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: The Australian
February 7, 2006
Iran's biggest-selling newspaper announced yesterday that it was holding a contest for cartoons of the Holocaust in response to the publication in European papers of caricatures of the prophet Mohammed. "It will be an international cartoon contest about the Holocaust," said the graphics editor of Hamshahri, Farid Mortazavi.
The aim was to turn the tables on the Western assertion that newspapers could print offensive material in the name of a free
Source: Haaretz
February 7, 2006
Archeologists uncovered dozens of ancient tombs at the Highway 6 construction site near Kiryat Gat, the Itim news agency reported Tuesday. The find yielded a trove of artifacts, including mint-condition pottery, statues, jewelry and the remains of sacrifices offered to the religious deities the inhabitants believed in.Peter Fabian, who is conducting the dig at the behest of the company building the highway, said they discovered cave drawings depicting deer that used to roam
Source: PennLive/AP
February 7, 2006
A director at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum was named to head the museum that will commemorate the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.Alice M. Greenwald will oversee the creation of the World Trade Center Memorial Museum, an underground gallery of exhibits planned next to the memorial that marks the destroyed twin towers' footprints. Groundbreaking is scheduled for next month; the museum and memorial are slated to open in 2009.
The museum "will honor in
Source: The Australian
February 7, 2006
Japanese leaders have renewed demands that Russia return four islands seized in 1945. Japan has yet to sign a peace treaty ending World War II with Russia due to the dragging dispute over the four Kuril islands off its northern coast, which Tokyo calls the Northern Territories."The government has the consistent opinion to try to sign a peace treaty as soon as possible after solving the territorial dispute," Foreign Minister Taro Aso told a rally of 1600 people in t
Source: Guardian
February 5, 2006
Some of the world's most precious archaeological treasures - the ancient Egyptian tombs and temples at Luxor - are being devastated by salt water that is eating their foundations, scientists have discovered.The temples of Amun, Luxor and Karnak, designated World Heritage Sites, have survived 4,000 years of arid desert heat but are now being destroyed by rising ground water.
The threat has been uncovered by American Egyptologists, who have warned that urgent acti
Source: BBC News
February 5, 2006
Hopes that a ship built on the River Wear could return to the north-east of England after almost 140 years have finally been scuppered. The City of Adelaide was built in 1864 by a Sunderland shipyard. It is the oldest surviving clipper in the world - the only other is the Cutty Sark.
Source: NYT
February 6, 2006
As the Senate prepares to hold hearings on Monday on domestic eavesdropping by the National Security Agency, old Washington hands see a striking similarity to a drama that unfolded three decades ago in the capital.
In 1975, a Senate committee led by Senator Frank Church of Idaho revealed that the N.S.A. had intercepted the phone calls and telegrams of Americans. Then, as now, intelligence officials insisted that only international communications of
Source: Tolerance.org
February 3, 2006
Twenty U.S. soldiers received Medals of Honor for their actions in the Wounded Knee massacre. Trying to correct history, Native Americans want the medals rescinded. On Dec. 29, 1890, American soldiers slaughtered more than 350 Lakota men, women and children in an event known to history books as the Battle at Wounded Knee.
Twenty of those soldiers were awarded Medals of Honor later renamed the Congressional Medals of Honor for their actions.
One hu
Source: BBC News
February 6, 2006
Demonstrators in a seaside suburb of Essex have staged a five month long protest to angry at plans to widen a road over the burial site of a Saxon king dubbed the King of Bling.Local resident Ant Bailey, 39, co-founded the camp five months ago with local environmental campaigner Shaun Qureshi.
