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: http://www.ireland.com
September 21, 2007
Campaigners battling the development of the M3 motorway near the historic Hill of Tara will take their protest to the US this weekend.
Poets, musicians, historians and archaeologists will join the Save Tara group outside the Consulate General of Ireland in New York tomorrow. At the same time, protests will be held in Chicago, Los Angeles and Dublin.
Source: NYT
September 21, 2007
In the continuing debate over the origin of the extinct “little people” of Indonesia, a team of scientists says it has found evidence in three wrist bones that these people were members of a distinct species rather than humans with a physical disorder.
The researchers describe the new findings in a report being published today in the journal Science. Critics disputed the interpretation, saying this was not clear evidence for the existence of a separate species, known as Homo floresi
Source: NYT
September 21, 2007
That first tower toppled at 9:59 a.m., a billion pounds of steel and concrete and bodies raining down. Smoke billowed like thunderheads, and New York’s mayor seemed to disappear into death’s maw.
Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani was two blocks from the south tower, in an office on Barclay Street, trying to get the vice president on the phone, when his world went dark with smoke. Back at City Hall, Deputy Mayor Rudy Washington waited and wondered and dialed the governor.
“We re
Source: Ralph Luker at HNN blog, Cliopatria
September 19, 2007
Nathan Nunn,"The Long-Term Effects of Africa's Slave Trades," National Bureau of Economic Research, September:
I construct measures of the number of slaves exported from each country in Africa, in each century between 1400 and 1900. The estimates are constructed by combining data from ship records on the number of slaves shipped from each African port or region with data from a variety of historical documents that re
Source: Telegraph (UK)
September 17, 2007
In 1961, Russia's finest dancer slipped through his keepers' fingers to defect to the West. But, years later, the Soviet secret police had their revenge. By John Bridcut
The KGB had seen it coming. When Rudolf Nureyev, the most promising young talent in Leningrad's Kirov Ballet, fled the Soviet Union for the West in June 1961, they were not surprised.
Source: MSNBC
September 19, 2007
Three of her four kids didn’t live to adulthood, and her husband was shot as he held her hand. If anyone ever deserved to go crazy, it was Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of the 16th U.S. president. “She had the most tragic public life in American history,” says James Cornelius, curator of the Lincoln Collection at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Ill.
But was she truly insane? That question is raised—but not answered—by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and M
Source: Library of Congress Blog
September 19, 2007
Some strong but, unfortunately, inaccurate words have been used regarding a small handful of the 50,000+ oral histories of the Veterans History Project (part of the Library’s American Folklife Center).
News reporters and others have been using terms like “fraud” or “misrepresentation” to describe the incorrect listing of 24 veterans on the VHP Web site as having been awarded the Medal of Honor (AKA the Congressional Medal of Honor).
Soon, and elsewhere on the LOC Web si
Source: AFP
September 20, 2007
Czechs got the chance to examine the world's biggest medieval manuscript, the "Codex Gigas" or "Devil's Bible," for the first time in almost 359 years on Thursday when the precious work went on show as part of a four-month-long exhibition.
The 13th century masterpiece, considered at the time as the eighth wonder of the world, was carried off as booty by Swedish troops from Prague during the Thirty Years' War but has returned at the end of painstaking negotiation
Source: Telegraph (UK)
September 21, 2007
Children in Venezuela are to be taught that Christopher Columbus was not a hero but the importer of colonialism and disease, as part of radical education reforms proposed by the government of Hugo Chavez.
Under the proposals students will start learning Marxist ideology at 11 years of age, plus history showing the evils of colonialism and capitalism.
The aim of the Bolivarian Educative System will be "the construction of a new socialist Venezuelan conscience and th
Source: MSNBC
September 20, 2007
A slow, lethal combination of external pressures including warfare, rather than a lack of natural resources, led to the demise of the Cherokee Indians, two new studies suggest.
