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
Jul 30, 2007
Thousands of academics from around the world have condemned plans for a UK boycott of Israeli institutions over its treatment of the Palestinians.
More than 10,000 academics have signed a declaration saying they would not join any project which barred Israelis.
The group, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), said the boycott plans attacked academic freedoms.
The UK's University and College Union voted in May to debate a boycott, and suspects this h
Source: Indian Country Today
Jul 30, 2007
A Los Angeles Native woman’s anger over “Native”-themed summer camps is echoed across the country as many Native people continue to object to non-Native people’s appropriation of tribal traditions, reports Indian Country Today. While walking her dogs in a Los Angeles Park, Marisol Crisostomo-Romo, 26, spotted a van with a tipi on it. A group of white children piled into the van, clutching bows and arrows. They were members of the five-week-long Camp Shi'ini, ''a Native American-themed summer cam
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Jul 30, 2007
An evening crew of bustling sailors had taken over loading munitions at Port Chicago Naval Magazine on July 17, 1944 -- a night like most others at the Suisun Bay pier during World War II.
At a barracks half a mile away, 20-year-old Irvin Lowery was relaxing with friends just after 10 p.m. when reverberations from a massive explosion shattered his windows and sent him flying across his room. The blast, the largest stateside disaster during the war, killed 320 people -- 202 of them
Source: NYT
Jul 30, 2007
There was something improbable about the new guy from Chicago via Honolulu and Jakarta, Indonesia, the one with the Harvard law degree and the job teaching constitutional law, turning up in Springfield, Ill., in January 1997 among the housewives, ex-mayors and occasional soybean farmer serving in the State Senate....
Mr. Obama did not bring revolution to Springfield in his eight years in the Senate, the longest chapter in his short public life. But he turned out to be practical and
Source: NYT
Jul 30, 2007
Now the story can be told: Vice President Dick Cheney, who ran the country for a brief two hours and five minutes earlier this month while President Bush was sedated during medical screening for colon cancer, did do a bit of official work as acting president.
He wrote a letter to his grandchildren.
“A souvenir for them to have down the road someday,’’ Mr. Cheney said today, during an interview with Mark Knoller of CBS Radio.
During the 14-minute interview i
Source: NYT
Jul 30, 2007
Asked which parent Chelsea Clinton most resembles, friends tick through the mother-daughter similarities. There is the habit of pre-empting questions by asking lots of them. The passionate interest in health care. The tendency to sound a bit scripted when talking about policy, even in private. The way both borrowed on family contacts to establish post-White House careers, but won over skeptical colleagues with their diligence and enthusiasm.
And if her mother, Senator Hillary Rodham
Source: BBC
Jul 30, 2007
The last known surviving British soldier to have fought in the trenches of World War I has revisited the site where he fought 90 years ago.
Harry Patch, 109, from Somerset, made the trip to Belgium to recall his part in the Battle of Passchendaele which claimed 250,000 British casualties.
He also went to pay homage to the tens of thousands of German soldiers who lost their lives.
Source: Times (UK)
Jul 30, 2007
As Russia flexes its foreign policy muscles against the West and President Putin enjoys record approval ratings, the Kremlin is turning its attention to schools to instil a new sense of nationalism in children.
Two new manuals for teachers have been accused of glossing over the horrors of the Soviet Union and of including propaganda to promote Mr Putin’s vision of a strong state.
One, for social studies teachers, presents as fact Mr Putin’s view that the Soviet collapse
Source: Newsweek
Jul 30, 2007
Dick Cheney may be a taciturn man, writes author Stephen F. Hayes, but the vice president can become animated discussing doomsday scenarios. In his new biography, "Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President" (578 pages. HarperCollins. $27.95), Hayes tells the story of the Cheney family, sitting around their new big-screen TV in Jackson Hole, Wyo., on a recent Fourth of July, watching the 1997 movie "The Peacemaker." Starring George Cl
Source: http://www.alamogordonews.com
Jul 29, 2007
Operation Paperclip was the code name used for an extraction process of German scientists from Nazi Germany during and immediately after the last stages of World War II, which brought together a team at White Sands Proving Grounds (now White Sands Missile Range) that assembled and tested the Nazi V-2 rocket, with all initial components having been brought from the fatherland as well.
The immigration process allowing for the entry of these individuals, some with questionable ties to
Source: BBC
Jul 29, 2007
A bid to exhume the remains of a man who is thought to be the last recoverable Battle of Britain pilot from a site in Kent has been abandoned.
