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: Rediff (India)
February 8, 2007
It's a 261-year-old tragedy.
On September 12, 1745, the Swedish ship East Indiaman Gotheborg almost reached the Gothenburg dock on Sweden's west coast after completing 30 months of her third voyage to China.
The ship -- belonging to the Swedish East India Company, which was established in 1731 to trade in southeast Asia -- was on a trade voyage, with goods like tea, porcelain, silk and spices worth millions on board. But she sank at the entrance of the dock.
Source: Newsweek
February 12, 2007
The president did seem mildly chastened by his party's defeat in the midterm elections—but not inclined to change course dramatically in Iraq.
He compared his situation to the crisis Harry Truman faced in the early days of the cold war. Then, as now, Bush said, the United States confronted a dangerous ideological foe. Truman had answered with the Truman Doctrine, a vow to protect free peoples wherever they were threatened with communist domination. Truman's policies had been unpopul
Source: UPI
February 8, 2007
PARIS -- The United Nations has expressed "deep concern" over Israeli construction projects around the Temple Mount, or al-Aqsa Mosque, in Jerusalem.
Koichiro Matsuura, director-general of UNESCO, said Thursday he has written a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert asking for the construction plans for the sites. He also asked the prime minister to refrain from action that could increase tension in the area, which could endanger the historic sites.
The
Source: Newsweek
February 12, 2007
When Harriet Washington, a med-school graduate and former fellow in ethics at Harvard Medical School, decided to research medical crimes against African-Americans, she feared she'd turn up much more than the Tuskegee experiment. She was right.
Washington's new book, "Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present," reveals that the 40-year Tuskegee study—which allowed black men with syphilis to die untre
Source: AP
February 8, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Inventors of the MRI, the Ethernet, the LP record and a popular weedkiller are among 18 people picked for induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
The Akron, Ohio-based hall of fame was founded by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the National Council of Intellectual Property Law Associations. It has inducted members since 1973 and will have honored 331 inventors with the new class.
The hall once was at the Patent Office in Washington, bu
Source: AP
February 8, 2007
JERUSALEM -- The Israel Antiquities Authority is considering broadcasting real-time, 24-hour video from a contentious Jerusalem holy site in a bid to allay Muslim fears the shrine will be harmed by repair work, an official said Thursday.
Muslim leaders ridiculed the idea, and Israeli police were on heightened alert before Friday Muslim prayers at the site, imposing travel restrictions and planning for a helicopter to hover overhead.
Israel says it needs to replace a cen
Source: International Herald Tribune
February 7, 2007
[Detlev Karsten ] Rohwedder was one of the last victims of a German terrorist movement that had horrified a wealthy and fairly complacent society while killing 34 people. Called the Baader-Meinhof gang after its founding members, Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader, the Red Army Faction had its roots in the 1968 student protest movement.
It moved quickly to waging an armed struggle against the capitalist system. This involved bank robberies, bomb attacks on government buildings and U.
Source: AP
February 7, 2007
WASHINGTON -- The Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced a project Wednesday that hopes to record at least 1,500 oral histories from black families over the next year.
The recordings are to be placed at the Library of Congress and in the archives of the Smithsonian Institution's future National Museum of African American History and Culture...
The CPB is funding the $1.4 million StoryCorps Griot project. Part of the project's name, "griot," is derived f
Source: Footnote.com press release
February 6, 2007
WASHINGTON and LINDON, Utah -- Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein and Footnote, Inc. Chief Executive Officer Russell Wilding today announced the release of Footnote.com in all the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) locations nationwide [list at http://www.archives.gov/locations]. This new service at the research centers will provide patrons free access to NARA content that Footnote has digitized and indexed.
Source: Telegraph
February 8, 2007
ROME -- A Jewish academic has shocked Italy by stating that Jews murdered Christians during the Middle Ages so that their blood could be used in ritualistic ceremonies.
The details were revealed in yesterday's Corriere Della Sera newspaper which published extracts of the book by Professor Ariel Toaff, "Easter of Blood: European Jews and Ritual Homicides".
Last night his claims were denied by leading Jewish figures including his father Elio, once chief rabbi o
Source: Guardian
February 8, 2007
MADRID -- Spanish police have arrested 52 people accused of plundering 300,000 artifacts from excavation sites throughout Andalusia in the largest swoop against illegal archaeological treasure hunting in the world, the interior ministry said.
