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
Jul 5, 2008
Jesse Helms, the former North Carolina senator with the courtly manner and mossy drawl who turned his hard-edged conservatism against civil rights, gay rights, foreign aid and modern art, died early Friday. He was 86.
Source: NYT
Jul 5, 2008
The National Park Service is starting to consider reopening the Statue of Liberty’s crown, which has been closed since the 9/11 attacks, according to documents released Friday by Representative Anthony D. Weiner.
Mr. Weiner, a Queens Democrat who represents parts of Queens and Brooklyn, provided reporters with copies of a request for bids that the National Park Service sent out in June for a study to determine if the crown can be safely reopened.
Liberty Island was clos
Source: AP
Jul 4, 2008
The American colonel, troubled by what he was hearing, tried to stall at first. But the declassified record shows he finally told his South Korean counterpart it "would be permitted" to machine-gun 3,500 political prisoners, to keep them from joining approaching enemy forces.
In the early days of the Korean War, other American officers observed, photographed and confidentially reported on such wholesale executions by their South Korean ally, a secretive slaughter believed
Source: http://www.9news.com
Jul 4, 2008
For the Fourth of July weekend, nearly 1,000 people from around the country will meet in Colorado to talk about a part of this country's past many often forget or ignore.
"This conference will explore: What does it mean today to be an American?" said Irene Hirano, longtime president and CEO of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles.
Hirano just stepped down and now serves as an executive advisor for the organization which purposefully held their
Source: CNN
Jul 4, 2008
How would the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin feel about the way the United States has turned out 232 years after declaring its independence?
Not pleased, a majority of Americans recently polled said.
According to a new CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey, 69 percent of adult Americans who responded to a poll June 26-29 said the signers of the Declaration of Independence would be disappointed by the way the nation has turned out overall.
Twent
Source: Fox News.com
Jul 4, 2008
SCRANTON, Pa. — Few of the 3,000 historic postcards in Jack Hiddlestone's collection are as veiled in mystery as the one with Abraham Lincoln on the front.
The postcard, from 1909, depicts an ornate stone pillar decked out with bronze eagles and lions and topped by an enormous bronze bust of the nation's 16th president. Along the bottom of the card are the words "Lincoln Monument, Nay Aug Park."
Here's the mystery: Sometime in the early decades
Source: BBC
Jul 4, 2008
The ancient city of Pompeii has fallen into such disrepair that the Italian government has declared a "state of emergency" in a bid to save the ruins.
Ministers intend to appoint a special commissioner to oversee the site, and have earmarked extra funding for it.
According to analysts, the ruins have suffered from lack of investment, mismanagement, litter and looting.
Source: BBC
Jul 4, 2008
The final mystery of 9/11 will soon be solved, according to US experts investigating the collapse of the third tower at the World Trade Center.
The 47-storey third tower, known as Tower Seven, collapsed seven hours after the twin towers.
Investigators are expected to say ordinary fires on several different floors caused the collapse.
Conspiracy theorists have argued that the third tower was brought down in a controlled demolition.
Unlike the twin towers, T
Source: Yahoo
Jul 3, 2008
Three out of five Americans think the U.S. Constitution is fine as is, but 39% fear it doesn't place enough restrictions on the government, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.
As the nation's July 4 birthday nears, 91% say they would vote for the Constitution as the fundamental law of the United States. Just 2% would vote against it.
Fifty-nine percent (59%) of voters say the 219-year-old "living document" should be left alone, while anot
Source: TurkishPress.com
Jul 3, 2008
Iraq said on Thursday it has created a special task force to investigate the theft of
valuable ancient Judaic manuscripts that later turned up in Israel.
The rare books, confiscated during the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, were rescued from US bombing
at the start of the 2003 war and then sent to the United States for restoration but later wound up
in Israel instead.
At a press briefing at the National Museum in Baghdad, Iraqi Minister of Tourism and Archaeology
Mohammad Abba
Source: http://www.catholicnews.com
Jul 3, 2008
In mid-April Silvio Berlusconi was elected prime minister of Italy in a campaign focused on increasing security and fighting crime, particularly by cracking down on illegal immigration.
