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: Boston Globe
November 30, 2006
The Civil Rights Project at Harvard is moving to the University of California at Los Angeles, along with its director, Gary Orfield, depriving the university of a prominent voice in the national debate about racial justice.
The 10-year-old center, which Orfield cofounded at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, has produced reams of influential research on inequality, particularly in education -- on the resegregation of schools, for example.
"I have been offered
Source: NYT
November 30, 2006
It’s not every day that an African country erects a 20-foot-tall statue in the busiest part of town to honor a white man.
But Brazzaville has always had a trend-defying relationship to its first master, Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza.
All across the continent, names that smacked of colonial rule were quickly jettisoned after independence. Leopoldville, the capital of the Belgian Congo named after King Leopold II, was renamed Kinshasa shortly after the country became Zaire.
Source: NYT
November 30, 2006
An appeals court on Wednesday cleared the way for the arrest and trial of former President Luis Echeverría on genocide charges in connection with the massacre of student protesters in 1968.
The court reversed earlier rulings that the statute of limitations had long since run out, saying it had two days to go.
The ruling is the final twist in a long battle by the administration of President Vicente Fox to charge and try Mr. Echeverría, who is 84 and in poor health, for h
Source: Reuters
November 30, 2006
Acting president Raul Castro is the"guardian" of
Cuba's communist government in the absence of his brother Fidel Castro and
in the face of U.S. threats, a hard-line member of the Cuban leadership
said on Thursday."We recognize Raul as the steadfast guardian of the Cuban Revolution,"
Information Minister Ramiro Valdes, a former security chief, said in a
speech to 200,000 people at a military-civilian rally in the eastern city
of Santiago.
His words added to the growing perception amon
Source: Reuters
November 30, 2006
ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Pope Benedict visited Istanbul's Blue Mosque on
Thursday and appeared to pray alongside an Islamic cleric during the visit
that made him only the second Roman Catholic Pontiff to enter a mosque.
The dramatic gesture was seen as yet another attempt by the Pope at
reconciliation after he infuriated much of the Muslim world with comments
taken as indicating he believed Islam was violent and irrational.
The Pope took off his shoes and donned what looked like whit
Source: AP
November 29, 2006
St. Nick, nein! A ban on St.
Nicholas at Vienna's kindergartens is taking some of the ho-ho-ho out of
the holidays for tens of thousands of tots this year. And it's creating a
political ruckus, with opposition parties accusing City Hall of kowtowing
to a growing Muslim population by showing Europe's Santa the kindergarten
door.
Municipal officials insist their decision is prompted more by psychology
than political correctness. Instead of joy, the sight of a strange bearded
figure at
Source: Reuters
November 28, 2006
The man who tried to kill Pope John Paul II in 1981
wants a day's leave from jail to discuss theology with Pope Benedict when
he visits Turkey this week, his lawyer said on Monday."I (Mehmet Ali Agca) asked the Turkish government to release me for one
day so that I can discuss theological issues with (Pope) Ratzinger," Agca
said in comments passed on by his lawyer Mustafa Demirbag at a news
conference."I want to discuss with him religious and mystic issues," Demirbag quoted
Agca as saying.
Source: Reuters
November 29, 2006
Three people have been detained for digging up part of
the Great Wall just days before strict new penalties are introduced to
protect China's most famous tourist attraction, Xinhua news agency said.
The men used excavators to take earth from the remains of part of the
Great Wall in Inner Mongolia, built at least 2,200 years ago, to use as
landfill for a village factory.
"It's just a pile of earth," Erhaihao village head Hao Zengjun was quoted
as telling officials from the Municipa
Source: Reuters
November 29, 2006
Building a housing complex or a road in the Holy
Land can often have grave implications.
Ancient cemeteries, burial caves from biblical times and centuries-old
artifacts have been unearthed during construction work in Israel over the
years, forcing contractors by law to call in archaeologists and sometimes
halt building projects.
In Holyland Park, a complex of apartments being built on a hill in
Jerusalem, archaeologists will soon finish removing bones and other
remnants from a
Source: Reuters
November 29, 2006
An ancient astronomical calculator
made at the end of the 2nd century BC was amazingly
accurate and more complex than any instrument for the
next 1,000 years, scientists said on Wednesday.
The Antikythera Mechanism is the earliest known device
to contain an intricate set of gear wheels. It was
retrieved from a shipwreck off the Greek island of
Antikythera in 1901 but until now what it was used for
has been a mystery.
