This page features brief excerpts of 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.
Source: MSNBC
February 22, 2008
The breakaway Serbian province of Kosovo once again captured the international spotlight when it declared independence from the Republic of Serbia on Feb. 17. The move by the majority ethnic Albanian population was condemned by Serbia and its staunch supporter Russia, but supported by many Western countries. The declaration also sparked riots in Serbia's capital, Belgrade, where protesters stormed and set fire to the U.S. Embassy. The history of the region may help provide answers to why Kosovo'
Source: LAT
February 21, 2008
Black History Month was established in 1976, as an evolution of Negro History Week (founded half a century earlier by Carter G. Woodson), and has since become a staple of the nation's elementary school classrooms and textbooks.
Times editorials, on the other hand, have paid little attention. The editorial board's first mention of "Negro History Week" was little more than a half-hearted announcement of the Week's 40th anniversary...
By contrast the 80s saw grow
Source: CNN
February 21, 2008
Demand is growing for personal historians who can help clients craft polished narratives - but actually making the time-intensive projects pay off is challenging, pros warn.
***
There's a growing interest in what some call "personal histories" these days, says Jim Cooper, a film producer and director who runs Socratic Productions, in Barrington, N.H.
Whether it's the portable audio recording stations erected by the nonprofit StoryCorps across the
Source: US News & World Report
February 20, 2008
Barack Obama says he stands for a new kind of politics, and many Americans clearly approve of that message. So many, in fact, that if the junior U.S. senator from Illinois doesn't win the presidency or even prevail in what is now a dead-heat run for his party's nomination, his candidacy will still be seen as what University of New Hampshire historian Harvard Sitkoff calls "an important moment in American political history."
Important is an understatement. That a bl
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 21, 2008
Many leading figures in the fields of science, politics and the arts have achieved success because they had autism, a leading psychiatrist has claimed.
Michael Fitzgerald, Professor of Psychiatry at Trinity College, Dublin, argued the characteristics linked to autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) were the same as those associated with creative genius.
Prof Fitzgerald cited Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, George Orwell, H G Wells and Ludwig Wittgenstein as examples of famous
Source: Reuters
February 20, 2008
Two big genetic studies confirm theories that modern humans evolved in Africa and then migrated through Europe and Asia to reach the Pacific and Americas.
The two studies also show that Africans have the most diverse DNA, and the fewest potentially harmful genetic mutations.
One of the studies shows European-Americans have more small mutations, while the others show Native Americans, Polynesians and others who populated Australia and Oceania have more big genetic change
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 21, 2008
The surviving men and women from the Air Transport Auxiliary of the Second World War are to be recognised with a new award, the Government announced yesterday.
The ATA's pilots, which included female flyers known as Spitfire women, delivered more than 300,000 aircraft to frontline airfields.
The civilian unit, founded in 1938, had a remarkable record and very few planes were lost or damaged, although 173 pilots and eight flight engineers were killed, including Amy Johns
Source: Newsweek
February 25, 2008
Michelle Obama was never much interested in calling attention to herself. As an undergrad at Princeton in the 1980s, she was interested in social change, but didn't run for student government. Instead, she spent her free time running a literacy program for kids from the local neighborhoods. At Harvard Law, she took part in demonstrations demanding more minority students and professors. Yet unlike another more prominent Harvard Law student who would later take up the cause, she was not one to hol
Source: NYT
February 22, 2008
Where is the next J. P. Morgan?
In times of market crisis, the safest course for any one market participant may be the riskiest course for the entire market. If everyone wants to sell, prices can go in only one direction.
In past financial crises, it has fallen to someone — regulators, investment banks or even a single banker — to organize collective action and avert disaster.
Such moves involved persuading people to take steps that seemed to go against the
Source: NYT
February 22, 2008
WHEREAS, in 1818 when the border between Georgia and Tennessee was marked by surveyors, mistakes were made that deprived Georgia of a sliver of the Tennessee River.
WHEREAS, Georgia’s water supply is now threatened by a severe drought.
WHEREAS, Georgia lawmakers on Wednesday passed a resolution to restore the boundary line to its appropriate latitude, notwithstanding skepticism all around and outright insults from their neighbors to the north.
