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: History Today
August 15, 2007
A treatment used by Stalin’s Red Army to treat bacterial infections could offer modern patients the solution to hospital super-bug, MRSA. Bacteriophages, viruses which feed on bacteria, have been used in Eastern European medicine for more than 60 years as an alternative to antibiotics. During the 1930s, as cures were sought for bacterial diseases, bacteriophages lost out to antibiotics in western European countries since they were harder to patent and thus offered less potential profit for drug
Source: Library of Congress
August 3, 2007
The only known copy of the 1507 world map by Martin Waldseemüller, the first map to use the name "America," spent nearly 400 years in obscurity in the library of a castle in southern Germany. Rediscovered in 1901 and purchased by the Library of Congress in 2003, this crown jewel of cartography will be secured in a state-of-the-art encasement and placed on permanent display later this year.
Source: Time
August 17, 2007
The military band's quick and terse rendition of India's national anthem was
greeted with a few hushed sighs and gentle nods, in keeping with the somber mood
of the Independence Day festivities at the governor's mansion. There was little
of the chest-thumping pride or fireworks on display for the few hundred guests.
European consuls fiddling with ties in the muggy heat; old freedom fighters
standing tall, their faces gaunt and expressionless. Sixty years after the
waning British Em
Source: HNN Staff
August 17, 2007
A 1994 interview with Dick Cheney featured on YouTube this week has drawn more than half a million hits. In the interview Cheney defends the first Bush administration's decision to allow Saddam Hussein to remain in power rather than remove him. Cheney says that going to Baghdad would have plunged the United States into a"quagmire" with parts of Iraq flying off.
The interview is circulating by email and was
Source: NBC
August 16, 2007
Is a White House wedding in the works?
Jenna Bush, one of President Bush's twin daughters, is engaged to be married to her longtime boyfriend, Henry Hager, the White House announced Thursday.
Asked if the two were getting married in the Rose Garden, Sally McDonough, press secretary for first lady Laura Bush, replied: "They have not set any details, date or place."
[Click on SOURCE link to watch a video by Bob Faw that reviews past White House wed
Source: http://www.ynetnews.com
August 16, 2007
Usually a scene of discord and strife – the Knesset soon plans to lend its halls to far more joyous fanfare.
Essentially the event that will kick-off the celebrations commemorating Israel's 60's birthday, the Knesset plans to reenact the historic United Nations partition vote that led to the creation of a Jewish state.
On November 29th, exactly six decades since the event, Israel's parliament will host the 1947 vote on the partition of western British Mandate Palestine into t
Source: http://www.business-standard.com
August 17, 2007
It is not the first time in history that housing sector default on account of aggressive expansion of credit to realty sector has pressed the panic button in world equity markets. In 1837 a real estate boom, fuelled by an aggressive expansion of credit, ended in disaster.
The current subprime mortgage default has wiped out over $5 trillion market capitalisation world over. All major benchmark indices have declined by over 10 per cent from the peak levels sometime in February 2007.
Source: Reuters
August 15, 2007
India marks 60 years of independence on August 15, celebrating the end of British colonial rule in 1947.
Following is a chronology of major events during the last six decades.
August 15, 1947 - India wins independence from Britain after being divided into two separate nations, India and Pakistan. Jawaharlal Nehru is appointed the first prime minister....
Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
August 16, 2007
The weekend began on Friday afternoon, after the mills closed. Women, their hair still fuzzed with chenille lint, crowded the doorways. Do you have any pretty dresses?
Things gained momentum on Saturday, as farmers who'd looked at the rear ends of mules all week raised their eyes to the treasures inside. You got overalls?...
For Irwin Koplan, those 60-year-old memories remain as vivid as a bolt of dress fabric. His father, Leo Koplan, was one of those merchants who open
Source: AP
August 15, 2007
Certain images will be indelibly linked to the interstate bridge collapse: Mangled green steel beams, giant concrete slabs that seem to float on the Mississippi River, a school bus frozen on a downward slant. Even as the search for victims continues, historians are thinking about how to document the carnage.
