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: NYT
November 30, 2005
A veteran black lawmaker urged prosecutors to reopen investigations of 10 bombings that rocked homes and churches during the yearlong Montgomery bus boycott, which was begun in 1955 after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. With 50th anniversary events starting this week, the legislator, State Representative Alvin Holmes, a Democrat, sent memorandums to federal, state and local prosecutors requesting investigations into the bombing of five homes, four churches and a c
Source: NYT
November 30, 2005
Defying high anticipation, one of two portraits of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart that have been in the New York Public Library's collection for more than a century failed to sell at Sotheby's yesterday in an auction that had generated advance controversy.
The other portrait, which had been owned by Alexander Hamilton and depicted Washington seated with a sword across his lap, sold for $8.1 million to an unidentified telephone bidder. Sotheby's predicted that it would go for $1
Source: NYT
November 30, 2005
Southern universities often find themselves struggling to temper Confederate imagery without alienating alumni and donors.SEWANEE, Tenn. - The flags from Southern states disappeared from the chapel. The ceremonial baton dedicated to a Confederate general who helped found the Ku Klux Klan vanished. The very name of the University of the South was tweaked, becoming Sewanee: The University of the South, with decided emphasis on Sewanee.
It all seemed eminently sens
Source: National Geographic
November 30, 2005
Meteorologists are describing the 2005 hurricane season with one word: unprecedented.
"Absolutely, as far as we know, this was unprecedented," said Keith Blackwell, a researcher at the University of South Alabama's Coastal Weather Research Center in Mobile. There's a long list of reasons why this hurricane season, which ends Wednesday, will be regarded as one for the ages:
• The 26 named storms that formed made it the m
Source: Itar-Tass (Belarus)
November 30, 2005
A memorial for the victims of Soviet repressions was vandalised on the north-eastern outskirt of Minsk on Wednesday. The vandals broke about a dozen crosses, tore down memorial plaques and icons, and scratched a Nazi swastika on one of them. They also damaged the marble memorial bench donated by the U.S. people to Belarus and installed more than 10 years ago during President Bill Clinton’s visit to the country. Research done by historians and archaeologists at the beginning
Source: Haaretz
November 30, 2005
German-born Pope Benedict XVI, who grew up during Hitler's rise to power, condemned the Nazi attempt to exterminate Jews on Wednesday as a "project of death" that will remain forever an indelible stain on human history.
In his strongest comments on the Holocaust since his election in April, the 78-year-old Pope spoke about a Biblical psalm recalling the destruction of Jerusalem in the Old Testament and the Babylonian exile of Jews.Addressing thou
Source: The Australian
November 30, 2005
With the hammer and sickle fluttering from shop fronts and odes to the revolution blaring across the capital, Laos has geared up to celebrate 30 years of communism.
In what was arguably the final act of the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese backed Pathet Lao communists who had overrun the landlocked Southeast nation formally created the Lao People's Democratic Republic on December 2, 1975.For the nation's five million people, and in particular its present rulers
Source: Yahoo News
November 30, 2005
The main building of the Library of Congress was evacuated Wednesday morning while a hazardous materials team investigated what people in the building said was a suspicious odor.
Capitol Police officer Dan Kurtz said two people in the Jefferson Building, located across the street from the Capitol, complained of feeling faint. One was treated at the scene and another was taken to a local hospital.
Source: USA Today
November 30, 2005
[by John Seigenthaler, a retired journalist]
"John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960's. For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven." -- Wikipedia
This is a highly personal story about Internet character assassination. It could be your story.[Editor's Note: This is a longer th
Source: Christian Science Monitor
November 30, 2005
In the past, it might have taken decades for a war memoir to be published. Today, half a dozen books address a conflict less than three years old.Not every publisher was impressed when Chris Ayres pitched a book in 2004 about his adventures as an unprepared young reporter plopped into the middle of the Iraq war a year earlier.
"The biggest criticism was that it was old," recalls Mr. Ayres, a Los Angeles-based correspondent for the Times of London who e
Source: NYT
November 27, 2005
Remember Earl Mazo? He was the co-author with Stephen Hess of a biography of Richard Nixon.
