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: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, is published by the Federation of American Scientists
August 22, 2007
In compliance with a requirement imposed by Congress, the Central
Intelligence Agency declassified and released the executive summary of
a CIA Inspector General report that was generally critical of CIA
performance prior to September 11, 2001.
>From a secrecy policy point of view, the most interesting thing about
the disclosure is that it was the result of a congressional initiative
undertaken against the wishes of the executive branch."While meeting the dictate
Source: AP
August 21, 2007
There it sits on your night stand, that book you've meant to read for who knows how long but haven't yet cracked open. Tonight, as you feel its stare from beneath that teetering pile of magazines, know one thing -- you are not alone.One in four adults say they read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Of those who did read, women and seniors were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices.The survey re
Source: AP
August 21, 2007
The Berlin Wall? What Berlin Wall?
The class of students entering college this month is the first post-Cold War class, according to the Beloit College Mindset List, a compilation of the events, technology, people and social trends that shaped the incoming crop of freshmen.
To them, it’s always been normal for Russia to have multiple political parties and U.S. rock bands to stop in Moscow on their tours, according to the list released Tuesday by the private school in thi
Source: WaPo
August 19, 2007
If you're compiling a list of local scandals a nd the people behind them (and, really, how can you resist?), it quickly becomes clear that the Washington area is a capital region in more ways than one. From Deborah Jeane Palfrey and Jack Abramoff to Robert Hanssen and Marion Barry, there's no shortage of colorful characters whose deeds have set local, and even international, tongues wagging. As it has been around the globe and throughout time, "wherever you've got a lot of money and power c
Source: http://newsinfo.inquirer.net
August 21, 2007
Rusting away in a musty chamber of a courthouse is the gun believed to have triggered the upheaval that altered Philippine history.
If the military’s account of the Philippines’ crime of the century were true, it was the same weapon that fired the fatal bullet into the head of opposition leader Benigno Aquino Jr. 24 years ago on Tuesday at the Manila International Airport on his return from self-exile in the United States.
The charcoal-toned Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum
Source: BBC
August 21, 2007
Alex Kurzem came to Australia in 1949 carrying just a small brown briefcase, but weighed down by some harrowing psychological and emotional baggage.
Tucked away in his briefcase were the secrets of his past - fragments of his life that he kept hidden for decades.
In 1997, after raising a family in Melbourne with his Australian bride, he finally revealed himself. He told how, at the age of five, he had been adopted by the SS and became a Nazi mascot.
His per
Source: AP
August 20, 2007
LIVERPOOL, England: A museum charting the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade opens to the public this week, focussing on the way this city enriched itself on human trafficking, but also on the resistance of enslaved Africans showed.
In some ways it will be the latest chapter in Liverpool's efforts to come to terms with its past.
In 1999, its city council formally apologized, expressing "shame and remorse for the city's role in this trade in human misery.&quo
Source: KTVU
August 20, 2007
FRESNO -- Mountain backpackers have discovered remains believed to be those of a missing World War II airman resting atop a glacier near where an aviation cadet's body was found two years ago, authorities said Monday.
The second set of human remains was found in an alpine region of Kings Canyon National Park in the Sierra Nevada range on Wednesday, as little as 50 feet from where climbers spotted the ice-entombed body of Leo Mustonen in October 2005, park officials said.
Source: CNN
August 21, 2007
Remember that goofy uncle of yours who always tried to impress you by "stealing your nose" or pulling the ol' separating-his-thumb-from-his-hand move? Well, those parlor tricks are nothing compared to the appendage stunts pulled by these 10 famous people.
John Wilkes Booth's neck bones
Einstein's brain
"Stonewall" Jackson's arm
Saint Francis Xavier's hand
Napoleon's bits and pieces
Oliver Cromwell's
Source: Guardian
August 20, 2007
Sixty years ago the Nazi U-boat fleet that menaced wartime Atlantic convoys and threatened Britain with starvation was scuttled off the north-west coast of Ireland. The sunken hulls and rusting torpedo tubes are encrusted with coral.
Salvage plans are now being explored to see whether one of the German submarines could be raised from the deep and brought ashore. The vessel and its wartime technology could be put on display as the central attraction for a new maritime museum in Derry
Source: NYT
August 20, 2007
Born out of affliction and neglect, [Martin Luther] King-Harbor in the end became a symbol of both.
