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: AP
May 19, 2007
MADISON — Thirty-seven years after a car bomb devastated a campus building and shook the nation’s anti-Vietnam war movement, University of Wisconsin leaders dedicated the first memorial Friday to the young scientist killed in the blast.
The 1970 bombing by four student radicals protesting weapons research at Sterling Hall was the most powerful act of domestic terrorism on U.S. soil until the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
But until now, the UW had nothing commemorating Rob
Source: Bryan Burrough in the NYT Book Review
May 20, 2007
I have no idea what book wears the crown of longest nonfiction title ever published. Whoever holds the record, it is about to be challenged by Vincent Bugliosi, whose new work, “Reclaiming History,” a cellular-level re-examination of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, clocks in at 1,612 pages. That’s not a typo. One thousand six hundred and twelve pages. Plus notes. On a CD-ROM. Bugliosi, best known as the prosecutor of Charles Manson and a co-author of the best seller “Helter Skelt
Source: Guardian
May 21, 2007
Fire today ravaged the Cutty Sark, turning the 19th century tea clipper and one of Britain's most important maritime treasures into a blackened wreck.Firefighters were called at 4.45am to the ship's dry dock in Greenwich, south London...
The Cutty Sark, on the banks of the river Thames, has been closed since November 2006 for a £25m renovation and was due to reopen in 2009. The ship needed substantial repairs because sea salt had speeded up the corrosion of its
Source: Washington Post
May 20, 2007
Two intelligence assessments from January 2003 predicted that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and subsequent U.S. occupation of Iraq could lead to internal violence and provide a boost to Islamic extremists and terrorists in the region, according to congressional sources and former intelligence officials familiar with the prewar studies.
The two assessments, titled "Principal Challenges in Post-Saddam Iraq" and "Regional Consequences of Regime Change in Iraq," we
Source: AP
May 20, 2007
HUAY NAM KHAO, Thailand -- When Lao Teng and his wife, members of Laos' ethnic Hmong minority, fled their homeland last June, they had hoped that they could leave their fear of persecution behind.Harsh reality quickly set in when they were arrested for illegal entry into Thailand upon their arrival at Huay Nam Khao, where about 8,000 other Hmong refugees have been living in limbo, wondering if their future holds a forced return to Laos.
Thailand classifies them
Source: AP
May 20, 2007
WASHINGTON -- The Republican patronage machine was in full motion early in the Ronald Reagan era, filling countless positions with the faithful. From his high perch at the Justice Department, Rudy Giuliani was not always willing to go along.Senators accustomed to having their way with certain administration appointments when their party took power bristled when Giuliani put candidates for U.S. attorney on ice. Pennsylvania GOP Sen. Arlen Specter complained directly to Presid
Source: Telegraph
May 21, 2007
Mongolian warlord Genghis Khan was notorious for his sexual as well as his territorial conquests. But the extent to which he captured women's hearts has now been revealed with research suggesting that he has 16 million Asian descendants.
Scientists traced a genetic trail believed to originate from the ruthless leader, who established the biggest empire the world as ever seen.
The work, conducted by Russian and Polish scientists, continued an investigation started three
Source: Guardian
May 21, 2007
Twenty-five years ago today the British won the Falklands war. Argentina did not surrender for another three weeks, but by nightfall on what the military called D-day, 3,000 Royal Marines and paratroopers had scrambled ashore at the little farm hamlets around San Carlos Water on East Falkland, and the game was up. They were still 90 miles from Stanley, but privately Argentinian commanders conceded that once the taskforce had secured the bridgehead, they could not be defeated.
Source: Sam Tanenhaus, New York Times
May 20, 2007
With the death on Tuesday of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the Baptist minister and founder of the Moral Majority, and the announcement on Thursday that Paul D. Wolfowitz would resign from the presidency of the World Bank, two major figures in the modern conservative movement exited the political stage. To many, this is the latest evidence that the conservative movement, which has dominated politics during the last quarter century, is finished.
But conservatives have heard this before, an
Source: New York Times
May 20, 2007
Surveying the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920’s, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk saw an impoverished peasant society that was 90 percent illiterate, whose primary exports were tobacco and dried fruit.
An autocrat, a drinker and a brilliant nation builder, Ataturk set about assembling a state meant to wrench his countrymen out of their backwardness.
