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: San Francisco Chronicle
January 15, 2007
Many of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s most formative writings and sermons -- some dating to when King was a precocious 19-year-old seminary student in 1948 -- languished for decades in a battered cardboard box.
A decade before her death in 2006, King's widow, Coretta Scott King, flew to San Francisco to ask Stanford Professor Clayborne Carson to examine and write about the box's contents.
The texts, which illuminate the theological foundations that America's most
Source: http://www.news.com.au
January 10, 2007
RUSSIAN archaeologists have uncovered the 2000-year-old remains of a warrior preserved intact in permafrost in the Altai mountains region, the official Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily says.
The warrior was blond had tattoos on his body. He was wearing a felt coat with sable fur trimmings and was buried in a wooden frame containing drawings of mythological creatures with an icepick beside him, the paper said.
Local archaeologists believe the man was part of the ruling elite of
Source: WaPo
January 15, 2007
In a recent survey of college students on U.S. civic literacy, more than 81 percent knew that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was expressing hope for "racial justice and brotherhood" in his historic "I Have a Dream" speech.
That's the good news.
Most of the rest surveyed thought King was advocating the abolition of slavery.
The findings indicate that years of efforts by primary and secondary schools to steep young people in the basics o
Source: Salt Lake Tribune
January 13, 2007
The pioneering artificial heart developed by Robert Jarvik will go on display at the Smithsonian Institution next month.
''As an item of historic interest, this is the only time the public has had a chance to look at it,'' Jarvik said of the heart first implanted by a University of Utah Health Sciences Center surgical team into the chest of Seattle-area dentist Barney Clark nearly a quarter century ago.
''Unfortunately, a lot of people who go see it would hav
Source: AP
January 13, 2007
EDINBURGH -- With barely the raising of a glass, Scotland is preparing to mark 300 years since accepting the Treaty of Union with England -- which bound two countries together and gave the world Great Britain.
The anniversary Tuesday of the Scottish parliament's voting to accept the treaty is focusing attention on growing discord, with advocates of Scottish independence gaining strength in their campaign for a referendum on breaking the union.
"This treaty can and
Source: AP
January 13, 2007
In 1759, British forces successfully beat back French occupiers of a triangular point of land where the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers meet to form the Ohio river. The British built Fort Pitt and named the adjoining area Pittsburgh.
Today, next to office buildings and sitting underneath modern highways, part of Fort Pitt is surrounded by a chain-link fence. Inside, construction equipment scoops up dirt and broken chunks of concrete in preparation to cover a wall and moat that onc
Source: Reuters
January 12, 2007
A major new exhibition of Martin Luther King's personal papers reveals the years of work that lay behind his "I Have a Dream" speech that has come to symbolize the U.S. civil rights movement.
The exhibition of 600 documents at the Atlanta History Center is the largest display of the papers since they were bought from the King family by an Atlanta consortium on behalf of Morehouse College last June for $32 million.
Displays of speeches and sermons King wrote in
Source: AP
January 13, 2007
What appear to be crude stone tools may provide evidence that people lived in Minnesota 13,000 to 15,000 years ago, which if confirmed would make them among the oldest human artifacts ever found in North America, archaeologists said Friday.
Archaeologists in the northern Minnesota town of Walker dug up the items, which appear to be beveled scrapers, choppers, a crude knife and several flakes that could have been used for cutting, said Colleen Wells, field director for the Leech Lak
Source: AP
January 12, 2007
Howard Hughes could have tied the knot with the Hollywood glamour girl anywhere in the world. But the billionaire's obsession with privacy prompted him to marry actress Jean Peters in the remote mining town of Tonopah 50 years ago Friday.
After failing in an effort to save the improbable site of the secret Jan. 12, 1957 wedding -- the L&L Motel -- a group of Tonopah residents has announced plans to commemorate the event by building a life-size statue of the couple.
