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: Slate (embedded links in original)
September 26, 2007
President Richard Nixon and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover surely collapsed from gossip hangovers after concluding a seven-minute-long telephone call on July 1, 1971.
An audio clip and transcript of the conversation was posted to the Web this week by the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs. According to the program's Ken Hughes, the National Archives made this conversation available to the public in October 1999, but Hughes believe
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
September 26, 2007
A man's role in World War II was clear - if he was able-bodied, he went off to fight. The iconic image of women in World War II is Rosie the Riveter, a made-up character in a poster promoting the need for women to step into manufacturing jobs vacated by men. But there also were women in the armed forces and others who tended to the home fires. Like men, many of them never forgot "The War," as a few tell filmmaker Ken Burns in his new seven-part PBS series that began Sunday on PBS....
Source: http://www.newsvine.com
September 4, 2007
They aren't certain, but underwater archaeologists say they may have discovered a boulder with a prehistoric carving in Lake Michigan's Grand Traverse Bay.
The granite rock has markings that resemble a mastodon — an elephant-like creature that once inhabited parts of North America — with what could be a spear in its side, say divers who have seen it.
They came across the boulder at a depth of about 40 feet while searching for shipwrecks in June, said Mark Holley, a scie
Source: NYT
September 26, 2007
The Congressional conference committee, vaguely familiar to generations of Americans from their battered civics texts, is in danger of losing its prominent role in how a bill becomes law.
Once the penultimate stage in the life of any bill as a forum for House and Senate members to work out their differences, the conference committee has fallen on hard times, shoved aside in the last five years by partisanship and legislative expediency. As a result, there is often no public scrutiny
Source: NBC News
September 25, 2007
A penny for your thoughts will have extra meaning in 2009 — the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth and the 100th anniversary of the introduction of the Lincoln penny.
To commemorate the event, the U.S. Mint, at the direction of Congress, will introduce four rotating designs on the 1-cent coin for that year depicting different aspects of Lincoln’s life.
Those designs will replace the engraving of the Lincoln Memorial on the “tails” side of the coin. The famous
Source: Telegraph (UK)
September 25, 2007
A police investigation has been launched after this giant swastika was cut into a corn field in New Jersey. [Click on SOURCE to view image.]
Each arm of the Nazi symbol is more than 100 metres long, and the entire design covers several acres.
Police say they believe it was cut by hand, probably with a knife or sickle - an effort that would have taken many hours or even days.
The swastika is only visible from the air and it is not clear how long it lay undis
Source: NYT
September 25, 2007
With Fear and Wonder in Its Wake, Sputnik Lifted Us Into the Future
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Sputnik changed everything - history, geopolitics, the scientific world. A reflection on the triumphs and disappointments of the space age.New Horizons Beckon, Inspiring Vision if Not Certainty
By JO
Source: NYT
September 25, 2007
Before Iran’s president took the stage at Columbia University on Monday, the university’s president, Lee C. Bollinger, sent out an early-morning e-mail message, calling on students and faculty “to live up to the best of Columbia’s traditions.” Yesterday, many critics questioned whether Mr. Bollinger had met that test himself.
On campus and in editorials across the nation, on political blogs and throughout academia, there was a sharp division of opinion about Mr. Bollinger’s pointed
Source: NYT
September 25, 2007
Lima, Peru: Both critics and admirers of the former Peruvian strongman Alberto K. Fujimori long argued that he deserved his day in court to explain the political killings, abductions and corruption during his rule. Mr. Fujimori even said so after the Chilean Supreme Court ruled in favor of extraditing him last week, claiming that the court case was part of a “strategy” to return to Peru.
But as Mr. Fujimori settles into a jail cell here before his trial, the prospect of that day co
Source: AP
September 24, 2007
Fifty years after federal troops escorted Terrence Roberts and eight fellow black students into an all-white high school, he says the struggles over race and segregation still are unresolved.
"This country has demonstrated over time that it is not prepared to operate as an integrated society," said Roberts, who is a faculty member at Antioch University's psychology program.
He and the other students known as the Little Rock Nine will help the city observe Ce
Source: History Today
September 24, 2007
A survivor from Auschwitz has discovered his neighbour in a retirement home in Arizona was an SS guard in another Nazi concentration camp. Nathan Gasch was also a prisoner at the Sachsenhausen camp, where fellow resident Martin Hartmann served as a member of the SS Death's Head Guard Battalion. Mr Hartmann has been stripped of his US citizenship and exiled back to Germany, following a two-year investigation by the Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations.
