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: NYT
August 9, 2007
Two fossils found in Kenya have shaken the human family tree, possibly rearranging major branches thought to be in a straight ancestral line to Homo sapiens.
Scientists who dated and analyzed the specimens — a 1.44 million-year-old Homo habilis and a 1.55 million-year-old Homo erectus — said their findings challenged the conventional view that these species evolved one after the other. Instead, they apparently lived side by side in eastern Africa for almost half a million years.
Source: NYT
August 9, 2007
There are times in the life of George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st president of the United States and father of the 43rd, that people, perfect strangers, come up to him and say the harshest things — words intended to comfort but words that wind up only causing pain.
“I love you, sir, but your son’s way off base here,” they might say, according to Ron Kaufman, a longtime adviser to Mr. Bush, who has witnessed any number of such encounters — perhaps at a political fund-raiser, or a r
Source: NYT
August 8, 2007
Recent investigations have challenged long-held views of nomadic culture as purely transient, with little impact on the urban, sophisticated societies that emerged later.
Instead, scientists like Dr. [Michael] Frachetti are discovering that nomadic cultures are flexible, switching between transient and more sedentary ways of life, and assimilating and inventing new ideas and technologies. Nomads created durable political cultures that still influence the way those countries interact
Source: AP
August 8, 2007
They number only eight, but are caretakers of a story stretching back 2,600 years. Now, it's up to the last Jews of Baghdad to decide whether to remain or flee their ancient home.
An Anglican clergyman who watches over the remaining Jewish families says they are increasingly desperate to emigrate to the Netherlands, where there is an active Iraqi Jewish community. But Israeli, Dutch and Jewish officials dispute the claims by the Rev. Andrew White that they want to fully abandon a ci
Source: NYT
August 8, 2007
The nation’s high school seniors performed significantly better on the first nationwide economics test than they did on other recent national exams in history and science, and demonstrated a better understanding of basic market forces like supply and demand than officials expected.
Results of the economics test, which was administered last year, are being released this morning. A summary report is available on the web at nationsreportcard.gov.
The Department of Educatio
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 8, 2007
Families across Britain will be able to uncover the wartime heroism of their ancestors today when the war pension records of more than a million soldiers wounded in the First World War go online.
Descendants of the war veterans will be able to read first-hand accounts about the horrors faced by their loved ones in the trench warfare of the 1914-18 war.
All First World War service records were destroyed when bombs wrecked the War Office in London during the Blitz in 1940
Source: HNN summary of article in Slate by Jack Shafer
August 7, 2007
Nixon Attorney General John Mitchell infamously threatened during Watergate to put the Washington Post's Katherine Graham's breast in a wringer if the paper continued to publish articles critical of the administration.
In a memo from 1972 that's just surfaced Charles Colson, a Nixon assistant, claims that George McGovern, commenting on Mitchell's threat, said that "based on Katherine Graham's figure, there's no danger in that."
McGovern, in an interview wit
Source: AP
August 8, 2007
With little fanfare, Jose Rodriguez, who heads the
National Clandestine Service, had his cover lifted
about a month ago. CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said
the driving factor was his interest in publicly
participating in minority recruitment events. He's
also retiring later this year after more than three
decades with the agency.
Rodriguez is the most important man in the U.S. spy
game whose name you probably never knew. When he was
mentioned publicly before now, he was referred to on
Source: Edward Rothstein in the NYT
August 7, 2007
If you stand in the middle of Auburn Avenue, outside the Queen Anne-style home in which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was born in 1929, and look past the King Center, past the trees leading into the National Park Service Visitor Center and past Ebenezer Baptist Church, toward the office buildings and hotels of downtown Atlanta, you can get some sense of what the precocious Martin might have felt standing in the same spot, before his family moved off the street when he was 12.
Source: BBC
August 3, 2007
A bottle of champagne believed to have been taken from Hitler's wine cellar by an allied soldier is being auctioned.
The prized bottle of 1937 Moet and Chandon goes under the hammer at Charterhouse auctioneers in Sherborne, Dorset on 17 August.
But the auctioneers say champagne does not age well and the tipple is unlikely to be drinkable.
Source: AP
August 3, 2007
Mexican archaeologists using ground-penetrating radar have detected underground chambers they believe contain the remains of Emperor Ahuizotl, who ruled the Aztecs when Columbus landed in the New World. It would be the first tomb of an Aztec ruler ever found.
