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: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH)
August 10, 2007
On August 3, 2007, the U.S. Senate by unanimous consent passed the “OPEN Government Act of 2007? (S. 849), a bill mandating major reforms in the operation of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Similar legislation (H.R. 1309) overwhelmingly passed the House earlier this year by a vote of 308-117. It is unclear at this time whether a conference committee will be needed to iron out any differences between the two bills or whether the House will simply adopt the Senate bill as passed.
Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH)
August 10, 2007
In a story broken this week by the Washington Post, it was revealed that a senior Smithsonian Institution official has resigned amid allegations that he destroyed minutes from a Smithsonian Board of Regents meeting in January at which former-Secretary Lawrence M. Small’s compensation and expenses were scrutinized. James M. Hobbins, executive assistant to the secretary of the Smithsonian, allegedly destroyed transcripts of the meeting despite orders from the Smithsonian’s general counsel that suc
Source: Bloomberg News
August 10, 2007
Big Ben, the bell in the clock tower above Britain's Parliament in London, will fall silent tomorrow until the end of September to accommodate repairs.
The clock will strike for the last time this month at 8 a.m. Saturday. An hour later, a team of specialists will scale down the tower's south side to clean the iconic face, an event which takes place every five years.
Quarter bells, which play a tune every 15 minutes, also will stop for maintenance. The 13.8-ton hour bel
Source: Time Magazine
August 9, 2007
At a time when the country was bitterly debating the role of religion in public life, we thought Graham's 50-year courtship of--and courtship by--11 Presidents was a story that needed to be told. Perhaps more than anyone else, he had shaped the contours of American public religion and had seen close up how the Oval Office affects people. We wondered what the world's most powerful men wanted from the world's most famous preacher. What worried them, and what calmed them? "Their personal lives
Source: Guardian
August 10, 2007
Thousands of rare books and manuscripts in Iraq's national library and archive, one of the country's most important cultural institutions, are in peril after the occupation of the building by Iraqi security forces, the library's director said yesterday.
Saad Eskander, a respected Kurdish historian who has run the library since 2003, told the Guardian that up to 20 Iraqi troops had seized the building at gunpoint yesterday, threatening staff and guards.
"They have t
Source: Press Release--Israel Government
August 9, 2007
In excavations carried out by the Israel Antiquities Authority in Tiberias impressive and unique finds were uncovered that shed light on the history of the ancient city.
The excavations were conducted over the course of the last three months at the request of Mekorot, as part of a project that involves the installation of a sewage pipeline and the transfer of the waste water treatment facility from Tiberias to the southern part of the Sea of Galilee.
The finds that were
Source: Guardian (UK)
August 10, 2007
Thousands of rare books and manuscripts in Iraq's national library and archive, one of the country's most important cultural institutions, are in peril after the occupation of the building by Iraqi security forces, the library's director said yesterday.Saad Eskander, a respected Kurdish historian who has run the library since 2003, told the Guardian that up to 20 Iraqi troops had seized the building at gunpoint yesterday, threatening staff and guards.
"They
Source: Science Daily
August 10, 2007
Approximately 250 million years ago, vast numbers of species disappeared from Earth. This mass-extinction event may hold clues to current global carbon cycle changes, according to Jonathan Payne, assistant professor of geological and environmental sciences. Payne, a paleobiologist who joined the Stanford faculty in 2005, studies the Permian-Triassic extinction and the following 4 million years of instability in the global carbon cycle.
In the July issue of the Geological Society of
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 9, 2007
Time travel, reckons Cambridge University's Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Stephen Hawking, is not possible "for if it was, they would already be here telling us about it".
Yet, for more than a century, the possibility has captivated both boffins and fiction writers - since H.G. Wells introduced the idea of a time machine in The Chronic Argonauts in 1888, and since Einstein's theories gave the notion an awful lot of academic clout early last century.
Films
Source: Bloomberg News
August 8, 2007
President George W. Bush said Barry Bonds's breaking of Major League Baseball's home-run record shouldn't lead to a rush to judgment on whether the San Francisco Giants slugger used steroids.
Bonds hit his 756th career home run last night, breaking the mark for most homers that Hank Aaron held for 33 years. Dogged by suspicions of steroids use, Bonds has denied knowingly taking them and has never been penalized for using performance- enhancing drugs.
