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: Scott McLemee at the website of Inside Higher Ed
January 16, 2008
One of the really puzzling phenomena [of the 2008 campaign] has been the habitual reference to Clinton’s run as “the first serious campaign for president by a woman.” That is how I heard it described on a cable news program half an hour ago. Chances are, a similar formulation is being used by someone in media-land right this very second. It is hopelessly ahistorical, yet now practically inescapable.
In her examination of press coverage between 1872 and 2004, [Erika Falk, author of t
Source: Guardian
January 17, 2008
The Ministry of Defence is to offer compensation and an apology to the Porton Down victims of secret chemical testing, it was reported today.
It is understood £3m will be made available between the 360 veterans who claim they were tricked into becoming "human guinea pigs" for nerve gas experiments.
The ex-servicemen say they were duped into thinking the trials only involved cold remedy tests at the military research centre in Salisbury, Wiltshire.
But r
Source: Reuters
January 17, 2008
An official Chinese obituary praised a late Communist Party city boss on Thursday for "maintaining stability" during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in a rare mention of a subject that remains taboo to this day.
Publication of the obituary of Zhang Lichang, the former party boss of the port city of Tianjin, in The People's Daily, the party's official paper, coincided with the third death anniversary of Zhao Ziyang.
Zhao was toppled as national party chief i
Source: China Daily
January 16, 2008
Chinese archaeologists have discovered an elaborately-made sword, which they believe is 2,500 to 2,600 years old, in an ancient tomb in the eastern province of Jiangxi.
"It is reckoned as the oldest ever excavated in the country," said Xu Changqing, chief of the excavation team.
Source: AP
January 15, 2008
A time capsule was found atop a bell tower at Mexico City's Metropolitan Cathedral, where it was placed in 1791 to protect the building from harm, researchers said Tuesday.
The lead box — filled with religious artifacts, coins and parchments — was hidden in a hollow stone ball to mark the moment on May 14, 1791, when the building's topmost stone was laid, 218 years after construction had begun.
Workers restoring the church found the box in October, inside the stone ball
Source: Washington Times
January 17, 2008
Jerusalem-based Nazi hunters, engaged in a race against time to find and prosecute World War II criminals before they die of old age, say they are frustrated that some European governments have not shown the same sense of urgency.
German authorities appear to have given up trying to bring the former Nazis to justice, while Austria has become "a paradise for war criminals," said Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel-based Simon Wiesenthal Center.
"In Germa
Source: CNN
January 16, 2008
The Library of Congress recently discovered three glass negatives of the crowd gathered at the U.S. Capitol in Washington for Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural address on March 4, 1865.
[Click on the SOURCE link to view pics.]
Source: WaPo
January 16, 2008
Every year the nation celebrates one man's birthday like no other's -- with song and poetry, breakfasts and rallies, parades that quicken the heart and films that well the eyes with tears.
Yesterday, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would have been 79.
If he could peer across the national landscape, he would see some 125 schools named after him, at least 770 streets, the vast majority of them concentrated in the South, where he fought the hardest -- and resistance was gr
Source: LAT
January 16, 2008
Between 1934 and 1936, more than 300,000 men and women, divided into several armies, trudged inland through a brutal terrain of frigid mountain passes, freezing rivers and marshes in search of a sanctuary to continue their nascent Communist revolution. Only one in 10 survived. Now, seven decades later, fewer than 500 are still alive.
For generations, their sacrifices have been considered legend, a Chinese version of America's Valley Forge, where sheer grit and dedication drove a you
Source: NYT
January 16, 2008
Card-catalog classifications hardly seem the subject of trans-Atlantic imbroglios, but the Library of Congress recently settled one when it agreed to reinstate a past policy of classifying works by Scottish authors under the heading “Scottish literature.” Early last year the library started classifying about 600 titles by Scottish writers as “English literature,” with subheadings like “Scottish authors” or “Scottish poets.” That offended the National Library of Scotland, which complained, enlist
Source: Jerusalem Post
January 15, 2008
US President George W. Bush is"very
conscious" that Jewish refugees fled to Israel from
Arab lands after the 1947-49 war, and this came up in his discussions on the Palestinian
refugee issue last week in Jerusalem, a senior Western diplomatic source said Tuesday.
