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: SanDiego.com
Jan 23, 2008
American Forces Network radio chattered in the background as Pat Kell fed and dressed her four children in Japan the morning of Jan. 23, 1968. A month earlier, her husband – Chief Petty Officer James Kell – volunteered for a secret mission aboard a World War II cargo ship newly refitted with communications gear. The vessel deployed from Yokosuka, Japan, after a voyage from San Diego.
Through the broadcast buzz, Pat Kell thought she heard the name of her husband's ship: Pueblo.
Source: AP
Jan 23, 2008
At least 40 bodies found in a mass grave in the central German city of Kassel could be the remains of slave laborers from a Nazi armaments factory, a city official said Wednesday.
The first four skeletons were found last week at a construction site at the University of Kassel, said police spokeswoman Sabine Knoell. Twenty-six more were found on Monday and Tuesday, and about 10 more were unearthed Wednesday, she said.
"It could well be that more skeletons will be fo
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Jan 23, 2008
James S. Rollins is called the father of the University of Missouri because he was responsible for gathering support to open the institution and donated the land for the original campus. But he was also a slave owner, and, generations later, one of his descendants has decided to address that through a gift to the black-studies program.
Clay Westfall Mering is Mr. Rollins’s great-great grandson. He has given a $25,000 donation to the university to endow a fund for black studies, offi
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Jan 23, 2008
Two shipping containers' worth of records created by Iraq's Baath Party that have been stored on an American naval facility for the past 21 months are about to find a new home at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank and library affiliated with Stanford University.
Hoover signed a deal on Monday with the Iraq Memory Foundation—a private, nonprofit group that has had custody of the documents since just after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003—for the transfer of about seve
Source: AP
Jan 23, 2008
The heart of a revered 19th century Argentine friar and patriot was stolen from an urn in the Franciscan monastery where it was kept for years as a religious relic, a church official said.
Whoever scooped up friar Mamerto Esquiu's heart on Tuesday left the urn it was stored in behind, said Jorge Martinez, head of the San Francisco monastery in the northwestern province of Catamarca.
"The theft was carried out because of the heart -- nothing else was stolen," h
Source: Bruce Bartlett, uthor of “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy,” in the NYT
Jan 23, 2008
The history of anti-recession efforts is that they are almost always initiated too late to do any good. This chart, based on recession timelines from the National Bureau of Economic Research, shows the enactment of stimulus plans is a fairly accurate indicator that we have hit the bottom of the business cycle, meaning the economy will improve even if the government does nothing.
[HNN Editor: Click on SOURCE link to view chart.]
Source: boingboing
Jan 22, 2008
A moving and intriguing Wired feature tells the story of the activists, hackers and engineers who are working to un-shred millions of hand-shredded secret files that the East German Stasi ripped to pieces in the run-up to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The secret police panicked when they realized that they were about to lose their tight rein on power and shredded as much as they could -- but they had collected more files than any other bureaucracy in the history of the world, and they couldn'
Source: AP
Jan 22, 2008
Towering above the modern streets and buildings of Irbil, the citadel's narrow alleyways and dusty courtyards stand almost deserted. Its mud-brick houses, built atop layers of ancient civilizations stretching back through millennia, are crumbling.
Irbil's citadel, claimed to be one of the longest continuously inhabited urban areas on Earth with a history of more than 8,000 years, is in danger. Its slopes are eroding and its buildings are collapsing.
But authorities in n
Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH)
Jan 22, 2008
On January 22, 2008, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) brought the “Presidential Records Act Amendments of 2007″ (H.R. 1255, S. 886) to the floor under the Senate’s unanimous consent rule that allows non-controversial bills to be considered on an expedited basis. However, Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) became the latest Republican senator to publicly put a hold on the bill and blocked floor consideration.
Last September, Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY) blocked a vote in th
Source: Reuters
Jan 22, 2008
The victims of human sacrifice by Mexico's ancient Mayans, who threw children into water-filled caverns, were likely boys and young men not virgin girls as previously believed, archeologists said on Tuesday.
The Maya built soaring temples and elaborate palaces in the jungles of Central America and southern Mexico before the Spanish conquest in the early 1500s.
