoken with Mr. Sarkozy on the subject, Le Monde said.

Mr. Sarkozy has said little publicly on the subject, but he noted last week that he had “been in touch with the family members,” adding: “I need their agreement.”

“No decision has been made on the Panthéonization,” a spokeswoman for the Elysée Palace said, declining to comment further.

Posted on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 12:02 AM | Comments (1) | Top

Indiana history buff restores Civil War gravestone

Source: Chicago Tribune (11-22-09)

ALBANY, Ind. - A former auto worker and history buff is keeping a Civil War soldier's memory alive by restoring the fallen soldier's marble gravestone.

Doug Cross of Albany came across Thomas Kent's grave last September while looking for a site where Civil War soldiers had used limestone slabs to cross the Mississinewa River.

He spotted Kent's gravestone in a clearing in the old Steubenville Cemetery and quickly suspected it belonged to a soldier.

"It was pitch black," he said. "It looked like a soldier monument by the way it was shaped, and I could read the word 'Fell' on there."

The gravestone was filthy and nearly indecipherable, but Cross took pictures and used a computer to enhance them. He and his 10-year-old daughter, Kelli, then used water and a soft scrub brush and non-damaging chemicals to make the stone readable again.

"It was full of sediment, kind of like a sandy substance, and we picked that out as good as we could," Cross said.

Now its words are clear: "Fell, Dec. 31, 1862 at the Battle of Stone River contending for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Aged 22 Ys, 1 Mo and 22 Ds."

Posted on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 12:00 AM | Comments (1) | Top

Monday, November 23, 2009

Catholic teachers find themselves intensely immersed in Jewish history

Source: LA Times (11-23-09)

The challah was blessed, the Manischewitz wine was poured, the candles were lighted. It could have been any Shabbat dinner in Los Angeles, were it not for the fact that it took place midweek and the room was full of Catholic schoolteachers.

The 34 teachers were participants in Bearing Witness, a seminar designed for educators in Catholic schools learning to teach about anti-Semitism and the history of the relationship between Jews and Catholics. Created in 1996 by the Anti-Defamation League, the seminars are now conducted across the United States.

The ADL's Los Angeles office is in its seventh year of running an annual Bearing Witness program.

The itinerary of the three-day course can include a discussion about the Holocaust, a synagogue tour or a lecture about Judaism in the period between the Old and New testaments...

Posted on Monday, November 23, 2009 at 11:58 PM | Comments (0) | Top

David Hamilton and his 2005 judicial opinion on God's secular title

Source: Slate (11-22-09)

Pop quiz: Which of the following names represents a nonsectarian, universal deity? Allah, Dios, Gott, Dieu, Elohim, Gud, or Jesus?

If you answered "none of the above," you are right as a matter of fact but not law. If you answered "Allah," you are right as a matter of law but not fact. And if you answered "Jesus," you might have been trying to filibuster David Hamilton, Barack Obama's first judicial nominee.

Hamilton, nominated last March, has seen his confirmation stalled until last week in the U.S. Senate, in part because his opponents claim he's a judicial activist for an opinion he wrote about God's proper secular title. In a 2005 case, Hinrichs v. Bosma, Hamilton determined that those who pray in the Indiana House of Representatives "should refrain from using Christ's name or title or any other denominational appeal," and that such prayer must hereinafter be "nonsectarian."

Bosma questioned the practice of opening state legislative sessions with sectarian Christian prayers that included a prayer for worldwide conversion to Christianity. Hamilton found this to be a violation of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause because it was government speech that favored one religious sect over another. In a post-judgment order, Hamilton also wrote that the "Arabic word 'Allah' is used for 'God' in Arabic translations of Jewish and Christian scriptures" and that 'Allah' was closer to "the Spanish Dios, the German Gott, the French Dieu, the Swedish Gud, the Greek Theos, the Hebrew Elohim, the Italian Dio, or any other language's terms in addressing the God who is the focus of the non-sectarian prayers" than Jesus Christ. Hamilton, himself a Christian, also added that "if and when the prayer practices in the Indiana House of Representatives ever seem to be advancing Islam, an appropriate party can bring the problem to the attention of this or another court." ...

Posted on Monday, November 23, 2009 at 11:50 PM | Comments (1) | Top

US couple plead guilty to spying for Cuba over 30 years

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-21-09)

Walter Myers, 72, a former State Department official with top-secret security clearance, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage and two counts of wire fraud, according to the department.

His wife, Gwendolyn Myers, 71, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to gather and transmit national defence information to Washington's Cold War enemy Havana, and will serve between six and 7.5 years behind bars.

The pair also agreed to forfeit $1,735,054 – the total salary Myers earned from the US government between 1983 and 2007, when he made repeated false statements to investigators about his security status.

"For the past 30 years, this couple betrayed America's trust by covertly providing classified national defence information to the Cuban government. Today, they are being held accountable for their actions," David Kris, assistant attorney general for national security, said in a statement.

"These guilty pleas should serve notice that we remain vigilant in protecting our nation's secrets and in bringing to justice those who compromise them."

The couple entered their pleas in the US District Court in Washington before Judge Reggie Walton.

The Myers – Walter had been known as Agent 202 and Gwendolyn was Agent 123 – were arrested on June 4 after an undercover FBI sting operation, having allegedly passed on secrets for decades to Washington's Cold War foe.

Posted on Monday, November 23, 2009 at 11:44 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Roemer could be key to U.S.-India relationship

Source: Politico (11-23-09)

When former Indiana congressman Timothy Roemer arrived in New Delhi in July as President Barack Obama’s new ambassador to India, he inherited one of the few U.S. international relationships that had dramatically improved during the Bush administration.

Bush had reversed course from the sanctions and hectoring the Clinton administration employed toward India after its 1998 nuclear tests, and left it to India and Pakistan to resolve their dispute over Kashmir. Most of all, under Bush, India felt that it had managed to at long last escape from being lumped with Pakistan and Afghanistan as problem children of the region.

But well before Roemer’s arrival there were concerns in New Delhi about the new administration. Those concerns have continued, making the state visit this week of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in the words of Nicholas Burns, a high-ranking State Department official, “a very big symbolic gesture toward India” by the new administration.

Shortly before the 2008 presidential elections, Obama created considerable anxiety in New Delhi when he told Time magazine that as president he would seek to mediate the Kashmir dispute, even mentioning Bill Clinton as a possible envoy for the task. India was none too pleased, and vigorously and successfully lobbied against it.

Just last week, Indians took great offense to two speeches Obama made on his trip to Japan, China and Korea. In Tokyo, Obama gave a speech on the importance of Asia, without once mentioning India. And in a joint statement with Chinese Premier Hu Jintao Indians saw signs of Obama encouraging a larger Chinese role in mediating relations between historic rivals India and Pakistan.

While perhaps inadvertent, such slights suggest “that nobody in the Obama administration is standing up now for India,” said C. Raja Mohan, a professor of South Asian studies currently on a fellowship at the Library of Congress.

Burns, a former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and now a professor at Harvard, attributes some of the problem to the administration simply having too many balls in the air. “The problem is that [the Obama administration] has been so focused by necessity on Afghanistan and Pakistan and on building the relationship with China, that there is the perception that that it is not spending as much time thinking about the India relationship,” he told POLITICO...

Posted on Monday, November 23, 2009 at 11:43 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Politico says: Senate filibusters aren't what they used to be

Source: Politico (11-23-09)

If you’ve been hoping to see Sen. Joe Lieberman star in a sequel to “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” this holiday season, you can put away the microwave popcorn.

Fury over the Connecticut senator’s announcement that he might join Republicans to filibuster a vote on the Senate health care bill has Democrats clamoring for Majority Leader Harry Reid to grab his teddy bear and let ’em talk all night.

But the public isn’t likely to see Lieberman offer a dramatic reading of the New Haven telephone book any time soon — nor catch Democrats cat-napping on the Senate floor to keep the session going round the clock.

Filibusters are far more common than most realize, but they don’t look much like Jimmy Stewart vehicles anymore, said Gregory Wawro, professor of political science at Columbia University and author of “Filibuster: Obstruction and Lawmaking in the United States Senate.”

“There are many more of them than there were prior to the 1970s,” he said. “They’re used for about everything of any significance these days.”

But instead of the spectacular verbal endurance tests for which Louisiana Democratic Sen. Huey Long was famous, senators now use “silent filibusters,” in which the opposition announces its intent to filibuster a bill, thereby forcing the party in power to assemble a 60-40 supermajority in order to move forward — even if no one is actually standing up on the floor to stop them.

“It used to be, the only way to stop anything was that: the all-night, all-day, hold-the-floor filibuster,” said one Republican leadership aide. “Whereas now, you need to produce 41. If you can get 41 senators, you can stop it.”

The aide acknowledged that an old-school filibuster isn’t likely this time around but also cautioned not to “rule anything out.” He said GOP members are “keyed up” for a national debate, which he predicts will last “for weeks and weeks.” And while it may not take quite that long, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) is already demanding that the entire 2,074-page Senate health care bill be read on the floor before a vote.

But that’s a pause and a political point, not an actual filibuster.

The last true old-school filibuster in the Senate is considered to have been conducted in 1986 by then-Sen. Alfonse D’Amato, a Republican from New York who was known as “Sen. Pothole” for his vaunted constituent-services operation. D’Amato spoke for 15 hours and 14 minutes in a failed effort to amend a tax bill to aid a struggling typewriter factory in Cortland, N.Y.

Since then, there have been plenty of silent filibusters, punctuated with periodic threats to haul out the cots, and even an all-night debate in 2007 staged to try to end a Republican filibuster over a bill on withdrawal from Iraq. Senators have also held the floor at length in protest or used filibuster-style techniques to slow down the proceedings...

Posted on Monday, November 23, 2009 at 11:39 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Czech Celebrations Muted 20 Years After Velvet Revolution

Source: WSJ (11-23-09)

PRAGUE -- Persistent unemployment and a growing distrust of the political class has taken some of the gloss off the Velvet Revolution that restored democracy to this country 20 years ago.

Celebrations marking the anniversary of the event have been subdued. Polls show that most Czechs don't regret the revolution; they just don't like what has happened since then.

On Nov. 27, 1989, waves of Czechoslovak factory workers marched into Prague to join student protesters in a nationwide strike that brought down Communist rule. A generation later, the Czechs are ruled by an impotent interim government, and they aren't anticipating real change until new elections, set to come by next May.

Other post-Communist countries in the region have gone through their own bouts of disillusionment and policy instability. Hungary and Romania have rolled from crisis to crisis.

The Czechs, while largely better off financially, have lost confidence in their leaders, some say.

Posted on Monday, November 23, 2009 at 11:29 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Leaked Indian report 'blames BJP for 1992 destruction of mosque'

Source: Times (UK) (11-24-09)

The destruction of a mosque by Hindu radicals that led to some of the bloodiest religious riots in India since Partition was “meticulously planned” by politicians including a former Prime Minister, according to a leaked report of the official investigation.

The razing of the 16th-century Babri mosque — in the northern town of Ayodhya, on December 6, 1992, by an estimated 150,000 Hindus — led to national violence in which about 2,000 people died, mostly Muslims.

The demolition also cemented the power base of the Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which came to power four years later. BJP hardliners had long claimed that the mosque stood on the birthplace of Lord Rama, the Hindu warrior god, and had campaigned for a Hindu temple to be built on the site.

Posted on Monday, November 23, 2009 at 6:20 PM | Comments (1) | Top

English Heritage seeks missing link as Darwin documents go online

Source: Times (UK) (11-24-09)

A nationwide search has begun to find the jottings and sketches by Charles Darwin in his Galapagos notebook.

The book, which proved so important for his treatise On the Origin of Species, has been missing since the early Eighties from Down House, Kent, Darwin’s former home and now a museum dedicated to his life and work.

English Heritage, which bought the property on behalf of the nation in 1996, is anxious to locate the original observations to complete a historical document of the scientist’s thoughts during the five years he spent travelling around the world on HMS Beagle.

The Galapagos notes are the only missing items from the collection, which can be read online from today, the 150th anniversary of publication of his groundbreaking theory.

Posted on Monday, November 23, 2009 at 6:17 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Venezuela's Hugo Chavez defends 'Carlos the Jackal'

Source: BBC (11-21-09)

In a speech to international socialist politicians, Mr Chavez said "Carlos", a Venezuelan, was not a terrorist but a key "revolutionary fighter".

He is serving a life sentence in France for murders committed in 1975.

Mr Chavez also hailed Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the late Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.

Posted on Monday, November 23, 2009 at 6:06 PM | Comments (1) | Top

UN confirms Lebanon body is British journalist

Source: BBC (11-23-09)

The body of Alec Collett was one of two dug up by British experts last week in Bekaa Valley, the Foreign Office said.

The freelance journalist was 64 when he was snatched at gunpoint from a car near Beirut airport in 1985.

The United Nations is to transport the body home. UK embassy staff in Beirut are assisting Mr Collett's family.

Posted on Monday, November 23, 2009 at 6:02 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Russian Investor to Shell out Millions for 'Hitler Limousine'

Source: Spiegel Online (11-23-09)

Michael Fröhlich, a German dealer in classic cars, has sold John Lennon's Mercedes 600, Marlene Dietrich's Rolls Royce Cabriolet and Charlie Chaplin's Bentley S3 in his time but has just arranged his most unusual deal yet -- a five-tonne armored limousine that, he says, was used by Adolf Hitler.

Fröhlich, 59, told SPIEGEL ONLINE that he managed to trace the vehicle to a collector in northern Germany on behalf of a Russian investor willing to shell out millions of euros for the open-top vehicle, one of several that supposedly ferried the Führer through adoring crowds before and during World War II.

The bluish-black Mercedes 770A Kompressor delivered in 1935 has changed hands a number of times in recent years. It is being sold together with five other vehicles of the same rare model, four of which were owned by top Nazis including Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. The other one belonged to a former president of Turkey, Ismet Inonu.

The unnamed Russian buyer is purchasing them all for a double-digit million euro sum, Fröhlich said. "I was of two minds about tracking down the car of this shit Hitler. Most of my relatives died in the war and I was saved by the Americans who provided penicillin in the Berlin airlift," he said. "The vehicle disgusts me, I have to say."

The Hitler limousine alone is estimated to be worth between €4 million and €10 million euros ($6-15 million), according to one media report.

Posted on Monday, November 23, 2009 at 5:59 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Sunday, November 22, 2009

What Do Presidential Libraries Say About Their Namesakes' Legacies?

Source: Fast Company (11-20-09)

Part of the point of a presidential library is that it's a monument to a leader's legacy--his style, his enduring affect on the world, even his reading habits...or lack thereof. Speaking of which, Laura Bush unveiled the design for her husband's book joint this week, and the ultra-traditional structure that nods to Washington but bows to the rest of Southern Methodist University's campus isn't winning any points with architecture critics. But how does W's design stack up against his predecessors? We checked out the libraries of fellow recent commanders-in-chief completed in the last three decades to compare.

43's George W. Bush Presidential Center was designed by New York-based architect Robert A.M. Stern to match the rest of SMU's Neo-Georgian campus. The brick and limestone structure is meant to evoke both Washington and Texas through its classical architecture and native landscaping (is that brush we see out front for Bush to clear?). The building is also chock-full of sustainable features which may earn it a Platinum LEED rating, which is interesting, since Bush famously battled climate change regulation while in office. All in all, Bush's library seems to be laying low...really low. He's hoping to blend invisibly into the landscape, and SMU's campus, and, well, we're guessing, history in general. Maybe to liven things up a bit, Stern could borrow a few of the concepts from this 2008 contest to design the Bush library.

Over in Little Rock, Arkansas, the William J. Clinton Presidential Center also earned a Platnium LEED rating for its green roof and energy efficiency, but for appropriately diametrically-opposed architecture. The bold, cantilevered ultracontemporary box also represents a huge departure from the traditional libraries of the past--much like Clinton's look-at-me governance. Designed by Polshek Partnership, it's flashy, confident--dare we say slick?--and a bit of a showoff against the traditional riverfront. Yep, just like Willie's built a new globe-trotting legacy for himself post-presidency, he's built a center of world-class architecture that's got both eyes firmly on the future...

Posted on Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 9:32 PM | Comments (1) | Top

This Time, Egyptian Riot Over Soccer, Not Bread

Source: NYT (11-20-09)

CAIRO — History has proved that there are two subjects that will move Egyptians to pour into the streets in riotous numbers, crashing windows, burning cars, battling one another and defying an army of club-wielding riot police officers.

One is the price of bread. Another is soccer, as was proved again this week after Egypt’s national team was defeated by its bitter rival Algeria, losing a berth in the World Cup tournament next year and sparking a riot outside the Algerian Embassy in Cairo late Thursday night.

But there was a pronounced difference between the bread riots of 1977 and 2008 and the soccer riot of Thursday night: the government quieted those earlier outbreaks by quickly lowering the price of bread, while this week it stoked outrage against Algeria.

Egypt had defeated Algeria 2-0 in Cairo on Saturday to set up Wednesday’s climactic playoff in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum. After Egypt lost the second match, the government withdrew its ambassador from Algiers and accused Algerians of menacing Egyptian fans after the game. President Hosni Mubarak’s eldest son, Alaa, a wealthy businessman, sounded as if he were calling his nation to war...

... Soccer is a national passion. The only time Egyptians take to the streets in flag-waving celebration is when their team wins. And in soccer terms the North African neighbor Algeria has for years been enemy No. 1. Both nations have waited a long time to get a spot in the World Cup, 24 years for Algeria, 20 for Egypt. The last time Egypt made it was in 1989, when it defeated Algeria.

From the start, the Egyptian government sought to exploit the games with Algeria for political reasons, political analysts said. State radio broadcast nationalist songs. Streets were filled with young men selling Egyptian flags. The president’s son Gamal Mubarak, who is often talked about as a possible successor to his 81-year-old father, attended the two games with other high-ranking party members.

“They excited people, thinking that this would keep them busy from other problems, but in the end it backfired,” said Osama Anwar Okasha, an Egyptian television writer and columnist who blamed leaders in both countries. “It made people here and there explode.”

Posted on Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 9:17 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Archaeologists warn Taliban destroying Pakistan's ancient heritage

Source: Yahoo News (11-22-09)

TAXILA, Pakistan (AFP) – Archaeologists warn that the Taliban are destroying Pakistan's ancient Gandhara heritage and rich Buddhist legacy as pilgrimage and foreign research dries up in the country's northwest.

"Militants are the enemies of culture," said Abdul Nasir Khan, curator of Taxila Museum, one of the premier archaeological collections in Pakistan.

"It is very clear that if the situation carries on like this, it will destroy our culture and will destroy our cultural heritage," he told AFP.

Taxila, a small town around 20 kilometres (13 miles) south of Islamabad, is one of Pakistan's foremost archaeological attractions given its history as a centre of Buddhist learning from the 5th century BC to the 2nd century.

Violence is on the rise in Pakistan as Taliban bombers and gunmen strike with increasing frequency and intensity in the cities of North West Frontier Province and around the capital Islamabad.

Posted on Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 9:13 PM | Comments (1) | Top

It's time to talk turkey about Thanksgiving traditions

Source: Journal Star (11-21-09)

Thanksgiving is heavily steeped in traditions.

But as sometimes happens with history and facts, myths can get in the way.

James W. Baker, senior historian at Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth, Mass., has some thoughts on why that is with Thanksgiving.

“It is an invented tradition,” he said. “It doesn’t originate in any one event. It is based on the New England Puritan Thanksgiving, which is a religious Thanksgiving, and the traditional harvest celebrations of England and New England and maybe other ideas like commemorating the Pilgrims. All of these have been gathered together and transformed into something different from the original parts.”

In honor of this week’s festivities, we take a look at the traditions of the holiday and separate fact from fiction on everything from history to football and more.

The first Thanksgiving

In 1621, the Plymouth colonists and Wampanoag tribe members shared a three-day autumn harvest feast. We know it as the first Thanksgiving.

But according to the Smithsonian Museum, Thanksgiving services began at least 20 years earlier with ceremonies in the Popham Colony in Maine and in Jamestown, where colonists gave thanks for their safe arrival.

And, historically speaking, the Pilgrims would have never considered their feast “Thanksgiving,” which was a religious holiday, according to historians at Plimoth Plantation, a museum dedicated to the history of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag.

That 1621 harvest celebration was anything but religious with feasting, singing, games, dancing and even drinking liquor, according to Smithsonian records.

Always a holiday?

President George Washington declared Nov. 26, 1789, an official holiday of “sincere and humble thanks,” and the nation’s first Thanksgiving under the new Constitution was celebrated.

But that was a one-time deal. Thanksgiving didn’t become a national holiday until 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln signed a proclamation declaring Thanksgiving be commemorated every year on the last Thursday in November. It is said that Lincoln selected that date because it was close to the date when the Mayflower anchored at Cape Cod, on Nov. 21, 1620.

In 1939 President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved the holiday to the third Thursday, to lengthen the Christmas shopping season and strengthen an economy still recovering from the Great Depression.

In 1941 Congress reversed Roosevelt’s decision. The president approved a joint house resolution establishing by law the fourth Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day...

Posted on Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 9:10 PM | Comments (2) | Top

Civic groups want to preserve colonial-era artifacts at Queens Plaza site

Source: New York Daily News (11-20-09)

Disagreement over the fate of two colonial-era millstones that had long been buried in a Long Island City sidewalk is causing some friction among local groups.

The Greater Astoria Historical Society and several other groups would like to see the stones, once part of a gristmill that dates back to the 1650s, removed and safely stored away.

But the Dutch Kills Civic Association thinks they should stay where they are until the city hires experts to determine if they are sturdy enough to move.

Right now, the millstones are caught in the middle of a major Queens Plaza renovation project. One has been removed and is sitting in a construction site, while the other is partially covered by a temporary fence.

Posted on Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 9:03 PM | Comments (1) | Top

US Senator says Lockerbie bomber should return to jail

Source: BBC (11-20-09)

A US senator has written to Prime Minister Gordon Brown calling for the Lockerbie bomber to be returned to prison.

Democrat senator Charles Schumer said Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi was released early on the assumption he only had three months to live.

Mr Schumer questioned the severity of Megrahi's prostate cancer given that the three months had now passed.

Posted on Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 8:43 PM | Comments (1) | Top

In Central America, Coups Still Trump Change

Source: Time (November 30 issue) (11-22-09)

If he holds his handy lead in the polls, Porfirio (Pepe) Lobo will be the next President of Honduras. Problem is, the last man elected to that office, Manuel Zelaya, was ousted last summer in a military coup. That makes it unlikely that any nation — except maybe the U.S. — will recognize Lobo if he wins the Nov. 29 election. But as he relaxes in his opulent house near Honduras' capital Tegucigalpa after a day of campaigning, Lobo sounds unfazed. "I practice Taekwondo for serenity," he says with his trademark Cheshire cat smile. "We have to hold this election, and the world has to recognize it, because Hondurans have to move on."

It would be great if a presidential election could magically transport the small, impoverished Central American nation beyond the political crisis that has gripped it since the June 28 coup. But unless Zelaya is restored to office before next week's balloting, which looks extremely unlikely, the international community is poised to brand the vote illegitimate. Instead, the election will confirm that Honduras has slipped back into the political chicanery and military meddling that typified the 1970s and '80s. "You can't use an election to clean the slate after a coup," says Christopher Sabatini, senior policy director at the Council of the Americas in New York City. "It just threatens to roll back democratic norms in Central America by decades."

Honduras, in fact, is the latest example of how little progress Central America has made since the coups, civil wars and corruption of the past. The institutional rot that spawned those Cold War conflicts remains, not just in Honduras but in nearby countries such as Guatemala, Nicaragua and Panama. In Nicaragua, for example, leftist President Daniel Ortega last month had Supreme Court justices loyal to him summarily lift a constitutional ban on presidential re-election so he can run again in 2011, even though most Nicaraguans oppose the change. In Panama, members of the powerful Arias family have so far been able to block the will of a relative who left some $50 million to poor children — the largest private gift in the nation's history. Even Costa Rica, once Central America's hopeful exception, has been rocked in recent years by corruption scandals involving Presidents.

And while it's been 20 years since Central America's last major civil-war battle, the isthmus is actually more dangerous today. Thanks in large part to exploding gang violence and useless justice systems, Central America has seen 79,000 murders in the past six years, more than the 75,000 people killed in El Salvador's 1980-1992 civil war or the 50,000 killed in Nicaragua's 1980-1990 contra war...

Posted on Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 8:42 PM | Comments (1) | Top

WWII Diary reveals Great Escape plot

Source: BBC (11-23-09)

Coded plans for "The Great Escape" have been found in the diary of a World War II airman from Greater Manchester.

Ted Nestor was a prisoner of war (POW) at the camp where 77 Allied officers managed to dig a tunnel and escape.

His journal includes stories of camp life, cartoons and even a coded reference to the mass breakout.

Now, 20 years after his death, his daughter Sharon Cottam has visited Stalag Luft III in Poland and learned that her father was a war hero.

Posted on Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 8:36 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Vatican tries to woo back the art world

Source: BBC (11-21-09)

Pope Benedict has invited international artists, sculptors, architects, musicians, film directors and even a solitary Italian prima ballerina to meet him under the soaring vaulted ceiling of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel in the Vatican on Saturday to begin a new dialogue between the Catholic Church and the arts.

Five hundred invitations were sent out to leading figures in the arts around the world last September, and more than 250 acceptances have been received at the Vatican.

Among them are such well-known names such as Anish Kapoor, whose current exhibition at the Royal Academy in London is drawing crowds; Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi-born British architect whose striking new Maxxi Museum of Modern Art has just opened in Rome; Daniel Libeskind, the Polish-born American who won the competition for the reconstruction of the World Trade Centre site in New York; and F Murray Abraham, the American movie star of Syrian descent who won an Oscar for Best Actor for his role as Salieri in the Mozart film, Amadeus, in 1985.

It is an eclectic list in which Italians outnumber all the foreigners. Among them are sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro; the doyen of film score composers, Ennio Morricone; and opera star Andrea Bocelli.

Posted on Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 8:34 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Former Soviet cosmonaut Konstantin Feoktistov dies

Source: BBC (11-22-09)

The USSR's first civilian cosmonaut Konstantin Feoktistov, a crew member of the Voskhod spaceship in 1964, has died in Moscow aged 83, Russian media say.

Feoktistov also designed and tested spaceships himself, and has a crater on the Moon named after him.

He worked on the design of both the Salyut and Mir space stations.

The 1964 flight is famous for being the first in which crew members were sent into space without wearing special space suits.

Posted on Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 8:32 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Cleric Wields Religion to Challenge Iran's Theocracy

Source: NYT (11-21-09)

CAIRO — For years, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri criticized Iran’s supreme leader and argued that the country was not the Islamic democracy it claimed to be, but his words seemed to fall on deaf ears. Now many Iranians, including some former government leaders, are listening.

Ayatollah Montazeri has emerged as the spiritual leader of the opposition, an adversary the state has been unable to silence or jail because of his religious credentials and seminal role in the founding of the republic.

He is widely regarded as the most knowledgeable religious scholar in Iran and once expected to become the country’s supreme leader until a falling-out with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the 1979 revolution and Iran’s supreme leader until his death in 1989.

Now, as the Iranian government has cracked down to suppress the protests that erupted after the presidential election in June and devastated the reform movement, Ayatollah Montazeri uses religion to attack the government’s legitimacy...

... These men have now adopted positions that Ayatollah Montazeri has argued for years, that even in a religious state legitimacy comes from the people. “The government will not achieve legitimacy without the support of the people, and as the necessary and obligatory condition for the legitimacy of the ruler is his popularity and the people’s satisfaction with him,” Ayatollah Montazeri said last month in response to questions the BBC sent to him.

In the early years of the revolution, he did not attract a broad following, in part because he was so plain-spoken. He was mocked by the elite and the middle class.

Despite his religious learning he came off as a sort of country bumpkin. In one joke that circulated after the revolution, he visited a medical school where students were studying to be pediatricians. Ayatollah Montazeri, the joke went, told them that if they studied harder they could become doctors for adults.

He was embraced by Ayatollah Khomeini because he promoted the concept of Velayat-e Faqih, which called for a religious leader to reign supreme over the government. The concept was ultimately embedded in the bedrock of the Islamic Republic. But Ayatollah Montazeri has also repeatedly said that he meant the faqih, or leader, should serve as an adviser, not as the final arbiter of all matters of state and religion.

Ayatollah Montazeri’s disillusionment, and his alienation from the state, came within a decade of the revolution. He mocked Ayatollah Khomeini’s decision to issue a fatwa calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie, author of “The Satanic Verses,” saying, “People in the world are getting the idea that our business in Iran is just murdering people.”

The breach with Ayatollah Khomeini became irreparable in January 1988, when Ayatollah Montazeri objected to a wave of executions of political prisoners and challenged the leadership to export the revolution by example, not by violence...

Posted on Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 8:31 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Cambodian Khmer Rouge trial of Comrade Duch set to end

Source: BBC (11-23-09)

The first trial at Cambodia's Khmer Rouge tribunal is entering its final week, with lawyers due to give closing arguments after months of testimony.

Kaing Guek Euv, better known as Comrade Duch, ran a prison where thousands of people were tortured and murdered in the late 1970s.

He is accused of crimes against humanity and faces a lifetime prison sentence if convicted.

But the defence is likely to repeat its argument that he was following orders.

Posted on Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 8:30 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Revealed: the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's secret plot to deny the Queen the throne

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-22-09)

Secret correspondence between the exiled Duke and Duchess of Windsor and their confidant Kenneth de Courcy has revealed a dastardly scheme to change the course of British history by denying Queen Elizabeth II the crown, says royal biographer Christopher Wilson.

It was the spring of 1946. The Second World War had drawn to a close, King George VI’s health was starting to fail and, from their homes in Paris and the south of France, the exiled Duke and Duchess of Windsor were having deeply ambitious thoughts.

More than 60 years ago, according to correspondence unearthed in a Californian library, the former King Edward VIII considered the idea of returning to Britain to become Regent, pushing aside his niece – now the Queen.

Posted on Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 8:27 PM | Comments (0) | Top

9/11 Suspects to Plead No Guilty, Seek Show Trial

Source: Fox News (11-22-09)

Scott Fenstermaker, the lawyer for accused terrorist Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, said the five detainees to be tried in New York would not deny their role in the 2001 attacks but "would explain what happened and why they did it."

The five men facing trial in the Sept. 11 attacks will plead not guilty so that they can air their criticisms of U.S. foreign policy, the lawyer for one of the defendants said Sunday.

Critics of Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to try the men in a New York City civilian courthourse have warned that the trial would provide the defendants with a propaganda platform.

Posted on Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 8:20 PM | Comments (1) | Top

In Turkey, Trial Casts Wide Net of Mistrust

Source: NYT (11-21-09)

ISTANBUL — Few here doubt that the case began with something threatening: in June 2007, 27 hand grenades and fuses were found in the attic of a house in an Istanbul slum. Investigators claimed they were stashed there by an ultranationalist retired officer and they were later linked to an elaborate coup plot.

But the question many are asking, inside and outside Turkey, is whether the Islamic-inspired government is exaggerating the threat in order to wage a much larger battle against this moderate Muslim nation’s secular establishment.

Since 2007, 300 people have been detained during the investigation of an underground group known as Ergenekon, including a writer of erotic novels, four-star generals and other military officers, professors, editors and underworld figures — some of whom appear to have committed no offense greater than speaking in favor of Turkey as a secular state...

... The case has brought into relief the larger strains in Turkey between a secular elite seeking to hold on to its waning influence and a growing, increasingly assertive population of observant Muslims. The case is being watched closely in Brussels, headquarters of the European Union, as a barometer of Turkey’s adherence to Western standards of justice. It comes as the country’s prospects for joining the bloc seem to be diminishing...

Posted on Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 8:19 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Rare Charles Darwin Book Found on Toilet Bookshelf

Source: AP (11-22-09)

An auction house says it is selling a rare first edition of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" found in a family's guest lavatory in southern England.

Christie's auction house said Sunday the book — one of around 1,250 copies first printed in 1859 — had been on a toilet bookshelf at a family's home in Oxford.

The book will be auctioned on Tuesday — the 150th anniversary of the publication of the famous work. Christie's said the book is likely to sell for $99,000.

Posted on Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 8:16 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Leaked U.K. Documents Reportedly Detail Iraq War Chaos

Source: AP (11-22-09)

Leaked British government documents call into question ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair's public statements on the buildup to the Iraq war and show plans for the U.S.-led 2003 invasion were being made more than a year earlier, a newspaper reported Sunday.

Britain's Sunday Telegraph published details of private statements made by senior British military figures claiming plans were in place months before the March 2003 invasion, but were so badly drafted they left troops poorly equipped and ill-prepared for the conflict.

The documents — transcripts of interviews from an internal defense ministry review of the conflict — disclose that some planning for the Iraq war had begun in February 2002. Maj. Gen. Graeme Lamb, then head of Britain's special forces, was quoted as saying he had been "working the war up since early 2002," according to the newspaper.

Posted on Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 8:14 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Iraq PM Steps Up Campaign Against Saddam Loyalists

Source: Fox News (11-22-09)

A stepped-up campaign by Iraq's prime minister against Saddam Hussein loyalists is alienating Sunni Muslims and stoking tensions between them and the majority Shiites ahead of key national elections.

In its latest anti-Baathist attack, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Shiite-dominated government put three men on state television Sunday to confess their alleged role in planning homicide attacks in Baghdad last month. The three, all in detention and dressed in orange prison jumpsuits, said the bombings were ordered by Saddam's Baath Party.

Al-Maliki's intensified rhetoric worsens one of Iraq's most dangerous sectarian fault lines — one which the United States has long struggled to calm.

Posted on Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 8:10 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Fossils of dinosaur-era crocodiles found in Sahara

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-20-09)

Five exotic crocodiles that lived alongside the dinosaurs 100 million years ago, including one sporting boar-like tusks and another with a duckbill snout, have been discovered in the Sahara.

Unlike their modern cousins, the ancient crocodilians were as agile on land as they were in the water.

They were reptiles like the dinosaurs, but belonged to a completely separate lineage that continues to this day.

The crocodiles once ran and swam across present-day Niger and Morocco, when the region was covered by lush plains and broad rivers.

Posted on Saturday, November 21, 2009 at 11:55 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Germany Concerned Its Evidence to Be Used to Back Death Penalty in 9/11 Trial

Source: Fox News (11-21-09)

Justice Ministry spokeswoman Katharina Jahntz on Saturday confirmed a report in Der Spiegel that a German observer would attend the trial to ensure that no evidence provided by Germany would be used to apply the death penalty.

A German government official says the nation will send an observer to the upcoming trial in New York of the professed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and four accused henchmen.

Three of the four suicide pilots who carried out the attacks had lived and studied in the northern German city of Hamburg. Germany, like the rest of Europe, except for Belarus, does not execute criminals

Posted on Saturday, November 21, 2009 at 11:44 PM | Comments (1) | Top

EU history will be all the history taught in schools

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-21-09)

The latest initiative by our "Children's Secretary", Ed Balls, is to abolish what remains of fact-based teaching of history and geography in our schools. He plans to "roll them together into themed lessons on social issues such as global warming" (funny how that seems to seep into everything nowadays).

The ruthless drive of educational progressives to eliminate history-teaching from schools has been under way since the 1960s. The aim is to ensure that children know nothing about their country's past or how the world came to be as it is, leaving their minds blankly open to whatever vacuous progressive claptrap is fed to them.

In his desire to chuck history onto what Lenin called "the scrapheap of history", Mr Balls may have to make an exception, however. A campaign is now being mounted in the European Parliament to make it compulsory for children to be taught the history of the EU. According to Mário David, the Portuguese MEP leading the campaign and a former chief of staff to the Commission President Jose-Manuel Barroso, it Is vital to counter all the "lying, cheating and mistrust" that surrounds the EU in the minds of the peoples of Europe. Our children must therefore be indoctrinated accordingly.

Posted on Saturday, November 21, 2009 at 7:59 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Cigar Churchill smoked as he planned D-Day is discovered after being hidden for 66 years

Source: Daily Mail (UK) (11-21-09)

A cigar smoked by Prime Minister Winston Churchill as he planned D-Day has been discovered - after being hidden for more than 60 years.

Christian Williams, 33, was given the artefact when he was just 12 by his grandfather Ronald Williams, a WWII veteran who served as the British premier's butler.

At more than 6in long, the cigar has never been touched by its owner, who keeps it safe in a sturdy wooden box.

It was taken from the historic Casablanca Conference at which Churchill and other Allied leaders declared they would fight until Germany’s unconditional surrender.

Posted on Saturday, November 21, 2009 at 6:12 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Obama's Approval Goes Below 50% In Gallup Poll

Source: Talking Point Memo (11-20-09)

President Obama's approval rating has fallen below 50% in the Gallup poll for the first time, the organization has announced.

The full number will be released at 1 p.m. ET. (Late Update: The number has been posted, with 49% approval to 44% disapproval.)

As Gallup has previously noted, every president since World War II, except for John F. Kennedy, eventually went below 50%. The shortest time for such a fall belongs to Gerald Ford at three months, while the longest (except for Kennedy, and his tragically shortened administration) was Dwight Eisenhower at 63 months, the only president to last through a full first term above 50%.

Falling below 50% doesn't necessarily spell defeat for re-election. Obama's ten months will match the ten months for Ronald Reagan, who was of course re-elected in a landslide, and Bill Clinton only stayed above 50% for four months.

Posted on Saturday, November 21, 2009 at 5:08 PM | Comments (1) | Top

TIME says: Three Key Lessons from Obama's China Tour

Source: Time (11-21-09)

... China's concerns, of course, have dramatically expanded in recent years, as was emphasized by Beijing's anxiety over the implication for its own dollar-denominated wealth of U.S. budget deficits. At the same time, Beijing is in no hurry to play the "other" global superpower rule vacated by the Soviet Union two decades ago.

Herewith, three key lessons to draw from the visit:

1. China's Star Has Risen and America's Has Ebbed, But the U.S. is 'Too Big to Fail'

As the Washington Post noted, when Bill Clinton visited Beijing a decade ago, the U.S. owed more money to Spain than it did to China. President Obama's America owes China some $800 billion and counting. China's economy is humming again, while America's is likely to remain sluggish for years. The sharp economic downturn, and the failure of the U.S. to impose its will in two very costly ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have shrunk America's global leverage. Today, far less powerful countries than China routinely decline to follow Washington's lead. An ironic dividend of capitalism's Cold War triumph has been the emergence of new power centers in the world economy — Brazil, Russia, India and, of course, China....

... 2. China Doesn't Want to Run the World, But It Has Interests That Differ from America's

Russia may be engaged in a geopolitical chess game with the U.S. aimed at recovering from the demise of its great power status, but China is different. It pushes back against U.S. initiatives only when those are deemed inimical to its national interests. Iran is a good example. Beijing's heavy investment in and reliance on Iran's energy sector make it extremely averse to serious sanctions or strategies that create political turmoil in Tehran. While insisting on compliance with the non-proliferation regime, Beijing does not believe Iran represents an imminent nuclear weapons threat. And its response to North Korea going nuclear suggests that a nuclear armed Iran is something it could live with...

... 3. Personal Chemistry Can't Change the World

The personal trust between President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was indispensable in fostering the climate for a rapid, peaceful end to the Cold War. Presidents Clinton, Bush and now Obama have all tried to cultivate personal relationships with their Chinese counterparts in the hope of smoothing a tricky relationship. But the usefulness of personal chemistry in dealing with China has strict limits, for a simple reason: While the President of the United States is, in George W. Bush's words, "the decider," his Chinese counterpart is not...

Posted on Saturday, November 21, 2009 at 4:31 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Rasmussen Report: 55% in New York Oppose Civilian Terror Trials

Source: Rasmussen Reports (11-20-09)

Just 35% of New York State voters agree with Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to try the confessed mastermind of the 9/11 terror attacks and five other suspected terrorists in a civilian court in New York City rather than before a military tribunal.

A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey in the state finds that 55% are opposed to that decision, which is part of the Obama administration’s effort to close the terrorist prison camp at the Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba.

But 57% are at least somewhat confident that New York City will be safe and secure during the trials of the terrorism suspects. Twenty-three percent (23%) are very confident.

Thirty-eight percent (38%) are not confident that the city will be safe during the trials, with 26% who are not very confident and 12% who are not at all confident.

Posted on Saturday, November 21, 2009 at 4:20 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Guerrilla Tourism Helps El Salvador Heal

Source: Time (11-18-09)

As a teenager, Leonor Marquez led a fleet-footed unit of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) guerrilla fighters through the steep mountain passes of Perkin, El Salvador. "We were young and fast," Marquez, now 37, remembers. She and her comrades, who were known as "Las Samuelitas", were a fierce group of insurgents who might have been giddy junior high girls had they not been in El Salvador in the 1980s.

The civil war ended 17 years ago, but Marquez is again leading groups through these forested hills with guerrilla warfare on her mind. Only now, those following her are Salvadoran students and American and European leftists stepping gingerly in their Reeboks and khaki shorts, and stopping frequently to drink bottled water. Welcome to El Salvador's new guerrilla-tourism industry.

"We should get going before it gets too dark," Marquez calls out in Spanish, watching the sun set over the mountain ridge and pulling out a flashlight — a visual aid that would have been much too risky to use during the rebels' deadly cat-and-mouse game with the patrols of the U.S.-backed Salvadoran army back in the '80s. On the short descent back to the revolutionary museum which houses the twisted carcasses of several attack helicopters downed by the guerrillas, she points out a crater where a 500-pound bomb was dropped by the army. Nearby is a bunker system used by FMLN rebels to escape those air raids. Back at the Perkin Lenca Lodge, Benito Chica takes out his guitar and plays revolutionary folksongs — the same ones he sang at the rebel camps two decades ago.

Marquez's tour is part of El Salvador's "Route of Peace, a network of rural, war-torn communities trying to rebuild themselves through tourism. Ironically, the project, which can include 15-day-long packages for tour groups, is now funded in part by a $184,000 grant from the U.S., which had helped bankroll El Salvador's right-wing military during the civil war that killed 75,000 people. Unlike U.S. historic battleground sites, with musty replica uniforms, powderhorns and recitals of textbook war accounts, here the guides are those that did the fighting. "This is guerrilla tourism," Chica says. He admits the offering is rustic and improvised, but he says the ex-guerrillas have plenty of experience facing challenges. "During the war, they would tell us we had to take a hill," says Chica. "We didn't know how, but we had to do it. Now they tell us we have to build tourism. We don't know how, but we have to do it."...

Posted on Saturday, November 21, 2009 at 4:16 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Analysts Fear British Economy Could Echo Japan's 'Lost Decade'

Source: NYT (11-20-09)

Britain may finally be emerging from recession, but many analysts warn that it is a false dawn. In fact, they argue, the economy here is so ravaged by growing debts and ruined banks that it could well be following in the steps of Japan’s lost decade of the 1990s.

The parallels are eerie: Like Japan, Britain enjoyed more than a decade of booming growth, fueled by aggressive bank lending and real estate investments. Haunted by the comparison, policy makers here have been extra aggressive in using fiscal and monetary levers in hopes of preventing the type of sustained period of stagnation and banking stasis that plagued Japan for so many years.

Posted on Saturday, November 21, 2009 at 4:00 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Hacked E-Mail Is New Fodder for Climate Dispute

Source: NYT (11-20-09)

Hundreds of private e-mail messages and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change.

The e-mail messages, attributed to prominent American and British climate researchers, include discussions of scientific data and whether it should be released, exchanges about how best to combat the arguments of skeptics, and casual comments — in some cases derisive — about specific people known for their skeptical views. Drafts of scientific papers and a photo collage that portrays climate skeptics on an ice floe were also among the hacked data, some of which dates back 13 years.

Posted on Saturday, November 21, 2009 at 3:59 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Pilot's wartime love letters sold

Source: BBC (11-21-09)

Letters sent by a Battle of Britain fighter pilot to his sweetheart in Norfolk have sold at auction for £2,100.

Sgt Eric Arthur Redfern wrote to Joan Preston, who would later become his wife, while serving in the RAF under the command of Douglas Bader.

The collection also included a letter informing her of his death in action in 1942, a few months after their wedding.

Photographs and medals were also sold at Ely in Cambridgeshire.

Posted on Saturday, November 21, 2009 at 3:42 PM | Comments (1) | Top

UN marks 20 years of Convention on Rights of the Child

Source: BBC (11-20-09)

Ceremonies are taking place around the world to mark the 20th anniversary of a landmark agreement protecting children.

The UN says the Convention on the Rights of the Child has transformed the way children are treated.

But it says a billion children in the world still go without food, shelter or healthcare and that millions are facing lives of poverty and abuse.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), signed in 1989, guarantees children the right to life, to education, the right to play and to be protected from abuse.

Posted on Saturday, November 21, 2009 at 3:39 PM | Comments (1) | Top

German Auction House Pulls Painting Owned by Nazis

Source: Fox News (11-21-09)

A German auction house says it has withdrawn from sale a painting that the Max Stern estate claims was one of hundreds the Jewish art dealer was forced to sell off by the Nazis.

Karl-Sax Feddersen, responsible for legal affairs at the Duesseldorf-based Lempertz auction house, said the picture by Alexander Adriaenssen had been pulled from Saturday's sale and its owner notified.

The estate claims it is one of some 400 works from Stern's collection sold under duress between 1935 and 1937. It is working to recover all of them.

Posted on Saturday, November 21, 2009 at 3:24 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Friday, November 20, 2009

Vietnam Vet Stages Hunger Strike in Front of White House to Raise Awareness About PTSD

Source: Truthout (11-20-09)

Since Veterans Day, Thomas E. Mahany, a 62-year-old Vietnam War veteran, has been on a hunger strike in front of the White House to raise awareness about post-traumatic stress disorder and protest the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mahany recently wrote a letter to President Obama calling on him to "withdraw our military men and women from the Middle East now." He said he plans to only drink water "until specific action is taken by your administration and our military to stem the tragic and ever-increasing rise in the incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)" that has seen a meteoric rise over the years among those serving in the military...

... Mahany, who also spent 29 days fasting for peace in Vietnam back in May 1970, wrote Obama, "I served in Vietnam and I also lost a brother-in law to suicide caused by PTSD. He had two young sons. I have seen firsthand what this can do to a family.

In taking my action, I hope to elicit for you, from the peace-loving people of this nation, moral support sufficient to spiritually bolster you as you make your decision concerning our military presence in Afghanistan."

Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 10:51 PM | Comments (2) | Top

Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out

Source: Spiegel Online (11-19-09)

Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents.

At least the weather in Copenhagen is likely to be cooperating. The Danish Meteorological Institute predicts that temperatures in December, when the city will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference, will be one degree above the long-term average.

Otherwise, however, not much is happening with global warming at the moment. The Earth's average temperatures have stopped climbing since the beginning of the millennium, and it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year.

Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 10:36 PM | Comments (1) | Top

A New Garden at the U. of California at Davis Honors Patwin People

Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education (11-20-09)

A new contemplation garden at the University of California at Davis honors the Patwin people, who once inhabited the land that became the campus. The garden, part of the university's 100-acre arboretum, is located on the bank of Putah Creek and includes 34 kinds of trees and plants that the Patwin used. The garden identifies many by their Patwin names.

The garden also includes a series of engraved basalt columns, one of which records the names of 51 Patwin men, women, and children who were removed to missions between 1817 and 1836, when California was controlled by Spain and, later, Mexico. You can watch a slide show about the garden by clicking here.

Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 10:24 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Evangelicals Give Away 170,000 Copies of Darwin's Book With 'Special Introduction'

Source: CNSNews (11-20-09)

About 1,200 Christian activists mobilized on college campuses nationwide on Wednesday to give away 170,000 copies of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the classic text on evolution. The book, however, contains a ‘Special Introduction’ by evangelist Ray Comfort that argues against Darwin’s theory and presents a creationist alternative to man’s origins and nature’s growth...

...November 24 is the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. Because the book is more than 100 years old, it is in the public domain, which means any publisher can put out an edition of the book.

“When I discovered that On the Origin of Species was public domain, I decided to publish it myself with a special Introduction, to give an alternative perspective, and give away free copies to university students,” said Comfort. “But when Kirk Cameron and I produced a short video-clip explaining what I wanted to do -- and posted it online -- we were very surprised at the reaction. We kicked a hornet’s nest. A big one.”

Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 10:06 PM | Comments (0) | Top

The Rise of China's Auto Industry

Source: Secrecy News (11-20-09)

“In recent years, China has become the world’s fastest growing automotive producer,” according to a new report (pdf) from the Congressional Research Service.

“[China's] annual vehicle output has increased from less than 2 million vehicles in the late 1990s to 9.5 million in 2008. In terms of production volume in 2008, China has surpassed Korea, France, Germany, and the United States, trailing only Japan.”

“China’s automobile industry has continued to expand despite the global economic downturn. From January to October 2009, more than 10 million vehicles were sold in China. If such growth continues, China is on its way to becoming world’s largest auto market,” the CRS said.

See “The Rise of China’s Auto Industry and Its Impact on the U.S. Motor Vehicle Industry,” November 16, 2009.

Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 9:37 PM | Comments (0) | Top

'Global warming' and '9/11': words that define the decade

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-19-09)

The Global Language Monitor, which uses a math formula to track the frequency of words and phrases in print and electronic media, said "Obama" came third in the list with the surname of U S President Barack Obama used as the stem for other words.

"Bail-out" was listed fourth after the bank bail-out was one of the first acts of the financial crisis, "evacuee" came fifth in the wake of Hurricane Katrina devastating New Orleans, and "derivative" featured fifth.

"Google," "surge," "Chinglish" meaning a hybrid of Chinese and English, and "tsunami," after the 2004 Asian disaster that left 230,000 people dead or missing, followed.

"Looking at the first decade of the 21st century in words is a sober, even sombre, event," said Paul JJ Payack, president of The Global Language Monitor.

"For a decade that began with such joy and hope, the words chosen depict a far more complicated and in many ways, tragic time. Nevertheless, signs of hope and renewal can be found in the overall lists."

Payack said the top phrase of the decade was "climate change" followed by "financial tsunami" and "Ground Zero." ...

Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 9:33 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Prehistoric Jaws: Meet the family of crocs that ate dinosaurs 100million years ago

Source: Daily Mail (11-20-09)

A family of five terrifying prehistoric crocodiles - including one with teeth like the tusks of a wild boar - have been discovered by fossil hunters.

The predators roamed the swamps, lakes and rivers of Africa 100million years ago hunting small dinosaurs and seeking out fish and grubs.

Unlike their modern cousins, the ancient crocodilians were as agile on land as they were in the water.

Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 9:32 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Archaeologists Plead for Import Restrictions on Common Coins

Source: Fox (11-18-09)

Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) representative Sebastian Heath indicated during a State Department (DOS) hearing in Washington last Friday, (November 13, 2009) stated that the AIA supports expanding the current import restrictions on cultural property from Italy to include coins. With Roman and Greek coins struck in Italy being the most popular of all ancient coins in the U.S., Heath's statement is a wakeup call for thousands of private collectors, museums and independent scholars. The Ancient Coin Collectors Guild (ACCG), a collector advocacy group, anticipates a deluge of opposition to this proposed expansion when DOS formally reviews the current Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), probably next fall.

The AIA position is controversial, even among archaeologists, with some AIA activists suggesting that preventing trade would end site looting. A 36-year-old AIA Convention resolution, expanded in 2004, restricts research on any object acquired after December 30, 1973 unless its existence (provenance) is documented earlier or it was legally exported since then from the country of origin. This excludes from study millions of privately owned coins that are legitimate "orphans" in the venerable 600-year-old coin market.

ACCG Director Kerry K. Wetterstrom represented the collectors guild at the DOS hearing with an oral presentation criticizing Italy's failed efforts to "improve the efficiency of the system to release certificates of exportation" as promised in Article II of the existing MOU. The ACCG also submitted written comment that outlines the success of British systems such as the Portable Antiquities Scheme, the Treasure Act and the Oxford Institute of Archaeology's Celtic Coin Index, started in 1961. The latter is a model of cooperation between finders of coins, archaeologists, coin collectors and the trade. Wetterstrom's presentation and the guild's written comment are posted on the ACCG web site.

Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 9:29 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Treasure trove of history found at SugarHouse site (PA)

Source: The Philadelphia Inquirer (11-18-09)

Under a tent on the grounds of the future SugarHouse Casino, archaeologists sift through buckets of debris, picking out and bagging the choicest broken bits.

Half a teacup. The neck of a blue bottle. A shard of thick brown pottery.

The artifacts come mostly from 18th-century brick privies, the colonial equivalent of Dumpsters.

But the items are practically newfangled compared with what the archaeologists have uncovered in a nearby plot about the size of a tennis court.

In the last month, they have found hundreds of relics left behind by people who lived along the Delaware River not 300 years ago, but 3,500. The cache, found in the southwest corner of the property, constitutes the largest single discovery of Native American artifacts in Philadelphia.

Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 9:28 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Crews search for Civil War history (Texas)

Source: The Daily News (Galveston County) (11-19-09)

TEXAS CITY — For years, the scoured remains of a Civil War naval tragedy slowly rusted beneath the spinning propellers of gargantuan tankers and sky-scraping container ships.

The scuttled USS Westfield, a Union gunship, and the last vestiges of its 14 doomed crew lay obscured in seafloor sediment near the confluence of the Texas City and Houston ship channels.

On Wednesday, however, divers and salvage crews visited the all-but-forgotten site to begin recovering what is left of the ship in preparation for a planned 5-foot deepening of the Texas City Channel.

Since the dredging will damage or destroy the archeological site, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Galveston District and Navy salvage experts stepped in to remove artifacts from the site, as required by federal law, Sharon Tirpak, Corps project manager for the Texas City Channel, said.

Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 9:27 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Ronald Reagan: Accidental Champion of the Black Underclass?

Source: The New Republic (11-20-09)

Labor economists generally agree that each extra year of school raises someone's earning by 10-15%. But it turns out that math classes could account for half of those gains.

And we can thank Ronald Reagan for this piece of knowledge. Following a critical report of the American education system by the Reagan administration in 1983, many states around the country raised the number of math and science courses that were required for graduation. In a new paper, Harvard's Joshua Goodman looks at what happened to earnings following the reforms. The higher math requirements (typically from 0 or 1 required courses to 2 or 3 courses) had the biggest impact on schools in low-income, black areas (most likely because white/higher income students were already taking 2 or 3 math classes.)

Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 9:25 PM | Comments (0) | Top

India Steps Up Its Fight Against Naxalites

Source: TIme (11-20-09)

Late-night digging along the back roads of Bastar, a dense jungle region in India's northern state of Chhattisgarh, can only mean one thing if there's nothing to show for it the next day: Maoist rebel activity. So when a group of villagers in the state's Kanker district, the gateway to Bastar, were kept awake for nights on end last month by repeated chinking from metal striking rock on a nearby road, they knew something was up.

They were right. The Maoists, commonly known in India as Naxalites, had dug a tunnel five feet under the surface of a paved back road that was used by security forces from the nearby Counter-Terrorism and Jungle Warfare College. The insurgents' tunnel's exit points, on the side of the road, were well concealed with alternating layers of sandbags and dirt. But before the Naxalites got around to booby-trapping the underground tunnel with improvised explosives cobbled together from scavenged pieces of iron and heisted explosive materials from state-owned mines, it had been filled in. The villagers had tipped off commandos from the college.

Naxalite rebels, whose leaders claim to follow Maoist doctrine on armed people's struggle, have been waging a guerilla war against the Indian government since their first uprising in the West Bengal village of Naxalbari in 1967. For over three decades a phlegmatic response from central and state security organs did little to prevent the then isolated Naxal insurgency from foraying into underdeveloped forest and jungle regions in central and eastern India where it gained support of impoverished tribal groups and villagers. By 2001, some Naxalites had gained sway over 51 districts, and with the state response mechanism to their movements still weak, that number quadrupled in less than a decade. Naxals now operate in 223 districts, spread out over one-third of India along a vertical belt commonly referred to as the Red Corridor...

Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 9:08 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Klan Enters Debate Over Song at Ole Miss

Source: Inside Higher Ed (11-20-09)

The Ku Klux Klan is planning a rally at the University of Mississippi Saturday to protest the university's ban on shouting the final line of a fight song: "The South shall rise again," The Memphis Commercial Appeal reported. The university has been discouraging the last line -- going so far as to change a song commonly performed at football games -- because the line is offensive to many who see it as a link to the university's racist past. The Klan sees the issue in a different way. "This is not a white or black issue at all. It's freedom of speech. They've got a right to say what they want at the game," said Shane Tate, a Klan leader in the state.

Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 9:02 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Lawmaker tells Texas' State Board of Education that Hispanics are lacking in textbooks

Source: The Dallas Morning News (11-20-09)

AUSTIN – Hispanics are getting the shaft in proposed history and social studies standards for Texas public schools, Hispanic legislative leaders complained Wednesday to the State Board of Education.

Rep. Norma Chavez, representing the House and Senate Hispanic caucuses, told board members that proposed standards for U.S. history, government and other social studies courses are a slap at the state's growing Hispanic population.

"It is as though Hispanics don't exist in many of these standards," Chavez, an El Paso Democrat, told the panel, noting that only 16 of 162 historical figures that must be covered in social studies are Hispanic.

Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 8:21 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Evolution and history compulsory (England)

Source: BBC (11-19-09)

Primary school children in England will have to learn about evolution and British history under a shake-up of the national curriculum.

Schools Minister Vernon Coaker says the subjects will be compulsory elements of a new primary school curriculum being introduced in 2011.

Scientists and humanists had lobbied ministers for the inclusion of evolution in the theme-based timetable.

History is already compulsory, but there were fears it would be sidelined.

Schools will not be told which parts of British history to teach.

Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 8:20 PM | Comments (0) | Top

German court orders return of ancient vessel to Iraq

Source: The Art Newspaper (11-18-09)

A German court has upheld Iraqi claims over a miniature gold vessel that for the past three years has been at the centre of a tangled dispute involving a Munich auction house, German customs, the Iraqi embassy in Berlin, an archaeologist, and a museum of classical antiquities.

The case, which has focused attention on the sale of smuggled Iraqi artifacts in Germany, began late in 2004 when the slightly dented six-centimetre-high gold vessel was included in a sale at Munich auction house Gerhard Hirsch Nachfolger, described as being of Mediterranean origin, possibly from Troy and dated to the Roman Iron-age period (1st century AD). However, the vessel was spotted by an unnamed expert who believed that it was in fact much older and of Sumerian origin.

The Iraqi embassy in Berlin was alerted and subsequently instigated proceedings against the auction house claiming breach of legislation prohibiting the sale of antiquities smuggled out of Iraq. The vessel was confiscated by the Stuttgart Customs Investigations Office and on the basis of a court ruling was handed to Dr Michael Müeller-Karpe, an archaeologist at the Roman-Germanic Central Museum in Mainz, for expert research and identification.

Dr Müeller-Karpe, agreed that the piece was of Iraqi origin and indeed that it was a rare example of a Sumerian gold vessel, around 4,500 years old and possibly made for a child's doll house. He speculated that it was likely to have been illegally excavated from the royal cemetery at the much looted site of the ancient Sumerian capital of Ur on the Euphrates river.

Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 8:16 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Senior counsel to 9-11 Commission claims the government sanitized the record to make itself look good

Source: NYT (11-15-09)

For all the trillions of dollars lavished on it, for all the talk about confronting new security threats, for all the exhortations to reinvent government, America’s defense establishment, as John Farmer reminds us in “The Ground Truth,” continued to fight the cold war more than a decade after it had ended. Preoccupied with building a costly missile defense system to counter a spurious menace from Russia and with maintaining “full spectrum dominance” over the rest of the globe, most Bush administration officials blithely ignored the danger emanating from the caves of Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden and his acolytes plotted against America. Confronted by a small group of mostly Saudi nationals armed with box cutters, the central nervous system of the country’s defense agencies went into a state of cataleptic shock. The only decisive action taken on 9/11 came not from the military, but from the courageous passengers who stormed the cockpit of United Airlines Flight 93, leading the hijackers to crash the plane over Pennsylvania farmland before it could reach its intended target in Washington.

As senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, Farmer, who was the attorney general of New Jersey and is the dean of the Rutgers School of Law, investigated the derelict conduct of the national security apparatus. He was well prepared to do so. In their valuable account of the commission’s activities, “Without Precedent,” the commission chairman, Thomas Kean, and the vice chairman, Lee Hamilton, noted that shortly after the attacks, Farmer — “one of our most important hires” — established a victims’ assistance center in New Jersey and helped the F.B.I. uncover important evidence in garbage at Newark International Airport. But the commission’s efforts to reconstruct the tragedy itself were, at best, resented and, at worst, impeded by the sprawling defense bureaucracy and the Bush administration, both of which had much to hide. Even two reports by the inspectors general of the Defense and Transportation Departments, released in 2006, whitewashed government failures. Now that numerous transcripts and tapes have been declassified, however, Farmer draws on them to assail the government’s official depiction of 9/11 as so much public relations flimflam.

Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 7:43 PM | Comments (0) | Top

WWII bomber pilot's Victoria Cross fetches record price

Source: BBC (11-20-09)

A Victoria Cross awarded to a 21-year-old World War II bomber pilot has sold at auction for £335,000.

The VC, which was presented to Flight Lieutenant Bill Reid in 1944 by King George VI, was bought by an anonymous bidder, setting a new record price.

Flt Lt Reid, from Crieff in Perthshire, was given the VC for his part in a bombing raid on Germany in 1943.

A total of five of his medals were auctioned at Spink in London, raising £348,000.

Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 5:59 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Henry VIII's love nest for sale

Source: BBC (11-20-09)

A house where newlywed Henry VIII stayed with his second wife Anne Boleyn has gone on the market after being rebuilt from a state of near collapse.

Shurland Hall, on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent, is thought to be the gatehouse of a Tudor palace owned by a courtier of the King, Thomas Cheyney.

It was probably built especially for Henry and Anne's visit in 1532, when the King spent three days hunting.

The Spitalfields Trust has restored it and put it up for sale for £2m.

Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 5:57 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Easyjet apologises for photoshoot at Holocaust memorial

Source: BBC (11-20-09)

Easyjet has apologised after fashion photographs shot at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin were published in its in-flight magazine.

In the pictures, models pose in designer clothes among the concrete blocks of the "Field of Stelae".

The budget airline says it was unaware of the images until they appeared in the magazine, which is published by a company called INK.

Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 5:56 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Mussolini's 'brain and blood for sale on internet'

Source: BBC (11-20-09)

The granddaughter of Italy's fascist dictator Benito Mussolini has said that blood and parts of his brain have been stolen to sell on the internet.

Alessandra Mussolini, a former showgirl turned MP, said she immediately informed the police when she found out.

The listing, on auction site Ebay, reportedly showed images of a wooden container and ampoules of blood.

Ebay, which does not allow the sale of human matter on its site, said that the listing was removed within hours.

Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 5:52 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Ethiopian Jews in Israel still await the promised land

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-20-09)

The ancient hymns brought tears to the eyes of Solomon Ayeli, as well as memories of his native Ethiopia which he left two decades ago for Israel - a country he loves but where he often feels rejected.

Separated during centuries from other Jewish communities, the Beta Israel were only recognised as Jews by Israel's two chief rabbis in 1975.

The recognition was crucial, as Aliyah - the Israeli law of return - allows any Jew to settle in Israel and get citizenship.

Israel airlifted in 35,000 Ethiopian Jews under Operation Moses in 1984, at the height of a famine in the Horn of Africa, and during the 1991 Operation Solomon.

Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 5:46 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Adolf Hitler is 'German Mussolini' warns 1924 French document

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-20-09)

Adolf Hitler was "the German Mussolini" who was "a very cunning demagogue", according to a hand-written report from a French spy in 1924.

The document is among thousands of paper on 1920s Germany that are about to emerge from obscurity as part of a major overhaul of the French National Archives.

The yellowed note from 1924 features a photograph of Hitler in a suit and tie, sporting his trademark side-parting and moustache, and lists his occupation as "journalist".

Those documents were transported to Paris in 1930 and have been stored ever since in the bowels of the National Archives, housed in a magnificent early 18th century residence in the heart of the historic Marais district.

Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 5:44 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Jesus Christ's 'death certificate' found on Turin Shroud

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-20-09)

Barbara Frale, a Vatican researcher, claims to have discovered Christ's 'death certificate' on the Turin Shroud.

The historian and researcher at the secret Vatican archive said she has found the words "Jesus Nazarene" on the shroud, proving it was the linen cloth which was wrapped around Christ's body.

She said computer analysis of photographs of the shroud revealed extremely faint words written in Greek, Aramaic and Latin which attested to its authenticity.

Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 5:42 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Italy Museum to Display Fingers, Tooth Believed to Be Galileo's

Source: AP (11-20-09)

A Florence museum says two fingers and a tooth believed to belong to Galileo Galilei have been found and will go on display next spring.

Three fingers and a tooth were taken from the astronomer's body in 1737 and placed in a container.

Paolo Galluzzi, director of the Museum of the History of Science, said a private collector had bought a container at auction containing two fingers and a tooth. The collector contacted Florence cultural officials and the parts and the container were found to match descriptions of the Galileo relics in historical documents.

Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 5:38 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Russia's Gorbachev Considers Political Comeback

Source: AP (11-20-09)

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev criticized Kremlin policies Friday and toyed with the ambitious idea of attempting a political comeback.

Gorbachev said that corruption and overdependence on oil exports have aggravated the impact of the global economic crisis on Russia. He urged President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to restructure the economy, cut down government spending and ensure political freedoms.

But he also suggested everyday Russians must shake their reliance on government largesse that has been boosted by energy price hikes during the past decade.

Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 5:36 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Lincoln letter to schoolboy sells for $60,000

Source: CNN (11-20-09)

Less than a month before the Civil War's start, a newly inaugurated President Lincoln took time from his frantic schedule to write to an Illinois boy whose classmates didn't believe he'd met the president.

A company that buys and sells historic documents sold the letter for $60,000 to a private collector and Civil War buff. The Raab Collection in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, originally purchased the note from another collector, said Nathan Raab, the company's vice president.

The buyer, who lives on the East Coast, asked that he not be identified.

Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 5:34 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Will a New Bear Market Bring Eugenics Movement Back? New Study from Socionomics Institute Says It's Happened in the Past, Could Happen Again

Source: Press Release (11-20-09)

A new study by The Socionomics Institute shows a link between bear markets and the rising popularity of eugenics movements over a span of 225 years.

"Although most people think that society has dumped eugenics on the trash heap of bad ideas," says analyst Alan Hall, "its core ideology of top-down reproductive control is likely to regain popularity in the upcoming bear market. There are already signs of resurgence."

For example, during the long bear market from 1966-1982, India sterilized more than 8 million poor people, China instituted its "One Child Policy," and sterilizations of Navajo Indians more than doubled from 1972-78. During the recent bear market that started in 2008, the more controlling aspects of eugenics have begun to reappear. In 2008, the Dutch Labor Party MP proposed forced sterilization of women deemed "unfit to procreate" (it didn't pass), and, in September 2009, Poland passed a law mandating that convicted pedophiles be castrated.

Hall finds that today's ideological undercurrents are similar to those of the early eugenics era, when popular culture and the educational system embraced the eugenics movement and many prominent people – such as Alexander Graham Bell, John Maynard Keynes, William Randolph Hearst, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Irving Fisher, George Bernard Shaw and Helen Keller – espoused compulsory reproductive control. Observing that today’s setup is similar, he identifies several popular beliefs, including environmentalism, that could form the rationale for eugenics-like campaigns in the future.

In his study for the November issue of The Socionomist, Hall explores the history of eugenics and explains how declining social mood morphed it into a method to control propagation by race and class. "The desire to improve the human condition is a positive, bull-market impulse," he writes, "but eugenics is about influencing or controlling others' reproductive choices. This reflects a desire for social control, a bear-market impulse."

In two charts, Hall shows parallels between the ebb and flow of the eugenics movement and the waves of social optimism and pessimism reflected in stock market prices. He argues that eugenics is history’s clearest lesson in how societies recast legitimate science, such as genetics, to justify class or race-based ideology during deep social-mood declines.

The eugenics movement began in the late 1800s and became a wildly popular ideology in the early 1900s. In 1893, a succession of ever-larger bear markets began. Each of these brought increasingly negative expressions of eugenics. Profoundly negative mood drove the third of these bear markets, which began in 1929 and culminated in the genocides of the 1930s and 1940s, the ultimate expression of eugenic ideology to date.

Hall argues that another bear market is due that will be larger than the 1929-1932 decline, based on Elliott wave analysis, which charts stock markets as wave patterns. Some possible results of a future depression in terms of eugenics? Euthanasia, Kervorkianism and tax breaks for signing a "Do Not Resuscitate" consent form.

* * * * *

About The Socionomics Institute
The Socionomics Institute, based in Gainesville, Ga., studies social mood and its role in driving cultural trends. The Institute’s analysis is published in the monthly research review, The Socionomist. Learn more at www.socionomics.net.

Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 3:03 PM | Comments (0) | Top

New York Times Washington correspondent Jodi Kantor to write book on Obamas

Source: The New York Observer (11-17-09)

New York Times Washington correspondent Jodi Kantor has secured a stunning seven-figure book deal this week with Little, Brown to write a volume on the Obamas.

The deal was the result of a heated citywide auction, and was brokered by independent lit agent Elyse Cheney. It comes on the heels of the 34-year-old reporter’s New York Times Magazine cover story on the Obamas’ marriage, which argued that “the Obamas mix politics and romance in a way that no first couple quite have before.”

It could not be determined whether Ms. Kantor has secured the Obamas’ cooperation, but the fact that her story featured an extensive interview with them in the Oval Office seemed to indicate that she is going into the project with a good working relationship with them.

Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 12:58 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Forgotten 1958 Time Capsule on Display at University of Chicago Law School

Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education (11-19-09)

The University of Chicago Law School is displaying a collection of letters recovered from a time capsule that was sealed in a cornerstone in 1958, reports the Chicago Tribune.

The capsule was supposed to have been unsealed on May 28, 2008 — the 50th anniversary of the school's opening — and would have been forgotten altogether but for a discovery by an alumni-magazine reporter. The loss would have been a tremendous one; the capsule contained letters from Supreme Court justices and the physicist Edward Teller, among others.

A Chronicle article that we dug up from our archives reports that humans have been misplacing time capsules ever since they became objects of popular fascination. The vessels are sealed amid great fanfare, but their openings — assuming the capsules aren't forgotten — rarely arouse excitement.

One time capsule described in the article, "the Crypt of Civilization," located at Oglethorpe University, is to be opened in the year 8113. It contains, among other things, a can of Budweiser.

Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 12:41 AM | Comments (0) | Top

British Support for Afghan War Fades

Source: Time (11-19-09)

Uncertainty is one of the most corrosive elements in politics, and as days melt into weeks with no firm decision from President Barack Obama on whether the U.S. will increase troop levels in Afghanistan, the remaining British consensus on the issue is threatening to dissolve. Public support for Britain's contribution to the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan has curdled as the body count of British troops has spiraled, reaching 98 this year alone. An opinion poll taken earlier this month after an Afghan policeman shot dead five British soldiers at a checkpoint in Helmand province revealed that three-quarters of the British public want U.K. forces to withdraw within a year...

... His speech did little to revitalize flagging public support. The British public is skeptical about the central tenet of Brown's policy that engagement in the region prevents terrorism on British streets. According to a survey taken Nov. 13-16 by politicshome.com, a news website, 44% of Westminster insiders agreed that the West's involvement in Afghanistan had helped combat global terrorism, but only 21% of respondents outside the Westminster bubble shared this view...

Posted on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 12:03 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Sweden sends back Maori remains

Source: BBC (11-18-09)

Officials from two museums in Sweden have handed over the remains of five indigenous Maori people to their New Zealand counterparts.

The remains include one almost complete skeleton, a skull, and three other skeleton parts.

The ceremony was held at the Natural History Museum in Gothenburg.

Museums across Europe have been repatriating human remains taken from indigenous burial grounds during colonial times.

The formal handing over involved a traditional Maori ceremony, including songs and prayers.

Te Herekiekie Herewini, repatriation manager of the Museum of New Zealand (Te Papa Tongarewa), thanked the Natural History Museum and the Museum of World Culture, also based in Gothenburg, for returning the body parts.

"This is significant for Maori as it is believed that through the ancestors' return to their homeland, the dead and their living descendants will retrieve their dignity, and also close the hurt and misdeeds of the past," he said.

Posted on Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 11:33 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Obama confronts history on Great Wall of China

Source: Reuters (11-18-09)

BADALING, China (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama took a walk alone on the Great Wall on Wednesday, wrapping up a visit to China with a visit to the ancient fortifications that symbolize the country's history and separateness.

"It's magical. It reminds you of the sweep of history," Obama said, after breaking away from his tour guides to walk alone along the snowy parapets, hands jammed into his pockets against the cold and wind.

"It gives you a good perspective on a lot of the day-to-day things. They don't amount to much in the scope of history."...

... "My hope is that in the future, perhaps as a result of the beginning that we have made on this journey, that many, many Americans... will have an opportunity to come here," Nixon said in 1972, at the same steep, curving Badaling section of the wall.

Nixon hoped "that they will think back as I think back to the history of this great people, and that they will have an opportunity, as we have had an opportunity, to know the Chinese people, and know them better."..

Posted on Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 11:31 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Ancient Greek worshippers showed inclination towards the Sun

Source: Times Online (11-19-09)

The Ancient Greeks deliberately built their temples to face the rising Sun, according to research that promises to shed light on their religious practices and to resolve a longstanding archaeological controversy.

An investigation into temples built by Greek colonists in Sicily has found strong evidence that they were aligned to the East.

The findings, by Alun Salt, of the University of Leicester, suggest that Ancient Greek religion may have included ritual elements inspired by astronomy, as well as illuminating the national culture of settlers who founded communities beyond the mainland. The study could settle a long-running dispute among archaeologists and classicists about temple orientation.

Although it has long been known that most of these shrines face east, some academics have questioned whether this alignment reflected a deliberate plan. Critics of astronomical theories have pointed out that some temples face north, south or west, and argue that their orientation was not important to the Greeks.

Dr Salt’s research, however, indicates that the predominant east-west alignment is almost impossible to explain by chance, and probably followed a religious convention founded on astronomy. Temples laid out in accordance with astronomical phenomena could have highlighted the role of gods and goddesses as arbiters of nature, or helped priests to interpret celestial omens. They could also have helped in observations needed to calibrate the religious calendar.

Posted on Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 9:41 PM | Comments (0) | Top

D-Day piper to be honoured by the French

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-17-09)

Bill Millin, now 86, tried to raise the morale of incoming troops with his tunes, as shells exploded overhead and machinegun fire raked Sword Beach.

The picture of the 21-year-old commando became one of the enduring images of the landings which paved the way to Hitler's defeat in the Second World War.

Now he is to be immortalised in a life-sized statue by the people of Colleville Montgomery, which he helped to liberate in 1944.

On Thursday a group of French officials are due to visit him near his home in Dawlish, Devon, to show him a model of the statue.

Posted on Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 9:40 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Dominican archaeologist closes in on Cleopatra, top Egyptologist says

Source: Dominican Today (11-18-09)

SANTO DOMINGO.- “That’s the mystery of the past, we’ve found doors as small as 20 by 20 centimeters which lead to great chambers,” revealed the Secretary General of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, regarding the search for Cleopatra’s tomb by a Dominican-Egyptian team.

Zahi Hawas is in the country to receive a decoration in the National Palace and a Doctorate degree from the Catholic University of Santo Domingo in the company of Dominican archaeologist Kathleen Martinez, who leads the team which searches for Cleopatra’s tomb.

“So far only 30 percent of archaeological artifacts and tombs have bee found,” Hawas said of the investigation in his country, despite the constant excavations by teams from around the world. “But with cameras we can now see what’s behind those magic walls.”

The Egyptian scholar said Egypt’s Government seeks to assure that the excavations are transparent and allow people around the world can observe the work. “We also use National Geographic so that everyone can see what we’re doing,” he said Wednesday morning in an interview on Telesistema Channel 11.

Posted on Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 9:37 PM | Comments (0) | Top

US Army Corps blamed for Katrina floods

Source: BBC (11-19-09)

A US judge has ruled that negligence by the US Army Corps of Engineers led to massive floods in parts of New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005.

The court upheld complaints by six residents and a business against the Corps over its maintenance of a navigational channel.

They were awarded damages totalling $720,000 (£431,000), and the ruling could lead to thousands more claims.

About 80% of New Orleans was flooded by Hurricane Katrina.

More than 1,800 people died on the US Gulf coast in the devastating storms.

The Corps is responsible for maintaining a system of canals and earthworks that protect New Orleans from storm surges.

US district judge Stanwood Duval ruled "negligent failure" to maintain the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet - a shipping channel - had led to flooding in the city's Lower 9th Ward and nearby St Bernard Parish.

Posted on Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 9:37 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Victorian railway lines found beside the Thames

Source: Stroud News and Journal (11-18-09)

HIDDEN Victorian railway lines have been found beside the Thames and Severn Canal at Thrupp.

The rails, unearthed during work to repair a leak in the watercourse, were probably used to transport coal to a nearby mill.

Dr Ray Wilson, honorary secretary of the Gloucestershire Society for Industrial Archaeology, said: "It is really exciting.

"We are seeing the physical remains of something which we imagined existed elsewhere but never knew existed at Thrupp.

"It helps us understand how the mills and the canal worked together."

Posted on Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 9:27 PM | Comments (0) | Top

"September 11 didn't change everything," says British academic

Source: Lee Ruddin (11-19-09)

These were the words of Steven Hurst, Senior Lecturer in Politics at Manchester Metropolitan University, at the launch of his book in London on Thursday evening.

Placing recent events in a broader historical context, The United States and Iraq since 1979: Hegemony, Oil and War (Edinburgh University Press) provides a theoretical framework that places the actions of the various US administrations in a wider process.

Using World Systems Theory, Hurst is the first to analyze the underlying factors of US policy towards the Persian Gulf over the past twenty-five years.

Posted on Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 7:45 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Commission Sends Schools Civil War History Lesson (Virginia)

Source: Media General News Service (NAT) (11-10-09)

More than 2,000 DVDs explaining the causes, conflicts and consequences of the Civil War have been mailed to all public schools in Virginia.

The three-hour history lesson was produced by a member of the Virginia Sesquicentennial of the American Civil War Commission who led the nation’s centennial commemoration.

“In the centennial, if we made a big mistake it was that we overlooked the young. We can’t do that again,“ said James I. Robertson, a history professor at Virginia Tech who in 1961 was appointed executive director of the U.S. Civil War Centennial Commission. “A nation that forgets the past has no future.“

Posted on Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 1:07 AM | Comments (1) | Top

Events planned to commemorate first major engagement of Civil War

Source: Culpeper Star Exponent (VA) (11-12-09)

Members of the Manassas City Council like the idea of commemorating the 150th anniversary of the First Battle of Manassas so much that they’re ready to give up $100,000 to make it happen in 2011.

The battle, fought July 21, 1861, was the first major engagement of the Civil War.

Creston M. Owen, chairman of the board of Virginia Civil War Events Inc., was before the board Monday asking for the money.

Owen’s outfit of volunteers is poised to begin organizing the nine-day commemoration that is set to include a Blue and Gray Ball at the Candy Factory, a re-enactment of the First Manassas battle, breakfast with the troops and concerts on the lawn of the Manassas Museum and at the battlefield.

Posted on Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 1:06 AM | Comments (0) | Top

200-year-old Trading Post Renovated in New Mexico

Source: Santa Fe New Mexican (NM) (11-14-09)

Historic preservation specialist Jeff Brown is hoping his work crews won't find the spot where legs and arms are buried at Pecos National Historical Park.

The appendages would be those amputated from Civil War soldiers in 1862 at a makeshift hospital housed in Kozlowski's Trading Post east of Santa Fe.

Finding the bony remains, while exciting, would slow down Brown's current project: a six-year renovation of the almost 2-century-old stage stop and tavern. The low-slung pink stucco building with faded turquoise trim along N.M. 63 was a popular stop on the Santa Fe Trail for decades.

Brown and crew will restore the adobe-and-pine building to its look from the 1940s and '50s, when E.E. "Buddy" Fogelson and his actress wife, Greer Garson, used the trading post as headquarters for their Forked Lightning Ranch.

Posted on Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 1:03 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Trust Targets Historic Civil War Parcel

Source: Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star (VA (11-17-09)

A key piece of the Chancellorsville Battlefield associated with Confederate Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson's 1863 flank attack is the next acquisition target of a Civil War preservation group.

The Civil War Preservation Trust yesterday announced a $2.1 million campaign to buy 85 acres, known as the Wagner Tract, along State Route 3 east of Wilderness Church.

The property includes 2,000 feet of frontage on the north shoulder of historic Orange Plank Road and lies within Chancellorsville Battlefield.

There, on May 2, 1863, Jackson led the flanking maneuver during bloody fighting that turned the tide of the battle in favor of the South.

"This land is arguably one of the most historically significant pieces of hallowed ground CWPT has ever saved, and we have just got to get it," said James Lighthizer, the organization's president.

Posted on Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 12:58 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Watergate 'Gap' Mystery to be Solved?

Source: ABC News (11-18-09)

A dark chapter in the history of the Watergate scandal surrounding former President Richard M. Nixon might soon be uncovered.

The National Archives announced today it will use forensic documentation technology to try and uncover the contents of two pages of handwritten notes taken by Nixon's chief of staff, H.R. "Bob" Haldeman.

Posted on Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 12:51 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Documents show secret messages from Moscow sparked German unification plans

Source: The National Security Archive (11-18-09)

Secret messages from senior Soviet officials to West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl after the fall of the Berlin Wall led directly to Kohl's famous "10 Points" speech on German unification, but the speech produced shock in both Moscow and Washington, according to documents from Soviet, German and American files posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive.

Published for the first time in English in the Archive's forthcoming book, "Masterpieces of History," the documents include highest-level conversations between President George H.W. Bush and Kohl; the text of the letter Kohl had delivered to Bush just as he announced the "10 Points" to the Bundestag on November 28, 1989; excerpts on Germany from the transcript of the Malta summit between Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev; Gorbachev's own incendiary meeting with the German foreign minister after Kohl's speech; and more.

The documents show the American administration's devotion to stability and "reserve" while the West German leader rushes to get out in front of the rapid changes in the East, at the same time that neither Bush nor Kohl expects unification to happen so quickly. Most strikingly, the documents and related accounts by Kohl's aide, Horst Teltschik, and Gorbachev's aide, Andrei Grachev, show that Kohl's famous "10 Points" speech was based in large part directly on secret messages from Moscow – but unbeknownst to Gorbachev.

Posted on Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 12:38 AM | Comments (0) | Top

'USA Today' Gets an Early Look at Bush Library Plans

Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education (11-18-09)

The George W. Bush Presidential Library at Southern Methodist University will be a fairly contemporary structure whose clean lines call to mind the shapes of Georgian architecture without replicating its ornament and details, according to drawings that the former president and his wife, Laura Bush, are scheduled to release at a press conference this afternoon.

But USA Today had the drawings online Tuesday evening, along with an article that described "a lantern-shaped roof that will glow at night." The article said Mr. Bush was "thrilled with the plans."

The Dallas Morning News followed quickly, posting an interview in which Mrs. Bush said she "did not want this to be monumental like some other libraries are." She added: "We wanted it to be human in scale." Mrs. Bush is an SMU alumna.

Posted on Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 12:36 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Obama Administration Has Achieved More in Middle East Than Bush Did in Eight Years, State Dept. Says

Source: CNSNews (11-18-09)

The Obama administration has done more on the Israeli-Palestinian issue during its ten months in office than its predecessor did in eight years, a State Department spokesman claimed on Tuesday...

... Kelly contested the assertion that President Obama’s Mideast envoy George Mitchell had made little progress during his months on the job. “We are less than a year into this administration, and I think we’ve accomplished more over the last year than the previous administration did in eight years,” Kelly said.

Posted on Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 12:19 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Obama Meets With Half Brother in China

Source: CNSNews (11-18-09)

When President Barack Obama landed in Beijing on Monday on his first state visit to China, his first order of business was family business.

Before he headed to a formal dinner with China's President Hu Jintao, he set aside time to see his half brother, Mark Ndesandjo, and Ndesandjo's wife, who had flown up from the southern boomtown of Shenzhen where they live.

Describing the meeting Monday as "overwhelming" and "intense," Ndesandjo told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday that he had long anticipated the chance to welcome his famous brother to China.

Posted on Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 12:18 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Magazine closure ended two decades of gay media in Atlanta

Source: Project Q Atlanta (11-16-09)

With a simple three-sentence notice taped to the door, the publishers of Southern Voice and David magazine ended two decades of gay media in Atlanta on Monday.

The publications, owned along with several others by Window Media and Unite Media, abruptly closed their doors overnight Sunday, ending a months-long battle with federal receivership that imperiled the gay media company.

Laura Douglas-Brown, the paper’s editor since 2006 and an employee for nearly 13 years, says the closings are a significant loss for her personally and for metro Atlanta’s LGBT population.

Posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 11:42 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Soviet lessons from Afghanistan

Source: BBC (11-18-09)

All the most senior ministers were at the Afghan strategy meeting.

They knew things were not going well, but from their leader there was a whiff of panic.

"We just need to be sure that the final result does not look like a humiliating defeat: to have lost so many men and now abandoned it all... in short, we have to get out of there."

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev - the speaker of those words - was understandably alarmed.

It was June 1986, almost a year since he had taken the decision to start withdrawing Soviet troops from Afghanistan and hand over more responsibility to the government there.

But Soviet losses, already above 10,000, kept mounting.

With conflicting signals this week about the direction of Western policy in Afghanistan, there is a hint of the same kind of panic and indecision.

Soviet exit strategy

US President Barack Obama is still deciding whether to send in thousands of US reinforcements.

Yet the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown - facing ever-greater opposition to the Afghan war - has been highlighting possibilities for UK troops to pull back in some areas next year.

It is less than two weeks since he was saying: "We cannot, must not and will not walk away."

But as Mr Gorbachev found, getting out is at least as difficult as staying in...

Posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 11:22 PM | Comments (0) | Top

1769 Thames toll bridge up for sale

Source: Yahoo News (11-18-09)

LONDON – A toll bridge built in 1769 across the River Thames will be auctioned next month, offering buyers a tax-free investment with a bit of historic charm.

The Swinford bridge brings in about 190,000 pounds (US$320,000) in toll payments from about 4 million vehicle crossings a year, and the bridge's owner can pocket all the income without paying tax.

The picturesque bridge in Oxfordshire, about 65 miles (105 kilometers) northwest of London, has a suggested price of 1.65 million pounds ($2.77 million). The property comes with a stone toll cottage and acres (hectares) of land.

Posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 11:17 PM | Comments (0) | Top

AP report Obama confident of KSM conviction

Source: Google News (11-18-09)

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama predicted that professed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be convicted, as Attorney General Eric Holder defended putting him through the U.S. civilian legal system.

In one of a series of TV interviews during his trip to Asia, Obama said those offended by the legal privileges given to Mohammed by virtue of getting a civilian trial rather than a military tribunal won't find it "offensive at all when he's convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him."

Obama quickly added that he did not mean to suggest he was prejudging the outcome of Mohammed's trial. "I'm not going to be in that courtroom," he said. "That's the job of the prosecutors, the judge and the jury."

In interviews broadcast on NBC and CNN Wednesday, the president also said that experienced prosecutors in the case who specialize in terrorism have offered assurances that "we'll convict this person with the evidence they've got, going through our system."

Obama said the American people should have no concern about the capability of civilian courts to try suspected terrorists. Attorney General Eric Holder last week announced the decision to bring Mohammed and four others detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to trial at a lower Manhattan courthouse.

Posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 11:14 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Archaeologists find pre-Columbian cemetery in Costa Rica

Source: Costa Rica Pages (11-16-09)

An indigenous cementery was uncovered within a two hectare plot of land in Guapiles, Costa Rica, about an hour and a half east of San Jose. The cementary, which was constructed by the Huetares tribe during the pre-Colombian era, was discovered while doing environmental studies that are required to obtain a construction permit for the building of a new high school in the area.

Researchers from the National Museum, led by archaeologist Francisco Corrales, proved the existence of a funeral complex divided into three sectors, two of which have been excavated and appear to be completly intact.

The archaeological site called Liceo, protects three tombs or mounds of stone used to cover a grave. Buried under the rocks, experts have already found an 59 ceramic artifacts, including funeral offerings and everyday objects.

According to Corrales, the cemetery was built by an indigenous group of the Huetares who inhabited the area between 300 and 800 AD. “During this phase, known as La Selva, these groups existed within a complex social organization that centered around a chief and then everything else structured into sectors,” he said. “The burial system we see here reveals the high level of development of those communities.”

Posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 11:11 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Water pipeline of Peter the First epoch discovered under Moscow

Source: Russia-ic (11-17-09)

Building of a shopping mall was planned to be launched in November under Pushkinskaya Square. Instead of that archeological excavations were started and brought out lots of finds.

“We unearthed a most interesting construction of the epoch of Peter the First” – the chief archeologist of Moscow professor Alexander Veksler says. Thus, for example, we found a wooden water conduit, water wells, coins, and variety of household items”.

Posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 11:10 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Celebrating Revolution With Roots in a Rumor (Prague)

Source: NYT (11-17-09)

PRAGUE — It was a revolution that began with a lie.

Vaclav Havel, the dissident who led the Velvet Revolution that overthrew Communism in Czechoslovakia, once declared that “truth and love must triumph over lies and hatred.” Yet the revolution — its name a reference to the clenched fist in the velvet glove — was set off by a false rumor that remains a mystery 20 years later.

On Tuesday, thousands of Czechs marched through the streets here, to the sound of wailing sirens and the growls of police dogs, eerily replicating a nonviolent student march on Nov. 17, 1989, in which the police rounded on demonstrators and rumors spread that a 19-year-old university student named Martin Smid had been brutally killed. Scores had indeed been violently beaten. But no one, in fact, had died.

Jan Urban, a dissident leader and journalist who helped to disseminate the lie that he, like many others, believed to be true at the time, recalled in an interview that news of the alleged death had spread quickly, helping to wake a nation out of its collective apathy and lighting the spark — eight days after the fall of the Berlin Wall — for the peaceful rebellion that culminated in the regime’s demise.

“Until that day, there had been a deal between the Communist regime and the people: ‘You shut up and we will take care of you,’ ” he said. “But the moment people had the impression that their kids were being killed, the deal was off. As a journalist, I am ashamed of the lie because it was a professional blunder. But I have no regrets because it helped bring four decades of Communism to an end.”

On Tuesday, Mr. Havel, President Vaclav Klaus and Prime Minister Jan Fischer joined the hundreds laying candles at the monument marking the clash. “The demonstration, the march set history into motion,” Mr. Havel said.

Yet two decades after a lie helped unleash a revolution, many Czechs remain uncertain not only about the truth of what unfolded in the heady days of November 1989, but also about the consequences of a revolution that some feel has failed to live up to its promises...

Posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 10:53 PM | Comments (0) | Top

New Web Site Makes Internet Time Traveling Easier

Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education (11-17-09)

Time traveling is coming to an Internet browser near you.

A new Web site called Memento Web will allow anyone curious about what the Internet used to look like to plug in a date and then browse the World Wide Web as it was on that day.

The site is already live with limited use. Users can enter a URL and the date on which they wish to see a version of the page the URL once called up.

That doesn't mean they'll get exactly what they were looking for. For example, a search for nytimes.com on November 17, 2006, returned a Web page dated December 8, 2007. Some searches don't work at all.

People behind the site, financed by a grant from the Library of Congress, said that they were still working on it and that they hoped to get more money to develop it further.

Michael Nelson, an associate professor in computer science at Old Dominion University, leads one of the teams behind the project. He said the tool made it easier to see Web sites that have been archived already by organizations such as Internet Archive or by sites like Wikipedia.

Posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 10:50 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Ancient university buildings under threat (UK)

Source: Guardian (UK) (11-17-09)

Anthony Edwards wasn't perturbed when he first saw the hole. Given its position in the Regent House Combination Room in Cambridge's Old Schools, where for three centuries all the business of the university was conducted, it must, he assumed, have been dug to deal with a bout of woodworm, a plumbing problem, or something worthy of archaeological investigation.

It was a month later, as the professor walked down Kings Parade and spotted two friends with "faces like thunder", that he found out the truth: the gap cut in the dais floor in the corner of room first used in 1400, revealing the concrete ceiling of the room below, was not simply for access to the pipes or dry rot but was to make way for the installation of a lift.

Appalled, he set about getting a copy of the plans. He was not impressed. "The Regent House is the oldest, the most beautiful and most important room belonging to the university," Edwards, a fellow of Caius college and former senior proctor, says.

"In fact, it is historically the most important room in the universities of the English-speaking world. It is the cradle of Cambridge's democracy, our Westminster Hall...

... But the row throws a spotlight on the ongoing tension between the need to modernise universities' historic buildings, with their treacherous staircases, uneven floors and lack of IT infrastructure, and the desire to preserve their centuries-old beauty.

Although there are special considerations for how the access demands of the 2004 Disability Discrimination Act are applied to listed buildings, they are not exempt. Another reason for modernisation is simply the need to make older buildings fit for purpose, for instance so that the technology often central to learning today can be used...

Posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 10:50 PM | Comments (0) | Top

13th Century castle is to be sold (Wales)

Source: BBC (11-18-09)

A 13th Century ruined castle is to be sold, with a starting price of £80,000.

Ewloe Castle, built by Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, is to to be auctioned with four other lots which are expected to fetch more than £500,000 in total.

Although privately owned, the castle is under the custodianship of Welsh historic monuments agency Cadw, and its character "must be preserved".

It stands close to the site where 200 Welshmen, led by the king of north Wales Owain Gwynedd, ambushed - and nearly killed - King Henry II in 1157.

Posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 11:57 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Ancients 'had heart disease too'

Source: BBC (11-18-09)

Hardening of the arteries has been found in Egyptian mummies - suggesting that the risk factors for heart disease may be ancient, researchers say.

A team of US and Egyptian scientists carried out medical scans on 22 mummies from Cairo's Museum of Antiquities.

They found evidence of hardened arteries in three of them and possible heart disease in three more.

All the mummies were of high socio-economic status and would have had a rich diet.

Posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 11:52 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Nabokov's unfinished work is published

Source: BBC (11-17-09)

When the famous Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977, he made it clear in his will that a manuscript he was working on should not be published.

In fact he instructed his wife Vera to burn the unfinished work.

Vera didn't destroy the work or publish it.

It was kept safely locked away in the vaults of a bank in Switzerland.

Posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 11:50 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Germany arrests top Rwanda rebels

Source: BBC (11-17-09)

Police in Germany have arrested two Rwandan militia leaders on suspicion of crimes committed in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Ignace Murwanashyaka, the leader of the FDLR rebel group, and his aide Straton Musoni were held on suspicion of crimes against humanity and war crimes.

FDLR leaders fled to DR Congo after the Rwanda genocide in which some 800,000 people - mostly ethnic Tutsis - died.

The FDLR's presence in DR Congo has been at the heart of years of unrest.

Posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 11:44 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Cheating bankers nothing new, 19th century 'Madoff medal' shows

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-18-09)

Intense public anger at cheating bankers is nothing new, this macabre souvenir created to mark the hanging of the 'Bernard Madoff of the 19th century' shows.

The reworked George III penny was fashioned as a memento to the hanging of Henry Fauntleroy, who forged cheques at his bank Marsh, Sibbald & Co for more than a decade before he was found out and it collapsed with enormous debts.

Showing sentiments have changed little over the best part of two centuries, one side of the coin describes Fauntleroy as "The Robber of Widows & Orphans".

The other warns "all insolvent bilking [cheating] bankers" that "The Fate of Fauntleroy" awaits them.

Posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 11:39 AM | Comments (0) | Top

'It's Magical': Obama Tours China's Great Wall

Source: Fox News (11-18-09)

White House aides were exultant after the president walked part of the Great Wall alone in a choreographed moment for photographers and "the shot" they had planned turned out perfectly.

President Barack Obama absorbed history's expanse Wednesday from atop the Great Wall of China, a manmade wonder of such enormity that Obama found himself putting daily life in perspective.

A must-see for presidents from President Richard Nixon on, the Great Wall was one of Obama's major sightseeing stops during his diplomatic tour of Asia.

Dressed in a winter jacket against a biting wind, Obama led a knot of people for a half-hour jaunt up the crenelated wall toward a watchtower, a restored section originally built 500 years ago

Posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 11:23 AM | Comments (0) | Top

U.S. Attends International Criminal Court Meeting for First Time

Source: AP (11-18-09)

The U.S. attended a meeting of the International Criminal Court's management board for the first time Wednesday in a sign it has stopped shunning the world's only permanent war crimes tribunal.

The U.S. has not ratified the court's founding treaty, the Rome Statute, partly because of fears the court could become a forum for politically motivated prosecutions of U.S. troops.

He told The Associated Press his presence is a sign the Obama administration wants to "re-engage with the court" but said Monday while visiting Kenya that possible ratification by Washington of the Rome Statute is likely still years away.

Posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 11:17 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Body of Kidnapped British Journalist Reportedly Found in Lebanon 23 Years Later

Source: The Times (UK) (11-18-09)

British investigators are hopeful that a body recovered from the eastern Bekaa Valley could be the remains of Alec Collett, a British journalist who was kidnapped and executed by a Palestinian group in 1986 during Lebanon’s civil war, the Times of London reported.

A military and forensic team led by the British embassy in Beirut is excavating an area near the village of Aitta al-Fuqar in the southern Bekaa Valley. The site was the location in the 1980s of a base belonging to Fatah – The Revolutionary Council, a radical and violent Palestinian group headed by Sabri al-Banna, better known by his nom de guerre Abu Nidal.

On Tuesday, the team unearthed the remains of two bodies, one of them an unidentified woman who reportedly was buried 20 years ago. The other body is undergoing DNA tests to see whether it is that of Collett, the Times of London reported.

Posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 11:13 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Letter Lincoln Wrote to Boy After Inauguration for Sale

Source: AP (11-17-09)

A letter President Abraham Lincoln wrote to a boy whose friends didn't believe he had met the commander in chief is being sold in Philadelphia.

Lincoln sent the letter from the White House to 8-year-old George Patten two weeks after his March 1861 inauguration.

The youngster had been mocked by classmates for saying he'd met the 16th president with his father, a journalist. His teacher wrote Lincoln to uncover the truth.

Posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 11:08 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Oldest U.S.-Born Person Dies at 114 in New York

Source: AP (11-18-09)

A 114-year-old woman believed to be the oldest native-born American and the third-oldest person in the world has died at a New York nursing home.

Olivia Patricia Thomas died Monday in the St. Francis Home of Williamsville, near Buffalo. She had lived there since 2004. She's being remembered as a dedicated gardener who loved to travel the world.

The Gerontology Research Group tracks supercentenarians and says Thomas was the oldest person born in the United States. She was born June 29, 1895.

Posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 11:05 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Noteworthy Senate debates throughout U.S. history

Source: CNN (11-17-09)

The Senate is about to embark on what could be the showdown of the year as top Democrats work to push through sweeping health care legislation.

The legislative chamber, however, is no stranger to history-changing debate. Lawmakers need to look no further than their predecessors to see how it's done.

In 1991, Congress voted for the use of military force towards Iraq after the Saddam Hussein-led country went to war with Kuwait.

The action was the first time Congress voted for going to war since the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964, which officially began U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

Posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 10:59 AM | Comments (0) | Top

West Virginia's Byrd becomes the longest-serving member of Congress

Source: CNN (11-18-09)

When Robert Byrd came to Congress from West Virginia, a postage stamp cost 3 cents and kids were clamoring for a new toy called Mr. Potato Head.

On Wednesday, almost 57 years later, Byrd became the longest-serving member of Congress in history.

Two days before he turns 92, the eloquent legislator known for his encyclopedic knowledge of Senate rules and history surpasses Carl T. Hayden, the Arizona Democrat who served a total of 20,773 days in the U.S. House and Senate.

With his 20,774th day representing West Virginia -- six years in House and then nearly 51 years and counting in the Senate -- Byrd sets a record for longevity unlikely to be broken as the political climate turns toward term limits and growing public dissatisfaction with Congress.

Posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 10:57 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Emily Chang, CNN Reporter, Detained In Shanghai Over Obama-Mao T-Shirt

Source: Huffington Post (11-17-09)

Orders to prevent sales of T-shirts showing Obama dressed like communist revolutionary Mao Zedong are in force during the president's visit -- and Chinese officials mean it, as a CNN reporter found out.

Correspondent Emily Chang reported that she went searching for Oba-Mao souvenirs at Shanghai's Yatai Xinyang market. Finding none, she pulled out a T-shirt she bought before the ban was imposed to record a report in the market.

Security guards pounced, telling her she did not have permission to film there and trying to grab the shirt, according to a report on CNN's Web site.

Chang was detained for two hours before being let go, with the shirt, the report said.

A cottage industry in T-shirts and other Oba-Mao trinkets catering mainly to foreign tourists has thrived in recent months. Bans such as the one that commercial regulators ordered in recent weeks are usually temporary. When U.S. or European government officials come to Beijing for trade talks, local markets typically remove copies of brand-name designer clothes -- until the foreign negotiators leave town.

Posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 12:55 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Obama Tours Forbidden City

Source: CNSNews (11-17-09)

Beijing (AP) - Playing tourist on his first visit ever to China, President Barack Obama drew a chilly comparison between the Chinese capital and his Illinois hometown....

... Built in the 1400s, the Forbidden City once was home to 24 Chinese emperors who ruled the country for nearly 500 years, between 1420 and 1911. The former imperial palace is now known as the Palace Museum, and is open to Beijing's visitors.

"It's a testament to the greatness of Chinese history," Obama said while on tour. He pronounced it "a magnificent place to visit" and said he wanted to come back with his wife, first lady Michelle Obama, and their two daughters, Malia and Sasha. Mrs. Obama did not accompany the president on the trip.

Posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 12:52 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Jerusalem: To two faiths, a holy patch of land; to the world, a powder keg

Source: The Washington Post (11-17-09)

JERUSALEM -- It is one of the most watched pieces of real estate in the world, 35 acres where an under-the-breath prayer or a whiff of a rumor can rouse warnings of war.

In both Judaism and Islam, the area known respectively as the Temple Mount and the Noble Sanctuary is considered a formative location. Jews believe it to be the site of Solomon's Temple and key biblical events. Muslims regard it as the spot where Muhammad was brought by the angel Gabriel before embarking on a trip to heaven to visit the other prophets.

It also remains a flash point, and a series of disturbances there this fall showed just how difficult it will be for Israelis and Palestinians to reach agreement on an area over which they negotiate not just as political entities but also as representatives of two faiths with an often-troubled relationship.

The recent round of clashes may have ebbed, but on any given day the depth of the standoff is apparent: Last week, Jordan's ambassador to the United States warned of the implications if, as Muslims often worry, Jewish extremists were to bomb one of the Muslim sites. Israeli Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom, meanwhile, reminded an audience in Jerusalem that his government would never share control of a city that is the object of daily Jewish prayer and the hoped-for site of a third temple. Under Muslim administration since the Crusades, the compound -- a largely open-air plaza that includes the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock -- is under Jordanian authority, an arrangement that Israel agreed to maintain after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and the creation of the Palestinian Authority in the 1990s.

The oversight from Amman, whose ruling Hashemite family is also the formal custodian of the preeminent mosques in Mecca and Medina, reflects how any agreement over Jerusalem will have to go beyond the bounds of what the Palestinians on their own can negotiate.

Posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 12:46 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Israel: Specter of Meir Kahane continues to haunt politics

Source: LA Times (11-16-09)

Two decades after his party was banned from running for seats in the parliament, Rabbi Meir Kahane and his ideas are once more on its agenda.

Recently, right-wing legislator Michael Ben-Ari asked to hold a discussion in parliament in memory of Kahane, an American-born rabbi who had founded the Jewish Defense League before moving to Israel and founding the militantly nationalist Kach movement that advocated removal of Arabs from biblical Israel. In 1988, Israeli law was amended to bar candidates who incited racism from running for parliament. Kahane, who had held a seat for four years at the time, was banned, and the party was outlawed altogether in 1994.

Kahane was assassinated in New York in 1990; some still subscribe to his views.

Ben-Ari filed a motion for a memorial discussion in parliament to mark the assassination anniversary. A reporter spotted it on the list and queried parliament speaker Rubi (Reuven) Rivlin, who removed it, calling it a provocation. Ben-Ari has challenged Rivlin's decision and has brought it up before a parliamentary committee that will vote on it coming few days.

It turns out that other parties expressed keen interest in the issue -- but not Israeli political parties...

Posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 12:44 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Prague marks Velvet Revolution

Source: BBC (11-17-09)

Czechs and Slovaks are marking the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution - which brought down the Communist government of the then-Czechoslovakia.

Past and present students will re-enact a Prague march that started the events.

The Communist Party announced it would relinquish power after hundreds of thousands demonstrated for 12 days.

The dissident playwright Vaclav Havel, who led the revolution before becoming president, is to attend a Prague rock concert as part of the celebrations.

Students are gathering in Prague's Albertov district - home to several faculties of Charles University - to retrace the steps of a march on 17 November 1989 that changed the course of Czechoslovak history.

Posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 12:09 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Old African-American cemetery relocation takes slow, delicate work (Atlanta)

Source: Atlanta Journal (11-15-09)

Jeff Gardner delicately scrapes away a century of red clay and scoops a child's bones into a casket.

The archaeologist has spent the past two months carefully sifting through dirt, trying to preserve the remains of generations of Clayton County families.

Gardner thought he was looking for 270 historic African American graves buried behind Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.

He found more than 340 – and is still digging.

Gardner and his crew are moving the graves -- which date back to the mid-1800s -- from the middle of a landfill in College Park to a public cemetery in Riverdale.

Posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 12:09 AM | Comments (0) | Top

'Ex Nazi' charged with 58 murders

Source: BBC (11-17-09)

German prosecutors have charged a 90-year-old alleged former Nazi SS member with the deaths of 58 Jewish forced labourers, officials say.

The man is accused of murdering the workers in Deutsch Schuetzen, an Austrian village, at the end of World War II.

The court has identified the suspect only as a "retiree from Duisburg".

The victims' remains were found in a mass grave in 1995 by the Austrian Jewish association.

Posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 12:08 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Bishops reprise old abortion fight with higher stakes

Source: Politico (11-17-09)

Thirty-three years ago this fall, a bitter, race-tinged fight over abortion matched Roman Catholic bishops and the House against the nation’s first popularly elected black senator, Republican Ed Brooke of Massachusetts.

Now, with health care reform on the line, the same male-dominated church hierarchy is dictating to the first woman speaker of the House, Democrat Nancy Pelosi, a Catholic herself and past ally for the bishops on everything from human rights in China to tax credits for low-income families.

Beneath this stark picture is a much more diverse nation — and set of political actors.

Two Americas have evolved since the late Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) first attached his famous amendment in 1976 barring federal Medicaid dollars from being used to fund abortion services for poor women. Seventeen states, representing 40 percent of the nation’s population, have exercised the option to use their own money to provide abortion services for Medicaid beneficiaries. And in these same states, women generally are far more likely to rely on their private insurance plans to help pay for abortions.

At the same time, the anti-abortion lobby remains dominant in Congress, fathering “mini-Hydes” that go beyond Medicaid to affect millions of federal workers, the military, the American Indian health service, women in federal prisons and even Peace Corps volunteers.

The bishops can make a strong case that the anti-abortion language inserted into the House health care bill extends only this central principle: Federal health dollars can’t go to pay for abortions. And for 12 years, these same restrictions have applied not just to fees for abortion services but also to any federal contributions to health plans that cover elective abortions.

“We have 53 million people already under Medicaid, and now we’re going to add about 33 million uninsured?” asked Richard Doerflinger, an associate director with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “It applies to a new situation, but it is not qualitatively a new situation.”

Or is it?...

Posted on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 12:04 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Proposed Merger Threat to Black Colleges in Mississippi

Source: Inside Higher Ed (11-17-09)

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour on Monday proposed combining the state's three public black colleges into one of the institutions, Jackson State University. While Barbour said that campuses would continue to exist at what are now Alcorn State University and Mississippi Valley State University, the proposal marks the most dramatic state challenge in recent years to the continuation of some public black colleges -- and the move comes in the state whose higher education system was the subject of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that governs college desegregation.

Governor Barbour also proposed a merger of the Mississippi University for Women (which is no longer just for women, its name notwithstanding) into Mississippi State University. While his plan stressed that the various merged institutions would survive in some form, he also said that this major reorganization should result in the elimination of many programs, which supporters of black colleges fear will come largely from their institutions. The governor's budget statement said that all of the state's public colleges would see "a rationalization of class offerings.... Every university would be expected to reduce costs by consolidating or eliminating programs not pulling their financial weight." (The plan in total would turn eight universities in the state system into five.)...

... Chambers noted that mergers of black educational institutions in the South have not historically gone well for black students and educators. "What happens to the faculty at black colleges" when programs are consolidated? he asked. And if the consolidations result in smaller branch campuses where Alcorn State and Mississippi Valley are now full institutions, "how do you ensure that the same number of minority students end up in college? Why aren't they asking questions about minority enrollments?"...

... Any merger of black colleges in Mississippi would have particular political significance because of United States v. Fordice, a 1992 Supreme Court decision that found Mississippi had failed to desegregate its higher education system. The decision specifically encouraged the state to consider mergers and to cut down on duplication of academic programs as a means of desegregating -- but the decision did not order mergers.

Posted on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 11:53 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Duke Professor Publishes Book with Muhammad Images

Source: Inside Higher Ed (11-17-09)

Many advocates for free speech were outraged when Yale University Press, in publishing a book about the controversy over the Danish cartoons of Muhammad, refused to publish the cartoons themselves. Gary Hull, a Duke University professor, decided the best response would be to publish a book that included the controversial images, and through his new Voltaire Press, he has now done so. The book, Muhammad: The "Banned" Images, includes an introduction by Hull on "the basic choice between free speech and force, and the ethical issues involved in suppressing free scholarly discourse for the sake of multiculturalism," as well as a survey of the history of images of Muhammad.

Posted on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 11:50 PM | Comments (0) | Top

30 Years After Murder, Is His Appeal Too Late?

Source: NYT (11-16-09)

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide whether it is too late for an Alabama man to argue that the murder that sent him to death row was not a capital crime when he committed it.

The inmate, Billy Joe Magwood, shot and killed Sheriff Neil Grantham in 1979 in front of the Coffee County jail. At the time, Alabama law imposed two requirements before the state’s judges could sentence defendants to death: the commission of one of 14 listed offenses and the existence of certain “aggravating circumstances.”

The murder of a peace officer like a sheriff was a listed offense. But Mr. Magwood’s crime did not satisfy the second requirement. The question before the Supreme Court is whether he took too long to raise the argument that he could not have lawfully been sentenced to death.

Although Mr. Magwood’s lawyers challenged his sentence on other grounds over the years, it was not until 1997 that they raised the question of whether his was a capital crime under Alabama law. In the meantime, a federal judge, acting on other grounds, ordered Mr. Magwood resentenced in 1985. He was again sentenced to death the next year...

Posted on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 11:45 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Online Maps: Now Everyman Offers New Directions

Source: NYT (11-16-09)

SAN FRANCISCO — They don’t know it, but people who use Google’s online maps may be getting directions from Richard Hintz...

... Mr. Hintz is a foot soldier in an army of volunteer cartographers who are logging every detail of neighborhoods near and far into online atlases. From Petaluma to Peshawar, these amateurs are arming themselves with GPS devices and easy-to-use software to create digital maps where none were available before, or fixing mistakes and adding information to existing ones.

Like contributors to Wikipedia before them, they are democratizing a field that used to be the exclusive domain of professionals and specialists. And the information they gather is becoming increasingly valuable commercially...

... That is changing the dynamics of an industry that has been dominated by a handful of digital mapping companies like Tele Atlas and Navteq.

Google is increasingly bypassing those traditional map providers. It has relied on volunteers to create digital maps of 140 countries, including India, Pakistan and the Philippines, that are more complete than many maps created professionally...

Posted on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 11:43 PM | Comments (0) | Top

To cut deficit, Red Cross sells treasures amassed over decades

Source: Google News (11-16-09)

WASHINGTON — Rose Percy has a long history with the American Red Cross. Complete with an extensive wardrobe and her own Tiffany jewelry, this 23-inch wax doll was first sold for $1,200 back in 1864 to benefit the U.S. Sanitary Commission — the precursor to one of best-known U.S. charities.

