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: Newsweek -- cover story
Oct 8, 2007
Mitt Romney, it all started in a two-story, wood-framed house on a busy street in Pontiac, Mich. Painted beige, encircled by an asphalt lot that would hardly hold a dozen cars, the building manages to look both decrepit and picturesque, like a million other urban churches across the country. Today it houses the Unity Church of Practical Christianity, but until Romney was 10, it was the Mormon church he attended with his family—at least twice a day on Sunday, and one night a week for youth group
Source: AP
Oct 7, 2007
The head of Parliament has warned the United States Congress not to pass an Armenian genocide bill, saying in a letter to the House speaker that the move would harm bilateral ties, his office said Sunday.
The speaker of Parliament, Koksal Toptan, said in his letter to the speaker, Nancy Pelosi, that "it might take decades to heal negative effects" of the bill if it passed, Toptan's office said in a statement.
The bill would declare the killings of Armenians f
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 7, 2007
One of Britain's leading universities is embroiled in an embarrassing row over hundreds of treasures looted from Iraq.
Found scattered around ancient Mesopotamia, the Aramaic incantation or devil bowls were placed upside down in homes during the sixth to eighth centuries to trap evil spirits. The spells, and information such as the names of the home owners, are not found in any other source. One collection contains the earliest examples of the Bible in Hebrew.
Anther co
Source: Reuters
Oct 7, 2007
PASARGADAE, Iran (Reuters) - For the people protesting against it, a new dam near these sun-drenched ruins may be more than an environmental upheaval: in it they scent an affront to the country's pre-Islamic identity.
For 2,500 years, the tomb of Cyrus the Great has stood on the plain at Pasargadae in southern Iran, a simple but dignified monument to a king revered as the founder of the mighty Persian empire. But some fear the dam and reservoir pose a threat to the ancient structure
Source: NYT
Oct 7, 2007
THE Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, the scaled-down, two-volume version of the mammoth 20-volume O.E.D., just got a little shorter. With the dispatch of a waiter flicking away flyspecks, the editor, Angus Stevenson, eliminated some 16,000 hyphens from the sixth edition, published last month. “People are not confident about using hyphens anymore,” he said. “They’re not really sure what they’re for.”
Source: NYT
Oct 7, 2007
For the past quarter of a century, Japan’s high school textbooks had included the accepted historical fact that that Okinawans had been coerced into mass suicides by Imperial Army soldiers.
But six months ago, the Education Ministry said that next year’s government-endorsed textbooks would eliminate all references to Japan’s soldiers. According to the revised passages, the Okinawans simply committed mass suicide or felt compelled to do so. But by whom?
“If Japanese sold
Source: NYT
Oct 7, 2007
THE Supreme Court has only once ruled on whether reporters may be forced to testify about their confidential sources, in a 1972 decision called Branzburg v. Hayes. Thanks to a cryptic concurring opinion from Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., to this day no one is quite sure what the decision meant.
On the one hand, the majority in the 5-to-4 decision said journalists had no First Amendment protection against grand jury subpoenas. On the other, Justice Powell, who joined the majority, wro
Source: NYT
Oct 7, 2007
In 1966, White House aides found themselves precariously perched between apprehension of looming disaster in Vietnam and the need for candor with their boss, President Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Disaster seemed a safer choice.
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was a logical candidate to speak the truth to his boss. Mr. McNamara told the historian and Kennedy confidant Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and the economist John Kenneth Galbraith in January over dinner and drinks that h
Source: NYT
Oct 7, 2007
JUST last year, Gen. Romeo Lucas García’s quiet death in exile here caught the attention of few people outside Guatemala, where he had presided over a ruthless period of civil war in which 37 people were burned to death during a siege at Spain’s embassy. Spain tried to extradite him in 2005 on human rights charges, but had gotten nowhere.
A tranquil death in a foreign land, at the age of 81: such a bookend to a life of brutality or corruption was long guaranteed for Latin America’s
Source: Aspen Times
Oct 6, 2007
A controversial Holocaust denial film is raising questions about free speech at GrassRoots TV, the Aspen community-access station.
Steve Campbell, founder of Citizens for 9/11 Truth, asked the station to air “Judea Declares War on Germany: A Critical Look at World War II” on Monday, but GrassRoots TV board members stopped the screening.