Several different things inspired him to set it up, he said, including "the trees, the park, the burial site" he thinks are at risk from Southend B
Source: NYT
February 6, 2006
The quarrel between Tokyo and Beijing over Japan's colonial and wartime history spilled over to the sensitive topic of Taiwan over the weekend, after Japan's foreign minister praised his country's past rule over the island.The minister, Taro Aso, said in a speech on Saturday that Taiwan's present high educational standards resulted from Japanese colonial policies. China, which ceded Taiwan after losing a war to Japan in 1895 and considers the island a renegade province, cond
Source: Las Vegas Review Journal
February 6, 2006
At first, Richard Johnston thought nothing of an online auction house's offer to sell a letter written in 1900 by a member of Butch Cassidy's infamous Wild Bunch for $5,999. It was only later that the Old West history buff from Reno made a surprising discovery: The two-page letter from outlaw Willard E. Christiansen to Utah Gov. Heber Wells was stolen from the Utah State Archives."I checked my files and discovered that I had seen the letter there in 1976," Johnston
Source: Louisville Courier Journal
February 6, 2006
A Middletown Kentucky historian is leading a team that is uncovering an escaped slave's past, along with the rest of Kentucky's slave history. The group includes scholars in Oldham, Henry, Trimble and Jefferson counties, as well as other states. What they find could lead to the first national trail following the course of an escaped slave, starting in New Castle, Kentucky and twisting up into Canada. Bibb, who was born between September 1813 and August 1814 just south of New
Source: WTOP (Washington D.C.)
February 6, 2006
The German Historical Museum said on Monday it was being sued to return a valuable poster collection seized by the Nazis from collector Hans Sachs to his son, who lives in the United States.The museum, situated in the former East Berlin, said it was surprised at the claim by Peter Sachs as the West German authorities had paid his father "considerable" compensation for the collection in the 1960s.
Hans Sachs, a Jewish dentist, was the leadin
Source: Washington Times
February 6, 2006
Many scholars are divided on whether President Bush has gone too far in the exercise of wartime powers. Presidents have often asserted disputed powers in the name of national security. Abraham Lincoln, citing a necessity to suppress support for the Confederacy, suspended habeas corpus, the right of suspects to challenge charges against them, in the Civil War.
Eighty years later, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt
Source: NYT
February 5, 2006
The trail led from New York to Geneva. Geneva to Zurich. Zurich to Rome. Rome to Beirut. Beirut to an Italian village. And back to New York.
The cast of characters read like a list from "The Maltese Falcon" or a novel by Eric Ambler.There was an art dealer of dubious reputation, a Levantine of unreliable memory, Italian grave robbers known as tombaroli, and the illustrious curators and museum directors who seemed above suspicion.
At
Source: Secrecy News, the newsletter written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation of American Scientists
February 5, 2006
Congressional Research Service (CRS) analyses of the Bush Administration's domestic surveillance activity have been exceptionally influential, and their influence has been magnified by media coverage that has sometimes overstated the rather nuanced conclusions of CRS analysts.
But now the CRS faces a backlash from Republican leaders in Congress who apparently resent the agency's high profile and independent judgment, and seek to rein it in.There has probab
Source: NYT
February 5, 2006
Betty Friedan, the feminist crusader and author whose searing first book, "The Feminine Mystique," ignited the contemporary women's movement in 1963 and as a result permanently transformed the social fabric of the United States and countries around the world, died yesterday, her 85th birthday, at her home in Washington.
Source: NYT
February 5, 2006
It is up to Congress to decide when the Mall is full. And although in 2003 it declared that no future construction would take place on the land, it can also make exceptions, as it did last week for the new African-American museum, which has been in the works since the early 1900's.Already, in fact, there are two other projects that have been approved — a visitors' center linked to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and a memorial to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to be loca
Source: Associated Press
February 4, 2006
An intense debate erupted during the Ford administration over the president's powers to eavesdrop without warrants to gather foreign intelligence, according to newly disclosed government documents. George H.W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney are cited in the documents.The roughly 200 pages of historic records obtained by The Associated Press reflect a remarkably similar dispute between the White House and Congress fully three decades before President Bush's ackno
Source: BBC News
February 3, 2006
Oetzi, the prehistoric man frozen in a glacier for 5,300 years, could have been infertile, a new study suggests. Genetic research, published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, also confirms that his roots probably lie in Central Europe.
Oetzi's body was found in the melting ice of the Schnalstal glacier in the Italian Alps in 1991.
Examination of his remains has already revealed the Copper Age man almost certainly died as a re