Now, Rose Percy, is on the auction block again.

On Tuesday, Percy will be sold in one of the first rounds of an extensive sale of treasures the American Red Cross has amassed over the decades. The current bid online: $5,000. The Red Cross also is selling a rare four-faced Cartier clock lamp, nurse uniforms from World War I and what could be the last Civil War-era flag of the forerunner U.S. Sanitary Commission.

"There's an opportunity for people to purchase a part of the Red Cross history and at the same time contribute to our humanitarian mission," said Red Cross spokesman Roger Lowe. At a time when many companies are cutting back on such vast archival collections, 128-year-old charity, he said, is asking itself, "Do I really need all of this?"

For the past two years, the charity whose core mission is disaster relief has been working feverishly to erase a $209 million operating deficit — a shortfall that now stands at $33.5 million. The national headquarters laid off a third of its 3,000 employees last year and made a rare appeal to Congress for help that produced a one-time, $100-million infusion. But the cost-cutting isn't over.

Posted on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 11:29 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Medvedev rejects WWII history 'rewrites'

Source: UPI (11-16-09)

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev told sailors in Singapore Monday that perceived attempts to rewrite the history of World War II should be rejected.

Medvedev told the crew of the Russian cruiser Varyag that historians will always debate the past; however, there was no doubt that the eventual outcome of the war had been agreed upon by the allied powers at the time.

"We should keep an eye on such things -- not fighting different points of view, but protecting our interests and thwarting falsifications of history that could hamper the interests of the state," the Russian president said.

Russia's RIA Novosti news agency said Monday that the president's remarks referred to resentment over the Soviet Union's occupation of neighboring nations after the Red Army rolled into Germany.

Posted on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 11:28 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Byrd Will Set Another Record

Source: NYT (11-16-09)

Senator Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, who is already the longest-serving senator in United States history, is set to cross yet another milestone of longevity in the legislative branch. On Wednesday, he’ll surpass Carl Hayden as the longest-serving member of Congress in history, combining terms in both the House and Senate.

Mr. Hayden, an Arizona Democrat, served in the House from 1912 to 1927 and in the Senate from 1927 to 1969 for a total of 56 years 319 days.

Mr. Byrd, whose 92nd birthday is Friday, served in the House from 1953 to 1959 and has been in the Senate ever since. He served as the Democratic leader from 1977 to 1989, about half of that time as the majority leader.

Expect numerous tributes in the Senate and in West Virginia, Gov. Joe Manchin and state lawmakers have scheduled a celebration on Wednesday at the State Capitol.

Posted on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 11:27 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Defendant's Words May Help 9/11 Case

Source: WSJ (11-17-09)

Federal prosecutors trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, could get a big boost from evidence that helped to acquit another alleged conspirator.

In statements submitted to a military commission last year, Mr. Mohammed said Salim Hamdan was a barely literate functionary with no involvement in the Sept. 11 conspiracy or other al Qaeda plots, contrary to prosecutors' allegations. Mr. Mohammed explained that his role as an al Qaeda leader gave him broad knowledge of the terrorist network's personnel and operations.

"I personally was the executive director of 9/11, and Hamdan had no previous knowledge of the operation, or any other one," Mr. Mohammed wrote in response to the written questions. "Due to my work as...a military official in al Qaeda, my job is to oversee all the al Qaeda cells abroad," he added.

A second alleged Sept. 11 conspirator, Walid bin-Attash, also provided answers to interrogatories -- written questions from defense attorneys -- that corroborated Mr. Hamdan's version of events.

Attorney General Eric Holder announced last week that Mr. Mohammed, Mr. bin-Attash and three other alleged conspirators will be tried in a civilian criminal court in New York, rather than the military-commission proceedings initiated during the administration of former President George W. Bush.

Posted on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 11:01 PM | Comments (0) | Top

How Is Obama's Extended Family Handling Reflective Fame?

Source: Slate (11-17-09)

Ever since President Obama moved into the White House, "the background players in his family drama—half-brothers, stepgrandmothers—are experiencing a disorienting measure of reflective fame," writes New York magazine. "They're doing their best to handle it, with varying degrees of grace." George Obama, the president's youngest half-brother, will be publishing a memoir and traveling to the United States for a publicity tour. But despite the reported six-figure advance, George still lives in a slum and constantly pushes interviewers to give him money in exchange for information. Tourists who arrive in Nairobi and are willing to pay $500 for a glimpse into Obama's past can go on a package deal called the "Obamaland Weekend Break," where they might get to visit Obama's octogenarian stepgrandmother. Sayid Obama, one of Obama's stepbrothers, has been acting more or less like a family spokesman but he is tired of dealing with the press and all the undercover birther activists who have gone to Kenya to try to prove the president was born there. But not everyone with Obama as a last name wants the world to know how they're related to the U.S. president. There are still an unknown number of Obamas out there who have somehow managed to evade the reflective glory.

Posted on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 9:05 PM | Comments (0) | Top

CBS News launching turn-of-decade look at America's position in the world

Source: Google News (11-16-09)

NEW YORK — CBS News is planning an ambitious turn-of-decade look at America's position in the world that's also designed as an opening competitive shot at Diane Sawyer.

Called "CBS Reports: Where America Stands," the series will look at issues such as health care, the military, the economy and crime. Reporters will show what was happening 10 years ago and compare it to now, with predictions about how things will be like at the start of the 2020s.

The "CBS Evening News" will be the centerpiece for the reports. But "The Early Show," "Face the Nation" and the network's radio and online outlets will also participate, said Sean McManus, CBS News president.

"People really do want to know how safe we are and could we fight another war if we had to," McManus said. "How strong is our military? Is it stronger than it was 10 years ago? Is it weaker? And how prepared are we for the challenges of the next decade."

The series could run for a couple of months and get a real showcase on Katie Couric's newscast, he said.

Posted on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 9:04 PM | Comments (0) | Top

What happens to the archives of minority newspapers that go out of existence?

Source: Poynter Online (11-17-09)

Over the years publications that target gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender audiences have come and gone -- witness today's tumult at Window Media LLC. A key newsweekly, The Washington Blade, may be no more after celebrating its 40th anniversary last month.

There's one very important angle that gets overlooked when minority media outlets go out of existence: archives. In today’s digital world, what happens to the online archives? Earlier this year the New York Blade shut down and all its online searchable back issues vanished. The same thing happened when Lesbian Gay New York (LGNY) declared bankruptcy -- years of issues that had been available and searchable online were gone. A new publication took up where LGNY left off -- Gay City News -- but what about all that community history, the public record of political and cultural matters? In the wake of the Washington Blade’s demise there are reports that another publication may arise, perhaps staffed with former Blade employees. I sure hope so – gay community publications have a vital role to play even in an era when major media outlets have pumped up their coverage of sexual minority issues. I also hope Window Media LLC's owners/shareholders will keep the Washington Blade, Southern Voice, South Florida Blade, etc. archives – online and otherwise -- available. Publisher, editors, writers -- and GLBT communities -- have a responsibility to ensure that such archives remain intact and widely accessible.

Posted on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 9:02 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Preserving access to papers relating to Lord Palmerston and Mountbatten: the Broadlands Archives campaign

Source: History Today (11-17-09)

At the end of last week, the University of Southampton launched a campaign to raise the necessary funds to preserve public access in the UK to hundreds of thousands of papers and photographs relating to Lord Mountbatten and Lord Palmerston. The Broadlands Archives have been on loan to the University’s Hartley Library since 1989, where they were transferred from the home of Lord Romsey. They were inherited by Lord Romsey, Mountbatten's grandson, on Mountbatten's assassination by the IRA off the Irish coast on August 27th, 1979. The University now needs to raise 2.85 million to acquire the Broadlands Archives.

The archives are stored in more than 4,500 boxes and include documents which chart the major political, social, diplomatic and economic events of the 19th and 20th centuries. They include 1,200 letters dealing with foreign affairs and general government business from the Queen to Lord Palmerston (1784-1865), who served as Foreign Secretary, Home Secretary and Prime Minister during Queen Victoria’s reign.

There are also 250,000 papers and 50,000 photographs which chart the career of Earl Mountbatten of Burma (1900-1979). In particular, they cover his time as Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia Command (SACSEA) from 1943 to 1946, and as the last Viceroy of India in 1947 and 1948 and the first Governor-General of the newly independent Union of India. Correspondence from this time includes letters from Gandhi and there are also papers and photographs of Mountbatten’s wife Edwina, Countess Mountbatten.

Posted on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 6:39 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Shakespeare Quartos Archive launched online

Source: Culture24 (11-17-09)

All 32 surviving quarto editions of Shakespeare's Hamlet have been collated in a free digital archive launched yesterday.

Shakespeare Quartos Archive allows scholars to compare early printed copies of the famous play in one place, without travelling between the world's great libraries.

The website's interactive format means high-quality page images can be annotated, searched and compared side by side for the first time.

The Transatlantic venture – funded by JISC in the UK and the National Endowment for the Humanities in the US – is being led by the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC.

Posted on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 6:29 PM | Comments (0) | Top

GOP faces struggle to recapture House in 2010

Source: Taegan Goddard's Political Wire (11-17-09)

"A lack of competitive open-seat House races in 2010 could complicate Republican efforts to fully maximize a favorable national environment and make large seat gains after back-to-back elections where the political winds were blowing in the opposite direction," Roll Call reports.

"So far, 18 Members have announced they are not seeking re-election in 2010 and are running for other office instead -- but only six of those races are currently considered competitive. No Member has yet announced an outright retirement, which is unusual; at this point in the 2008 cycle, 14 Members had announced their retirement and five others were running for Senate."

The Fix: "Compare those numbers to 1994 when 40 of the 52 seats Democrats lost were in open seat races and you begin to see why the comparison between the two elections is somewhat ill-fitting. Watch to see how many more House Democrats decide to bail on a re-election race next November between now and January 2010; if that number stays below 15 or 20, Democrats have to feel good about holding the House in 2011."

Posted on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 2:51 PM | Comments (0) | Top

David Segal: Naming the '00s

Source: NYT (11-14-09)

THERE are 46 days left in 2009, which means it is just about time to commence the beloved and enduring parlor game known as “Name That Decade.”

You know the rules — coin a pithy, reductive phrase that somehow encapsulates the multitude of events, trends, triumphs and calamities of the past 10 years. If you can also rope in some of the big personalities and consumer obsessions, that’s a bonus.

For the ’00s, it seems the trick will be finding a small package sturdy and flexible enough to capture so much upheaval and change. And worry — although in hindsight, it sure seems like we kept worrying about the wrong menace.

The decade began with a frenzy of fear about the Y2k millennium bug, which many technology experts said would sunder computers, crash jets and wreak havoc in every corner of the globe. As that non-emergency passed, a genuine threat quietly gathered in the form of a plot to fell the twin towers.

Later, we scoured Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, which we did not find. As we searched, we built weapons of financial chaos right here at home, with home mortgages, leverage and something called Collateral Debt Obligations.

Fortunes and a staggering number of jobs have vanished, inflicting misery in this country and others on a scale that would surely have exceeded the most garish of Saddam’s fantasies.

So: The Era of Misplaced Anxiety?

“How about the Decade of Disruptions?” suggests Walter Isaacson, the former editor of Time magazine and author of a biography of Benjamin Franklin. “We had coasted through the ’90s with irrational exuberance. Between the fall of the Berlin Wall until the fall of the twin towers, there was nothing unnerving us. It was the decade after the cold war and it seemed like we were done with global struggles.”

“Then we get to a decade that begins with 9/11 and we realize we will be involved with a global struggle. And the decade has various financial disruptions — the dot-com bubble, Enron — culminating in the one last year. It’s been a decade as bumpy as the ’90s were blithe.”

The upside of “disruption” is that it’s flexible enough to capture both the financial meltdown and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But what if you just want to focus on our money woes?

“This will be remembered as the era when the North went South,” offers Carmen Reinhart, economist and co-author of “This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.”

By North and South Ms. Reinhart isn’t referring to geography; she means developed economies and emerging economies.

“If you look at the 1990s, it was a decade of emerging market crises,” she said. “The big peso blowout in Mexico in 1994 and ’95. Asia erupts in the summer of ’97 and the Asian crisis runs into ’98.” And so on.

“Meanwhile, the North was in its Great Moderation phase,” Ms. Reinhart said. “If you look at academic discussion and even public perception, in the first seven years of this decade, people thought the North had beaten the business cycle. Not only did we convincingly show that we have not mastered the business cycle, but we’re having an emerging-market style of crisis. This is something we haven’t seen in the postwar era and it’s something that in the years of the Great Moderation we would have thought unthinkable.”

Actually, the Decade of the Unthinkable is pretty good, too. If nothing else pleasant can be said about the last 10 years, they sure weren’t dull.

“It’s been a tough decade for those of us in the future prediction business,” says the futurist Paul Saffo, who teaches at Stanford University. “Realities have consistently outpaced our wildest imaginings.”

Mr. Saffo said he had struggled to keep his forecasts a few paces ahead of the times, which appears to be the inspiration for his decade appellation of choice.

“Overshoot,” he says. “It’s been a decade of overshoot.”

Overshoot?

“In the ’90s,” he says, “we had all the indicators of the problems that were coming and in our complacency we did nothing. The environment, terrorism, financial markets.”

None of these problems came out of nowhere, he says. But because no one acted, “the problems, once they began, overshot the institutions that could have solved them.”

And this isn’t a problem that he thinks is going away. “Without a doubt, we’re seven billion people driving at light speed down a dark and foggy highway and we can’t see past the windshield.”...

Read More...

Posted on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 1:01 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Families of first world war tank crew commemorate historic battle (France)

Source: Guardian (UK) (11-16-09)

Relatives of soldiers who were killed in one of the world's first major tank battles will make a pilgrimage to France this week to celebrate the men's bravery.

Historians have traced families of the crew of the MkIV D51 tank, better known as "Deborah", who died during the battle of Cambrai in the first world war.

Five of its eight crew died during the battle, and the tank itself was abandoned and buried before it was pinpointed by historians beneath a field near the village of Flesquieres and dug out in 1998.

On Friday the families of the five men who died and one who survived will visit the spot to remember the battle and honour the bravery of their forefathers.

Posted on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 12:42 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Metal Thieves Steal 1,500 Pound Cannon From Veteran's Cemetary (California)

Source: Fox News 40 Sacramento (11-15-09)

VALLEJO - A huge cannon at a Vallejo's Sunrise Memorial Cemetary...taken by thieves. It was part of a memorial dedicated to veterans, but cops think thieves stole it for the scrap metal.

Francisco Lopez is a Veteran and a Historian. He says these metal thieves are only thinking about making money and not respecting our cemetaries. "These are unique treasures that are not available anywhere and they are relics of these soldiers times."

Posted on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 12:39 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Officials Discuss Plans to Bring Gitmo Detainees to Illinois

Source: CNSNews.com (11-13-09)

Chicago (AP) - Gov. Pat Quinn and U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin on Sunday tried to build support and counter criticism of a proposal to sell a prison in rural northwestern Illinois to the federal government to house Guantanamo Bay detainees and other inmates.

Federal officials are expected to visit the maximum security Thomson Correctional Center, about 150 miles west of Chicago, on Monday.

Both Quinn and Durbin said the possibility of selling the prison to the federal government was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help create about 3,000 jobs, both at the prison and directly in surrounding communities in an area where unemployment has topped 10 percent.

Posted on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Monday, November 16, 2009

Black Panthers denounce 'new' Panthers

Source: The Washington Times (11-16-09)

The New Black Panther Party catapulted itself to national attention during the November 2008 presidential election when two of its members, one brandishing a nightstick, were captured on videotape intimidating voters at a Philadelphia polling place.

But the original Black Panther Party, which famously advocated black power and preached self-defense through confrontation in the 1960s and 1970s, is not happy with the new upstart. It has condemned the New Black Panther Party and its tactics, saying the NBPP "stole" the party's name for its "own misguided purposes."

The Huey P. Newton Foundation Inc., created in 1993 and co-founded by Fredrika Newton, Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton's widow, said in a statement that the original party was "never a group of angry young militants full of fury toward the white establishment ... but operated on love for black people, not hatred of white people.

"As guardian of the true history of the Black Panther Party, the foundation, which includes former leading members of the party, denounces this group's exploitation of the party's name and history," the statement said. "Failing to find its own legitimacy in the black community, this band would graft the party's name upon itself, which we condemn.

"There is no New Black Panther Party," the statement said, describing the NBPP as "a small band of African Americans calling themselves the New Black Panthers." It said the NBPP has "no legitimate claim on the party's name" and that it "only pretends to walk in the footsteps of the party's true heroes."

The denouncement by the foundation, which now operates community-based literacy, voter outreach and health-related programs, is not the only challenge facing the NBPP...

Posted on Monday, November 16, 2009 at 11:58 PM | Comments (0) | Top

U.S. Supreme Court declines 'Redskins' suit

Source: WSJ (11-17-09)

WASHINGTON -- The Washington Redskins ended their four-game losing streak Sunday. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court handed the professional football team another victory, declining to hear a petition alleging its use of the "Redskins" mascot is racially disparaging.

Suzan Harjo v. Pro-Football Inc., a case that began in 1992, centered on whether a dispute over a potentially offensive trademark can be dismissed if the challenge was not filed promptly. Though the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board ruled in 1999 that the name was disparaging and should be changed, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. later decided that the challengers had waited too long to file their petition. The Redskins first registered the mascot with the Patent and Trademark Office in 1967.

The Redskins acquired their controversial name in 1933, before they arrived in Washington.

Originally the "Boston Braves," then-owner George Preston Marshall renamed the Boston Redskins in honor of their head coach, William "Lone Star" Dietz, himself a Native American, according to team lawyers in a brief for the high court.

When the team moved to Washington in 1937, the name was tweaked to reflect its new hometown.

Groups of law and psychology professors have filed amicus briefs in the case, urging the court to prohibit dismissing trademark disputes based on timeliness questions if the name does public damage.

In this case, use of the "Redskins" epithet propagates a negative stereotype of Native Americans, the psychology professors argued.

Posted on Monday, November 16, 2009 at 11:52 PM | Comments (0) | Top

South Pole explorers to drill for Sir Ernest Shackleton's Whisky

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-15-09)

Explorers are planning to recover a rare batch of whisky lost during explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated voyage to the South Pole a century ago.

Two crates of the now extinct “Rare Old” brand of McKinlay and Co whisky have been buried in the Antarctic ice since Shackleton was forced to abandon his polar mission in 1909.

But Whyte & Mackay, the whisky giant that owns McKinlay and Co, has asked a team of New Zealand explorers heading out on a January expedition to return a sample of the drink for a series of experiments.

The team intends to utilise special drills to free the trapped crates and rescue a bottle from the wreckage, which is believed to have been discarded 97 miles from the pole.

If they cannot retrieve a full bottle, they are hoping to use a syringe to extract some of the contents.

Posted on Monday, November 16, 2009 at 11:26 PM | Comments (0) | Top

The child of Auschwitz's Kommandant

Source: BBC (11-16-09)

Barbara Cherish is a child of the SS, and the burden lies heavily upon her.

She knew early in her life that her German father, Arthur Liebehenschel, was involved in something terrible, something the family did not discuss.

Only later, as an adult, did she discover he had run part of the Auschwitz concentration camp for five months during World War II.

The knowledge gnawed at her, but it took a life crisis - her divorce and the death of her sister - to spur her to delve into the past and piece together her father's story.

The result is a book in which she struggles to reconcile her love for the father she never knew with the knowledge of his crimes, which saw him sentenced to death in Poland after the war.
“ I do have mixed feelings because he was a complex person. Here's this good person that really tried everything he could to help the prisoners ”

Posted on Monday, November 16, 2009 at 11:22 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Evidence for kings David and Solomon

Source: Times Online (11-16-09)

“King David and King Solomon lived merry, merry lives,

With many, many concubines and many, many wives.

But when old age crept after them, with many, many qualms,

King Solomon wrote the Proverbs and King David wrote the Psalms.”

There are several versions of this anonymous rhyme, but the problem, some biblical archaeologists argue, is that there is little evidence that either king existed: archaeological remains have been assigned to their reigns on the basis of cryptic verses in the Old Testament, and then used to “prove” the date of similar buildings at other sites.

Until 15 years ago, Professor Eric Cline notes in a new book, there was no extra-biblical documentary mention of even the House of David as ruling in Judea. The fragmentary Tel Dan Stele, found reused as building material at a site in what is now northern Israel in 1993-94, provided the first evidence outside the First Book of Kings.

Dating to about 842BC, the Tel Dan inscription describes the defeat of Joram, king of Israel, and Ahaziyahu, king of Judah, by a ruler of Aram-Damascus earlier in the 9th century BC. The Israelites had invaded his territory, located somewhere in Lebanon or southern Syria, but he “slew seventy kings, who harnessed thousands of chariots and thousands of horsemen. And I killed Joram son of Ahab, king of Israel, and I killed Ahaziyahu, son of Joram, king of the House of David.”

“However, we are still lacking any contemporary or near-contemporary inscriptions that mention Solomon: at the moment we do not have a single one,” Professor Cline says. “Moreover, there is still very little archaeological evidence for the existence of David.”

Posted on Monday, November 16, 2009 at 11:22 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Yemen Finds Dreamland of Architecture

Source: NYT (11-15-09)

SANA, Yemen — It has been almost 800 years since Saleh Qaid Othaim’s house in the heart of the Old City was built from hand-cut stones and traditional alabaster decorations.

Yet on a recent morning, Mr. Othaim watched contentedly as a group of men renovated the place using exactly the same ancient methods and materials. Workers mixed the moist chocolate-brown masonry known as teen while a master builder supervised, a dagger hanging from his belt. There was no scaffolding, no helmets, no whine of machines: only the scraping of trowels and masonry, interrupted at last by the call to prayer in the high desert air.

“I don’t care how long it takes,” said Mr. Othaim, a government worker. “The most important thing is that it be done in a traditional way.”

The capital’s Old City is one of the world’s architectural gems, a thicket of unearthly medieval towers etched with white filigree and crowned with stained-glass windows. But more unusual than their mere survival is the fact that the traditional building arts continue to thrive here. Elsewhere in the Middle East, many older houses are being ripped down to make way for bland steel-and-glass high-rise buildings. The hyper-modern skyline of Dubai, United Arab Emirates, with its mismatched skyscrapers looking as if they were hurled down at the Persian Gulf from outer space, is being emulated in Beirut and other cities.

Yemen is different. For all its many woes — wars, a water crisis and the rise of Al Qaeda — the country’s adherence to ancient traditions often makes it feel like a refuge. Even outside the Old City, the bands and crescents of medieval Yemeni architecture can be seen on many newer buildings and homes, along with the translucent alabaster windows known as gammariyas...

Posted on Monday, November 16, 2009 at 10:52 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Taking Aim at Student Muckrakers at Northwestern University

Source: NYT (11-15-09)

Since 1992, Prof. David Protess at the Medill school at Northwestern University has worked with undergraduate journalism students to investigate cases in which prosecutors appear to have taken aim at the wrong people. That might be about to happen again, only this time the students themselves would be the targets.

In one of the most recent cases, students working with the effort, which became the Medill Innocence Project in 1999, uncovered evidence that suggested Anthony McKinney had been wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for almost three decades for the murder of a security guard in 1978...

... And because of that investigative work — and perhaps work on other cases, which has led to the exoneration of 11 people, 5 of whom had been sentenced to death — the project and its students find themselves in the gun sights of Cook County prosecutors.

“I and some of my former classmates are now wondering if we are going to have to consider going to jail to protect our sources and our notes,” said Evan S. Benn, a writer and editor at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch who worked on the case in his final semester at Medill before graduating in 2004.

The prosecutors are seeking access to investigative materials, e-mail messages, course outlines, syllabuses, training materials and, yes, even grades, to explore the “bias, motive and interest” behind the students’ work..

Posted on Monday, November 16, 2009 at 10:47 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Suspect Is Key to Pace in 9/11 Case

Source: WSJ (11-16-09)

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has said he was ready to confess to orchestrating the Sept. 11 attacks, a move that would make his case relatively easy for prosecutors. But if Mr. Mohammed decides to work with his American lawyers to stall the case, he has plenty of tools at his disposal, criminal lawyers say.

When Mr. Mohammed appeared before a U.S. military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in December, he said he and his four co-defendants wanted the proceedings over quickly. "We don't want to waste time," he told the judge. "We want to enter a plea."

Now the U.S. is scrapping military tribunals for the five men and bringing them before a civilian court in New York. If Mr. Mohammed acts to speed his own execution and await what he asserts is glorious martyrdom with a guilty plea in federal court, that would bypass a trial, eliminate the need to select a jury and lead to sentencing probably before the end of 2010.

"I think the most likely scenario is these guys don't make any bones about it and they confess their involvement," said Harry Schneider, a Seattle lawyer who helped defend Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's former driver, in a military commission. "They are proud of what they did."

"Typically, it takes a year from indictment to trial" in the Manhattan federal courts, said David Kelley, the Manhattan U.S. attorney during the George W. Bush administration. "This case is a lot more complex. There's going to be a lot of pretrial litigation, and that timeline may double."

Mr. Kelley, who was a leader of the Justice Department's 9/11 investigation and now is a partner with Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP, said "first and foremost" among the issues Mr. Mohammed could raise is the conduct of the government.

Posted on Monday, November 16, 2009 at 10:35 PM | Comments (0) | Top

McCain asks staffers to hold their fire on Palin

Source: CNN (11-16-09)

John McCain asked former campaign staffers Friday to avoid engaging in a back-and-forth over claims made by former running mate Sarah Palin in her new book, CNN has confirmed.

On a conference call with senior campaign advisers, the former Republican presidential candidate asked them to hold back from responding – telling them, in effect, that "this too shall pass," according to sources familiar with the call.

On Friday, McCain conceded to the reality of the media firestorm surrounding Palin's charges against his team, and told them he understood if they felt the need to defend themselves. But the Arizona senator called for a minimalist approach, suggesting that his former aides avoid television appearances.

Posted on Monday, November 16, 2009 at 9:26 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Muslim academics and students are turning against Darwin's theory

Source: Times (UK) (11-17-09)

Muslims in many countries are increasingly rejecting Darwin’s theory of evolution, under the influence of conservative elements in Islam, a science conference was told yesterday.

Nidhal Guessoum, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, told the conference, being held in Egypt by the British Council, that in too many places students and academics believed they had to make a “binary choice” between evolution and creationism, rather than understanding that one could believe both in God and in Darwin’s theory.

Dr Guessoum, who is a Sunni Muslim, said that in countries such as Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan and Malaysia, only 15 per cent of those surveyed believed Darwin’s theory to be “true” or “probably true”. This stand was equally prevalent among students and teachers, from high school to university. Most alarmingly, he claimed, science teachers were misrepresenting the facts and theories of evolution by mixing it with religious ideologies.

Posted on Monday, November 16, 2009 at 8:24 PM | Comments (1) | Top

MI6 chiefs to give evidence at Iraq inquiry

Source: Times (UK) (11-17-09)

The past and present heads of MI6 will be among the first witnesses to give evidence at the official inquiry into the Iraq war.

Sir John Scarlett, who retired as Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service on November 1, and Sir John Sawers, his successor, are among 20 top advisers, diplomats and military figures required to attend.

Sir John was chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee which was responsible for the Government dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, published in September 2002, prior to the invasion of Iraq in March the following year.

Posted on Monday, November 16, 2009 at 8:21 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Napoleon's hair on display in London

Source: History Today (11-16-09)

Last Thursday, Sir John Soane’s Museum in London announced that a gold mourning-ring belonging to Soane and containing a lock of Napoleon’s hair had been returned to the museum. The museum had previously tried to acquire the ring at an auction held by Christie’s in June. At the time, however, the museum was the under-bidder. With the support of The Art Fund and private donors the museum has now successfully purchased the ring for £41,000.

The ring originally belonged to Sir John Soane and was allegedly one of his most treasured private possessions. It featured on his will among the items to be kept ‘as heir looms in my family’. However, it eventually passed out of the family’s ownership and was deemed lost. When it went on sale in June, it was the first time that the museum had news of its whereabouts since Soane’s death in 1837.

The ring is hallmarked London 1822, the year after Napoleon’s death. It contains a lock of plaited brown hair, which was given to Sir John by Elizabeth Balcombe, the daughter of an official on St Helena who became close friends with the Emperor.

Posted on Monday, November 16, 2009 at 6:13 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Indian heroine's letter unearthed

Source: BBC (11-16-09)

A previously undiscovered letter written by one of India's best known female rebels against British colonial rule has been found by academics.

The letter was written by Lakshmibai, Rani of Jhansi, shortly before the Indian mutiny - or first war of independence - in 1857.

It has been found in London in the archives of the British Library.

Posted on Monday, November 16, 2009 at 6:06 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Rwanda genocide ruling overturned

Source: BBC (11-16-09)

The UN tribunal hearing cases from the 1994 Rwandan genocide has freed a man who had been sentenced to 22 years.

Protais Zigiranyirazo, the brother-in-law of ex-Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, had been found guilty of organising a massacre of 1,000 people.

But the appeals court judge said there had been serious errors in his trial and his conviction in 2008 violated "the most basic principles of justice".

Reporters say Mr Zigiranyirazo looked stunned and relieved by the ruling.

Posted on Monday, November 16, 2009 at 6:00 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Where have all the protests gone? US students in limbo

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-16-09)

When Hemnecher Amen, a student, joined a protest outside the White House recently, it was the latest visible opposition here to US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hardly anyone took any notice.

With the US military several years into two faraway wars, American students like Amen are taking to the streets less often - and to less effect - than their Vietnam-era predecessors who were the vanguard of the anti-war movement in the 1960s and early 1970s.

The economic and academic pressures on today's youth, intimidation by the authorities, online distractions and conflicted views about the "good" war in Afghanistan, not to mention other causes such as health care and slashed school budgets clawing for attention, have conspired to snuff out anti-war activism on campus, experts and students say.

Posted on Monday, November 16, 2009 at 5:56 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Benito Mussolini regarded Adolf Hitler as a 'sentimentalist'

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-16-09)

Benito Mussolini regarded Adolf Hitler as a teary-eyed "sentimentalist" but was jealous of the Nazi dictator's power and fame, diaries written by the Italian leader's mistress reveal.

Claretta Petacci's journals, which will be published this week, describe a meeting he had with the German leader in 1938 after British prime minister Neville Chamberlain agreed to Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland.

The diaries also show Mussolini was irritated by being regarded as a junior partner to Hitler, maintaining that his fascism and anti-Semitism dated back to the 1920s, before Hitler rose to prominence.

The book, Secret Mussolini, contains extracts from Petacci's diaries written between 1932 and 1938.

Posted on Monday, November 16, 2009 at 5:54 PM | Comments (0) | Top

How the Nazis tried to take Christ out of Christmas

Source: The Times (UK) (11-17-09)

For the perfect Nazi Christmas you had to hang glittering swastikas and toy grenades from the pine tree in the living room and, in your freshly pressed uniform, belt out carols urging German women to make babies for the Führer rather than worship the Jewish Baby Jesus. Then came the moment to light the pagan candle-holders — hand-made by labourers at Dachau.

Hitler’s dream of a 1,000-year Reich came to an end long before the world was subjected to 1,000 of his Christmases but an exhibition in Cologne is highlighting how the Nazis, in particular Heinrich Himmler, tried to take Christ out of Christmas.

The Nazi version — removing lines about Christ and inserting a paean to snowy fields — remained in some songbooks and, outside churchgoing families, is the version sung by many Germans today. The same goes for carols referring to Virgin Birth and lullabies that invoke the Baby Jesus. The rewriting was supervised by the chief Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, who had the brief of changing the German calendar. Christmas was to be merged into a Julfest, a celebration of the winter solstice of light and of oneness with nature. It drew on pagan traditions and tried to squeeze religion out.

The plan was to break the emotional power of the Church. The star from the Christmas tree was replaced with a sun in case it could be interpreted as a Star of David, or if red, as a Bolshevik symbol. The name for the Christmas tree, Christbaum, was usurped in the press by fir tree, light tree or Jultree. The point of the Julfest was to remember Germanic ancestors and soldiers, although most Germans did their best, discreetly, to keep Christmas religious.

Posted on Monday, November 16, 2009 at 5:51 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Palin: I Can't Be Blamed for GOP Losing Presidency in 2008

Source: Fox News (11-16-09)

Sarah Palin said she thinks the Republican ticket lost the 2008 presidential election because Americans were looking for change, and not because she undermined the campaign or was unprepared for the vice presidential seat.

In an interview with Oprah Winfrey that aired Monday, Palin said the economy tanked under a Republican administration and people wanted to try a different path.

As for her daughter's pregnancy, Palin described to Oprah the handling of the news that Bristol Palin was pregnant, saying that the then-17-year-old Bristol was embarrassed to see her pregnancy on the news. Palin said she tried to console Bristol and thought the campaign botched the message management on the pregnancy and thought that the realism of the situation should have been the message that shone through.

Posted on Monday, November 16, 2009 at 5:46 PM | Comments (2) | Top

'Forgotten Australians' get apology

Source: CNN (11-16-09)

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd formally apologized on Monday to thousands of adults who, as impoverished British children, were brought to Australia with the promise of a better life but found abuse and forced labor.

The so-called Forgotten Australians -- children who came from British families struggling with severe poverty or from institutions in the UK -- were brought to Australia in a program that ended 40 years ago.

The program scarred generations of children who were placed in state institutions and orphanages. They later told of being kept in brutal conditions, being physically abused and being forced to work on farms.

Posted on Monday, November 16, 2009 at 5:43 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Signs of man, Ice Age beast found together in Mexico

Source: USA Today (11-9-09)

Scientists have found evidence that cavemen near the U.S.-Mexican border were butchering gomphotheres, elephant-like beasts from the Ice Age that had been believed to be nearly extinct in North America by the time humans appeared there.

Researchers from the University of Arizona and Mexico's anthropology institute say they found the bones of two young gomphotheres — along with blades, a scraping tool and stone chips from making spear tips — at an 11,000-year-old site in Mexico's Sonora state.

The finding adds fuel to a debate over whether overhunting by humans helped drive prehistoric animals such as mastodons, North American horses and gomphotheres into extinction, said Vance Holliday, a University of Arizona archaeologist on the team.

Posted on Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 5:18 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Human bones found at Saanich construction site may be 1,000 years old (Canada)

Source: Times Colonist (Canada) (11-9-09)

Bones found at a Saanich lot where a new home is being built are believed to be the 1,000-year-old remains of an 18-year-old aboriginal person, but police say it is also possible the bones are from several individuals.

The discovery began with a false alarm when on Nov. 3, a dog nosing around at the construction site pulled out a bone from loosened earth where excavators had been working. Construction was stopped at that point and is still on hold. Saanich police took the bone to the Royal B.C. Museum where it was determined to be a rib bone of a cow that had likely died in the early 1900s.

An archaeologist reviewed the site and the next day three more bones were unearthed. They were also examined.

The Provincial Archaeology Branch is working closely with police to confirm the bones’ heritge and whether more bones may be at the site.

Posted on Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 5:09 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Search for Plant in WV Yields Rare Civil War Find

Source: WHSV (11-11-09)

A search for paw paws near Fort Boreman Historical Park has uncovered a rare artifact: a stone bearing the carved name of a Civil War soldier.

A search for paw paws near Fort Boreman Historical Park has uncovered a rare artifact: a stone bearing the carved name of a Civil War soldier.

Civil War historians Brian Kesterson and Terry McVey found the stone October 26.

During the war, Fort Boreman was a Union encampment.

Kesterson says the inscription "A.P. Jones 1861" was carved into the stone, along with a soldier on a horse that indicated Jones was a member of a cavalry unit.

Posted on Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 4:58 PM | Comments (0) | Top

A return to glory

Source: The Boston Globe (11-15-09)

The latest restoration of USS Constitution is undoing historically incorrect changes, bringing the ship ever closer to its 1812 splendor.

The only living veteran of the War of 1812” -- as USS Constitution Commander William Bullard described the old warship when he turned over his post this summer -- is having a makeover. Actually, “Old Ironsides” has gone through many looks since its launch 212 years ago. Some, such as the two-story barnlike structure built on its upper deck in 1882 and used for offices, were far removed from the iconic appearance attached to the ship today.

Restoration efforts beginning in the late 1920s have helped Constitution regain its look and dignity. In the mid-1990s, work restored the ship’s structural integrity, enabling it to sail under its own power for the first time in 116 years. The current three-year rehabilitation, which ends next year, will have similarly dramatic results. “When we’re done, Constitution will look as close to her 1812 configuration as it has since 1927,” says Richard Whelan, director of the Naval History and Heritage Command Detachment Boston, which oversees the ship’s maintenance.

Posted on Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 4:55 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Statue of Sir Tasker is unveiled (Wales)

Source: BBC (11-15-09)

A statue honouring the late Victoria Cross holder and former Welsh Rugby Union president Sir Tasker Watkins has been unveiled by his daughter.

The 9ft (2.7m) bronze sculpture takes pride of place on the walkway leading into the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff.

Lady Mair Griffith-Williams performed the ceremony in front of a distinguished audience.

Sir Tasker, whose wartime bravery earned him the Victoria Cross at the age of 25 in 1944, died two years ago.

Posted on Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 4:48 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Glencoe Massacre orders displayed (Scotland)

Source: BBC (11-15-09)

A 300-year-old document which led to one of the most infamous episodes in Scottish history is to go on display.

The signed order for the Massacre of Glencoe will form the centrepiece of an exhibition to mark the end of the Year of Homecoming.

It will be among nine cultural treasures which will be displayed in the National Library of Scotland from this week.

Thirty eight members of the MacDonald clan were killed in the massacre.

Posted on Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 4:44 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Serbian Orthodox patriarch dies

Source: BBC (11-15-09)

The head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Pavle, has died in Belgrade, the Church has announced.

The patriarch, 95, became leader of the Church in 1990. He was admitted to the city's military hospital two years ago.

Though he reportedly suffered from heart and lung conditions, the Church did not specify the cause of death.

Posted on Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 4:37 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Denholm Elliott PoW Shakespeare book to be auctioned

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-15-09)

The family of the actor Denholm Elliott is auctioning an archive of his memorabilia including a book of Shakespeare’s plays sent to him at a prisoner of war camp in Germany during the Second World War.

Elliott first developed an interest in acting while an RAF prisoner of war when he read and re-read the book sent to the camp in Selesia by the Red Cross.

He staged amateur dramatics and on his release he pursued an acting career in London before making his film debut in 1949.

Four Plays Of Shakespeare is among the memorabilia from his family expected to fetch more than £15,000 at auction in London. The book still carries the distinctive prison camp stamp, Stalag VIII B.

Posted on Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 4:32 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Giuliani: Obama Repeating 'Mistake of History' With Sept. 11 Trial Decision

Source: Fox News (11-15-09)

The mayor who oversaw rescue efforts in the wake of the attacks on lower Manhattan tells 'Fox News Sunday' the president is only granting the 'wish' of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad at the expense of the American people and that the conspirators should be tried in a military tribunal.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani accused the Obama administration of "repeating the mistake of history" by bringing the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks and his accomplices to New York for a civilian trial, saying the administration has definitively reverted to a "pre-9/11 approach."

Giuliani said the biggest problem is that the United States is treating terrorists as it did after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which was followed by a string of other terrorist attacks on Americans overseas and finally by the Sept. 11 massacre.

Posted on Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 4:27 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Army Will Search for More WWII Bombs at Orlando School

Source: Fox News (11-15-09)

ORLANDO, Fla. — The Army Corps of Engineers will be returning to an Orlando middle school to search for World War II explosives that might be buried there.

The federal agency will inspect part of the Odyssey Middle School campus where 15 portable classrooms are being removed because of declining enrollment. Corps officials hadn't been able to search that area with metal detectors and other bomb finding technology before.

More than 400 pounds of World War II-era bombs and munitions were unearthed from the grounds around the middle school over the winter holidays last year. Part of the school grounds had been used by the Army in the 1940s to train bombardiers for combat.

Posted on Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 2:39 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Sweden Returns 22 Looted Human Skulls to Hawaii

Source: Fox News (11-14-09)

STOCKHOLM — With a solemn ceremony in Stockholm's antiquities museum, Sweden on Saturday marked the return of 22 skulls looted from a native Hawaiian community mainly in the 17th century.

The symbolic ceremony — attended by guests from Hawaii and the Nordic countries' own indigenous Sami population — was part of Sweden's increased efforts to return indigenous remains collected by scientists across the world in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The Swedish government in 2005 ordered its museums to search through their collections, and has since returned more than 20 human remains, mainly to Australia.

The Hawaiian skulls had been returned privately earlier Saturday so that the Hawaiian delegates could perform a ritual according to traditional customs.

Museum director Lars Amreus said he hoped the return would help "fulfill the spiritual circle" of those whose graves had been violated by the Swedish scientists.

"We know that they were collected, although by today's standards: they were looted," Amreus said.

Posted on Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 2:38 PM | Comments (0) | Top

How America Backs Pakistani Spies

Source: The Daily Beast (11-15-09)

The CIA has given hundreds of millions of dollars to support Pakistan's spy network since the September 11 attacks, contributing as much as a third of the foreign agency's annual budget, the Los Angeles Times reported Sunday. Additionally, a secret State Department program pays Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency tens of millions of dollars for capturing or killing wanted militants, officials tell the newspaper. All of this money has some in the U.S. government concerned because of fears that the ISI also supports Taliban extremists. "There really are two ISIs," a former CIA operative said. "On the counterterrorism side, those guys were in lock-step with us," the former operative said. "And then there was the 'long-beard' side. Those are the ones who created the Taliban..."

Posted on Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 2:36 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Native American History Month

Source: DVIDS (11-14-09)

BAGHDAD – The contributions of Native Americans to American history, as well as the military, are quintessentially, well, American.

November marks Native American History Month and is intended to celebrate and commemorate the rich culture of the various Indian nations, said Sgt. 1st Class Tamatha Denton, from New York.

"The theme for this year is 'Understanding American Indian Heritage Now and Then,'" she said. "We're touching on military service all the way back from the Revolutionary War to the global war on terrorism."

This year observance for Multi-National Division Baghdad Soldiers, here, will have storytellers relating the history of Native American military service as well as traditional foods. Stories will include the famous code talkers of World War II, whose secret code, transmitted in the Navajo language, confounded the Japanese and was never decoded. Also touched upon will be more modern heroes such as Spc. Lori Piestewa, who was the first Native American woman to die in combat when her convoy came under attack outside Nasiriyah during the opening month of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003.

The participation of Native Americans in the U.S. military is long and storied, with 25 Medal of Honor winners, Denton explained.

"Their involvement in U.S. military service is higher per capita than any other ethnic group in the United States," she said. "That speaks volumes."

Posted on Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 2:29 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Forest People May Lose Home in Kenyan Plan

Source: NYT (11-14-09)

MARASHONI, Kenya — With the stroke of a pen, the last of Kenya’s honey hunters may soon be homeless.

Since time immemorial, the Ogiek have been Kenya’s traditional forest dwellers. They have stalked antelope with homemade bows, made medicine from leaves and trapped bees to produce honey, the golden elixir of the woods. They have struggled to survive the press of modernity, and many times they have been persecuted, driven from their forests and belittled as “dorobo,” a word meaning roughly people with no cattle. Somehow, they have always managed to survive.

Now, though, the little-known Ogiek, among East Africa’s last bona fide hunters and gatherers, face their gravest test yet. The Kenyan government is gearing up to evict tens of thousands of settlers, illegal or not, from the Mau Forest, the Ogiek’s ancestral home and a critical water source for this entire country. The question is: Will the few thousand remaining Ogiek be given a reprieve or given the boot?

“Tell Obama and his men to help us,” pleaded Daniel M. Kobei, an Ogiek leader, who still seems almost stunned that the Ogiek may have to leave a forest they have battled for decades to conserve. “It’s not that we’re special, but this forest is our home.”...

... To the Ogiek, all this is sadly familiar. Though they are among the oldest communities in East Africa, many were marched off their land by British colonists in the 1930s and herded into “native reserves” where countless Ogiek died from diseases they had no natural resistance to, like malaria. The British felled their forests and planted pine trees, good for commercial logging, though in the Ogiek’s eyes, for little else.

The persecution continued after Kenya’s independence in 1963, with the Kenyan police burning down Ogiek huts to drive the people out of the woods. In the 1990s, the government began handing out thousands of acres in the Mau Forest to political friends, which squeezed the Ogiek even further. The Ogiek sued in Kenyan courts, and the Ford Foundation helped pay their legal bills, but their forest continued to melt away...

Posted on Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 2:19 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Unusual Partners Study Divisive Jerusalem Site

Source: NYT (11-14-09)

JERUSALEM — At the heart of this contested city, the holy site known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary, has become, for many, the epicenter of the conflict between Israel, the Palestinians and the wider Muslim world.

The mere mention of the place stirs passions and memories of centuries of bloodshed. Its alternative names evoke the depth of religious devotion and the competing claims.

Many of those contradictions are encapsulated in a new book, “Where Heaven and Earth Meet: Jerusalem’s Sacred Esplanade,” to be published here on Monday. The book is a collection of essays by renowned scholars on the history, archaeology, aesthetics and politics of the place that Jews revere as the location of their two ancient temples, and that now houses the Al Aksa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam.

The illustrated 400-page book, in English, appears at a time of heightened tensions over the coveted site. Most extraordinarily, its authors and co-sponsors include Israeli and Palestinian experts and institutions, giving an unfettered platform to Muslims, Christians and Jews...

... Yet the board of Al-Quds University recently decided to boycott Israeli academic institutions to protest Israel’s policies and because peace talks have stalled.

Mr. Abu Sway said that projects already under way were allowed to be completed, and that the Palestinian chapters of the book were submitted long before the boycott took hold.

The book was years in the making and required exceptional tact on the part of the co-editors, Oleg Grabar of Princeton University, and Benjamin Kedar of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Mr. Kedar came up with the neutral term “sacred esplanade” in the title. “It was the compromise,” he said. “It should be acceptable to all.”

Israel captured East Jerusalem, including the Old City, formerly controlled by Jordan, in the 1967 war. Since then, a fragile status quo has been preserved at the compound. The civil administration remains in the hands of the Waqf, the Muslim religious endowment, while overall security is the responsibility of the Israeli police. Israel claims sovereignty over all of Jerusalem, while the Palestinians demand that the eastern part be recognized as the capital of a future independent state. ..

Posted on Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 2:11 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Portrait of 9/11 'Jackal' Emerges as He Awaits Trial

Source: NYT (11-14-09)

WASHINGTON — Not long after he was rousted from bed and seized in a predawn raid in Pakistan in March 2003, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed gave his captors two demands: He wanted a lawyer, and he wanted to be taken to New York.

After a nearly seven-year odyssey that took him to secret Central Intelligence Agency jails in Europe and an American military prison in Cuba, Mr. Mohammed is finally likely to get his wish.

He will be the most senior leader of Al Qaeda to date held to account for the mass murder of nearly 3,000 Americans, facing trial in Manhattan while his boss, Osama bin Laden, continues to elude a worldwide dragnet.

Yet the boastful, calculating and fiercely independent Mr. Mohammed has never neatly fit the mold of Qaeda chieftain. He has little use for the high-minded moralizing of some of his associates, and for years before the Sept. 11 attacks, he refused to swear an oath of loyalty to Mr. bin Laden — figuring that if the Qaeda leader canceled the Sept. 11 plot, he would not have to obey the order.

A detailed portrait of the life and worldview of Mr. Mohammed, 44, has emerged in the years since his capture, filled in by declassified C.I.A. documents, interrogation transcripts, the report of the Sept. 11 commission and his own testimony at a military tribunal. And the most significant terrorism trial in American history will be a grand stage for a man who describes himself as a “jackal,” consumed with a zeal for perpetual battle against the United States...

... It was not until the mid-1990s that American counterterrorism experts began to understand Mr. Mohammed’s significance to the cause of global jihad, after a thwarted plot to blow up 12 American commercial aircraft in midair. The so-called Bojinka plot, hatched in a Manila apartment with his nephew, the World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef, was Mr. Mohammed’s first inspiration for using airliners as ballistic missiles against civilian targets, according to the 9/11 commission report and recently declassified C.I.A. documents.

In 1996, Mr. Mohammed traveled to Afghanistan to sell Mr. bin Laden on an idea: simultaneously hijacking 10 aircraft and flying them into different prominent civilian targets in the United States. He would be on the one plane not to crash, and after the plane landed would emerge and deliver a speech condemning American policy on Israel...

Posted on Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 2:08 PM | Comments (0) | Top

U.S. Soldiers Among First to Tour Ancient Iraqi Temple

Source: Fox News (11-14-09)

The Ziggurat of Ur has stood for 4,000 years in the desert near Nasiriyah in southeastern Iraq, but this unique historical site had been almost completely off limits to visitors under Saddam Hussein.

All that has changed since the old regime was overthrown in 2003, and now, U.S. soldiers are some of the site's most receptive visitors.

The temple-pyramid is part of the ruins of an ancient Sumerian city.

Dhair Muhsen, an Iraqi tour guide, said Hussein made it difficult for tourists to visit the sites, setting up strict checkpoints with Iraqi soldiers and telling people they couldn't take pictures.

The majority of people who visit the site now are U.S. soldiers, who are bussed over to the site from nearby Camp Adder.

Posted on Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 2:04 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Venice Mourns Flight of Residents From City's Heart

Source: NYT (11-14-09)

VENICE — At high noon on Saturday, a gondola bearing a hot-pink plywood coffin decked with yellow flowers made its way down the Grand Canal. Onlookers watched from the shore and shouted greetings from the Rialto Bridge before the boat alighted nearby in front of the Venice city hall.

Part photo opportunity, part political theater, the spectacle was the centerpiece of a fake funeral for the city of Venice. A group of prankster-provocateurs organized it to protest the fact that the number of residents in Venice’s historic center has dropped below 60,000, down from 74,000 in 1993, as rising rents and hordes of tourists have pushed thousands to the mainland.

As a result, locals feel like an endangered species. “We’re going to turn into a city of ghosts if something isn’t done soon,” said Matteo Secchi, a local hotelier and a spokesman for Venessia, the group that organized the funeral. “In 30 years there might be zero Venetians left.”

Dressed in black the day before the funeral, Mr. Secchi, 40, was standing near a pharmacy with an electronic population ticker in the window. It read 59,992.

The city, however, places the number at 60,025 for Venice proper, plus another 30,000 in the surrounding islands. In a statement, Venice’s housing commissioner, Mara Rumiz, compared the stunt to “a funeral for a father who is still alive, which in general brings a bit of bad luck.” Still, it is a long way down from 108,300 residents in 1971. And it pales in comparison with the 18 million tourists who visit Venice each year.

Some local residents think the funeral is overdue. “They came too late,” said Massimo Zane, 52, as he stood at his fish stand in the Rialto market. “We’re already dead.”

When his father opened the stand 40 years ago, “we had rows of people lined up two deep,” he said. Not so today. “There are just a few retired people here. I’m sorry for them. Life is expensive.”

Posted on Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 2:02 PM | Comments (0) | Top

How Old Is Old Enough? A Look at When Children are Considered Adults

Source: NYT (11-14-09)

THIS past week the Supreme Court heard arguments about whether children should ever be sentenced to life without parole for crimes that don’t involve murder.

At the heart of the argument lies a vexing question: When should a person be treated as an adult?

The answer, generally, is 18 — the age when the United States, and the rest of the world, considers young people capable of accepting responsibility for their actions. But there are countless deviations from this benchmark, both around the world (the bar mitzvah, for instance), and within the United States...

... And if you think separating the men from the boys (or the women from the girls) is difficult today, tracing the history of America’s conception of childhood just complicates things further.

In the 19th century, teenagers were expected to raise their own children and work in the fields. This was true even though 19th-century teenagers were physically and intellectually less advanced than teenagers today. Thanks to better nutrition and more formal schooling, today’s children generally reach puberty earlier and are, at least in theory, more informed about the world around them.

In other words, the only thing that is consistent about our notions of when a child becomes an adult is our inconsistency, says Steven Mintz, a historian at Columbia University...

... In Florida, for instance, the state got tough on teenage criminals when juvenile crime rates jumped during the 1990s, threatening not only residents and visitors, but Florida’s bedrock tourism industry itself. Two such juvenile offenders, one who raped a woman when he was 13, and another who committed armed robbery at 16, brought the appeals heard by the Supreme Court last week...

... Over the years attempts have been made to align these various ages of majority. The voting age was lowered during the Vietnam War, for example, largely because Americans were uncomfortable with a democracy that forced 18-year-olds to die for their country but denied them suffrage...

Posted on Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 1:54 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Historian rules out skull as Ned Kelly's (Australia)

Source: The Border Mail (AU) (11-14-09)

BEECHWORTH’S noted Ned Kelly historian Ian Jones says the skull handed to Victorian authorities for DNA authentication this week is not likely the famous bushranger’s.

Mr Jones said the skull was likely Ernest Knox’s, who was executed at Old Melbourne Gaol 14 years after Kelly.

“His initials are EK (the same as Edward Kelly) and it appears the grave that was dug up in 1929 as Ned Kelly’s grave was Ernest Knox’s,” Mr Jones said.

Mr Jones first saw the skull in 1972.

He said the facial features seemed too long and that a cast of the skull taken for reconstruction was very similar to the face of Knox.

And Mr Jones said Kelly’s true skull would have to be in two pieces.

That was unlike the one West Australian man Tom Baxter has presented to authorities.

“Ned’s skull has to be in two pieces because they, doctors and students, removed his head, and took his body apart and his organs out after the execution,” Mr Jones said.

“It was reported at the time that they were going to be able to tell us all about the intelligence of this famous bushranger.

“The only reason a group like that would remove the head is to examine the brain and unless you saw the skull in half the only way you can get the brain out is a teaspoon, which is not going to be much good for research.”

Mr Jones said he still held out hope Kelly’s skull would one day be found.

Posted on Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 1:42 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Rare WWII Japanese doll finds home in Kansas

Source: Kansas City (11-13-09)

When Bob Enright first showed Kevin Corbett a small doll a sailor took off a Japanese kamikaze pilot whose plane struck a ship in World War II, he knew it was special.

“Bob said people had given him advice, saying sell the doll,” Corbett said. “He asked me what I thought and I told him not to listen to anyone; it was something special, something culturally significant.” ...

... The next day, he received a reply from Ellen Schattschneider, who teaches anthropology at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. She has done extensive research on the dolls, which are called mascot dolls—masukotto ningyo in Japanese—and has written a book, “Facing the Dead: Japan and its Dolls in the Mirror of War.”

Schattschneider’s interest in the dolls developed while researching special ceremonies in northeastern Japan, in which the soul of an unmarried person who has died is married, in effect, to a beautiful bride doll.

On her Web site, www.pacificwrecks.com/history/doll/, she wrote that mascot dolls mayhave developed from amulets carried by samurai.

“This appears to be an example of the widespread belief in Japan that dolls have a kind of soul (tamashi) and can carry the identity or essence of a person who has made or owned them,” she said.

By World War II, Japanese women and girls made small dolls for soldiers out of scraps of kimono or other cloth. The dolls were thought to bring soldiers good luck.

The doll in Corbett’s possession was given to a kamikaze or tokkotai soldier who flew planes into U.S. Navy ships.

Schattschneider said the dolls “were given to keep the kamikaze company during their terribly lonely final journeys.”

The dolls are rare because many were destroyed in the suicide missions. There is one other known doll in the United States and a handful in Japan.

Posted on Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 1:23 PM | Comments (0) | Top

9/11 Trial Poses Unparalleled Legal Obstacles

Source: NYT (11-13-09)

WASHINGTON — How do you defend one of the most notorious terrorist figures in history?

One step, legal analysts say, may be to ask for a change of venue.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s lawyers, whoever they are, will no doubt question whether he can get a fair trial from a jury sitting, as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. noted, in a Manhattan courthouse “just blocks away from where the Twin Towers once stood.”

Then will come the inevitable challenges to interrogation methods used on Mr. Mohammed during more than six years in detention. The government has acknowledged waterboarding him 183 times to extract information about the Sept. 11 attacks, which he eventually admitted planning.

Finally, if Mr. Mohammed is convicted, defense lawyers will most likely plead for jurors in New York, historically more cautious about capital punishment than much of the rest of country, to spare the sentence of execution and send him to prison for the rest of his life instead...

