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: American Heritage
June 12, 2007
American Heritage, the nation’s preeminent magazine of history and the parent of this website, has stopped publication, at least temporarily, with the April/May 2007 issue, now on newsstands. The website will continue to publish.
American Heritage, a bimonthly, was founded in 1954. It was bought by Forbes Inc. in 1986 and has suffered financially in recent years amid hard times for magazines in general. Forbes put it up for sale earlier this year and has not yet found a buyer.
Source: The Guardian
June 12, 2007
China has become the land of 1,000 identical cities, a senior government official has warned in an outspoken attack on the country's rush towards modernity.
Qiu Baoxing, the vice-minister of construction, said the damage to the country's heritage was similar to that wrought during the cultural revolution of 1966-76.
In the early stages of that period, Red Guards ransacked temples and burned ancient scripts in the name of revolutionary politics. Today, the damage is mor
Source: VNUNet
June 12, 2007
Newly released documents have shown that the US military was considering the development of a chemical weapon to turn enemy soldiers gay.
Edward Hammond, of Berkeley's Sunshine Project, used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a copy of the proposal from the Air Force's Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio and passed it to CBS 5.
According to the document the Air Force requested $7.5m for the development of such a weapon, but the proposal was rejected.
Source: Hindustan Times
June 12, 2007
China on Tuesday claimed to have unearthed a large cache of explosives, abandoned by Japanese troops during World War II, from the base of a hill in Dunhua City in northeast China's Jilin Province.
The 3,500 bombs, still lethal and weighing more than 40 tonnes, were found buried in a rectangular pit at the foot of the hill in Dunhua's Shaheyan Township, which was once the site of a Japanese military airport, police said.
The bombs were discovered by three local farmers
Source: AP
June 12, 2007
Iran will publish the speeches and writings of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for Israel's destruction and once wrote President Bush a letter criticizing his handling of the Sept. 11 attacks, newspapers reported Tuesday.
Ahmadinejad reportedly has appointed a 15-member panel—dubbed the Council of Policy-Making and Supervision over Publication of President's Works and Thoughts—and made up of his closest allies, to compile and publish the works.
The move provok
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education
June 12, 2007
Another professor at DePaul University was rejected for tenure at the same time as Norman G. Finkelstein, and she believes her advocacy for the embattled political scientist may have derailed her career.
"There is no good explanation for why I was denied tenure," Mehrene E. Larudee, an assistant professor of international studies, said in an interview on Monday. "So one has to look elsewhere."
Praised as "outstanding" by the dean of her c
Source: The San Francisco Chronicle
June 12, 2007
In July 1941, newly drafted Army Pvt. Masaji "Gene" Uratsu received an unusual request during basic training: Report to division headquarters. There, a captain pulled him into a room and asked the farm boy to translate a Japanese textbook and Japanese military field guide. Nervously, Uratsu -- who was born in the United States but had studied in Japan as a child -- stumbled through the translation. He read aloud, feeling like a mouse cornered by a cat. After Uratsu finished, the captai
Source: The Telegraph
June 12, 2007
A blunder by MI5 has blown the cover on some of its top wartime agents - 60 years after they carried out secret operations.
The identities of operatives from the intelligence services are normally closely guarded, even after long periods of time have passed since their retirement.
However, an apparently innocuous file released by MI5 to the National Archives earlier this year has allowed a number of agents who operated during World War Two to be identified.
Source: Deutsche Welle
June 12, 2007
A fund set up by the German government to compensate Nazi-era forced laborers has finished its last payments to victims. The remaining money in the fund will be used for reconciliation projects.
The Remembrance, Responsibility and Future foundation to compensate Nazi-era forced laborers paid 1.7 million people more than 4.4 billion euros ($5.8 billion) in recent years.The money has been paid and everything has run its course without a problem,"
Source: BBC News
June 12, 2007
Instructions on how to build a nuclear reactor have been revealed from five sealed envelopes that have lain hidden for almost 70 years.
The documents were sent to the UK's Royal Society for safekeeping by James Chadwick, discoverer of the neutron, during World War II.
He felt their contents, which described cutting-edge science, were far too sensitive to publish at the time. The envelopes were recently discovered in the science academy's archives.
Source: The Age
June 12, 2007
AN ANCIENT training manual for Roman athletes — carved in marble almost 2000 years ago — prescribes far worse punishments than a sending off or a week's docked pay if they performed badly in the Colosseum.
