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: Reuters
October 7, 2007
PASARGADAE, Iran (Reuters) - For the people protesting against it, a new dam near these sun-drenched ruins may be more than an environmental upheaval: in it they scent an affront to the country's pre-Islamic identity.
For 2,500 years, the tomb of Cyrus the Great has stood on the plain at Pasargadae in southern Iran, a simple but dignified monument to a king revered as the founder of the mighty Persian empire. But some fear the dam and reservoir pose a threat to the ancient structure
Source: NYT
October 7, 2007
JUST last year, Gen. Romeo Lucas García’s quiet death in exile here caught the attention of few people outside Guatemala, where he had presided over a ruthless period of civil war in which 37 people were burned to death during a siege at Spain’s embassy. Spain tried to extradite him in 2005 on human rights charges, but had gotten nowhere.
A tranquil death in a foreign land, at the age of 81: such a bookend to a life of brutality or corruption was long guaranteed for Latin America’s
Source: NYT
October 8, 2007
When schoolchildren turn to the chapter on Christopher Columbus’s humble origins as the son of a weaver in Genoa, they are not generally told that he might instead have been born out of wedlock to a Portuguese prince. Or that he might have been a Jew whose parents converted to escape the Spanish Inquisition. Or a rebel in the medieval kingdom of Catalonia.
Yet with little evidence to support them, multiple theories of Columbus’s early years have long found devoted proponents among t
Source: NYT
October 7, 2007
THE Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, the scaled-down, two-volume version of the mammoth 20-volume O.E.D., just got a little shorter. With the dispatch of a waiter flicking away flyspecks, the editor, Angus Stevenson, eliminated some 16,000 hyphens from the sixth edition, published last month. “People are not confident about using hyphens anymore,” he said. “They’re not really sure what they’re for.”
Source: NYT
October 7, 2007
For the past quarter of a century, Japan’s high school textbooks had included the accepted historical fact that that Okinawans had been coerced into mass suicides by Imperial Army soldiers.
But six months ago, the Education Ministry said that next year’s government-endorsed textbooks would eliminate all references to Japan’s soldiers. According to the revised passages, the Okinawans simply committed mass suicide or felt compelled to do so. But by whom?
“If Japanese sold
Source: NYT
October 7, 2007
THE Supreme Court has only once ruled on whether reporters may be forced to testify about their confidential sources, in a 1972 decision called Branzburg v. Hayes. Thanks to a cryptic concurring opinion from Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., to this day no one is quite sure what the decision meant.
On the one hand, the majority in the 5-to-4 decision said journalists had no First Amendment protection against grand jury subpoenas. On the other, Justice Powell, who joined the majority, wro
Source: NYT
October 7, 2007
In 1966, White House aides found themselves precariously perched between apprehension of looming disaster in Vietnam and the need for candor with their boss, President Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Disaster seemed a safer choice.
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was a logical candidate to speak the truth to his boss. Mr. McNamara told the historian and Kennedy confidant Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and the economist John Kenneth Galbraith in January over dinner and drinks that h
Source: NYT
October 6, 2007
His subjects were mostly children and teenagers at the time, terrified witnesses to mass slaughter. Some were forced to work at the bottom rung of the Nazi killing machine — as diggers of mass graves, cooks who fed Nazi soldiers and seamstresses who mended clothes stripped from the Jews before execution.
They live today in rural poverty, many without running water or heat, nearing the end of their lives. So Patrick Desbois has been quietly seeking them out, roaming the back roads an
Source: Nathaniel Deutsch, professor of religion at Swarthmore College, in an op ed in the NYT
October 6, 2007
THE United States didn’t set out to eradicate the Mandeans, one of the oldest, smallest and least understood of the many minorities in Iraq. This extinction in the making has simply been another unfortunate and entirely unintended consequence of our invasion of Iraq — though that will be of little comfort to the Mandeans, whose 2,000-year-old culture is in grave danger of disappearing from the face of the earth.
The Mandeans are the only surviving Gnostics from antiquity, cousins of
Source: WaPo
October 6, 2007
For six decades, they held their silence.
The group of World War II veterans kept a military code and the decorum of their generation, telling virtually no one of their top-secret work interrogating Nazi prisoners of war at Fort Hunt.