... Mr. Mohammed and his four co-defendants in military custody have admitted their active involvement in plotting the Sept. 11 attacks and have boasted of their success in killing 3,000 people.

Once the Justice Department brings formal terrorism charges against him, Mr. Mohammed could seek to enter a guilty plea, just as he has tried to do in military custody.

But legal analysts were not convinced that he would go that route and said that he might instead seek to martyr himself in the eyes of Muslim extremists through a grand and lengthy trial...

Posted on Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 1:58 AM | Comments (0) | Top

The Army opens a broad new probe into Arlington

Source: Salon (11-13-09)

In the wake of a Salon investigation, the Army Friday announced a broad investigation into “lost accountability” at some graves at Arlington National Cemetery, along with shoddy record keeping and other issues at the cemetery.

Army Secretary John McHugh ordered the inquiry after a series of articles in Salon showed the cemetery found an unknown casket in a grave in 2003, covered it up with dirt and quietly walked away, and also buried another service member in the wrong plot in 2008 on top of a soldier already in that grave. In that second case, the cemetery also failed to alert family members when they dug up and moved remains to fix the problem. The Salon reports suggested these kinds of errors could be widespread, since the cemetery has failed to implement a computer system to track burials as other cemeteries have, despite nearly a decade of work and nearly $6 million spent on the effort.

“As the final resting place of our nation’s heroes, any questions about the integrity or accountability of (Arlington’s) operations should be examined in a manner befitting their service and sacrifice,” McHugh said in a statement. He directed the Army inspector general to spearhead this new inquiry.

The Army on Friday also released the results of a previous inquiry sparked by Salon’s first report on the unknown casket quietly covered up in 2003. The Army says “non-invasive geophysical analysis … strongly suggest[s]” that the unknown casket is either a husband or a wife who died years apart that should have been buried together in a nearby grave. (Spouses are stacked together in one grave at Arlington.)...

Posted on Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 12:55 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Google, Authors, Publishers Offer Revised Book Pact

Source: WSJ (11-14-09)

Google Inc. and two author and publisher groups submitted a narrower version of a legal settlement that would allow Google to distribute millions of digital books online, hoping to mollify the Justice Department and other critics who blasted the original settlement as overly broad and anticompetitive.

The revised settlement will only cover books that were either registered with the U.S. Copyright Office or published in the U.K., Australia, or Canada.

The new agreement also addresses concerns about orphan works, or books whose right holders are unknown, while keeping them in the settlement. The fixes include limiting what is done with the revenue generated from those works and appointing an independent fiduciary to look out for the interests of those rights holders.

Posted on Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 8:31 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Newsweek: The Surprising Lessons of Vietnam

Source: Newsweek (11-16-09)

Stanley Karnow is the author of Vietnam: A History, generally regarded as the standard popular account of the Vietnam War. This past summer, Karnow, 84, picked up the phone to hear the voice of an old friend, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. The two men had first met when Holbrooke was a young Foreign Service officer in Vietnam in the mid-1960s and Karnow was a reporter covering the war. Holbrooke, who is now the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, was calling from Kabul. The two friends chatted for a while, then Holbrooke said, "Let me pass you to General McChrystal." Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, came on the line. His question was simple but pregnant: "Is there anything we learned in Vietnam that we can apply to Afghanistan?" Karnow's reply was just as simple: "The main thing I learned is that we never should have been there in the first place."

Words of wisdom, but not all that useful to General McChrystal. Like it or not, he is already in Afghanistan, along with roughly 68,000 American and 35,000 European troops. McChrystal has been charged by President Obama with presenting a strategy for victory, generally defined as standing up the Afghan Army to beat back the Taliban and deny sanctuary to Al Qaeda. An avid reader of history, McChrystal has read Karnow's book, but he has also read many others. One that he has read—and reread—is a 1999 book called A Better War, written by Lewis Sorley, a retired Army lieutenant colonel. Sorley argues that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the United States could have won in Vietnam—if only the U.S. Congress hadn't cut off military aid to South Vietnam.

Not surprisingly, the Sorley book is getting a lot of attention at the upper levels of the Pentagon and at McChrystal's headquarters in Kabul. Told that NEWSWEEK was looking into the parallels between the Sorley book and General McChrystal's situation in Afghanistan, a senior Marine general exclaimed, "You're on to something there!" (Like other senior military officials contacted by NEWSWEEK, the general declined to be quoted praising a book that argues, though not in so many words, that the military was stabbed in the back by its civilian leaders.)

Posted on Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 8:29 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Arms dealer involved in the Iran-Contra scandal returns, now selling his image

Source: NYT (11-13-09)

CAIRO

He was a small man, with a very neatly trimmed black mustache, seated in a corner, leaning forward on his walking stick, smiling, sipping Scotch from a glass that seemed too large for his frail hands. His face brightened with a smile as he reminisced about the dictator’s wife who once locked herself in the bathroom of his private jet and the star-studded, five-day extravaganza he threw for his 50th birthday.

Oh, the memories of a fallen billionaire arms trader.

“My personal philosophy is I don’t regret matters that happen, good or bad,” said the man, Adnan M. Khashoggi, who is 74 years old and these days prefers to be remembered as “Mr. Fix It,” rather than the arms dealer involved in the Iran-Contra scandal. “I just accept this as my destiny. It’s a personal attitude.”

Mr. Khashoggi has been linked to — but never convicted in — almost every major scandal of the late 20th century: Wedtech, B.C.C.I., the indictment of the Marcoses in the Philippines, as well as Iran-Contra. He is a favorite of conspiracy buffs, who have connected him to such things as the death of Princess Diana (her boyfriend at the time, Dodi al-Fayed, was his nephew) and to voting irregularities in Florida in the 2000 presidential election (a former employee was a local election official).

Now, he is trying to make a comeback. After a lifetime spent using his connections to make deals for himself, he is working as a consultant, selling his connections.

Instead of commissions he gets “incentive pay.” He flies commercial now (at his clients’ expense), which is a big change for a man who once had his own DC-8, and he lives in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the only property he still owned after the collapse of his empire. But he is far from broke, or at least manages to appear far from broke, which has always been the magic of Mr. Khashoggi.

“It is all part of the mechanism for impressing people, with your talk, with your views and with your appearance,” he said of his once-profligate ways...

Posted on Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 8:20 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Obama Says U.S. Seeks to Build Stronger Ties to China

Source: NYT (11-13-09)

TOKYO — The United States is not threatened by a rising China, President Obama said Saturday, but will seek to strengthen its ties with Beijing even as it maintains close ties with traditional allies like Japan.

In a wide-ranging speech on his first trip to Asia as president, Mr. Obama drew on his own background to reassure the people of the fast-growing continent that even as the United States seemed preoccupied with conflicts in the Middle East and other regions, it was increasingly “a nation of the Pacific.”...

... “My own life is part of that story,” he said. “I am an American president who was born in Hawaii and lived in Indonesia as a boy. My sister Maya was born in Jakarta and later married a Chinese-Canadian. My mother spent nearly a decade working in the villages of Southeast Asia, helping women buy a sewing machine or an education that might give them a foothold in the world economy.”

“So,” he added, “the Pacific rim has helped shape my view of the world.” He even spoke of his first trip to Japan as a boy—“As a child, I was more focused on the matcha ice cream,” he said.

That drew laughs from the audience, which gave him a standing ovation both before and after his speech.

Posted on Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 7:57 PM | Comments (0) | Top

China Focuses on Territorial Issues as It Equates Tibet to U.S. Civil War South

Source: NYT (11-13-09)

BEIJING — The Chinese government had a special message for President Obama on Thursday: He is black, he admires Abraham Lincoln, so he, of all people, should sympathize with Beijing’s effort to prevent Tibet from seceding and sliding back into what it was before its liberation by Chinese troops: a feudalistic, slaveholding society headed by the Dalai Lama.

“He is a black president, and he understands the slavery abolition movement and Lincoln’s major significance for that movement,” Qin Gang, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said at a news conference.

Mr. Qin added: “Thus, on this issue we hope that President Obama, more than any other foreign leader, can better, more deeply grasp China’s stance on protecting national sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

For many Americans, Mr. Qin’s analogy might sound like a stretch, but it revealed which issues Chinese leaders see as among their top priorities, ones that Mr. Obama will no doubt have to grapple with after he arrives in China on Sunday for his first trip here.

While much attention will be focused on broad international issues like trade and currency values, climate change and the ailing world economy, questions of sovereignty and territory remain an obsession of Chinese foreign policy. Some scholars and analysts see this as an expression of an aggressive expansionism that will only deepen as China moves toward superpower status. Others argue that China is driven more by the need to recover territory wrested from it during the decades it was known as the Sick Man of Asia, when pieces of it were humiliatingly annexed by European powers and Japan...

Posted on Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 7:55 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Turkey Seeks Kurdish Reconciliation

Source: WSJ (11-14-09)

ANKARA -- Turkey's government laid out long-awaited plans Friday to reconcile with the country's large Kurdish minority and end a separatist war that has cost tens of thousands of lives, prompting the main opposition party to storm out of parliament in protest.

The heated debate was symbolic of the sensitivities of the Kurdish issue in Turkey, which has only recently begun to be debated openly and impartially.

Opponents accused the government of pandering to terrorists. Many also fear that its "democratic initiative" is part of a wider plan by the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, which has Islamist roots, to dismantle a secular, centralized state model in which the military for decades played a controlling role. Opponents see acknowledgement of Turkish military abuses against Kurds as an attempt to undermine the military.

Under the plan outlined Friday, Turkey would get a new constitution to replace the current one, which was drafted by a military junta in the early 1980s. Private broadcasting in the Kurdish language would be made legal, adding to the public Kurdish-language channel launched in January. The government would also establish an independent body to deal with complaints against the security forces. Villages given Turkish language names since the 1950s would get their former Kurdish names back.

Posted on Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 7:47 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Rare gold coin sparks legal row (UK)

Source: BBC (11-14-09)

The discovery of a rare 15th Century gold coin in Powys has triggered a legal row.

The coin, from the reign of Henry IV, was unearthed by contractor Shaun Bufton on 28 April while he was working on a new water pipeline in Newtown.

But archaeologists failed to return it to him.

Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust said it had made a mistake in not returning the coin and it regretted not having told him what was happening.

When it was minted in about 1400, Henry IV had just become king and Owain Glyndwr's rebellion was under way in Wales.

Posted on Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 6:20 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Unseen colour 3D film of Queen's Coronation to be broadcast for first time (UK)

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-11-09)

Unseen colour 3D newsreel of the Queen’s Coronation, which was lost in an archive for more than 50 years, is to be broadcast for the first time.

The 17-minute footage, thought to be the first in the world to be filmed in colour 3D, was discovered in a tin labelled “Royal Review 1953” in the British Film Institute (BFI).

It had been passed in the 1960s to BFI by Dixons, the electrical retailers, with a letter which said: “We give you this film for your safe keeping in the national archives.”

Posted on Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 6:11 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Anger at Stephen Fry's claims about Princess Margaret

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-13-09)

With thousands of followers on Twitter, the social networking website, Stephen Fry has come to be regarded as a modern oracle.

The actor and comedian has, however, upset friends of the late Princess Margaret by accusing her of anti-Semitism.

At the HarperCollins History Lecture at the Royal Institute of British Architects, Fry claimed that the Queen's sister had been shocked when he told her at a dinner party that he had Jewish ancestors. Fry, who is a great chum of the Prince of Wales, alleged that she expressed her horror by shouting to everybody else at her table: "He's a Jew. He's a Jew."

Posted on Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 6:08 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Australian officials to test Ned Kelly skull

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-13-09)

Ned Kelly, the infamous Australian bush ranger, may finally be able to rest in peace after a skull believed to belong to the outlaw was handed to authorities for forensic testing.

Kelly's skull has been missing ever since it was stolen from a display cabinet at the Old Melbourne Gaol in 1978, just yards from where Kelly was hanged in 1880 for killing a policeman. The crime went unsolved and the whereabouts of the skull became one of Australia's greatest mysteries.

Then, earlier this week on the 129th anniversary of Kelly's hanging, Tom Baxter, a farmer from Western Australia, delivered a skull to the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, claiming it was the same one that was stolen from the jail more than 30 years ago.

Posted on Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 6:06 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Thatcher death text sparks diplomatic flurry among Canadian Conservatives

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-13-09)

A text message reading "Thatcher has died" set off a diplomatic flurry among members of Canada's parliament at a black tie dinner this week, local media reported on Thursday.

Stephen Harper, Canada's conservative prime minister, was quickly informed that Baroness Thatcher, the 84-year-old former British Prime Minister, had passed away.

Upon learning the "news" via mobile or Blackberry at a soiree honouring Canadian military families on Tuesday, some 2,000 shocked Conservatives and their advisors reportedly huddled to discuss a reaction.

It turned out the message was sent by John Baird, the transport minister, from his home in Toronto to a person at the gala dinner to say that his beloved 16-year-old gray tabby cat, named for Lady Thatcher, had died.

Posted on Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 6:03 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Australia to say sorry to abused British child migrants

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-14-09)

An apology is to be made to the victims of child migration schemes who were shipped from Britain to Australia, where many suffered abuse and neglect.

On Monday, the Australian government will say sorry to the thousands of children deported there during the twentieth century.

Meanwhile, Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, will this week say he is to look into what can be done to make amends to all the children who were shipped to Australia, Canada and other former colonies, in schemes undertaken by successive governments up until 1967.

Posted on Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 5:58 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Bush Attorney General: 9/11 Trial Offers Jihadists Platform

Source: Fox News (11-14-09)

Michael Mukasey, the final attorney general in the Bush administration, defended military tribunals, asserting that they were created for this kind of case and noting that they were used during and after World War II.

Holder said he decided to seek justice against the suspects in federal court rather than a military tribunal because the attacks targeted civilians on U.S. soil. But Mukasey and other critics say the attack was an act of war that should be prosecuted in a military tribunal.

Mukasey said it's unlikely that Mohammed will be acquitted because of his confession and other evidence linking him to the attack. But he added that same evidence could present problems in federal court.

Posted on Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 5:54 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Some Fear Bush Administration Could Become Target in 9/11 Trial

Source: Fox News (11-14-09)

Some critics say a civilian trial -- instead of a military tribunal -- for self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his accomplices could end up targeting the Bush administration and its anti-terror policies.

One of those five defendants, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, has been at the center of the debate over those Bush-era polices, in particular the harsh interrogation techniques used on Mohammed and others in an effort to obtain information on Al Qaeda and any additional attacks.

Supporters of trying the detainees in military tribunals note that the tribunals have relaxed standards for presenting evidence and offer minimized risk of disclosing government anti-terror secrets.

Posted on Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 5:52 PM | Comments (0) | Top

JFK's last autograph nets big bucks at auction

Source: CNN (11-14-09)

What could be the last autograph signed by President Kennedy was sold recently at an auction of itmes linked to his assassination in Texas.

Kennedy reportedly signed the front page of the Dallas Morning News, which contained a photo of him and the first lady and a preview of their arrival that day in Dallas.

A Dallas woman handed the president the newspaper and he signed it for her, according to Heritage Auctions, the company that sold the item. The date of his assassination, which came about two hours later, was on the front page of that paper near his signature.

The newspaper was purchased by Joe Maddalena, president and owner of Profiles in History in Calabassas, California for $39,000.

Posted on Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 5:47 PM | Comments (0) | Top

9/11 family members welcome, criticize civilian trials

Source: CNN (11-13-09)

Some family members of 9/11 victims welcomed the announcement that five Guantanamo Bay detainees with alleged ties to the attacks will be tried in a New York civilian court, while others blasted the decision.

But others -- including members of the September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, some of whom spoke to reporters by phone on Friday -- said a civilian trial allows for transparency, noting that families of the victims could attend. Their access to a military trial would be more limited, they said.

Dozens of family members of 9/11 victims have signed a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, who announced the trial decision; President Obama; and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates opposing a civilian trial for the alleged plotters

Posted on Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 5:46 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Troubled vet journeys back to Vietnam -- this time to offer helping hand

Source: CNN (11-14-09)

He is a former Marine who has lived with battleground nightmares for 40 years and now plans a return to the land that haunts him.

But Kevin Roberts' decision is not fueled by remorse. Nor is it about healing a life defined by 13 stinging months in Vietnam. Rather, late-in-life altruism has led him to volunteer to build houses for poor families residing along Vietnam's Mekong River.

Next week, he'll pick up a hammer and saw for the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Work Project 2009, an annual weeklong affordable housing project led by the former president. Roberts will join a team of about 20 volunteers who will construct houses in Ke Sat village, just outside Hanoi, November 15-21.

Posted on Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 5:44 PM | Comments (0) | Top

AP: "Palin's book goes rogue on some facts"

Source: AP (11-14-09)

Sarah Palin's new book reprises familiar claims from the 2008 presidential campaign that haven't become any truer over time.

Ignoring substantial parts of her record if not the facts, she depicts herself as a frugal traveler on the taxpayer's dime, a reformer without ties to powerful interests and a politician roguishly indifferent to high ambition.

Palin goes adrift, at times, on more contemporary issues, too. She criticizes President Barack Obama for pushing through a bailout package that actually was achieved by his Republican predecessor George W. Bush — a package she seemed to support at the time.

Posted on Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 12:31 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Friday, November 13, 2009

Documents Show U.S. Officials Worried Mullah Omar Was Growing Closer to Bin Laden in 1998

Source: The National Security Archive (11-13-09)

Three years before al Qaeda's attacks on the United States on 9/11, U.S. officials detected an alarming shift in the ideological stance of Taliban leader Mullah Omar toward pan-Islamism – a change that portended a burgeoning alliance between the Afghan regime and Osama bin Laden. The report that Omar might be falling under bin Laden's "influence" is contained in a December 1998 U.S. Embassy cable from Islamabad, Pakistan, one of a number of recently declassified government documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive and published here today on the eighth anniversary of the Taliban's expulsion from Kabul.

The new documents provide other revealing insights into the inner workings of the notoriously opaque Taliban which underscore the challenges and potential opportunities that continue to confront U.S. policy-makers today. For example, while the organization in the late 1990s showed a troubling inclination toward radical Islamic thinking on issues beyond its usually more parochial concerns, it also displayed a pragmatic and even opportunistic side, recruiting troops from a variety of political perspectives including local communists. And although the documents describe Mullah Omar as highly authoritarian and adept at keeping his political rivals off-balance, the organization had evidenced a surprising diversity of viewpoints within its upper ranks, which suggested possible weak spots in the organization's control.

Posted on Friday, November 13, 2009 at 10:52 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Russian Orthodox and Catholic church may end 950-year rift

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-13-09)

Relations between the Vatican and the Russian Orthodox Church have been tense for centuries, but in a sign that relations are finally thawing, Archbishop Ilarion, who heads the Russian Orthodox Church’s foreign relations department, said that both sides wanted a meeting, although he emphasised that problems remained.

Ilarion spoke of a rapprochement under Pope Benedict XVI that would allow for a meeting with the new Russian Orthodox Patriarch, Kiril, who took up his office in February after the death of the previous patriarch.

“There have been visits at a high level,” said Illarion. “We are moving towards the moment when it will become possible to prepare a meeting between the Pope and the Moscow patriarch.”

He added that in recent years there had been “noticeable improvements” in relations between the two churches.

“The progress in relations between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church began after Benedict XVI became pope. He is…a person who does not aim to grow the Catholic Church in traditional Orthodox regions.”

Some observers had hinted a meeting between the two Church leaders was forthcoming, but many issues still stand in the way of bridging the split, which dates from 1054 when Patriarch of Constantinople was excommunicated from the Catholic Church.

The breach heralded the Great Schism that finally divided the Christian churches of East and West – which had long had political and theological differences, including the wording of the Nicene Creed – and led to the creation of the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church.

Posted on Friday, November 13, 2009 at 10:17 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Court Rules CIA Did Not Violate Valerie Plame's First Amendment Rights

Source: Truthout (11-13-09)

By now, most people can admit to the fact that former covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson had a decades long career with the spy agency before high-level officials in the Bush administration leaked her undercover status to reporters six years ago.

That is, most people except for Valerie Plame Wilson.

On Thursday, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, ruled that the CIA did not violate Wilson’s First Amendment rights when it refused to allow the former covert CIA operative to reveal that she worked for the agency prior to 2002 in her memoir, “Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House.”

The ruling means that a chunk of Wilson's memoir will remain classified and she is still barred from acknowledging that she was employed by the agency prior to January 2002.

Posted on Friday, November 13, 2009 at 10:16 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Politico reports that RNC's health plan has covered abortion since 1991

Source: Politico (11-13-09)

The Republican National Committee will no longer offer employees an insurance plan that covers abortion after POLITICO reported Thursday that the anti-abortion RNC's policy has covered the procedure since 1991.

"Money from our loyal donors should not be used for this purpose," Chairman Michael Steele said in a statement. "I don't know why this policy existed in the past, but it will not exist under my administration. Consider this issue settled."

Posted on Friday, November 13, 2009 at 9:37 PM | Comments (0) | Top

How the Nazis Stole Christmas

Source: Spiegel Online (11-13-09)

It all started innocently enough. Back in the mid-1970s, Rita Breuer began collecting old German Christmas ornaments after her husband expressed the desire for a good old-fashioned Christmas tree like his grandmother used to have. Breuer, who hails from the small town of Olpe, 60 kilometers from Cologne, scoured flea markets and raided friends' attics in the search for baubles and came to accumulate quite a collection which included not only tree ornaments, but also Advent calendars, cribs and Christmas cards.

But then something strange happened. Breuer, who was now being helped in her quest by her daughter Judith, came across more and more objects that didn't fit with the usual peaceful image of Christmas, lsuch as World War I-era miniature soldiers, bombs and hand grenades designed to hang on the tree. The Breuers started to get interested in how Christmas had been abused for propaganda purposes over the years, most blatantly by the Nazis. Their hobby turned into a full-fledged amateur research project.

Now, more than 30 years after Rita Breuer first began collecting Christmas knickknacks, selected objects from the family collection have gone on show at the National Socialism Documentation Center in Cologne. The exhibition, which looks at the history of Christmas and propaganda from the 19th century until the present day, focuses on how the Nazis misused Christmas for their own foul purposes and tried to turn it into a "Germanic" winter solstice festival.

Posted on Friday, November 13, 2009 at 9:07 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Germany's neighbors try to redeem their 1989 negativity

Source: Deutsche Welle (11-11-09)

Germans have often noted British tourists' World War II obsession with a mixture of bemusement and dismay. But recent revelations have shown that this preoccupation, usually expressed in the un-threatening confines of comedy, was also the British prime minister's deep personal phobia at the time of Germany's reunification.

While USA and, surprisingly, the Soviet Union, largely welcomed the moment of redemption and euphoria that ushered in the end of a black century, Germany's non-superpower neighbors were prey to old fears.

"It is still an uncomfortable thought," Professor Paul Nolte, who teaches history at the Free University in Berlin, told Deutsche Welle, "That something that Germans were so happy about, and that unified Europe, could have been rejected by our closest partners. We ask ourselves, 'How could anyone have been against it?' "

At the end of October this year, France followed Britain in releasing its foreign policy archives from 1989 and 1990 in the run-up to the reunification of Germany. Although the files will not precipitate a major reassessment of history, they illustrate the depth of fear among western leaders who were publicly celebrating the victory of democratic freedom over communism.

Posted on Friday, November 13, 2009 at 9:03 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Great writers 'fail' US computer program designerd to assess student essays

Source: BBC (11-12-09)

Winston Churchill's iconic "fight them on the beaches" speech did not make the grade when it was marked by a computer system, exam experts have said.

And extracts from modern classics such as Lord of the Flies by William Golding and a novel by Ernest Hemingway also failed to impress the computer.

All were marked down by a US program designed to assess students' essays.

UK exam boards and the qualifications development agency are experimenting with similar procedures.

At the moment, in the UK, computers are used only to mark some GCSE multiple-choice exam papers, in which there are right and wrong answers.

But exam boards are working on systems which would allow pupils to sit their exams online and for them to be marked by computer...

... As for William Golding, an extract from Lord of the Flies was criticised as having "inaccurate and erratic sentence structure".

Ernest Hemingway's The End of Something was also marked as not up to standard.

In this case, the writer was said to have "shown lack of care in style of writing and vocabulary"...

Posted on Friday, November 13, 2009 at 9:03 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Changing times in Russia

Source: BBC (11-13-09)

At the time of writing this, it is just after 1500 (GMT+2) in Kaliningrad. People in this west Russian exclave, between Poland and Lithuania, still have a few more hours of work before heading home for their dinner.

In Kamchatka, in the far east of Russia, people have long since left work and had their dinner. In fact it is 0100 (GMT+12), and the majority are probably fast asleep in their beds.

In between the two ends of this, the world's largest country, lie another nine time zones.

President Medvedev said, when he raised the issue in his state of the nation speech, that Russians had "traditionally been accustomed to feeling a pride" in how many time zones the country had "because to us it seemed a vivid illustration of the greatness of our motherland".

Posted on Friday, November 13, 2009 at 8:58 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Pakistani Army ran Muslim extremist training camps, says anti-terrorist expert

Source: Times (UK) (11-14-09)

The Pakistani Army ran training camps for a Muslim extremist group, at least until recently, with the acceptance of the US Central Intelligence Agency, according to France’s foremost anti-terrorist expert.

Jean-Louis Bruguière, who retired in 2007 after 15 years as chief investigating judge for counter-terrorism, reached this conclusion after interrogating a French militant who had been trained by Lashkar-e-Taiba and arrested in Australia in 2003.

In a book in his counter-terrorism years, Mr Bruguière says that Lashkar-e-Taiba, which was set up to fight India over disputed Kashmir territory, had become part of the international Islamic network of al-Qaeda.

Posted on Friday, November 13, 2009 at 8:43 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Turkey is to allow Kurdish television as peace process gathers pace

Source: Times (UK) (11-14-09)

Turkey’s Government has unveiled a “historic” offer to end its 25-year armed conflict with Kurdish fighters that has cost more than 40,000 lives.

Besir Atalay, the Interior Minister, told parliament that he intended to end permanently the conflict with separatists, who are thought to have about 6,000 fighters. “Our slogan is more freedom for everybody,” Mr Atalay said yesterday, outlining what he described as “an open-ended process” to “end terrorism and raise the level of democracy”.

One of the first steps would be to lift a ban on private television channels broadcasting in Kurdish. The Government would then end a ban on political campaigning in the language, and permit the restoration of Kurdish names to towns and villages given Turkish names since the 1950s. A committee will be established to address Kurdish concerns that they suffer discrimination.

Posted on Friday, November 13, 2009 at 8:41 PM | Comments (0) | Top

On display for the first time: Diary of British reporter who exposed Stalin's famine in Ukraine (UK)

Source: Yahoo News (11-13-09)

LONDON – The diaries of a British reporter who risked his reputation to expose the horrors of Stalin's murderous famine in Ukraine were put on public display for the first time Friday.

Welsh journalist Gareth Jones sneaked into Ukraine in March of 1933, at the height of a famine engineered by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Millions of people starved to death between 1932 and 1933 as the Soviet secret police emptied the countryside of grain and livestock as part of a campaign to force peasants into collective farms.

Jones' reporting was one of the first attempts to bring the disaster to the world's attention.

"Famine Grips Russia — Millions Dying" read the front page of the New York Evening Post on March 29, 1933. "Famine on a colossal scale, impending death of millions from hunger, murderous terror ... this is the summary of Mr. Jones's firsthand observations," the paper said.

As starvation and cannibalism spread across Ukraine, Soviet authorities exported more than a million tons of grain to the West, using the money to build factories and arm its military.

Historians say that between 4 million and 5 million Ukrainians perished in what is sometimes referred to as the Great Famine.

Posted on Friday, November 13, 2009 at 5:35 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Israel displays coins from Roman destruction of Jewish Temple 2,000 years ago

Source: Yahoo News (11-11-09)

JERUSALEM – Israel displayed for the first time Wednesday a collection of rare coins charred and burned from the Roman destruction of the Jewish Temple nearly 2,000 years ago.

About 70 coins were found in an excavation at the foot of a key Jerusalem holy site. They give a rare glimpse into the period of the Jewish revolt that eventually led to the destruction of the Second Jewish Temple in A.D. 70, said Hava Katz, curator of the exhibition.

The Jews rebelled against the Roman Empire and took over Jerusalem in A.D. 66. After laying siege to Jerusalem, the Romans breached the city walls and wiped out the rebellion, demolishing the Jewish Temple, the holiest site in Judaism.

The coins sit inside a glass case, some melted down to unrecognizable chunks of pockmarked and carbonized bronze from the flames that destroyed the Temple.

Posted on Friday, November 13, 2009 at 5:34 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Silverware taken from USS Arizona during World War II pulled from auction

Source: Star Bulletin (Hawaii) (11-12-09)

Silverware from the sunken ship apparently was kept by a Navy diver after salvaging

Lime-encrusted silverware taken from the officers' mess aboard the USS Arizona during World War II have been pulled from an auction.

Cowan's Auctions, a Cincinnati resale house specializing in American historical and military items, had planned to sell the 24 pieces on Dec. 9, with initial estimates of $15,000 to $20,000. But when Navy attorneys got wind of the planned sale, they put pressure on the auction house.

A Navy spokesman, Bill Doughty, noting that lawyers were reviewing the matter, explained that "U.S. Navy craft and their associated contents remain the property of the U.S. Navy unless expressly abandoned or title is transferred by appropriate U.S. government authority."

Property rights are established in the U.S. Constitution and international maritime law.

"USS Arizona is considered one of our nation's most sacred and hallowed historical sites," Doughty said. "Many of the 1,177 crewmen who died on Dec. 7, 1941, aboard the ship are entombed in the ship at the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor. We cherish the memory of the sailors who sacrificed in World War II. The significance of USS Arizona should never be diminished or cheapened."

Posted on Friday, November 13, 2009 at 5:33 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Five 9/11 suspects to be charged in NY

Source: Politico (11-13-09)

The confessed mastermind of the September 11th terrorist attacks will face charges in the city he targeted.

The Obama administration has decided that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other terrorism suspects now detained at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay will be charged in civilian court.

Two Obama administration officials confirmed plans to transfer Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men to New York City from the prison at Guantanamo Bay to face charges in a civilian federal court. The five are currently charged before a military commission proceeding at Guantanamo Bay prison that was suspended as the Obama administration considered where to try them.

Attorney General Eric Holder is scheduled to announce the decision at 11 am.

Posted on Friday, November 13, 2009 at 5:25 PM | Comments (0) | Top

McCain Aide Denies Palin Book Claim

Source: The Daily Beast (11-13-09)

Sarah Palin's book Going Rogue isn't out until Tuesday but leaked excerpts reported by the Associated Press are already setting off denials from John McCain's old campaign staff. In response to the Palin's reported claim that she received a bill from the McCain campaign to pay for expenses related to her own vetting process, a McCain official told CNN that the story is "one hundred percent untrue." The official added: "All those bills are from her personal attorney Thomas Van Flein, mostly relating to the Troopergate investigation and other ethics investigations. It is not legal to pay for those investigations out of general election funds, even if the campaign was so inclined." A spokeswoman for Palin, Meg Stapleton, wouldn't confirm whether the claim was even in the book as it is still embargoed before its release.

Posted on Friday, November 13, 2009 at 5:22 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Researchers find 2 Japanese supersubmarines sunk by U.S. at end of WWII

Source: Chicago Tribune (11-13-09)

U.S. researchers said Thursday they have located the remains of two high-tech Japanese submarines that were scuttled by the U.S. Navy off Hawaii in 1946 to prevent the technology from falling into the hands of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the Cold War.

One of the vessels was the largest non-nuclear sub ever built and had the ability to sail 1 1/2 times around the globe without refueling. Called the I-14, the behemoth was 400 feet long, 40 feet high, and carried a crew of 144. It was designed to launch two folding-wing bombers on kamikaze missions against U.S. cities such as New York and Washington, D.C., although the end of the war prevented such attacks.

The second was an attack submarine called the I-201, whose design foreshadowed the sleek submarines of today, and which was thought to be twice as fast as any American subs. It never fought in the war either.

Posted on Friday, November 13, 2009 at 5:19 PM | Comments (0) | Top

George W. Bush Announces Programs for Bush Institute at Southern Methodist U.

Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education (11-12-09)

Former President George W. Bush, speaking today in Dallas, listed education, economic growth, freedom, and global health as the policy areas that will be the focus of a future institute bearing his name at Southern Methodist University, The Dallas Morning News reported. The institute will be part of the $300-million presidential center, which will include a library and museum. In his comments today, Mr. Bush attempted to ease faculty concerns that the institute would be too partisan, saying it will be "independent and nonpartisan." The university also announced that James W. Guthrie, an education professor and director of the Peabody Center for Education Policy at Vanderbilt University, will join Southern Methodist's faculty and become the institute's first senior scholar.

Posted on Friday, November 13, 2009 at 2:55 PM | Comments (0) | Top

George W. Bush Chooses UVa. For Oral History Project

Source: Talking Points Memo (11-12-09)

Former President George W. Bush has chosen the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia to conduct a "comprehensive oral history of his presidency."

The Miller Center and Bush's foundation announced the George W. Bush Oral History Project this morning, saying the university's scholars will do 100 interviews with the Bush Cabinet and outside advisers during the 5-year project.

Posted on Friday, November 13, 2009 at 2:52 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Two German Killers Demanding Anonymity Sue Wikipedia's Parent

Source: NYT (11-12-09)

Wolfgang Werlé and Manfred Lauber became infamous for killing a German actor in 1990. Now they are suing to force Wikipedia to forget them.

The legal fight pits German privacy law against the American First Amendment. German courts allow the suppression of a criminal’s name in news accounts once he has paid his debt to society, noted Alexander H. Stopp, the lawyer for the two men, who are now out of prison.

“They should be able to go on and be resocialized, and lead a life without being publicly stigmatized” for their crime, Mr. Stopp said. “A criminal has a right to privacy, too, and a right to be left alone.”

Posted on Friday, November 13, 2009 at 1:56 PM | Comments (0) | Top

9/11 Mastermind to NYC for Civilian Trial

Source: CBS (11-13-09)

Self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other Guantanamo Bay detainees will be sent to New York to face trial in a civilian federal court, a law enforcement official told CBS News Friday.

Attorney General Eric Holder plans to announce the decision later in the morning, a White House official told the Associated Press. The official is not authorized to discuss the decision before the announcement, so spoke on condition of anonymity.

Without confirming details of the decision, President Barack Obama said it was a legal and national security matter. "I am absolutely convinced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be subjected to the most exacting demands of justice," Mr. Obama said at a joint news conference in Tokyo with Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama.

Posted on Friday, November 13, 2009 at 8:56 AM | Comments (0) | Top

In Newark, NJ a rare treature trove of historical documents and assorted artifacts

Source: NJ (11-12-09)

NEWARK -- One of the artifacts brought out from behind the heavy, six-inch doors of a basement vault in Newark is an oil portrait of Arthur T. Vanderbilt, New Jersey’s chief justice from 1948-1957.

Still stored there are original letters from the Olmsted Brothers, famed park designers, and even original art-deco door knockers, shaped as human figures and once gripped by Newark visitors to an "Egyptian-style" courthouse razed in 1907.

The black-doored vaults along a darkened corridor inside the Essex County Hall of Records in Newark provide a home for historical documents and assorted artifacts that were once scattered in offices throughout the county.

The items — many of them portals into the lives of the Essex County of old — have been digitally captured within the past year, making for quite a picture show in the offices of Frank J. DelGaudio, the county risk manager in charge of records modernization.

"We can just pull up anything back to 1682," DelGaudio said.

Posted on Friday, November 13, 2009 at 12:09 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Report offers snapshot of union labor today

Source: SF Gate (via OpEdNews) (11-11-09)

Today's typical union member is a woman working in the public sector, whereas 25 years ago it might have been a man with a factory job, according to a report that looks at the changing face of organized labor.

The report, published by the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, starts its analysis in 1983, when federal surveys first started collecting details about union members.

By analyzing those records, author John Schmitt found that more than 45 percent of today's unionized workers are women, up from 35 percent in 1983...

... Union membership in absolute and percentage terms has declined over the last quarter century.

Schmitt said that in 1983, 20.5 million people, or 23.3 percent of the U.S. workforce, was unionized.

In 2008, 17.8 million people, or 13.7 percent of the labor force, worked under union contracts.

Posted on Friday, November 13, 2009 at 12:03 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Thursday, November 12, 2009

At 75, Charles Manson still has the power to influence others

Source: CNN (11-12-09)

At 75, Charles Manson has spent more than half his life in prison for masterminding the notorious Helter Skelter killing spree that left actress Sharon Tate and six others dead in Los Angeles during the summer of 1969.

Manson spent his 75th birthday this week at the state prison in Corcoran, California, where he is isolated from the rest of the prison population. Some records indicate that Manson was born on November 12, but Manson's current associates and California corrections records indicate his birthday was on Wednesday, November 11.

While his appearance has changed significantly from the wide-eyed cult leader who appeared on the cover of Life magazine in 1969, Manson continues to wield influence over some who consider him a wizened messenger.

Posted on Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 11:47 PM | Comments (1) | Top

"Don't ask, don't tell" repeal coming next year?

Source: Salon (11-11-09)

LGBT activists -- and progressives generally, regardless of sexuality -- have been waiting for months now to hear about a timetable for repealing the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, which forbids gays from openly serving. And with good reason; ending the ban was, after all, a campaign promise of President Obama's.

If Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., is to be believed -- and given his own sexuality and his stature among Congressional Democrats, on issues like this one, he generally is -- we now have an idea of that timeline.

On Wednesday, Frank told the Advocate's Kerry Eleveld that a repeal is likely to be a part of the Department of Defense authorization bill taken up in Congress next year. "'Don’t ask, don’t tell' was always going to be part of the military authorization," Frank said.

Posted on Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 11:23 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Sniff test to preserve old books

Source: BBC (11-12-09)

The key to preserving the old, degrading paper of treasured, ageing books is contained in the smell of their pages, say scientists.

Researchers report in the journal Analytical Chemistry that a new "sniff test" can measure degradation of old books and historical documents.

Posted on Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 11:10 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Japanese celebrate 20th anniversary of Emperor Akihito's coronation

Source: Yahoo News (11-12-09)

TOKYO – Tens of thousands of well-wishers gathered outside Japan's moat-ringed Imperial Palace — many shouting "Banzai," a traditional wish for long life — to mark Thursday's 20th anniversary of Emperor Akihito's coronation to the world's oldest throne.

Parades, concerts and speeches by leading athletes, actors, businesspeople and politicians marked the festivities that lasted most of the day.

But in unusually somber comments of his own, Akihito appealed for future generations to learn from the war-marred reign of his father, the late Emperor Hirohito.

In a rare news conference before the anniversary, the 75-year-old monarch said he is concerned that Japanese will forget their past.

Japan's Chrysanthemum Throne — the world's oldest hereditary monarchy — has undergone major changes since the country's surrender ended World War II in 1945, when Hirohito was officially considered a living god and loyalty to the throne was used to rally the nation behind the war.

Posted on Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 11:06 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Seeking Revival, City to Buy Land in Coney Island

Source: NYT (11-11-09)

After a year of ultimatums, threats and stop-and-go talks, the Bloomberg administration has agreed to pay $95.6 million to a developer for seven acres in the heart of Coney Island, according to executives on both sides of the negotiations. It is a crucial step forward for the city’s vision of turning the faded and mostly dormant seaside amusement district into an exciting destination reminiscent of its heyday.

The city’s deal with the developer, Joseph J. Sitt, capped a long standoff between the two sides, with each claiming it had the best plan for the revival of the fabled playground, but neither able to bring its plan to fruition in a deadly real estate market.

The city will announce the deal on Thursday, but the reality of a revived Coney Island remains a long way off.

Posted on Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 10:44 PM | Comments (0) | Top

New history rules for Canadian immigrants

Source: UPI (11-11-09)

Canada is unveiling a new study guide for would-be citizens that requires much more knowledge of the country's military history, a federal minister said.

At an Ottawa news conference Tuesday timed for the observance of Remembrance Day Wednesday, Immigration and Citizenship Minister Jason Kenney said the new immigration test will require knowledge of Canada's military achievements in both World Wars, Korea and a myriad of peacekeeping missions, Sun Media reported.

"I think it's scandalous that someone could become a Canadian not knowing what the poppy represents," Kenney said of the 1.5-inch red plastic lapel pins sold each year to commemorate the thousands of World War I Allied soldiers buried in a French cemetery rife with poppies.

Posted on Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 10:41 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Scalia uncomfortable saying if he'd support Brown v. Board of Education

Source: NYT (11-9-09)

If there is a topic Justice Antonin Scalia does not relish discussing, it is how he would have voted in Brown v. Board of Education had he been on the Supreme Court when it was decided in 1954.

The question came up last month at the University of Arizona in what was billed as a conversation between Justice Scalia and Justice Stephen G. Breyer. The discussion, between the court’s two primary intellectual antagonists, bore the relationship to a conversation that a fistfight does to a handshake. The justices know how to get under each other’s skin, and they punctuated their debate with exasperation, eye-rolling and venomous sarcasm.

The Brown decision, which said the 14th Amendment prohibited segregation in public schools, is hard to square with Justice Scalia’s commitment to originalism, the theory of constitutional interpretation that says judges must apply the original understanding of the constitutional text.

Brown presents originalists with a problem. The weight of the historical evidence is that the people who drafted, proposed and ratified the 14th Amendment from 1866 to 1868 did not believe themselves to be doing away with segregated schools.

Yet Brown is widely thought to be a moral triumph. A theory of constitutional interpretation that cannot account for Brown is suspect if not discredited.

Originalists hate the subject. Justice Scalia has called it “waving the bloody shirt of Brown.”

Posted on Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 10:30 PM | Comments (0) | Top

The Last of China's 'Lotus-Feet' Ladies

Source: WSJ (11-13-09)

LIUYI VILLAGE, YUNNAN PROVINCE -- In a courtyard of her crumbling house, Wu Liuying lifts her favorite pair of shoes from a dusty cardboard box. Hand-sewn from navy-blue cloth, embroidered with pink flowers, they are no bigger than a small child's slippers.

But they slip easily over the gnarled shrunken feet of the 90-year-old Ms. Wu. From the age of 5, her feet were bound tightly with cotton strips, warping them. The four smallest toes folded under the sole, which was squeezed into a high arch, creating a crevasse between the heel and the ball of the foot.

Hers was among the last of countless generations of Chinese women who bound their feet in search of an idealized form of beauty. Though banned in 1912 after the Qing dynasty fell and the Nationalists established a republic, the practice lingered, especially in remote areas of China. A 1928 census in rural Shanxi province found that 18% of women had bound feet; binding also hung on in Liuyi, in the frontier province of Yunnan.

"When the Nationalists came here we would undo our feet in the daytime," says Ms. Wu. "Then, in the night, we would bind them again."

In time the Communist government, which took power in 1949, succeeded in stigmatizing foot-binding as backward and shameful. Today, like Ms. Wu's tumbledown house -- where cobwebs cloak the rotted eaves -- the millennium-old custom is slipping into history. Few of the elderly survivors care to try to explain to their grandchildren how they came to wear such dainty shoes, the agony they endured and what exactly was so sexy about a 10-centimeter foot that -- being hard to clean -- usually gave off a tangy smell and was prone to decay.

"It's out of fashion now," says Ms. Wu...

Posted on Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 10:25 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Bible That Vanished on Kristallnacht Is Heading Home

Source: NYT (11-9-09)

On Nov. 9, 1938, a two-volume black-leather-clad Hebrew Bible vanished from a library in Vienna after that city’s Jewish community came under assault from soldiers during Kristallnacht, the start of the Nazi pogrom against Jews.

As is the case with much art looted during World War II, the Bible’s location during the following few decades was mostly unknown.

But last winter, the two volumes, printed 493 years ago, were smuggled into New York City, according to federal authorities, who noticed them advertised in a catalog of a New York auction house and confiscated them.

On Monday afternoon, at a repatriation ceremony at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan, the historic Bible began its journey home, 71 years to the day after it was seized.

Posted on Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 10:23 PM | Comments (0) | Top

France and Germany Use the Remembrance of a War to Promote Reconciliation

Source: NYT (11-11-09)

PARIS — For the first time since the armistice that ended World War I with Germany’s defeat in 1918, a German leader joined French officials here to mark the moment the guns fell silent on the Western Front after a war that killed millions.

Posted on Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 9:58 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Obama 'risks Suez-like disaster' in Afghanistan, says key adviser

Source: Guardian (UK) (11-12-09)

A key adviser to Nato forces warned today that Barack Obama risks a Suez-style debacle in Afghanistan if he fails to deploy enough extra troops and opts instead for a messy compromise.

David Kilcullen, one of the world's leading authorities on counter-insurgency and an adviser to the British government as well as the US state department, said Obama's delay in reaching a decision over extra troops had been "messy". He said it not only worried US allies but created uncertainty the Taliban could exploit.

Speaking in an interview with the Guardian, he compared the president to someone "pontificating" over whether to send enough firefighters into a burning building to put a fire out.

He was speaking as Obama left Washington for a nine-day trip to Asia without announcing a decision on troop numbers. The options being considered by the US have been narrowed down to four: sending 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 or 40,000, the latter the figure requested by the Nato commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal. These would be on top of 68,000 US troops already deployed.

Posted on Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 6:21 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Obama breaking foreign travel records

Source: Taegan Goddard's Political Wire (11-12-09)

CBS News reports President Obama's trip to Asia will bring his total to 8 foreign trips and 20 countries since becoming president.

"The only other president to come close to Mr. Obama's first-year-in-office globe-trotting numbers is President George H. W. Bush, who took 7 foreign trips to 14 countries."

In addition, as Politico notes, Obama is stopping in Alaska on his way to Asia. It's the only state he hasn't been to since he declared his run for president.

Posted on Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 6:05 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Activists break West Bank barrier

Source: BBC (11-9-09)

Palestinians and foreign peace activists have broken apart a section of the West Bank barrier.

They used ropes and at least one truck to pull down some of the concrete blocks forming the Israeli-built wall.

The activists carried out the protest to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The barrier, which separates Israel from the West Bank, is a mixture of fences, barbed wire, ditches and concrete slabs up to 8m (26ft) high.

Posted on Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 5:41 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Australia 'Nazi case' extradition

Source: BBC (11-12-09)

The Australian government has approved the extradition of an 88-year-old alleged former Nazi to Hungary to face accusations of murder.

Charles Zentai is accused of killing Jewish teenager Peter Balazs in Budapest in 1944.

At the time, Mr Zentai was a warrant officer in the Hungarian army, then allied to Nazi Germany.

Hungary has two months to complete the extradition. Mr Zentai's family say they will try to overturn the decision.

Posted on Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 5:37 PM | Comments (0) | Top

African slavery apology 'needed'

Source: BBC (11-12-09)

Traditional African rulers should apologise for the role they played in the slave trade, a Nigerian rights group has said in a letter to chiefs.

The letter said some collaborated or actively sold off their subjects.

The group said it was time for African leaders to copy the US and the UK who have already said they were sorry.

It urged Nigeria's traditional rulers to apologise on behalf of their forefathers and "put a final seal to the history of slave trade", AFP news agency reports.

Posted on Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 5:35 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Warhol artwork sells for $43.8m

Source: BBC (11-12-09)

Andy Warhol artwork 200 One Dollar Bills has sold in New York for $43.8m (£26.5m) - the second highest auction price for a work by the pop artist.

The 1962 silk screen print, which shows 200 life-sized images of dollar bills, had a pre-sale estimate of $8m to $12m (£4.8m to £7.3m) at Sotheby's.

The contemporary sale fetched $134.4m (£81.3m) with 52 out of 54 lots sold.

Warhol's 1963 painting Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I) sold for a record $71.7m (£43.4m) in 2007.

Posted on Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 5:34 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Mona Lisa 'had eyebrows'

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-12-09)

The Mona Lisa originally had eyebrows, according to a French art expert who has analysed Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece with a special camera.

Pascal Cotte said da Vinci built the painting up in layers, the last being a special glaze whose optical properties increased the illusion of a three-dimensional face. Above the glaze Da Vinci painted details such as the eyebrows.

He has uncovered a host of secrets about the Mona Lisa using a 240 megapixel camera. It can measure light so sensitively as to see through the top paint surface and uncover the layers below.

Cotte's work is explained in an exhibition, The Secrets of the Mona Lisa, that opens at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester on Saturday.

Posted on Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 5:30 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Bush Warns of 'Temptation' to Abandon Free-Market System in Wake of Recession

Source: Fox News (11-12-09)

The former president, outlining his vision for a policy institute to bear his name at Southern Methodist University, calls the decision to back the $700 billion bank bailout one of the "most difficult" of his presidency. But he warns that policymakers may be taking government intervention too far in the wake of the rescue package.

Former President George W. Bush on Thursday warned that Washington is in danger of taking the country away from free-market principles in the wake of the recession, as he defended his decision to approve a Wall Street bailout package in the final months of his term.

The former president said the Bush Institute will keep economic growth and free-market principles as a focal point, along with issues like education, global health and "human freedom."

Posted on Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 5:27 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Poland Evacuates 3,000 People After WWII Bomb Found

Source: AP (11-12-09)

Police say they have evacuated 3,000 people in Wroclaw, a city in southwestern Poland, after discovering a World War II-era bomb.

Wroclaw police spokesman Pawel Petrykowski says workers found the 1,100-pound bomb Thursday during construction of a new music hall that will go up near the Wroclaw Opera House.

Petrykowski said the area was evacuated, residents were asked to avoid the area and a special crane was brought in to remove the bomb.

Posted on Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 5:21 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Radical Muslim Cleric Who Defended World Trade Center Bombers a Guest of NYC Mayor

Source: Fox News (11-12-09)

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg welcomed to City Hall an "unindicted co-conspirator" in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, later claiming he didn't know the radical Muslim cleric had been invited, the New York Post reported.

Siraj Wahhaj has called the FBI and CIA the "real terrorists," defended the convicted World Trade Center attack plotters and said his hope is that all Americans will become Muslim.

In 1995, Wahhaj was identified as one of 170 who are "unindicted co-conspirators" in the World Trade Center bombing two years earlier, the Post said. He has denied involvement in the conspiracy.

Posted on Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 5:20 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Diocese protects oldest known European records in the United States (Florida)

Source: Yahoo News (11-11-09)

ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. – Sister Catherine Bitzer slowly opened a file box and carefully removed a brittle page, scarred by years of neglectful storage, mold and insects. At 415 years old, the marriage record written by a Roman Catholic priest is still readable and is one of the oldest known European records from the United States.

It's among thousands of artifacts detailing the lives of the Spanish soldiers, missionaries and merchants who settled St. Augustine, the nation's oldest permanent city. The church kept the only official records, a role that today is filled by government.

After being scattered from Florida and surviving destruction for centuries, they are now safe in a newly renovated waterproof, fireproof and climate-controlled building at the Diocese of St. Augustine, said Bitzer, the archivist of the diocese.

Michael Gannon, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Florida, calls the archives "a pocketful of miracles." He tracked down most of the documents, which had traveled to Cuba, back to St. Augustine and then Notre Dame, Ind.

Posted on Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 1:35 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Pope Benedict Urges Europeans to Keep Alive Their Christian Roots

Source: Yahoo News (11-11-09)

VATICAN CITY – Pope Benedict XVI has urged Europeans to defend their continent's religious and cultural heritage.

The pope told pilgrims Wednesday that all those who hold the future of Europe dear to their hearts should "rediscover, appreciate and defend the rich cultural and religious heritage" of past centuries.

Benedict has been urging Europeans to keep alive their Christian roots, saying that Christian values are fundamental for the survival of societies. How to reinvigorate the faith in an increasingly secular Europe is a central theme of Benedict's papacy.

Posted on Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 1:34 AM | Comments (0) | Top

A Chronicle of Gaza, in Kitsch Form

Source: The American Task Force on Palestine (11-10-09)

“I can offer you a discount on the headbands,” said Tareq Abu Dayyeh, souvenir-store owner. “They’re just like the kind used by suicide bombers.”

He was making a sales pitch at his Chairman Arafat Shop, one of Gaza’s oddest commercial outlets. A battery-powered, dancing Osama bin Laden doll occupies a shelf above Barack Obama coffee mugs emblazoned with a misspelling of the U.S. president’s middle name: “Abu Hussain Palestine Loves You.” A plastic Virgin Mary and Jordan River holy water share space with plaques depicting the Dome of the Rock, the foremost Muslim shrine in Jerusalem.

The green flags of the Islamic party Hamas, which took over the Gaza Strip in 2007, stand next to the yellow banners of Fatah, the bitter rival that Hamas expelled. Che Guevara, the Cuban revolutionary leader, appears on T-shirts.

“We have something for everybody, believe me,” said Mr. Abu Dayyeh, 31, who started working in the store in 1994 when his father founded it.

Since then, the shop has been a one-stop barometer of Palestinian fortunes, selling kitsch that chronicles war, political infighting and Gaza’s isolation since 2006, when Israel began to blockade the coastal strip.

When the store opened, it was called the PLO Flag Shop, and the souvenirs reflected hope. Yasir Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, had returned from exile to take control of parts of Gaza and the West Bank. Peace seemed to be on the horizon and in tribute the shop displayed little crossed Israeli and Palestinian flag pins and key chains, Israeli flags and menorahs, the candelabra that is a symbol of Judaism.

A big seller was an inflatable vinyl pillow imprinted with Mr. Arafat’s smiling face. One that was purchased in 1995 deflated after a few months.

Israeli-themed mementos fell out of favor in the late 1990s as peace talks foundered, the Israeli settlements expanded and Hamas carried out a suicide-bomb campaign inside Israel. Posters of Saddam Hussein, who supported Palestinian liberation, were the rage.

“When things were good, everyone thought that Gaza was going to become the next Singapore; instead, it became the next hell,” Mr. Abu Dayyeh said, adding that he would take 5 shekels, or $1.33, for a Saddam poster now.

Posted on Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 12:43 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Arafat celebrated five years after death

Source: The American Task Force on Palestine (11-11-09)

More than 13,000 Palestinians gathered in Ramallah on Wednesday to mark the fifth anniversary of the death of former Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.

Large crowds packed into the Presidential Compound to hear a memorial from President Mahmoud Abbas, who donned a white ball cap emblazoned with the flag of Palestine and a black and white kuffeyeh as he addressed the crowd for what many anticipated to be a historic speech. Rumors spread before the event that Abbas would announce his resignation, precipitating the dissolution of the Palestinian Authority...

... Addressing allegations of repeatedly bowing to US pressure, Abbas said "We have paid a heavy toll to protect our independence in decision making, and to promote the PLO, and we will never allow anybody to destroy our achievements," though he did not lay out a plan for the continuation of Palestinian achievements.

"Our revolution is the longest in history, and it might be the last revolution in the world. We want to get rid of occupation, and we want a just solution for refugees' problem in accordance with the UN resolution 194. As long as 1967 territories are occupied, we have the right to demand removal of settlements because they are illegal," he said.

Posted on Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 12:41 AM | Comments (0) | Top

MI figures out what went wrong in Lavon affair - 55 years later

Source: The American Task Force on Palestine (11-11-09)

Fifty-five years after the notorious failure of an Israeli sabotage operation in Egypt, Military Intelligence has finally gotten around to figuring out what went wrong. The answer? Pretty much everything.

An educational presentation about the 1954 Lavon affair prepared by the MI history and heritage division found that MI had not sufficiently trained the members of the sabotage unit, who were mostly amateurs and included several Egyptian Jews, and had failed to give them cover stories, plan escape routes or otherwise plan for the possibility that they would be caught.

"First and foremost, this is the story of the failure of Military Intelligence, starting with the choice of targets for the network's sabotage operations, the operational planning and the superficial and sloppy training, and ending with the method of execution, which totally failed to carry out the pointless mission, which had no chance of reaching the strategic goal its operators had set: the cancellation of the planned British evacuation of the Suez Canal," stated the MI analysis.

Posted on Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 12:39 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Palace of Japan's warrior queen discovered

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-11-09)

The building covering nearly 300 square metres was located close to the city of Sakurai and the former Japanese capital of Nara, 300 miles south-west of Tokyo.

Built on stilts, the structure was found beside three other aligned buildings, leading archaeologists to believe it is the site of Himiko's Yamatai palace.

"A building cluster that is placed in such a well-planned manner is unprecedented in Japan at that period in time," Hironobu Ishino, director of the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Archaeology, told Kyodo News.

