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: David Margolick in Vanity Fair
Sep 24, 2007
During the historic 1957 desegregation of Little Rock Central High School, 26-year-old journalist Will Counts took a photograph that gave an iconic face to the passions at the center of the civil-rights movement—two faces, actually: those of 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford on her first day of school, and her most recognizable tormentor, Hazel Bryan. The story of how these two women struggled to reconcile and move on from the event is a remarkable journey through the last half-century of race relat
Source: History Today
Sep 24, 2007
A survivor from Auschwitz has discovered his neighbour in a retirement home in Arizona was an SS guard in another Nazi concentration camp. Nathan Gasch was also a prisoner at the Sachsenhausen camp, where fellow resident Martin Hartmann served as a member of the SS Death's Head Guard Battalion. Mr Hartmann has been stripped of his US citizenship and exiled back to Germany, following a two-year investigation by the Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations.
Source: Baltimore Sun
Sep 24, 2007
Anne Arundel County archaeologists knew they were looking for one of 18th-century Maryland's rich and famous.
Samuel Chew was a well-connected Quaker planter and merchant, and his home on a knoll above the Chesapeake Bay was an early landmark, used by ship captains to guide them into the tobacco port of Herrington, on Herring Bay.
But no one expected this.
Months of digging to uncover the foundation walls of the Chew House have revealed one of the largest,
Source: AP
Sep 24, 2007
Israeli archaeologists said they have discovered a quarry that provided King Herod with the stones he used to renovate the biblical Second Temple compound — offering rare insight into construction of the holiest site in Judaism.
The source of the huge stones used 2,000 years ago to reconstruct the compound in Jerusalem's Old City was discovered on the site of a proposed school in a Jerusalem suburb.
Today, the compound Herod renovated houses the most explosive religious
Source: http://www.digitaljournal.com
Sep 24, 2007
Intact clay pots sealed with cartouches* of King Tutankhamun and eight baskets have been discovered in his treasure room in the Valley of the Kings, the Egyptian culture minister said Monday.
Farouk Hosni said the discovery was unearthed by the first Egyptian excavation team to work in the Valley of the Kings near the city of Luxor in southern Egypt.
The Valley of the Kings was used for burials for around 500 years from 1540 BC onwards.
*Cartouches are ov
Source: Editor & Publisher
Sep 24, 2007
When Ken Burns' World War II documentary began airing yesterday, the "Baldo" comic strip was already six days into a story line inspired by content the public-television series was mostly lacking.
The "Baldo" sequence, which continues through this Thursday, is about an elderly barber named Benito Ramirez who looks back on his World War II experiences. "Baldo" co-cartoonists Hector Cantu and Carlos Castellanos created the character after learning this s
Source: AP
Sep 24, 2007
George Ray trudged for two hours through thick vegetation to a blurry mark found on Google Earth.
Mr. Ray is one of the many amateur archaeologists entranced by the Lost Colony — the 117 English settlers who disappeared from North Carolina's Outer Banks in the late 1500s, having left behind only a single clue to their fate. In all the years since, no one has found much of anything else.
But there have long been stories told about a rotting boat in the Great Dismal Swamp
Source: Fox News
Sep 24, 2007
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday questioned why Iran can't have a nuclear program when the United States has one, repeated his inference that historical accounts of the Holocaust are myths, and denied that there are homosexuals in Iran.
In animated remarks before students and faculty at a controversial speaking engagment at Columbia university, the Iranian leader also denied that Iran sponsors terror, and instead pointed the finger at the U.S. government as a supporte
Source: Fox News
Sep 24, 2007
Columbia University said it would welcome any notable figure visiting the United States — even Adolf Hitler himself — to speak to students and faculty at the Ivy League college.
But there are those who question what the New York college's standards are. They ask why a school that will not allow an ROTC program to be part of its curriculum would allow Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, one of America’s avowed enemies, onto its campus....
University officials did not return calls from
Source: NY Sun
Sep 24, 2007
As the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, prepares to address Columbia University today amid a storm of student protest, state and city lawmakers say they are considering withholding public funds from the school to protest its decision to invite the leader to campus.
In an interview with The New York Sun, the speaker of the Assembly, Sheldon Silver, said lawmakers, outraged over Columbia's insistence on allowing the Iranian president to speak at its World Leaders Forum, would c
Source: NYT
Sep 24, 2007
On June 23, 1967, Senator Thomas J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, was censured by the United States Senate for diverting $116,000 in campaign funds for his personal use. The vote was 92 to 5.