When about two dozen veterans got together yesterday for the first time since the 1940s, many of the proud men lamented the chasm between the way they conducted interrogations during the war and the harsh measures used today in questioning
Source: NYT
October 5, 2007
A Chilean judge on Thursday ordered the arrests of the widow and five children of Gen. Augusto Pinochet and 17 of his closest military and civilian collaborators on charges of misappropriating public funds.
Although charges relating to tax fraud had been brought against his wife and son and two other associates earlier, it was the first time that such a large group of his inner circle had faced such charges.
In a 60-page ruling, Judge Carlos Cerda said the 23 people ben
Source: NBC News
October 5, 2007
The country has a new landmark: an African burial ground discovered in New York. NBC’s Ron Allen reports.
Source: AHA Blog
October 3, 2007
Apparently this CNN contributor’s grasp of past presidents is limited to ones on “coins, stamps, or monuments.” In his article, “Seven Presidents Nobody Remembers,” he presents a suspect list of “forgotten” presidents. Maybe we’ll let him slide with Chester Arthur and Millard Fillmore, but Herbert Hoover? Really?
Source: NYT
October 5, 2007
Karl Benz, whose three-wheel gas-powered contraption was the forerunner of the modern automobile, just can’t get a break.
When Daimler-Benz and the Chrysler Corporation were negotiating their merger in May 1998, Daimler offered to drop the Benz hyphenate if Chrysler agreed to take a back seat in the name DaimlerChrysler.
Nine years later, with their corporate divorce papers safely filed, DaimlerChrysler lopped off the name of its American ex at a shareholders’ meeting
Source: Newsweek -- cover story
October 8, 2007
Mitt Romney, it all started in a two-story, wood-framed house on a busy street in Pontiac, Mich. Painted beige, encircled by an asphalt lot that would hardly hold a dozen cars, the building manages to look both decrepit and picturesque, like a million other urban churches across the country. Today it houses the Unity Church of Practical Christianity, but until Romney was 10, it was the Mormon church he attended with his family—at least twice a day on Sunday, and one night a week for youth group
Source: Atlantic Monthly
November 1, 2007
With this issue, ... [the] magazine turns 150—declining, with respect, the “battered,” still aspiring to the magical. What, beyond the patient commitment of its owners, can account for this longevity? Consider The Atlantic’s passage: through a permanent revolution in technology, from the telephone, to the practical fountain pen, to the radio, to the note pad, to the television, to the Internet; through financial crises, beginning in 1857 with what The Atlantic called a national “flurry” over cr
Source: AP
October 3, 2007
In an unlikely marriage of desire to secede from the United States, two advocacy groups from opposite political traditions — New England and the South — are sitting down to talk.
Tired of foreign wars and what they consider right-wing courts, the Middlebury Institute wants liberal states such as Vermont to be able to secede peacefully.
That sounds just fine to the League of the South, a conservative group that refuses to give up on Southern independence.
Source: Lawrence Journal World & News (KS)
October 5, 2007
Keep the day. Dump the Columbus.
That’s long been the rallying cry at Haskell Indian Nations University each year as Columbus Day — which is Monday — approaches.
But now, Haskell students want city commissioners to also shine a spotlight on the subject. Members of Haskell’s American Indian Studies Club have asked city commissioners to proclaim Monday as Indigenous Peoples Day, instead of celebrating it as Columbus Day.
“It (the holiday) is in essence celebr
Source: http://www.praguemonitor.com
October 4, 2007
Jan Kubis and Jozef Gabcik, the wartime Czechoslovak heroes who murdered Nazi Reichsprotector Reinhard Heydrich, are buried in anonymous pits at Prague's Dablice cemetery, a year-long research has confirmed, the daily Mlada fronta Dnes (MfD) writes Wednesday.
Paradoxically, the two paratroopers, along with their colleagues within the anti-Nazi resistance, who all finally committed suicide in a cache before the Gestapo could catch them alive, are buried in Dablice along with Karel Cu
Source: NYT
October 5, 2007
SHABAK VALLEY, Afghanistan: In this isolated Taliban stronghold in eastern Afghanistan, American paratroopers are fielding what they consider a crucial new weapon in counterinsurgency operations here: a soft-spoken civilian anthropologist named Tracy.
Tracy, who asked that her surname not be used for security reasons, is a member of the first Human Terrain Team, an experimental Pentagon program that assigns anthropologists and other social scientists to American combat units in Afgh
