· December, 2006

Stories about History from December, 2006

Russia, Belarus: “Gazilla”

  30 December 2006

There's a distinct sense of deja vu this New Year's Eve: Gazprom, Russia's largest (and state-controlled) company and the world's biggest extractor of natural gas, is in the spotlight again, both locally (due to an ambitious and controversial construction project in St. Petersburg) and internationally (due to a dispute over...

The Balkans: Main 2006 Stories

  29 December 2006

Ed of Balkan Baby lists the most important regional stories of 2006: “Slovenia moves towards Eurozone,” “Croatia and Serbia Disappoint at World Cup,” “Croatia Stop-Start its way towards EU,” etc.

Africa: James Brown and Africa

  29 December 2006

Blake Lambert, blogging at Sub-Saharan Africa Roundtable, writes about James Brown's connection to Africa, “Yet JB’s best-known visit to the continent was in 1974 when he performed at a concert as part of the famous “rumble in the jungle” in Kinshasa. Muhammad Ali fought George Foreman in one of the...

Russia: Kalmyk Deportation

  28 December 2006

Yet another sad anniversary from J. Otto Pohl: “Sixty-three years ago the Stalin regime deported the vast majority of the Kalmyk population from their historic homeland to Siberia.”

Serbia, USA: What Serbs Think About America

  28 December 2006

In his blog post called “America is shaking”, Neven Andjelic shares his opinion on the United States (SRP): This big country is shaking. A number of events have caused the current condition. None of them has anything to do with my arrival to Berkley four months ago when I first...

Trinidad & Tobago: Christmas, credulity and commerce

  27 December 2006

Jeremy Taylor goes over some of the impossible notions about Christmas we have come to accept as fact, concluding “I take some comfort in the thought that the man at the centre of all the fuss would have dismissed it all, just as he furiously ran the bankers off the...

Russia: Moscow Half a Century Ago

  27 December 2006

LJ user fool_4_lifetime found a rare photo album in a Moscow dump – Im Flug nach Moskau, by Erich Einhorn, ARTIA, 1959 – and scanned and posted 60 spreads of Moscow photos from it in the moya_moskva (My Moscow) LJ community. (Warning: bandwidth intensive!) Here is one of the photos:...

Ethiopia/Somali: a reckless war

  27 December 2006

Enset describes Ethiopia-Somali war as “a reckless war borne of bad choices”: “If the Ethio-Eritrean war of 1998-2000 was a senseless war, then this war between the radical Somali Islamist and the illegitimate Meles-led regime of Ethiopia is a reckless one for all involved.”

Guadeloupe, India: 152nd Anniversary of Tamul Hindus’ Arrival

  26 December 2006

Atout Guadeloupe announces (Fr) that Guadeloupeans of Hindu Tamul origin celebrated the 152nd anniversary of their ancestors’ arrival in Guadeloupe on Dec. 24. Says the feed: “Hindus arrived after the second abolition of slavery.” The ceremony which took place in capital Pointe-a-Pitre included offerings of flowers to the ocean and...

India: The day MGR died

  25 December 2006

Metroblogging Chennai remembers the Christmas Eve of 1987, when a famous politician died. “The size of the crowd was unimaginable – hundreds of thousands of people. The driver had to inch along. People peered in, saw us foreigners and the wreath, and parted to let us pass.”

Russia: A Blogger's Short Stories

  25 December 2006

Copydude is posting short stories – one, two, three, four – he wrote while in Tatarstan: “They come under the category of ‘True Lies’ – or what writers prefer to call ’semi-documentary’. I wrote them about real people – but sourced largely from local gossip.”

Russia: Litvinovich on Beslan Report

  25 December 2006

David McDuff of A Step At A Time translates a piece by Marina Litvinovich, an activist and founder of the Truth of Beslan portal; she writes: “Another of the report’s conclusions is that 32 people took part in the school seizure, of whom 31 were killed and one has been...

Poland: Honorary King

  25 December 2006

The beatroot reports: “46 members of the Polish parliament have tabled a motion to name Jesus Christ as the ‘honorary King of the Republic of Poland’. […] There is an historical precedent to this mad move, however. The Virgin Mary was made Honorary Queen of Poland 350 years ago by...

Croatia: War Crimes

  25 December 2006

Neretva River writes: “As exhumations begin at Osijek's central cemetery as part of the Croatian judiciary's investigation of war crimes committed against Osijek's non-Croat civilian population during December 1991, 2006 could prove to have been the year that domestic courts in Croatia demonstrated that they are serious about prosecuting war...