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: TPM Cafe
Apr 17, 2008
So the Senate has voted to require the Justice Department to investigate how Rep. Don Young's (R-AK) earmark came to be changed after the bill passed both houses of Congress. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), who was pushing a competing solution (an eight-member bicameral committee), says that sets "the troubling and bizarre precedent of turning the Attorney General into the de facto Senate and House Parliamentarian."
And indeed, it does seem to be a first. Associate Senate Historia
Source: Fox News
Apr 17, 2008
This week, the television show "Jeopardy!" featured a category titled "April 15th," filled with fun facts about the dire day. Let's see how much you know about U.S. tax history.
What was the first tax imposed upon the American Colonies? How did the U.S. pay the debts generated by the American Revolution? a) Property taxes, based on acreage and improvements; b) excise taxes on liquor, tobacco, sugar, auctions; c) head taxes, levied on each person in household and
Source: Arizona Republic
Apr 17, 2008
Arizona public schools would be barred from any teachings considered counter to democracy or Western civilization under a proposal endorsed Wednesday by a legislative panel.
Additionally, the measure would prohibit students of the state's universities and community colleges from forming groups based in whole or part on the race of their members, such as the Black Business Students Association at Arizona State University or Native Americans United at Northern Arizona University. Thos
Source: AFP
Apr 17, 2008
Towering like sentries above the necropolis of Ancient Thebes in southern Egypt, the world-famous Colossi of Memnon will see their number double from two to four from next year.
The painstaking work of 12 archaeologists and hundreds of workers is about to redefine the way visitors see and understand this mysterious site that has cast its spell over travellers for more than 2,000 years.
"It will be sensational, that's for sure!" Hourig Sourouzian, the project's
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Apr 17, 2008
The first drafts of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, which have never before been seen in public, are being published online for the first time today.
For decades one of the most important collections of primary materials in the history of science was available only to scholars at Cambridge University Library, which had been given the 90,000 papers and images by the Darwin family in 1942.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Apr 17, 2008
An eccentric aristocrat who deserted English society to travel the world believed she had found a cure for the plague, letters show.
Lady Hester Stanhope, the niece of the Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, claimed to have cured a 12-year-old boy with a mysterious remedy called "serpent stone".
The ingredients are not described, but it is thought to have been a homemade concoction.
Source: http://www.rapidcityjournal.com
Apr 17, 2008
A Native American historian and descendant of the Crazy Horse family, says he questions the authenticity of a knife and beaded sheath said to have been carried by Crazy Horse that will be on the auction block Saturday at a gallery in New Braunfels, Texas.
Source: Justin Ewers in US News & World Report
Apr 17, 2008
[Pope] Benedict is the head of a church that has been grappling for decades with how it should treat other religions. After the reforms of the 1960s, the Vatican moved, at least rhetorically, into a much more liberal era, recognizing publicly that all religions represented some form of fundamental truth, seeming to leave some of its more conservative theology behind. John Paul II, for one, carried this rhetoric into his papacy, meeting not just with Jewish and Muslim leaders but with members of
Source: NYT
Apr 17, 2008
An effort to substantially alter Arizona’s official Sept. 11 memorial has failed, ending months of rancorous debate over statements on it that some deemed unpatriotic or irrelevant to the attacks seven years ago.
The memorial, “Moving Memories,” is a large open-air concrete disc topped by an elevated ring of stainless steel with 54 phrases laser cut into it. Like other monuments to Sept. 11, it provoked arguments over the meaning of the attacks and how to commemorate them, something
Source: NYT
Apr 17, 2008
On March 6, 1970, a bomb explosion destroyed a Greenwich Village town house, killing three members of the radical Weather Underground and driving other members of the group even deeper into hiding. On Wednesday night, those events emerged as the focus of a sharp exchange between Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama at their debate in Philadelphia.
