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 7, 2007
For thousands of years, most people on earth lived in abject poverty, first as hunters and gatherers, then as peasants or laborers. But with the Industrial Revolution, some societies traded this ancient poverty for amazing affluence.
Historians and economists have long struggled to understand how this transition occurred and why it took place only in some countries. A scholar who has spent the last 20 years scanning medieval English archives has now emerged with startling answers fo
Source: Fox News
August 7, 2007
Adolf Hitler, the most notorious champion of Richard Wagner and “racially pure” German music, banished Jewish and Russian musicians from the concert halls of the Third Reich — but apparently listened secretly to their work.New light has been shed on the Nazi leader’s musical tastes by the discovery of what are said to be a hundred of his gramophone records found in the attic of a former Soviet intelligence officer, Lev Besymenski.
“There were classical recording
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, is published by the Federation of American Scientists
August 6, 2007
One day after President Bush signed into law a bill that requires
public disclosure of the national intelligence budget, the House of
Representatives adopted an amendment to prevent that requirement from
taking effect.
The budget disclosure provision appeared in legislation enacting the
recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, which was passed by Congress
last month and signed by President Bush on August 3.
If implemented, it would mark the first time that Congress successfully
as
Source: Robert McHenry at the Britannica blog (Click here for a version of this entry with embedded links.)
August 6, 2007
Last week an artist named Duke Riley caused a bit of a stir in New York harbor by approaching too closely to the liner QE2 in a homemade submarine. Press coverage of the stunt duly noted that the design of the submarine was loosely based on that of the"Turtle," which saw brief and mainly fruitless service in the Revolutionary War and is generally considered the first American submarine, certainly the first to be intended for use in war. What the news reports failed to note was that one of Artist
Source: NPR
August 3, 2007
The U.S. Coast Guard marks more than a million lives saved in a 217th birthday ceremony Saturday. As part of the announcement, the service has released a "Top 10 Rescue Videos" compilation on YouTube and a "Top Ten Coast Guard Rescues" list dating back to 1888. Coast Guard Chief of Public Affairs Jim McPherson describes some of the highlights.
Source: Globe & Mail
August 4, 2007
Mea culpa. Two decades ago, when I wrote a Fodor's travel guide to Toronto, I tried to pump up the prose by telling the story of the first white man in the area. Coureur de bois Étienne Brûlé, scout for Samuel de Champlain, lived among the Huron (so my text assured readers) until, in 1633, his drinking and womanizing so offended them that they killed and ate him. Sex, death and cannibalism - I hoped all this would lure people into reading about Toronto.
This is why we need a Toronto
Source: Newsday
August 3, 2007
A prisoner of war in Austria for a year and a half during World War II, Michael Colamonico kept busy drawing in a notebook. He bartered with German soldiers to score crayon pencils and sketched visions of home: fighter jets, the Statue of Liberty, a pin-up girl bedecked in stars and stripes.
"In order to keep a healthy mind, I was active," he said. "I did whatever I could."
But after the war, he stowed the journal, along with newspaper clippings, pho
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 8, 2007
Fully one-third of those who survived the ghettos and concentration camps, or hid from the Nazis in forests and attics, before fleeing to modern-day Israel are now living below the official poverty line of about £200 per month, struggling to pay for medication and treatment for ailments resulting from so many years of starvation and torture. Most are now octogenarians.
The Israeli government had proposed a new state Holocaust survivors’ benefit of 83 shekels a month, or about £10, o
Source: NYT
August 5, 2007
Love, in all its splendor and mess, found a fit expression on Rome’s oldest bridge last year. Inspired by a best-selling book, then the movie version, young couples wrote their names on a padlock. They chained their locks around lampposts on Ponte Milvio. Then they symbolically cut off escape by tossing the keys into the wine-dark Tiber below.
But reality quickly set in, as it often does after passion. Thousands of locks and chains piled up. The lamps atop two light posts crumbled u
Source: Daily Press (VA)
August 4, 2007
Five years of painstaking archaeological work came to an end this week when conservators at The Mariners' Museum chiseled the last stubborn pieces of concreted sand and rust from the inside of the USS Monitor gun turret.