The coins, urns, sculptures and mosaics from Iberian, Roman and Islamic settlements were stolen at night using metal detectors, historical maps of the digs and excavation manuals, police said. Sometimes watchmen collaborated with the thieves, l
Source: Haaretz (Tel Aviv)
February 7, 2007
In S.Y. Agnon's story "As a Musician Playing," a character, Avigdor, stands on the roof of his house and looks out over the Old City of Jerusalem. "House touches house and roof touches roof. A person can pass from one end of Jerusalem to another by the roofs, as a city built connected together, Avigdor said, alluding to the Psalms, sighing deeply. Jerusalem is connected by its houses and divided by its inhabitants."
It is hard to know whether the the Jewish Quart
Source: Los Angeles Daily News
February 6, 2007
The UCLA Film & Television Archive makes its long-awaited move to the new, state-of-the-art Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum in Westwood on Friday...
"With this theater's level of technology, we can go from silent film to the most extraordinary and contemporary surround sound, and we can go from the nitrate era all the way up to digital in a contemporary setting," [UCLA Dean Robert] Rosen enthuses...
With its store of more than 220,000 movies and
Source: Chicago Tribune
January 31, 2007
JAMESTOWN, Va. -- So this guy is walking toward the parking lot with his wife, big guy with a small camera around his neck, and he's obviously not happy.
"I thought there would be buildings," he says.
The first permanent English settlement in the New World is celebrating, in a responsibly big way, its 400th birthday this year.
To put that in era-perspective: In 1607, Shakespeare's latest hit play, "Antony and Cleopatra" (follow-up to his
Source: AP
February 8, 2007
ROME -- They died young and, by the looks of it, in love. Two 5,000-year-old skeletons found locked in an embrace near the city where Shakespeare set the star-crossed tale "Romeo and Juliet" have sparked theories the remains of a far more ancient love story have been found.
Archaeologists unearthed the skeletons dating back to the late Neolithic period outside Mantua, 25 miles south of Verona, the city of Shakespeare's story of doomed love.
Buried between 5,00
Source: AP
February 7, 2007
DALLAS -- Southern Methodist University professors on Wednesday overwhelmingly rejected a plan to hold a faculty-wide vote on whether the campus should host a partisan think-tank as part of George W. Bush's presidential library.
Faculty Senate President Rhonda Blair said it was defeated because the measure was too narrow, asking professors if they approved or disapproved of the partisan institute, which would report to the Bush Foundation, not SMU. The issue may be discussed again n
Source: National Security Archive
February 7, 2007
Washington, DC, February 7, 2007 - The CIA's proposed new rule on Freedom of Information Act processing fees is likely to discourage FOIA requesters while imposing new administrative burdens both on the Agency and the public, according to formal comments filed with the CIA today by the National Security Archive of George Washington University.
The Archive's general counsel, Meredith Fuchs, commented that, "Significant time, money, and other resources were spent by the CIA on fe
Source: NYT
February 7, 2007
Saad Eskander, the director of Iraq’s National Library and Archive in Baghdad, finally had some time to catch up on his diary after a couple of very busy weeks. As he wrote in his latest entry, he was having trouble repairing the Internet system; the Restoration Laboratory “was hit by 5 bullets”; and “another librarian, who works at the Periodical Department, received a death threat. He has to leave his house and look for another one, as soon as he can; otherwise, he will be murdered.”
Source: International Herald Tribune
February 6, 2007
PARIS -- Two decades ago, France transformed an abandoned railway station into a glittering museum for Impressionist masterpieces. Now, the Orsay Museum is getting another overhaul — to resurrect forgotten architectural details of the original train depot.
The museum on the banks of the Seine River is shrouded in scaffolding and netting as experts paint it, rebuild corroded metal marquees and restore pollution-stained stonework.
The touchups on the facade are part of a
Source: Washington Post
February 7, 2007
Sixty years ago this summer, the Exodus 1947 sailed from Marseilles, France, with 4,500 passengers, most survivors of the Holocaust, and began another horrific chapter in Holocaust-era history.
The refugees were bound for Palestine, then a British territory, and, a few miles from shore, the British Royal Navy boarded the ship and eventually deported the passengers to France. When they arrived back in Marseilles, the refugees refused to disembark. They went on a hunger strike and end
