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: Buffalo News
June 28, 2007
Documents in secret police files show that about a dozen bishops still alive had ties to Poland’s communist-era secret services, a Catholic Church commission said Wednesday.But a top bishop warned that the documents may not be an accurate guide on how much the bishops cooperated.
Poland’s Catholic bishops asked the special church commission to review their communist- era files in January, after a scandal in which Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus of Warsaw resigned j
Source: Washington Post
June 28, 2007
Dick Cheney is the most influential and powerful man ever to hold the office of vice president. This series examines Cheney's largely hidden and little-understood role in crafting policies for the War on Terror, the economy and the environment. Sunday: Part 1Working in the BackgroundA master of bureaucracy and detail, Cheney exerts most of his influence out of public view. Monday: Part 2
Source: http://www.dominicantoday.com
June 26, 2007
SANTO DOMINGO.- A journalist and historian said there’s "forceful and irrefutable" proof of the United States Government’s participation in the plot to physically eliminate the dictator Rafael Trujillo.
Víctor Grimaldi, in a 12 page document published in: osersosa.blogspot.com, said to deny the U.S. took part in Trujillo’s death is to “try to block the sun with a finger.”
He said in the first interrogations into the judicial case in June 2, 1961 –which can be
Source: http://www.ledger-enquirer.com (Columbus, Ohio)
June 27, 2007
When we took it down from the wall, Barbara Romey treated the framed certificate like a delicate work of art. No one at the newspaper knew she was taking it. But because she's a historian, I knew she'd take good care of the Ledger's Pulitzer Prize.
OK, so it was the certificate. The gold Pulitzer medal is tucked away in a vault. That didn't diminish the value of this piece of paper that had been displayed at the newspaper since 1955.
Barbara and I met when her class fro
Source: Forbes
June 26, 2007
If John Adams had had his way, Independence Day this year would be celebrated on a Monday, providing everyone with a three-day weekend. Instead, this holiday celebrating freedom remains subject to the tyranny of the calendar, which this year dictates that Independence Day falls on Wednesday, July 4.
But July 4 was not, in fact, the date on which the Second Continental Congress voted to dissolve the bonds that connected the 13 colonies to Great Britain. Lots of momentous events have
Source: WaPo
June 27, 2007
Justice John Paul Stevens, the third-oldest person ever to sit on the Supreme Court, turned 87 on April 20. If he's still on the court 142 days from now, he'll overtake Roger B. Taney, who died as chief justice in 1864 at the age of 87 years 209 days.
Stevens still has a long way to go if he wants to catch Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who was 90 when he retired from the court in 1932. But he has already started invoking his considerable life experience to buttress his opinions.
Source: AP
June 27, 2007
The U.S. State Department gave final approval Wednesday, June 27, 2007, for one of the world's most famous fossils, the 3.2 million-year-old Lucy skeleton unearthed in Ethiopia in 1974, to tour the U.S. on exhibit for the first time. The Smithsonian has objected to the idea, however, because museum experts don't think the fragile remains should travel, so Lucy won't be stopping at the National Natural History Museum, but in other U.S. museums instead.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
June 27, 2007
Think the idea of "Photoshopping" pictures is new? Photo tampering goes back to at least around 1860, though the methods were far more low-tech than today (but surprisingly convincing). Apparently this image of Abraham Lincoln is a mash-up of Lincoln's head and John Calhoun's body. Hany Farid, a Dartmouth University professor of computer science, lays out several examples of photo tampering through the ages and points to tools to detect a cut-and-paste job. We saw it mentioned on the V
Source: http://www.register-herald.com
June 9, 2007
LEWISBURG , WV — Although historical Lewisburg’s abundant landscape of Civil War tales has been well documented, there is one chapter in its war-torn past that’s shrouded in mystery and continues to be embroiled in debate.
Unnoticed by many who live here is a white oval, approximately 6 feet in diameter, high upon the right-hand side wall of the two-story brick building located at 124 W. Washington St. And inside the oval is a red flag with criss-crossed blue bars flying from a post
Source: Press Release--Austin Aslan, Community Organizer, Sacramento ACT
June 21, 2007
The SCUSD school board voted tonight to rename the former Goethe Middle School officially as Rosa Parks Middle School....
