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: BBC
Sep 19, 2007
A group of WWII veterans will be reunited with the world's last remaining Wellington Bomber aircraft to have seen active service.
Surviving members of the RAF Wellington crew will gather at Brooklands Museum in Weybridge, Surrey, to see the restored plane on Wednesday.
The plane was unearthed by a team searching for the Loch Ness monster in Scotland in 1985.
Source: NYT
Sep 19, 2007
Of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, linguists say, nearly half are in danger of extinction and likely to disappear in this century. In fact, one falls out of use about every two weeks.
Some languages vanish in an instant, at the death of the sole surviving speaker. Others are lost gradually in bilingual cultures, as indigenous tongues are overwhelmed by the dominant language at school, in the marketplace and on television.
New research, reported
Source: NYT
Sep 19, 2007
Last December, Rebecca Erbelding, a young archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, opened a letter from a former United States Army intelligence officer who said he wanted to donate photographs of Auschwitz he had found more than 60 years ago in Germany.
Ms. Erbelding was intrigued: Although Auschwitz may be the most notorious of the Nazi death camps, there are only a small number of known photos of the place before its liberation in 1945. Some time the next month,
Source: US Department of Defense website
Sep 18, 2007
The nation has stood in awe of the U.S. Air Force’s “bravery and endurance,” dating from the Berlin Airlift during the Cold War’s outset, through two wars in Asia and to today’s global conflict, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said today.
During a ceremony in the Pentagon courtyard, Gates, a former airman, spoke to hundreds who gathered to celebrate the U.S. Air Force’s 60-year anniversary. Currently, the Air Force boasts a 700,000-strong force with roughly 25,000 members deployed
Source: AP
Sep 18, 2007
Remains believed to be of an American soldier killed in Cambodia decades ago during the Vietnam War were flown Monday to the U.S. for forensic analysis.
After a brief ceremony at Phnom Penh International Airport, a U.S. military transport plane left with the coffin holding the remains for a military laboratory in Hawaii, where tests to determine identification are to be conducted.
According to a statement from the U.S. Embassy, 55 Americans are still unaccounted for in
Source: NYT
Sep 18, 2007
The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight tonight.
The move comes two years to the day after The Times began the subscription program, TimesSelect, which has charged $49.95 a year, or $7.95 a month, for online access to the work of its columnists and to the newspaper’s archives. TimesSelect has been free to print subscribers to The Times and to some students and educators.
In addition to opening the entire site to a
Source: USA Today
Sep 18, 2007
Students don't know much about history, and colleges aren't adding enough to their civic literacy, says a report out today.
The study from the non-profit Intercollegiate Studies Institute shows that less than half of college seniors knew that Yorktown was the battle that ended the American Revolution or that NATO was formed to resist Soviet expansion. Overall, freshmen averaged 50.4% on a wide-ranging civic literacy test; seniors averaged 54.2%, both failing scores if translated to
Source: Chicago Tribune
Sep 18, 2007
A defendant is shown sporting judicial robes and reading in court. Another drawing, shaded in murky brown, depicts a celebrity poet testifying in Sanskrit. A third captures an indignant defendant describing how he was bound and gagged in the courtroom for calling the judge a "fascist" and a "dog."
These images are among 483 courtroom sketches from the 1969-70 Chicago Seven conspiracy trial recently acquired by the Chicago History Museum. The pictures, the work of
Source: NYT
Sep 18, 2007
A lock of hair and wool leggings belonging to Sitting Bull, below, leader of the Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux, are to be returned by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History to his closest living relatives. In an announcement yesterday, the museum said that after Sitting Bull was killed in 1890 while being arrested by tribal police, his body was in temporary possession of Horace Deeble, an Army doctor at the Fort Yates military post in North Dakota, who obtained the hair and leggings from t
Source: NYT
Sep 18, 2007
Beginning next month, Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission will collect testimony on Staten Island, home to one of the largest populations of Liberians outside Africa, many of them survivors of 14 years of civil war.
The commission aims to construct a permanent historical record for Liberia, a country that has been wracked by power struggles and waves of savage violence.
Truth commissions have become a popular way to confront the crimes of crumbling regimes aro
Source: NYT
Sep 18, 2007
Sometimes the maturity of a field of science can be measured by the heft of its ambition in the face of the next daunting unknown, the mystery yet to be cracked.