The discovery coincided with celebrations today to mark the 20th anniversary of the enthronement of the present emperor.

Queen Himiko is a popular character in Japanese history. She was apparently able to wield great power in the Yamatai Kingdom from around the end of the second century. Legends handed down from the time describe her as "being skilled with magic".

Posted on Thursday, November 12, 2009 at 12:33 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars posts struggle

Source: USA Today (11-11-09)

GALESBURG, Ill. — The future of VFW Post 2257 might hinge on the life span of its worn-out, 50-year-old boiler and attendance at weekly bingo games this winter.

Like many Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion posts, Post 2257 in this western Illinois city of 31,000 people is struggling to survive as older members die and younger veterans decide not to join. Nationally, the number of VFW posts declined from 8,374 in 2007 to 7,915 as of June, spokesman Jerry Newberry says. The American Legion has 14,150 posts, down from 14,260 two years ago, spokesman John Raughter says.

More than a building is at stake here and at other troubled posts, says quartermaster Mike Lummis, who keeps the books for Post 2257. VFW and American Legion posts, both founded to fight for veterans' benefits and promote patriotism, quickly became havens where veterans could talk with peers about experiences and problems, members say. Beyond the physical posts, both groups have long been vital presences in communities, marching proudly in parades, placing flags in cemeteries and sponsoring scholarships and Little League teams.

Some younger vets buy into the misconception "that all this organization is is a bunch of old warriors sitting around blowing smoke and in a lot of places drinking beer and telling war stories," Lummis says. "Well, that's not correct at all" — especially at Post 2257, where zoning rules bar alcohol sales.

"We look after our fellow vets whose lives were never the same and the ones fighting in the current wars and the wars that will come," Lummis says.

As national membership in the VFW dips — down from a peak of 2.5 million in 1992 to 1.5 million as of June — VFW posts have to change, Newberry says. Local posts are encouraged to welcome female vets, offer family friendly programs such as child care and to make veterans who are having trouble with civilian life feel comfortable. "You have to give them a reason to join," he says...

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 11:59 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Reagan Associates and Friends Commemorate the Fall of the Berlin Wall

Source: Politico Playbook (11-11-09)

About 600 people turned out last night for the event at the Library of Congress, including Reagan alumni, veterans of Bush 41, senators, ambassadors, former Congress members, judges and press luminaries like CNN’s Sam Feist. Rick Fowler, manager of the Beach Boys, who have a long association with President Ronald Reagan, also attended. Defense Secretary Robert Gates gave a tough, pro-Reagan speech that emphasized the message of peace through strength. It was one of the biggest gatherings ever of Reagan administration alumni, and a prelude to the Reagan Centennial activities that will begin soon in advance of RR’s 100th birthday, on February 6, 2011. During the reception, guests were able to view a display Melissa Gillers and her team brought from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, Calif. Items on display include the original speech cards President Reagan used to deliver his "tear down this wall" speech, and the suit and cuff links he wore during the speech. On loan from Fred Ryan: an original piece of the Wall, on which President Reagan wrote: “Tear down this wall.” Guests also saw the original INF Treaty, on loan from the State Dept, and the pen Secretary Gorbachev used to sign it. James Hadley Billington, the Librarian of Congress, welcomed the audience. Then Fred Ryan introduced Secretary Gates.

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 11:58 PM | Comments (0) | Top

President Bush outlining his vision for a unique public policy Institute

Source: Politico Playbook (11-11-09)

TOMORROW IN DALLAS, 2 p.m. CT: “Former President George W. Bush will give a keynote address at Southern Methodist University on Thursday, November 12, 2009, outlining his vision for a unique public policy Institute that will link scholarly research with practical results. Former First Lady Laura Bush will also speak about her involvement with the Institute and its upcoming programs. The George W. Bush Institute will be part of the George W. Bush Presidential Center, which will also include the President’s Library, Museum and Archives. The George W. Bush Presidential Center will become the first presidential library complex to house a policy Institute. In their speeches on Thursday, the former President and First Lady will outline the initial areas of focus for the George W. Bush Institute and announce several programs that will begin on the SMU campus and around the world in the spring of 2010.”

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 11:57 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Services remember world war dead

Source: BBC (11-11-09)

Services of commemoration are being held around the world to mark Armistice Day, the end of World War I in 1918.

At a speech at Arlington National Cemetery, US President Barack Obama said no tribute could match the service and sacrifice of the armed forces.

Earlier, Angela Merkel became the first German chancellor to mark the day by attending French events in Paris.

In London, the Queen, politicians and British Armed Forces chiefs recalled the passing of the WWI generation.

Mr Obama laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery, where America's war dead are buried.

He praised the "extraordinary bravery and service" of the armed forces past and present.

"To the veterans, the fallen and their families - there is no tribute, no commemoration, no praise that can truly match the magnitude of your service and your sacrifice," he said.

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 11:45 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Archaeologists find mummy of young priestess from 300-450 AD in Peru

Source: Thaindian News (11-9-09)

An archaeological excavation has uncovered the mummy of a young priestess, a member of the elite, with several precious items dating from the period of 300-450 AD in Cahuachi, Peru.

According to a report in Travel Culture History News, the mummy was found inside a series of rooms between the Great Pyramid and what is known as the Orange Pyramid.

The building would have formed a small temple that had 4 columns holding up its roof.

Giuseppe Orefici, director of the Nasca Project, said that the archaeologists had to remove a layer or reeds and ropes that covered the burial.

The body appeared to have been painted and found with an additional vertebra added.

She also had slightly deformed forearms, apparently something self-inflicted by having the arms extended vertically for long periods of time - perhaps as a result of a praying.

She was wrapped in finely woven fabric that had patterns of orcas (killer whales) found in the southern pacific and contained obsidian arrow heads.

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 11:42 PM | Comments (0) | Top

'Important troves of African-American historical materials' in Trouble

Source: Inside Higher Ed (11-11-09)

One of the most important troves of African-American historical materials became the subject of national ire and hand wringing this week, when the student newspaper at Howard University reported that the university library’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center -- considered one of the foremost repositories of artifacts and manuscripts related to black history -- could close due to an inadequate budget and a shortage of staff.

The article prompted a stream of upset phone calls, e-mails, blog posts -- including an item in The Root, a Web magazine founded by Henry Louis Gates Jr., decrying the news. It also prompted an e-mail to the paper from Alvin Thornton, Howard’s associate provost for academic affairs, emphasizing that the university has no plans to close the research center.

Thomas C. Battle, the retiring director of Moorland-Spingarn, whose comments had touched off the speculation over the research center’s, told Inside Higher Ed that his comments had indeed been misinterpreted, and that he did not believe the center would close.

Still, Battle said, the center is in trouble. He said it has been understaffed since the early 1990s, when budget cuts and restructuring caused the center to reduce its staff by more than half. Since then, the staff has continued to shrink incrementally, culminating with several key staffers accepting buyouts this year...

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 11:30 PM | Comments (0) | Top

UMass Criticized for invitation to convicted terrorist, Ray Luc Levasseur

Source: Boston.com (11-10-09)

Governor Deval Patrick today assailed the speaking invitation that a group of UMass Amherst faculty extended to a convicted terrorist, even after criticism from state and university leaders scuttled earlier plans for a speech.

"I am more than a little disappointed about this invitation having been extended,'' Patrick said at a State House news conference. I fully get the point, and respect the idea of free speech. But I think it is a reflection of profound insensitivity to continue to try and have this former terrorist on the campus.

Ray Luc Levasseur, the founder and former leader of the radical revolutionary group United Freedom Front, is scheduled to speak Thursday night. An earlier invitation for him to speak at a library symposium was canceled last week amid pressure from Patrick's office and from family members of victims of his group's attacks, which included the April 1976 blast on the third floor of the Suffolk County Courthouse that injured two dozen people...

... Levasseur was released from federal prison in Atlanta in 2004 after serving 18 years for his involvement in the radical group, which plotted a series of bombings and bank robberies along the East Coast between 1976 and 1984.

In 1989, after the longest criminal trial in Massachusetts history, Levasseur avoided additional jail time when he was acquitted by a federal jury of attempting to overthrow the government by force.

The group's followers were also convicted in the murder of a New Jersey state trooper, Phil Lamonaco, and linked to a 1982 shootout with Massachusetts state troopers. Police groups and the trooper's widow have pledged to protest Levasseur's speech.

Levasseur originally was invited to the university on the 20th anniversary of his 1989 acquittal to speak at a forum discussing response to social and political unrest during the 1960s.

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 11:28 PM | Comments (0) | Top

'Recapitation' of James Garfield Statue at Hiram College (Ohio)

Source: Inside Higher Ed (11-11-09)

Hiram College this week held a "recapitation" ceremony to celebrate the return of the head on a statue of President James A. Garfield. Garfield was a student, instructor and administrator at the college before his ill-fated presidency. A statue honoring him was unveiled on campus in May and was mysteriously decapitated days later. The head was found and returned anonymously to local police officers.

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 11:25 PM | Comments (0) | Top

German children: What do they know about the Berlin Wall?

Source: The Christian Science Monitor (11-10-09)

Frankfurt, Germany - Yesterday, Marlene Muehlmann saw the Berlin Wall tumble down.

Along with tens of thousands of young people from around the world, she decorated one of 1,000 giant dominoes erected along the strip that once divided East and West Germany and then toppled to commemorate the end of the cold war.

"I knew everything already, how the border was," says Marlene, a 9th-grader who lives in Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg, not far from where the wall was. "The parents in half the class had something to do with it." She knew that her mother had been barred from taking her high school exam because of her parents' church activities. She knew, too, that her friend's grandfather was put in jail when he tried to escape, only to be denounced by a friend. [Editor's note: The original misstated how her mother left East Germany.]...

... In the Black Forest village of Ichenheim, near the French border, Tobias Geiser knew little of his country's eastern half until his teacher sent him on a historical scavenger hunt. After months of interviews, he and fellow students built a Trivial Pursuit of sorts about the German Democratic Republic's (GDR) history.

His verdict? "The wall still exists in people's heads," says Tobias, whose project won third place in a national history competition "We hope that that can happen if the economy in the east improves."

Study: Kids have rosy view of east

Last year, a study stunned Germans by revealing not only how little youths know of the GDR, but how many still view it as a cozy, socially just society. Two decades after unification, children's views of their country's second dictatorship still hinges on whether they grew up in the east or in the west.

"We still have a country that's divided into two," says Monika Deutz-Schroeder, co-author of "Social Paradise or Stasi State? The GDR seen by schoolchildren – an East-West comparison."

Conducted with 5,219 schoolchildren in Berlin, Brandenburg, Bavaria, and North Rhine Westphalia, Ms. Deutz-Schroeder's survey showed the disparities: Only 57 percent of young people from East Germany approved of the Federal Republic's political system as opposed to 83 percent from West Germany...

... History minus the ideology

Experts tend to agree that too little time is devoted to teaching GDR history – but note that it typically takes two decades for history to be absorbed and taught without ideological twists.

"Until the wall came down, there was no GDR history that wasn't ideologically tainted," Professor Moser says. "We need teaching materials."

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 11:13 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Kerry warns against revisionist Vietnam history

Source: Boston.com (11-10-09)

Senator John F. Kerry, who came to national prominence when he testified before Congress as a Vietnam war hero turned anti-war activist, is now warning against those pushing for a troop surge in Afghanistan by asserting that the same could have turned the tide in Vietnam.

"Let me be clear: more than 58,000 American troops died because they were sent into battle based on false assumptions, flawed goals, and faulty strategies. Yes, we adopted smarter tactics near the end, but by then the die was cast. History has definitively branded Vietnam for the mistake it was no one should believe that the deaths of nearly 60,000 Americans and at least 1.5 million Vietnamese were somehow not quite enough," Kerry, who is now chairman of the same committee he addressed in 1971, writes in the Nov. 16 issue of Newsweek magazine.

The Massachusetts Democrat, who is among those cautioning President Obama against sending the full allotment of 40,000 additional US troops sought by the top commander in Afghanistan, says there are some similarities with Vietnam.

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 11:11 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Honor our Veterans by recording their histories

Source: The Putnam Standard and Citizen's Newspaper (11-10-09)

The Veterans Administration and the Library of Congress Veterans History Project have a special message for all Americans this Veterans Day - Honor our Veterans. Record their histories!

By recording the oral histories of our Veterans, we preserve the human face of American history for generations to come and honor those men and women who swore to protect and defend the United States.

The Veterans History Project (VHP) collects and preserves the remembrances of American war veterans and civilian workers who supported them.

These collections of first-hand accounts are archived in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress for use by researchers and to serve as an inspiration for generations to come.

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 11:05 PM | Comments (0) | Top

70 years after WW2 erupted, a new battle for history rages in Europe

Source: Guardian (UK) (11-11-09)

The simulated screeching of the Stukas over Warsaw almost has you ducking for cover. The thump of marching jackboots portends terror. The melancholy piano of Chopin tugs at Polish heartstrings.

In the Museum of the Warsaw Rising, the sound effects are powerful, the visuals compelling, the tragedy forcefully conveyed. The story of the Polish capital's suicidal rebellion in 1944 against the Nazi occupation is vividly told through interactive, multi-media installations that play on the emotions as much as they engage the intellect.

Critics complain that it treats the past like a Disneyland theme park and avoids important and troubling questions. But it is the first such modern museum in Poland, devoted to the 63-day insurrection in August and September 1944 that left 200,000 dead and incurred a terrible revenge when the Nazis methodically razed Warsaw.

The museum is the first to reconstruct the events of a famous, but neglected, chapter in the history of the second world war. And it is a box-office sensation.

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 7:29 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Textbook sheds light on Khmer Rouge era (Cambodia)

Source: BBC (11-10-09)

Even though it was not a school day, dozens of them made their way in to Sisowath High School in the centre of Phnom Penh for a presentation ceremony.

School and government officials were formally handing out the new Khmer Rouge history book, a scene that will be repeated across the country in the closing months of this year.

Three decades have passed since the fall of the Khmer Rouge government. Yet only now are Cambodian schoolchildren finally starting to learn about what happened during the Pol Pot era.

As many as two million people died in the late 1970s from forced labour, malnutrition and the summary execution of so-called "enemies of the revolution".

But the subject was conspicuous by its absence from the high school curriculum until the new textbook received official approval.

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 1:52 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Tracing your family's military past (UK)

Source: BBC (11-11-09)

The death of the "last Tommy", Harry Patch, in July put an end to first-hand memories of the World War I trenches. But if Armistice Day pricks your curiosity about what your ancestors did in the world wars, there are many avenues of archives to explore.

And according to Anthony Richards, archivist at the Imperial War Museum, interest in researching family military history is now more popular than ever. A major aspect of genealogy is often the involvement of family members in one or other of the two world wars.

Once you have details of a relative's military unit - a particular regiment for example - the next step is again to access the National Archives and obtain that unit's regimental war diaries.

These were kept by each battalion's adjutant - a staff officer who assists the commanding officer in issuing orders and also keeps records of its activities.

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 9:43 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Is Iraq the next holiday hotspot?

Source: BBC (11-11-09)

After more than six years of conflict Iraq seems an unlikely place for a holiday. But could its status as the birthplace of civilisation see tourists flocking?

For most travellers it will, undoubtedly, be years before Iraq becomes a destination of choice. But as the country stabilises its advocates believe its potential is beginning to emerge.

At one time Iraq was a regular stop for British travellers. Early flights to imperial India refuelled in the port city of Basra. But the fact that all the country's major cities have been ravaged by years of warfare now make it a more difficult sell.

Even so, for the first time in a decade, the head of Iraq's tourism board is in London to attend the World Travel Market to promote the country as a holiday destination.

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 9:39 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Missing link dinosaur discovered

Source: BBC (11-11-09)

Researchers have discovered a fossil skeleton that appears to link the earliest dinosaurs with the large plant-eating sauropods.

This could help to bridge an evolutionary gap between the two-legged common ancestors of dinosaurs and the four-legged giants, such as diplodocus.

The remarkably complete skeleton shows that the creature was bipedal but occasionally walked on all four legs.

The team reports its discovery in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B.

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 9:34 AM | Comments (0) | Top

The quest to regain Egypt's antiquities

Source: BBC (11-11-09)

Later this month Egyptian archaeologists will travel to the Louvre Museum in Paris to collect five ancient fresco fragments stolen from a tomb in the Valley of the Kings in the 1980s, but there are many other "stolen" antiquities which they also want back, reports the BBC's Yolande Knell in Cairo.

Thousands of artefacts were spirited out of Egypt during the period of colonial rule and afterwards by archaeologists, adventurers and thieves.

According to a 1972 United Nations agreement, artefacts are the property of their country of origin and pieces smuggled out must be returned.

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 9:33 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Lost images of pre-war Jewish life unearthed

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-11-09)

Hanukkah dinner in Odessa, bathers in the Baltic Sea, a tailor in front of his shop in Serbia - just some of the 25,000 images of pre-war Jewish life garnered from the private collections of survivors for a new exhibition.

With the number of those who lived through the Holocaust fast dwindling, researchers scoured cities across Europe, the Balkans, the former Soviet Union and Baltic states, to glean as much as they could about the lives of Jewish families in the years before World War II.

The resulting collection of stories and around 300 photographs - selected from the thousands that were copied and preserved - is now on display in the northern Austrian city of Linz, where Hitler also attended school.

Since 2000, experts from Serotta's Vienna-based organisation Centropa have interviewed 1,350 elderly Jews living in 15 different European countries and copied around 25,000 old photographs.

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 9:26 AM | Comments (0) | Top

UN declares July 18 Nelson Mandela Day

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-11-09)

The United Nations has declared July 18 "Nelson Mandela International Day" to mark the South African anti-apartheid leader's contribution to peace.

A resolution adopted by consensus by the 192-member world body calls for commemorations every year starting in 2010 on July 18 - Mandela's birthday - to recognise the Nobel Peace Prize laureate's contribution to resolving conflicts and promoting race relations, human rights and reconciliation.

Mandela, 91, led the fight against apartheid in South Africa as head of the African National Congress' armed wing. He was convicted of sabotage and other crimes and served 27 years in prison. When he was freed in 1990, he supported reconciliation and helped lead South Africa's transition toward multi-racial democracy.

Mandela became the country's first president to win in a fully democratic election and led South Africa from 1994-99. He is celebrated today as an international statesman and continues to speak out on human rights and other global issues.

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 9:23 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Britain’s last First World War veteran shuns Remembrance Day

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-11-09)

Britain’s last surviving First World War veteran has shunned Remembrance Day commemorations in Australia because he does not agree with the glorification of war, his family has said.

In July Claude Choules, 108, became Britain’s sole survivor from the 1914-1918 war, following the death of Harry Patch, aged 111.

Mr Choules, who lives in a nursing home in Perth, served on HMS Revenge during a 41-year naval career that spanned both world wars, witnessing the surrender of the German Imperial Navy in 1918 and the scuttling of the fleet in Scapa Flow.

But his daughter Daphne Edinger said he had been scarred by his experiences and chose not to celebrate the Armistice or other veterans’ days.

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 9:22 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Armistice Day memorial service: nation falls silent to honour war dead

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-11-09)

The nation fell silent at 11am today as the passing of the First World War generation was marked at a moving Westminster Abbey memorial service for Armistice Day.

The Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, senior politicians and the heads of the Armed Forces gathered for the ceremony in central London.

The Very Rev Dr John Hall, Dean of Westminster, opened the service by recalling the moment exactly 91 years ago when the guns fell silent in Europe.

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 9:18 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Germany, France Mark End of WWI in Joint Ceremony

Source: AP (11-11-09)

For the first time since World War I, the leaders of Germany and France appeared together at a ceremony Wednesday to commemorate the end of the conflict, saying it is now time to celebrate their countries' reconciliation and friendship.

Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel together laid a wreath of flowers at the tomb and symbolically relit the perpetual flame above it to mark the 91st anniversary of the end of World War I.

The last of 8.4 million French who fought in the war that tore Europe apart died in March 2008, and Sarkozy wanted to use the Armistice commemoration to look to the future with the nation that was vanquished but which, with France, now has a central role in the European Union.

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 9:09 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Navajo Code Talkers to Walk in NYC Veterans Day Parade

Source: AP (11-11-09)

The famed Navajo Code Talkers, the elite Marine unit whose unbreakable code stymied the Japanese in World War II, fear their legacy will die with them.

Only about 50 of the 400 Code Talkers are believed to be still alive, most living in the Navajo Nation reservation that spans Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. Many are frail or ill, with little time left to tell the world about their wartime contribution.

But on Wednesday, 13 of the Code Talkers are coming to New York City to participate for the first time in the nation's largest Veterans Day parade.

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 9:06 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Kalashnikov gun designer turns 90

Source: CNN (11-11-09)

Red Army tank commander Sgt. Mikhail Kalashnikov invented his first machine gun in 1942, during the Second World War, as he sat in a hospital bed recovering from a wound that he got in western Russia.

But as Russians say, the first blintz always comes out wrong. His first model had inborn flaws and defects, and is now on display in an arms museum bearing his name.

It took him several more years to develop and fine-tune what later became an internationally recognized perfect killing instrument -- the AK-47. AK is a Russian acronym for 'Kalashnikov's machine gun,' and 47 stands for the year it was invented.

On Tuesday the legendary weapons designer turned 90. It was a day celebrated in Russia on a scale akin to a national holiday.

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 9:03 AM | Comments (0) | Top

History 'being cut from timetables' (UK)

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-10-09)

Thousands of pupils are now getting only two years worth of teaching in the subject at secondary level, instead of the expected three, it was claimed.

Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, admitted that teachers should have the “flexibility” to cut the amount of time devoted to certain subjects.

But David Laws, the Liberal Democrat children’s spokesman, said the move was a "disgrace".

"Ed Balls is giving the green light to schools to allow pupils to dump crucial subjects such as history as early as age 13," he said.

"Pupils already have the freedom to stop studying key subjects such as modern languages and history at age 14 - and Ed Balls' latest move is a step too far. The teaching of history is a crucial part of providing a broad and balanced curriculum which informs young people about the World in which they live.

"Dropping this subject at age 13 is bound to leave many young people ignorant about key events and issues in British and World history.

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 1:17 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Power for U.S. From Russia's Old Nuclear Weapons

Source: NYT (11-9-09)

MOSCOW — What’s powering your home appliances?

For about 10 percent of electricity in the United States, it’s fuel from dismantled nuclear bombs, including Russian ones.

“It’s a great, easy source” of fuel, said Marina V. Alekseyenkova, an analyst at Renaissance Capital and an expert in the Russian nuclear industry that has profited from the arrangement since the end of the cold war.

But if more diluted weapons-grade uranium isn’t secured soon, the pipeline could run dry, with ramifications for consumers, as well as some American utilities and their Russian suppliers.

Already nervous about a supply gap, utilities operating America’s 104 nuclear reactors are paying as much attention to President Obama’s efforts to conclude a new arms treaty as the Nobel Peace Prize committee did.

In the last two decades, nuclear disarmament has become an integral part of the electricity industry, little known to most Americans.

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 1:15 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Nicolas Sarkozy accused of rewriting history after Facebook slip

Source: Guardian (UK) (11-9-09)

It started out as a personal account by a world leader of where he was when the wall came down. The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, posted a photograph of himself taking a pickaxe to the Berlin Wall on his Facebook page, describing how he rushed to Berlin on 9 November 1989, and crossed through Checkpoint Charlie on the first day the gates opened.

But today, Sarkozy was accused of rewriting history by French journalists who had studied reports from the time and found no evidence that he was in Berlin on the day the wall fell. Some suggested he was not in the city until a week later...

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 1:15 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Vanished Persian Army Said Found in Desert

Source: Discovery News (via OpEdNews.com) (11-8-09)

The remains of a mighty Persian army said to have drowned in the sands of the western Egyptian desert 2,500 years ago might have been finally located, solving one of archaeology's biggest outstanding mysteries, according to Italian researchers.

Bronze weapons, a silver bracelet, an earring and hundreds of human bones found in the vast desolate wilderness of the Sahara desert have raised hopes of finally finding the lost army of Persian King Cambyses II. The 50,000 warriors were said to be buried by a cataclysmic sandstorm in 525 B.C.

"We have found the first archaeological evidence of a story reported by the Greek historian Herodotus," Dario Del Bufalo, a member of the expedition from the University of Lecce, told Discovery News.

According to Herodotus (484-425 B.C.), Cambyses, the son of Cyrus the Great, sent 50,000 soldiers from Thebes to attack the Oasis of Siwa and destroy the oracle at the Temple of Amun after the priests there refused to legitimize his claim to Egypt.

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 1:09 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Obama Wants to Visit Hiroshima, Nagasaki in Future

Source: VOA News (11-10-09)

President Barack Obama says he wants to visit the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sometime during his presidency, but will not have time when he travels to Japan later this week.

In an interview with Japanese broadcaster NHK, Mr. Obama said he would be honored to have the opportunity to visit the two cities that were devastated by U.S. atomic bombs at the end of World War II.

If he does, Mr. Obama will be the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 12:56 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Rasmussen Report: 28% Say Today's Veterans Face More Challenges Than Vietnam Returnees

Source: Rasmussen Reports (11-9-09)

Twenty-eight percent (28%) of adults nationwide believe that veterans of today’s conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan face more challenges when they return home than veterans of the Vietnam War.

However, the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that another 24% believe veterans of today’s conflicts face fewer challenges when they arrive home compared to those who served in Vietnam.

The plurality (42%) believes the challenges veterans from both eras have faced are about the same.

Twenty-seven percent (27%) of those who have served in the military say today’s veterans have it worse, while nearly the same number (28%) say they face fewer challenges than those who fought in Vietnam.

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 12:12 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Korean navies exchange fire

Source: CNN (11-10-09)

Seoul, South Korea (CNN) -- North and South Korea said their naval forces clashed Tuesday in disputed waters, and each blamed the other for what is the first such violent incident in seven years...

... North and South Korea have been bitterly divided since the 1950-53 war between them ended without a peace treaty.

There was, however, an armistice with the U.N. Command establishing the Northern Limit Line (NLL), a demarcation on the Yellow Sea designed to avert clashes at sea. But the two nations dispute the exact location of the sea border, and North Korea does not observe the line.

Clashes have occurred before in the Yellow Sea, especially during crab fishing season, according to the defense news Web site Globalsecurity.org. Since 2001, North Korean vessels have crossed the NLL 65 times -- 22 were this year -- though most of these incidents do not turn violent.

The first clash since the Korean War that turned deadly took place in June 1999 when a North Korean ship was sunk. And in 2002, a series of North Korean incursions sparked an exchange that killed six South Korean sailors and wounded nine others.

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 12:10 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Tomb of Tutankhamun to undergo 5-year cleaning and restoration

Source: Yahoo News (11-10-09)

CAIRO – Egypt's famous Tomb of Tutankhamun will undergo a five-year project to clean and restore the lavish wall paintings in the underground chambers of the boy king whose golden mask and artifacts have long awed the world.

The project to restore the country's most famous tomb is the latest collaboration between Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities and the Los Angeles-based Getty Conservation Institute, which in the past restored nearby tombs and designed airtight cases to display Egypt's mummies.

Since the small, four-roomed tomb and its famous golden burial mask were discovered in 1922 by British archaeologist Howard Carter, observers have noted strange brown spots marring the wall paintings.

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 12:04 AM | Comments (0) | Top

D.C. Sniper's Last Day

Source: The Daily Beast (11-10-09)

With his final appeal rejected by the Supreme Court on Monday, the mastermind behind the D.C. sniper attacks is scheduled to be executed Tuesday, barring a last-minute commutation of his sentence from Virginia Governor Tim Kaine. John Allen Muhammad, working with his young accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo, killed 10 people in the D.C. metro area in 2002 in a series of sniper attacks that terrorized the populace and garnered national interest. The two were captured on October 24 of that year at a Maryland rest stop. Some relatives of Muhammad's victims plan on watching the execution, while Virginia activist group Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty has planned statewide vigils. Muhammad's lawyers have appealed to Gov. Kaine for a commutation to life in prison on grounds of mental illness.

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Hindenburg airship beer auctioned

Source: BBC (11-10-09)

A blackened bottle of beer found in the wreck of the Hindenburg zeppelin is expected to fetch thousands of pounds at auction.

The bottle was found by a fire-fighter cleaning up the American airfield where the German airship exploded in 1932.

The bottle will be the most expensive ever bought if it meets its estimated price of £5,000 ($8,337) on Saturday.

The airship was engulfed by flames as it landed in New Jersey, killing 38 people and injuring 60.

Posted on Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 11:57 PM | Comments (0) | Top

For Taliban Fighters, a Fading Memorial

Source: NYT (11-9-09)

TARAKHEL, Afghanistan — The locals call the place “The Taliban Cemetery,” a weed-clotted memorial to the men who died for the movement during its fiercest campaigns in the years before 9/11.

The graveyard, next to this tiny village north of Kabul, sits a few miles from what was once the front line against the rebels who fought the Taliban after the group captured Kabul in 1996. Those rebels, then known as the Northern Alliance, finally overran the Taliban and captured Kabul — with American help — in November 2001.

Eight years after the last fighter was buried here, the cemetery has fallen into decrepitude. Many of the gravestones are broken and smashed — the vandalism, the villagers say, of a marauding anti-Taliban militia. Weeds and rocks and tattered prayer flags obscure much of what is left. The villagers of Tarakhel, though Taliban enthusiasts, have given up trying to care for the place.

But with a little digging and scraping, the Taliban cemetery reveals itself, and the time that it preserved. Together, the surviving graves offer a history of the Taliban’s early years, and of the tumultuous era when young jihadists from around the world traveled to Afghanistan to train and fight.

There are perhaps two hundred men buried here, not just Afghans but Arabs, Chechens, Indians and Pakistanis. There is even the body of a young man from Great Britain.

“The Arabs are buried over there,” said Mohammed Zahir, sweeping his finger toward a swath of broken earth at the rear of the cemetery. Mr. Zahir, who lives in Tarakhel, wandered over when he spotted a foreigner walking among the tombs.

The Arab fighters, Mr. Zahir said, were killed in the first American bombardment in October 2001. A United Nations truck brought their bodies here and dumped them. The villagers of Tarakhel gave the dead hurried burials, in unmarked graves; they feared the gunmen of the Northern Alliance would dig up and desecrate the corpses if they discovered them. As it was, they came and smashed many of the tombstones.

“They were animals that day,” Mr. Zahir said.

Yet many of the gravestones are intact, preserving the stories of the men underground: their names, the places they were born, the days when they died. Each of the dead here, over the years, got his own granite tombstone, a gift from the Taliban warlords who ran the country then...

Posted on Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 11:48 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Long Island Fishing License Comes With a Colonial Catch

Source: WSJ (11-10-09)

EAST HAMPTON, N.Y. -- Stuart Vorpahl has waged a lonely battle since 1984 against the state of New York over his right to fish. For refusing to obtain a commercial fishing license, he has been arrested at least four times, once on a dock after a police officer seized 490 pounds of fluke and two lobsters from his 40-foot trawler.

Now, others here on Long Island's East End are joining the 69-year-old Mr. Vorpahl's cause. And they are supporting his argument, based on a 313-year-old colonial-era document, called the Dongan Patent, that conferred responsibility for town land and waterways on locally elected trustees.

"I keep telling everyone, 'Your right to go fishing is right here!'" he shouts, holding up a copy of the document in his kitchen cluttered with files and books on the subject. "But the courts don't want to open this can of worms."

All of his cases over the years were dismissed or ended in mistrials, largely without the judges considering the merits of the Dongan Patent. In one instance, the court was unable to form a jury because Mr. Vorpahl is too well-known. His family has lived for centuries pulling striped bass from these waters.

But this time looks different.

Posted on Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 11:31 PM | Comments (0) | Top

US Congress Has History of Reversing Cuts

Source: WSJ (11-11-09)

In 1997, Congress passed a budget law that mandated tough curbs on Medicare spending, setting up formulas to reduce doctor payments if broad spending targets were exceeded. But when the formula began taking a serious bite out of doctor reimbursements in 2002, Congress acted to reverse the cuts -- a step it has repeated five times since then.

That history shows why some critics believe billions of dollars in budget savings Congress is promising through its health-care overhaul might never materialize.

Under both Democrats and Republicans, Congress repeatedly has waived curbs it has tried to place on spending. It has given back other savings from the 1997 law to hospitals, skilled nursing facilities and other providers, most notably in 1999. More recently, Congress has twice switched off a cost-saving trigger that was contained in a 2003 bill establishing a Medicare prescription-drug benefit. Congress also frequently has waived budget resolution limits, as well as pay-as-you-go rules requiring offsets for tax cuts and entitlement spending.

The House bill passed last weekend trims government spending in several areas by more than $400 billion, through a combination of cuts falling largely on pharmaceutical makers, private health insurance companies and hospitals.

"Congress is notorious for passing Medicare savings, and then after the cuts take place and the political groups get activated, we restore all the money," said Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.). "The [new] cuts will never take place. ...In the next few years, they'll all be given back" with some exceptions.

Posted on Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 11:29 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Bill Clinton Presses Senators to Pass Health Bill

Source: WSJ (11-11-09)

WASHINGTON -- Former President Bill Clinton came to Capitol Hill Tuesday to underline for Democrats the political consequences of failing to pass a health overhaul, saying doing nothing was the worst outcome.

Mr. Clinton spoke as both sides in the Senate braced for a battle on the floor. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) said Tuesday that once Senate debate begins, Republicans would offer "a lot of amendments" on subjects from abortion to immigration to a government-run insurance plan.

"This is a big bill," Mr. McConnell told reporters. "The majority seeks to take over one-sixth of our economy."

The appearance by Mr. Clinton, whose own attempt at a health bill failed 15 years ago, reflected the urgency Democrats feel to maintain the momentum behind the bill following its narrow House passage Saturday and signs of a tempestuous debate ahead in the Senate.

Posted on Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 11:28 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Berlin Wall anniversary prompts nostalgia for East German products

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-10-09)

East German products have received a new lease of life 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall as Germans bask in nostalgia for the old Democratic Republic.

Years after the last Trabant chugged off the production line, the iconic car it is set to take to the roads again, but this time sporting an ultra-modern electric engine instead of the dirty two-stroke of communist days.

Despite possessing a body made of plastic and cotton matting, and a poor reputation for reliability, original Trabants still see a brisk trade on eBay in Germany with models in good condition going for as much as £2,000.

Posted on Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 10:38 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Fort Hood shooting: Nidal Malik Hasan 'had contact with 9/11 imam'

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-10-09)

Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood gunman, had been in recent contact with a radical imam said to have been a "spiritual adviser" to two of the September 11 hijackers.

The communications, believed to be emails, between Hasan and Anwar al-Awlaki, who is in Yemen, were sent over the last two years and had been intercepted by US intelligence agencies.

They were investigated but it was decided that they did not require following up. The disclosure will open US authorities to criticism that they failed to recognise warning signs about Hasan, and fuel fears that he was in contact with other extremists abroad prior to the shootings.

Posted on Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 10:36 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Play for a king sells for 84,000 GBP (Wales)

Source: BBC (11-10-09)

A Jacobean manuscript of a play which was to have been performed for James I and was later found in a trunk at a castle has sold at auction for £84,000.

The heavily crossed out draft for The Amazon was discovered in an attic at Powis Castle in Welshpool, Powys.

The hitherto unknown play by Lord Edward Herbert of Chirbury had been valued at £90,000 by Bonhams in London.

It is believed the play was to have been performed before the king and his court in 1618, but it was cancelled.

Posted on Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 10:33 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Charles Taylor 'duped' by Nigeria

Source: BBC (11-10-09)

Former Liberian President Charles Taylor has said he was duped by Nigeria into being arrested there in 2006.

Speaking at his war crimes trial in The Hague, he said Nigeria's then-leader had reneged on a promise to let him leave the country freely.

He also claimed a plot involving the UK and the US led to his indictment.

Mr Taylor is accused of backing rebels, who committed widespread atrocities throughout the 1990s in Liberia's neighbour Sierra Leone.

Posted on Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 10:18 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Czech troops in Nazi symbols row

Source: BBC (11-10-09)

Three Czech soldiers who served as part of the Nato force in Afghanistan have been suspended for wearing Nazi symbols, Czech defence officials say.

Two are said to have adorned their helmets with symbols of SS divisions while serving in eastern Afghanistan.

Czech Defence Minister Martin Bartak said their behaviour was "unacceptable" and suspended them immediately.

Posted on Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 10:15 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Obama Marks Fall of Berlin Wall as 'Rebuke of Tyranny'

Source: Fox News (11-9-09)

President Obama, saying Nov. 9, 1989, was a day he will "never forget," expresses regrets for not being able to attend the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

President Obama on Monday marked the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in a video message broadcast before a huge crowd in Germany, calling the destruction of the wall a "rebuke of tyranny."

The video message was aired after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who led the U.S. delegation in Germany for the celebration, addressed the crowd.

Posted on Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 10:11 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Did Neanderthals Have Sex with Modern Humans

Source: Live Science (11-6-09)

We are currently the only human species alive, but as recently as 24,000 years ago another one walked the earth — the Neanderthals.

These extinct humans were the closest relatives we had, and tantalizing new hints from researchers suggest that we might have been intimately close indeed. The mystery of whether Neanderthals and us had sex might be solved if the entire Neanderthal genome is reported soon as expected. The matter of why they died and we succeeded, however, remains an open question.

Neanderthals — also called Neandertals, due to changes in German spelling over the years — had robust skeletons that gave them wide bodies and short limbs compared to us. This made them more like wrestlers, while modern humans in comparison are more like long-distance runners.

Roughly 30,000 years ago, the Neanderthals disappeared, although pockets might have survived until as recently as 24,000 years ago. Since they vanished just as modern humans were emerging there, scientists have long speculated that we might have driven their extinction.

Posted on Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 10:04 AM | Comments (0) | Top

N. Carolina Guard Soldiers help preserve Iraqi history

Source: Multi-National Division Baghdad RSS/Iraqcrisis (11-9-09)

BAGHDAD – What may look like large, weathered mounds of dirt in rural farmland near Mahmudiyah are actually artifact-filled ruins of an ancient civilization.

Soldiers of the North Carolina National Guard's 120th Combined Arms Battalion, 30th Heavy Brigade Combat Team, surveyed the sites, here, recently, with officials from the Government of Iraq's Ministry of Antiquities and Tourism to examine ways to preserve and protect two ancient Sumerian sites from looters.

The complexes of dirt mounds – Tal Aldair and Sobbar Abu Habba – were once Sumerian city walls outside of what is today Mahmudiyah, south of Baghdad. Pottery and clay tablets with the world's first form of writing, Cuneiform, are known to be in the mounds. The Sumerian culture is the oldest civilization in the world, dating back to the 6th century B.C.

"It's for the world and not just Iraq to preserve these world heritage sites because a lot of folks know it as the cradle of civilization," said Morrison. "These [Sumerians] were the first people we know of in history to be able to write and keep records and those are the kinds of artifacts that are here today."...

Posted on Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 2:26 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Digging for Clues in Mystery of 16th Century Calusa People (Florida)

Source: The News-Press (11-5-09)

In the cool, buggy shade of a huge royal poinciana, archaeologist Michael Wylde dragged his trowel 1,200 years into the past.

Wylde, manager of the Randell Research Center at Pineland, was renewing an excavation begun last winter of a Calusa Indian site known as Mound 5 of Brown's Mound Complex...

... "Brown's Mound Complex is a site we know about extensively but not intensively," said Bill Marquardt, curator in archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville. "In other words, we sort of know where everything is on the site, but we don't know what all of the parts of the site have to tell us. We've never had the chance to know the function of Mound 5, whether it was a garbage pile or a special-purpose mound or something else. This is a good opportunity to find out."

When the Spanish arrived on the Gulf coast in 1513, the Calusa were the dominant people of South Florida, demanding tribute from as far away as the Keys and Cape Canaveral.

Work at Mound 5 might produce clues as to how and when the Calusa became so powerful...

Posted on Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 2:22 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Bridge to connect city to Fort York

Source: The Star (10-16-09)

For years, Fort York has been separated from the harbour it once protected and the city it defended, hemmed in by the Gardiner Expressway and a rail corridor.

But construction of a new pedestrian-cyclist bridge over the railway tracks, which begins next year as part of a $35 million revitalization of the national historic site, will once again connect the fort with city neighbourhoods to the north and waterfront trails to the south.

"One of our biggest challenges over the years has been accessibility and the ability to have a good physical presence," says museum administrator David O'Hara. The bridge will link the northwest portion of the 18-hectare park to the south side of Wellington St. east of Strachan Ave.

Paths from the fort, built by Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe on the shores of Lake Ontario in 1793, once connected it to the Town of York – Toronto's birthplace and founded by Simcoe the same year.

Future plans call for a bike trail south of Front St. through existing parks, which will form an east-west link from the fort to downtown.

Posted on Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 2:20 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Excavations in Georgia may help pinpoint trail of Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto

Source: Google News (11-5-09)

ATLANTA — An archaeologist says excavations in southern Georgia have turned up beads, metal tools and other artifacts that may pinpoint part of the elusive trail of the 16th-century Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto.

Dennis Blanton of the Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta was scheduled to present his findings Thursday to the Southeastern Archaeological Conference in Mobile, Ala.

Excavations since 2006 in rural Telfair County uncovered remains of an Indian settlement along with nine pea-sized glass beads and six metal objects, including three iron tools and a silver pendant. Blanton says the artifacts are consistent with items Spanish explorers traded with Indians.

In a research paper prepared for the conference, Blanton wrote that the site "not only holds evidence of Hernando de Soto's initial passage through Georgia in the spring of 1540, but that it is a probable point of direct contact" with American Indians.

Posted on Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 2:18 AM | Comments (0) | Top

War of 1812 commemorative stamp proposed

Source: SooToday (10-7-09)

WASHINGTON - U.S. Senator Carl Levin, D-Michigan, [has] introduced a concurrent resolution calling for the issuance of a postage stamp commemorating the War of 1812.

Seven other senators have joined Levin in co-sponsoring the bill.

They are Senator Voinovich, R-Ohio; Senator Landrieu, La.; Senator Kaufman, D-Del.; Senator Brown, D-Ohio; Senator Stabenow, D-Mich.; Senator Snowe, R-Maine; and Senator Leahy, D-Vt.

“I am pleased to introduce this resolution commemorating the War of 1812, which secured our lasting independence from Great Britain, set our border with Canada, limited violence on the frontier and ensured the safety of American mariners around the world,” Levin said.

“Michigan witnessed many battles during the war, including the Battle of the River Raisin, near current day Monroe. That bloody battle in January 1813 gave birth to the rallying cry 'Remember the Raisin' which inspired American soldiers.”

If passed by the Senate and House of Representatives, the concurrent resolution introduced [yesterday] would express the sense of Congress that the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee should recommend to the postmaster general that a stamp commemorating the War of 1812 be issued.

Posted on Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 2:16 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Scots Aim Lasers at Landmarks

Source: NYT (11-4-09)

EDINBURGH — Come April a small team of experts from the Glasgow School of Art and the government heritage entity Historic Scotland will fly to South Dakota at the behest of an organization called CyArk and the United States National Park Service. They will make laser scans and computer models of Mount Rushmore.

Aside from the wee bit of Scottish blood in three of the four enshrined presidents (Lincoln’s the odd man out, in case you’re wondering), there is of course nothing whatsoever Scottish about this most all-American of sites. But cultural expertise transcends national borders. The Scottish team of four or five will spend a few days setting up and moving around their various scanners to capture all of Mount Rushmore’s nooks and crannies, collecting billions of bits of digital information, which will then be brought back here, to be crunched and sorted out by computer.

What results should be the most complete and precise three-dimensional models ever of the site, millions of times more detailed and accuratethan the best photographs or films, precise down to the tiniest fraction of a millimeter...

... The cultural implications of the technology are big, as are the political ones for Scotland, which, via the country’s culture minister, Michael Russell, has latched on to the laser team’s work.

It was about three years ago that Mr. Pritchard’s art school group began surveying a swath of the center of Glasgow, along the River Clyde, creating 3-D digital representations of some 1,400 buildings and dozens of streetscapes. They caught the attention of Mr. Mitchell, who enlisted Mr. Pritchard to scan a decaying iron bridge in Dundee, which was nearly impossible to survey with much accuracy except by laser. The bridge project led to scans of Stirling Castle and Rosslyn Chapel, the 15th-century Gothic fancy to which “The Da Vinci Code” has lately brought swarms of conspiracy-minded tourists. One of them was a man who tried one day to take a sledgehammer to the so-called Apprentice Pillar, convinced that the Holy Grail was hidden inside it.

No harm done, but the event illustrated, as Mr. Mitchell noted, why scans are necessary. “Remember Windsor?” he asked, referring to the fire in 1992 that burned parts of the British royal castle. “If restorers had had laser scans back then, they could have rebuilt everything to within three millimeters of accuracy, but instead they had to rely on conjecture from photographs.” He noted the more recent case of the Buddhas in Afghanistan that the Taliban blew up in 2001...

Posted on Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 2:14 AM | Comments (0) | Top

50 caught looting in Plymouth during the Blitz (UK)

Source: The Herald (11-9-09)

THE heroic image of wartime Plymouth has been dealt a blow by new research.

During the Second World War Blitz, 50 Plymothians were caught and convicted of looting, the research by an historian reveals.

The looters moved in as German bombs rained down on the city.

Shockingly, many were men and women in positions of trust, according to a new book by Exeter University historian Dr Todd Gray.

Plymouth's heaviest bombing took place from March to April of 1941. It was during this period that looting appears to have been heaviest, with children, servicemen, wardens and firefighters all taking part.

The home of Wilfred Shawe on the Hoe was one of the many destroyed on the night of April 22.

Posted on Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 2:08 AM | Comments (0) | Top

U.S. Officer Revisits His Past in Vietnam

Source: NYT (11-9-09)

DA NANG, Vietnam — Cmdr. H. B. Le, the first Vietnamese-American to command a United States Navy destroyer, had just stepped ashore on a formal port call, making an emotional return to Vietnam for the first time since he fled as a young boy on a fishing boat at the end of the war in 1975.

A youthful and smiling man of 39, he bore on his shoulders the weight of the symbolism of cautiously warming military ties between Vietnam and the United States in the visit over the weekend.

But the symbolism became more nuanced when his welcoming ceremony was delayed by a dispute over a request to display the red Vietnamese flag with its gold star aboard the U.S.S. Blue Ridge, the flagship of the Seventh Fleet, which had just pulled into port.

Two hours later the flag was finally raised high on the yardarm, seemingly in accord with the Vietnamese demand and contrary to American naval custom.

The waiting generals began to smile again, the red carpet was rolled out and Commander Le was free to proceed with his return...

... He was returning to a very different Vietnam from the one he fled at the age of 5 with his parents and three of his siblings. Most people in this young nation, like Commander Le himself, have no memory of the war.

In the last decade or more, Vietnam has opened its economy, increased trade with the United States and risen from postwar poverty even as the Communist government maintains control of the news media and political expression.

The city of Da Nang today, with four new bridges, broad streets and an emerging high-rise skyline, is almost unrecognizable to those who were here during the war years.

Despite the changes, the flag-raising dispute and the background of Commander Le’s own story illustrated the complexities of a relationship that remains shadowed by the war, even as it moves tentatively forward.

Posted on Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 2:07 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Hillary Clinton: Berlin Wall Festivities Not Just A Party

Source: CNSNews.com (11-9-09)

Berlin (AP) - U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton congratulated Germans on the 20-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall at a meeting Monday with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

"I am delighted to be here in Berlin, the city that meant so much, not only to the German people, but to the European and the American people and the world," Clinton said at the Chancellory.

"I congratulate the chancellor, not only on the very well deserved occasion here, but on the work that she and her government are doing here. It is an honor to be representing the United States."

Twenty years after the collapse of the wall that divided East and West Berlin, Clinton said Sunday at an earlier event, the hard work that went into ending the Cold War must be channeled to meet fresh challenges, including the fights against extremism and climate change.

As the Obama administration looks to often reluctant European allies to bolster their NATO forces in Afghanistan, Clinton said Monday's commemoration of Nov. 9, 1989, the night "when history pierced the concrete and concertina wire," must look forward and not back...

Posted on Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 2:05 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Twenty years after Berlin, Palestinians crack Israel's wall

Source: The American Task Force on Palestine (11-9-09)

Marking the 20th anniversary since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Palestinians tore down a section of Israel's wall in the West Bank village of Ni'lin on Friday.

During a weekly protest against the barrier, which cuts through the Ramallah-area village's center and isolates residents from 60 percent of their farmland, some 300 demonstrators methodically dismantled a concrete section before Israeli forces opened fire...

... "Twenty years ago, no one imagined that the monstrosity that divided Berlin would ever be taken down, but it took only two days to do it," participant Muhib Hawaja told the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth.

"Today we proved that we too can pull it off, right here and right now. That is our land beyond the barrier, and we have no intention of ceding it. We will triumph because justice is on our side," he added.

Posted on Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 12:29 AM | Comments (1) | Top

Rasmussen Report: 93 Percent Say Fall of Berlin Wall Important To World History

Source: Rasmussen Reports (11-9-09)

Seventy percent (70%) of U.S. voters rate the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism as Very Important in terms of world history.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows another 23% see the events as somewhat important. Just four percent (4%) of voters say the fall of the wall around Berlin and the collapse of communism were not very or not at all important.

The Berlin Wall was built by the communist East Germans to surround the free city of West Berlin. It was in place from 1961 to 1989 and came to symbolize the barrier between democratic Western Europe and Soviet-dominated communist Eastern Europe.

Eighty-four percent (84%) of voters also identified President Ronald Reagan as the man who famously declared, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

Reagan’s challenge to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was issued on June 12, 1987, but it wasn’t until November 9, 1989, that the East German government announced that the border was open, effectively “tearing down” the wall. Celebrating Germans on both sides then began physically tearing down the barrier. The communist Soviet Union itself lasted only last two more years...

Posted on Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 12:02 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Monday, November 9, 2009

Cantor Says Tea Party's Dachau Photos 'Inappropriate'

Source: Talking Points Memo (11-6-09)

At yesterday's tea party rally on Capitol Hill, at least one protester brandished a large graphic photograph of the victims of the Dachau Nazi concentration camp, comparing health care reform to Nazi policies. Today, Rep. Eric Cantor's (R-VA) spokesman called the photograph "inappropriate."

Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY) has also condemned the poster.

Cantor, in an interview today with Bloomberg, also offered some criticism of radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh's comparison of President Obama to Adolf Hitler.

"Do I condone the mention of Hitler in any discussion about politics?" said Cantor, who is the only Jewish Republican in Congress. "No, I don't, because obviously that is something that conjures up images that frankly are not, I think, very helpful."...

Posted on Monday, November 9, 2009 at 11:54 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Former STASI man sickened by collapse of Communism

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-9-09)

Heinz Kessler has no regrets over the deaths to those who tried to cross the Berlin Wall.

Almost alone among the ex-Communist titans who ran the east bloc, he remains a stalwart defender of the system he served as minister of defence in the Honecker politburo.

Now 89 and living in Lichtenberg, Berlin, he regards the united Germany as a "callous and unjust" government, and wishes that the wall and the wire was still standing.

For his beliefs, Herr Kessler has been barred from membership in the Party of Democratic Socialism, the successor to the East German Communist Party, which is trying to convey a moderate, democratic image.

He has also been convicted of manslaughter as a result of his role in ordering East German border guards to shoot at fleeing refugees. The case involved seven victims picked from among the more than 600 who died while trying to flee.

"On some matters I cannot change my position," he says. "I refuse to sacrifice my Communist beliefs to the fashion of the day. I am and remain a believer in democratic centralism and a revolutionary socialist party."

Posted on Monday, November 9, 2009 at 11:40 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Celebrations to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall are under way

Source: BBC (11-9-09)

German Chancellor Angela Merkel was joined at the Brandenburg Gate by Russia's Dmitry Medvedev, France's Nicolas Sarkozy and UK PM Gordon Brown.

In a special video address, US President Barack Obama said Berliners had rebuked tyranny on 9 November 1989.

The event two decades ago led Germany to reunify, caused the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Cold War's end.

Communist East Germany erected the 155-km (96-mile) concrete barrier in 1961 to encircle West Berlin and prevent citizens from fleeing into the capitalist enclave...

... Mrs Clinton also spoke, before introducing a surprise video address from Washington by Mr Obama.

"There could be no clearer rebuke of tyranny. There could be no stronger affirmation of freedom," he said of the wall's tearing down.

Mr Medvedev said the wall's collapse had helped Russia and Germany end their World War II enmity.

He said he hoped everyone had rejected the dividing lines represented by the wall.

In his speech, Mr Brown told Berliners: "You dared to dream in the darkness. You knew that while force has the temporary power to dominate, it can never ultimately dictate."

After the leaders spoke, a chain of 1,000 giant foam dominoes - painted with messages of freedom by young people - was toppled along where the wall once stood...

Posted on Monday, November 9, 2009 at 11:21 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Anger at Northwestern Over Blackface Costumes

Source: Inside Higher Ed (11-9-09)

Many students at Northwestern University are upset over the blackface Halloween costumes of some white students, NBC Chicago reported. Morton O. Schapiro, Northwestern's president, sent an e-mail to students saying: “While I fully support the principles of free expression, at the same time I am deeply disappointed to see any example of insensitivity that demeans a segment of our community." A forum on the incident Thursday night attracted many students. The Daily Northwestern ran a live blog on the forum, attracting many comments. Northwestern is far from the first campus at which blackface or racially stereotyped Halloween costumes have created racial tensions.

Posted on Monday, November 9, 2009 at 11:11 PM | Comments (0) | Top

An Ethical Question: Does a Nazi Deserve a Place Among Philosophers?

Source: NYT (11-8-09)

For decades the German philosopher Martin Heidegger has been the subject of passionate debate. His critique of Western thought and technology has penetrated deeply into architecture, psychology and literary theory and inspired some of the most influential intellectual movements of the 20th century. Yet he was also a fervent Nazi.

Now a soon-to-be published book in English has revived the long-running debate about whether the man can be separated from his philosophy. Drawing on new evidence, the author, Emmanuel Faye, argues fascist and racist ideas are so woven into the fabric of Heidegger’s theories that they no longer deserve to be called philosophy. As a result Mr. Faye declares, Heidegger’s works and the many fields built on them need to be re-examined lest they spread sinister ideas as dangerous to modern thought as “the Nazi movement was to the physical existence of the exterminated peoples.”

First published in France in 2005, the book, “Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy,” calls on philosophy professors to treat Heidegger’s writings like hate speech. Libraries, too, should stop classifying Heidegger’s collected works (which have been sanitized and abridged by his family) as philosophy and instead include them under the history of Nazism. These measures would function as a warning label, like a skull-and-crossbones on a bottle of poison, to prevent the careless spread of his most odious ideas, which Mr. Faye lists as the exaltation of the state over the individual, the impossibility of morality, anti-humanism and racial purity...

Posted on Monday, November 9, 2009 at 10:45 PM | Comments (0) | Top

The Legacy of 1989 Is Still Up for Debate

Source: NYT (11-8-09)

The historical legacy of 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and the cold war thawed, is as political as the upheavals of that decisive year....

In general, said James M. Goldgeier of George Washington University, a historian of the period, “the big question out there for 20 years is who gets the credit.”

For many in the United States, he said, most of the credit now goes to President Ronald Reagan and his aggressive military spending and antagonism toward Communism. That view has largely eclipsed another American perspective, which was that globalization and democratization were so powerful that a Mikhail Gorbachev was inevitable, and that the cold war ended through “soft power” — propaganda, diplomacy and the Helsinki accords.

“As the partisan divide over Reagan has dissipated, I think over time most Americans, if they think back at all, say it was Reagan who said, ‘Tear down this wall,’ and down it came,” Professor Goldgeier said.

Robert Kagan, a historian with the Carnegie Endowment in Washington and an editor of The Weekly Standard, said conservatives won the debate. “The standard narrative is Reagan,” he said.

This is not the case in Europe, Mr. Kagan said. “If 90 percent of Americans say it was the U.S. being firm, 99 percent of Europeans think it was they being soft — that the wall fell through Ostpolitik and West German TV.”

Posted on Monday, November 9, 2009 at 9:45 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Barriers May Crumble, but Psychological Borders Remain

Source: NYT (11-6-09)

BERLIN — During his childhood, Lutz Braun could see the Berlin Wall from his home in Blankenfelde, a village south of the city that was part of communist East Germany.

