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: Christian Today
Oct 30, 2007
The village church and its steeple have dominated the skyline of rural France for centuries, surviving feuding warlords, foreign invasion and the upheavals of the French Revolution.
But as local mayors look to the future, some are thinking the unthinkable and threatening to demolish the crumbling churches they have to fund, prompting cries of sacrilege from a heritage lobby that says the French way of life is under attack.
Hundreds of 19th-century edifices face the wrec
Source: NYT
Oct 30, 2007
Art and history scholars, amateur coin collectors and professional numismatists are among the 11 members of the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee, the panel that offers coin-design guidance to the United States Mint and the Treasury secretary.
“Coins are a very particular form of artwork and tend to be very evocative of American history,” said Mitchell Sanders, the committee chairman and an amateur coin collector and market researcher based in Rochester. “We’re working on somethin
Source: NYT
Oct 30, 2007
The names of thousands of people who were executed during the bloodiest period of Stalin’s purges were read aloud in a daylong ceremony here on Monday at a square in front of the former Soviet secret police headquarters, where many of the victims died or began their journey to execution.
Memorial, a human rights organization that assists survivors of Soviet repression and commemorates its victims, organized the event, one of a series this year marking the 70th anniversary of a perio
Source: LiveScience
Oct 30, 2007
More than fifty headless skeletons have been unearthed in one of the oldest Pacific Islander cemeteries in the world.
The individuals were members of a socially complex society, traveling between islands hundreds of miles away, a new study suggests.
The finding could solve a long-held debate over whether the Lapita people, thought to be ancestors of the Polynesians, were isolated on individual islands or interacted with other distant Lapita tribes to find marriage partn
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, is published by the Federation of American Scientists
Oct 30, 2007
As required by law, the Director of National Intelligence today
disclosed that the budget for the National Intelligence Program in
Fiscal Year 2007 was $43.5 billion.
The disclosure was strongly resisted by the intelligence bureaucracy,
and for that very reason it may have significant repercussions for
national security classification policy.
Although the aggregate intelligence budget figures for 1997 and 1998
($26.6 and $26.7 billion respectively) had previously been disclosed
Source: Waco Tribune
Oct 30, 2007
For Byron Johnson, director of the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum, a nearly 70-foot-tall statue of a 19th-century Ranger represents the idyllic image most Americans have of the legendary Texas lawmen.
But for Ernesto Calderon, a Mexican-American and Waco native with roots in the Chicano movement, the statue carries the symbolism a 70-foot-tall noose could hold for an African-American.The proposal to erect a towering Texas Ranger statue outside Waco’s off
Source: AFP
Oct 30, 2007
For many Franco's mausoleum, with its giant granite cross that is visible for kilometers around, is a painful reminder of the suffering endured under Franco's repressive dictatorship, which only ended after his death in 1975. But a controversial law to be voted on by parliament Wednesday which aims to honor the the victims of the 1936-39 civil war and the dictatorship that followed it, includes measures to depoliticize the grounds.The "law of historical memory" wou
Source: Reuters
Oct 30, 2007
Russian President Vladimir Putin paid his respects on Tuesday to millions of people killed under Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and called for the country to unite to prevent a repeat of its tragic past.Putin, a former KGB spy, marked Russia's annual day of remembrance for the victims of Stalin's purges with a visit to Butovo, a military training ground near Moscow where tens of thousands of people were executed by firing squads.
Millions of people were executed
Source: http://www.yomiuri.co.jp
Oct 29, 2007
Students at a Kyoto girls school dressed in schoolgirl sailor suits at an explanatory meeting for prospective students and their parents on Saturday, after research showed that the school was the first in the country to introduce them.
The Heian Jogakuin St. Agnes School in Kamigyo Ward re-created the uniforms that the nation's schools first adopted during the Taisho era (1912-1926).
An investigation by Okayama-based school uniform manufacturer Tombow Co. confirmed that
Source: http://www.nctimes.com
Oct 29, 2007
OCEANSIDE --- At first, it is the graffiti that stands out on a group of granite boulders that sit a few hundred yards from a small seasonal creek. But closer inspection shows a series of faint red markings with much more historic significance.
"These are clearly pictographs, and they're probably Luiseno," said Joel Seay, referring to the Luiseno band of American Indians who once lived in the San Luis Rey River valley.