Neurobiology probes the circuitry of the brain for the secrets of behaviors and thoughts that make humans human. High-energy physics seeks and may be on the verge of finding the so-called God particle, the Higgs boson thought to endow elementary particles with their mass. Cosmology is confounded by dark matter and dark ener
Source: NYT
Sep 18, 2007
Maria Smirnova barreled past the heavy granite walls of the 16th-century Solovetsky Monastery, blaring French hip-hop in her oversized truck to the consternation of the nearby monks whose long, black cloaks billowed in the northerly breeze.
Ms. Smirnova, 23, runs an adventure tour company on the Solovetsky Islands, an archipelago in the White Sea of northwestern Russia, about 100 miles from the Arctic Circle.
Though growing in popularity, her business has roiled the mon
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 17, 2007
In 1961, Russia's finest dancer slipped through his keepers' fingers to defect to the West. But, years later, the Soviet secret police had their revenge. By John Bridcut
The KGB had seen it coming. When Rudolf Nureyev, the most promising young talent in Leningrad's Kirov Ballet, fled the Soviet Union for the West in June 1961, they were not surprised.
Source: International Herald Tribune
Sep 17, 2007
Sun Yat-sen, the medical doctor who brought down China's last imperial dynasty in 1911, has become the flavor of the year in Hong Kong.
A "Sun Yat-sen Historical Trail" through the trendy district of Soho has recently been refurbished. It takes walkers close to the Sun Yat-sen Museum that opened in December 2006. And at a nearby old mansion, the Museum of Medical Sciences is holding an exhibition on "The Medical and Social Landscape during Dr. Sun Yat-sen's Formative
Source: AP
Sep 17, 2007
It is Iran's version of "Schindler's List," a miniseries that tells the tale of an Iranian diplomat in Paris who helps Jews escape the Holocaust — and viewers across the country are riveted.
That's surprising enough in a country where hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has questioned whether the Holocaust even took place. What's more surprising is that government media produced the series, and is airing it on state-run television.
The Holocaust is rarely
Source: Hispanic Link
Sep 17, 2007
It took 403 years after immigrants from Spain first settled in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565 for the United States to proclaim Hispanic Heritage Week as an official annual national celebration.
In 1968, at the behest of Congress, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced the commemorative event, which was extended to a full month — from Sept. 15 to Oct. 15 — 20 years later.
With deep roots in the Great Society and some successful campaigns to insert Latinos into president
Source: http://www.allheadlinenews.com
Sep 17, 2007
Libya celebrated the 76-year anniversary of the death of national hero Omar Al Mukhtar. On August 16, 1931, Italian forces in the city of Solouq, in the North African country, executed Mukhtar.
Mukhtar is one of the most influential national heroes the Libyan people cherish. He led the resistance movement against the Italian for over 20 years. Mukhtar was an Islamic teacher before founding and organizing a resistance movement that led successful attacks against the Italians.
Source: BBC
Sep 17, 2007
Forensic experts have unearthed the remains of dozens of German soldiers buried in Montenegro's capital during World War II, officials say.
The remains were discovered during construction work a few kilometres from the centre of Podgorica.
Many more soldiers are believed to be buried in the area, German and Montenegrin experts say.
Source: Jerusalem Post
Sep 17, 2007
A building from the Late Bronze Age apparently constructed for Egyptian authorities before the Israelite settlement in the Land of Israel has been uncovered in an excavation on the edge of the Negev desert near the Gaza Strip, Ben-Gurion University announced Monday.
The month-long summer dig on the eastern section of the Besor Stream, about 12 kilometers east of Gaza, revealed the 3,000-year-old site buried underneath a 7th century Philistine rural village from the Second Iron Age,
Source: NYT
Sep 17, 2007
After nearly two decades as chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan wants to solidify his standing in history.
In an interview timed with the release of his memoir Monday, Mr. Greenspan sought to distance himself from the economic policies of President Bush and refute critics who say his policies at the Fed contributed to the housing bubble and bust that is now roiling the economy....
Mr. Greenspan, 81, acknowledged that the housing frenzy had been pumped up in