And WHEREAS t
Source: NYT
February 22, 2008
Time Magazine filed an appeal Thursday in Indonesia of a court ruling awarding former President Suharto more than $100 million in damages over an article about what the United Nations calls one of the most gargantuan thefts of our time.
Ruling last August, the court said that Time had libeled Mr. Suharto by reporting that he and his family had amassed a fortune of least $15 billion in money and assets stolen from the country he governed.
“If it stands, the decision will
Source: http://www.politico.com
February 22, 2008
In 1995, State Senator Alice Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district’s influential liberals at the home of two well known figures on the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.
While Ayers and Dohrn may be thought of in Hyde Park as local activists, they’re better known nationally as two of the most notorious – and unrepentant — figures from the violent fringe of the 1960s anti-war movement.
Now, as Obama runs for preside
Source: NBC Nightly News
February 21, 2008
"Only an accountant could catch Al Capone."
That's the headline on a poster distributed by the Internal Revenue Service, hoping to persuade potential recruits that life as a tax investigator won't be just columns of figures and Schedule A. Though many people think it was Elliot Ness, a fed from the forerunner of ATF, or the FBI that brought down Scarface, that honor belongs to the IRS.
On Nightly News tonight, we get a first look at secret IRS files, now being
Source: NYT
February 20, 2008
KIGALI, Rwanda — Skeletons are still being discovered and buried in mass graves on a terraced hillside in this lush, verdant city, the legacy of the gruesome genocide in which 800,000 Rwandans, many of them children, were slaughtered over 100 days in 1994.
So when President Bush paid his respects to the dead on Tuesday, laying a wreath and touring a museum where the skulls of victims are laid out under glass in haunting, neat white rows, the subject of another conflict that Mr. Bush
Source: Reuters
February 21, 2008
A woman alleged to have murdered prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp during World War Two has died aged 86, Austrian justice officials said on Thursday.
German-born Erna Wallisch died in hospital on Saturday a month after Austria, prompted by new testimony from Poland, reopened an investigation into her past that had been dropped in 1973 for lack of hard evidence.
The Polish findings, based on witness statements, suggested Wallisch may have committed murder in the M
Source: NYT
February 21, 2008
KURIM, South Korea — This village was once drenched with blood. Bodies of villagers shot or stabbed to death lined its lanes, and the stench of people burned alive saturated its air.
What makes Kurim remarkable, however, is not the killings of about 300 people in the months surrounding the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. Eruptions of violence among neighbors caught up in the ideological strife of the time were common in South Korea, survivors and historians say.
Rat
Source: Newsday
February 20, 2008
History is full of political and corporate voices, mostly educated, generally well-to-do men and women. Christopher Matthews and his team search for the unspoken voices of African slaves who lived and worked on the farms and big estates and are part of Long Island history.
While anti-slavery leaders secretly helped captive Africans flee their Southern masters, other Long Island property owners were still purchasing slaves at open markets, swapping and renting them to each other. Of
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
February 20, 2008
Thailand's new prime minister, who recently stirred outrage by denying that 46 people had died in a violent crackdown on university students and other pro-democracy protesters in 1976, went before parliament on Monday to swear he had not been involved in the incident.
The prime minister, Samak Sundaravej, was Thailand's deputy interior minister at the time of the bloody assault on Thammasat University.
"If I am not telling the truth, may I face destruction and ill
Source: AFP
February 20, 2008
Millions of tourists may have been romancing the wrong stone on a castle battlement in southern Ireland in an effort to get the "gift of the gab", according to a new study.
The authenticity of the Blarney Stone, kissed by about 400,000 tourists a year, has been questioned by Mark Samuel, an archaeologist and architectural historian, and Kate Hamlyn in a new book.
According to legend, kissing the stone at Blarney Castle, near Cork, endows the kisser with the g
Source: Spiegel Online
February 20, 2008
Druids belong to the realm of myth -- archaeologists have never been able to prove their existence. But now researchers in England have uncovered the grave of a powerful, ancient healer. Was he a druid?
