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: Independent
May 15, 2007
...A study by the Cambridge Classic Project has discovered that there are now 459 state secondary schools teaching Latin. That is not very many, out of a total of 4,000, but in 2003...Latin was available in only 200 state schools.
It is a rare bit of good news for those who worry about the chronic decline of classical education.There was a protest yesterday outside the House of Commons by sixth-form girls from Godolphin and Latymer school, in Hammersmith. Dressed in an
Source: USA Today
May 15, 2007
Unquestioning partisanship is giving way to a balanced view of Richard Nixon at his presidential library as the federal government prepares to take it over from a private foundation.
Opened in 1990, four years before the 37th president died, the Nixon Presidential Library and Birthplace has been an orphan. It's the only one among 12 presidential libraries that gets no taxpayer funds.The library doesn't hold Nixon's presidential papers because Congress wanted to
Source: AP
May 15, 2007
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Harvard University on Tuesday approved a new general education curriculum for the first time in three decades that it says will help students "understand themselves as products of -- and participants in -- traditions of art, ideas, and values."The new curriculum requires students take semester-long courses in each of seven areas including ethical reasoning, critical skills, mathematical reasoning, sciences of living systems, sciences of the phys
Source: Jerusalem Post
May 16, 2007
In a new book that "totally contradicts everything that has been accepted to this day" about the Six Day War, two Israeli authors claim that the conflict was deliberately engineered by the Soviet Union to create the conditions in which Israel's nuclear program could be destroyed.
Having received information about Israel's progress towards nuclear arms, the Soviets aimed to draw Israel into a confrontation in which their counterstrike would include a joint Egyptian-Soviet b
Source: New York Times
May 16, 2007
At his death yesterday, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the founding father and long the public face of the religious right, left behind a university, a megachurch and a movement that are likely to carry on his legacy.
Mr. Falwell was best known to the public as a reliably combative television guest, who spouted off on everything from the Clintons to Sept. 11 to the children’s television show “Teletubbies,” which he saw as a gay conspiracy. But out of the limelight, Mr. Falwell was busy bui
Source: AP
May 16, 2007
WARSAW -- The pilgrims keep coming, seeking out the fragile 97-year-old woman in her tiny nursing home room filled with pictures and flowers.
The attention tires Irena Sendler sometimes. She never sought credit for smuggling 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto anyway. Not for risking execution to save other people's children, or holding out under torture by the Nazis, or enduring decades as a nonperson under the communist regime that followed.
She once dismis
Source: AFP
May 16, 2007
BEIJING -- The demolition of a supposedly protected section of Beijing's old city began this week, triggering renewed outrage over the demise of the Chinese capital's historic courtyards and alleyways.
The homes in Beijing's Dongsi Batiao are being razed to make way for a new residential development, crystallising the plight of the narrow maze-like alleys known as hutongs that once dominated the ancient city centre.
State media have seized on the destruction of the site
Source: International Herald Tribune
May 11, 2007
ROME -- The anarchist Giovanni Passannante is becoming a cause célèbre 97 years after his death.
Until this week, Passannante's skull and brain -- preserved in formaldehyde -- were on display at a criminology museum in Rome in what ranked as one of Italy's more macabre showcases. It was a strange punishment in a museum-loving society for someone who tried to kill the king of Italy 120 years ago. [That attempt on Umberto I was in 1878. The king was killed by another anarchist in 1900
Source: Guardian
May 16, 2007
MOSCOW -- They made up a secret French codeword for sex -- bingerle. They were careful never to use their real names but signed off affectionately: "With you always".
And during more than a decade of furtive correspondence, Russia's Tsar Alexander II and his young mistress Ekaterina Dolgaroukaya wrote frankly of their desire for one another - and of the pleasures of past and future love-making.
Yesterday some 22 unpublished erotic letters written by the Tsar t
Source: Independent
May 16, 2007
Monet's series of paintings depicting the dappled light playing across the water-lilies at his home in Giverny are considered some of the finest works by the French Impressionists.
But new research suggests the famously blurred effect achieved by the master's brush strokes may have been a literal representation of how he saw the world.
