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: Miami Herald
November 5, 2007
While the English-speaking Caribbean is this year commemorating the 200th anniversary of the end of the British transatlantic slave trade, communities like Accompong Town, made up of descendants of runaway slaves known as Maroons, stand as living reminders of the vicious yet empowering anti-slavery struggle.But the Maroon legacy in the western Jamaican village of Accompong Town and three other runaway slave settlements remains controversial, because their peace treaty with t
Source: David Price at the website of Counterpunch
October 30, 2007
[David Price is author of Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists.]
Last December, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps published a new Counterinsurgency Field Manual (No. 3-24). In policy circles, the Manual became an artifact of hope, signifying the move away from the crude logic of "shock and awe" toward calculations that rifle-toting soldiers can win the hearts and minds of occupied Iraq through a new appreciation of cultu
Source: AP
November 4, 2007
A woman who is credited by historians with convincing Abraham Lincoln to grow whiskers - which helped him be elected as president - will be honored in Kansas this week.
Grace Bedell was 11 when she wrote Lincoln to encourage him to grow a beard because it would make him handsome. She later moved to Delphos, Kansas, in Ottawa County and lived there until she died in 1936.
Last March, a historian found a second letter from Bedell to Lincoln when she was older, asking for
Source: Sydney Morning Herald
November 5, 2007
A MOBILE phone rings as Chicka Dixon is talking on the land line.
"What's that? That's bloody ASIO [Australian Security Intelligence Organisation], is it?" the 79-year-old says.
He is only half-joking.
With a 30-year embargo now over, Mr Dixon has in his hands 150 often tedious, sometimes frightening and occasionally humorous pages of his ASIO file from the 1960s and '70s, when he was one of the leaders of the indigenous rights movement.
Source: http://www.bangkokpost.com/O
November 5, 2007
About 2,000 books, magazines, photo albums, video tapes, movie and audio CDs relating to homosexuals fill the small room that is the country's only library dedicated to documenting the local gay community.
Called the Thai Queer Resource Centre (TQRC), it was founded by Australian scholar Assoc Prof Peter Jackson with the aim of preventing the history and voice of the Thai GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender) community from erosion by the state.
"No officia
Source: AP
November 4, 2007
A few years back, the Leshan Giant Buddha started to weep.
Or so some locals imagined when black streaks appeared on the rose-colored cheeks of the towering 7th-century figure, hewn from sandstone cliffs in the forests of southern China. They worried they had angered the religious icon.
The culprit, it turned out, was the region's growing number of coal-fired power plants. Their smokestacks spew toxic gases into the air, which return to earth as acid rain. Over time, th
Source: NPR
November 3, 2007
The surprisingly contentious confirmation process of Michael Mukasey, President Bush's pick for attorney general, has come down to one issue: waterboarding. Mukasey has called waterboarding personally "repugnant," but said he did not know enough about how it has been used to define it as torture.
Source: AP
November 4, 2007
Robin Hood might have a hard time hiding out in the Sherwood Forest of today.
The forest once covered about 100,000 acres, a big chunk of present-day Nottinghamshire County. Today its core is about 450 acres, with patches spread out through the rest of the county.
Experts say urgent action is needed to regenerate the forest and save the rare and endangered ancient oaks at its heart.
Some 15 organizations have joined forces to draw up a rescue plan, hoping t
Source: AP
November 4, 2007
The linen wrapped mummy of King Tut was put on public display for the first time on Sunday — 85 years after the 3,000-year-old boy pharaoh's golden enshrined tomb and mummy were discovered in Luxor's famed Valley of the Kings.
Archeologists removed the mummy from his stone sarcophagus in his underground tomb, revealing his shriveled leather-like face and body.
"The golden boy has magic and mystery and therefore every person all over the world will see what Egypt is
Source: AP
November 4, 2007
Thousands of Iranians nationwide demonstrated Sunday to celebrate the 28th anniversary of the takeover of the U.S. Embassy by militant students, state television reported.
Demonstrators in the capital, Tehran, including elementary school students, gathered outside the former U.S. Embassy, chanting anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli slogans. They burned the two countries' flags and warned Washington to learn from the hostile incident.
