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: Robert McHenry at the Britannica blog (Click here for a version of this entry with embedded links.)
Aug 6, 2007
Last week an artist named Duke Riley caused a bit of a stir in New York harbor by approaching too closely to the liner QE2 in a homemade submarine. Press coverage of the stunt duly noted that the design of the submarine was loosely based on that of the"Turtle," which saw brief and mainly fruitless service in the Revolutionary War and is generally considered the first American submarine, certainly the first to be intended for use in war. What the news reports failed to note was that one of Artist
Source: NYT
Aug 6, 2007
The Spitzer administration says it has taken steps to finally solve the quandary of the “survivors’ stairway” at ground zero.
By that, it means every step — all 38 of them. Together.
Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s chief of downtown redevelopment, Avi Schick, proposes to keep the stairway whole and intact — but just the seven-foot-wide stairway proper, not the hulking concrete structure around it.
Held together and supported by a specially designed truss, the stairs w
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, is published by the Federation of American Scientists
Aug 6, 2007
One day after President Bush signed into law a bill that requires
public disclosure of the national intelligence budget, the House of
Representatives adopted an amendment to prevent that requirement from
taking effect.
The budget disclosure provision appeared in legislation enacting the
recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, which was passed by Congress
last month and signed by President Bush on August 3.
If implemented, it would mark the first time that Congress successfully
as
Source: Asia Times
Aug 6, 2007
The local history of Okinawan farmers includes horrifying accounts of mass suicide and murder under orders from the Japanese military.
Records of those events are irksome for the Japanese government that is keen to whitewash this part of history. But local governments in Okinawa and the surrounding islands are determined not to let the Japanese Education Ministry have its way. "The fact is that such orders to die were sent to people indoctrinated by the Ja
Source: CNN
Aug 6, 2007
This city almost erected a billboard outside Jamestown, Virginia, to congratulate it on its 400th birthday -- and remind everyone St. Augustine passed that milestone four decades ago.
St. Augustine is the nation's oldest city, and its 442nd birthday celebration is scheduled for August 28-September 1, including historical re-enactments, entertainment, and yes, a Thanksgiving feast. But this one will commemorate a feast held in September of 1565 by the Spaniards and native Timucuan In
Source: Japan Times
Aug 5, 2007
Stereotypical images of Japanese collectively in denial about the atrocities committed by the Imperial armed forces are grossly misleading and overlook the more prevalent view accepting wartime guilt and favoring atonement. In [JAPAN'S CONTESTED WAR MEMORIES: The "Memory Rifts" in Historical Consciousness of WWII] ... Hokkaido University's Philip Seaton persuasively argues that, "Japanese war memories are not nearly as nationalistic as they are frequently made out to be."
Source: WaPo
Aug 5, 2007
April 25, 2007, marked the 500th anniversary of an extraordinary event: the naming of America. The story of how it happened is a murky tale of intrepid seafarers and failed business ventures, naive scientists and greedy publishers, mendacity and spin. Above all, it is the fascinating tale of Amerigo Vespucci, a small-time Florentine trader with a talent for self-promotion who reinvented himself as explorer and stargazer, and whose reputation has since become entangled in webs of myth. Felipe Fer
Source: NYT
Aug 5, 2007
Love, in all its splendor and mess, found a fit expression on Rome’s oldest bridge last year. Inspired by a best-selling book, then the movie version, young couples wrote their names on a padlock. They chained their locks around lampposts on Ponte Milvio. Then they symbolically cut off escape by tossing the keys into the wine-dark Tiber below.
But reality quickly set in, as it often does after passion. Thousands of locks and chains piled up. The lamps atop two light posts crumbled u
Source: AP
Aug 5, 2007
Four presidential candidates are lined up to visit Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show" over the next three weeks as Comedy Central's satirical news review ramps up its "Indecision 2008" coverage.
Sen. Joseph Biden, the Delaware Democrat, is first up this Wednesday. Biden appeared on "The Daily Show" last winter on the day he announced his candidacy.
Republican John McCain makes his 10th appearance on Aug. 16, followed by another Republican, for
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 5, 2007
Freak weather, prisoners held without trial, bishops behaving badly: it's the stuff of everyday news. Except these are not 21st-century reports, they are 17th-century ones.
It has taken seven years - at least two longer than expected - and the collaboration of six leading international academics to extract these stories of life in the late Stuart period from the "diary" of Roger Morrice, a Puritan cleric-turned-lobby correspondent.