Alt
Source: CSM
November 29, 2006
Not many people can still close their eyes and recall playing cards and folk dancing with Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and the young rebels in the bean-oil lit caves of Yanan. But Mr. Rittenberg can. The idealistic Jewish boy from Charleston, S.C., stayed behind when the US Army left China, dreaming of a new social order where skin color and ethnicity wouldn't matter.Madame Sun Yat-Sen, wife of China's founder, got him a UN relief job. He later joined the Communist Party, became
Source: International Herald Tribune
November 29, 2006
According to the English-language version of Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia, he was a victorious military and political leader who founded China's modern Communist state. He was also a man many saw as "a mass murderer, holding his leadership accountable for the deaths of tens of millions of innocent Chinese." Switch to Wikipedia in Chinese, and one discovers a very different man. There, Mao Zedong's reputation is unsullied by any mention of a death toll in the great purges
Source: LAT
November 25, 2006
Robert M. Gates, President Bush's nominee to lead the Pentagon, advocated a bombing campaign against Nicaragua in 1984 in order to "bring down" the leftist government, according to a declassified memo released by a nonprofit research group.
The memo from Gates to his then-boss, CIA Director William J. Casey, was among a selection of declassified documents from the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal posted Friday on the website of the National Security Archive,
Source: http://www.the-tidings.com
November 24, 2006
As chief counsel and staff director to the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations from 1977 to 1979, G. Robert Blakey --- who had worked in the Justice Department in the JFK White House years --- led the later investigation into JFK's death.
This week --- 43 years after the assassination --- the professor and O'Neill Chair in Law at the University of Notre Dame Law School, and author of "Fatal Hour: The Assassination of President Kennedy by Organized Crime," gave a
Source: Atlantic Monthly
December 1, 2006
Who are the most influential figures in American history? The Atlantic recently asked ten eminent historians. The result was The Atlantic’s Top 100—and some insight into the nature of influence and the contingency of history. Was Walt Disney really more influential than Elizabeth Cady Stanton? Benjamin Spock than Richard Nixon? Elvis Presley than Lewis and Clark? John D. Rockefeller than Bill Gates? Babe Ruth than Frank Lloyd Wright? Let the debates begin.
Source: Christian Science Monitor
November 29, 2006
"I never meant to stay in China.... I never even meant to go to China."
The contradiction defines Sidney Rittenberg's life and world. Mr. Rittenberg knows China's epic Communist revolution intimately, not as a witness, but a participant - often on the wrong side of history.
Not many people can still close their eyes and recall playing cards and folk dancing with Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and the young rebels in the bean-oil lit caves of Yanan. But Rittenberg can
Source: Jeffrey B. Spurr, Islamic and Middle East Specialist, Harvard University
November 28, 2006
Friends and colleagues,
I have just received the grave and deeply dispiriting news from Dr.
Saad Eskander that he has closed the Iraq National Library and
Archive for the time being as of last Tuesday. On 15 November, he
informed me that his institution had been bombed thrice in three
weeks, and subjected to sniper fire, including directly into his own
office. Another young librarian was recently murdered, and the
building had been shelled several times in the few days previo
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
November 28, 2006
Students who hand in papers with text copied from the Internet: Are they unethical sneaks, or just young people confused by the wide-open nature of the Web? Often they're the latter, some experts say.
Now Pima Community College is about to put that theory to the test.Instead of suspending or expelling students found guilty of plagiarism, the Arizona college will try to rehabilitate offenders by putting them through a five-step "traffic school," reports the Tucson Citizen.
Source: Media Matters
November 21, 2006
Even though Democrats gained control of the House of Representatives and the Senate without losing a single seat -- an electoral feat last accomplished in 1938 -- the media have not highlighted this achievement in the two weeks after Election Day. But when Republicans gained seats in both the House and Senate in the 2002 midterm elections, the first time since 1934 a president's party had done so during its first midterm election, news outlets praised it as "remarkable" and "histo
Source: Stone Pages
November 27, 2006
Much has been made of the corruption that has tarnished the image of Chinese local government officials but it seems bribery among the country's authoritative ranks was in full swing more than 2,800 years ago. The inscriptions on two bronze urns unearthed recently in northwest China's Shaanxi province tell the story of how, in 873 BCE, a noble man managed to bribe the judiciary in order to dodge charges of appropriating farmland and slaves.
