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 (UK)
January 17, 2007
Venice is to get a new bridge, its first in more than 70 years. This week the first piles were sunk on the bank of the Grand Canal by the railway station for Il ponte di Calatrava, which should be ready to bear its first cargo of tourists across to the buses and car parks of Piazzale Roma by the summer. The prefabricated sections were towed up the canal over the past two summers and are now ready to be bolted in place.
Designed by Santiago Calatrava, the Spanish engineer whose dram
Source: AP
January 17, 2007
Hawaii Sen. Daniel Akaka reintroduced the Native Hawaiian Recognition Bill on Capitol Hill on Wednesday morning.
The so-called Akaka bill is part of a seven-year push for legislation to recognize Native Hawaiians as indigenous inhabitants of the 50th state. Their legal status would be similar to that of American Indians and Alaskan Natives.
The bill provides a process to set up a Native Hawaiian government and then start negotiations to transfer power and property from
Source: Dallas Morning News
January 17, 2007
Southern Methodist University's president told about 175 professors Wednesday that any agreement to put the Bush presidential library, museum and a policy institute on the campus will preserve SMU's academic values and ethics.
"I assure you that any real or perceived fears or concerns about the institute or any part of the library in some way inhibiting this university's practice of academic freedom and diversity of opinion and practices are unfounded," SMU President Geral
Source: BBC
January 18, 2007
A Starbucks coffee shop in Beijing's Forbidden City palace could close following a massive online protest over its presence on the historic site.
A palace spokesman was quoted by state media as saying they were considering whether Starbucks would remain after a major renovation of the site. A China state TV personality has led an online campaign to have the US coffee giant's outlet removed from the site.
Rui Chenggang said its presence "trampled over
Source: Guardian (UK)
January 18, 2007
Charles I may not have been a brilliant king but he has come to us as a devoted husband, a connoisseur of art who cleaned up the drunkenness and profanity tolerated by his father. He didn't lose his head over women.
Drunkenness and profanity returned with a vengeance with his son Charles II, who spent more time with Nell Gwyn and a series of mistresses than his royal spouse.So when Sarah Poynting, of Keele University, announced she had cracked two letters writte
Source: KTVB Idaho
January 18, 2007
Leaders of four Idaho American Indian tribes today viewed Depression-era murals depicting an Indian lynching that are hung in the stairwell of the old courthouse destined to house the state Legislature in 2008 and 2009.Shoshone-Bannock, Shoshone-Paiute, Nez Perce and Coeur d'Alene representatives spent 25 minutes inside the vacant Ada County Courthouse.
There are 26 murals in all, including two depicting a buckskin-clad Indian as he's apprehended by two white me
Source: DPA German Press Agency
January 18, 2007
Estonia is deliberately ignoring "groundless accusations" from Russia in an increasingly heated row over the fate of a WWII memorial, the Estonian prime minister said on Thursday. "Until 1997-1998 Estonia reacted to accusations, but it didn't do us any good ... After that we started to deliberately ignore accusations," Andrus Ansip told reporters.His comments follow a blast of criticism from Russia over recent legislation passed in Estonia. Last week Esto
Source: Boston Globe
January 18, 2007
A French court handed a leading far-right French politician a three-month suspended jail sentence and fined him 5,000 euros ($6,500) on Thursday for questioning the Holocaust.The Lyon court found Bruno Gollnisch, No. 2 in the far-right National Front party, had "disputed a crime against humanity" in remarks he made during a news conference in the eastern French city on October 11, 2004.
The judge also ordered Gollnisch to pay 55,000 euros in damages to
Source: USA Today
January 16, 2007
A massive ruin offers fresh clues about the culture of Peru's vanished Chachapoya, the "cloud warriors" who battled the Inca Empire more than 500 years ago.
Best known for building mountainous cliff-side tombs and filling them with bundled mummies, the Chachapoya (cha-cha-POY-ah) were once rulers of the northern Andes. Aside from cliff tombs and stone houses, they have left archaeologists few large ruins to study.
Until now.