The takeover, which occurred during Iran's 1
Source: http://www.happynews.com
November 1, 2007
The Coca-Cola Company announced a US $2 million donation to the Hellenic Olympic Committee (HOC) toward the restoration of its site in Ancient Olympia, the cradle of the Olympic Games and the ultimate symbol of Greek and international cultural and sports heritage. The site was severely damaged by the recent forest fires that scorched the grounds of the Peloponnesus in Greece over the summer.
Dominique Reiniche, president of The Coca-Cola Company's European Union Group, met with Mino
Source: Fox News
November 2, 2007
Sen. Barack Obama, trailing in the polls among black Democratic voters, whirled through South Carolina Friday to talk about civil rights and racial disparities, picking up the endorsement of the state's first black Supreme Court justice since Reconstruction along the way.
Ernest Finney, a former state Supreme Court chief justice endorsed Obama Friday, saying the Illinois senator's views on education helped him make up his mind.
Speaking at the Clarendon County Courthous
Source: AP
October 4, 2007
It wasn't exactly the shot heard 'round the world, but the shot Timothy Murphy supposedly pulled off 230 years ago this month helped change history.
Murphy was a Pennsylvania-born frontiersman who moved to New York's Schoharie (skoh-HAIR'-ee) Valley during the Revolutionary War, when he joined a company of Virginia sharpshooters serving in the Continental Army.
Some historians credit Murphy with firing the shot that killed a British general during a critical moment of t
Source: NYT
November 4, 2007
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s political camp struck back on Saturday against rivals who were attacking her as overly secretive, circulating legal arguments from a Clinton ally asserting that the Clintons are not blocking the release of presidential papers about their discussions in the White House in the 1990s.
Bruce Lindsey, a top adviser to former President Bill Clinton, issued a lengthy statement on Friday evening saying that, contrary to some news reports, Mr. Clinton had “n
Source: http://www.yomiuri.co.jp
October 29, 2007
Students at a Kyoto girls school dressed in schoolgirl sailor suits at an explanatory meeting for prospective students and their parents on Saturday, after research showed that the school was the first in the country to introduce them.
The Heian Jogakuin St. Agnes School in Kamigyo Ward re-created the uniforms that the nation's schools first adopted during the Taisho era (1912-1926).
An investigation by Okayama-based school uniform manufacturer Tombow Co. confirmed that
Source: http://www.thestar.com
November 3, 2007
It emerged this week that Karl Marx, the father of communism, suffered from a chronic and excruciating skin disease with known psychological effects that might have had an impact on his political theories.
The 19th-century revolutionary thinker had a condition called hidradenitis suppurativa, in which the sweat glands in his armpits and groin become blocked and inflamed and his skin covered in boils and carbuncles.
Or so argues Sam Shuster, a professor of dermatology at
Source: NYT
November 3, 2007
LAKEWOOD, N.J. — Like many strange tales, the story of the antiques dealer, the scholars from Scotland and the contested archive of a Russian conductor begins in the suburbs of New Jersey.
The papers belonged to Serge Jaroff, conductor of the Don Cossack Chorus, a singing group founded by members of the Russian Imperial Army that rose to popularity in the 1930s.
Mr. Jaroff, who died in 1985, lived in a tiny green house in this town near the Jersey Shore. Lisa Myer, a 49
Source: NYT
November 2, 2007
A lovely little piece of subway history on the uptown platform of the No. 1 line at 59th Street-Columbus Circle — so old it actually antedates the trains — was concealed from generations of riders by a false wall.
With the false wall being removed as part of the station renovation, history has come to light again: a blue-and-white Art Nouveau plaque, with a flowery border (worthy of willow ware) encircling the words, “The Tiles in This Exhibit are the product of the American Encaust
Source: http://www.registerguard.com
October 31, 2007
Critics of a speaker widely viewed as one of the nation’s most prominent deniers of the Holocaust say they will counter his talk in Eugene on Friday with a competing event and a later symposium.
Mark Weber, director of the Institute for Historical Review, will speak on “The Israel Lobby.” His visit comes at the invitation of the Pacifica Forum, a local discussion group founded by retired University of Oregon professor Orval Etter.
Weber, a historian who grew up in Portl
Source: LAT
November 2, 2007
To the end of his days, Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr. believed that dropping the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima was a justifiable means of shortening World War II and preserving the lives of hundreds of thousands of American servicemen who military experts said might have died in a final Allied invasion of Japan.
For Tibbets, the pilot whose bombing run unleashed the devastating explosive force and insidious nuclear radiation that leveled two-thirds of the city and killed at least 80,0