Mr. Obama was asked by a moderator, George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, about his relationship with Bill Ayers, a former Weath
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, is published by the Federation of American Scientists
Apr 17, 2008
A memorandum of understanding signed this month by the Director of the
Central Intelligence Agency and the National Archivist is expected to
enable the transfer of many permanently valuable historical CIA records
that are 50 years old or older to the custody of the National Archives
(NARA), officials of both agencies said today.Up to now, "we haven't had a framework" for such transfers, said Joe
Lambert, the new CIA chief information officer. And so, with few
Source: NYT
Apr 17, 2008
The phone call was routine, the kind often made before big auctions. Sotheby’s was preparing to sell a striking rust-brown image of a leaf on paper, long thought to have been made by William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography. So the auction house contacted a Baltimore historian considered to be the world’s leading Talbot expert and asked if he could grace the sale’s catalog with any interesting scholarly details about the print — known as a photogenic drawing, a crude precurs
Source: NYT
Apr 17, 2008
BEIJING — Not far from National Stadium, the city’s mammoth, just-finished Olympic arena, another construction project is still facing an Olympic deadline. The building, sheathed in a green construction tent, will house Beijing’s first museum exclusively dedicated to Tibet.
Inside, curators will display antiquities, dynastic records and reproductions to demonstrate China’s dominion over Tibet as far back as the 13th century. Many experts question China’s historical claims, but few c
Source: Email from Dr. Steve Lomazow
Apr 17, 2008
[Dr. Lomazow, Assistant Professor of Neurology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, is working on a book about FDR's health problems. Click here for his blog.]
Based on new and original research, my article, co-authored with leading dermatopathologist, A. Bernard Ackerman, entitled “An Inquiry Into the Pigmented Lesion Above the Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Left Eyebrow” has just been released in the April 2008 issue of the highly respec
Source: Slate
Apr 16, 2008
[In early April] when Texas authorities entered the compound of the polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints near Eldorado, the men, women, and children of the ranch surely thought of a similar raid conducted on their predecessors more than half a century earlier. In 1953, Arizona law-enforcement officials descended on the Short Creek community on the Arizona-Utah border and took nearly 400 Mormon fundamentalists, including 236 children, into custody. The raid on Sho
Source: http://www.news.com.au
Apr 16, 2008
A GOLDMINE of Australian military history has been uncovered in Bendigo. The unique material includes hundreds of film negatives more than 90 years old that had been stored in an old biscuit tin in a garage since the end of World War I.
The photos were taken by twice-wounded Jack Grinton, of Bendigo, and include shots from the Somme and Villers-Bretonneux in France, where some of the deadliest fighting took place.
The collection includes the camera used by Sgt Grinton -
Source: Huffington Post News Story
Apr 16, 2008
During the past week, Sen. Hillary Clinton has presented herself as a working class populist, the politician in touch with small town sentiments, compared to the elitism of her opponent, Sen. Barack Obama.
But a telling anecdote from her husband's administration shows Hillary Clinton's attitudes about the "lunch-bucket Democrats" are not exactly pristine.
In January 1995, as the Clintons were licking their wounds from the 1994 congressional elections, a debate
Source: Dallas Morning News
Apr 16, 2008
Looking back almost 40 years, the director of Texas' first presidential library says he should have been tougher on Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Harry Middleton, 86, said he and fellow staffers in the 1971 opening of the LBJ museum at the University of Texas at Austin were too close to the former president to give a highly critical account of the controversies that defined his tenure – especially the Vietnam War.
It wasn't until 1982, when historians and other outside experts
Source: Brandon Watson at the blog Siris, quoting from an article by Lawrence Kraus.
Apr 16, 2008
"THOMAS AQUINAS may never have actually wondered how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but his tortured musings about metaphysical issues associated with the non-corporeality of angels (and the related issue of whether there is excrement in heaven) stretched the limits of reasonable rational inquiry so far that later scholars invented the phrase to mock him."
The angels-on-pins parody is due in great measure to Isaac D'Israeli...
Source: http://www.april16archive.org/
Apr 16, 2008
The April 16 Archive uses electronic media to collect, preserve, and present the stories and digital record of the Virginia Tech tragedy of April 16, 2007. The archive is hosted on the Virginia Tech campus, and is curated by students, faculty, and staff. We welcome contributions from the greater Virginia Tech community and anyone who wants to share and reflect on these events. We are all Virginia Tech.