The ruin was first discovere
Source: Asia Media News Daily
January 17, 2007
The CIA has fixed information regarding South Korea's history on its World Factbook website, a civic group said yesterday. The CIA has changed its description of Korea from an "independent kingdom for much of the past millennium" to an "independent kingdom for much of its millennia-long history," the Voluntary Agency Network of Korea said.The original sentence was inaccurate as it insinuated that South Korea's history only began a millennium ago and ignor
Source: AP
January 17, 2007
Monkeys infected with a resurrected virus that was responsible for history's deadliest epidemic have given scientists a better idea of how the 1918 Spanish flu attacked so quickly and relentlessly: by turning victims' bodies against them.
The research, which found that an over-stimulated immune system killed even as it tried to fight the flu, helps explain why many of the 50 million people who died in the epidemic were healthy young adults. Conventional flu usually claims mostly the
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
January 16, 2007
Whether it is the hunt for the last surviving perpetrators of the Holocaust, the restitution of looted artworks, or new evidence of the complicity of governments in that immense crime against humanity by Germany and its allies, U.S. public interest in European war crimes has not flagged since the end of World War II.
But the war crimes committed by Japan — including biological warfare, human experimentation, and massacres — have attracted much less attention in the six decades since
Source: Independent (UK)
January 15, 2007
Their hair, once a symbol of youthful rebellion, is now shot through with grey. Bodies that writhed with wild abandon to psychedelic music sport stiff knees and wrinkles.
"How many of you are on acid right now?" rock critic Joel Selvin asked an audience of former hippies who turned out yesterday to mark the 40th anniversary of the Human Be-in, the counterculture event that set the stage for the Summer of Love. "How many of you are on antacid right now? "
Source: Yahoo
January 16, 2007
Putting to rest a 200-year-old mystery, scientists say Napoleon Bonaparte died from an advanced case of gastric cancer and not arsenic poisoning as some had speculated.
After being defeated by the British in 1815, the French Emperor was exiled to St. Helena--an island in the South Atlantic Ocean. Six years later, at the age of 52, Bonaparte whispered his last words, "Head of Army!"
An autopsy at the time determined that stomach cancer was the cause of his deat
Source: NYT
January 16, 2007
Because of its otherworldly brilliance, the 16th-century Taíno Indians of Cuba called it turey, their word for the most luminous part of the sky.
They adored its sweet smell, its reddish hue, its exotic origins and its dazzling iridescence, qualities that elevated it to the category of sacred materials known as guanín. Local chieftains wore it in pendants and medallions to show their wealth, influence and connection to the supernatural realm. Elite women and children were buried wit
Source: WaPo
January 16, 2007
At the stroke of midnight on Dec. 31, something profound happened in the government secrecy system. With little fanfare, the paradigm of secrecy shifted.
The days when secrets would be secret forever officially ended that night. Some 700 million pages of secret documents became unsecret. No longer were they classified. They became . . . public. Imagine it: Some 400 million formerly classified pages at the National Archives, another 270 million at the FBI, 30 million elsewhere, all e
Source: NYT
January 16, 2007
For what experts say is probably the first time, more American women are living without a husband than with one, according to a New York Times analysis of census results.
In 2005, 51 percent of women said they were living without a spouse, up from 35 percent in 1950 and 49 percent in 2000.
Coupled with the fact that in 2005 married couples became a minority of all American households for the first time, the trend could ultimately shape social and workplace policies, inc
Source: WaPo
January 10, 2007
The Justice Department and the National Archives improperly assured the Sept. 11 commission that its members had access to all relevant materials about the Clinton administration's terrorism policies, without knowing if original, uncopied documents had been removed from the archives by former national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, a Republican congressional report said yesterday.
The report, issued by Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), accused both agencies of
Source: MSNBC
January 15, 2007
Ruby Bridges was just six years old when she became the face of school integration in 1960. Now, as NBC's Martin Savidge reports, she's helping to save the school that made her famous.
Source: MSNBC
January 15, 2007
Would France have been better off under Queen Elizabeth II?
The revelation that the French government proposed a union of Britain and France in 1956 — even offering to accept the sovereignty of the British queen — has left scholars on both sides of the Channel puzzled.
Newly discovered documents in Britain’s National Archives show that former French Prime Minister Guy Mollet discussed the possibility of a merger between the two countries with British Prime Minister Sir