Bolstered by interns from the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary, the summer-long excavation turned up more than a dozen unexpected artifacts - including silverware, bullets and gun-sight covers - hidden inside the last few inches of concretion. It also uncovered sev
Source: WaPo
August 3, 2007
The climate-controlled room whirrs with electronics. A digital recorder copies a 46-year-old video of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Other machines digitize audio testimonies taped by Holocaust survivors. Microfilmed war documents flash across a digital scanner at two images per second, or 5 million a month.
Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial is getting its huge archive ready to go online.
In Washington, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is reproduc
Source: NYT
August 6, 2007
The Spitzer administration says it has taken steps to finally solve the quandary of the “survivors’ stairway” at ground zero.
By that, it means every step — all 38 of them. Together.
Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s chief of downtown redevelopment, Avi Schick, proposes to keep the stairway whole and intact — but just the seven-foot-wide stairway proper, not the hulking concrete structure around it.
Held together and supported by a specially designed truss, the stairs w
Source: AP
August 5, 2007
Four presidential candidates are lined up to visit Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show" over the next three weeks as Comedy Central's satirical news review ramps up its "Indecision 2008" coverage.
Sen. Joseph Biden, the Delaware Democrat, is first up this Wednesday. Biden appeared on "The Daily Show" last winter on the day he announced his candidacy.
Republican John McCain makes his 10th appearance on Aug. 16, followed by another Republican, for
Source: Asia Times
August 6, 2007
The local history of Okinawan farmers includes horrifying accounts of mass suicide and murder under orders from the Japanese military.
Records of those events are irksome for the Japanese government that is keen to whitewash this part of history. But local governments in Okinawa and the surrounding islands are determined not to let the Japanese Education Ministry have its way. "The fact is that such orders to die were sent to people indoctrinated by the Ja
Source: CNN
August 6, 2007
This city almost erected a billboard outside Jamestown, Virginia, to congratulate it on its 400th birthday -- and remind everyone St. Augustine passed that milestone four decades ago.
St. Augustine is the nation's oldest city, and its 442nd birthday celebration is scheduled for August 28-September 1, including historical re-enactments, entertainment, and yes, a Thanksgiving feast. But this one will commemorate a feast held in September of 1565 by the Spaniards and native Timucuan In
Source: http://news.newamericamedia.org
August 4, 2007
The Afro-American Newspaper will receive assistance in processing its archives through a nearly half a million dollar grant to Johns Hopkins University. The purpose of the grant is to develop a new archival training practicum and internship program at Johns Hopkins that will survey the AFRO's archives of hidden treasures and introduce students to archival practice and theory. The program will also encompass faculty from Morgan State University, who will assist in the archival training program.
Source: WaPo
May 4, 2007
JENA, La. -- Here in the woodsy heart of Louisiana, town leaders were looking for a fresh start, a way to erase the recent memory of Jim Crow-like hangman's nooses dangling from a shade tree at the local high school. So they cut the tree down.
But after the events of the past 12 months, that attempt by white officials about two weeks ago to heal the town's deep racial divide before the start of a new school year might be too little, too late.
A few weeks after the noose
Source: WaPo
August 3, 2007
Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, the outspoken church leader who was killed in 1980 as he celebrated Mass, has become as polarizing in death as he was in life.
The campaign to make him a Roman Catholic saint appears to be languishing, as Vatican officials privately debate whether Romero was a martyr for the faith or for the political left.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 5, 2007
On an isolated bluff of prairie grassland overlooking the mighty Missouri river, a weather-beaten stone bust marks the final resting place of Sitting Bull, the legendary Lakhota Sioux tribal leader and warrior.
The vista has changed little since his day, but this peaceful spot on South Dakota's Standing Rock Indian reservation is now the focus of a bitter row that some are calling Sitting Bull's last stand.
It pits his descendants against tribal rivals in a showdown ove
Source: NYT
August 5, 2007
BAD AROLSEN, Germany, Aug. 2 — Like other Holocaust victims, Noemi Ban has gone back numerous times to survey the ghostly field of chimneys at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi concentration camp in Poland where she and her family arrived in July 1944, and she alone survived.
But last May, Mrs. Ban got an even more jolting glimpse into her past, when she visited the Holocaust archive in this tranquil town in central Germany. There, filed in the labyrinthine shelves of records, was a fade