Source: Guardian
January 13, 2007
Mary Martin was 11 years old when her father taught her to box. She would come home from school scratched and bruised, her ears ringing with abuse from the playground. Mary Martin had the unhappy distinction of being the granddaughter of Britain's last convicted witch.
Mrs Martin knew her grandmother, Helen Duncan, as a comforting woman she could trust, the granny with a special gift: talking to spirits. But this was April 1944, at the height of the war with Germany. Mrs Duncan had
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
January 15, 2007
Debate over the proposed George W. Bush presidential library at Southern Methodist University intensified on the campus last week when a group of faculty members sent a letter to the university's president, R. Gerald Turner, asking for a" campuswide dialogue" on the role and effect the library would have at SMU.
According to the letter, faculty members at the Dallas institution are concerned that an acc
Source: The Australian
January 15, 2007
Displays of Nazi symbols such as swastikas could be banned across Europe under a German proposal put to European Union members overnight.Germany will also seek to make denial of the Holocaust a crime punishable by up to three years' imprisonment during its six-month presidency of the EU.
German Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries was expected to outline details of the proposed law, that would punish anyone in the EU who publicly rejected the Nazi slaughter of six
Source: Yahoo
January 14, 2007
PETERSBURG, Kentucky (Reuters) - Ken Ham's sprawling
creation museum isn't even open yet, but an expansion
is already underway in the state-of-the art lobby,
where grunting dinosaurs and animatronic humans
coexist in a Biblical paradise.
A crush of media attention and packed preview sessions
have convinced Ham that nearly half a million people a
year will come to Kentucky to see his Biblically
correct version of history.
Source: AP
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 Anthon
Source: Legal History (Blog run by Mary Dudziak)
January 15, 2007
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the Thurgood Marshall Law Library at the University of Maryland announce a joint project to make records of the Civil Rights Commission available on-line. The press release, below, refers to the Civil Rights Act (presumably meaning the Civil Rights Act of 1964), but of more value to researchers will be Commission reports, such as a 1961 report on voting rights, available here
Source: AP
January 14, 2007
Monday is a Utah state holiday and a federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. -- except for the state's legislators, who report to work that same day every year to open their annual session.
Civil rights leaders say the state -- which doesn't have a single black legislator -- should be ashamed of itself.
''They really should be embarrassed,'' said Jeanetta Williams, president of the Salt Lake branch of the NAACP. ''It does frustrate me -- very much.''
Source: NYT
January 14, 2007
With growing faculty unease over plans to enshrine President Bush’s official papers and a policy institute at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, the process of creating the nation’s 13th presidential library is off to a familiar start: discord.
On Thursday, 68 theologians, professors and other faculty members present and past, citing complaints about President Bush’s “poor marks” on civil liberties, the environment, gay rights and the war in Iraq, sent the university president
Source: NYT
January 14, 2007
DURING the midterm elections, a question nagged at Republicans who agreed to follow the White House script on the Iraq war: Does the president care more about his legacy than the party’s in pushing his course?
By last week, many Republicans on Capitol Hill had come to believe that their interests and the president’s may be diverging even wider.
On one end of Pennsylvania Avenue is a president who argues that history will judge him favorably on the war; on the other are
Source: NYT
January 14, 2007
NOBODY will quibble with President Bush’s line Wednesday night that in Iraq, “Victory will not look like the ones our fathers and grandfathers achieved; there will be no surrender ceremony on the deck of a battleship.”...
[What might victory look like?]
Remember the Spanish Civil War? The best America can hope for, some experts said, would be for Iraq to turn into today’s version of the Spanish Civil War.
For readers without immediate access to Wikipedia, t
Source: NYT
January 14, 2007
Germany wants to use its European Union presidency to push through legislation that would make denying the Holocaust punishable by stiff prison sentences in all 27 of the union’s member states.
Germany’s justice minister, Brigitte Zypries, said Thursday night that Germany’s commitment to combating racism and xenophobia — and keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive — was both an enduring historical obligation and a present-day political necessity.