The one-hour program features Dr. Frederick Töben, an Australian national and member of the Adelaide Institute, an organization that de
Source: Bangor Daily News
Oct 6, 2007
History is hiding in the murky waters of the Penobscot River.
Artifacts from the Penobscot Expedition of 1779 - the largest Revolutionary War naval expedition and worst naval defeat in United States history until Pearl Harbor - offer a peek into the country’s beginnings.
The battle, which ended with the loss of between 30 and 40 commissioned naval ships and sloops of war by the hands of their own crews, left everything from smoking pipes and shoe buckles to swivel guns
Source: Mercury News
Oct 6, 2007
A critical audit released Friday found struggling History San Jose has been swimming in red ink because of weak financial management, fanciful fundraising goals and limited efforts to reduce expenses.
The Macias Consulting Group audit recommends the San Jose City Council grant the non-profit a relatively modest subsidy increase of $717,113, spread over the next four years in decreasing amounts. The audit also said History San Jose should reprioritize staffing to reduce personnel cos
Source: Nathaniel Deutsch, professor of religion at Swarthmore College, in an op ed in the NYT
Oct 6, 2007
THE United States didn’t set out to eradicate the Mandeans, one of the oldest, smallest and least understood of the many minorities in Iraq. This extinction in the making has simply been another unfortunate and entirely unintended consequence of our invasion of Iraq — though that will be of little comfort to the Mandeans, whose 2,000-year-old culture is in grave danger of disappearing from the face of the earth.
The Mandeans are the only surviving Gnostics from antiquity, cousins of
Source: NYT
Oct 6, 2007
His subjects were mostly children and teenagers at the time, terrified witnesses to mass slaughter. Some were forced to work at the bottom rung of the Nazi killing machine — as diggers of mass graves, cooks who fed Nazi soldiers and seamstresses who mended clothes stripped from the Jews before execution.
They live today in rural poverty, many without running water or heat, nearing the end of their lives. So Patrick Desbois has been quietly seeking them out, roaming the back roads an
Source: WaPo
Oct 6, 2007
For six decades, they held their silence.
The group of World War II veterans kept a military code and the decorum of their generation, telling virtually no one of their top-secret work interrogating Nazi prisoners of war at Fort Hunt.
When about two dozen veterans got together yesterday for the first time since the 1940s, many of the proud men lamented the chasm between the way they conducted interrogations during the war and the harsh measures used today in questioning
Source: NBC News
Oct 5, 2007
The country has a new landmark: an African burial ground discovered in New York. NBC’s Ron Allen reports.
Source: NYT
Oct 5, 2007
Karl Benz, whose three-wheel gas-powered contraption was the forerunner of the modern automobile, just can’t get a break.
When Daimler-Benz and the Chrysler Corporation were negotiating their merger in May 1998, Daimler offered to drop the Benz hyphenate if Chrysler agreed to take a back seat in the name DaimlerChrysler.
Nine years later, with their corporate divorce papers safely filed, DaimlerChrysler lopped off the name of its American ex at a shareholders’ meeting
Source: Lawrence Journal World & News (KS)
Oct 5, 2007
Keep the day. Dump the Columbus.
That’s long been the rallying cry at Haskell Indian Nations University each year as Columbus Day — which is Monday — approaches.
But now, Haskell students want city commissioners to also shine a spotlight on the subject. Members of Haskell’s American Indian Studies Club have asked city commissioners to proclaim Monday as Indigenous Peoples Day, instead of celebrating it as Columbus Day.
“It (the holiday) is in essence celebr
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 5, 2007
The mysteries of the Order of the Knights Templar could soon be laid bare after the Vatican announced the release of a crucial document which has not been seen for almost 700 years.
A new book, Processus contra Templarios, will be published by the Vatican's Secret Archive on Oct 25, and promises to restore the reputation of the Templars, whose leaders were burned as heretics when the order was dissolved in 1314.
The Knights Templar were a powerful and secretive group o
Source: NYT
Oct 5, 2007
SHABAK VALLEY, Afghanistan: In this isolated Taliban stronghold in eastern Afghanistan, American paratroopers are fielding what they consider a crucial new weapon in counterinsurgency operations here: a soft-spoken civilian anthropologist named Tracy.
Tracy, who asked that her surname not be used for security reasons, is a member of the first Human Terrain Team, an experimental Pentagon program that assigns anthropologists and other social scientists to American combat units in Afgh