The vote was 5 in favor, with one abstention and 1 no vote. Member Michael Navarrete voted no on the grounds that he wanted a person with local roots to be put on the middle school. 13 year old Michael Zamora, who introduced himself to the board tonight as "a leader from the last graduating class of Goethe Middle School" brought to the
Source: National Security Archive
June 26, 2007
The full "family jewels" report, released today by the Central Intelligence Agency and detailing 25 years of Agency misdeeds, is now available on the Archive's Web site. The 702-page collection was delivered by CIA officers to the Archive at approximately 11:30 this morning -- 15 years after the Archive filed a Freedom of Information request for the documents.
The report is available for download in its entirety and is also split into smaller files for easier download.
Source: NYT
June 27, 2007
By next year, more than half the world’s population, 3.3 billion people, will for the first time live in towns and cities, a number expected to swell to almost 5 billion by 2030, according to a United Nations Population Fund report released today.
The onrush of change will be particularly extraordinary in Africa and Asia, where between 2000 and 2030 “the accumulated urban growth of these two regions during the whole span of history will be duplicated in a single generation,” the rep
Source: NYT
June 27, 2007
Even before a United States Congressional panel overwhelmingly passed a resolution on Tuesday urging Japan to apologize for its wartime sex slavery, the Japanese government said it would have no comment.
But the vote of 39 to 2 by the House Committee on Foreign Affairs has set the stage for an adoption by the full House of Representatives next month, at which point Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will face pressure to respond in some way or another.
Already Mr. Abe, who initi
Source: NYT
June 26, 2007
Historians often assume that they need pay no attention to human evolution because the process ground to a halt in the distant past. That assumption is looking less and less secure in light of new findings based on decoding human DNA.
People have continued to evolve since leaving the ancestral homeland in northeastern Africa some 50,000 years ago, both through the random process known as genetic drift and through natural selection. The genome bears many fingerprints in places where
Source: NYT
June 26, 2007
Time was, fossils and a few stone artifacts were about the only means scientists had of tracing the lines of early human evolution. And gaps in such material evidence were frustratingly wide....
[Now] new finds have filled in some of the yawning gaps in the fossil record. They have doubled the record’s time span from 3.5 million back almost to 7 million years ago and more than doubled the number of earliest known hominid species. The teeth and bone fragments suggest the form — the m
Source: NYT
June 25, 2007
One entry, dated April 14, 1954, was about I. F. Stone, who was described as being a writer from New York. Mr. Stone, it was noted, condemned Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s “persecution of innocent citizens” and likewise the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the Senate’s corresponding committee....
From 1940 to 1975, thousands of reports like these were part of extensive files compiled by the F.B.I. while it carried out a clandestine surveillance campaign on the National L
Source: NYT
June 27, 2007
A single tooth and some DNA clues appear to have solved the mystery of the lost mummy of Hatshepsut, one of the great queens of ancient Egypt, who reigned in the 15th century B.C.
Archaeologists who conducted the research, to be announced formally today in Cairo, said this was the first mummy of an Egyptian ruler to be found and “positively identified” since King Tutankhamen’s tomb was opened in 1922.
Zahi Hawass, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities
Source: AP
June 22, 2007
A World War II fighter plane once entombed under hundreds of feet of snow and ice in Greenland is back on a mission it began nearly 65 years ago.
Dubbed "Glacier Girl" after being recovered, the P-38 left Teterboro Airport on Friday for another leg of a journey toward Duxford, England, where it's scheduled to land June 29.
Fighter pilot Brad McManus, the first member of his squadron to crash-land onto a glacier in Greenland, is now the only pilot still alive f
Source: NPR
June 22, 2007
Authorities in Poland want to change the name of the Auschwitz concentration camp to officially include the word"German" in the title. Poles hope that will end the problem of Poland being mistaken as the perpetrator.
The change was first discussed last summer. A decision will be made at the UNESCO conference at the end of June.Related Links
Cliopatria blog
Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH)
June 21, 2007
On June 21, the Senate Appropriations’ Committee approved the Labor, Health & Human Services and Education Fiscal Year (FY) 2008 appropriations bill. The Committee provided $120 million for the Teaching American History Grants program at the U.S. Department of Education. This is $210,000 more than last year’s budget and $70 million more than the President’s request.
The House Labor, HHS & Education Appropriations Subcommittee also provided $120 million for Teaching American