The date of the Cherokee society's collapse is often cited as 1785, when several tribes signed the Treaty of Hopewell and came under the jurisdiction of the new United States of America. Resource scarcity was the major factor in the dissolution, many historians have thought, based on an eyewitness narrative o
Source: Press Release-- Arlington Heritage Alliance
September 21, 2007
Preservationists in northern Virginia are organizing to protest a plan to replace the marble-cracked Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The Arlington Heritage Alliance insists the old monument can be saved.In an email to HNN the group argues:
It's hard to believe, but officials at Arlington National Cemetery plan to
replace the original Tomb of the Unknown Soldier with a new replica solely
because of easily reparable cosmetic imperfections. This 1932 monument
Source: AP
September 21, 2007
JENA, La. (AP) - It had many of the signs of the early civil rights protests—militant slogans, upraised clenched fists and multitudes of police—but none of the hate and fear-drenched campaigns in Selma, Little Rock and Montgomery.
Thousands of protesters descended on this tiny central Louisiana town Thursday, rallying against what they see as a double standard of justice for blacks and whites.
But unlike the protests that became landmarks for civil rights when fire hoses and
Source: BBC
September 21, 2007
A new book for travellers to China plans to make no mention of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Should travel guides tell the whole history of a place, or bow to local sensitivities?
Hotels are a must. So are tips on the local cuisine. A few key phrases. Some maps. A list of the best tourist sites and their opening hours. Perhaps some cultural do and don'ts.
All are key ingredients of a typical guide book. And yet many also feel the need to offer something more - a ground
Source: http://www.cwnews.com
September 20, 2007
A spokesman for the Polish bishops' conference, Father Jozef Kloch, has announced that a Church commission on clergy collaboration with the former Communist secret police will complete its work in November.
The Church investigative commission will not produce a list of bishops who collaborated with the Communist regime, because the documentation available for study proved to be incomplete.
In June, the head of the investigating panel, Bishop Slawoj Leszek Glodz, reveale
Source: Reuters
September 20, 2007
The German government agreed Wednesday to pay workers who labored in the country’s Jewish ghettos during the Nazi era about $2,797 each in compensation.
Compensation for ghetto workers, who generally received a small but often negligible wage, was one of the last outstanding claims dating from the Third Reich. Chancellor Angela Merkel had been keen to settle the claims and asked top officials to work together with Israel on the matter.
Source: NYT
September 21, 2007
They were Vicente and Jorge, two cowboys turned presidents, and they held their first summit meeting together at a ranch.
But Vicente Fox, who finished his term as Mexico’s president last year, pokes fun at the cowboy credentials of President Bush in a new autobiography, recalling the time Mr. Bush turned down an offer to ride Mr. Fox’s beloved horse, Dos de Julio.
“He demurred, backing away from the big palomino,” Mr. Fox wrote in “Revolution of Hope,” which is due out
Source: WaPo
September 20, 2007
He was a sickly orphan who had died of pneumonia as a teenager and then was left behind when the cemetery where he was buried in Northwest Washington moved a decade after his death.
He lay lost and forgotten beneath the sprawl of the city, while six generations and 155 years passed by.
And when his body was accidentally unearthed by a construction crew in 2005 -- still clad in his fine white burial suit and encased in an iron coffin -- researchers at the Smithsonian Ins
Source: Press Release--Ascribe
September 14, 2007
"To Illuminate the World," a full day of events celebrating the life of literary legend James Baldwin, will be held at Hampshire College on Saturday, Oct. 13. Baldwin spent several years as a visiting scholar at Hampshire before his death in 1987. A program established in the spirit of his ideals, the James Baldwin Scholars Program, is an integral part of the day, which ends with a dinner kicking off a drive to endow the program.
"The questions which one asks
Source: Bloomberg News
September 11, 2007
In 1912, Ludwig Borchardt discovered a 3,400-year-old statue of Nefertiti, a queen of ancient Egypt, among ruins on the eastern bank of the Nile.
The German archaeologist shipped it home to Berlin, where it became the centerpiece of the antiquities collection at the Altes Museum. Now the blue, gold and terracotta bust is the focus of an international tug of war. After Germany refused to lend the statue to Egypt for a three-month exhibition, Egyptian officials said they may demand t
Source: WaPo
September 20, 2007
Joann Bagnerise couldn't bring herself to visit George Washington's home at Mount Vernon, driving by without stopping, thinking too much about the hundreds of slaves who had labored in the mansion and fields beyond the brick walls. Even yesterday, as the Dumfries resident sat in the warm sun near the estate's new model of a slave cabin, she said she was filled with conflicting emotions.
"It's very solemn," she said from underneath the brim of a wide straw hat. "I'm f