His Entring Book, which lay
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 5, 2007
On an isolated bluff of prairie grassland overlooking the mighty Missouri river, a weather-beaten stone bust marks the final resting place of Sitting Bull, the legendary Lakhota Sioux tribal leader and warrior.
The vista has changed little since his day, but this peaceful spot on South Dakota's Standing Rock Indian reservation is now the focus of a bitter row that some are calling Sitting Bull's last stand.
It pits his descendants against tribal rivals in a showdown ove
Source: NYT
Aug 5, 2007
BAD AROLSEN, Germany, Aug. 2 — Like other Holocaust victims, Noemi Ban has gone back numerous times to survey the ghostly field of chimneys at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi concentration camp in Poland where she and her family arrived in July 1944, and she alone survived.
But last May, Mrs. Ban got an even more jolting glimpse into her past, when she visited the Holocaust archive in this tranquil town in central Germany. There, filed in the labyrinthine shelves of records, was a fade
Source: NYT
Aug 5, 2007
THE new hybrid Ford Escape taxis scuttling around New York City give their occupants an aura of environmental superiority. But as far as clean electric-powered cars are concerned, these high-mileage hybrids are actually a bit behind the times.
About 100 years behind.
Starting in 1914, the Detroit Taxicab and Transfer Company built and operated a fleet of nearly 100 electric cabs. Customers would often wait for a smoother, cleaner, more tasteful electric cab, even when a
Source: NYT
Aug 5, 2007
HAMPTONBURGH, N.Y. (AP) -- An artist has mowed an 850,000-square-foot rendering of a Purple Heart medal into a park field to honor the 75th anniversary of the medal that commends servicemembers killed or wounded in action.
The rendering, to be unveiled Sunday in Thomas Bull Memorial Park in this city 55 miles northwest of New York City, was done by field artist and painter Roger Baker, whose past works include the Statue of Liberty and Elvis Presley.
According to Baker,
Source: Globe & Mail
Aug 4, 2007
Mea culpa. Two decades ago, when I wrote a Fodor's travel guide to Toronto, I tried to pump up the prose by telling the story of the first white man in the area. Coureur de bois Étienne Brûlé, scout for Samuel de Champlain, lived among the Huron (so my text assured readers) until, in 1633, his drinking and womanizing so offended them that they killed and ate him. Sex, death and cannibalism - I hoped all this would lure people into reading about Toronto.
This is why we need a Toronto
Source: Daily Press (VA)
Aug 4, 2007
Five years of painstaking archaeological work came to an end this week when conservators at The Mariners' Museum chiseled the last stubborn pieces of concreted sand and rust from the inside of the USS Monitor gun turret.
Bolstered by interns from the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary, the summer-long excavation turned up more than a dozen unexpected artifacts - including silverware, bullets and gun-sight covers - hidden inside the last few inches of concretion. It also uncovered sev
Source: http://news.newamericamedia.org
Aug 4, 2007
The Afro-American Newspaper will receive assistance in processing its archives through a nearly half a million dollar grant to Johns Hopkins University. The purpose of the grant is to develop a new archival training practicum and internship program at Johns Hopkins that will survey the AFRO's archives of hidden treasures and introduce students to archival practice and theory. The program will also encompass faculty from Morgan State University, who will assist in the archival training program.
Source: Yahoo
Aug 4, 2007
PHILADELPHIA - An antiques collector stumbled upon a
Civil War-era rarity that was about to suffer the same
fate as yesterday's trash.
Antiques collector Stephen Burns discovered that a
pile of periodicals intended for the garbage heap
turned out to be dozens of issues of"Little Pilgrim,"
a children's reader published in Philadelphia in the
1850s and '60s. The periodical featured fiction,
poetry, riddles and other items for young readers.
Burns was at an auction when a bidder
Source: NYT
Aug 4, 2007
Trying to forestall an embarrassing protest march by survivors of the Holocaust, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel on Friday agreed to rethink a widely criticized plan to give them a monthly stipend of about $20.
Mr. Olmert had announced the plan in response to concerns about poverty among some of the 240,000 Holocaust survivors who live in Israel, but the size of the stipend was considered risible by an organization of survivors. The organization announced a protest march on Sun
Source: NYT
Aug 4, 2007
At slack tide off Red Hook, Brooklyn, there are usually lots of things floating in the water, most of which you would not want to touch without the help of a good hazmat suit. But just after sunrise yesterday, something truly strange was bobbing there in the shallows near Pier 41: a submarine fashioned almost completely from wood, and inside it a man with an obsession.
The man, Duke Riley, a heavily tattooed Brooklyn artist whose waterborne performance projects around New York have