The wall snaked along, cutting through fields, yards and gardens. But Mr. Braun’s family did not talk about the wall. “As children, we did not see borders,” said Mr. Braun, 56. “They played no role.”

When Mr. Braun was conscripted into the East German People’s Army in the mid-1970s, he had no choice but to acknowledge the border that divided his country, and Europe. He was dispatched to a border guard unit that patrolled the area north of Berlin. The unit’s task was to prevent East Germans from scaling the wall and escaping to the Western part of the city...

... The fall of the Berlin Wall did destroy borders between countries, at least physically. Millions of people who had been raised in communist Eastern Europe had for the first time in their lives the possibility to see the West. But the idea of borders, mental or physical, across Europe, was not eradicated.

“The West had preoccupied our imagination for so long,” said Ivan Krastev, chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia. “We had talked about destroying the borders. It was about the physical act of crossing. No constraints.” ...

... Now that Mr. Krastev can travel and lecture anywhere he chooses, he can see what opportunities the end of the Cold War and globalization have created.

“Yet for many, globalization is seen as a threat because there is no protection,” he said. “Borders have become important again, but this time it is the West that wants to put them up, not the East.”

Posted on Monday, November 9, 2009 at 8:14 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Japan's Mixed Signals Add to Uncertainty Over U.S. Installations

Source: WSJ (11-9-09)

When President Barack Obama meets Japan's new prime minister in Tokyo on Friday, he will face a government that appears uncertain about how to resolve the major issue complicating ties between the two allies.

Members of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's administration have sent mixed signals in recent weeks over the Japanese government's stance on a plan to realign U.S. forces on the remote southern island of Okinawa. Mr. Hatoyama campaigned in part on reviewing the plan, which is unpopular in Okinawa because many there want U.S. forces off the island entirely.

A crowd estimated at 21,000 people protested Sunday at Ginowan City in Okinawa and called for U.S. forces to leave, according to the rally's organizers. About 2,000 staged a protest at a U.S. air base in nearby Kadena on Saturday...

... The U.S. military's presence has become increasingly unpopular within Okinawa. The rape of a 12-year-old girl by U.S. servicemen in 1995 prompted talks to close the Futenma base. The crash of a military helicopter in a college campus near Futenma in 2004 led to the 2006 agreement.

More recently, Japan's weakened economy has added to the bitterness. As a price for hosting military bases, Tokyo traditionally dished out generous public works spending to prop up Okinawa. But as Japan's overall economy began to falter in the 1990s and the government's debts piled up, Tokyo began to cut such spending.

Posted on Monday, November 9, 2009 at 11:38 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Prague Communists Called for Wall to Open on November 8, 1989

Source: The National Security Archives (11-8-09)

Just before the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago, even the hardline Czechoslovak Communist leaders called for the opening of the German border, according to documents from high-level archives in Berlin, Bonn and Prague published for the first time in English and posted on the Web today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

Compiled and edited by Czech historian Vilem Precan and translated by Todd Hammond, the documents show that waves of East German refugees fleeing to the West through Czechoslovakia (more than 62,000 just in the period from November 4 to 10, 1989) so alarmed the Czechoslovak Communist authorities – who previously had resisted the reforms under way in Poland, Hungary and in Moscow – that they asked the East German leadership on November 8 to allow its citizens to go directly to West Germany, in effect to open the border.

The documents posted today include the secret diplomatic exchanges between the West German foreign ministry and its embassy in Prague where thousands of refugees took shelter, between East German diplomats in Prague and their bosses in East Berlin, between Czechoslovak diplomats and Party officials and their counterparts, and eyewitness accounts by dissident Charter 77 spokespeople about the refugee crisis.

The posting also includes contemporaneous photographs of the scene at the West German embassy in Prague, Czech police attempting to prevent refugees from scaling the embassy walls, the tent city that arose in its courtyard, and rows of abandoned Trabant cars in the streets of Prague...

Posted on Monday, November 9, 2009 at 11:31 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Ancient papers saved in tax deal (Wales)

Source: BBC (11-9-09)

The future of records dating back more than 700 years has been secured - with the help of the taxman.

Estate ledgers, royal edicts and personal correspondence are to stay at Bangor University after a deal with Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC).

The deal agreed with executors of the Penrhyn Castle estate will see the archives accepted for the British people in lieu of inheritance tax.

They reveal the history and politics of the families of the castle in Gwynedd.

The documents, which range from 13th Century parchment to 20th century typed papers, chart hundreds of years of history.

Posted on Monday, November 9, 2009 at 10:33 AM | Comments (0) | Top

The Africans who fought in WWII

Source: BBC (11-9-09)

The 70th anniversary of World War II is being commemorated around the world, but the contribution of one group of soldiers is almost universally ignored. How many now recall the role of more than one million African troops?

Yet they fought in the deserts of North Africa, the jungles of Burma and over the skies of Germany. A shrinking band of veterans, many now living in poverty, bitterly resent being written out of history.

For Africa, World War II began not in 1939, but in 1935.

Posted on Monday, November 9, 2009 at 10:29 AM | Comments (2) | Top

Sarkozy posts Berlin Wall photo

Source: BBC (11-9-09)

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has posted on Facebook a picture of himself at the Berlin Wall, saying he had chipped away at it with a pickaxe.

The image shows Mr Sarkozy, then a 34-year-old French MP, standing before a graffiti-covered section of the wall.

His caption dates the image to 9 November 1989, but French observers say it was probably taken the next day.

Posted on Monday, November 9, 2009 at 10:27 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Italian couple discover 16th-century frescoes in bedroom

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-9-09)

Mr de Paolis came across the paintings after deciding to add a bathroom in the apartment, which partly extends into an abandoned medieval tower that was thought to have been part of a military fort in Civitavecchia, a port west of Rome.

Bit by bit, De Paolis uncovered copies of the frescoes in Raphael's Room of Heliodorus at the Vatican museums, thought to have been painted by a contemporary student of the Renaissance master, Ugo da Scarpi, best known for his wood carvings.

The Room of Heliodorus is one of four frescoed chambers by Raphael and his disciples, commissioned for the private apartments of Pope Julius II in the Apostolic Palace, now part of the Vatican Museums, next to the Sistine Chapel.

Posted on Monday, November 9, 2009 at 10:24 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall commemorate Canada's war dead

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-8-09)

Canada's war dead were commemorated at a Remembrance Sunday service attended by the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall.

The royal couple joined a congregation in Victoria, British Colombia, to mark the sombre occasion on the same day the Queen led the nation in honouring Britain's fallen servicemen and women.

Canadians who have died fighting in the First and Second World Wars and in the more recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan were remembered.

Posted on Monday, November 9, 2009 at 10:21 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Work on 9/11 memorial park begins

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-9-09)

Relatives of passengers on United flight 93, the hijacked 9/11 plane which crashed in a field after an on-board fight for the controls, have broken ground on a permanent memorial park in their honour.

At a ceremony at the weekend that was led by Ken Salazar, the US Interior Secretary, 39 relatives of the 40 passengers and crew who died turned shovels of soil in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

The government intends to have the first phase of a national monument completed by September 11, 2011 – the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks.

Posted on Monday, November 9, 2009 at 10:19 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Sir Andrew Motion 'ripped off history book for Remembrance Sunday poem'

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-9-09)

Sir Andrew Motion, the former Poet Laureate, has been accused of ripping off work by a military historian for a Remembrance Sunday poem.

Ben Shephard said Motion's poem An Equal Voice had used 17 passages from his book A War of Nerves, which documented the effects of shell shock on soldiers.

Motion, who said his poem "stitched together" accounts from "a variety of sources", dismissed Shephard's claim of plagiarism by saying he was working in a long tradition of "found poetry" that dated back to Shakespeare.

Posted on Monday, November 9, 2009 at 10:15 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Berlin Wall anniversary: leaders recreate historic walk

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-9-09)

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has joined former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Polish leader Lech Walesa to recreate the historic walk across the Berlin Wall on the 20th anniversary of its collapse.

Crowds thronged the areas where the 96-mile wall encircled West Berlin in the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

Chancellor Merkel, Mr Gorbachev and Mr Walesa walked across the site of the Bornholmer Strasse where the first crowds were filmed crossing freely from the Communist state and the democratic western enclave.

Posted on Monday, November 9, 2009 at 10:13 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Obama Draws Criticism for Sitting Out Berlin Wall Anniversary

Source: Fox News (11-9-09)

The president does not plan to travel to Germany to attend the 20th anniversary celebration Monday of the fall of the Berlin Wall, drawing heated criticism from those who say he's ignoring a shining triumph of American-inspired democracy.

"A tragedy," is how former House Speaker Newt Gingrich described Obama's absence.

For its part, the administration is citing a scheduling conflict. The White House says the president simply does not have the time to go, with the trip to Asia starting Wednesday.

Posted on Monday, November 9, 2009 at 10:05 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Germany Celebrates Fall of the Berlin Wall

Source: Fox News (11-9-09)

Germans from both sides of the former Berlin Wall celebrated on Monday, 20 years after the Iron Curtain fell, sending East Germans flooding west and setting in motion events that soon led to the country's reunification.

Chancellor Angela Merkel — reunited Germany's first leader to grow up in the communist east — started the day with President Horst Koehler and other leaders at a prayer service at a former East Berlin church that was a rallying point for opposition activists in 1989.

Memorials also were planned to the 136 people killed trying to cross the border. Candles were lit and 1,000 towering plastic foam dominoes placed along the wall's route to be tipped over.

Also expected in Berlin for the ceremonies were the leaders of all 27 European Union countries and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev.

Posted on Monday, November 9, 2009 at 10:02 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Alleged Fort Hood Shooter Tied to Mosque of 9/11 Hijackers

Source: AP (11-8-09)

The family of the alleged Fort Hood shooter held his mother's funeral at the same Virginia mosque that two Sept. 11 hijackers attended in 2001, at a time when a radical imam preached there.

Whether the Fort Hood shooter associated with the hijackers is something the FBI will probably look into, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.

Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey said Sunday it's important for the country not to get caught up in speculation about Hasan's Muslim faith, and he has instructed his commanders to be on the lookout for anti-Muslim reaction to the killings at the Texas post.

Posted on Monday, November 9, 2009 at 9:57 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Citizenship for Polish Hero of American Revolution

Source: NYT (11-7-09)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Gen. Casimir Pulaski finally became an American citizen, 230 years after he died fighting in the Revolutionary War.

President Obama signed a joint resolution of the House and the Senate on Friday that made Pulaski, a Polish nobleman, an honorary citizen.

Pulaski’s contribution to the American colonies’ effort to leave the British Empire began with a flourish. He wrote a letter to Gen. George Washington with the declaration: “I came here, where freedom is being defended, to serve it, and to live or die for it.”

Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, Democrat of Ohio, had been pushing for the honorary citizenship since 2005.

“Pulaski made the ultimate sacrifice for this country, and he deserves nothing but the highest honor and recognition for his service,” Mr. Kucinich said then.

Posted on Sunday, November 8, 2009 at 4:58 PM | Comments (0) | Top

India's Scottish heritage remembered in renovation of Calcutta's Raj architecture

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-8-09)

In a bid to remind the world of the prominent role that Scots played in laying the foundations of colonial India, the Scottish government has launched a campaign to renovate some of the sub-continent's finest imperial buildings before they decay beyond repair.

The conventional view of Indian colonial life as a quintessentially English experience - all G&Ts, tea and cricket - has long overlooked the fact that Scots were heavily represented in HMG's vast imperial civil service, and as businessmen and architects.

Now, keen to underline its independence from London in foreign affairs, Scotland's new nationalist government plans to reclaim that forgotten heritage in Calcutta, the capital of British India.

Its first target will be helping to restore the rubble-covered grand staircases and peeling walls of once-magnificent buildings like Duff College, named after Alexander Duff, a Scots missionary and pioneering educationalist who arrived in Calcutta in 1830 after being shipwrecked twice en route. But Holyrood also hopes to remind Indians of the role that Scots played in educating and inspiring some of the sub-continent's leading independence campaigners.

Posted on Sunday, November 8, 2009 at 4:15 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Cubans are finally free - to buy peas and potatoes

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-7-09)

The staples were removed from a list of rationed foods that most Cubans depend on, permitting them to buy as much of the products as they want – at 20 times more than they used to.

The move comes amid efforts by Raul Castro's government to scale back Cuba's subsidy-rich, cash-poor economy. Lunches which cost so little they were almost free lunches were eliminated from some state-cafeterias in September. In October, the Communist Party's Granma newspaper published a full-page editorial saying the time had come to do away with the ration books altogether.

Authorities say their goal is to encourage more productivity and free the state from a crushing economic burden. Critics – including some on the streets of Havana – argue that the moves break with what had been a sacred covenant of the revolution Fidel Castro led in 1959: that socialism would not make people rich, but would provide all Cubans with at least the basics.

Even with the changes, the state pays for or heavily subsidises nearly everything, from education to health care, housing to transportation. But many Cubans see the ration book – or "libreta" in Spanish– as a flawed but fundamental right, and shoppers on Friday bristled at the new changes

"This is crazy. They should be adding products to the ration book, not taking away from it," said Roberto Rodriguez, a 55-year-old delivery man buying rice, sugar and coffee at an official store in Havana's Vedado neighborhood. "If they don't produce enough, people will start to hoard products and things will get even worse."

Posted on Sunday, November 8, 2009 at 4:10 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Funeral Mass for Senator Kennedy Inspired Catholic Spat

Source: Time (11-8-09)

The leaders of the Roman Catholic Church traditionally couch even the harshest disagreements in decorous, ecclesiastical language. But it didn't take a decoder ring to figure out what Rome-based Archbishop Raymond Burke meant in a late-September address when he charged Boston Cardinal Seán O'Malley with being under the influence of Satan, "the father of lies."

Burke's broadside at O'Malley was inspired by the Cardinal's decision to permit and preside over a funeral Mass for the late Senator Ted Kennedy. And it has set the Catholic world abuzz. Even more than protests over the University of Notre Dame's decision to invite President Barack Obama to speak, disputes over the Kennedy funeral have brought into the open an argument that has been roiling within American Catholicism. The debate nominally centers on the question of how to deal with politicians who support abortion rights. Burke and others who believe a Catholic's position on abortion trumps all other teachings have faced off against those who take a more holistic view of the faith. But at the core, the divide is over who decides what it means to be Catholic...

... Burke's confrontational approach doesn't always mesh with the more discreet diplomacy favored by his Italian colleagues. "He's seen as a bull in a china shop," says an American priest and longtime Rome resident. "I've seen Italian bishops roll their eyes."

In retrospect, it should have been obvious that the funeral plans for Kennedy would reignite a lingering dispute within the church. The question of whether the Senator should even be described as a Catholic because of his support for abortion rights and his checkered life history was hotly debated on Catholic blogs and religion websites like Beliefnet.com. Right-wing Catholics lobbied the Boston archdiocese to refuse the Kennedy family a church funeral. Robert Royal of the Faith & Reason Institute called O'Malley's decision to go ahead with the Mass a "grave scandal" on a par with the sexual-abuse crisis...

Posted on Sunday, November 8, 2009 at 3:49 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Guarding Balance of Power at Iron Curtain's Edge

Source: WSJ (11-7-09)

For decades a hilly region in central Germany divided by the Iron Curtain was at risk of becoming the ground zero of a nuclear World War III. During the Cold War, troopers of the U.S. 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment -- known as the Blackhorse regiment -- patrolled this border from Observation Post Alpha near the West German town of Fulda.

They were there to protect the so-called Fulda Gap -- a key weakness in the West's defense. It was the most difficult area for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to defend because of its accessible terrain and a geography that marked a deep protrusion of eastern territory into the West.

The Fulda area, about 100 miles from Frankfurt, was seen as an attractive avenue for a military push from the East into Western Europe.

Roger Cirillo, who served in the Fulda area as a captain during the 1970s, says he always trained his soldiers to expect a situation where the enemy would outnumber them. But he knew that in case of an attack, "there was no way that I could do my job without getting killed." He also left no doubt in his subordinates that they were likely to die if it came to defending their post.

Mr. Cirillo, now director of the Association of the U.S. Army's book progam, in Arlington, Va., remains fascinated by Cold War Germany. After retiring from the armed forces, he got his doctorate and researched defense plans of both sides...

Posted on Sunday, November 8, 2009 at 3:47 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Deer Still Shun Iron Curtain Border

Source: WSJ (11-4-09)

GRAFENAU, Germany -- It has been 20 years since the Berlin Wall fell. But deep in the forest here, a red deer called Ahornia still refuses to cross the old Iron Curtain.

Ahornia inhabits the thickly wooded mountains along what once was the fortified border between West Germany and Czechoslovakia. At the height of the Cold War, a high electric fence, barbed wire and machine-gun-carrying guards cut off Eastern Europe from the Western world. The barriers severed the herds of deer on the two sides as well.

The fence is long gone, and the no-man's land where it stood now is part of Europe's biggest nature preserve. The once-deadly border area is alive with songbirds nesting in crumbling watchtowers, foxes hiding in weedy fortifications and animals not seen here for years, such as elk and lynx.

But one species is boycotting the reunified animal kingdom: red deer. Herds of them roam both sides of the old NATO-Warsaw Pact border here but mysteriously turn around when they approach it. This although the deer alive today have no memory of the ominous fence.

Posted on Sunday, November 8, 2009 at 3:46 PM | Comments (0) | Top

With Wall Just a Memory, German Divisions Fade

Source: NYT (11-7-09)

BERLIN — “The Quiz of the Germans,” a lighthearted entry amid a crush of serious examinations of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, pitted three West German celebrities seated behind the sloping hood of an old Volkswagen Beetle against counterparts from the East perched above the front of a clunky Trabant.

On a television stage emblazoned with an oversize map of unified Germany, the questions about the divided old days were as symmetrical as the antique cars. The topics — nude beachgoers in the East and sex education in the West, vacation destinations or the funny dialects on either side — struck a note of shared Germanness that endured even at the peak of the cold war.

The anniversary on Monday has prompted a powerful national conversation, not just about a moment two decades ago, but about Germany today. It is more united and less turbulent than many here or abroad expected and, given its 20th century history, than many thought it deserved to be. Especially among the young, there is the sense that the aspiration to transcend Germany’s dark history and simply become normal may finally be within reach.

The latest round of news media accounts on the tumultuous final hours of the wall have emphasized not some sense of historical inevitability driven by economics and geopolitics, but rather the capricious human side of the event. That is reflected in last week’s cover story in the magazine Der Spiegel, which meticulously reconstructed, hour by hour, the events of the day that built up to the wall’s unexpected opening, titled “The Error That Led to Unity.”

Bureaucratic confusion over new travel regulations led crowds of East Berliners to gather at border checkpoints on Nov. 9, 1989, prompting guards to open the gates, bringing a sudden end to the division of the city with a night of spontaneous celebration and reunion.

In recent weeks polls have been released on the differences, and as often as not the similarities, between the former East and the former West in matters of love and real estate, table manners and car ownership. In ways both typically serious and atypically jocular, Germans seem to be groping for an understanding of what happened and what, along the way, they have become.

Beneath the trivial differences lies a country more unified than anyone expected. That is not to say that there are not still some hard feelings, and particularly among those from the East, known officially as the German Democratic Republic. Despite great strides and an estimated $2 trillion in assistance since 1989, many there have not quite caught up to the West materially and saw their everyday way of life disappear along with the wall...

Posted on Sunday, November 8, 2009 at 3:30 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Saturday, November 7, 2009

Massive foam dominoes to be toppled in tribute to Berlin Wall's fall

Source: Yahoo News (11-7-09)

BERLIN – Massive colorful dominoes painted by German students were placed Saturday along the former path of the Berlin Wall to mark the 20th anniversary of the opening of the barrier that divided the city for nearly three decades.

Many of the upright 7.5-foot-high (2.3-meter-high) plastic foam dominoes carried messages, including "We are one people." The approximately 1,000 dominoes stretching for 1.5 kilometers (1 mile) will be toppled Monday as part of wider celebrations of the wall's fall.

One labeled "bleeding heart" showed a sword cutting through the city of Berlin, starting a crimson flow of blood speckled with crosses.

"Everyone has walls in their heads to a certain extent," said Berlin resident Stefan Schueler as he perused the domino display. "It's always a good thing if one can break them down, and I think this is a good symbol."

Posted on Saturday, November 7, 2009 at 9:10 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Secret Documents Show Opposition to German Unification

Source: The National Security Archive (11-7-09)

The fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago generated major anxiety in capitals from Warsaw to Washington, to the point of outright opposition to the possibility of German unification, according to documents from Soviet, American and European secret files posted on the Web today by the National Security Archive.

Solidarity hero Lech Walesa told West German chancellor Helmut Kohl on the very day the Wall would fall that "events in the GDR [East Germany] are developing too quickly" and "at the wrong time," that the Wall could fall in a week or two (it would be a matter of hours) and then Kohl and the West would shift all their attention and aid to the GDR, leaving poor Poland "in the background." And indeed, Kohl cut short his visit to Warsaw and flew back to Germany as soon as the news arrived of the breach of the Wall.

British prime minister Margaret Thatcher earlier had told Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev that "Britain and Western Europe are not interested in the unification of Germany. The words written in the NATO communiqué may sound different, but disregard them." Top Gorbachev aide Anatoly Chernyaev concluded that Thatcher wanted to prevent unification "with our hands" and not her own.

Former U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski informed Soviet Politburo member Aleksandr Yakovlev, "I openly said that I am in favor of Poland and Hungary remaining in the Warsaw Treaty Organization. Both blocs should not be disbanded right now. I do not know what will happen if the GDR ceases to exist. There will be one Germany, united and strong. This does not correspond to either your or our interests."...

Posted on Saturday, November 7, 2009 at 9:02 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Chinese anger at sale of Qing Dynasty seal

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-6-09)

The green jade seal, belonging to the emperor Qian Long (1736-1795) fetched £3.6 million, six times its estimate, at the auction on Wednesday following frantic bidding by eight competing collectors.

News of the sale was greeted with anger on the Chinese internet, where the country's growing nationalism frequently finds its voice.

"Bandits have seized our treasures and are now selling them off at auction for ridiculous profits. How can we tolerate such behaviour?" wrote one user of the Sohu Internet portal. "The Chinese government must get fully involved in this matter." The seal, lot 136, was the prize object in a 261-lot sale which raised a total of £8.3m...

Posted on Saturday, November 7, 2009 at 9:01 PM | Comments (0) | Top

East Germans may have arrived in West Berlin hours before previously thought

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-7-09)

The rival version of events on November 9 has cast doubt on the official history of one of the most celebrated decisions of the century, as Berliners prepare to mark the 20th anniversary of the breaching of the wall with a "Festival of Freedom" this weekend.

Until recent weeks, Harald Jaeger, a Stasi officer at Bornholmer Strasse in north Berlin, held the undisputed mantle of the man who peacefully breached the Berlin Wall. But now Heinz Schafer, who was a colonel in the East German army in 1989, has declared that he was the first to open the barriers, at Waltersdorf in the far south of the city. Col Schafer, a 78 year-old who lives in a bleak suburb not far from the former crossing, only put forward his account in a talk to schoolgirls earlier this year.

"As soon as I saw the announcement on television [that travel restrictions for East Germans had been lifted], I put on my uniform and returned to the station," he said. "People had already gathered between the fence and the barrier and were demanding the right to cross. I had certain things to do – for example, we had to take the ammunition out of the self-shooting guns to make them safe...

Posted on Saturday, November 7, 2009 at 9:00 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Wiesel calls tea party Holocaust comparisons 'indecent and disgusting'

Source: Salon (11-6-09)

Unfortunately, it seems that whether it's on the Internet or in real life, Godwin's Law always finds a way to prove itself again. People manage to use Nazi and Holocaust references in the most poorly considered of ways, as if they're unaware of the true horror that was the slaughter of millions of innocent people.

That sort of thing has been happening all too frequently during protests against Democratic healthcare reform plans, and one of the more shocking examples was on display at the protest on Capitol Hill Thursday: A banner that featured a picture of naked, emaciated bodies stacked in a pile, with text reading, "National Socialist Health Care: Dachau, Germany -- 1945."

Now, someone with credibility on the issue that's all too real has spoken out against these comparisons. Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and author, put out a statement through his foundation's Twitter account. It reads simply, "Elie Wiesel on the GOP Tea Party's anti-Semitism and Holocaust comparisons: 'This kind of political hatred is indecent and disgusting.'"

Posted on Saturday, November 7, 2009 at 8:55 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Father and son 'Indiana Jones Team' cleared of illegal treasure hunting in Essex (England)

Source: Saffron Walden Reporter (10-30-09)

A father and son team of treasure hunters, branded as the Essex 'Indiana Jones team' who were accused of illegally removing 3000 year old artefacts from an Uttlesford estate while acting as metal detecting "nighthawks", were today cleared.

They were found not guilty in a Crown Court test case prosecution which has been closely watched by treasure hunters throughout the country.

Today's verdict has implications for all who head out to the countryside with metal detectors in search of treasure.

Bronze Age axe heads, spearheads and a chisel were found when the two men caught while operating at about 5am in the "dark and rain," on land belonging to Lord Braybrooke without permission, Ipswich Crown Court was told.

Posted on Saturday, November 7, 2009 at 8:47 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Second 'royal' Iron Age burial mound in Oss (Netherlands)

Source: Dutch News (11-2-09)

Archaeologists have found the Iron Age burial mound of a wealthy man in Noord Brabant, the second major find within a cluster of earthworks and other remains near the town of Oss.

The first mound was identified in 1933 and is considered one of the most important archaeological sites in the country.

Posted on Saturday, November 7, 2009 at 8:46 PM | Comments (0) | Top

History shows Philly transit strike could be worse

Source: Philly.com (11-6-09)

PHILADELPHIA - As the city's transit strike drags into its fourth day, tempers are frayed, commuter trains are packed, streets are clogged and some residents remain virtually stranded at home.

It could be worse.

During World War II, federal troops armed with bayonets and rifles gave striking Philadelphia transit employees an ultimatum: Get back to work or be drafted.

And there wasn't much brotherly love in the city in 1910, when a transportation strike led to riots, about two dozen deaths and the destruction of hundreds of trolleys.

The current walkout will surely cause economic and political damage, but Philadelphia is unlikely to see the strong-arm tactics and strike-related violence seen in decades past, historians and labor experts say.

Posted on Saturday, November 7, 2009 at 8:38 PM | Comments (0) | Top

With his latest purchase, Warren Buffett is on track to be today's Cornelius Vanderbilt

Source: WSJ (11-7-09)

The American railroad produced the nation's original corporate capitalists—the ones we call tycoons, moguls, or robber barons. The first and greatest was "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt, who amassed the New York Central system between New York and Chicago in the 1860s and '70s. This week's purchase of Burlington Northern by Warren Buffett seems to make Mr. Buffett a worthy successor.

"It's an all-in wager on the economic future of the United States," Mr. Buffett said of his purchase. "I love these bets." So did Vanderbilt. And Mr. Buffett's wager is on a Vanderbiltian scale. His company, Berkshire Hathaway, is paying $26.3 billion in cash and stock for 77.4% of the enormous railroad. (It already owned the rest.) In the Information Age, this is a startling endorsement of the oldest of the old economy.

Nineteenth century railroads largely created the modern corporate economy. Led by Vanderbilt, they landscaped the playing field that Mr. Buffett now strides across. The tale of the two titans, then, is a tangled story rather than a mere contrast of then and now.

On Nov. 8, 1833, the 39-year-old Vanderbilt boarded a train. Railroads were new enough that this was notable in itself. The locomotive resembled an oversize barrel thrown on its side, with wheels and a smokestack. The three cars that trailed behind were modeled on stagecoaches, and looked nothing like the rectangular boxes of decades to come. The train pulled out of South Amboy, N.J., and chugged down the Camden & Amboy Railroad. It soon reached the terrifying speed of 25 miles per hour...

Posted on Saturday, November 7, 2009 at 8:23 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Friday, November 6, 2009

Senate Rejects Effort to Block Civilian Trials for 9/11 Victims

Source: Truthout (11-5-09)

Washington - After an emotional debate over how to keep Americans safe, the Senate Thursday narrowly defeated an effort to prevent civilian trials in U.S. courts for the accused planners of the 9/11 attacks.

The Senate's 54-45 vote to reject the measure by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., opens the door for President Barack Obama to bring Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-professed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, to trial in federal court, rather than the military commissions Graham helped create.

Posted on Friday, November 6, 2009 at 9:57 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Children's Slavery Lesson Upsets Charlotte NAACP Leader

Source: wsoctv9 North Carolina (11-5-09)

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- A controversial history lesson left parents and teachers upset in Union County.

The teachers plan to write letters to leaders at the historic Latta Plantation about their disapproval of a hands-on history lesson during a Rea View Elementary class trip Wednesday.

During a lesson on the Civil War, tour guide Ian Campbell, who is himself black, made black students pretend to be slaves in front of their white classmates.

Campbell said he's been a historian for more than 15 years.

"I am very enthusiastic about getting kids to think about how people did things in 1860, 1861 -- even before that period," he said.

One parent said Campbell took his enthusiasm too far when he picked three black elementary school children out of a group of mostly white students to play the role of cotton picking slaves during a his hands-on history lesson. The parent said the students were also made to wear bags used to gather cotton around their necks.

Campbell said, "I was trying to be historically correct not politically correct."

Posted on Friday, November 6, 2009 at 9:37 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Newark students make ornaments of American landmarks for White House Christmas tree

Source: New Jersey Real-Time News (11-6-09)

Images of downtown Newark, the Statue of Liberty, the state Capitol in Trenton and the new Giants and Jets football stadium in the Meadowlands sports complex will grace the holiday tree in the Blue Room of the White House this Christmas thanks to the efforts of students at the Chancellor Avenue School in Newark.

The seventh and eighth grade students are creating 10 holiday ornaments for the tree depicting various "noteworthy and inspirational buildings or sites with historical significance or cultural importance," according to the instructions they received from the White House.

Posted on Friday, November 6, 2009 at 9:05 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Nantucket Sound may get new status

Source: Boston.com (11-6-09)

Massachusetts’ top historic preservation officer has dealt a setback to the proposed Nantucket Sound wind farm, ruling yesterday that the body of water is eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places because of its cultural significance for two Native American tribes.

In a letter released late in the afternoon, Brona Simon, state historic preservation officer, said she believes that Nantucket Sound is so culturally important to two Wampanoag tribes that it should be eligible to be listed on the National Register as a traditional cultural property. Her decision conflicts with an earlier conclusion by the Minerals Management Service, the federal agency that led the environmental review of the Cape Wind project.

Posted on Friday, November 6, 2009 at 9:04 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Amid Berlin Wall Commemorations, Activists Rally for Liberation of North Korea

Source: CNSNews.com (11-6-09)

As Germany prepares to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, activists in South Korea will hold a series of events this weekend to highlight calls for similarly momentous developments leading to the liberation of North Korea.

Planned events include a mass human rights and democracy demonstration led by North Korean refugee leaders in Seoul on Saturday; an all-day national day of prayer, fasting and repentance on Sunday; and another demonstration on Monday at the Demilitarized Zone dividing the two Koreas, calling for the North’s liberation.

A spokesman for the organizers said from Seoul on Friday that North Korean refugee organizations, groups focusing on North Korean human rights, and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) were participating in the “UnifyKorea2009” events...

... Almost a year later, on Oct. 3, 1990, Germany was formally reunified.

The Korean peninsula has been divided since the end of World War II left the formerly Japanese-occupied country split at the 38th parallel between zones occupied by the Soviet Union and the United States...

Posted on Friday, November 6, 2009 at 9:02 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Rasmussen Report: 52% Say America's Best Days Are In the Past

Source: Rasmussen Reports (11-5-09)

Fifty-two percent (52%) of voters feel that America’s best days are in the past, according to the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. This marks the highest level of voter pessimism in two years and is up 13 points from a year ago when Barack Obama was elected president.

Thirty-five percent (35%) feel the nation's best days are still to come, down 13 points since President Obama’s inauguration in January.

Posted on Friday, November 6, 2009 at 8:55 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Oldest American artefact unearthed

Source: Nature News (11-5-09)

Archaeologists claim to have found the oldest known artefact in the Americas, a scraper-like tool in an Oregon cave that dates back 14,230 years.

The tool shows that people were living in North America well before the widespread Clovis culture of 12,900 to 12,400 years ago, says archaeologist Dennis Jenkins of the University of Oregon in Eugene.

Studies of sediment and radiocarbon dating showed the bone's age. Jenkins presented the finding late last month in a lecture at the University of Oregon.

His team found the tool in a rock shelter overlooking a lake in south-central Oregon, one of a series of caves near the town of Paisley.

Posted on Friday, November 6, 2009 at 8:41 PM | Comments (0) | Top

One is Six UK Children Think Auschwitz is a Theme Park, One in Ten Think Hitler a Soccer Manager

Source: International Business Times (UK) (11-5-09)

A survey conducted by a veterans charity has found startling evidence that school children are increasingly ignorant of the history of the Second World War, with one in twenty believing Adolf Hitler to be a former national football team coach of Germany and one in six thinking that Auschwitz is a theme park.

The survey, conducted by Erskine, which takes care of around 1,350 war veterans, asked 2,000 children aged nine to 15 a number of questions about the Second World War and got some astonishing results.

One in six of respondents said they thought that Auschwitz is a theme park based on the Second World War. One in 20 said that the Holocaust was the celebration of the end of the war, whilst one in ten said they believed that the SS were Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven...

Posted on Friday, November 6, 2009 at 8:38 PM | Comments (0) | Top

A taste for the old East Germany

Source: BBC (11-5-09)

The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 thrilled most East Germans - though not manufacturers, whose goods became suddenly uncompetitive. But 20 years on, reports Lucy Hooker, some former East German brands are going strong.

Madeline Achterberg still harbours a fondness for many aspects of life in the old East Germany, especially the food, even though she wasn't even born in 1989.

"These things have a special spirit to them. They have a feeling of telling stories and Christmas," she says. "They have a story behind them."

Her family lives in Munich now, but when they go back, they return with bags bulging. ..

... Erika Mendel, a 70-year-old retired engineer from Berlin, says she tried some of the Western brands on offer and found the quality poor.

She buys the GDR washing powder she's always used, and cosmetics, liqueurs and many foodstuffs. Her husband drinks the East German brand of beer he has always drunk.

"I know it was always good and is still good now," she says...

Posted on Friday, November 6, 2009 at 8:36 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Bookless Libraries?

Source: Inside Higher Ed (11-6-09)

What started as a debate over whether brick-and-mortar libraries would survive much further into the 21st century turned into an existential discussion on the definition of libraries, as a gathering of technologists here at the 2009 Educause Conference pondered the evolution of one of higher education’s oldest institutions.

“Let’s face it: the library, as a place, is dead,” said Suzanne E. Thorin, dean of libraries at Syracuse University. “Kaput. Finito. And we need to move on to a new concept of what the academic library is.”...

... Despite the objections of “a minority of very loud faculty members,” Thorin said, the days of wandering through the stacks are over. “People,” she told the audience, of whom many were librarians, “the world has changed, and so have your students, and so have your faculty!”...

... The library still is, and will continue to be, the centerpiece of a campus, Luce said. The history of libraries, he said, has been marked by evolution: They were founded as places where materials were collected and stored. Then they shifted their focus toward connecting clients with resources. Then, with the addition of creature comforts such as coffee shops, they became "experience" centered, effectively rendering student unions obsolete.

“Now, in the fourth generation, we’re really seeing the library as a place to connect, collaborate, learn, and really synthesize all four of those roles together,” said Luce. “How do you do that without bricks and mortar?”...

Posted on Friday, November 6, 2009 at 8:34 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Karadzic Gets Delay, and Lawyer, in War Crimes Trial

Source: NYT (11-5-09)

PARIS — Judges ordered Thursday that a lawyer be imposed on Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader on trial in The Hague for war crimes and genocide, but halted the trial until March 1, to give a lawyer time to get ready.

Their decision effectively gave Mr. Karadzic, who has insisted on representing himself, almost four additional months to prepare his defense, which is more than an appeals court gave him when it ordered the case to begin.

“We need time to digest this decision,” said Marco Sladojevic, one of the lawyers assisting Mr. Karadzic. “We will try to find a constructive answer when the team meets with him tomorrow.”

Since his trial before the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague opened Oct. 26, Mr. Karadzic has forced the court’s hand by staying in his cell.

He showed up briefly for a procedural hearing on Tuesday, only to argue again that he needed more time to deal with the great load of materials relating to the charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in the 1992-95 Bosnian war...

Posted on Friday, November 6, 2009 at 8:21 PM | Comments (0) | Top

To Merkel, a Night in '89 Was Just the First Step on a Long Path for 2 Germanys

Source: NYT (11-5-09)

BERLIN — A young East German physicist named Angela Merkel was on her way home from her weekly trip to the sauna and a beer with a friend when she was swept up in the ecstatic crowds crossing the border at Bornholmer Street on the night of Nov. 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell.

Now, as chancellor of a reunited Germany, Mrs. Merkel is presiding over a series of events commemorating the 20th anniversary of that day. In a talk with reporters here on Thursday she shared her recollections about that historic day and the long path Germans have taken since then to bring the two sides closer.

The moment was ripe for looking back on the fall of the wall “after many years of just trying to deal with the daily problems,” Mrs. Merkel said. “Our heads are now above water, and we have accomplished the most important things.”

The timing appeared right for Mrs. Merkel as well. She is fresh off her victory in elections in September and is the first chancellor from the former East Germany, or German Democratic Republic, since reunification. Mrs. Merkel has seized the moment and seemed more animated and at ease than normal, given her often very serious public demeanor.

She balanced her comments about the events of that day with an appreciation of the struggles faced by her fellow East Germans in the period of dislocation that followed. The celebrations and the discussion itself are complicated by profound disappointment among those left behind in the painful restructuring economy of the former East, and what many there view as a discussion dominated, like so many facets of their lives, by those from the West...

Posted on Friday, November 6, 2009 at 8:14 PM | Comments (0) | Top

As Wall Crumbled, Berliners Rebuilt Their Lives

Source: WSJ (11-7-09)

Klaus Rader's rise began when the Wall fell.

He was 26 years old and managing a McDonald's in the sleepy West German town of Hof when the Berlin Wall was toppled 20 years ago on Monday. The next day, East Germans poured into the West. The first stop for many was Mr. Rader's Golden Arches, a siren of capitalism's long-forbidden fruits.

"We were overrun," Mr. Rader recalls. In just hours, all his hamburgers and fries were devoured. What piles of gold awaited the owner of the first McDonald's in eastern Germany, he wondered.

Now 46, Mr. Rader drives a Porsche and is a partner in an international chain of hip Italian eateries sprouting in Warsaw, London, Istanbul, Budapest, Washington and even in Berlin's Potsdamer Platz, near where the Wall once stood.

"It all started in that McDonald's" the night the border opened, Mr. Rader says...

Posted on Friday, November 6, 2009 at 8:08 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Tocqueville's Letters Home Finally Published in English

Source: NYT (11-3-09)

Most of Tocqueville’s letters from America, which were written between the spring of 1831 and February 1832, when he sailed for home, have never been published in English, but Frederick Brown, a biographer of Flaubert and Zola, has collected and translated them for a volume that Yale University Press is to release next year. A sample of the letters, roughly 20 percent of the whole, appears in the current issue of The Hudson Review, and they reveal a Tocqueville different from the one we know, or think we know, from “Democracy in America.”

Posted on Friday, November 6, 2009 at 12:41 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Obama Says U.S. Must Reverse Course With Native Americans

Source: CNSNews.com (11-5-09)

Washington (AP) - Making good on a campaign promise to hold a yearly summit with American Indians, President Barack Obama told tribal leaders Thursday gathered in Washington that he is determined to reverse the federal government's history of marginalizing Indian nations.

"You will not be forgotten as long as I'm in this White House," Obama said during opening remarks at the all-day conference of tribal leaders and government officials.

Obama said the meeting is the largest and most widely attended gathering of tribal leaders in U.S. history. Officials planned to discuss problems facing American Indians, including economic development, education, health care, public safety and housing.

Given the government's history of reneging on agreements with Native Americans, Obama said it took an "extraordinary leap of faith" for leaders to attend the meeting. Obama said he is determined to be a good partner with tribal nations.

Posted on Friday, November 6, 2009 at 12:19 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Himmler's WWII Third Reich Reichstag gold tapestry captured by 101st airborne hits the auction block

Source: PRweb (11-5-09)

Himmler’s WWII Third Reich Gold & Red Velvet Tapestry goes to auction on December 5th, 2009. This rare and desirable U.S. 101st airborne war capture piece is an original one-of-a-kind museum quality German Third Reich WWII antiquity. Originally hung in the Reichstag, later moved to Himmler's personal residence following a fire at the Reichstag. Captured by the United States Allied forces from Himmler's residence in 1945. Complete provenance and authenticity to accompany this war treasure.

This rare and desirable U.S. 101st airborne war capture piece is an original one-of-a-kind museum quality German Third Reich WWII antiquity.

As provenanced in "World War II German War Booty" Volume II by Ltc Thomas M Johnson. Page 66. Reputedly designed by Professor Obersturmbannführer-SS Carl Diebitsch and created by Elsie Seifert. The tapestry was removed from Heinrich Himmler’s residence in Berchtesgaden in 1945 by a member of the 506th Parachute Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division. This piece originally hung in the Reichstag, Germany’s historic landmark parliamentary building, but was removed to Himmler’s residence after the fire which destroyed a similar piece. The construction is of heavy gold bullion thread on a blood red velvet backing. Bullion tassels and chord. Size is approximately 7 x 9 feet. Tapestry is conveyed together with a copy of the aforementioned book.

Posted on Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 11:52 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Churchill ashtray for sale

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-5-09)

An ashtray that belonged to Prime Minister Winston Churchill is due to be sold at auction in Norfolk, with experts estimating the silver dish could fetch £1,500.

The silver dish used by Churchill is expected to fetch a premium price when it goes under the hammer in Norfolk, owing to its famous connections.

Churchill, a keen smoker who was frequently pictured with a cigar clamped between his teeth, used the ashtray at The Other Club – a political dining club he co-founded in 1911.

The 200-year-old ashtray was originally intended to be a butter dish.

William King, auctioneer at Keys of Aylsham – which will sell the item on November 18, told the Eastern Daily Press: “It is a relatively unassuming butter dish.

Posted on Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 11:50 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Public schoolboy faces jail for urinating on war memorial

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-5-09)

Organisers of a pub crawl which led to a student urinating on a city centre war memorial should have been prosecuted with him, a judge has suggested.

Philip Laing, 19, an ex-public schoolboy, pleaded guilty to outraging public decency when he appeared at Sheffield magistrates’ court and was warned he could face jail.

District Judge Anthony Browne told him: “I have no doubt whatsoever it was the vast amount of alcohol you consumed that led you to behave that way.

“Carnage was the name of the organisation that promote this type of activity and some might say someone should be standing alongside you this morning.”

Laing was one of 2,000 students who took part in Carnage UK, a seven hour drinking session through Sheffield city centre on Oct 11 while a similar event took place in Cardiff.

Posted on Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 11:48 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Germany and Egypt to talk over 3,400 yr old statue of Nefertiti

Source: Google News (11-4-09)

LUXOR, Egypt — A German expert will attend talks next month to discuss Cairo's demand for the return of a 3,400-year-old statue of Queen Nefertiti, Egypt's antiquities chief said on Wednesday.

The bust of the Egyptian beauty is the centrepiece of Berlin's "Neues Museum", which reopened last month 70 years after it was closed following heavy bomb damage during World War II.

"The director of the Egyptian antiquities department at the Berlin museum will come (to Egypt) on December 8 to discuss the right of Egyptians to the return of the statue of Nefertiti," Zahi Hawass told journalists on a visit to Luxor.

Nefertiti's bust reached Germany in mysterious circumstances, with German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt bringing the figure to Berlin a year after it was unearthed on the banks of the Nile.

Posted on Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 11:47 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Ancient weapons factory unearthed (UK)

Source: Leicester Mercury (UK) (11-4-09)

Archeologists have unearthed an 8,000-year-old weapons factory.

The find, near Melton, is the biggest ever mid-Stone Age discovery in Leicestershire, with fingernail-sized flint pieces, burned animal bones and evidence of tents.

The bonus for the University of Leicester team is the site has not been churned up by ploughs, like most county land has.

It has remained undisturbed since the time before Britain became an island.

The dig took place prior to the construction of a new estate in Loughborough Road, Asfordby.

Posted on Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 11:46 PM | Comments (0) | Top

A museum cataloguing centuries of Roman rule in Wales is facing permanent closure, says the trust which runs it

Source: BBC (11-4-09)

The Segontium Roman Museum in Caernarfon, Gwynedd is on a site which experts call one of the best preserved Roman fortresses in the world.

But cash from a five-year funding deal is running out, and the trust says it may not be able to open in the spring.

The Welsh Assembly Government says it hopes a solution can be found to save the centre from closure.

Segontium Cyf, a trust made up of local people, took over the running of the centre from National Museum Wales in 2003.

Since then, the day-to-day running costs of the centre have been met through a funding deal set-up by the national museum.

Posted on Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 11:45 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Hitler's house to go on sale for 2m GBP

Source: Daily Mail (11-5-09)

The owner of the house where Adolf Hitler was born wants to put it on the market with a likely asking price of over £2million.

But the local authority in Braunau-am-Inn, Austria, has vowed to try to find a way of blocking any sale because it fears it could land up in the hands of extreme right-wingers who would turn it into a grotesque shrine to his memory.

The mayor of Braunau, Gerhard Skiba, said ideally the town council would like to purchase it and so control its future fate.

But there is not enough money in the town coffers to buy the property, Salzburger Vorstadt 15.

Posted on Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 11:36 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Where the Boys Aren't

Source: NYT (11-4-09)

MAN on the premises!

Martha Morales, the evening supervisor at the Webster Apartments, a large, brick home to 370 women of varying ages and occupations, strode down a long corridor lined with identical doors. She zeroed in on one of them and knocked.

“Can I come in your room?” she called out politely — and then got straight to the point. “We think you have a man in there.”

A young woman opened the door.

There was no man to be seen in the small, modest chamber, just a narrow single bed, desk and a chest of drawers. But there was also a closet. Under orders, the young woman opened it.

Sure enough, crouching inside amid the hanging garments was a terrified-looking male — who proceeded to run for his life. He tore out of the room and disappeared down the hall. Ms. Morales let him go, staying behind to speak sternly to his female host and order her to report to the building’s manager, Maryann Lienhard, the next morning.

This is not a tale from the 1950s. It is straight out of 21st century New York City. With an amused smile but an earnest tone, Ms. Lienhard (who warned the embarrassed tenant that she would get “no second chances”) recalled the incident the other day — just one small drama from a slice of life that many people assume vanished from the city decades ago.

The Webster, on West 34th Street, is one of the few remaining all-female residences in a city that used to have many. Hotels and apartment houses that provided temporary refuge for young ladies hoping to find fame, or start a career (or snare a husband) in the big city occupy a distinct sliver of New York lore. The most famous, the Barbizon Hotel for Women on East 63rd Street, was memorably depicted in Sylvia Plath’s 1963 novel “The Bell Jar” as populated by well-to-do “girls” whose parents “wanted to make sure their daughters were living in a place where men couldn’t get at them and deceive them.”

Plath gave the place a thinly fictionalized name, the Amazon. In real life the Barbizon is known for sheltering Grace Kelly while she was studying acting, as well as a young Joan Crawford, Candice Bergen, Ali McGraw, Liza Minnelli and Plath herself. An ad for the hotel that ran in The New Yorker in 1966 boasted, “Many of the world’s most successful women were Barbizon girls.”

Though the Barbizon and others, such as the Parkside Evangeline on Gramercy Park, have succumbed to developers’ offers over the years, sold and remade into condos or luxury hotels, the smattering of all-female residences that remain are thriving, most with waiting lists of prospective tenants. The appeal today is not so different than it was in the past: safety, cleanliness and — especially attractive in modern-day New York — a good real estate deal.

It costs about $1,000 per month to live at the Webster. For that you get a small single room and shared bath but also a hot breakfast and dinner, maid service, use of a large walled garden and a roof deck with a spectacular view of the Empire State Building. (Developers are constantly making unsolicited offers for the property.)

The deal is similar — minus the garden and the roof deck — at the Brandon Residence for Women, tucked among multi-million-dollar town houses and co-ops on the Upper West Side, and the Sacred Heart Residence, run by an order of Catholic nuns, in Chelsea.

The Jeanne D’Arc Residence on West 24th Street, which was established in 1896 as a home for “friendless French girls” who crossed the Atlantic to take jobs as nannies and seamstresses, is even cheaper — between $355 and $510 a month, depending on the size of the room. But you have to cook yourself...

Posted on Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 11:25 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Out of Power but Newly Popular, France's Chirac Issues Memoir

PARIS -- In retirement, former French President Jacques Chirac has achieved something that eluded him while in office: popularity.

Days after he was ordered to stand trial on embezzlement charges, Mr. Chirac is rated as France's most admired political figure, according to French polling agency Ifop. During Mr. Chirac's presidency, from 1995 to 2007, his approval ratings slipped to 30% as he struggled with issues such as unemployment and crime.

The publication of his memoirs -- the first volume is out in France this week -- could cement a newly found status as the nation's grandfather.

"He is looking to rehabilitate himself," says Vincent Tiberj, a political researcher at Paris-based university, Sciences Po. "This is part of the transformation."

In his book, titled "Each Step Should Be a Goal," the 76-year-old Mr. Chirac retraces his career until his election to the presidency in 1995. He breaks his silence on his successor Nicolas Sarkozy, and weighs in on erstwhile rivals including former President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing...

Posted on Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 11:22 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Museums Hope to Bring New Life to the Haight (San Fransisco)

Source: WSJ (11-5-09)

The Haight-Ashbury neighborhood is history. At least, so think two groups of residents who are planning museums to capture memories of the 1960s hippie movement before they fade with its aging participants.

One, led by Haight-Ashbury Free Clinics founder David E. Smith, will function as a "library museum" of the free-clinic movement, which began in the Haight in the 1960s to provide free health care to residents. The other effort, led by local artist David Wills, will chronicle the neighborhood's history from its farming days in the late 1800s to the Summer of Love in the 1960s.

If the museums launch -- neither is slated to open until after 2011 -- they would be the latest in a recent push by San Francisco groups to better document the city's history. The San Francisco Museum and Historical Society has been working to renovate the old Mint Building in the South of Market neighborhood into a San Francisco Museum by 2013. Last year, the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual Transgender Historical Society opened a museum in the Castro district. Another half a dozen local museums have expanded in the past five years, according to the San Francisco historical society.

Posted on Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 11:21 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Photo of Lee Harvey Oswald with rifle is real, says scientist

Source: Yahoo News (11-5-09)

CONCORD, N.H. – The infamous photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald holding a rifle in his backyard would have been nearly impossible to fake, according to a new analysis by a Dartmouth College professor.

Oswald, who was shot to death days after being charged with the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, claimed the photo of him holding a rifle in one hand and Marxist newspapers in the other had been doctored. Over the years, many others have pointed out what appear to be inconsistent lighting and shadows.

But Hany Farid, director of the Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth, said the shadows are exactly where they should be.

Posted on Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 10:21 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Liberal group invokes history in health reform push

Source: The Hill (11-3-09)

A key liberal group released an ad Tuesday encouraging lawmakers to support health reform, likening the vote to support for historic social programs.

A new 30-second television spot from the group Americans United for Change pushes lawmakers do weather any controversy over the health proposals before Congress and cast a vote in favor of the reforms.

The ad notes controversy over Social Security, child labor laws, and national parks when those were authorized by Congress, suggesting that the new health rules would become a core part of American culture like those programs.

Posted on Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 1:12 AM | Comments (0) | Top

France to Mark Fall of Berlin Wall With Musical Tribute

Source: NYT (11-3-09)

PARIS — France will mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall with an open-air musical spectacle featuring 27 cellists and a laser show telling the fall of communism in a series of gigantic projections in the center of Paris, the minister for European affairs, Pierre Lellouche, announced Monday.

The festivities will take place on the Place de la Concorde, where the annual Bastille Day military parade culminates, and will begin at 7 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 9. Inspired by a musical tribute given at Checkpoint Charlie two days after its fall by the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, the concert features prominent cellists from each of the European Union’s 27 member nations.

Posted on Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 1:10 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Two Sentenced, Three Absolved in Argentine "Dirty War" Trial

Source: Truthout (11-3-09)

Buenos Aires, Argentina - A federal court in Buenos Aires on October 23 convicted two former army officials - Jorge Olivera Rovere and Jose Menendez - to life sentences, for crimes committed during Argentina's "Dirty War." Rovere, 83, was commander of the city of Buenos Aires for the army during the first year of the last military dictatorship in Argentina in 1976. Official government reports say that just fewer than 9,000 people were forcibly disappeared during the last dictatorship, which ruled until 1983.

Three other defendants in the case, Teofilio Saa, Humberto Lobaiza and Felipe Alespeiti, who together were charged with 114 counts of kidnapping, were absolved.

Since 2003, when Argentina's Congress repealed several amnesty laws from the 1980s passed during democratic transition, which has protected officials from prosecution, more than 560 officials have been indicted. Before the verdict on October 23, just over 60 officials had been convicted, and three had been absolved. The case doubles the number of officials who have been found not guilty.

Posted on Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 12:51 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Obama Notes Anniversary of Iran Embassy Takeover

Source: CNSNews.com (11-4-09)

Washington (AP) - President Barack Obama noted Wednesday's 30th anniversary of the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, while insisting he wants the U.S. and Iran to move beyond "suspicion, mistrust and confrontation."

Islamic militants stormed the embassy in Tehran on Nov. 4, 1979, seizing its occupants. Fifty-two Americans were held hostage for 444 days.

The crisis "deeply affected the lives of courageous Americans who were unjustly held hostage, and we owe these Americans and their families our gratitude for their extraordinary service and sacrifice," Obama said in a statement issued late Tuesday.

"This event helped set the United States and Iran on a path of sustained suspicion, mistrust and confrontation," Obama added. "I have made it clear that the United States of America wants to move beyond this past, and seeks a relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran based upon mutual interests and mutual respect. ... We have made clear that if Iran lives up to the obligations that every nation has, it will have a path to a more prosperous and productive relationship with the international community."

The Iranian government backed events Wednesday to commemorate the anniversary of the takeover, including an annual anti-American rally outside the brick walls of the former embassy compound. Thousands of people gathered outside the former embassy, waving anti-American banners and signs praising the Islamic Revolution.

Posted on Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Italy Rules in Rendition Case

Source: WSJ (11-5-09)

An Italian court convicted 23 U.S. intelligence operatives on charges of kidnapping an Egyptian imam on a Milan street, prosecutors and lawyers said. The decision is a landmark ruling on the controversial U.S. practice of abducting suspected terrorists and flying them to other countries for interrogation.

Robert Seldon Lady, a former Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Milan, was sentenced Wednesday in absentia to eight years in prison, according to his court-appointed lawyer Arianna Barbazza. Twenty-one other CIA operatives and an Air Force official, all tried in absentia, received five-year prison sentences, Ms. Barbazza said, adding that she planned to appeal the verdict.

The judge, Oscar Magi, issued an order for the immediate arrest of the convicted operatives, Ms. Barbazza added. A European Union arrest warrant for the 23 U.S. intelligence operatives is already outstanding.

Italy hasn't issued an extradition request for any of the Americans implicated, however, and the Italian appeals process could take several years, making it unlikely that any of the convicted operatives will actually serve time.

The case of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, is the first trial to reach a ruling related to the so-called extraordinary rendition program of the U.S., under which terrorism suspects have been ferreted out of Europe to other nations, some of which use torture.

The rendition practice was used by the CIA under President Bill Clinton and then more aggressively during the George W. Bush administration.

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 11:59 PM | Comments (0) | Top

1979 hostage crisis still casts pall on U.S.-Iran relations

Source: CNN (11-4-09)

Thirty years ago Wednesday, Iranian student revolutionaries climbed over the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and seized dozens of Americans, whom they ultimately held hostage for 444 days.

The hostage crisis, coming in the aftermath of Iran's Islamic revolution, ended diplomatic relations between Washington and Tehran -- a rift that persists to this day.

Iran celebrates the embassy takeover as an official holiday, and tens of thousands showed up in Tehran on Wednesday to hear anti-American speeches.

