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: Inside Higher Ed
Aug 9, 2007
Nearly 300 college and university presidents in the United States have endorsed a statement by Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University, denouncing the push by Britain’s main faculty union to have professors boycott Israeli academics and universities. “In seeking to quarantine Israeli universities and scholars, this vote threatens every university committed to fostering scholarly and cultural exchanges that lead to enlightenment, empathy, and a much-needed international marketplace of ide
Source: NYT
Aug 9, 2007
SORRY, Barry Bonds. You’re still 112 home runs away from the home run record, the real record, that is. Hitting 756 dingers is certainly quite an achievement, more than anyone else has hit in Major League Baseball history. But it is far behind the world record, the 868 homers slugged by Sadaharu Oh when he played for the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants from 1959 to 1980.
Source: NYT
Aug 9, 2007
Two fossils found in Kenya have shaken the human family tree, possibly rearranging major branches thought to be in a straight ancestral line to Homo sapiens.
Scientists who dated and analyzed the specimens — a 1.44 million-year-old Homo habilis and a 1.55 million-year-old Homo erectus — said their findings challenged the conventional view that these species evolved one after the other. Instead, they apparently lived side by side in eastern Africa for almost half a million years.
Source: NYT
Aug 9, 2007
There are times in the life of George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st president of the United States and father of the 43rd, that people, perfect strangers, come up to him and say the harshest things — words intended to comfort but words that wind up only causing pain.
“I love you, sir, but your son’s way off base here,” they might say, according to Ron Kaufman, a longtime adviser to Mr. Bush, who has witnessed any number of such encounters — perhaps at a political fund-raiser, or a r
Source: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Little Rock)
Aug 8, 2007
Gov. Mike Beebe said Wednesday that he won't delay the implementation of new social studies standards that historians have said will de-emphasize the teaching of Arkansas history.
He stressed that state history will continue to be taught in a separate class for one semester between seventh and 12th grades, as required by law.
"We're not backing up one iota, and it's going to be mandatorily taught and taken," Beebe said in an interview.
Beebe said
Source: Bloomberg News
Aug 8, 2007
President George W. Bush said Barry Bonds's breaking of Major League Baseball's home-run record shouldn't lead to a rush to judgment on whether the San Francisco Giants slugger used steroids.
Bonds hit his 756th career home run last night, breaking the mark for most homers that Hank Aaron held for 33 years. Dogged by suspicions of steroids use, Bonds has denied knowingly taking them and has never been penalized for using performance- enhancing drugs.
"There is spec
Source: Christian Science Monitor
Aug 8, 2007
"It was the best of times; it was the worst of times." Charles Dickens's famous line in "A Tale of Two Cities" could be used to describe what is probably hitting home about now for millions of American high school students: Lazy summer days cut short by the frantic rush to finish required reading lists before school starts.
"Most teens spend the summer doing whatever, and then cram the reading in during the last two weeks," says 2007 high school graduat
Source: NYT
Aug 8, 2007
MOSCOW — A giant cross now commands the field where the first shots of Stalin’s Great Terror sounded 70 years ago. It was erected on Wednesday with religious pomp but little recognition from a government prone to whitewash one of Russia’s darkest eras.
The cross was ferried more than 800 miles by boat from a former Soviet prison camp on the White Sea through the Belomor Canal — built in the 1930s by slave labor — to Moscow, in a religious procession linking major sites from a yearlo
Source: NYT
Aug 8, 2007
Recent investigations have challenged long-held views of nomadic culture as purely transient, with little impact on the urban, sophisticated societies that emerged later.
Instead, scientists like Dr. [Michael] Frachetti are discovering that nomadic cultures are flexible, switching between transient and more sedentary ways of life, and assimilating and inventing new ideas and technologies. Nomads created durable political cultures that still influence the way those countries interact
Source: AP
Aug 8, 2007
They number only eight, but are caretakers of a story stretching back 2,600 years. Now, it's up to the last Jews of Baghdad to decide whether to remain or flee their ancient home.
An Anglican clergyman who watches over the remaining Jewish families says they are increasingly desperate to emigrate to the Netherlands, where there is an active Iraqi Jewish community. But Israeli, Dutch and Jewish officials dispute the claims by the Rev. Andrew White that they want to fully abandon a ci
Source: NYT
Aug 8, 2007
The nation’s high school seniors performed significantly better on the first nationwide economics test than they did on other recent national exams in history and science, and demonstrated a better understanding of basic market forces like supply and demand than officials expected.