In addition to strengthening local government's power to expel undocumented foreigners, the Berlusconi government has focused its crime-fighting efforts on the estimated 140,000 Roma and Sinti -- Gypsies -- who live in the country.
At least half the Gypsies are Italian citizens.
Source: History Today
Jul 3, 2008
Astronomers from Texas State University have suggested an alternative date for Julius Caesar’s first landing in Britain. Donald W. Olson and Russell Doescher dispute the accepted dates for the Roman landing of August 26-27, 55BC, because the English Channel was flowing in the wrong direction. Tests carried out in August 2007 provided a unique opportunity for comparison with 55BC tidal conditions. It prompted the astronomers to suggest a revised date of August 22-23 for the invasion at Deal on th
Source: Time
Jul 3, 2008
Obama now wears a flag pin on his lapel. Every day.
Short of wearing a stars and stripes onesie, the flag lapel pin is the quickest sartorial method for a politician to telegraph his or her patriotism. The origin of the flag lapel pin is murky, though it is by necessity linked the history of the American flag as a commonly used symbol. According to Mark Leepson's Flag: An American Biography, the "near religious reverence many Americans have" for our national symbol dates o
Source: AP
Jul 3, 2008
- Historian James Heintze can tick off colorful accounts of how the nation has celebrated the Fourth of July over the years: In the 19th century, canons fired, church bells sounded and fireworks exploded.
Indianapolis residents watched in 1911 as two trains purposely collided at full speed, the locomotive personnel bailing out before the crash.
The gray-haired, bespectacled academic has chronicled just about everything there is to know about commemorating the birth of t
Source: NYT
Jul 3, 2008
The Ainu had lived on Japan’s northernmost island for centuries, calling their home Ainu Mosir, or Land of Human Beings. Here, they had fished, hunted, worshiped nature and established a culture that yielded “Yukar,” an oral poem of Homeric length.
But just as with America’s expansion West, the Japanese pushed north in the late 19th century in the first sign of their imperialist ambitions. Japanese settlers decimated the Ainu population, seized their land and renamed it Hokkaido, or
Source: LiveScience
Jul 3, 2008
July Fourth is a celebration of outdoor cooking, as well as our nation's birthday. It's time to brush off the barbecue and throw masses of processed meat on the grill.
As we all stand around waiting for the fire to die down so that we can make s'mores, it's also a time to ponder the notion that the barbecue is a ritual 700,000 years old or more, and it might have something to do with our big brains.
Human ancestors started out eating whatever they could; berries, bark
Source: Reuters
Jul 3, 2008
Archeologists are opening a cave sealed for more than 30 years deep beneath a Mexican pyramid to look for clues about the mysterious collapse of one of ancient civilization's largest cities.
The soaring Teotihuacan stone pyramids, now a major tourist site about an hour outside Mexico City, were discovered by the ancient Aztecs around 1500 AD, not long before the arrival of Spanish explorers to Mexico.
But little is known about the civilization that built the immense cit
Source: AP
Jul 3, 2008
Madame Tussauds' has a new museum in Berlin — complete with a controversial wax Adolf Hitler hunkered down in his bunker.
The likeness of the Nazi leader, hunched over a desk in a dimly lit bunker just before he committed suicide at the end of World War II, was one of dozens unveiled Thursday at the opening of the British wax museum's latest branch.
The waxworks here are showcased in chronological and thematic order, highlighting Europe's postwar history.
Source: Chicago Tribune
Jul 3, 2008
Arlan Ettinger will never forget the response he got the day he took one of civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks' hats to a meeting at Harlem's historic Apollo Theater.
"It was a fairly plain-looking black hat. And then I said it was Rosa Parks'. And their mouths just opened up without saying a word and tears" flowed, Ettinger said. "It was a very, very powerful moment. You could see the impact this woman has had on everyone."
Ettinger's New York City auc
Source: NYT
Jul 3, 2008
Baby boomers, hired in large numbers during a huge expansion in higher education that continued into the ’70s, are being replaced by younger professors who many of the nearly 50 academics interviewed by The New York Times believe are different from their predecessors — less ideologically polarized and more politically moderate.
“There’s definitely something happening,” said Peter W. Wood, executive director of the National Association of Scholars, which was created in 1987 to counte