Today, Turkey is poised to join Europe —- if the continent will have it —- in what would be the fulfillment of Ataturk’s v
Source: AP
May 20, 2007
MADRID -- Authorities in Spain are looking into whether a U.S. company can be charged with stealing Spanish heritage for excavating colonial-era treasure from a sunken British warship.Odyssey Marine Exploration said Friday it had discovered the ship —- along with gold and silver coins worth an estimated US$500 million (€371 million) —- somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean...
Spain's Culture Ministry said it thought the statement was "suspicious," after Odys
Source: AP
May 20, 2007
BAD AROLSEN, Germany - Looking back at the first weeks after World War II, a French lieutenant named Henri Francois-Poncet despaired at ever fulfilling his mission to establish the fate of French inmates of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
For the living skeletons who survived the Nazi terror, the Displaced Persons camp set up two miles away offered little relief from misery.
A bleak picture springs with stark immediacy from typewritten reports by the Allied office
Source: Rocky Mountain News
May 18, 2007
A faculty group defending the accuracy of works by embattled University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill misrepresented sources or relied on books the authors themselves have since repudiated.
"That's just blatant distortion to make their point," said Russell Thornton, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose book was quoted in defense of Churchill.
University of Oklahoma professor Circes Sturm, who was also quoted, said she has sinc
Source: NYT
May 20, 2007
IN 19th-century Russia, Czar Nicolas I commissioned an official national anthem known as “God Save the Czar.”
In 21st-century Washington, the anthem would be more suitably titled “God Help the Czar.”
It’s not good to be the czar, not here, not now. The czars dwell in bureaucratic jumble, not palatial privilege. Indeed, you know it has gotten messy, the problem so immense — and the managers so desperate — that the only solution lies with something as fundamentally undemo
Source: Observer
May 20, 2007
Scientists will outline dramatic evidence this week that suggests a comet exploded over the Earth nearly 13,000 years ago, creating a hail of fireballs that set fire to most of the northern hemisphere.
Primitive Stone Age cultures were destroyed and populations of mammoths and other large land animals, such as the mastodon, were wiped out. The blast also caused a major bout of climatic cooling that lasted 1,000 years and seriously disrupted the development of the early human civilis
Source: New York Times
May 19, 2007
Former President Bill Clinton is speaking today in the presidential swing state of New Hampshire, but he is not speaking on her behalf; he is speaking with a Republican. And not just any Republican: Former President George Bush, the father of the man whom Mrs. Clinton routinely criticizes on the campaign trail as an incompetent and disastrous leader.
When it comes to the first President Bush, both Clintons appear to have a soft spot, and the feeling seems mutual. Mr. Bush and Mr. Cl
Source: BBC News
May 18, 2007
A burial ground found under the A2 in Kent has marked the area as one of the most important sites of Roman Britain.
Archaeologists say the burial site, near Gravesend [near the Roman town of Springhead], ranks with those found at the most important Roman cities such as Colchester and St Albans.Three graves were found during a routine dig before work started on a £122m road widening scheme.
Archaeologist Tim Allen said one of the bodies, which had b
Source: UPI
May 18, 2007
TOKYO -- Japan is trying to get the younger generation to be more patriotic by changing the law.
A bill was passed Friday by the Diet's Lower House to make teaching patriotism and "love of country" part of compulsory education. If passed, it will be the first time since World War II that Japan will make teaching patriotism part of the national curriculum for all elementary and junior high school students.
Source: Wall Street Journal (free article)
May 16, 2007
Lori White thinks high school students should study a variety of religions, including Christianity. But the Bible curriculum used in Odessa, Texas, and a growing number of other schools, she says, is aimed at instilling faith, not knowledge.
''It's a curriculum that proselytizes,'' says Ms. White, whose son graduated from Odessa's Permian High School last year.
The text used in Odessa high schools, developed by the nonprofit National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, rep
Source: Reuters
May 19, 2007
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez demanded Pope Benedict apologize to Indians in Latin America for saying this month in Brazil that the Roman Catholic Church purified them.
Chavez, who regularly clashes with the Catholic Church in Venezuela but had not directly criticized the Pope before, accused the Pontiff on Friday of ignoring the "holocaust" that followed Christopher Columbus's 1492 landing in the Americas. "With all due respect your Holiness, apologize because the
