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: Minneapolis Star Tribune
March 11, 2007
Tucked away amid basement boxes and bookshelves in a handsome St. Paul house is a treasure trove that scholars say is rapidly becoming the world's largest repository of Hmong books, artifacts, photographs and recordings. There's a valuable qeej, a traditional Hmong instrument that looks like a wooden trombone and sounds like an accordion. There's a book written by a Chinese emperor in 1810, exploring the history of the oppressed people known in China as the Miao.
There are chipped p
Source: Live Science
March 11, 2007
Great fiction, impossible science
The urge to hug a departed loved one again or prevent atrocities are among the compelling reasons that keep the notion of time travel alive in the minds of many.
While the idea makes for great fiction, some scientists now say traveling to the past is impossible.
There are a handful of scenarios that theorists have suggested for how one might travel to the past, said Brian Greene, author of the bestseller, “The Elegan
Source: USA Today
March 12, 2007
Back in 1989, as a young graduate student at the University of Southern California researching a masters thesis, William Aceves asked the government for information about its"freedom of navigation" program involving international waters and air space.
The seemingly benign request, made under a 1966 law designed to let people find out what their government is doing, languished for years.
Just last month, Aceves, now a full professor at California Western School of Law in San Diego, go
Source: Guardian
March 12, 2007
BAD AROLSEN, Germany -- Cornelis Brouwenstijn was forced to surrender his black leather wallet when he entered Neuengamme concentration camp in northern Germany in 1944. Inside it the 22-year-old, a handsome blond Dutch Jew, had tucked his passport, ration cards, some curly-edged photographs of family and friends and a love poem typed on two sides of an onion-skin page: "Ode to a Girl", whose "skin is clear as glass".
Brouwenstijn's now crumbling wallet is one of
Source: Washington Post
March 12, 2007
Every half-century or so, Virginia throws a party to commemorate the arrival of English colonists on its shores. This year comes a biggie: the 400th anniversary. The whole world's invited, and the guest list is especially long and prestigious.
Even the queen of the mother country plans to cross the Atlantic to help mark the occasion.
Already, the cost of activities surrounding the bash is upward of $200 million. The trick has been how to celebrate something long buried
Source: Los Angeles Times
March 12, 2007
ALCATRAZ ISLAND, Calif. —- For 150 years the lighthouse beacon here has alerted sailors to San Francisco's rocky, fog-shrouded coast. It beamed from the island when it housed a Civil War-era fort, a military prison, a maximum-security penitentiary and a national park.
Today, the public is free to roam the island's artillery batteries, prison cells and guardhouses —- virtually every building on the 22-acre island except its most recognizable structure, the towering lighthouse. The ol
Source: Times (of London)
March 12, 2007
Life for the first people to settle down to farm in Britain was far more violent than previously supposed, research suggests.
Far from a peaceful expansion into empty and fertile lands, the transformation from hunter-gatherer to farming society was riven with conflict and change. New techniques have allowed archaeologists to pinpoint ages of Early Neolithic, long-barrow burial mounds more accurately, forcing them to revise virtually every assumption about Britain’s first farmers.
Source: International Herald Tribune
March 11, 2007
LONDON -- An article from 1937 under the name of Winston Churchill that blamed Jews for their own persecution has ruffled a long-held view among Britons of their wartime leader's pro-Jewish sentiments.
Some experts on the history of British Jews dismissed the article, saying its existence has been well-known and it had never been published because Churchill rejected the views of the ghost-writer who composed it...Accounts of the article were reported Sunday in several British newspa
Source: Times (of London)
March 12, 2007
BERLIN -- Adolf Hitler should be stripped of German citizenship, according to MPs from the state that awarded it to him 75 years ago, aiding his rise to power.
The MPs hope such a move will bring redemption for the city of Braunschweig which, they claim, has been wrongly blamed for appointing Hitler as a civil servant on February 26, 1932. The appointment made Hitler, who was born in Austria, a German national, meaning he could run in the presidential election a few weeks later.
Source: CBC (Canada)
March 11, 2007
The Hamas education minister has reversed an order to remove and destroy copies of an anthology of Palestinian folk tales in school libraries because it contains a few references to sexual body parts.
Nasser Shaer said Saturday that he had not been informed of the ban, which was implemented earlier this week.