The manual recommends a flogging to get them to perform better. And the same went if they drank too much mead or behaved disgracefully with the local maidens.The marble tablet was found in 2003 in the town of Alexandria Troas in Turkey, and deciphe
Source: The Virginian-Pilot
June 12, 2007
A DNA testing company and a genealogy enthusiast say they're trying to achieve what archaeologists have so far failed to do: find out what happened to the Lost Colony, the 1587 settlement on Roanoke Island that disappeared without a wisp of evidence.
"The Lost Colony story is the biggest unsolved mystery in the history of America," said Roberta Estes, owner of DNA Explain, a private DNA analysis company based in Brighton, Mich. "I don't know what we'll find in the end
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education
June 12, 2007
For nine months, Riyadh Lafta, an Iraqi professor of medicine, tried to get a visa to visit the University of Washington, where he had been invited to share his research on the unusually high rates of cancer among children in southern Iraq.
But by last March, with no visa forthcoming, the American institution came up with an alternative plan. Mr. Lafta would deliver his lecture at Simon Fraser University, in Vancouver, British Columbia, and it would be broadcast by video to a public
Source: Agence France Presse
June 12, 2007
A statue modeled on the "Goddess of Democracy" paraded during the bloody Tiananmen Square protests 18 years ago was unveiled Tuesday as a memorial to victims of communism worldwide. The memorial, located near the Capitol Hill site of the US Congress, pays homage to the "more than 100 million people" who have died under communism since Russia's Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
US President George W. Bush Tuesday likened the Cold War to today's struggle against terrorism
Source: NYT
June 12, 2007
The story of Romulus and Remus is almost as old as Rome. The orphan twins were suckled by a she-wolf in a cave on the banks of the Tiber. Romulus grew up to found Rome in 753 B. C. Historians have long since dismissed the story as a charming legend.
This year, Italian archaeologists reported discovering the long-lost cave under the Palatine Hill that ancient Romans held sacred as the place where the twins were nursed. The grown brothers fought over leadership of the new city, the s
Source: Earth Times
June 12, 2007
Award-winning marketing executive Chris Moseley has been appointed Senior Vice President of Marketing for The History Channel. The announcement was made today by Nancy Dubuc, Executive Vice President and General Manager, The History Channel.
In her new role, Moseley will spearhead all marketing, promotional and branding campaigns for The History Channel and its domestic networks including History International, The History Channel en espanol and Military History Channel across all c
Source: NYT
June 11, 2007
BUTOVO, Russia — Barbed wire still lines the perimeter of the secret police compound here on the southern edge of Moscow where more, perhaps far more, than 20,000 people were shot and buried from August 1937 through October 1938, at the height of Stalin’s purges. Now, gradually, Butovsky poligon — literally, the Butovo shooting range — is becoming a shrine to all of the victims of Stalin’s murderous campaigns. Grass-covered mounds holding the victims’ bones crisscross the pastoral field, which i
Source: Washington Post
June 11, 2007
Bettye Kearse stepped inside the mansion at Montpelier, former president James Madison's Virginia estate, to find the walls stripped bare. Rooms once opulently adorned have been deconstructed by archaeologists to reveal the slatted wooden frame that held together the home of one of the nation's premier architects.
Kearse, 64, a Massachusetts pediatrician, says she hopes to prove something the mansion's walls have so far kept hidden: that she, an African American, is a direct descend
Source: Washington Post
June 11, 2007
Two recent examinations suggest that torture arises not because of individual barbarity and sadism, or even because of the presence or absence of enlightened laws, but because of social and psychological structures. The 20th century provided more avenues for such structures to flourish, these analyses suggest, which is why so much more torture took place in the last 100 years. Sociologist Christopher Einolf recently compiled a history of torture. He limited his study to cases involving conduct t
Source: Inside Higher Ed
June 11, 2007
DePaul University on Friday formally denied tenure to Norman G. Finkelstein, who has taught political science there while attracting an international following — of both fans and critics — for his attacks on Israeli policies and the “Holocaust industry.”
Finkelstein’s tenure bid has attracted an unusual degree of outside attention and his research has been much debated by scholars of the Middle East. In evaluating his record, DePaul faculty panels and administrators praised him as a