The anniversary was also an opportunity to reignite the anti-government protests that were sparked in June, following a disputed presidential election, and thousands of anti-government protesters ignored warnings from Iranian authorities to stay home.

One of the leaders of the 1979 hostage-takers says the United States and Iran must not be hostages to history...

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 10:52 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Military Censorship of Photographs in WWI

Source: Secrecy News (11-4-09)

During the course of World War I, tens of thousands of photographs were withheld from publication by the U.S. military. These included images that might have revealed troop movements or military capabilities, pictures that were liable to be used in enemy propaganda, or those that could adversely affect military or public morale.

The development of military controls on publication of photographs during WWI was described in a 1926 U.S. Army report (large pdf) that is illustrated with dozens of images that had been withheld, with a description of the reasons their publication was not permitted.

See "The Military Censorship of Pictures: Photographs that came under the ban during the World War - and why" by Lt. Col. Kendall Banning, U.S. Army Signal Reserve Corps, 1926 (courtesy of the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center).

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 10:46 PM | Comments (0) | Top

13th century marble pieces found in Acre

Source: Jerusalem post (Israel) (11-3-09)

In an excavation conducted in late October about 100 meters north of the Old City wall of Acre, a unique find was discovered from the Crusader period in the 13th Century: a hoard of 350 marble items that were collected from destroyed buildings.

According to Dr. Edna Stern, excavation director of the Israel Antiquities Authority, the hoard was found in an archaeological excavation conducted by the Israel Antiquities Authority before the Acre Municipality began building a new structure to house classrooms in the Hilmi Shafi Educational Campus.

"We have here a unique find, the likes of which have never been discovered in the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the Crusader period (the capital of which was Acre)," Stern said in a statement on Tuesday.

"During the archaeological excavations we came upon a cellar that was sealed by a collapse, comprised of building stones and charred beams."

Stern said that beneath the cellar floor a hoard of about 350 marble items and colored stones were discovered, including two broken marble tombstones with Latin inscriptions with one belonging to a person by the name of Maratinus.

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 10:30 PM | Comments (0) | Top

British cosmetic shop bans Rememberance Day poppies

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-4-09)

A chain of cosmetic stores has banned its staff from wearing Remembrance Day poppies.

Catherine Barr, an assistant with Bodycare UK for seven years, was astonished when she was ordered to remove the poppy she had worn to work.

“I turned up for work wearing my poppy and was told by management that I couldn’t. I was quite upset and really annoyed, so refused to remove it.”...

... Because of her refusal an area manager called at the store to inform her it was “against company policy”...

... Local war veterans are saddened by the ban. David Murray, county manager for West Lancashire Royal British Legion, said: "Poppies are there for the remembrance of troops past and present, and it’s always sad when corporate bodies take that sort of stance.”

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 10:29 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Island thieves bag Viking Treasure

Source: The Local (Sweden) (11-2-09)

Five hundred Viking era silver artifacts have been plundered from a site of archaeological interest on the Baltic island of Gotland.
Two archaeologists employed by Gotland county were dismayed to discover the valuables had vanished when they arrived at a field in Alva in Gotland to follow up on a recent find.

"It's just as saddening every time it happens because it's our heritage that disappears," said Majvor Östergren at the Gotland County Administrative Board.

The methodical thieves dug some 250 holes in a bid to secure as much booty as possible. Östergren estimated that the impostors had made off with 500 silver pieces worth a combined total of 250,000 to 500,000 kronor ($35,000 to $70,000).

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 10:28 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Bulgarian archaeologists find silver treasure in Thracian tombs

Source: Sofia News Agency (Bulgaria) (11-3-09)

A team of Bulgarian archaeologists have discovered a new tomb of an aristocrat from Ancient Thrace near the southern town of Nova Zagora.

The team led by archaeologist Veselin Ignatov found a burial tomb of 12 square meters date back to the end of 1st century and beginning of 2nd century AD. It is located outside of the village of Karanovo.

The burial site of the Thracian aristocrat contains a number of interesting items including a silver treasure of vessels and artifacts that were place there to be used by the aristocrat in his afterlife.

Those include two silver cups with images of love god Eros, and a number of other ornate silver and bronze vessels.

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 10:27 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Pieces of 1946 British Destroyer Found Near Greece

Source: Google News (11-3-09)

TIRANA, Albania — Pieces of a British destroyer that was badly damaged by Albanian mines in 1946, straining relations between the two countries for decades, appear to have been discovered in a waterway near Greece, U.S. and Albanian researchers said Monday.

The wreckage was found 50 yards (meters) under water in the Corfu Channel between the Albanian mainland and the Greek island of Corfu. It is believed to be a section of the bow of the British destroyer HMS Volage, the researchers said.

Forty-four sailors died in the mine explosions that damaged the Volage and another British Navy destroyer, the HMS Saumarez. Both ships suffered extensive damage but reached Corfu for repairs.

The incident halted talks between Communist Albania and Britain on restoring diplomatic ties that were broken earlier that year. The two countries only formally re-established ties in 1991.

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 10:25 PM | Comments (0) | Top

1,800-year-old grave found in Vietnam

Source: Thanh Nien News (Vietnam) (11-3-09)

An ancient grave has been unearthed in the northern port city of Hai Phong.

Do Xuan Trung, an archeologist at the Hai Phong City Museum, on October 27 estimated that the grave is about 1,800 years old.

The grave was discovered at depth of more than five meters underground while a construction crew dug on the side of the Thanh Den Mountain to enlarge the Tan Phu Xuan Cement Factory...

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 10:19 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Could the U.S.-Cuba Travel Ban End Soon?

Source: Time (11-4-09)

Not too long ago, Ricardo Herrero was one of Miami's Cuban-American hard-liners, an ardent supporter of the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba as well as the ban on U.S. travel to the communist island. But a half-dozen trips to Cuba during this decade have changed his mind about the latter. "There are no better ambassadors of American culture and American democracy than Americans themselves," says Herrero, 31. Many fellow Cuban Americans who've traveled there, he adds, have come to the same conclusion: they "always come back saying it was a completely eye-opening experience" and have "changed their views because they witnessed firsthand the ineffectiveness of our current policy."

For the first time, there are hard numbers to show that Herrero is far from alone. Last year, a majority of Miami Cuban Americans said they favored dumping tight regulations on Cuban-American travel to Cuba — something candidate Barack Obama pledged to do and then did this year as President. And a recent poll found that a remarkable 59% of all Cuban Americans think the 46-year-old ban on all U.S. travel to Cuba should be removed. The survey by Miami-based Bendixen & Associates, the largest Hispanic polling firm, also found that 48% of older and more conservative Cuban exiles known as historicos support lifting the prohibition, up from 32% in 2002. "I think that all exchange is good," says one, 68-year-old Miamian Lala Suarez, who before coming to the U.S. was imprisoned in Cuba by Fidel Castro's government after the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion by militant exiles.

The importance of this attitude shift can't be underestimated. Whenever Congress has tried in the past to strike down the Cuba travel ban — even when a majority of Americans said they wanted to get rid of it — the biggest obstacle has always been the staunch resistance of politically potent Cuban-American voters. But the newest bill, the freedom to travel to Cuba act, introduced this year in both the House and Senate, suddenly has Cuban-American backing — and as a result a decidedly better chance of passing. In a recent statement, Indiana Senator Richard Lugar, a Republican and co-sponsor, called this "a very good time for public diplomacy with Cuba."...

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 10:17 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Berets and Baguettes? France Rethinks Its Identity

Source: Time (11-4-09)

For decades, the French considered it taboo to question whether immigration and foreign influences were diluting France's social and cultural character. Indeed, the topic was considered so toxic that no one in France besides extreme-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen would even take it up in public. But times have changed. Twenty years after Le Pen's National Front Party (FN) became a political force in France, its view that immigration is threatening the French national identity is starting to gain wider acceptance. Now, the government is putting the issue front and center for the first time by encouraging people to have a vigorous national debate about what it means to be French in the 21st century.

"We must reaffirm the values of national identity and pride in being French," Eric Besson, the Minister for Immigration and National Identity, said as he announced the three-month series of discussions on Nov. 2. "This debate doesn't scare me. I even find it passionate." Besson says it's important for an increasingly diverse France to define its essential unifying values and reclaim a national pride and patriotism that the National Front co-opted long ago for its own xenophobic purposes...

... Besson's supporters say the goal, however, is not to single out immigrants and minorities, but rather to safeguard the unique aspects of the French identity that they perceive as being threatened by foreign influences. "Globalization erases a little more of every nation's characteristics every day," says Frédéric Lefebvre, spokesman for Sarkozy's ruling Union for a Popular Majority Party. Given such cultural erosion, Lefebvre called for a defense of our "cultural model and la Douce France" — an allusion to crooner Charles Trenet's famous 1943 song rhapsodizing about the villages, people and traditions of pastoral France.

But Trenet's song was meant to be an inspiration to his countrymen to withstand the brutal Nazi occupation of France. Some of Besson's critics say the national-identity debate, meanwhile, is rooted in modern-day xenophobia, not nostalgia. Perhaps a solution might be to inspire patriotism by asking French people to warble Trenet's ditty regularly rather than dutifully drone "La Marseillaise" once a year...

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 10:15 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Remnants of fort along Trail of Tears yield relics, unique look at history (Tennessee)

Source: m.knoxnews.com (11-3-09)

COKER CREEK, Tenn. - It has been more than 170 years since the dark days of the Cherokees' forced removal from their lands in Tennessee, Georgia and the Carolinas.

Twenty-nine forts were used by the U.S. government to gather and temporarily house the migrating Cherokee, along with their families and slaves.

Cities with names like Hayesville and Murphy in North Carolina, Calhoun in Georgia, Charleston in Tennessee, and Fort Payne in Alabama have been built over most of these sites, so most of the physical fortifications have disappeared.

But remnants of one fort have been discovered in East Tennessee.

Because the Monroe County family that owned the property never plowed the land or used it for development, Cherokee National Forest archeologists are finding a treasure trove of historic relics from the former location of Fort Armistead.

The U.S. Forest Service purchased the 26-acre site in 2005 from Kenneth and Kathleen Dalton, and archeologists and volunteers began using metal detectors and controlled excavations to search in a grid pattern for artifacts.

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 9:46 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Gold Treasure Kept Hidden for 40 Years (Bulgaria)

Source: Standart (11-3-09)

The biggest gold treasure in Bulgaria has been locked for 40 years. For several decades already the state authorities have been trying to discover the missing coins from the hoard, which was once a part of the treasury of Alexander the Great (336-323). The 80-kilogram weighing hoard is kept in a safe for lack of exhibition equipment. Two farmers, father and daughter discovered the fabulous riches of gold in 1968 near the Breznik village of Rezhantsi. One night, the two of them had been ploughing a furrow in the field when the tractor crashed a large earthen pythos, the size of a big amphora. The trasure - coins of pure gold and silver - was escorted by militia to the Pernik Museum of History, but the discoverers of the hoard, as well as some of the shepherds in the region, kept for themselves some of the coins. Some of the lost pieces were seized by the police and deposited for safe-keeping at the Sofia Museum of Archaeology. The coins date back from the fourth century BC

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 9:44 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Siegfried Sassoon archive likely to stay in UK after 550,000 GBP award

Source: Guardian (UK) (11-4-09)

A threat that a rich personal archive of Siegfried Sassoon's journals, poems and letters would be broken up or sold to the US appears to have been lifted, it will be announced today.

The National Heritage Memorial Fund will say it is awarding £550,000 to Cambridge University's campaign to buy the war poet's literary archive. That means the university is just £110,000 short of the £1.25m needed to secure it from the Sassoon estate.

The news, due to be announced at the House of Commons today, has been welcomed by prominent figures involved in the Sassoon campaign, including his official biographer, Max Egremont, who called the archive "extraordinary".

"The response to the appeal has been heartening in these difficult times and shows Sassoon's popularity and importance as a writer," he said...

... She said it was important for the nation that the archive remain in Britain. "[Sassoon] is such a figure and had such an impact on the historiography of world war one," she said.

Sassoon, a patriot, joined up as war was about to break out and soon ended up in the unimaginable horror of the western front. The experience traumatised and transformed him.

He was a courageous soldier but was sometimes stupidly brave and some of his actions may have been the result of his depression at what was going on around him.

In 1917, a year after being awarded the Military Cross, Sassoon published The Soldier's Declaration – a handwritten copy of which exists in the archive. This was his impassioned refusal to return to duty after being wounded...

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 9:42 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Nazis march through London

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-4-09)

The astonishing photo shows Nazi supporters saluting a procession through the heart of London, as Hitler's troops carry a coffin draped in the swastika flag.

Taken in 1936, the scene shows the funeral procession of German ambassador Leopold von Hoesch who was carried through Whitehall, in sight of Buckingham Palace, before being transferred to a gun carriage and transported down The Mall.

The black and white picture, seemingly Britain's worst nightmare, was shot three years before the outbreak of World War Two when governments around the world were still trying to avoid confrontation with Germany...

... The image of the parade was uncovered by London cab drive and historian Harry Harris, as part of a Discovery Channel documentary on wartime London, due to be screened on Sunday.

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 9:38 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Victim of Stalinist Church Persecutions Beatified

Source: Digital Journal (11-2-09)

A Hungarian Bishop, Zoltán Meszlényi, has been recognised as a martyr for his faith by the Catholic Church. Meszlényi is the first of the Hungarian victims of the Stalin-era anti-church persecution to be beatified.
The mass marking the Beatification of the one-time Bishop of Esztergom, Zoltan Meszlenyi, was celebrated by Hungary’s Cardinal Péter Erdő at the Esztergom Baszilica at the weekend, according to the Caboodle.hu website. Esztergom is Hungary’s historical religious capital, as Canterbury is in England. Cardinal Erdő, head of the country’s Catholic Church, said at the mass:

Meszlenyi is the first of the Hungarian victims of Stalinist anti-church persecution to be beatified.

Beatification is the first step in the Roman Catholic Church’s process of making someone a saint, after which the person is referred to as “Blessed.” If certain further steps take place, such as a miracle that the church recognises, he or she will be declared a saint of the church.
Bishop Meszlényi took over the reigns of the persecuted church from Cardinal József Mindszenty in 1950 when Mindszenty was jailed on trumped-up charges. His show trial was widely followed in the international media in the 50s.

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 9:36 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Chinese challenge to 'out of Africa' theory

Source: NewScientist (11-3-09)

The discovery of an early human fossil in southern China may challenge the commonly held idea that modern humans originated out of Africa.

Jin Changzhu and colleagues of the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology in Beijing, announced to Chinese media last week that they have uncovered a 110,000-year-old putative Homo sapiens jawbone from a cave in southern China's Guangxi province.

The mandible has a protruding chin like that of Homo sapiens, but the thickness of the jaw is indicative of more primitive hominins, suggesting that the fossil could derive from interbreeding.

If confirmed, the finding would lend support to the "multiregional hypothesis". This says that modern humans descend from Homo sapiens coming out of Africa who then interbred with more primitive humans on other continents. In contrast, the prevailing "out of Africa" hypothesis holds that modern humans are the direct descendants of people who spread out of Africa to other continents around 100,000 years ago.

The study will appear in Chinese Science Bulletin later this month.

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 9:30 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Riddle of 200-year-old Irish grave in New York

Source: The Independent (11-3-09)

Workers uncovered a young Irishman's grave in New York's Greenwich Village more than 200 years after he died.

Now authorities are determined to solve the mystery of the life and death of the Co Kildare man.

New York City Dept of Parks and Recreation workers expected to find unidentified bones when they dug below the city's Washington Square Park -- more than 20,000 people are believed to be buried in the former graveyard. But they discovered the 210-year-old 3ft-high sandstone gravestone of a Co Kildare man who died in 1799.

Its writing, still clear, read: "Here lies the body of James Jackson, who departed this life the 22nd day of September, 1799 aged 28 years, native of the county of Kildare, Ireland."

Workers have several times found skeletons during the restoration of the park, but Jackson's stone was the first burial marker.

"It's very unusual," John H Geismar, the archaeological consultant who made the discovery, said. "In fact, I'm stunned."

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 9:29 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Obama's half brother discusses abusive father

Source: Yahoo News (11-4-09)

GUANGZHOU, China – President Barack Obama's half brother has broken his media silence to discuss his new novel — the semi-autobiographical story of an abusive parent patterned on their late father, the mostly absent figure Obama wrote about in his own memoir.

In his first interview, Mark Ndesandjo told The Associated Press that he wrote "Nairobi to Shenzhen" in part to raise awareness of domestic violence.

"My father beat my mother and my father beat me, and you don't do that," said Ndesandjo, whose mother, Ruth Nidesand, was Barack Obama Sr.'s third wife. "It's something which I think affected me for a long time, and it's something that I've just recently come to terms with."

Like his novel's main character, Ndesandjo had an American mother who is Jewish and who divorced his Kenyan father. The novel, which goes on sale Wednesday by the self-publishing company Aventine Press, is one of several books in the works by relatives of the president.

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 9:21 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Civil War heritage trail extends to Liverpool (UK)

Source: Lee P Ruddin (11-4-09)

Plans for a new Civil War heritage trail were endorsed by the city’s Lord Mayor last night.

“It is great news that the Lord Mayor will be helping to ensure Liverpool’s roles in the Sesquicentennial are successful,” Tom Sebrell said shortly after his meeting with Mike Storey.

American born and London-based historian Tom, who is about to receive his PhD, is currently writing the material for walks and bus (possibly even ferry) tours in 2011 and beyond.

Tom continued: “He and I agree that this huge step forward will further educate both academics and enthusiasts of the American Civil War, deepening our understanding of how great of an effect the conflict had on Great Britain.

“Furthermore, if it were not for events which took place in Liverpool and Birkenhead from 1861-65, the war likely would have been much shorter.

“Large numbers of American tourists visiting Merseyside in 2011-15 will see brilliantly-preserved sites historically and culturally significant to the American Civil War and Anglo-American relations in the Victorian era.”

Mr Sebrell is keen to stress that his plans are not partisan to any side in the war, but aim to educate and increase understanding.

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 7:37 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Amateur 'stunned' after 1m GBP find

Source: BBC (11-4-09)

An Iron Age treasure hoard unearthed by a metal-detecting amateur has been unveiled.

The four gold Iron Age neck ornaments, or torcs, date from between the 1st and 3rd Century BC and are said to be worth an estimated £1m.

They were discovered in September by "first-time" metal-detector enthusiast David Booth in a field in Stirlingshire.

The find is the most important hoard of Iron Age gold in Scotland to date.

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 6:47 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Epic Muhammad movie in pipeline

Source: BBC (11-2-09)

An epic movie about Islam's Prophet Muhammad is in the pipeline, backed by a producer of the Lord of the Rings.

American Barrie Osborne, who also produced The Matrix, told Reuters the film would be an "international epic" aimed at "bridging cultures".

In accordance with Islamic rules, the Prophet cannot be depicted on screen. Images of the Prophet are considered blasphemous by Muslims.

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 6:44 PM | Comments (0) | Top

War tribunal head in Serbia visit

Source: BBC (11-4-09)

The international war crimes tribunal's chief prosecutor is due to visit Serbia to gauge the country's progress hunting for its two remaining war fugitives.

Serge Brammertz will spend two days in Belgrade before submitting a report to the UN Security Council.

His comments on how Serbia is co-operating with the tribunal will be key to its ambitions for EU membership.

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 6:43 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Oldest T. rex relative identified

Source: BBC (11-4-09)

Scientists have identified the most ancient fossil relative of the dinosaur Tyrannosaurus rex.

The new addition to T. rex's clan is known from a 30cm-long skull uncovered during excavations in Gloucestershire in the 1900s.

The well-preserved fossil is held in London's Natural History Museum.

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 6:41 PM | Comments (0) | Top

'Red' China stamp fetches record

Source: BBC (11-2-09)

A Chinese stamp pulled from circulation the day it was issued because it failed to show Taiwan as part of China has fetched a record price in Hong Kong.

The rare 1968 stamp was picked up at an auction by an unidentified buyer, for HK$3.68m (US$475,000, £290,000).

It features a worker holding a book filled with Mao Zedong's quotations and a red map of China in the background.

However, self-ruled Taiwan was left uncoloured. China sees the island as a renegade province of its own.

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 6:38 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Tutankhamun finder's home on show

Source: BBC (11-4-09)

The Egyptian mud-brick house of British archaeologist Howard Carter has been re-opened as a museum.

Carter was living in the house 87 years ago when he made his most famous discovery, the tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamun.

He had been employed by collector Lord Carnarvon to search for the tomb of the then relatively unknown pharaoh.

Relatives of Carter and his patron were among the first visitors to the newly-renovated property.

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 6:34 PM | Comments (0) | Top

'Archaeologist of erotica' uncovers lost world of brothels

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-4-09)

The sign hung at 12, rue Chabanais, in the days when the building housed the most prestigious of Paris's infamous bordellos, read 'Welcome to the Chabanais: The House of All Nations'.

The brothels closed down 60 years ago and nowadays the skinny eight-storey building on a tiny street near the Louvre houses an employment agency and a bunch of flats. But right across the road, at number 11, a gallery is keeping its memories alive.

Nicole Canet, who runs a gallery-boutique of erotic pictures and historic sex toys, is holding an exhibition there on the heyday of France's legendary "maisons closes", or authorised brothels.

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 6:21 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Sarah Palin victory and defeat speeches leaked

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-4-09)

Leaked copies of two speeches Sarah Palin prepared for last year's US election night have revealed she planned to salute her husband Todd as the nation's "first ever Second Dude" in the event of victory.

In defeat, which she suffered with Senator John McCain at the hands of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the Republican vice-presidential candidate wanted to tell Todd to "get ready for the Iron Dog snow machine race!".

A new book, Sarah from Alaska, details how the then state governor fought tooth and nail to introduce Sen McCain on stage in his home town of Phoenix, Arizona, in the early hours of the morning.

She decided not to tell her own staff members that permission had been denied by senior McCain staff hours before the candidates took the stage, apparently in the hope of a last minute reprieve.

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 6:20 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Vatican Post Office Prints First Braille Stamps for Anniversary

Source: AP (11-4-09)

The Vatican post office says it has issued its first Braille stamps to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Louis Braille, the French creator of the writing and reading system for the blind.

The stamps feature a portrait of Braille and his system's raised dots that spell out Braille, Vatican City State and the price.

Braille was born in France in 1809 and lost his sight at an early age. He then developed a reading and writing system based on patterns of raised dots that allow blind people to recognize the alphabet with the tips of their fingers.

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 6:16 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Former Embassy Hostages Recall Anniversary of Iran Takeover

Source: Fox News (11-4-09)

Thirty years after the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, some former hostages are trying to forget their 444 days in captivity, while others intend to memorialize the "dark day" with those who endured it firsthand.

L. Bruce Laingen, 87, was the U.S. charge d'affaires in Tehran — the highest ranking diplomat in the country — when the American embassy was overtaken by militants and radical Iranian students on Nov. 4, 1979, in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution. He was among 52 American embassy workers held captive until Jan. 20, 1981.

To mark Wednesday's anniversary, Laingen said he planned to have dinner with Michael Howland, who was assistant chief of security at the embassy, and Victor Tomseth, who was a senior political officer there. All three men were held at the Iranian Foreign Ministry for more than 14 months before being released.

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 6:13 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Karadzic: small-town figure became front-man for Serb strongman Milosevic

Source: The Christian Science Monitor (11-3-09)

Radovan Karadzic broke a boycott on his Yugoslav war crimes trial today to ask for 10 more months for his defense against genocide charges in Bosnia.

"I would really be a criminal if I were to accept these conditions," the former Bosnian Serb president told Judge Kwon O-gon, who is considering appointing a stand-by council for him...

... Who was Radovan Karadzic, then?

Balkan historians and Sarajevo experts say Karadzic always had a thirst for fame. He was a small- town Montenegrin, a bootmaker's son who moved from the hills to big city Sarajevo seeking greatness. He claimed lineage to Vuk Karadzic, father of the Serbian language. He published three volumes of poetry, much of it harboring a Sarajevo grudge: "The city lies ablaze like a rough lump of incense."

But he cut little weight among city blue-bloods even as he shape-shifted, for a time, into a Green Party politician and a soccer-club psychiatrist, or stood with Muslim leader Alia Izetbegovic to honor Muslims and Serbs killed in World War II and vowed never to let the Drina River flow with blood again.

Yet Mr. Karadzic's thirst for fame helped him become a key "front man" for Serb strongman Slobodan Milosevic's bloody project of "greater Serbia," experts say. His venue: a war that dissident poet and Czech president Vaclev Havel called an attack on "civilizational values," when he pressed for military intervention in the 44-month siege of Sarajevo that fellow "poet" Karadzic helped direct. Barring the arrest of Bosnian Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic, Karadzic's war-crimes trial is seen as a last chance to bring closure to the Balkan tragedy.

Long clashes over Sarajevo

From 1991-95, US and European capitals clashed over how to deal with children and grandmothers shot in the streets of a European city by Serb snipers in the hills above a city of Orthodox, Protestant, Roman Catholic, Muslim, and Jewish worship sites. Leaders weighed the cost of stopping the carnage against the meaning of not stopping it. Ineffectual blue-helmeted United Nations peacekeepers were sent in. At one point, Karadzic was so indispensable to the UN process that he could avert UN airstrikes against his own forces as they closed in on unarmed Bosnian Muslim "safe havens," usually on grounds that strikes would thwart a pending peace deal. The result: the Srebrenica massacre.

Yet, "before the war, Karadzic was a nonentity," says Bosnian historian Marko Attila Hoare. "He was an embezzler, an opportunist. He has nothing to say, makes no intellectual contributions. His background is primitive."

Historians stress Karadzic's country background in the Balkan context. "Milosevic tried to cut a figure as a modern European statesman; Karadzic was cruder," says Mr. Hoare. "In October 1991, he openly tells Muslims in the Bosnian parliament that he will eliminate them. He's seen as a kind of wild man, doesn't know how to dress properly, but no one in Sarajevo could believe he would be able to destroy so many lives."...

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 2:05 AM | Comments (0) | Top

New Institute of African Royalty will honor Mandela

Source: Yahoo News (11-3-09)

JOHANNESBURG – Dancers clad in animal skins opened a royal ceremony Tuesday, a nod to tradition for the forward-thinking kings, queens and chiefs who jetted in to Johannesburg from across Africa to launch an institute they hope will expand their roles on the continent

The two dozen leaders from Morocco to Swaziland describe their new Institute of African Royalty as part think-tank on democracy and development, part lobby group to polish their image. They say their model is anti-apartheid icon and former President Nelson Mandela, and plan to honor the man referred to during Tuesday's proceedings as "Prince Mandela" at a gala ceremony in Pretoria, the capital, later this week.

Sello Hatang, a spokesman for the anti-apartheid icon's office, said Mandela "feels honored to be respected by the traditional leadership."

Mandela's family claims the royal chieftaincy of Mvezo, a village in southeastern South Africa, and he spent part of his childhood in the court of a tribal regent being groomed, like his father before him, to advise kings.

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 12:49 AM | Comments (0) | Top

20 years later, major effort to repair, restore Berlin Wall

Source: Yahoo News (11-3-09)

BERLIN – Stroke by stroke, Gerhard Kriedner applied pink acrylic paint with a small brush on a 14-yard stretch of the Berlin Wall, recreating the mural he first painted months after the Berlin Wall came down on Nov. 9, 1989.

Kriedner and 90 artists from around the world have gathered again to repaint their original creations on the concrete slabs, bringing new life to images that have been eroded by the elements over the last two decades, on the longest remaining length of the wall that once split Germany's capital.

"This is a very emotional thing for me," Kriedner, 69, said, adding that he escaped from communist East Germany to the West himself as a young man. "The Berlin Wall stands for the total lack of freedom we had at the time."

While Berliners were initially eager to tear down the city's most detested symbol, in recent months there has been a major effort to restore the 3/4 mile-long (1.3-kilometer) dilapidated East Side Gallery — a major tourist attraction with 106 different paintings and graffiti.

"The wall was rotten through and through," Kriedner said on a recent chilly, overcast autumn day as he put the finishing touches on his mural — a dark, barren landscape with bursting soap bubbles colored pink and light blue, his interpretation of the promise of Socialist dreams colliding with reality...

"In order to restore the wall, the entire artwork was scraped off, the concrete was chiseled down to the steel insides, and then everything had to be reapplied, but this time with waterproof acrylic paints," the Bavarian artist said, adding that he'd been working off a photo of his original piece to ensure the new version mimicked the original.

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 12:21 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Rasmussen: 49% Blame Bush for Economy, 45% Blame Obama

Source: Rasmussen Reports (11-3-09)

Voters for the first time are blaming President Obama nearly as much as President Bush for the country’s continuing economic problems.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 49% still blame the economic situation on the recession that began under Bush. But 45% now say the nation’s economic problems are caused more by Obama’s policies.

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 12:19 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Remains of 1,000 people recovered at medieval site (Ireland)

Source: Irish Examiner (11-4-09)

THE skeletal remains of more than a thousand people have been recovered from what experts believe was one of the country’s largest medieval cemeteries.

The ancient bones have produced evidence of several suspected murders and one case of leprosy – an extremely rare occurrence in medieval times.

Osteoarchaeologist Carmelita Troy, of Headland Archaeology in Cork, said yesterday she has studied the ancient remains of nearly 1,300 individuals – adult males and females along with children – who were buried at the site at Ardreigh, Athy, in Co Kildare.

It is one of the largest skeleton assemblages in the country.

Posted on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 12:09 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Pablo Escobar burnt cash to keep warm on the run

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-3-09)

The infamous cocaine baron is said to have lit a bonfire using wads of US dollars at a mountain hideout while he was being hunted by authorities.

Sebastian Marroquin, who has changed his name from Juan Pablo Escobar, claimed his father burnt the notes when he realised his daughter Manuela was suffering from hypothermia.

They also used the fire, fuelled by $2 million in cash, to prepare food.

Escobar's son, who moved with his family to Argentina after his father's death 15 years ago, also told the Colombian magazine Don Juan the security-mad billionaire bought his own taxi firm to find out when outsiders arrived in their native Medellin. He also moved his family every 48 hours between 15 hideaways he had all over the city.

Posted on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 11:52 PM | Comments (0) | Top

JFK Library Releases New Evidence on Diem Assassination

Source: The National Security Archive (11-3-09)

The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library has just released new evidence on United States collusion in the late 1963 coup d’etat in South Vietnam that ended in the assassination of Saigon leader Ngo Dinh Diem. This is a crucial new piece of the puzzle, for the release includes actual tape recordings of White House meetings several months earlier when President Kennedy initially considered requests from South Vietnamese generals for U.S. backing in a coup attempt. The tapes reflect both Kennedy’s doubts and U.S. determination to change the game in South Vietnam, and decisions made here, in August, led directly to the November coup. Later this month the Archive will post an Electronic Briefing Book reflecting upon the new evidence. For the present we are re-posting our earlier commentary presentation, documents and tapes directly pertinent to the American role in the Saigon coup.

Posted on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 11:46 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Computer-assisted map could yield archaeological remnants at Tippecanoe battle site

Source: Yahoo News (11-1-09)

BATTLE GROUND, Ind. (AP) - Tippecanoe County officials want to create a computer-assisted map of a historic battlefield that could yield clues about archaeological remnants buried there.

The Tippecanoe County Historical Association plans to use a device to measure anomalies in the earth's magnetic field to find underground objects. It also might use ground-penetrating radar to find items if funding can be found.

Archaeologist Colby Bartlett says it would be the first professional investigation of the site.

Posted on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 11:40 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Ultimatum Over Ole Miss Fight Song

Source: Inside Higher Ed (11-3-09)

The University of Mississippi has altered its fight song to discourage a chant of "the South will rise again," based on the old version. With many fans continuing that chant -- which many find offensive -- Chancellor Dan Jones said Monday that either the chant stops, or he'll bar the song from being played at football games, the Associated Press reported. "The University of Mississippi is a warm and welcoming place. So many have worked hard to make sure our image moves forward, and we don't want anything to hurt that," Jones said in a speech.

Posted on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 11:35 PM | Comments (0) | Top

USS New York Battleship takes its place in history

Source: Examiner.com (11-2-09)

The USS New York Battleship took a tour around New York City this morning and went under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, paused at the World Trade Center site, then up and back the Upper West Side before docking in Midtown Manhattan. The USS New York is an Landing Platform Deck (LPD 21) and is a "mobility triad uniquely adaptable to a variety of modern day combat situations," according to the USS New York.org website.

The USS New York completed a five-day voyage from Norfolk, Virginia for the official commissioning in New York City. The USS New York Battleship was created with 7.5 tons of steel from the twin towers and was given that name after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

Posted on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 11:30 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Merkel's Address Will Mark Wall's Fall

Source: WSJ (11-3-09)

BERLIN -- Chancellor Angela Merkel will mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in a speech Tuesday to the U.S. Congress, a rare honor for a German leader, but political observers say she is expected to face tough questions from the U.S. about Germany's contributions to the economic recovery, Iran and Afghanistan.

President Barack Obama could make uncomfortable demands on Ms. Merkel now that September's German elections are out of the way, analysts say. The U.S. expects Germany to start delivering on a range of issues, though German officials have played down any tensions. The U.S. is looking for help from Germany and other major exporters to rebalance the world economy, with the aim of making it less reliant on American consumers by boosting demand in Europe and Asia...

... Ms. Merkel's invitation to address Congress is being viewed in Germany as a rare honor. Then-chancellor Konrad Adenauer's address to the House of Representatives in 1957 is the nearest precedent...

Posted on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 11:08 PM | Comments (0) | Top

CIA Unseals Documents Requested Two Decades Ago

Source: Slate (11-3-09)

More than 20 years ago, in July 1989, the National Security Archive filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the CIA, seeking documents related to an Iranian-born businessman implicated in the Iran-Contra affair. This summer, the CIA finally sent the files, 15 documents in all, according to the archive, a nongovernmental research institute. "In the last 20 years, the CIA sent status updates about this request intermittently: in August 1989, in October 1992, and in November 2003," the archive notes on its blog. "Two of these responses seemed more concerned with determining and collecting fees than with the fulfilling the request itself." Part of the reason for the delay could be that the CIA sent around the request to other agencies, such as the Department of Defense and the Department of State. Still, the 20-year wait looks to be the CIA's longest: In the agency's annual report in 2008, it (apparently mistakenly) said the oldest still-pending FOIA request had been filed in 1992.

Posted on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 10:43 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Moscow could have started WW3 over Berlin Wall: Gorbachev

Source: Yahoo News (11-3-09)

MOSCOW (Reuters) – The Kremlin could have started World War Three in 1989 had it used troops to crush the demonstrations that preceded the fall of the Berlin Wall, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said on Tuesday.

Gorbachev is hailed in the West for ignoring hardliners who advised him to guarantee the Soviet Union's future by crushing a growing wave of dissent in Eastern Bloc countries which led to the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989.

When asked by a reporter why he did not use force to halt the demonstrations, Gorbachev said it would have sparked a catastrophic set of events and even a world war.

"If the Soviet Union had wished, there would have been nothing of the sort (the fall of the Wall) and no German unification. But what would have happened? A catastrophe or World War Three," said Gorbachev, 78.

"My policy was open and sincere, a policy aimed at using democracy and not spilling blood. But this cost me very dear, I can tell you that," he said.

Most Russians revile Gorbachev for his weakness in allowing the collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of Moscow's global empire. A poll last year found that 60 percent of Russians still viewed the demise of the Soviet Union as a "tragedy."

Posted on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 10:41 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Ex-KGB spy gunned down in Moscow

Source: BBC (11-3-09)

A Russian businessman who was convicted in Israel as a KGB spy has been shot dead in Moscow, police say.

Investigators said Shabattai Kalmanovich, 60, was killed by gunmen who fired at his Mercedes from a passing car, Russian media reported.

His driver was seriously wounded in the attack but tried to chase the killers, reports said.

Mr Kalmanovich was well known in Russia as a music concert promoter and as a basketball sponsor.

His killing appeared to have been "carefully planned", a police official was quoted by ITAR-Tass news agency as saying.

In televised remarks, Moscow Investigative Committee chief Anatoly Bagmet said the killing could have been related to Mr Kalmanovich's business affairs or have been driven by "personal revenge".

Jailed for spying

Mr Kalmanovich emigrated from the former Soviet Union to Israel in 1971 and in 1988 was jailed for spying for the KGB, media reports said.

He was released after serving five years and relocated to Sierra Leone, where he made a fortune in the diamonds trade.

He later returned to Russia where he ran a large shopping centre in Moscow and promoted concerts for stars including Michael Jackson and Liza Minnelli.

Posted on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 9:14 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Bomber Command memorial design unveiled (UK)

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-3-09)

The Bomber Command Association hopes the memorial to the 55,573 airmen who died in the Second World War will be in place by 2011, with work beginning next year if sufficient funds can be raised by then.

Since The Daily Telegraph launched the Forgotten Heroes appeal a year ago, more than £1.5million has been raised following an overwhelming response from readers, but the appeal needs to raise another £1m before the project can go ahead.

Details of how you can donate to the appeal appear at the end of this article.

It is intended that the memorial will be built from Portland stone, and have as its centrepiece a bronze sculpture of a heavy bomber’s seven crew members looking up at the sky through an opening in the roof.

The proposed site for the memorial is in Piccadilly, near Hyde Park Corner and on the edge of Green Park, subject to approval by the Royal Parks and Westminster Council.

Posted on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 9:11 PM | Comments (0) | Top

1m pound golden hoard rewrites history of ancient Scotland

Source: The Times Online (UK) (11-4-09)

An enthusiast with a metal detector has unearthed a £1 million hoard of Iron Age gold necklaces from a field near Stirling in a discovery that is set to revolutionise the way that historians view some of Scotland’s ancient inhabitants.

According to experts at the National Museums of Scotland (NMS), the four beautifully worked “torcs” represent the most significant find of Iron Age metalwork in the country. One of the Stirling necklaces is a ribbon torc made from twisted Irish or Scottish sheet gold. Another is encrusted with circles of gold wire and beads of gold that look like pearls.

In financial terms, the anonymous finder has struck gold in every sense. A single, similar item — the Newark torc — was sold for £350,000 in 2006, suggesting that treasure trove of well in excess of £1 million will soon be paid by the Crown.

Posted on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 8:00 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Within yards of Buckingham Palace... the day London played host to a Nazi funeral

Source: Daily Mail (UK) (11-4-09)

It looks like a scene from Britain's worst wartime nightmare.

German soldiers parade down The Mall in sight of Buckingham Palace, hailed by arms raised in Nazi salutes.

The flag on the coffin bears a swastika. The respectful silence is broken only by the stamp of military boots.

Were it not for the Grenadier Guardsmen, the extraordinary top photograph might have been taken after Hitler's plans to dominate Britain and Europe came to fruition in London.

But this was 1936, three years before the start of the Second World War, and the event was the funeral of the German ambassador, Leopold von Hoesch.

Posted on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 7:51 PM | Comments (0) | Top

No bids made for former PoW camp (UK)

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-3-09)

A former Prisoner of War camp in County Durham which was advertised for sale online failed to attract any bids.

Tourist attraction Harperley camp, near Crook, was put on auction site eBay for £900,000 by its current owners who can no longer afford its restoration.

James and Lisa McLeod now hope a public body, charity or heritage organisation will step in to save the camp.

The camp housed German and Italian prisoners in World War II and won ancient monument status in 2002.

Posted on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 7:45 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Anglo-Saxon treasures on display

Source: BBC (11-3-09)

A small selection of the most important Anglo-Saxon find since the discovery of the Sutton Hoo burial site has gone on display at the British Museum.

A total of 18 items, all taken from the Staffordshire Hoard, can be viewed by the public in London.

The hoard, made up of more than 1,500 objects, was first discovered in early July in a field in south Staffordshire by a man using a metal detector.

It is being examined by experts who will report to a valuation committee.

Posted on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 7:43 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Dinosaur skeleton to be rebuilt

Source: BBC (11-3-09)

Dinosaur bones which have been entombed in rock for more than 210 million years are to finally be extracted and constructed into a complete skeleton.

The rocks containing the fossilised remains of the Thecondontosaurus Antiquus were found in a quarry in South Gloucestershire in the 1970s.

Scientists at the University of Bristol are planning to remove the rock to reveal the bones within.

The project was made possible by a £295,000 Heritage Lottery Fund grant.

Posted on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 7:42 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Former Nazi SS man hears charges

Source: BBC (11-2-09)

A former member of the Nazi SS has been read murder charges in a German court relating to the wartime deaths of three Dutch civilians.

Heinrich Boere, 88, is charged with shooting the three in 1944. He has previously acknowledged the killings, as reprisals against the resistance.

Mr Boere also heard a written plea from a relative of one the deceased, asking him to openly admit responsibility.

Reports say throughout the hearing, the accused sat motionless in a wheelchair.

Posted on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 7:37 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Argentine ex-leader goes on trial

Source: BBC (11-3-09)

The trial has begun of Argentina's last military ruler, Reynaldo Bignone, and five other retired generals.

The men are charged in connection with the alleged kidnapping, torture and disappearance of 56 opponents of the military government in the late 1970s.

The abuses are alleged to have taken place at the Campo de Mayo base on the outskirts of the capital, Buenos Aires.

Human rights groups say up to 30,000 people were killed or disappeared in Argentina between 1976 and 1983.

Posted on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 7:34 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Jacques Chirac memoir admits admiration for old foe Margaret Thatcher

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-3-09)

The former French president Jacques Chirac has expressed his grudging admiration for Margaret Thatcher despite their bitter clashes over Europe.

In his memoirs, to be published on Thursday, the 76-year-old Mr Chirac recounts what he decribes as his country’s “conflictual” relations with Britain.

While he is critical of Lady Thatcher, in particular over her handling of the 1981 hunger strike of IRA prisoners, he is clearly impressed by her statesmanship.

Posted on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 7:25 PM | Comments (0) | Top

New statue of Chairman Mao surprises China

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-3-09)

An enormous new statue of a young Mao Tse-tung has shocked China by portraying him with a long mane of windswept hair.

The statue, which has emerged from scaffolding in the central city of Changsha, will eventually stand more than 100ft tall.

The new statue, however, is both seated and of a young Mao, aged 32, when he composed a poem about Changsha.

On the Chinese internet, opinion was divided. Some web users praised the "far-sightedness" of the Changsha government, while others compared the statue to the Sphinx.

Posted on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 7:21 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Famed French Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss Dies at Age 100

Source: AP (11-3-09)

Claude Levi-Strauss, widely considered the father of modern anthropology for work that included theories about commonalities between tribal and industrial societies, has died. He was 100.

The French intellectual was regarded as having reshaped the field of anthropology, introducing structuralism — concepts about common patterns of behavior and thought, especially myths, in a wide range of human societies. Defined as the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity, structuralism compared the formal relationships among elements in any given system.

During his six-decade career, Levi-Strauss authored literary and anthropological classics including "Tristes Tropiques" (1955), "The Savage Mind" (1963) and "The Raw and the Cooked" (1964).

Posted on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 7:13 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Aggressive Karadzic appears at war crimes hearing

Source: CNN (11-3-09)

Bosnian war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic launched a full-throated attack on the International War Crimes Tribunal Tuesday, as he appeared at a hearing to discuss his refusal to appear for trial.

Karadzic, who is accused of responsibility for the worst massacre in Europe since World War II, says he has had insufficient time to prepare his defense. He is representing himself.

But Judge O-Gon Kwon told Karadzic it was the court, not the defendant, who decides when the case is ready for trial. He advised Karadzic to participate in order to get a fair trial.

The judges will decide by the end of the week how to deal with the former Bosnian leader's boycott of the proceedings, Judge Kwon said before adjourning the trial for the day.

Posted on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 7:06 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Historic journey: Journey Through Hallowed Ground, a driving route

Source: Fredericksburg.com (10-25-09)

WHEN IT COMES to history, nobody beats Virginia. Other claimants to No. 1 are mere pretenders, given Virginia's long-term impact on the nation's development.

This is the Cradle of Presidents; the home of Jamestown; the site of the Confederate capital and four of the Civil War's bloodiest battles, as well as the surrender at Appomattox. This space is far too small to enumerate the commonwealth's historic contributions.

Given the ongoing efforts to preserve so many aspects of Virginia's history, there is one particular recent success worth noting. The Journey Through Hallowed Ground, a driving route that begins in Gettysburg, Pa., and ends at Monticello, has been designated a National Byway by U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. The vast majority of the tour is, of course, in Virginia.

The designation is not about rules and regulations, and not about sacrificing property rights. It is an honorary title that puts a global spotlight on a corridor that is home to many sites that have played key roles in America's past (meaning, also, its present). The result won't be a human herd overrunning these cherished sites, but it could mean a boost to regional tourism. Those even a little bit up on history will know that Fredericksburg, along with the historic sites that surround it, is nearby.

The designation creates a marketing tool designed to spread the word that this is a fun-filled and educational way to explore the nation's past. You do it at your own speed. The route is enticingly scenic, without heavy traffic or theme-park crowds.

Posted on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 2:45 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Civil War's First Monument to Fallen Soldiers Rescued and Restored (Kentucky)

Source: Associated Press (NAT) (10-20-09)

On a cold December day in 1861, a few hundred German immigrants in blue Union uniforms squared off against 3,000 Confederates on foot and horseback near Munfordville, Ky.

When the withering artillery and musket fire cleared, the rebels fled, and Kentucky's first Civil War battle ended in victory for the 32nd Indiana regiment known as the "First German."

But before the regiment marched on, infantryman August Bloedner carved a limestone monument to the 13 Union dead, leaving behind the Civil War's first monument to fallen soldiers.

Now, nearly 150 years later, that monument is set to be placed in a museum, likely in Louisville, after being rescued and restored following decades of neglect and environmental wear that nearly destroyed it at Cave Hill Cemetery, where it has rested since 1867.

The Battle of Rowlett's Station, and its important monument, is just one of the stories Kentucky officials will highlight as they prepare to mark the 150th anniversary of the Civil War and the Commonwealth's unique and deeply divided place in it.

According to the Kentucky Department of Archives and Libraries, more than 75,000 Kentuckians fought for the Union, while roughly 40,000 fought for the Confederacy. As many as one-third died from combat, disease and exposure, historians estimate.

"We were a border state; presidents of the North and South were both from Kentucky; and we had stars on both flags it divided many families here," said Donna Neary, director of Kentucky's 2011-2015 Sesquicentennial Initiative aimed at commemorating the political, economic and cultural impact of the war in a slave-owning border state.

Posted on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 2:42 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Preservation Association Hopeful Battlefield Site Is Closer to Designation as National Historic Site (Minnesota)

Source: West Central Tribune (MN) (10-29-09)

Union soldiers and Dakota warriors who clashed in a violent conflict 147 years ago may be remembered on the western Minnesota prairie where they gave their lives, and where the bodies of some still lie.

Gene Flaten, representing the Wood Lake Battlefield Preservation Association, told the Yellow Medicine County Board of Commissioners on Tuesday that the group is hopeful of seeing the site of the Sept. 23, 1862, Battle of Wood Lake designated as a national historic site within a year’s time.

It would represent a big step toward the group’s ultimate goal of preserving the site as a national battlefield.

It’s one of only two Civil War battlefield sites currently recommended by the National Park service for consideration for such a designation in Minnesota. The other is Fort Ridgely, where Union soldiers and Dakota warriors also battled in the U.S.-Dakota Conflict of 1862.

Col. Henry Sibley and his 1,600 troops thwarted an ambush by Chief Little Crow at this site in eastern Yellow Medicine County, and the battle ended what some called President Abraham Lincoln’s “second war.”

Flaten said the nonprofit group has entered into a 50-year lease agreement with a landowner to protect a 64-acre portion of the battlefield. It is also close to completing a perpetual easement for a 240-acre portion of the battlefield with other landowners.

Posted on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 2:36 AM | Comments (0) | Top

U.S. Sen Landrieu Wants Commission on War Anniversary

Source: Shreveport Times (LA) (11-2-09)

U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., has taken up a banner of history that has fallen, at least on the field of battle.

She and fellow Democratic Sen. Jim Webb, of Virginia, have introduced the Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission Act of 2009 “to establish a Commission to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War,” a release from her office states.

“We must remember the legacies of the Civil War,” Landrieu said. “The United States emerged completely altered after the four years of struggle, and as a testament of American resilience, grew stronger than it was before. The cultural and political ramifications still shape the American landscape today. It was in the era of Reconstruction that Congress adopted the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, acknowledging black Americans as free and equal citizens of the United States. The Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission Act of 2009 is about preserving that memory.”

As someone with ancestors who fought on both sides of the nation’s bloodiest war, Webb said it has special significance for him.

“It is important that all Americans are aware of the many sacrifices made, by soldiers and civilians alike, for which we emerged as a stronger, more diverse and free nation because of these sacrifices,” he said. “The intention of this commission is to ensure the proper recognition of the sesquicentennial and builds on my other legislative efforts to support educational and preservation efforts for this turning point in American history.”...

... The Landrieu-Webb proposed commission would consist of 25 members drawn from government, business and academia, and would be charged to develop and carry out programs to ensure suitable national observance of the anniversary...

Posted on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 2:31 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Fall of Berlin Wall Marks End of Cold War

Source: Voice of America (11-2-09)

November 9th marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Most analysts and historians agree that former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev played a pivotal role in the events leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond. His policies of "perestroika" - restructuring - and "glasnost," or openness, paved the way for the dissolution of communist power in Eastern Europe and ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Robert Legvold from Columbia University says a key factor was Gorbachev's decision that he would not use force to suppress reformist aspirations in Eastern Europe.

"Increasingly he made it apparent to the East Europeans that the Soviet Union would not do what it had done many times in the past: 1953 in Berlin, 1956 in Hungary and Poland, 1968 in the Czech Republic and so on," Legvold said.

In July 1989, the so-called "Brezhnev Doctrine" was replaced by what one Gorbachev adviser described as the "Sinatra Doctrine," based on the singer's song "My Way". In other words, the adviser said East European countries were now able to go their own way - politically and economically.

Posted on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 2:10 AM | Comments (0) | Top

One year after his election, what has Obama achieved?

Source: The Christian Science Monitor (11-2-09)

When Barack Obama campaigned for president, the first-term senator from Illinois set a high bar for himself. Making history as the first African-American to occupy the Oval Office almost seemed beside the point. In Reaganesque fashion, he wanted to transform America.

Then the financial markets collapsed. The economy teetered on the edge. By the time Mr. Obama was elected, almost one year ago, an anxious nation was ready for answers. Could Washington stave off a full-fledged depression? Though Obama would not take office for 2-1/2 months, Americans hung on his words as if he were already president.

Fast-forward to today, and President Obama faces debate about what exactly he has achieved since taking office. “Saturday Night Live” lampooned him as having checked no boxes on his “to do” list. The surprise announcement a week later that he had won the Nobel Peace Prize, an award he himself said he did not deserve, only enhanced the notion that Obama was more about hope and hype than substance.

Some academics defend him.

“He’s had a good first year,” says Ted Widmer, a presidential historian at Brown University in Providence, R.I., and a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton. “Two of his biggest accomplishments are easy to overlook, but they were both important. He kept the financial crisis from becoming worse. And he vastly improved the way the rest of the world thinks about America.”...

... Viewed through the prism of how “Obama so far” stacks up against past presidents, the issue of high expectations sits front and center. Twice since Obama’s election, Time magazine has run cover stories on what he can learn from Franklin Roosevelt, the last president to tackle both economic crisis and war. On one, Obama’s face is Photoshopped onto a famously jaunty picture of FDR. Obama himself has wrapped his image in the mantle of Abraham Lincoln...

... Obama’s election itself raised expectations, says Russell Riley, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. “There was a miracle at the ballot box, and people expect those miracles to continue later,” he says. “But [Obama officials] don’t help themselves by setting deadlines early on that they then don’t meet.”

Obama’s immediate predecessors can all claim some victories in their first nine months in office. George W. Bush cut taxes, passed the No Child Left Behind education reform, and pulled the nation together after 9/11. Bill Clinton passed a major stimulus and deficit-reduction program, was on his way to passing the North American Free Trade Agreement, and presided over a historic Arab-Israeli handshake.

George H.W. Bush’s term, in many ways Ronald Reagan’s “third term,” got credit for his successful stewardship of the end of the cold war. President Reagan launched his “revolution” by enacting the largest tax cuts in history.

It is the start of Jimmy Carter’s presidency that serves as Obama’s cautionary tale. Mr. Carter, like Obama, came in with an ambitious agenda – but in Carter’s case, it fell flat but for passage of the Panama Canal Treaties. His inner circle accompanied him from Georgia and did not mesh well with the barons of Capitol Hill, even though all were Democrats. Obama, in contrast, has peppered his administration with Clinton veterans, including chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.

Early failures don’t always portend a failed presidency.

“A president whom we all admire like John F. Kennedy had to get through the Bay of Pigs before he moved on to his record of accomplishment,” says Mr. Widmer of Brown University.

At least, he adds, Obama has not endured disaster, even if he has yet to pull off a signature piece of legislation in the vein of what Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson achieved early. In the first 100 days alone, Roosevelt pushed through 15 major bills, a record that matched the extraordinary circumstances. By August 1965, less than seven months after winning the presidency in his own right, Johnson had launched Medicare, Medicaid, and the Voting Rights Act...

Posted on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 12:39 AM | Comments (0) | Top

History books re-written twenty years after fall of Berlin Wall

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-2-09)

"For young people, the Communist era is as exotic as ancient Greece," said Anna Dzierzgowska, a history teacher in Warsaw.

"We are lucky not to have to wear uniforms, observe army-style discipline, have our hair cut for school and admire Lenin," Clara Dimitrova, a high school student from Sofia, said with relief.

What students learn in school often clashes with the memories of their disillusioned parents, who struggled during the transition to democracy and remember with nostalgia the feeling of security they had during the Socialist era.

It also took time before historians could shake off the Communist propaganda and start teaching a more objective view of this period.

But after years of mulling how to represent Communism, textbooks in Bulgaria have now settled on descriptions such as "the adoption of the Stalinist totalitarian model signifies suppression of political pluralism, imposing the role of the communist party leader and non-respect of the rights of the citizens".

In Hungary, history lessons have become "fairly objective," says Gyorgy Nemeth, a history professor in Budapest .

Textbooks are filled with pictures and original documents - primary sources that allow students to make up their own judgement - he said...

Related Links

AHA Blog: Survey of sites on the fall of the Berlin Wall

Posted on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 12:09 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Monday, November 2, 2009

NBC Nightly News features JFK clips on Vietnam, drawing parallels with Afghanistan

Source: NBC (11-2-09)

Sept. 9, 1963: In this interview on NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley report, President John F. Kennedy—fresh off his 'victory' in the Cuban missile crisis—discusses U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Hear more excerpts from never-before-released tapes of President John Kennedy discussing Vietnam policy.

Posted on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 11:53 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Reviving Prison Studies

Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education (11-1-09)

The Background

Some 2.3-million people are incarcerated in the United States. From the 1920s to 1975, the imprisonment rate hovered around 110 per 100,000 U.S. residents; it has since rocketed to 760—proportionally five to 12 times as high as any other industrialized nations.

The annual bill: $64-billion.

Reacting to that scale and to increasingly harsh methods of imprisonment, scholars across the social sciences and humanities are energetically studying incarceration, reviving a research interest of the 1960s and 1970s that was inspired by prison-reform efforts.

The revival was long due. To hear specialists tell it, during the 1980s and 1990s, most criminologists ignored prisons to study the causes and prevention of crime. Meanwhile, when political liberals demanded improved prison safety and conservatives called for greater security, prison officials created locked-down lockups where academics were unwelcome.

What's Happening Now

In the past few decades, Michel Foucault figured large in studies of imprisonment, but recently his influence has begun to wane. Many scholars were enamored of the French theorist's argument that the disciplinary mechanisms of prisons were analogous to, and even would be superceded by, everyday practices of surveillance and correction designed to create "docile bodies" fitted to service in modern economies.

The chief failing of Foucault's argument, says Stephen D. Cox, a professor of literature at the University of California at San Diego, was its assumption that it was possible to construct institutions that conquered inmates' resistance. For Cox, author of a new study of imprisonment, The Big House: Image and Reality of the American Prison, Foucault's thesis "therefore has no leverage on the facts of prison life. … Gresham M. Sykes, the great sociologist of prisons, knew this in the 1950s, and it's obvious to anyone who works in a prison."