Regina Wicks Schatz and Earl Mazo were married this past weekend by Rabbi George B. Driesen at the Pooks Hill Marriott in Bethesda, Md.
Mr. Mazo, 86, retired as the head of the Joint Committee on Printing of the United States Congress, for which he supervised all official publications. Before that he was a political reporter for The New York Herald Tribune
Source: WP
November 29, 2005
Years before he wrote "On the Waterfront," before that film brought him an Oscar, and before he earned the ire of many colleagues by testifying during the Hollywood communist witch hunt, writer Budd Schulberg had the distinct honor of arresting Leni Riefenstahl.
He was in Germany, assembling a film to be used at the Nuremberg trials as evidence against the Nazis. Riefenstahl, the legendary director and propagandist for Hitler, knew where the skeletons were. So Schulberg, d
Source: WSJ
November 29, 2005
Rapid development and demand from the antiques trade are destroying the last vestiges of ancient wood temples and homes in Shanxi province-buildings that, until now, survived because of their isolation. The former mansions in this northern region of China, a once-prosperous hub along the ancient trading route known as the Silk Road, lie in decay. What the older residents still value -- the terra-cotta roof tiles, latticed doors and courtyards -- are of little interest to their children, who want
Source: Inside Higher Ed
November 29, 2005
Many colleges in recent years have eliminated majors or departments in relatively obscure fields, citing the need to focus on areas with growing student interest. Few, however, have taken the step Post University plans: eliminating majors in English and history and upper-level courses in liberal arts generally.Post, in Waterbury, Conn., was founded as a private university in 1890, and has always had a strong vocational orientation. The university has seen some ra
Source: NYT
November 29, 2005
As a lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department, Samuel A. Alito Jr., the Supreme Court nominee, played an active role in advancing the administration's efforts to expand law enforcement powers and limit restrictions on prosecutors, documents released Monday by the Justice Department show.The 470 pages of documents, which consist mainly of memorandums Mr. Alito wrote as a deputy assistant attorney general in the office of legal counsel in 1986 and 1987, generally address
Source: NYT
November 29, 2005
A prominent German archaeologist and aid worker who had lived and worked in Iraq for years has been kidnapped, the German government confirmed today as images of her surrounded by masked, armed men were broadcast on international television.
The kidnappers threatened to kill the archaeologist, Susanne Osthoff, unless Berlin stopped cooperating with the Iraqi government, according to a videotape delivered to the German state broadcaster ARD. A still image from the tape showed two blindfolded
Source: Guardian (UK)
November 25, 2005
The fireman's hall on Primorska Street, a crimson and white building with a large Croatian flag, is a centre of Pozega's community life, rented out for wedding parties and operettas.
On Christmas Day 64 years ago the hall was not a place to party. Around 150 of this country town's Jews were rounded up, penned here, robbed of their valuables, and put on cattle wagons bound for the concentration camps of fascist Croatia's Ustasha state. They all perished, along with hundreds of other
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 26, 2005
A French historian has caused uproar by claiming Napoleon provided the model for Hitler's Final Solution with the slaughter of more than 100,000 Caribbean slaves.
In The Crime of Napoleon, Claude Ribbe accuses the emperor of genocide, gassing rebellious blacks more than a century before the Nazis' extermination of the Jews.His accusations refer to the extreme methods used to put down a ferocious uprising in Haiti at the start of the 19th century. The
Source: WRKO Boston
November 29, 2005
France’s parliament voted Tuesday to uphold a law that puts an upbeat spin on the country’s painful colonial past, ignoring complaints from historians and the former French territory of Algeria.
The law, passed quietly this year, requires school textbooks to address France’s "positive role" in its former colonies.
France’s lower house, in a 183-94 vote, rejected an effort by the opposition Socialists to kill the law. Passage would have been unusual, since the
Source: Los Angeles Times
November 29, 2005
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame voters have chosen an eclectic new class broad enough to encompass jazz trumpeter Miles Davis and the punk-pioneering Sex Pistols, but they once again snubbed rap.Other members of the induction class announced Monday were Black Sabbath, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Blondie.
For a second consecutive year, hip-hop's prime candidate, Grandmaster Flash, failed to gather the necessary support from the 700 rock historians overseeing nominee selection.