"I have decided to correct the illegal measures that were taken regarding disposing the book," Shaer told the Associated Press.
Some 1,500 c
Source: AFP
March 11, 2007
LONDON -- The Second World War prime minister Winston Churchill argued that Jews were "partly responsible for the antagonism from which they suffer" in an article publicised for the first time Sunday.
Churchill made the claim in [a never-published] article entitled "How The Jews Can Combat Persecution" written in 1937, three years before he started leading the country.
He outlined a new wave of anti-Semitism sweeping across Europe and the United Sta
Source: Telegraph
March 10, 2007
ROMe -- A teenage fad to attach padlocks to Rome's oldest bridge as a sign of unbreakable love has caused a political ruckus and triggered a mysterious theft.
Every week, hundreds of teenage couples visit the Ponte Milvio and testify to their everlasting love by writing their names on a padlock and clipping it to a chain wrapped around two of the bridge's lampposts. They then throw the keys into the Tiber.
The fad was immortalised last year in I Want You, a romantic nov
Source: NYT
March 11, 2007
ALREADY in this pre-presidential year, the question is out and about: How judgmental will the public be of candidates, how demanding of idealized personal lives and vintage family values?
It’s old news that divorce is no longer disqualifying for a candidate, hasn’t been since 1980, when the country elected Ronald Reagan, the divorced and remarried family-values candidate. As national divorce rates skyrocketed, divorce lost its wounding political impact. The end.
Or was
Source: Newsweek
March 12, 2007
American museums are returning some of the world's great antiquities to their original homes. Should they? A new debate over who owns the past is underway.
In 1972, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art paid a record-smashing $1 million for an ancient Greek vase known as the Euphronios Krater. It was worth every penny. The krater—a 12-gallon pot for mixing wine and water—was one of only two dozen surviving examples by the great painter Euphronios, and it even had his signature. Thom
Source: Newsweek
March 11, 2007
Newsweek has prepared a slide show featuring pictures of past presidents in Latin America.
[Scroll to Bush in Latin America.]
Source: NYT
March 11, 2007
Former political prisoners are coming forward with accounts of witch hunts and torture that can sound unreal to young South Koreans today. Large-scale antigovernment demonstrations, tear gas and firebombs have long since receded from the streets. North Korea stirs more sympathy for its economic plight than it does fear.
The Korea of three decades ago was a very different place.
Source: AP
March 9, 2007
GUATEMALA CITY —- Mayan priests will purify a sacred archaeological site to eliminate "bad spirits" after President Bush visits next week, an official with close ties to the group said Thursday.
"That a person like (Bush), with the persecution of our migrant brothers in the United States, with the wars he has provoked, is going to walk in our sacred lands, is an offense for the Mayan people and their culture," Juan Tiney, the director of a Mayan nongovernmental o
Source: AP
March 10, 2007
NEW ORLEANS -- With the boom of cannons, the Navy commissioned the USS New Orleans before thousands of onlookers Saturday, marking the first time since at least World War II a Navy ship has been built and commissioned in its namesake city...
The $1.3 billion USS New Orleans is a transport ship that can embark a landing force of up to 800 Marines. It is the fourth ship to bear the New Orleans name. The last one was an amphibious assault vessel that served during the Vietnam War and i
Source: Reuters
March 10, 2007
TOKYO -- Prime Minister Shinzo Abe sought on Sunday to contain fallout from his remarks about women forced to act as wartime sex slaves for Japanese soldiers as the furor threatened to cloud summits with Chinese and U.S. leaders.
Abe sparked outrage abroad when he said in February there was no evidence that Japan's government or army had forced the mostly Asian women to work in military brothels during World War Two.
Abe has endorsed a 1993 government apology to the &qu
Source: Sunday Times (of London)
March 11, 2007
MILAN -- Pope Benedict XVI plans to bring back the celebration of mass in Latin, overriding a rare show of protest from senior cardinals.
With a papal decree said to be imminent, Catholic publishers in Rome are preparing new editions of the Latin missal. They have sent proofs to Vatican authorities for approval, the Rome newspaper La Repubblica reported yesterday.
Vatican sources said Benedict, who is fluent in Latin, is considering publication of a papal “motu proprio”