Monet's deteriorating sight, caused by the onset of cataracts, has long been the subject of speculation by art historians. A computer si
Source: Christian Science Monitor
May 16, 2007
WHEATON, Md. -- With quill in hand, Rabbi Menachem Youlus scrutinizes his latest treasure –- a centuries-old Torah, stabbed and burned by Nazis during World War II. Many of the onyx-colored Hebrew letters of the scroll are so damaged they now appear to float like rafts on a sea of tea-colored parchment.The Torah scribe will painstakingly retrace the letters –- 300,000 of them –- reapplying the ink six times on each letter to preserve the original penmanship.
It'
Source: AHA Blog
May 15, 2007
A new textbook on the history of the Khmer Rouge—the Cambodian Communist faction which murdered an estimated 1.7 million people during its four-year reign of terror in the late 1970s—cannot be used as a stand-alone reader for high-school students, says the government in Phnom Penh.
Instead, the book will be assigned as a supplementary source and used by the Cambodian Ministry of Education to produce a less controversial work on the same topic.A History of Democr
Source: AP
May 14, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO -- Darwin Coon is constantly reminded of his time on Alcatraz. The former bank robber can see the notorious island prison from just outside his front door in the city's North Beach district.
Coon remembers thinking he'd never get out alive, and was among the last inmates to leave when U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy closed the federal penitentiary in 1963. Years later, when a niece asked him to show her his old cell, he responded: "I never wanted to go back t
Source: AP
May 15, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Governors could order federal facilities to lower their flags to honor fallen military troops under legislation passed by the House Tuesday.
Source: AP
May 15, 2007
TOKYO -- The granddaughter of wartime Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, who was executed for crimes against humanity, said Tuesday she will run for a parliamentary seat in July to ''restore the honor'' of those who gave their lives for Japan.
Yuko Tojo, 67, told The Associated Press she will run as an independent from the Tokyo constituency for the legislature's upper house...In a separate statement, Tojo called for a national debate on punitive postwar treaties impos
Source: Lorraine Ahearn, Greensboro (N.C.) News-Record
May 13, 2007
Not that spring didn't come that May, warm and beautiful as it is now. The first rays of morning slanted in the window, bringing the full-throated music of songbirds and the forgotten scent of blossoms.
At last, the winter of 1945 was in ashes, and the war in Europe with it. In the camps outside town, corpses were piled in mounds, like rubble. In the cities, bricks of bombed-out buildings were stacked neatly along the sidewalks, ready to be put back together.
But to Bob
Source: 'Spy,' Telegraph
May 15, 2007
For the first time, Prince William joined his brother Harry at the annual Combined Services Memorial service in Hyde Park on Sunday, both decked out in traditional Savile Row style. But where did they get their [bowler] hats?
Spy picked up the trail at Lock & Co, the famous St James's hatters which has supplied the Palace for more than 300 years.
"Actually bowlers are pretty popular right now," says a spokesman."A lot of the fashion press are starting to feature them. For women it's a
Source: AP
May 15, 2007
LAUREL, Md. -- Many of Laurel's older residents can point to the precise spot in the shopping center where Arthur Bremer's gunshots paralyzed Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace and cut short his campaign for the White House in 1972.
They recall just what they were doing that May 15 afternoon when they heard that the loner from Milwaukee had shot Wallace five times as he shook hands in the parking lot of what was then the city's main retail plaza.
But 35 years later, as Laur
Source: AP
May 15, 2007
NEW DELHI -- The Taj Mahal is getting dirty, and some want to get it even dirtier.
The 17th-century mausoleum is renowned for the paleness of its marble, but these days it looks more yellow than white.
A report Monday by a parliamentary panel blamed air pollution, saying the Taj Mahal is encrusted with ''suspended particulate matter,'' or granules of dirt and soot found in high levels in the air around the site in the city of Agra...
To restore the monument
Source: BBC News
May 14, 2007
ROME -- The Emperor Augustus said he found Rome a city of brick -- and he left it a city of marble.
But 2,000 years on, the cracks in his legacy are beginning to show.
The Forum, the Colosseum and the palaces of the Palatine Hill still stand as proud testament to the Roman builders' genius. Yet today they are betrayed by monumental neglect...One of the latest closures came in November 2005, when a 16th-Century wall collapsed without warning in a wel