Results of the economics test, which was administered last year, are being released this morning. A summary report is available on the web at nationsreportcard.gov.
The Department of Educatio
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 8, 2007
Families across Britain will be able to uncover the wartime heroism of their ancestors today when the war pension records of more than a million soldiers wounded in the First World War go online.
Descendants of the war veterans will be able to read first-hand accounts about the horrors faced by their loved ones in the trench warfare of the 1914-18 war.
All First World War service records were destroyed when bombs wrecked the War Office in London during the Blitz in 1940
Source: AP
Aug 8, 2007
With little fanfare, Jose Rodriguez, who heads the
National Clandestine Service, had his cover lifted
about a month ago. CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said
the driving factor was his interest in publicly
participating in minority recruitment events. He's
also retiring later this year after more than three
decades with the agency.
Rodriguez is the most important man in the U.S. spy
game whose name you probably never knew. When he was
mentioned publicly before now, he was referred to on
Source: BBC
Aug 8, 2007
A giant cross commemorating the victims of Stalinist purges in the 1930s has been erected at a ceremony near Moscow.The wooden cross - 12.5m high (41 ft) and 7.6m wide (25 ft) - was placed in Butovo, at the site of a former execution ground.
At least 20,000 people were killed there by Stalin's secret police, the NKVD. The first killings occurred exactly 70 years ago.
Hundreds of people attended the ceremony south of the capital.
Events
Source: NYT
Aug 8, 2007
Mr. [Barry] Clifford has spent about 25 years looking for and salvaging the remains of the Whydah, a pirate ship sailed by Samuel Bellamy, who was known as Black Sam. The ship sank off the coast of Wellfleet, Mass., during a storm in April 1717.
The mass, about 12,000 pounds, is thought to be part of the wreck and to contain at least seven iron cannons. Mr. Clifford and his team plucked it from below 30 feet of sand last week.
The cannons twisted together and probably
Source: Asia Times
Aug 7, 2007
A short walk through the rice and sugarcane fields that dot Yomitan village, 20 kilometers north of Naha, capital of Okinawa prefecture, leads to dark, dank caves where hundreds of civilians took refuge as United States troops invaded the island during World War ll.
More than six decades later, these caves are at the center of a bitter battle over what really happened there.
For Masayasu Oshiro, a historian who has documented the sufferings of poor farming communities
Source: HNN summary of article in Slate by Jack Shafer
Aug 7, 2007
Nixon Attorney General John Mitchell infamously threatened during Watergate to put the Washington Post's Katherine Graham's breast in a wringer if the paper continued to publish articles critical of the administration.
In a memo from 1972 that's just surfaced Charles Colson, a Nixon assistant, claims that George McGovern, commenting on Mitchell's threat, said that "based on Katherine Graham's figure, there's no danger in that."
McGovern, in an interview wit
Source: NYT
Aug 7, 2007
For the past 20 years, Pier A has been an overlooked remnant on the waterfront of Lower Manhattan.
A once-grand Victorian structure that juts toward the Statue of Liberty from the northern edge of Battery Park, the pier has been the object of some big redevelopment plans but little activity. Frustrated by the pace of progress, city officials said last week that they had taken back control of the pier from a private developer and had plans to transform it into the gateway to New York
Source: Edward Rothstein in the NYT
Aug 7, 2007
If you stand in the middle of Auburn Avenue, outside the Queen Anne-style home in which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was born in 1929, and look past the King Center, past the trees leading into the National Park Service Visitor Center and past Ebenezer Baptist Church, toward the office buildings and hotels of downtown Atlanta, you can get some sense of what the precocious Martin might have felt standing in the same spot, before his family moved off the street when he was 12.
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Aug 7, 2007
The Advanced Placement program offers curriculums and testing in 37 areas — chemistry and calculus, art history and Latin literature, Chinese language and culture and European history, to name just a few. But there is no AP in African-American history.
Some school district officials have recently suggested that such an AP program be created — but the College Board is skeptical. College Board officials say their doubts have nothing to do with the significance of African-American hist