Maya priests in the city of Chichen Itza in the Yucatan peninsula sacrificed children to petition the gods for
Source: AP
Jan 22, 2008
A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks.
The study concluded that the statements "were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses."
The study was poste
Source: NYT
Jan 22, 2008
What’s in a disease’s name? Long-hidden shame, perhaps.
In most cases, as with lung cancer or heart failure, names are not much more than thumbnail descriptions. But for a few common illnesses like Alzheimer’s disease and for hundreds of rarer ones, doctors and patients often use names honoring the first doctor to publicize the illness or its symptoms.
Some doctors have criticized that as a source of confusion. Different names are used in different countries in some cas
Source: Press Release--Council on Contemporary Families Briefing Paper on Teen Pregnancy and Poverty
Jan 22, 2008
In fairy tales, there are two possible outcomes for a young girl. In the Disney version, the handsome prince rescues her, then marries her, and everyone lives happily ever after. In the dark version, the heroine makes a dreadful mistake that leads to disaster. For the past 15 years, political pundits have been telling us a dark fairy tale about American teens, blaming America's high poverty rates on the actions of teenage girls who have babies out of wedlock. This assumption guided the welfare r
Source: NYT
Jan 22, 2008
Rudolph W. Giuliani likens himself to a boxer who never takes a punch without swinging back. As mayor, he made the vengeful roundhouse an instrument of government, clipping anyone who crossed him....
Mr. Giuliani was a pugilist in a city of political brawlers. But far more than his predecessors, historians and politicians say, his toughness edged toward ruthlessnessand became a defining aspect of his mayoralty. One result: New York City spent at least $7 million in settling civil rights laws
Source: BBC
Jan 22, 2008
Laser technology is being used to locate potential archaeological sites hidden by woodland in Worcestershire.
The hope is that ancient settlements and farms across the Wyre Forest will be detected by lasers fired from aircraft 3,300ft (1,000m) up.
The results are processed by computers and turned into images of the ground, currently hidden by trees.
Source: LAT
Jan 22, 2008
He works as a blacksmith in one of Baghdad's swarming Shiite slums. But at least once a month, Abu Saif tucks a pistol into his belt, hops into a minibus taxi and speeds south.
His goal: to unearth ancient treasures from thousands of archaeological sites scattered across southern Iraq.
Images of Baghdad's ransacked National Museum, custodian of a collection dating back to the beginning of civilization, provoked an international outcry in the early days of the war in 200
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 22, 2008
An amateur treasure hunter has unearthed a hoard of bronze age axe heads thought to be worth about £80,000.
Tom Peirce started combing a field with his metal detector after dropping off a school coach party at a farm.
Within a few minutes it began beeping and he found the first axe head fragment 10in into the soil.
When he dug deeper, Mr Peirce found dozens more and, over the following two days, he and a colleague, Les Keith, uncovered nearly 500 bronze art
Source: Irish Sun
Jan 22, 2008
The long-held notion that agriculture in Europe started a good 5,000 years before developing in the Americas, has been challenged by new evidence suggesting that farming started in the Old World and New World almost simultaneously.
The evidence, in the form of Peruvian squash seeds, signifies that planting, watering, weeding, and harvesting in the New and Old Worlds was almost concurrent.
In a paper published in the journal Science last June, anthropological archaeolog
Source: NYT
Jan 22, 2008
When engineers began poking and prodding at the Utah Capitol a few years ago, sounding the structure for how it might fare in the earthquake that seismologists say will surely strike here one day, they grew increasingly scared as they moved higher toward the dome.
The quality of the concrete varied — solid at the foundation, crumbling near the top — and that finding could mean only one thing: There had been only so much building material, and construction crews, in finishing the dom
Source: Lawrence Repeta at the website of Japan Focus
Jan 21, 2008
[Lawrence Repeta is a Professor at Omiya Law School and the author of Yami wo Utsu -- Secrecy and the Future of America -- featuring interviews with leading FOIA activists in the United States, published in Japanese by Nihon Hyoronsha.]
More than six decades after the end of World War II, responsibility for wartime suffering remains a highly sensitive political issue in Asia, nowhere more so than in the Japan-Korea relationship. When the two countries normalized relations in 1965, o
