Republicans Want To Rewrite Trump's 2019 Impeachment

WASHINGTON ― House Republicans want to rewrite the history of then-President Donald Trump’s impeachment in 2019.

House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) on Tuesday asked the State Department for documents related to Joe Biden’s role in U.S. policy toward Ukraine during the latter years of his vice presidency.

The request signals that Republicans are serious about reviving Trump’s accusation that Biden pushed for the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor in order to benefit a Ukrainian company that employed his son Hunter Biden. It’s a dubious claim that could become the centerpiece of a Republican effort to impeach the president. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) announced Tuesday that he had directed his colleagues to open an impeachment inquiry.

Hillary Clinton's Response To Honduran Coup Was Scrubbed From Her Paperback Memoirs

Those who want to know what former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said about Honduras' 2009 coup in her autobiography shouldn't bother with the paperback version.

Clinton's role in the aftermath of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya's ouster has come under greater scrutiny since the March 3 assassination of environmental and indigenous rights activist Berta Cáceres. Critics argue that the U.S. push for new elections in the months after the coup helped legitimize the actions of the Honduran military, destabilize the country and pave the way for the extreme violence that followed. Killings of activists like Cáceres and others have become devastatingly common.

Netanyahu Says Muslim Leader Convinced Hitler To Kill Jewish People

REUTERS -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu provoked controversy on Wednesday, hours before a visit to Germany, by saying the former Muslim elder in Jerusalem convinced Adolf Hitler to exterminate the Jews.

In a speech to the Zionist Congress late on Tuesday, Netanyahu referred to a series of attacks by Muslims against Jews in Palestine during the 1920s that he said were instigated by the then Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini.

Putin Is Rewriting History. There Would Be No ISIS Without Assad.

Every week, we bring you one overlooked aspect of the stories that made news in recent days. You noticed the media forgot all about another story's basic facts? Tweet @TheWorldPost or let us know on our Facebook page.

According to Russian President Vladimir Putin, the war in Syria is very simple: President Bashar Assad's regime is fighting the Islamic State militant group and associated terrorist organizations.

Emails relating to B.C.'s Highway of Tears allegedly deleted

A former staffer at the B.C. Ministry of Transportation alleges that more than a dozen emails were deleted in November 2014 following a freedom of information request relating to the Highway of Tears, a stretch of road notorious for cases of missing and murdered women.

The NDP has made public a letter written by former executive assistant Tim Duncan to Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham. In the letter, Duncan says that when he protested an instruction to delete the emails, a ministerial assistant took hold of his keyboard and did it himself.

David Brooks Tries To Rewrite History Of The Iraq War

Twelve years ago, as an editor of the Weekly Standard, David Brooks was a staunch advocate for invading Iraq. He belittled and sneered at those who expressed doubt. On March 23, 2003, Brooks wrote: “The situation has clarified, and history will allow clear judgments about which leaders and which institutions were up to the challenge posed by Saddam and which were not.”

Now, Brooks has a different view. “History is an infinitely complex web of causations,” Brooks wrote on the Iraq war in his Tuesday New York Times column.

Harper Government Retroactively Rewrites Gun Registry Law

OTTAWA - The Harper government moved to retroactively rewrite Canada's access to information law in order to prevent possible criminal charges against the RCMP, The Canadian Press has learned.

An unheralded change buried in last week's 167-page omnibus budget bill exempted all records from the defunct long-gun registry, and also any "request, complaint, investigation, application, judicial review, appeal or other proceeding under the Access to Information Act or the Privacy Act," related to those old records.

Meet the Politicians Trying to Bury America’s Past

The planet is aflame with the killing of messengers. We can barely keep score of the assaults on memory: from Mosul to Moscow to Dresden to Dhaka, the destruction proceeds apace—of ancient monuments, scientific archives and schools, of journalists as well as journalism itself. We, the witnesses, expend a great deal of breath and ink promising to “never forget.” Yet both globally and locally, in ways large and small, there is huge resistance to even the smallest reminders of injury: no one wants to talk about trauma or privilege as the invisible distributors of public costs and private benefits today. No one wants to bring it home.

Inside The Koch-Backed History Lessons North Carolina Wants To Teach High School Students

Public high school students in North Carolina will be taught from a lesson plans and worksheets prepared by a organization closely tied to the billionaire Koch brothers, if the state’s Department of Public Instruction gets its way. According to the Raleigh News and Observer, the Virginia-based Bill of Rights Institute received a “$100,000, sole-source contract with [North Carolina] to help develop materials for teachers to use in a course on founding principles that the state requires students to take.”

The Tories Should Not Hide History From Canadians

Eighteen months after the original publication in French, The Battle of London has just been published in English, with new revelations of improprieties by the Supreme Court at the time of constitutional patriation. When it was first released last year in French, the book stirred up a great many questions and doubts about what happened at this crucial juncture in history. Yet, more than 30 years after the fact, our government has shown no willingness to disclose the numerous documents in its possession on the matter, despite repeated demands, including a unanimous motion voted by the Quebec National Assembly. Indeed, much of the story of patriation is only known to us thanks to British documents, without which my book would not have been possible.