"There is spec
Source: Boston Globe
August 9, 2007
Mauritania has passed a law promising jail time for slave-holders, an important step in the northwest African country's push to eliminate a practice that has quietly persisted despite a 25-year-old ban.
The law, adopted unanimously late Wednesday by the legislature, calls for prison sentences of up to 10 years for people found keeping slaves, along with fines for slave-holders and reparations for those who have been enslaved.
Human rights campaigners praised the law as
Source: Christian Science Monitor
August 8, 2007
"It was the best of times; it was the worst of times." Charles Dickens's famous line in "A Tale of Two Cities" could be used to describe what is probably hitting home about now for millions of American high school students: Lazy summer days cut short by the frantic rush to finish required reading lists before school starts.
"Most teens spend the summer doing whatever, and then cram the reading in during the last two weeks," says 2007 high school graduat
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 10, 2007
The Koran should be banned as a “fascist book” alongside Mein Kampf because it urges Muslims to kill non-believers, says Dutch populist MP Geert Wilders.
The leader of the far-right Freedom Party, which holds nine of the Dutch parliament's 150 seats has called for the ban after an alleged Islam inspired attack on a Labour councillor who had renounced the Muslim faith.
Mr Wilders claims that the Koran “calls on Muslims to oppress, persecute or kill Christians, Jews, diss
Source: NYT
August 8, 2007
MOSCOW — A giant cross now commands the field where the first shots of Stalin’s Great Terror sounded 70 years ago. It was erected on Wednesday with religious pomp but little recognition from a government prone to whitewash one of Russia’s darkest eras.
The cross was ferried more than 800 miles by boat from a former Soviet prison camp on the White Sea through the Belomor Canal — built in the 1930s by slave labor — to Moscow, in a religious procession linking major sites from a yearlo
Source: AP
August 3, 2007
LAKE GEORGE, N.Y. - When Louis-Joseph de Montcalm departed the southern shore of this Adirondack lake in 1757, he left behind the smoldering ruins of a British fort, mutilated bodies and the seeds for the story line of an American literary classic.
This week, a descendant of the famous French general is being given the royal treatment where his ancestor faced enemy gunfire and, afterward, vilification for a bloody episode James Fenimore Cooper fictionalized in his novel, "The
Source: WaPo
August 2, 2007
After years of shoveling his way through archaeological digs so intense that they injured his L5 vertebra, John Rutherford made his biggest discovery sitting in a cubicle west of Seven Corners in Fairfax County.
He was scouring 1937 photographs of Centreville on his computer screen when the star-shaped outline of a Civil War fort came into view, like an intricate painting on the landscape.
The fort is invisible in contemporary aerial photos. But those early images -- 21
Source: Asia Times
August 7, 2007
A short walk through the rice and sugarcane fields that dot Yomitan village, 20 kilometers north of Naha, capital of Okinawa prefecture, leads to dark, dank caves where hundreds of civilians took refuge as United States troops invaded the island during World War ll.
More than six decades later, these caves are at the center of a bitter battle over what really happened there.
For Masayasu Oshiro, a historian who has documented the sufferings of poor farming communities
Source: Japan Times
August 5, 2007
Stereotypical images of Japanese collectively in denial about the atrocities committed by the Imperial armed forces are grossly misleading and overlook the more prevalent view accepting wartime guilt and favoring atonement. In [JAPAN'S CONTESTED WAR MEMORIES: The "Memory Rifts" in Historical Consciousness of WWII] ... Hokkaido University's Philip Seaton persuasively argues that, "Japanese war memories are not nearly as nationalistic as they are frequently made out to be."
Source: Inside Higher Ed
August 9, 2007
Nearly 300 college and university presidents in the United States have endorsed a statement by Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University, denouncing the push by Britain’s main faculty union to have professors boycott Israeli academics and universities. “In seeking to quarantine Israeli universities and scholars, this vote threatens every university committed to fostering scholarly and cultural exchanges that lead to enlightenment, empathy, and a much-needed international marketplace of ide
Source: NYT
August 9, 2007
SORRY, Barry Bonds. You’re still 112 home runs away from the home run record, the real record, that is. Hitting 756 dingers is certainly quite an achievement, more than anyone else has hit in Major League Baseball history. But it is far behind the world record, the 868 homers slugged by Sadaharu Oh when he played for the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants from 1959 to 1980.