Those who have chronicled other disasters say it's important to quickly secure artifacts, photographs and witness accounts that will convey the magnitude years from now. Key items wou
Source: http://www.jpost.com
August 15, 2007
The most poorly compensated half of the estimated 250,000 Holocaust survivors living in Israel who are entitled to monthly pensions, 52%, receive payments of NIS 1,200 to NIS 1,600.
Under the first compensation agreement between Israel and Germany, signed in 1953, Germany gave Israel $750 million in goods and services for the absorption of Holocaust survivors and to help the young state.
Germany conditioned the agreement on the renunciation of any future claims by Israe
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 16, 2007
A tribe in Papua New Guinea has apologised for killing and eating four 19th century missionaries under the command of a doughty British clergyman.
The four Fijian missionaries were on a proselytising mission on the island of New Britain when they were massacred by Tolai tribesmen in 1878.
They were murdered on the orders of a local warrior chief, Taleli, and were then cooked and eaten.
The Fijians - a minister and three teachers - were under the leadershi
Source: Slate
August 15, 2007
The average newspaper should expand by a factor of 50 the amount of space given to corrections if Scott R. Maier's research is any guide.
Maier, an associate professor at the University of Oregon's School of Journalism and Communication, describes in a forthcoming research paper his findings that fewer than 2 percent of factually flawed articles are corrected at dailies.
Maier's study relied on data gathered from 10 metropolitan newspapers: the Boulder Daily Camera, the Charl
Source: Inside Higher Ed
August 16, 2007
Yale University Press on Wednesday announced that a libel suit against it and one of its authors has been dropped, without any changes being made in the book or any payments to the plaintiffs. The book in question is about Hamas and comes just weeks after Cambridge University Press settled a libel case against it over a book about Islamic terrorism by promising to destroy remaining copies of the book.
The cases are notably different in that Cambridge was sued in Britain (where libel
Source: NYT
August 15, 2007
IMPRUNETA, Italy — It has been said that wars are a way of teaching geography. And maps are caught up in the strife.
“The problems of cartography are the same that exist in diplomatic relations,” said Stefano Strata, a co-director of Nova Rico, a company that has been making custom globes for 50 years in this small town near Florence better known for its terra cotta.
For mapmakers like Nova Rico, geographic disputes are commonplace. For a Turkish customer, Cyprus is sho
Source: NYT
August 16, 2007
Precisely 80 years on, the Sacco-Vanzetti case still resonates like a mournful chord. Almost instantly elevated to the status of myth, the trial and execution of the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti remains one of the blackest pages in the American national story, a cautionary tale of lethal passions fueled by political fear and ethnic prejudice....
“Sacco and Vanzetti,” Bruce Watson’s spirited history of the affair, does a great service in rescuing fact from the haze
Source: AP
August 15, 2007
Most folks can correctly name George Washington as the nation's first president. After that, things get tricky.
The U.S. Mint is hoping its new dollar coin series will help refresh some hazy memories about the names of Adams, Jefferson and the rest.
That could be a tall order, however, given the results of a poll the Mint commissioned to find out just how much Americans know about their presidents.
According to the telephone poll conducted by the Gallup Org
Source: Reuters
August 16, 2007
An 800-year-old, gold-plated
crucifix that went missing after being seized by the
Nazis has been found in a rubbish skip in Austria,
police said.
The crucifix, made of copper and enamel, was crafted
in Limoges, France, and was part of a Polish art
collection brought to Austria during Nazi rule, Josef
Holzberger, police spokesman in Salzburg, said on
Thursday.
Source: NYT
August 15, 2007
After enduring a century and a half of change in Lower Manhattan, decrepit and anonymous, the birthplace of The New York Times is now being torn down, brick by brick.
By an odd turn of history, the demolition of The Times’s oldest home occurred just as the company settles into its seventh and newest headquarters, a 52-story tower across Eighth Avenue from the Port Authority Bus Terminal.
Yesterday, a worker armed with an appropriately 19th-century demolition tool — a sl
Source: Inside Higher Ed
August 15, 2007
A greater percentage of social scientists today feel that their academic freedom has been threatened than was the case during the McCarthy era.
That finding — from Neil Gross, an assistant professor of sociology at Harvard University — was among a series of pessimistic papers presented at a forum on academic freedom Tuesday at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.
Gross surveyed social science professors last year about whether they had felt that