Flt Sgt Eric Williams was 28 when he was shot down on a combat mission over the Thames Estuary on 15 October 1940.
His squadron was attacked by German fighters led by Major Adolf Galland - the leading German ace of the period.
The operation to recover his remains from the site in Albion Parade, Gravesend, was called
Source: Robert Townsend in the AHA Blog (Click on SOURCE for embedded links.)
Jul 29, 2007
Moving past the usual alarmist anecdotes, a new study by the Center on Education Policy (CEP) offers hard evidence that the social studies are being squeezed in America’s schools by test-driven pressures imposed by the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act.
English Language Arts (ELA) and Math—the two subjects that are regularly tested under NCLB—are taking up an increasing amount of student time. In a survey of 491 school districts they found that 58 percent increased the amount of time
Source: Boston Globe
Jul 29, 2007
THE CORPORATION for Public Broadcasting is chasing teenagers. But instead of courting them with content about sex, music, or MySpace, the corporation is investing $20 million to develop multimedia content -- from television shows to Web-based games -- about American history and civics....
Launched in 2005, this project asked public television managers to develop media projects that "measurably improve" how middle and high school students learn civics and history. Public te
Source: AP
Jul 29, 2007
Around here, history lives on with people's underwear.
Two artists are selling hot pink underwear screen-printed with the word "Ypsipanty" as part of an effort to keep alive the city's historical place in the underwear business.
Linette Lao and Mark Maynard have sold nearly 200 pair of Ypsipanties.
"We were just thinking about Ypsi-positive things that we could make," Maynard told The Ann Arbor News for Sunday editions. To them, he said,
Source: Guardian
Jul 29, 2007
It was designed by a friend of Pablo Picasso, adorned with mosaics depicting Oedipus and the Sphinx, and described as Art Deco at its Athenian best. But a row about the building that guidebooks describe as a 'must-see' on the boulevard linking the Greek capital's great classical sites is now threatening to eclipse the opening of Europe's most ambitious museum. All because the 1930s building blocks the view from a restaurant.
Culture Ministry officials say the four-storey architectur
Source: NYT
Jul 29, 2007
They were high school friends from Park Ridge, Ill., both high achievers headed East to college. John Peavoy was a bookish film buff bound for Princeton, Hillary Rodham a driven, civic-minded Republican going off to Wellesley. They were not especially close, but they found each other smart and interesting and said they would try to keep in touch.
Which they did, prodigiously, exchanging dozens of letters between the late summer of 1965 and the spring of 1969. Ms. Rodham’s 30 dispatc
Source: Seattle Times
Jul 28, 2007
Take a drive down Dock Street any time of day, and you'll see two large people looking back at you. A bushy-eyebrowed, hook-nosed ship's captain, and a serene Muckleshoot woman, side by side.
They're about 8 feet high, and they're staring out from the wall of the Working Waterfront Maritime Museum. The faces are part of a brand-new mural on the street side of the museum, the beginning of a multiyear, $28 million renovation. It's an 80-foot-long scene of turn-of-the-century Tacoma,
Source: NYT
Jul 28, 2007
It’s not an unfamiliar tableau these days: people gathered on a grassy expanse of the National Mall here, listening to someone deliver an impassioned antiwar speech with phrases like “aggressive, activist foreign policy,” “the war we are creating,” “vigorous governmental efforts to control information” and “distorted or downright dishonest documents.” At some point, the crowd breaks into applause and a young woman yells out, “That’s right!”...
The firebrand orator was Max Bunzel, a
Source: Times (UK)
Jul 27, 2007
Seventy-four years ago this week, The Times started serialising the worst book ever written. Adolf Hitler had dictated Mein Kampf in Landsburg Prison in 1924, while incarcerated for his attempted putsch against the German Government. The book would not be published in Britain until October 1933, but this newspaper obtained the rights to run exclusive extracts four months earlier.
The Times explained that it was publishing this vile, anti-Semitic rant on the grounds that “readers wil
Source: BlackFarmers.org
Jul 27, 2007
[HNN: On Friday the House of Representatives approved a new farm bill that includes a provision to pay millions of dollars to black farmers discriminated against by Agriculture Department bureaucrats in earlier dcades. The bill goes to the Senate in the fall.]
John Boyd, president of the National Black Farmers Association, said it is something that needs to
happen."At least the farmers will get their cases heard on their merits," said Boyd, who raises corn, soybeans and
chickens in so