“I think a grave mistake has been made, and I am the one who must bear the scar of that mistake for the rest of my life,” Thomas Dodd told a hushed chamber. His voice broke, and he was led off the floor in tears. Four years later, he died a broken man.
Christopher Dodd, the fifth
Source: NYT
Sep 24, 2007
None of the stars at Radio City Music Hall last week to raise money for the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial mentioned the quarrel that has been bubbling up over plans for the towering three-story monument in Washington.
For months now critics have been grumbling about the selection of Lei Yixin, a Chinese sculptor — rather than an African-American — to carve a stone statue of Dr. King on a four-acre plot between the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials. Then last week Harry Wu,
Source: Reuters
Sep 24, 2007
A Malian historian married to the head of the African Union has challenged fellow academics to produce a continental history book as a riposte to French President Nicolas Sarkozy's view that Africans lack history.The French leader enraged many Africans when he laid out his Africa policy in July at one of French-speaking Africa's most prestigious educational institutions in a speech many denounced as patronising and out-dated.
"The tragedy of Africa is that
Source: AFP
Sep 24, 2007
Several hundred Hindu nationalists protested Monday against a visit by a group of Britons to honour their ancestors who crushed an anti-colonial uprising in India in 1857.The activists from India's main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) shouted "English go home" and "Hail Mother India" in Lucknow city, where the visitors were due to arrive later Monday.
The British tourists intend to follow a trail across several sites in northern India
Source: AP
Sep 24, 2007
Fifty years after federal troops escorted Terrence Roberts and eight fellow black students into an all-white high school, he says the struggles over race and segregation still are unresolved.
"This country has demonstrated over time that it is not prepared to operate as an integrated society," said Roberts, who is a faculty member at Antioch University's psychology program.
He and the other students known as the Little Rock Nine will help the city observe Ce
Source: NJ Star Ledger
Sep 23, 2007
Gov. James E. McGreevey's downfall came at the hands of a former staffer named Golan Cipel. But in the state Archives, which keeps the papers of governors and their aides dating to the 1700s, there is no record of Cipel's work.
Early in his tenure, McGreevey was stung by the revelation that a key staffer on his transition team was an ex-convict. But there is no record of anything that occurred at McGreevey's transition office.
There are no gubernatorial calendars, no da
Source: LAT
Sep 23, 2007
BAHIA ... With its varied and exotic attractions, Brazil has long been a travel mecca, drawing more than 700,000 U.S. citizens annually. But the big attraction for many black Americans is Brazil's flourishing African heritage, most evident here in Bahia state, where vast slave plantations once serviced Europe's craving for sugar and tobacco.
"The different African traditions have certainly been better preserved here," said Paulette Bradley, a marketing manager who was visi
Source: Azzaman
Sep 23, 2007
The Ministry of Tourism and Archaeology is to celebrate a decision by U.N.’s cultural organization, UNESCO, to inscribe Samarra’s
ancient sites on the list World Heritage in danger.
Jassem Jaafar, the minister, said his ministry was planning a major festival to mark UNESCO’s decision. “The festival has to match
the significance of Samarra as an ancient and holy Iraqi city,” he said.
Samarra is holy to both Muslim Sunnis and Shiites as it contains remains of the Great Mosque and
Source: David Margolic in the NYT
Sep 23, 2007
FIFTY years ago this week, all eyes were on Little Rock, Ark., where nine black students were trying, for the first time, to desegregate a major Southern high school. With fewer than 150 blacks, the town of Grand Forks, N.D., hardly figured to be a key front in that battle — until, that is, Larry Lubenow talked to Louis Armstrong.
On the night of Sept. 17, 1957, two weeks after the Little Rock Nine were first barred from Central High School, the jazz trumpeter happened to be on tour
Source: NYT
Sep 23, 2007
The twin forces of rising life expectancy and falling birthrates have accelerated the process. This is apparent from the United States, where policy makers fret over the baby boom generation beginning to retire, to Japan, which has the highest share of people older than 60 in the world. As in Japan, more than a quarter of the population in Italy and Germany is over 60, and the phenomenon extends to Poland and Russia.
Although the German government has begun to address the issue, it