Source: http://www.wilsoncountynews.com (Texas)
September 25, 2007
FREDERICKSBURG— Jonathan Parshall, naval historian and co-author of the award-winning Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway, has confirmed a stunning moment in history.
Kaname Harada of the Imperial Japanese Navy, Dusty Kleiss of the U.S. Navy, and U.S. Navy Cmdr. Harry Ferrier first encountered each other during the historic Battle of Midway during World War II.
The three met for the first time in 65 years at the National Museum of the Pacific War’
Source: LAT
September 25, 2007
In honor of trailblazing newsman Ruben Salazar's relentless efforts to chronicle the complexity of race relations in Los Angeles, the U.S. Postal Service in 2008 will issue a commemorative stamp of the former Los Angeles Times reporter and columnist.
"He was a groundbreaker for Latinos in this country, but his work spoke to all Americans," Postmaster Gen. John E. Potter said Monday. "By giving voice to those who didn't have one, Ruben Salazar worked to improve life fo
Source: Telegraph (UK)
September 25, 2007
Parts of British history need to be rewritten to emphasise the roles played by other races and religions like Muslims, a prominent race relations campaigner has said.
Trevor Philips, the chairman of the new Commission for Equalities and Human Rights, said the history of Britain did not properly reflect the contribution of other cultures.
Rewriting the country’s history would demonstrate to Britons in the 21st century how other groups part from Anglo Saxons shaped the na
Source: Press Release
September 25, 2007
Today opponents of the Bush Library and Institute vowed to continue their fight within the 11 million member United Methodist Church to deny approval to Southern Methodist University (SMU) to host the Bush complex.
The South Central Jurisdictional Conference of the United Methodist Church will meet in Dallas from July 15-19, 2008, when it will be asked by SMU to approve the use of university land for the Bush complex, which will include a partisan political institute operated tota
Source: Daily Record
September 21, 2007
[I]n Scotland, where the Holocaust is not on the national curriculum, many teenagers have never heard of Auschwitz, never mind of the cold, calculating extermination of men, women and children which took place there.
And many believe this murder on a terrible scale could easily happen again unless the lessons from Auschwitz are finally learned.
Which is why the Holocaust Education Trust decided to take a group of Scottish school pupils to the concentration camp.
Source: Baltimore Sun
September 24, 2007
Anne Arundel County archaeologists knew they were looking for one of 18th-century Maryland's rich and famous.
Samuel Chew was a well-connected Quaker planter and merchant, and his home on a knoll above the Chesapeake Bay was an early landmark, used by ship captains to guide them into the tobacco port of Herrington, on Herring Bay.
But no one expected this.
Months of digging to uncover the foundation walls of the Chew House have revealed one of the largest,
Source: AP
September 24, 2007
Israeli archaeologists said they have discovered a quarry that provided King Herod with the stones he used to renovate the biblical Second Temple compound — offering rare insight into construction of the holiest site in Judaism.
The source of the huge stones used 2,000 years ago to reconstruct the compound in Jerusalem's Old City was discovered on the site of a proposed school in a Jerusalem suburb.
Today, the compound Herod renovated houses the most explosive religious
Source: http://www.digitaljournal.com
September 24, 2007
Intact clay pots sealed with cartouches* of King Tutankhamun and eight baskets have been discovered in his treasure room in the Valley of the Kings, the Egyptian culture minister said Monday.
Farouk Hosni said the discovery was unearthed by the first Egyptian excavation team to work in the Valley of the Kings near the city of Luxor in southern Egypt.
The Valley of the Kings was used for burials for around 500 years from 1540 BC onwards.
*Cartouches are ov
Source: Editor & Publisher
September 24, 2007
When Ken Burns' World War II documentary began airing yesterday, the "Baldo" comic strip was already six days into a story line inspired by content the public-television series was mostly lacking.
The "Baldo" sequence, which continues through this Thursday, is about an elderly barber named Benito Ramirez who looks back on his World War II experiences. "Baldo" co-cartoonists Hector Cantu and Carlos Castellanos created the character after learning this s