An amateur archeologist and preservationi
Source: History Today
Oct 29, 2007
Declassified documents reveal US diplomats doubted Margaret Thatcher's political worth when she became Tory leader. A briefing paper sent to Henry Kissinger in 1975 read: “Unfortunately for her prospects of becoming a national, as distinct from a party, leader, she has over the years acquired a distinctively upper middle-class personal image.” The documents, part of a batch on European foreign relations recently made available by the National Archives in Washington, also comment on “her conventi
Source: Jerusalem Post
Oct 29, 2007
Victory by 800 mounted Australians over 4,000 well-trained Turks seems a bit far-fetched. But that's exactly what happened on October 31, 1917, at the Battle of Beersheba, which 90 years ago arguably changed the direction of the Sinai and Palestine campaign during World War I.
It was a day of surprises for the Turks, one that had been planned far in advance: Already in May 1917, General Philip Chetwode wrote his Notes on the Palestine Campaign, which outlined a suggested plan of att
Source: NYT
Oct 29, 2007
What does it mean to be the Democratic front-runner at this stage in the race? Not as much as Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is now leading in the national polls, might wish, if past elections are any indicator.
Starting in 1952, the Democrats have contested the presidency 11 times (not counting 1964, 1980 and 1996 when they nominated incumbents). Of those 11 times, only five of the candidates who were leading in national polls in January won the nomination: Adlai E. Stevenson
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 29, 2007
Preferably headless, rattling chains optional, but soul wandering the earth for eternity essential: it is what those of a ghoulish persuasion may want to see this Hallowe'en week — a ghost.
To assist in this quest the National Trust has released a top 10 list of its most haunted historic properties.
In at number one is Blickling Hall, Norfolk, described by the National Trust as a "magnificent Jacobean house famed for its fine tapestries, rare books and reputedly th
Source: AFP
Oct 29, 2007
Fifty years ago Saturday, a perky-eared mutt named Laika, scooped up from the streets of Moscow, became the first earthling to breach our planet's atmosphere and enter space.
It was a short and painful voyage for the docile little stray, which died within hours after launch, but a crowning coup for the Soviet Union.
Only a month earlier, Moscow had humiliated the United States by lobbing Sputnik, the world's first satellite, into orbit.
Sputnik 2 added anot
Source: AP
Oct 29, 2007
The FBI used mob muscle to solve the 1964 disappearance of three civil rights volunteers in Mississippi, a gangster's ex-girlfriend testified Monday, becoming the first witness to repeat in open court a story that has been underworld lore for years.
Linda Schiro said that her boyfriend, Mafia tough guy Gregory Scarpa Sr., was recruited by the FBI to help find the volunteers' bodies. She said Scarpa later told her he put a gun in a Ku Klux Klansman's mouth and forced him to reveal th
Source: AP
Oct 29, 2007
When it comes to presidential politics, the news media loves front-runners. And seems to hate them, too.
Within the first five months of the presidential contest, the media effectively had reduced the field to five candidates, even though there were 17 mainstream Democrats and Republicans, a study of political coverage found.
But the tone of the coverage for the top two front-runners — Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton and Republican Rudy Giuliani — hardly was friendly. N
Source: Science Daily
Oct 29, 2007
Questions about human migration from Asia to the Americas have perplexed anthropologists for decades, but as scenarios about the peopling of the New World come and go, the big questions have remained. Do the ancestors of Native Americans derive from only a small number of “founders” who trekked to the Americas via the Bering land bridge? How did their migration to the New World proceed? What, if anything, did the climate have to do with their migration? And what took them so long?
A
Source: National Security Archive
Oct 29, 2007
Washington D.C., October 29, 2007 - The National Security Archive filed a motion on Friday, October 26, seeking expedited discovery against the Executive Office of the President to find out what e-mails are missing from the White House e-mail system or backup tapes.
Archive General Counsel Meredith Fuchs explained, "The pressing need for the information arises out of troubling representations by the EOP and its components about its document preservation obligations and the loca
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Oct 29, 2007
The president of Iran isn’t the only Holocaust denier to win a platform on an American college campus.
At Michigan State University Friday, Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party who was convicted in 1998 for incitement of racial hatred over material denying the Holocaust, was brought to campus for a speech denouncing Islam. Griffin acknowledges having been a Holocaust denier, but says he no longer is one. His party is on record opposing black-white marriages, believ