The irony is that the Conservatives have recently conducted consultations on what they call "Canada's Action Plan on Open Government" -- part of "the federal government's efforts to foster greater openness and accountability." Unfortunately, it is difficult to reconcile this with their refusal to amend our antiquated Access to Information Act. This legislation (ironically enacted in 1982) needs to be modified if historians are to do their job properly.

How Stephen Harper is rewriting history

Mark O’Neill, president of the Canadian Museum of Civilization, the country’s biggest and most-visited museum, is typically an upbeat guy. But as he leads a reporter around Canada Hall, the winding stroll through Canadian history that is one of the museum’s central features, he doesn’t exactly offer a seminar in cheery tour-guide patter. At about the midpoint of the walk, which starts with the Vikings arriving and ends in a 1960s-vintage airport lounge, O’Neill steps into one of his favourite installations—an intact early 20th-century Ukrainian Catholic church, painstakingly relocated to the museum from Smoky Lake, Alta. “Look around,” he says. “You will learn virtually nothing about Ukrainian Canadians. You will learn nothing about the first Canadian internment camps. You will learn nothing about the Ukrainian community today.”

Scholars, authors wary of government review of Canadian history

Canadian history has a reputation for being dull, but our nation's past is arousing passions in Ottawa of late.

The federal government has spent $28 million commemorating the bicentennial of the War of 1812, a program that some critics say was an extravagant exercise in drumming up patriotism.

The Conservative government's latest foray into the history books has also divided opinion. Last month, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage started a "thorough and comprehensive review of significant aspects of Canadian history."

Canadian history is not just about wars and battles

Parliament’s Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage has voted to undertake a “comprehensive review of significant aspects of Canadian history. That history would include, but not be limited to, pre-Confederation, Confederation, suffrage, WWI, with an emphasis on battles such as Vimy Ridge, WWII, including the liberation of Holland, the Battle of Ortona. The Battle of the Atlantic, the Korean conflict, peacekeeping missions, constitutional development, the Afghanistan conflict, early 20th century Canada, post-war Canada and the late 20th century.”

MPs’ war over Canadian history misses the point

Canadians don’t learn enough Canadian history. Virtually everyone in Canada agrees on that much.

What remains in dispute is what history, or whose history, Canadians should be learning more about. That’s why the Conservative-dominated Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage’s comprehensive review of (among other things) the history that is being taught in Canadian schools has become so controversial.

MPs don’t really want to talk about history

What do you have against Canadian history?

That’s the question Conservative MPs are getting ready to ask opposition MPs. When the House of Commons Heritage Committee decided last week to hold a thorough review of Canadian history, they knew criticism was sure to follow.

The Conservative government’s commemorations of historical events and its funding cuts to important historical institutions such as Library and Archives Canada have created a continuous small froth of controversy. This was especially so around the commemorations of the War of 1812, commemorations that turned out, despite some riveting TV commercials that seemed to be channelling Mel Gibson, to be less “yee-haw!” and more “ho-hum.”

Do the Conservatives want to change Canada’s history?

The question, really, is why? Why would a Commons committee undertake a study of something that isn’t really under its jurisdiction? This is essentially what the Heritage committee is about to do, after it decided it would launch a “thorough and comprehensive review of significant aspects in Canadian history,” which will include “a breakdown and comparison of relevant standards and courses of study offered in primary and post-secondary institutions in each of the provinces and territories.”

Online reaction to a Postmedia story Thursday night on the committee’s decision was resoundingly negative — and in the House of Commons on Friday it didn’t get much better.

Stephen Harper’s Conservatives to lead review of Canadian history

OTTAWA — Federal politicians have launched a “thorough and comprehensive review of significant aspects in Canadian history” in Parliament that will be led by Conservative MPs, investigating courses taught in schools, with a focus on several armed conflicts of the past century.

The Ahistorical Way a Neoconservative Remembers the 1990s

The indefatigable Bill Kristol has written an article in The Weekly Standard that every American ought to read. There is no more clarifying example of how skewed the neoconservative perspective on military intervention is than the claim he makes about U.S. foreign policy in the 1990s. In his telling, politicians like Rand Paul want to harness war-weariness reminiscent of those post-Cold War days, when American voters no longer wanted to act as "the policemen of the world."

"That decade of not policing the world ended with 9/11," Kristol warns.

Jamie Dimon Claims He Tried To Save Lehman Brothers In 2008

Jamie Dimon now claims that he and his bank, JPMorgan Chase, labored to prevent the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers, according to documents filed in federal court this week. That assertion directly contradicts the conventional understanding that the bank effectively exploited Lehman’s vulnerabilities for its own gain.

“We took huge exposures to keep Lehman alive,” Dimon said during a Feb. 23 deposition conducted as part of a lawsuit filed against JPMorgan by the Lehman Brothers estate, which is seeking $8.6 billion in damages.

F-35 Report Was Edited To Remove Harsh Criticism Of Tory Leadership

OTTAWA - Stinging criticism of the political and bureaucratic fiasco surrounding the F-35 by the country's budget officer and even the auditor general was edited out of the final version of a parliamentary investigation, a draft copy of the report shows.

The Conservative-dominated all-party House of Commons public accounts committee held seven hours of hearings and spent much more time arguing with Opposition members behind closed doors last spring and fall over the handling of the stealth fighter program.