Several scholars have proposed explanations for American incarceration that are clearly indebted to Foucault but seek to take account of prison conditions.

David Garland, a professor of sociology and law at New York University, suggests that a "penal-welfare" system that sought to rehabilitate prisoners held sway for a century until the 1970s, when militant prison reform provoked conservatives like Ronald Reagan to impose radical law-and-order regimes. Even as crime rates eased, fearful voters came to view criminals, particularly African-American ones, as undeserving of the rights of citizenship.

Jonathan Simon, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley's Center for Criminal Justice, sees the roots of the phenomenon in the collapse of the New Deal in the 1960s and the rise of a new kind of social control: Fear-mongering by governments and other powerful agents led to a societal embrace of the lockdown in various forms—incarceration, the detention of immigrants, zero-tolerance policies in schools, and gated communities. The Berkeley social theorist Loïc Wacquant, too, contends that neoliberalism has eroded democratic citizenship by imposing harsh penal policies as a means of containing social unrest.

Sixty percent of African-American men who do not graduate from high school spend time in prison, and almost 30 percent of all black men do. But scholarly attention to the severe racial imbalance in American imprisonment has been surprisingly slow in coming given how stark the statistics are, says Robert R. Perkinson, an associate professor of American studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa...

... What's Next

The key emerging issue in prison research is whether state and federal budgets can bear the cost of the boom. Arizona, facing a $2-billion budget shortfall, is seeking to place nine of its 10 prisons in the hands of private companies. Some states are considering releasing large numbers of prisoners to parole, including cash-strapped California where critics blame corrections for diverting money from schools, social programs, and infrastructure.

Scholars have argued that prison privatization has proceeded on the basis of little serious research, and that drug-rehabilitation programs and prison-diversion programs offer big cost savings. To date, they've been largely ignored.

Researchers expect a better hearing, better financing, and potentially major reforms from a national review of all aspects of incarceration that U.S. Senator Jim Webb, a Virginia Democrat, has initiated.

Posted on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 11:52 PM | Comments (0) | Top

U of Virginia Professor: Global Warming Started Before Smokestacks

Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education (11-1-09)

People have changed the planet's climate, warming the atmosphere by churning out greenhouse gases.

But that process didn't start during the Industrial Revolution. It began thousands of years ago, according to a controversial hypothesis, before anyone uttered the phrase "global warming."

The warming, triggered by a relative handful of farmers, some cutting and burning forests and others planting rice paddies, could be the best way to explain one of the strangest oddities in earth's climate record. The notion has admirers but also adamant detractors, who say it has major holes and—just as seriously—provides an excuse for skeptics of current global warming to say that climate change is a long-term trend that has little to do with car tailpipes and modern industry.

"I think the debate is good," says the man behind the idea, William F. Ruddiman, an emeritus professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia. "Weak hypotheses get knocked down right away. Ours is still drawing attention after five years, and that's a good sign." He recently co-wrote a paper in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews, adding evidence that a small, ancient population could have produced a surprisingly large amount of greenhouse gases.

Posted on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 11:47 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Texas man recalls being a hostage in Iran as 30th anniversary approaches

Source: McClatchy (11-2-09)

ARLINGTON, Texas — Rick Kupke was busy encrypting classified messages inside the U.S. Embassy in Tehran when the Marine Corps guard yelled over the radio, "They're coming over the wall!"

Hundreds of Iranian student protesters were scaling the 7-foot wall around the embassy and making their way into the building through the tear gas being sprayed.

It was Nov. 4, 1979, and the administrative officer told Kupke to send a telegram to the State Department saying, "Demonstrators . . . are taking the embassy over."

Kupke, then a 33-year-old communications officer and electronics specialist, sent the telegram, closed a vault door to keep workers in the second-floor office safe and began shredding sensitive government documents — including those about unpopular Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who fled to the U.S. that year.

"The State Department asked me if I destroyed all the cables going back and forth about the shah. They said, 'You have to confirm to us that you personally destroyed that.' I said, 'Yes.' Then they gave us the order to destroy all of our equipment."

After Kupke smashed Teletype machines, he began the first of three trips to the roof to keep rifles and shotguns out of the hands of Iranians. After his third trip, he became the 66th — and final — American taken hostage that day.

He spent 444 days in captivity in what he and others call one of the United States' first confrontations with terrorism. The hostage takers wanted the shah returned to Iran; the hostages were the bargaining chip...

On Wednesday, 30 years after being taken hostage, Kupke plans to call a few of the former hostages.

"I’ll wish them a happy Nov. 4," he said. "It’s happy because we all lived through it."...

Posted on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 11:42 PM | Comments (0) | Top

More misplaced remains at Arlington National Cemetery

Source: Salon (11-1-09)

This story is part of a special Salon investigation of problems at Arlington National Cemetery.

Air Force Master Sgt. Marion Grabe passed away on Christmas day in 2007. She had served 26 years as an operating room nurse in the Air Force she loved, including 17 months in a Manila hospital treating wounded soldiers during the Vietnam War.

In death, Grabe wanted to mark her service to her country with a suitably honorable burial at Arlington National Cemetery. "She wanted to be buried there so bad," recalled Grabe's sister, Dorothy Nolte. Thinking of the fiasco that ensued with Grabe's burial at Arlington, Nolte added sadly, "She deserved better."

On Jan. 28, 2008, the cemetery interred Grabe's cremated remains in the wrong plot, on top of the casket of another deceased service member. The Army then moved Grabe's remains without requesting permission from Nolte, her next of kin -- despite cemetery regulations urging efforts to obtain permission from family -- but later claimed to Salon that it had notified the next of kin. The official who moved Grabe without family approval is the same official who may bear primary responsibility for the poor record keeping at the cemetery, which has already resulted in at least one "unknown" grave, as previously documented by Salon, in a cemetery that is supposed to have no new "unknowns." And the mistake is part of a pattern of errors at the cemetery, where several current and former cemetery employees tell Salon there may be a large number of similarly misplaced remains....

Posted on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 11:19 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Logging caused Nazca collapse

Source: BBC (11-2-09)

The ancient Nazca people of Peru are famous for the lines they drew in the desert depicting strange animal forms.

A further mystery is what happened to this once great civilisation, which suddenly vanished 1500 years ago.

Now a team of archaeologists have found the demise of the Nazca society was linked in part to the fate of a tree.

Analysing plant remains they reveal how the destruction of forests containing the huarango tree crossed a tipping point, causing ecological collapse.

The team have published their findings in the journal of Latin American Antiquity.

Posted on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 11:14 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Second World War blunder that doomed 50,000 British PoWs

Source: Guardian (UK) (11-1-09)

A fateful blunder by British military intelligence allowed the Nazis to seize 50,000 Allied prisoners of war from the Italians during the Second World War and transport them to camps in Germany and Poland where thousands are believed to have perished.

Newly published evidence reveals that a top-secret branch of the Ministry of Defence known as MI9 ordered British PoWs in Italy to remain in their camps after Italy surrendered. The order, issued in June 1943 as Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery was planning the invasion of the Italian mainland, and revealed for the first time in a new book, Where the Hell Have You Been?, was transmitted in code on a BBC religious broadcast. In some camps, British officers posted their own guards to prevent the men from leaving, even after the Italians had laid down their weapons.

As a result, the German army was able to walk into dozens of camps and round up the PoWs. According to War Office records, more than 50,000 Allied soldiers were transported from Italian camps by cattle train to far worse conditions in Germany and Poland during the summer of 1943. Thousands are estimated to have died, either shot while trying to escape from the trains or in the camps over the course of the following two winters.

Posted on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 11:12 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Amid Soldiers and Mines in the Korean DMZ, School Is in Session

Source: NYT (10-26-09)

TAESUNG FREEDOM VILLAGE, Korean demilitarized zone — Kim Han-seul, a fifth grader, has the most heavily armed crossing guard in the world.

Each morning, his school bus picks him up at a bustling town outside the demilitarized zone that separates South and North Korea. It drives through wire fences, tank traps and military checkpoints along a road flanked by minefields.

After a 50-minute drive escorted by a military jeep with a United Nations flag, the bus unloads Han-seul and a score of other students at Taesung Elementary, the only school inside the Korean demilitarized zone, a heavily armed no man’s land guarded on both sides by nearly two million troops facing off in an uneasy truce.

“People say that if a war broke out, I am going to be the first to be killed,” said Han-seul, an 11-year-old with horn-rimmed glasses. “But I say, if we haven’t had another war since the Korean War in the 1950s, why would you expect a war to happen now? I don’t have a worry in the world.”

Then he hurried off to join friends on a trampoline in the schoolyard.

Nearby, armed South Korean soldiers stood guard behind the corners of school buildings.

This two-story island of childhood innocence is the proudest part of Taesung Freedom Village, the only pocket of land inhabited by South Korean civilians inside the 2.5-mile-wide demilitarized zone.

For decades, the village and its school have symbolized the uneasy peace on the border. To keep them populated, South Korea has given the villagers incentives for staying, exempting them from taxes and mandatory military service. Taesung is one of South Korea’s richest villages, its farmers allotted 10 times as much farmland as their average counterparts elsewhere in the country.

Still, by 2007, Taesung was succumbing to the problem plaguing every other rural village in South Korea: its population was shrinking and aging as young people left for college and jobs in cities. The number of elementary school students dwindled to a mere six in 2007 from around 25 decades ago, making the school a prime target for a cost-cutting program that called for shutting down and merging rural schools depleted of students.

But Taesung is no ordinary school. Its presence gives a determined look of normality to a village where few things are normal...

Posted on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 11:08 PM | Comments (0) | Top

A Look at Myanmar's History as Emerging Energy Supplier

Source: WSJ (11-2-09)

Sandwiched in between China and India, two of the world's biggest new sources of energy demand, Myanmar is believed to have significant untapped reserves of natural gas. But its tangled history of government restrictions and, more recently, allegations of human-rights violations have limited outside investment to develop its resources.

The country now known as Myanmar was one of the world's first oil producers, with some exports as early as 1853. Foreign investment followed, with sizable fields developed in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

In 1962, the country came under the control of a military regime that nationalized the oil and gas industry. Until the late 1980s, the government kept foreign operators out. But beginning in 1988, it liberalized the oil and gas sector to begin allowing outside investment again. Western companies including Total S.A. and Unocal Corp. -- later bought by Chevron -- entered the market.

Within a few years, however, the U.S. and Europe imposed sanctions against Myanmar's military regime, preventing other Western companies from staking a claim. In their absence, a host of investors from Asia and elsewhere expanded their operations, including Cnooc Ltd. of China and South Korea's Daewoo International. The process intensified after 2004, as Myanmar authorities accelerated the opening of areas for exploration.

By 2007, at least 27 companies from 13 countries, including Petronas of Malaysia and ONGC of India, were active in Myanmar's oil and gas industry, according to a report by Human Rights Watch. The list included numerous companies that are wholly or partially owned by national governments in the region.

Posted on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 10:59 PM | Comments (0) | Top

An Odd Couple of Pols Have Stayed in the Running for a Half Century

Source: WSJ (11-2-09)

LEWIS RUN, Pa. -- Tuesday, voters in this small borough, population 573, will decide whether one of the longest-lasting, though little-known, political teams will stay together.

Mayor Albert Montecalvo and his right-hand man, Council President Frank Langianese, both 87 years old, are up for re-election, seeking their 15th and 16th terms. The pair, who were next-door neighbors as children, have worked together for 56 years on matters like water, sewer and garbage collection.

They agree on most things, except politics.

"He blames everything on the Democrats, and I blame everything on the Republicans," says Mr. Langianese, a Democrat.

"He," says Mr. Montecalvo, a lifelong Republican, nodding to his partner, "was the original Arlen Specter," referring to the Pennsylvania senator who earlier this year switched from Republican to Democrat. Mr. Langianese, originally a Republican, changed allegiances in 1958 after he lost in the Republican primary but was elected in the general election thanks to write-ins from Democrats. That's different, says Mr. Langianese. "I didn't change midterm. I don't believe in that."

Both men have won every election since the mid-1950s but don't take anything for granted, even though the mayor is running unopposed. "There is always a concern someone will write someone in," says Mayor Montecalvo, whose friends call him Abbe. "People sit in bars. They drink, complain about roads not getting plowed and garbage not picked up, but they never come to meetings. They say get rid of the old guys, but they don't want to run."

That is happening in Lewis Run and elsewhere. There are a lot of octogenarians on Pennsylvania ballots this election. Dan Rose, 88, is running for his fifth term as mayor of Irwin, in western Pennsylvania. In the eastern part of the state, James C. Kennedy is running for his fifth term as mayor of South Coatesville. He turned 92 in October and is older than South Coatesville itself. It was incorporated in 1921...

Posted on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 10:47 PM | Comments (0) | Top

FBI interview summary: Cheney had 72 instances of uncertainty

Source: Yahoo News (11-2-09)

WASHINGTON – Federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald famously declared in the Valerie Plame affair that "there is a cloud over the vice president." Last week's release of an FBI interview summary of Dick Cheney's answers in the criminal investigation underscores why Fitzgerald felt that way.

On 72 occasions, according to the 28-page FBI summary, Cheney equivocated to the FBI during his lengthy May 2004 interview, saying he could not be certain in his answers to questions about matters large and small in the Plame controversy.

The Cheney interview reflects a team of prosecutors and FBI agents trying to find out whether the leaks of Plame's CIA identity were orchestrated at the highest level of the White House and carried out by, among others, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff.

Among the most basic questions for Cheney in the Plame probe: How did Libby find out that the wife of Bush administration war critic Joseph Wilson worked at the CIA?

Libby's own handwritten notes suggest Libby found out from Cheney. When Libby discovered Cheney's reference to Plame and the CIA in his notes — notes that Libby knew he would soon have to turn over to the FBI — the chief of staff went to the vice president, probably in late September or early October 2003.

Posted on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 10:15 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Court Declines Case of Klansmen in '64 Slayings

Source: NYT (11-2-09)

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday said it would not review a case arising from the 1964 kidnapping and killing of two black teenagers along the Mississippi-Louisiana border, an episode that continues to stir legal debate as it stokes memories of the ugliest racism.

The court declined to take the case of James F. Seale, a cancer-stricken former Ku Klux Klan member now in his mid-70s, who was convicted more than three decades after the deaths of Charles E. Moore and Henry H. Dee. Mr. Seale is serving a life term for kidnapping and conspiracy, and the Supreme Court’s action on Monday means his conviction stands.

The victims were 19 when they were abducted, tied to trees, whipped and thrown into a Mississippi River backwater on May 2, 1964. Horrible as they were, the killings did not attract much attention, because only weeks later they were overshadowed by the infamous killings of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Miss., the case depicted in the movie “Mississippi Burning.”...

Posted on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 10:13 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Lady Beefeater subject of harassment

Source: Yahoo News (11-2-09)

LONDON – Women faced their share of trouble at the Tower of London, including three queens who were beheaded there.

But treachery has long been considered a thing of the past at the notorious 11th century fortress. At least until now.

If charges made Monday are true, the Tower — a popular tourist attraction and home to Britain's Crown Jewels — will add bullying to the list of foul deeds committed there. The victim: the first woman selected to join the all-male ranks of the Tower's yeoman warders, popularly known as "Beefeaters."

Moira Cameron — a veteran of long military service — was named a warder at the Tower two years ago. Hers was supposed to be a happy story about how a bastion of male supremacy could become a place where women, too, could serve queen and country.

On Monday, embarrassed Tower officials conceded that Cameron had apparently been subjected to a campaign of bullying and harassment conducted by some of her resentful male colleagues. They said two male warders have been suspended and a third is under investigation for suspected harassment of Cameron.

Posted on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 10:03 PM | Comments (0) | Top

iPod University: YouTube's growing collection of university lectures

Source: Newsweek (10-29-09)

YouTube has built a global reputation as the place to go for video clips of singing cats, laughing babies, reckless drivers, and raucous wedding processionals. But there's more to the site than pointless entertainment; there is a growing collection of university lectures available, including one by a Harvard Business School professor talking about consumer psychology in the recession, and Cambridge University historian David Starkey discussing the history of the British monarchy. Earlier this year YouTube launched a new home for education, YouTube EDU, which started as a volunteer project by company employees seeking a better way to aggregate educational content uploaded by U.S. colleges and universities. Last month the subsite went international, with 45 universities in Europe and Israel adding their content to the stream. "Around the world people can, from the comfort of their home, refresh their knowledge on a subject or explore other topics to better themselves intellectually," says YouTube EDU's Obadiah Greenberg. "I think that is rather profound."

One need not be a student to reap the benefits of higher education anymore. In addition to YouTube EDU, Web sites like iTunes U, TED, and Academic Earth allow millions of people to download lectures by some of the world's top experts—for free. Known as open educational resources—or OER—the movement is turning education into a form of mass entertainment. "There is a real appetite for content that is not just a sneezing-cat video," says Peter Bradwell, a researcher for the British academic think tank Demos. "There is a growing desire for intellectually stimulating material that is easily accessible." MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) offers free access to most of the school's course material and lectures on subjects like Anglo-American folk music and the behavior of algorithms. iTunes U provides free lectures, discussions, and conferences from schools like Oxford, Yale, and the French business institute HEC Paris. "The beauty of this platform is that it brings your material to a much wider audience," says Carolyn Culver, head of strategic communications for Oxford.

The democratization of higher education started in the 1990s when universities began looking to the Web to market their intellectual resources. In 1999, Germany's University of Tübingen became the first institution of higher learning to offer free lectures on the Web, and in 2002, MIT launched its OCW site. Now nearly 45 percent of visitors to the MIT site are what the school calls "self-learners." Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon computer scientist who died of cancer last year, tapped into this trend and became a Web star after he videotaped his final lecture, about achieving childhood dreams. To date, "The Last Lecture" has received 10.5 million hits...

Posted on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 10:00 PM | Comments (0) | Top

POLL: 20 Years After Wall's Fall, End of Communism Cheered - But With Reservations

Source: Pew Research Center (11-2-09)

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, most of the publics of former Iron Curtain countries look back approvingly at the collapse of communism. Both east and west Germans express positive opinions about reunification. But the enthusiasm about these changes has waned.

The Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project surveyed nearly 15,000 people in the U.S. and 13 European nations: Britain, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, and Ukraine. Key findings:

There is broad support for the collapse of communism in former Iron Curtain countries – but it is somewhat diminished from 1991.

§ Support for a multiparty system is down in six of nine former Eastern bloc nations polled; support for market economy has slipped in eight of nine.

§ Germans - both east and west - overwhelmingly approve of the reunification.

§ 63% of east Germans say they are better off as a result of reunification.

§ But now, as then, many in former East Germany believe they were overwhelmed by West Germany, that unification happened too quickly, and that the east still lags the west.

Life satisfaction has improved substantially since 1991 among all former communist publics polled.

§ Younger, better educated and urban people register the greatest gains in life satisfaction.

§ Generation gaps in well-being now exist that were not apparent in 1991. In Poland, for example, half (50%) of those younger than 30 rate their lives highly, compared with just 29% of those 65 and older.

Despite greater satisfaction with life, large numbers in many countries say that most people are now worse off economically than under communism.

§ Business and political leaders are seen as benefiting much more than ordinary citizens. Among Slovaks, for example, 97% say that politicians have benefited a great deal or a fair amount from the transition from communism, compared with just 21% who say so about ordinary people.

§ Younger, better educated and urban people, whose lives have improved, offer the greatest support for the transition to democracy and capitalism.

It is a rocky transition to democratic principles in many former communist countries, particularly in Russia.

§ The Poles, the Czechs, Slovaks and those in the former East Germany offer the broadest endorsement of democracy.

§ Russians express the least enthusiasm for democratic values. On a range of democratic principles tested, from a fair judiciary to honest elections, the median figure of Russians saying the principle is “very important” is just 39%.

A resurgence of nationalism is evident in Russia – and its neighbors worry about Russian influence.

§ A majority (58%) of Russians say “it is a great misfortune that the Soviet Union no longer exists.” Nearly half say “it is natural for Russia to have an empire.”

Racial and ethnic hostilities persist in the former East bloc countries, but in some cases at lower levels than in 1991.

Attitudes toward the European Union are generally positive, but there is evidence of disgruntlement in the wake of the recent economic crisis.

NATO draws favorable reviews in the 12 member nations surveyed. But majorities in both Ukraine and Russia express unfavorable opinions.

This report is for immediate release. We are hosting a discussion about these findings today at 2:30 pm in Washington, DC with former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former U.S. Representative Vin Weber. For event details, contact: mrohal@pewresearch.org.

View the executive summary at http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=267 and a PDF of the report at http://pewglobal.org/reports/pdf/267.pdf.

Posted on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 9:55 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Cold War Museum says it's making progress on a building

Source: Press Release--Francis Gary Powers Jr. (11-2-09)

The November 1 issue of the Cold War Times is now posted for viewing online at www.coldwartimes.com. Over the past decade, the Cold War Museum has made great strides in honoring Cold War veterans and preserving Cold War history. I am writing to provide you with a brief update.

Location, Location, Location

Progress continues with our efforts to find a permanent home for The Cold War Museum. When negotiations ceased with Fairfax County earlier this year, all options were reconsidered, including collaborating with a museum or university interested in adding the most comprehensive Cold War collections to its holdings. I am pleased to report that the Cold War Museum board of directors has entered into lease negotiations with Vint Hill EDA (www.vinthill.com) for use of 4000 sq ft of storage and exhibit space 40 miles from Washington, DC. Vint Hill EDA and the Fauquier County Industrial Development Authority will contribute a total of $100,000 towards building restoration and provide nine months of free storage space for our $3 million in Cold War artifacts once the lease is agreed to and finalized.

We need your financial support now to help prepare for our future home. Secure online donations can be made at www.coldwar.org/museum/contributions.html. We also need to get help from our volunteers in the Northern Virginia area to help move our artifacts from Fairfax to Vint Hill. The tentative date for this move is Nov 14 and 15. Email me if you are available to assist.
50th Anniversary of U-2 Incident Tour to Moscow and Sverdlovsk

May 1, 2010 will mark the 50 anniversary of the U-2 Incident. To commemorate this historic flight, I am working with AAA to organize a trip to Moscow and the crash site May 1-9, 2010. If you would like to join me on this tour, please email gpowersjr@garypowers.com. An itinerary can be found in this issue of The Cold War Times. More details will follow in the February issue of The Cold War Times.
Artifact Loans, Mobile Exhibit, and Spy Tours

The Cold War Museum continues to work with the Diefenbaker Museum in Ottawa, Canada, the Atomic Bunker in Harnekop, Germany, and the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC to display some of its artifacts until the museum secures a permanent home. The mobile exhibit on the U-2 Incident, the "Spies of Washington Tour," and related educational activities continue to generate interest and support. The National Electronics Museum (www.hem-usa.org) near Baltimore, MD will display the mobile U-2 Incident exhibit through January 9, 2010. The mobile exhibit is booked at Virginia Historical Society (www.vahistorical.org) in Richmond, Virginia January through May 2010 and will then travel to the EAA Museum (www.eaa.org) in Oshkosh, WI for their 2010 Air Adventure fly-in and air show. Dates are now being scheduled for the fall 2010 and beyond. The educational Spy Tour of Washington (www.spytour.com) is booking group tours online. Email gpowersjr@coldwar.org for more info on exhibit bookings and tours.

In 2005, The Cold War Museum acquired a 5000 sq ft Cuban Missile Crisis Display from the Florida International Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. In preparation for the 50th Anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, The Cold War Museum is in talks with The Virginia War Memorial (www.vawarmemorial.org) as a partner to display this exhibit, complete with a Soviet SA-2 missile, at their facility in Richmond, Virginia in conjunction with this anniversary. If you would like to find out more about the exhibit, please email gpowersjr@coldwar.org for information.

Museum Chapters

The Cold War Museum is pleased to announce the formation of its newest chapter, The Cold War Museum-Moscow. I would like to thank volunteer Jason Smart of Northern Virginia for all the hard work he has done to establish this chapter, which compliments the museum chapters in Berlin, Germany; Hollywood, Florida; San Juan, Puerto Rico; Milwaukee, Wisconsin staffed by volunteers. For additional information, visit www.coldwar.org/museum/museum_chapters.html.

The Cold War Museum recently stepped into the "social networking age" and created a virtual chapter, The Facebook Cold War Museum Group (FBCWMG). We have also decided to launch a CWM www.vkontakte.ru initiative. Vkontakte is the Russian equivalent of Facebook and is the thirtieth most visited site on the internet according to Alexa - The Web Information Company.

New Updates

In September, I was invited to be the Keynote Speaker at The National Nike Veteran Reunion in Anchorage, Alaska. The reunion was sponsored by Friends of Nike Site Summit, a grassroots organization formed two years ago to preserve the Cold War missile site that overlooks Anchorage from Mount Gordon Lyon. Veterans and others interested attended the reunion. More info online at www.nikesitesummit.org. While in Anchorage, I also was invited to give a speech about the history of the Cold War and the U-2 Incident to over 600 local high school students at Bartlett High School.

On October 2, I attended an event at the German Ambassador's Residence in Washington, DC to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Earlier this year I was invited to participate on the committee that worked with the German Embassy in DC to commemorate this important anniversary as part of their Freedom Without Walls program. More info online at www.Germany.info/withoutwalls.

I am pleased to announce that The Cold War Museum has been accepted as a charity on EBay's Mission Fish. Now you can shop on EBay and support The Cold War Museum. Visit http://donations.ebay.com/charity/charity.jsp?NP_ID=33316 for more details. Get the word out: "Support our cause on eBay" - There you can find great items for purchase that support our cause, create a listing or make a "Donate Now" donation.

Locating at Vint Hill is a very exciting development for The Cold War Museum. Please consider a 2009 year-end tax deductible contribution that will help us prepare for our new home. Your gift will ensure future generations remember Cold War events and personalities that forever altered our understanding of national security, international relations, and personal sacrifice for one's country. For more information or to make a contribution, please visit www.coldwar.org/museum/contributions.html. Together we can make this vision a reality.

Thank you for your continued interest and support.

Very truly yours,

Francis Gary Powers, Jr.
Founder
The Cold War Museum
P.O. Box 178
Fairfax, VA 22038
P-(703) 273-2381
F-(703) 273-4903
www.coldwar.org
gpowersjr@coldwar.org

Posted on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 5:38 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Lockerbie bomber had 'three months to live'... now he's well enough to go home

Source: Daily Mail (UK) (11-1-09)

The row over the release of the Lockerbie bomber was reignited last night after it emerged he has been released from hospital.

Abdelbaset Al Megrahi was freed from a Scottish jail on compassionate grounds in August after a medical assessment concluded he had only three months to live because of his prostate cancer.

But the 57-year-old former Libyan intelligence agent and his family now say that, while weak and terminally ill, he is not close to death, and continues to work on clearing his name.

Posted on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 2:58 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Baroness Thatcher in the cold as former leaders remember fall of the wall

Source: Times (UK) (11-2-09)

Three greying men, one in a wheelchair, one leaning on a stick, shuffled on to a theatre stage normally occupied by high-kicking chorus girls to discuss old times — the good old days when the Berlin Wall came down and they were in charge of the world.

The 20 years since have taken their toll on Mikhail Gorbachev, George Bush Sr and Helmut Kohl, but this weekend they were determined to celebrate and be celebrated.

Margaret Thatcher, regarded by many as one of the key players in ending the Cold War, was not there.

It was not clear whether she had been invited, though she rarely makes public appearances these days. With the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, Baroness Thatcher is either being dismissed as marginal and obstructive to Germany’s historically inevitable unification, or she is being edited out altogether.

Posted on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 2:48 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Ship built with Twin Towers steel in maiden voyage

Source: Times (UK) (11-2-09)

The USS New York, a new battleship built with steel from the World Trade Center, sailed into New York harbour today on its maiden voyage and delivered a 21-gun salute near Ground Zero.

The $1 billion US Navy assault vessel, whose bow includes 7.5 tonnes of steel recycled from the 2001 terror attack, will be officially commissioned in its namesake city on Saturday.

Rescue workers and families of those killed in the attack gathered on the Manhattan waterfront to watch the 684ft warship glide up the Hudson River past the World Trade Center site with its sailors standing at attention on the deck.

Posted on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 2:46 PM | Comments (0) | Top

History books re-written twenty years after fall of Berlin Wall

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-2-09)

Posted on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 2:43 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Karadzic 'regretted that not all Bosnian Muslims died at Srebrenica'

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-2-09)

The former Bosnian Serb president boycotted the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague again but agreed to attend a hearing on Tuesday aimed at continuing the trial without him unless he takes his place in the dock.

Alan Tieger, the UN prosecutor, concluded his case, begun last week, by accusing Mr Karadzic of personal responsibility for "one of humanity's dark chapters", the slaughter of over 7,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica.

"He was informed of its progress throughout. He knew that men were being killed. He covered up the mass expulsions and murders and continues to do so today," he said.

"The only regret he had about the entire operation was that some Muslim men got away."

War crimes investigators have gathered evidence that the 64-year old defendant had "issued and signed" orders, between 1992 and 1995, commanding Republika Srpska troops to drive out Muslims in eastern Bosnia's Srebrenica region.

Posted on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 2:40 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Cromwell's legacy damages tomb of Black Prince

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-2-09)

Stained glass windows overlooking the tomb of Edward, Prince of Wales, were destroyed by Puritan iconoclasts in the 1640s, allowing damaging UV rays to enter the cathedral unfiltered. Since then, clear replacements have been installed and the deterioration of the paintwork on the 14th century canopy surrounding the prince's resting place has continued.

The brilliant colours of the artworks that look down on the bronze figure of the prince are fading rapidly and the red pigment used by the original artists is turning black.

In a bid to halt the centuries of damage, restoration experts have now installed a huge blind to shield the artworks from harmful rays and created a system for regulating the humidity.

Posted on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 2:38 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Pope John Paul II 'to be beatified within months'

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-2-09)

The mayor of Rome, who would play a pivotal role in organizing the event, said the beatification of John Paul is expected to take place "at the latest" by 2010.

Speaking on a visit to Krakow, in the former Pope's native Poland, Gianni Alemmano said: "These are internal decisions (for the Vatican) but it is expected to take place at the latest by next year."

Vatican observers say the most likely date for the beatification would be April next year, on the fifth anniversary of the popular Pontiff's death.

Posted on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 2:37 PM | Comments (0) | Top

British MP ordered to withdraw Holocaust comments

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-2-09)

The Conservative leader is understood to be holding open the option of withdrawing the Tory whip from the MP if he fails to say sorry for his remarks.

Mr Cameron made clear his displeasure when asked about the backbencher’s comments, made in an email to an angry voter, during a question and answer session following a speech in London.

In the message, written after he was accused of being a “trougher” for using his allowances to pay his own company £100,000, the MP compared the public outcry over the expenses scandal to the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany.

Posted on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 2:35 PM | Comments (0) | Top

House of Terror explores Hungarian secret police methods

Source: Deutsche Welle (10-31-09)

The House of Terror Museum is located in the building which served as the successive secret police headquarters of both Hungary's fascist and communist governments.

The Nazi-affiliated Arrow Cross party took over Hungary in the last months of World War II. During the regime's short rule from October 1944 to January 1945, 80,000 Jews were deported to the Nazi death camps, while an estimated 20,000 Jews were killed outright – hundreds of them in the basement of the building which now houses the museum.

When the communists came to power after the Soviets liberated Budapest in 1945, their secret police (known by the abbreviation AVH), moved into the former fascist police headquarters. There, police interrogated, tortured and executed those considered an enemy of the state.

Now, visitors can walk through the former interrogation rooms and prison cells, and watch videos of interviews with former detainees as well as old propaganda films – all of which illustrate the horror of living in Hungary in these two periods.

Posted on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 2:31 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Demjanjuk witness to be charged with war crimes

Source: Deutsche Welle (11-1-09)

German news magazine Der Spiegel reports in its Monday edition that the witness, identified only as Samuel K., is "suspected of assisting in the gruesome murder of at least 434,000 people" when he was a guard at the Belzec death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Samuel K., an 88-year-old man who lives near Bonn, had given descriptions of his time as a guard to investigators in 1969, 1975, 1980 and again this past June.

"It was clear to us that Jews were killed there and were later burned, too. We could smell it every day," the magazine quotes K. as saying.

Like Demjanjuk, K. was a Ukrainian soldier taken prisoner by the Nazis. German authorities say the men volunteered or were recruited to serve as guards in concentration camps. Demjanjuk allegedly served in Sobibor and is accused of being an accessory to the murder of 27,900 people, mostly Jews. Spiegel said that K. fully acknowledged serving as a guard in the Belzec death camp.

Posted on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 2:29 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Robben Island is 'under threat'

Source: BBC (10-31-09)

Nelson Mandela was held prisoner on the island for most of the 27 years he was in jail, and it is now a World Heritage site and major tourist attraction.

But reports say thousands of feral rabbits are devastating local wildlife and undermining historic buildings.

The premier of the Western Cape has called for urgent action on the site.

Posted on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 2:26 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Pi author plans Holocaust novel

Source: BBC (10-31-09)

Beatrice And Virgil, a literary allegory for the Holocaust, will be published around the world in June 2010 - eight years after Life of Pi.

It will ask "profound and philosophical questions about the nature of love and evil", said the publishers.

The Canadian author's winning novel is one of the most successful Booker books to date.

Posted on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 2:22 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Karadzic 'will appear at trial'

Source: BBC (11-2-09)

He boycotted the trial's start last week saying he needed more time to prepare his defence.

In a letter to the presiding judge, Mr Karadzic says he will attend a procedural hearing at the court on Tuesday to discuss his defence.

His letter also calls for a fair and expeditious trial.

Proceedings were adjourned when Mr Karadzic failed to appear in court last Monday.

Posted on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 2:20 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Pinochet soldiers ready to confess

Source: Al Jazeera (11-2-09)

Hundreds of former Chilean military conscripts have offered to reveal details of crimes they committed and witnessed during the late General Augusto Pinochet's rule.

The former soldiers, who served in the army during Pinochet's 1973 coup against Salvador Allende, the then president of Chile, made the offer to talk during a demonstration on Sunday to seek financial and medical benefits from the state.

They said they would reveal details such as where bodies of victims were buried, but only if their safety is guaranteed, fearing that they could face prosecution or retaliation by the former superiors who they claimed ordered them to torture and kill political prisoners.

Using their confessions as a bargaining chip, the former participants in the "dirty war" hope to improve their chances of securing benefits from pensions to psychological treatment.

Posted on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 2:16 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Shanghai comes to terms with British colonial 'century of humiliation'

Source: Telegraph (UK) (10-31-09)

Since the Communist party came to power in 1949, it has worked hard to remove traces of the time when the city was carved up into concessions run by the British, French, Americans and Japanese.

History textbooks refer to the "century of humiliation" that China endured at the hands of foreigners after it lost the Opium War of 1840.

The elegant two-floor building at number 33 on the Bund, Shanghai's historic waterfront, was at the heart of British trade and interests in China.

Behind it lay the Bund Garden, an acre of green space landscaped by an imported Scottish gardener.

The consulate, and the consul's residence next door, were built in 1873 and are some of the oldest buildings still standing on the Bund.

After the British gave up the concession, the complex was used by Chinese bureaucrats but it fell into disrepair after being abandoned.

Now a project is under way to renovate the buildings and to use them to entertain visiting politicians and dignitaries.

Posted on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 2:15 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Sunday, November 1, 2009

The Global Anti-Trust Battle Over Google's Library

Source: Time (10-31-09)

Who knew there was so much fight in those dusty books? When Google announced plans in 2004 to scan millions of tomes tucked into library stacks across the country, admirers embraced the ambitious project as a digital undertaking as visionary as Magellan setting sail around the world. The project would throw open musty archives everywhere, putting hidden works on the Internet for all to use.

How things change. The library project is now embroiled in a ferocious legal free-for-all spanning the globe. At the battle's heart is Google's year-old settlement with groups representing authors and publishers who sued the company over its plans to digitize and copy books. In response to complaints by settlement's many opponents, a federal judge in New York has asked Google to revise the settlement by Nov 9. After that, opponents and the Department of Justice will carefully scrutinize the new deal.

The case presents a tangle of issues: how to create new markets for old books without shortchanging authors; how to nurture new technology without stifling competition; and how to preserve all that when one company — in this case, Google — is pioneering the revolution and could profit handsomely. One commentator, who supports the original settlement, has called it "the World Series of antitrust."

Some of the protest centers on a new, non-profit Book Rights Registry that the settlement would create. The registry would find authors or their heirs, and pay them for the use of their newly digitized writing, whether a blockbuster novel, a poem included in an anthology or liner notes for a long-ago blues album...

... Authors are on both sides of the barricades. Opponents of the settlement include silver-maned folk singer Arlo Guthrie and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, author of the so-called "torture memos" for President Bush. The settlement counts The Joy Luck Club author Amy Tan and noir crime novelist Elmore Leonard among its supporters. The deal has many other supporters as well, from disability rights groups to Dr. Seuss Enterprises and the National Grange...

Posted on Sunday, November 1, 2009 at 8:55 PM | Comments (0) | Top

'Puzzlers' reassemble shredded Stasi files, bit by bit

Source: LA Times (11-1-09)

Reporting from Berlin and Zirndorf, Germany, - Martina Metzler peers at the piles of paper strips spread across four desks in her office. Seeing two jagged edges that match, her eyes light up and she tapes them together.

"Another join, another small success," she says with a wry smile -- even though at least two-thirds of the sheet is still missing.

Metzler, 45, is a "puzzler," one of a team of eight government workers that has attempted for the last 14 years to manually restore documents hurriedly shredded by East Germany's secret police, or Stasi, in the dying days of one of the Soviet bloc's most repressive regimes.

Two decades after the heady days when crowds danced atop the Berlin Wall, Germany has reunited and many of its people have moved on. But historians say it is important to establish the truth about the Communist era, and the work of the puzzlers has unmasked prominent figures in the former East Germany as Stasi agents. In addition, about 100,000 people annually apply to see their own files.

The Stasi, which is said to have had more than 170,000 informers, succeeded in destroying thousands of files, shredding them in machines called "ripping wolves" until the equipment broke down under the weight of the task, then through burning and pulping (the contents, held in buckets in the archive, are known as "Stasi porridge"). At the end, agents tore them by bare hand as the teeming crowds smashed down their doors.

The shredded files, which any good German bureaucrat knows as vorvernichtete Akten or pre-destroyed files -- fill a staggering 16,000 mail sacks that contain about 45 million individual pages, or 600 million scraps. Thus far, the puzzlers are 440 sacks into the process.

"If we carry on at this pace we'll still be here in 500 years' time," says Ernst Schroedinger, a 54-year-old former amateur boxer turned puzzler...

... This month, Metzler has been piecing together documents relating to the life of Stefan Heym, a late German-Jewish writer who chose to live in the GDR but was frequently at odds with the regime and was spied on relentlessly.

"I've just found the sketch of his children's bedroom drawn on orders from the Stasi by his cleaning lady, who they code-named 'Frieda,' " says Metzler, who reads thrillers in her spare time to relax.

The pencil sketch shows everything from the position of the doors and windows, to the cupboards and rugs.

"However many documents I piece together, it'll never cease to amaze and shock me the extent to which friends, colleagues, even husbands and wives, went to betray each other. It shows you what a poison regime it was," she says.

The puzzlers' work helps prevent the public from forgetting how bad the East German regime was, Metzler says.

"Put it this way, I used to think, why do they keep regurgitating all the stuff about the Hitler regime that happened over 60 years ago," she says. "And now, since working here, I know why the reconstruction work is so important, so that we don't forget, and that's what motivates me when some people say our task is hopeless and leads nowhere."...

Posted on Sunday, November 1, 2009 at 8:46 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Passport Reveals a Suspected Terrorist's Journey

Source: WSJ (10-31-09)

In 2001, a few days before the Sept. 11 attacks, a German engineering student named Said Bahaji unexpectedly announced to his family he had a job waiting for him at a Pakistani computer company and he flew to Karachi, leaving behind his wife and infant son.

In the aftermath of the attacks, Mr. Bahaji, the Muslim son of a German mother and Moroccan father, was found to have rented and shared an apartment with two suspected World Trade Center hijackers, including Mohammed Atta, the believed ringleader, and a third Arab man who tried to take flying lessons in the United States.

Little had been heard from Mr. Bahaji since then until this week, when a German passport believed to be his was recovered by Pakistani troops in an abandoned militant compound.

Pakistani authorities suspect Mr. Bahaji is one of the al Qeada leaders helping the Taliban fight government forces in the rugged South Waziristan region.

U.S. and German investigators believe he helped the Hamburg based terrorists with logistics like obtaining travel documents and setting up computers.

In a 2002 interview, Mr. Bahaji's aunt, Barbara Arens, said her nephew "might have been tricked into going to Pakistan." Ms. Arens said she was once close to Mr. Bahaji but stopped talking to him when he adopted increasingly fundamentalist views in the late 1990s. "Half of me thinks he's guilty."

Even before Sept. 11, 2001, German authorities thought Mr. Bahaji was up to something. Born in Germany, he spent most of his youth on his father's family's large farming estate in northern Morocco. He returned to Germany in 1996 to attend a technical university in Harburg, a working-class suburb of Hamburg.

At that time, Mr. Bahaji held moderate beliefs, and even had a love affair with a Catholic woman he met in a year-long preparatory program for foreign students, according to close relatives who spoke to The Wall Street Journal. Heartbroken when it ended, he sought solace in Islam and at al-Quds, a Hamburg mosque frequented by extremists, these relatives said.

There he got to know Mamoun Darkazanli, a Syrian merchant who shared a bank account with a man believed to have masterminded the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa. Because of his association with Mr. Darkazanli, Mr. Bahaji was watched for a time by German police...

Posted on Sunday, November 1, 2009 at 8:32 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Jesuit Message Drives Detroit's Last Catholic School

Source: Time (Nov 9th Issue) (11-1-09)

Lunch period at an inner-city all-boys school is an event associated with the sounds of chaos, not classical music. And yet there are definitely strains of Beethoven coming from the piano in the cafeteria at the University of Detroit Jesuit High School and Academy. Behind the pianist, another student waits patiently for his turn. Upstairs in the art room, a senior is using the lunch hour to apply more brushstrokes to a portrait. A few kids are playing pickup ball in the gym, but more are crowded in the library.

In a city where 47% of adults are functionally illiterate and only 25% of high school freshmen make it to graduation, U of D is the chute through which bright young men can get to college. The school boasts a near perfect graduation rate and sends 99% of its graduates on to higher education. (In 2009 the one student who didn't go to college turned down a scholarship from the University of Michigan to sign a seven-figure contract with the Detroit Tigers.)

Catholic high schools have long provided a way out for high-achieving urban students. But in Detroit, most Catholic schools either closed down or left the city decades ago, after the race riots in 1967, when white Catholics fled to the suburbs and the city's population dropped by half. Only the Jesuits stayed, maintaining U of D's imposing stone structure on the corner of 7 Mile and Cherrylawn. The Catholic order is known for its education systems and its missionary work. In Detroit, they have become one and the same.

Detroit was once heavily Catholic, dotted with parochial schools in well over 100 parishes that served the Irish and East European immigrants who built the city. Of those, the oldest was the University of Detroit, founded as a Jesuit high school and college in 1877. Elmore Leonard wrote theology papers there before the detective novels that made him famous. The school produced Congressmen, state supreme court justices and a president of CBS.

Then came 1967 and the race riots that lasted five days, took 43 lives and changed the composition of Detroit almost overnight. The trickle of white ethnic Catholics to the suburbs that had started after World War II became a flood. Within seven years, the city's African-American residents had become a majority. But only 50,000 or so were Catholic, which meant the archdiocese could no longer support the same network of parishes and schools.

The tectonic shifts threw U of D into crisis. In less than a decade, the school's rolls plummeted from a high of about 1,100 students to no more than 500. In 1976 the Jesuits found themselves beset by parents, alumni and faculty arguing that the school should follow the lead of Detroit's other marquee Catholic institution, Catholic Central, and relocate to the suburbs. An intense internal debate was followed by consultation with Rome and finally a decision: not only would the school remain in Detroit, but it would also start investing its resources in the city and increase the racial diversity of its student body...

Posted on Sunday, November 1, 2009 at 8:12 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Listed buildings and scenic spots face destruction after planning rule changes

Source: Telegraph (UK) (10-31-09)

In previously unreported plans, the Government is to downgrade protection on old buildings and those in conservation areas in order to “benefit developers” and “reduce the number of applications for planning permission rejected on heritage grounds.”

The professional body representing town planners today launches an unprecedented attack on the proposal as “fundamentally flawed”, “unfit for purpose” and a potential “charter for people who want to knock buildings down.” The president of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has also attacked the plans and experts estimated that tens of thousands of listed and heritage properties could be knocked down as a result of the proposed change...

... The move is intended to make it easier and quicker to build “nationally necessary” but highly-controversial projects. Sir Michael Pitt, the IPC’s new chair, said it would “deal with the enormous amounts of delay” caused to vital projects by the current system. “The country needs a more effective means of decision making on national infrastructure,” he said...

... The separate changes to historic building protection are contained in a draft Government “planning policy statement,” PPS 15, slipped out during the summer holidays and open for consultation until last week. It will become national policy which all local councils must follow when making decisions on individual planning applications.

The new policy says that local authorities should allow the demolition or alteration of historic buildings where the “material harm” caused to an area’s heritage “is outweighed by the wider social, economic and environmental benefits of the proposed development”. The policy says that this “is likely to benefit developers… for example, it should reduce the number of applications for planning permission, listed building consent and conservation area consent rejected on heritage-related grounds”.

There are about 375,000 nationally listed buildings and about the same number of locally listed buildings. The proposed policy says that “material loss of grade 1 and 2-star listed buildings” should be “wholly exceptional”. However, it makes no mention of grade 2 listed buildings, which make up 92 per cent of England’s listed buildings...

Posted on Sunday, November 1, 2009 at 8:06 PM | Comments (0) | Top

The History of Daylight Saving Time in the US

Source: Neatorama (10-31-09)

Daylight Saving Time ends in most of the United States a 2AM on Sunday, November 1st (Hawaii and Arizona have been on standard time all summer). We remember which way to set our clocks by thinking “spring forward, fall back.” It makes you wonder how we ever got our clocks coordinated in the first place. Believe it or not, standard time and time zones were the railroad industry’s idea.

“In the early 19th century … localities set their own time,” said Bill Mosley, a public affairs officer at the U.S. Department of Transportation.

“It was kind of a crazy quilt of time, time zones, and time usage. When the railroads came in, that necessitated more standardization of time so that railroad schedules could be published.”

In 1883 the U.S. railroad industry established official time zones with a set standard time within each zone. Congress eventually came on board, signing the railroad time zone system into law in 1918.

The 1918 law assigned the Interstate Commerce Commission to oversee the time zones, and legislated Daylight Saving Time. Later, the decision whether to observe DST was left up to the states.

Posted on Sunday, November 1, 2009 at 7:57 PM | Comments (0) | Top

City reveals 'Bronze Age site'

Source: BBC (11-1-09)

Archaeologists have unearthed what they say could be a prehistoric Bronze Age burial site in central Oxford.

Experts say important chiefs may have been laid to rest at the site of the former Radcliffe Infirmary.

Land around the River Thames, known as the River Isis as it passes through Oxford, was often used for prehistoric burial, ritual and social monuments.

The Museum of London Archaeology (Mola) also revealed evidence of a later 6th Century Saxon settlement.

Posted on Sunday, November 1, 2009 at 3:43 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Russia 'simulates' nuclear attack on Poland

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-1-09)

Russia has provoked outrage in Poland by simulating an air and sea attack on the country during military exercises.

The armed forces are said to have carried out "war games" in which nuclear missiles were fired and troops practised an amphibious landing on the country's coast.

Documents obtained by Wprost, one of Poland's leading news magazines, said the exercise was carried out in conjunction with soldiers from Belarus.

After spending 40 years under Soviet domination few in Poland trust Russia, and many Poles have become increasingly wary of a country they consider as possessing a neo-imperialistic agenda.

Posted on Sunday, November 1, 2009 at 3:23 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Prophet Mohammed film planned

Source: Telegraph (UK) (11-1-09)

An epic film about the Prophet Mohammad backed by the producer of "The Lord of the Rings" is being planned with the aim of "bridging cultures".

Filming of the £90 million English-language film was set to start in 2011, with Barrie Osborne as its producer, Almoor Holdings, a Qatari media company, said.

The company said the film - in which the Prophet would not be depicted, in accordance with Islamic strictures - was in development and talks were being held with studios, talent agencies and distributors in the United States and Britain.

Posted on Sunday, November 1, 2009 at 3:19 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Former President Bill Clinton Unveils Statue in Kosovo

Source: AP (11-1-09)

Thousands of ethnic Albanians braved low temperatures and a cold wind in Kosovo's capital Pristina to welcome former President Bill Clinton on Sunday as he attended the unveiling of an 11-foot statue of himself on a key boulevard that also bears his name.

Clinton is celebrated as a hero by Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority for launching NATO's bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999 that stopped the brutal Serb forces' crackdown on independence-seeking ethnic Albanians.

This is his first visit to Kosovo since it declared independence from Serbia last year.

Posted on Sunday, November 1, 2009 at 3:17 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Chapel housing 9/11 victims set on fire

Source: CNN (11-1-09)

A man faces charges of arson after he allegedly set fire to a section of Memorial Park, which houses the remains of victims of September 11, 2001, attacks, police said Saturday.

Brian Schroeder, 26, who was arrested Saturday, faces charges of criminal mischief, police said.

Memorial Park, a large white tent in east midtown Manhattan, is the temporary resting place for unclaimed and unidentified remains, according to the chief medical examiner's office.

The remains will be relocated to the World Trade Center Memorial after its completion, according to the office.

Posted on Sunday, November 1, 2009 at 3:13 PM | Comments (0) | Top

David Plouffe memoir: Excerpts

Source: Mike Allen's Playbook in Politico (11-1-09)

From Mike Alllen’s Playbook, exclusive excerpts from “The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory” — $15.09 on Amazon – by DAVID PLOUFFE, campaign manager of Obama for America:

“The remarkable Obama for President campaign, led by a once-in-a-generation candidate, had the audacity to win — and not just to win, but to do so with guts, defying conventional wisdom again and again. We talked to voters like adults and organized a grassroots movement of average citizens the likes of which American politics had never seen.” (p. 3)

JUNE 2007: “Our research team had put together a document that highlighted the voluminous examples of Hillary Clintons’ expressing tacit support for outsourcing. We knew this could cause huge problems in Iowa with blue-collar voters … The document on outsourcing was titled ‘Hillary Clinton, D-Punjab,’ after an incident when Hillary Clinton was in India and she jokingly told a local official that should be her title because of her ongoing political interest in many things Indian. It was stupid and snarky; these research documents historically do not see the light of day, so communications staff doesn’t treat them as though their language will be repeated. They are considered off-the-record and rarely get sourced. As a result, we were sloppy. But we got burned, and the New York Times broke the story that we were moving the D-Punjab document around the press world. [Jeff Zeleny’s “Political Memo,” at the bottom of A10 on Saturday, June 16, 2007, was headlined, “A New Kind of Politics Closely Resembles the Old.”]

Posted on Sunday, November 1, 2009 at 1:49 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Tehran set to lose status as Iran capital

Source: Guardian.co.uk (11-1-09)

It has witnessed some of Iran's most tumultuous events: the fall of the shah, the return of Ayatollah Khomeini and the transformation from pro-western monarchy to revolutionary Islamic republic.

Now Tehran's days as the Iranian capital appear numbered after a powerful state body approved a plan for a new principal city. The idea was proposed by the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and rubber-stamped by the expediency council.

Seismologists have warned that Tehran is liable to be struck by a catastrophic earthquake in the foreseeable future. It is not clear whether a new capital will be built from scratch or sited in an existing city.

Iran has had numerous capitals during its history, including Isfahan, Qazvin, Shiraz, Mashhad and Hamedan. Since the Qajar king Agha Mohammad Khan declared it capital in 1795, Tehran has become the country's political, social, economic and cultural centre.

Posted on Sunday, November 1, 2009 at 12:30 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Pakistanis to Clinton: War on Terror Is Not Our War

Source: Truthout (10-30-09)

Islamabad, Pakistan - After three days of encounters with America-bashing Pakistanis -- who rejected her contention that the U.S. and Pakistan face a common enemy -- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Friday that "we're not getting through."

Prominent women and tribesmen from the North West Frontier Province delivered the same hostile message that she'd heard the two preceding days from students and journalists: Pakistanis aren't ready to endorse American friendship despite an eight-year-old anti-terrorism alliance between the countries and a multi-billion-dollar new U.S. aid package.

Clinton put her case directly to the public Friday in televised appearances in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, fielding angry questions about the alleged activities of U.S. contractor Blackwater in Pakistan, the tough conditions that came with a $1.5 billion-a-year American aid package and alleged U.S. favoritism toward Pakistan's archenemy, India.

One tribesman bluntly told her: "Your presence in the region is not good for peace."

"We are fighting a war that is imposed on us. It's not our war. It is your war," journalist Asma Shirazi told Clinton during the women's meeting. "You had one 9-11. We are having daily 9-11s in Pakistan."

Posted on Sunday, November 1, 2009 at 12:26 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Passports of Jihadists Found by Pakistani Army

Source: Time (10-30-09)

... Alongside carefully arrayed mortar shells, short-range artillery equipment and a range of rifles is a pile of papers and documents. Among them are plans showing how to assemble an "impact grenade" and a "time delay" grenade. Other pieces of paper, handwritten in Arabic, apparently lay out instructions on how to rig another explosive device. Also among the documents are two European passports that purportedly belong to fugitive al-Qaeda members who are linked to the 9/11 attacks and the 2004 Madrid bombings.

Most prominent is a German passport that appears to have belonged to Said Bahaji, 34, a member of the Hamburg cell that orchestrated the 9/11 attacks who was close to its ringleader, Mohamed Atta. The passport was apparently issued in Hamburg to Bahaji, the son of Moroccan and German parents, on Aug. 3, 2001. A Pakistani tourist visa valid for 90 days that appears inside the passport was stamped the following day. An entry stamp from Karachi dated Sept. 4, 2001, suggests that Bahaji landed in the Pakistani port city just a week before the attacks on New York and Washington. There was no sign of further travel in the passport.

It was not possible to verify the authenticity of the passport, number L8642163, or determine whether its apparent holder had been in the area, had been killed or had abandoned it there years ago. But the details in the passport closely matched those available from an Interpol-U.N. Security Council Special Notice. The passport number only differs by one digit, and the photographs are clearly of the same person.

Another passport the army claimed it recovered, and seen by reporters on the visit, belonged to Raquel Burgos Garcia, also 34, a Spaniard who had converted to Islam and later joined al-Qaeda as a low-level operative. The Spanish passport, number P099823, did not bear any Pakistani stamps. Her passport was also issued just weeks before the 9/11 attacks, on Aug. 1, 2001.

According to a Moroccan student card purportedly belonging to Garcia that was displayed with her passport, she is the wife of Amer Azizi, a Moroccan terrorist suspect linked to the 2004 Madrid bombings. Garcia's passport bore no traces of travel to Pakistan but did have stamps showing repeated travel to Morocco, her apparent husband's country. There was also a used travel visa to Iran, where Azizi is reported to have fled at one point. And there was an Indian visit visa, but it did not appear to have been used for travel.

If genuine, the passports would confirm what the U.S. has been saying all along: that Pakistan's wild borderlands have served as a sanctuary for global jihadis who may be plotting fresh attacks on the West. Bahaji served as a "senior al-Qaeda propagandist," says a senior U.S. counterterrorism official. Soon after the 9/11 attacks, it was widely reported that members of the Hamburg cell had their first known meeting at Bahaji's 1999 wedding in a Hamburg mosque...

Posted on Sunday, November 1, 2009 at 12:11 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Fox News Poll finds public still blames Bush for recession

Source: The Washington Independent (10-30-09)

Here’s a somewhat surprising result from the new Fox News poll. Asked which president is “more responsible for the current state of the economy,” only 18 percent say President Obama. Fifty-eight percent say former President George W. Bush. Nine percent blame both of them. Republicans are the only subgroup of voters who blame Obama, and only by a six-point margin of 35 percent to 29 percent.

Posted on Sunday, November 1, 2009 at 12:00 AM | Comments (0) | Top

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