Jewish organizations have been trying for years to underline the similarities between the
plight of Jewish and Arab refugees, and this was a clear indication that the narrative has
begun to seep into US administration thinking.
Source: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/24816.html
January 16, 2008
Workers rolled out sod amid snow flurries Tuesday, determined that the summer home where President Lincoln and his family spent more than a quarter of his Washington life will look fully restored by Presidents Day.The sprawling Gothic Revival cottage, likely to be Washington's next niche tourist attraction, lies only three miles north of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. But it's 300 feet higher than the swamp-level White House, hence is breezier and as much as 7 degrees co
Source: Spiegel Online
January 14, 2008
Reminders of the prehistoric past keep surfacing in a rich dinosaur graveyard in southern England. What a girl named Mary Anning found there in the 1800s began to dismantle the Bible's account of creation -- and anticipated the theory of evolution....
Tens of thousands of tourists come to Charmouth each year to hunt for the remains of prehistoric fauna. Freelance biologist Colin Dawes guides hundreds of amateur paleontologists through the bizarre fossil graveyard every week. Under h
Source: NYT
January 15, 2008
Americans routinely used to wear their political hearts on their sleeves — or at least on their lapels. George Washington proudly displayed his own on his chest when he was inaugurated as the nation’s first president, where Federal Hall now stands in Lower Manhattan.
Nearly two centuries later, in 1968, a 10-year-old Manhattan student named Jordan M. Wright glommed a handful of Bobby Kennedy for President buttons from a Midtown campaign headquarters. Since then, Mr. Wright, a New Yo
Source: WSJ
January 12, 2008
On the night of April 24, 1944, British air force bombers hammered a former Jesuit college here housing the Bavarian Academy of Science. The 16th-century building crumpled in the inferno. Among the treasures lost, later lamented Anton Spitaler, an Arabic scholar at the academy, was a unique photo archive of ancient manuscripts of the Quran.
The 450 rolls of film had been assembled before the war for a bold venture: a study of the evolution of the Quran, the text Muslims view as the
Source: Baltimore Chronicle and Sentinel
January 15, 2008
A Republican congressman, who has spent the better part of the past two years on a mission to ensure Jesus Christ has a place in all aspects of federal government, has introduced a resolution to designate a week every year to honor the nation's "rich spiritual, and religious history."House Resolution 888, sponsored by Congressman Randy Forbes (R-Virginia), is currently before a House committee and has 31 co-sponsors. It purports to be free from singling out a speci
Source: Reuters
January 15, 2008
Guatemala will create a tourist park at the ruins of an ancient Maya city that is home to one of the world's largest pyramids, the country's president said on Monday.
The Maya built soaring temples and elaborate palaces in Central America and southern Mexico before mysteriously abandoning their cities around 900 A.D.
Recently elected Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom said the park would give tourists access to the Mirador archeological site, which contains hundreds of b
Source: International Herald Tribune
January 14, 2008
GÖTTINGEN, Germany: The future of indigenous American studies in this historic German university town now lies partly in the hands of a 56-year-old Australian named Gordon Whittaker.
Whittaker is one of the last professors in Germany who cultivates the dying languages of native peoples in North and South America. At the University of Göttingen, where he has been a professor since 1990, he looks likely to witness the end of such work there.
This year, the university deci
Source: USA Today
January 12, 2008
The owner of one of two Erie Canal-era taverns still standing in the city hopes to move the building to the terminus of the canal. A fierce wind storm may have given him a head start.
This week's 60 mph winds tore off part of the roof of McBride's Irish Pub, which dates to roughly the 1850s, and the building was cordoned off because of the threat of falling bricks.
Source: David Plotz at Slate
January 14, 2008
An American-born Israeli in his early 50s, Ian [Stern] operates Dig for a Day, probably the biggest archaeology outreach program in the world. Every year, Stern's dig here at Maresha is visited by 30,000 to 50,000 tourists—most of them American Jews. They do spadework for Stern's academic research, get a hands-on crash course in archaeology, and experience their own history by digging in the dirt.
The Bible and archaeology are almost comically obtrusive in Israel. It's a tiny, dense