“The most mystifying element here,” said Joe Hicks, who grew up in Watts and who is the vice president of Community Advocates Inc., a group in downtown Los Angeles that focuses on race relations, “is that instead of demanding to keep an incompetent hospital open, why didn’t community activists take the opposite position that black people and poor folks deserve the same kind of care as
Source: BBC
August 20, 2007
A collection of Nazi era board games - including one where players are given points for bombing British cities - are being auctioned in the UK this week.
The rare trove of wartime board games also includes a version of Snakes and Ladders based on the exploits of U-boat captain Gunther Prien.
The games are thought to have come from a German collector. They will be sold at Mullock's Shropshire on Thursday.
Source: Reuters
August 20, 2007
A volcanic eruption that buried
a Mayan village 1,400 years ago preserved a manioc
field -- the first evidence that the nutritious crop
was cultivated by the ancient people, researchers said
on Monday.
The discovery may help explain how the civilization
prospered, the team at the University of Colorado at
Boulder said. It is the first evidence for cultivation
of the calorie-rich tuber in the New World.
"We have long
Source: NYT
August 21, 2007
The Etruscan tomb was hidden in such a remote corner of Tuscany that Andrea Marcocci, the archaeology student who found and identified it about a decade ago, was not very worried that anyone else would stumble upon it.
Then, this year, woodsmen began to clear brush in the area, and Mr. Marcocci — who had believed the tomb would be safe as long as it was concealed in a forest — realized he had to act.
“I became worried that what’s supposed to be the patrimony of mankind
Source: AP
August 20, 2007
DAVENPORT, Iowa - The Putnam Museum is sending two of
its mummies on a field trip in hopes of learning more
about their history.
The mummies, described as among the Davenport museum's
most prized and popular possessions, will be carefully
removed from their cases on Tuesday and taken by
ambulance to Genesis Medical Center's West Central
Park Avenue Campus, where they will undergo CT scans.
The scans, being donated by the hospital, are expected
to reveal new information about
Source: NYT
August 19, 2007
TWELVE summers ago, Bosnian Serb fighters rounded up 8,000 Muslim men in the village of Srebrenica, herded them into nearby woods and slaughtered them.
The massacre was one of the final acts of ethnic cleansing in the Bosnian conflict, a three-year war of siege, expulsion, rape and execution. And it so jolted the United States and allies in Europe that they threatened bombing to compel the warring factions to meet peaceably at an Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio.
They met
Source: NYT
August 20, 2007
Since Aug. 6, Jennings Lilly finds himself turning again and again to the television news reports, his thoughts flashing back nearly four decades to a time when he and five fellow miners were trapped for 10 days in a cold, flooded mine only three feet high in these Appalachian hills.
It was pitch black most of the time, and the men had no contact with rescue crews, who had all but given up hope of finding them alive; that they were found has been known ever since as the Miracle of
Source: Editor & Publisher
August 17, 2007
In the 35 years since they broke the Watergate scandal, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein have been cursed, praised, threatened, defended, and shared a Pulitzer Prize.
Now they're about to be waxed.
Madam Tussaud's Wax Museums, which operate six such locations worldwide, from New York to Shanghai, are about to open a Washington, D.C. location.
Among the figures planned for the new site are meltable sculptures of Woodward and Bernstein, according to General M
Source: Dallas Morning News
August 17, 2007
President Bush had been in office just a few months when Dallas oilman Ray Hunt came to Washington to talk about life after the White House.
Where would his legacy best be tended?
After a private dinner, in a conversation in the White House family quarters, Mr. Hunt, a major Bush campaign contributor, suggested his own alma mater – Southern Methodist University.
"I said to him, 'Mr. President, I would like to raise a new subject and that is that one of
Source: Reuters
August 20, 2007
Egyptian archaeologists have found
what they said could be the oldest human footprint in
history in the country's western desert, the Arab
country's antiquities' chief said on Monday.
"This could go back about two million years," said
Zahi Hawass, the secretary general of the Egyptian
Supreme Council of Antiquities. "It could be the most
important discovery in Egypt," he told Reuters.
Archaeologists found th