The find could provide an extraordinary window into Aztec civilization at its apogee. Ahuizotl (ah-WEE-zoh-tuhl), an empire-builder who extended the Aztecs' reach as far as Guatemala, was the last emperor to complete his rule
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 5, 2007
Freak weather, prisoners held without trial, bishops behaving badly: it's the stuff of everyday news. Except these are not 21st-century reports, they are 17th-century ones.
It has taken seven years - at least two longer than expected - and the collaboration of six leading international academics to extract these stories of life in the late Stuart period from the "diary" of Roger Morrice, a Puritan cleric-turned-lobby correspondent.
His Entring Book, which lay
Source: BBC
August 8, 2007
A giant cross commemorating the victims of Stalinist purges in the 1930s has been erected at a ceremony near Moscow.The wooden cross - 12.5m high (41 ft) and 7.6m wide (25 ft) - was placed in Butovo, at the site of a former execution ground.
At least 20,000 people were killed there by Stalin's secret police, the NKVD. The first killings occurred exactly 70 years ago.
Hundreds of people attended the ceremony south of the capital.
Events
Source: NYT
August 8, 2007
Mr. [Barry] Clifford has spent about 25 years looking for and salvaging the remains of the Whydah, a pirate ship sailed by Samuel Bellamy, who was known as Black Sam. The ship sank off the coast of Wellfleet, Mass., during a storm in April 1717.
The mass, about 12,000 pounds, is thought to be part of the wreck and to contain at least seven iron cannons. Mr. Clifford and his team plucked it from below 30 feet of sand last week.
The cannons twisted together and probably
Source: http://www.asianews.it
August 6, 2007
Tens of thousands of elderly survivors, children and dignitaries gathered at the Peace Memorial Park, to remember the more than 250,000 people who ultimately died on the 62nd anniversary of the blast. During the ceremony Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba, singled out the United States for “failing to halt nuclear proliferation”.
In the Peace Memorial Park, close to ground zero of the blast, participants held a minutes silence at 8.05 local time when the B-29 Enola Gay bomber dropped the atomic
Source: Newsweek
August 13, 2007
Sami Adwan is the very model of a soft-spoken professor. He measures his words, and listens carefully to what others have to say. Yet while pursuing an education Ph.D. at the University of San Francisco in the 1980s, Adwan not only refused to listen to Jewish students, he says he dropped out of classes if he knew they included Jews. A Palestinian born in the village of Surif, near Hebron, Adwan had grown up under the shadow of the Israeli occupation, hearing tales from his father and grandfather
Source: AP
August 7, 2007
LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that a filly can't be named "Sally Hemings" after Thomas Jefferson's most famous slave and reputed lover.
The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati ruled that the Jockey Club can legally bar horse owner Garrett Redmond from naming his 4-year-old horse after Hemings.
Judge Alice Batchelder, writing for the three-judge panel, said Redmond has other options that may be approved by the Jockey Club, whic
Source: WaPo
August 5, 2007
April 25, 2007, marked the 500th anniversary of an extraordinary event: the naming of America. The story of how it happened is a murky tale of intrepid seafarers and failed business ventures, naive scientists and greedy publishers, mendacity and spin. Above all, it is the fascinating tale of Amerigo Vespucci, a small-time Florentine trader with a talent for self-promotion who reinvented himself as explorer and stargazer, and whose reputation has since become entangled in webs of myth. Felipe Fer
Source: LAT
August 6, 2007
ATLANTA — Three years ago, when Charles Steele Jr. became president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he worked out of a cramped headquarters without power or light. The embattled civil rights group's funds were scant, and so, too, was it's sense of mission.
Its fortunes have since changed, and the organization that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. co-founded is marking its 50th anniversary today with the opening of a $3-million international headquarters here. The bui
Source: NYT
August 7, 2007
For the past 20 years, Pier A has been an overlooked remnant on the waterfront of Lower Manhattan.
A once-grand Victorian structure that juts toward the Statue of Liberty from the northern edge of Battery Park, the pier has been the object of some big redevelopment plans but little activity. Frustrated by the pace of progress, city officials said last week that they had taken back control of the pier from a private developer and had plans to transform it into the gateway to New York
