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: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
Jul 23, 2007
Now, like a sixth grader caught scribbling “BU + GWB” in a notebook, Baylor officials will apparently be forced to confess their daydreams [of hosting the Bush library] in public. A Texas judge on Monday instructed the university to answer questions about whether it believes its library proposal is a dead letter, the Dallas Morning News reported today.
The unusual ruling arose in a lawsuit filed against SMU by Gary Vodicka, a Dallas resident who asserts that the university improperl
Source: Salon
Jul 23, 2007
By late last week, the fight between the Bush White House and Congress over the firings of nine U.S. attorneys seemed to be leading toward possible contempt charges for some former administration officials. The Bush administration had previously asserted executive privilege over certain documents and witnesses sought by Congress in its investigation of the firings, even directing former White House counsel Harriet Miers to disobey a subpoena ordering her to appear before Congress. Democratic leg
Source: WaPo
Jul 23, 2007
Domestication of food and fiber plants in the New World — as well as the emergence of communities built around farming — appears to have occurred earlier than previously believed.Researchers from four institutions, including the Agriculture Department, reported in the journal Science that they have determined certain cultivated plant material from northern Peru to be 9,240 years old.
The researchers, led by Vanderbilt University anthropologist Tom Dillehay, date
Source: NYT
Jul 23, 2007
ANDERSEN AIR FORCE BASE, Guam — To take part in its annual exercises with the United States Air Force here last month, Japan practiced dropping 500-pound live bombs on Farallon de Medinilla, a tiny island in the western Pacific’s turquoise waters more than 150 miles north of here....
“The level of tension was just different,” said Capt. Tetsuya Nagata, 35, stepping down from his cockpit onto the sunbaked tarmac.
The exercise would have been unremarkable for almost any o
Source: Alexander Solzhenitsyn interview published in the NYT
Jul 23, 2007
[Question]: Thirteen years ago when you returned from exile, you were disappointed to see the new Russia. You turned down a prize proposed by Gorbachev, and you also refused to accept an award Yeltsin wanted to give you. Yet now you have accepted the State Prize which was awarded to you by Putin, the former head of the FSB intelligence agency, whose predecessor the KGB persecuted and denounced you so cruelly. How does this all fit together?
Solzhenitsyn: The prize in 1990 was propos
Source: LAT
Jul 23, 2007
CHANGSHA, China — Someday, a great monument in Washington may bear the name of Lei Yixin. For now, you can find him down a pockmarked road in a grungy industrial suburb of this Chinese provincial capital.
The monument won't be built to honor Lei, who is scarcely famous in his own hometown, much less the United States. It is being built in memory of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and will rise along Washington's Tidal Basin, between the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials.
Source: NYT
Jul 23, 2007
It was in the Rütli Meadow in 1291 where, according to legend, representatives of the three original Swiss cantons, Schwyz, Uri and Unterwalden, took an oath to protect one another from the great threat of the era, the Austrians. So each Aug. 1, the reputed date of the Rütli oath, the Swiss celebrate their independence and courageous beginnings.
“It’s a bit of Bastille Day and the Fourth of July rolled into one,” said Urs W. Studer, Lucerne’s mayor, seated in his spacious office in
Source: Press Release--David Wyman Institute
Jul 23, 2007
More than 100 Holocaust scholars and Jewish leaders --including top leaders of Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Judaism-- have signed a petition urging the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to change its main exhibit so as to include acknowledgment of the 1940s Holocaust rescue activists known as the Bergson Group.
During the Holocaust years, some American Jewish leaders opposed the Bergson Group for being too forthright in its criticism of the Roosevelt administration’s fa
Source: NYT
Jul 23, 2007
Taiwan plans to revise school textbooks to drop references that recognize Chinese historical figures, places and artifacts as ''national,'' an official said Sunday.The announcement is the latest in a series of moves by the island in the past few months to assert its sovereignty as President Chen Shui-bian's final term in office winds down.
Pan Wen-chung, an Education Ministry official, said authorities are considering dropping about 5,000 ''inappropriate'' refer
Source: Jewish Community Alliance of Maine
Jul 23, 2007
Israel's Education Ministry says it is offering a new textbook for Arab third-graders acknowledging for the first time that the creation of the Jewish state was a tragedy for Palestinians.The textbooks for the upcoming school year give the Jewish narrative of the events of 1948 and 1949 when Israel's creation drew an invasion by Arab armies in a conflict that displaced some 700,000 Palestinians. They point out Jews' historical connection to the Holy Land and their need for a
Source: Deutsche Welle
Jul 23, 2007
For years Flossenbürg has been regarded as one of the "forgotten concentration camps" of World War II. Now, a new exhibition has opened which tells the story of those who were incarcerated and who lost their lives there.A postcard in one of the first display rooms of the new museum reads: "Greetings from Flossenbürg." The friendly greeting is positioned under a picture of the historic castle ruins for which the small town on the German-Czech border is sti
Source: Live Science
Jul 23, 2007
People living in Europe during early Medieval times (400—1200 A.D.) actually had a progressive view of illness because disease was so common and out in the open, according to the research presented at a recent historical conference.
Instead of being isolated or shunned, the sick were integrated into society and taken care of by the community, the evidence suggests."The Dark Ages weren't so dark," said University of Nottingham historian Christina Lee, c
Source: The Age (Australia)
Jul 23, 2007
An expert panel in Canberra will consider a report tomorrow that several mass graves have been discovered holding the bodies of about 400 Australian and British soldiers killed in the Battle of Fromelles, in what might have been the most calamitous day in Australian history.The battle, in July 1916, was a bloody introduction for Australians to the horrors of the Western Front. Fred Kelly, one of the last Gallipoli veterans, said Gallipoli was a picnic compared with Fromelles
Source: WCBS
Jul 23, 2007
A 3-foot-by-10-foot section of brick wall, painstakingly preserved from a 175-year-old building in lower Manhattan, is raising some interesting questions. The brickwork symbol is part of a tantalizing historical whodunit. The setting conjures both New York's mercantile past and its future, and those who may be involved include a prominent, deeply Christian businessman.
Could the design be a cryptic marker of mystical beliefs? A tradesman's signature? A bit of architectural shorthand
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jul 23, 2007
They made the ultimate sacrifice for their country, hurling themselves from the trenches before vanishing in a hail of German bullets so thick that it was described by one witness as a "crisscrossed lattice of death".
Now, more than 90 years after hundreds of British and Commonwealth soldiers died and disappeared in the First World War killing fields of northern France, historians believe they have found several mass graves containing the remains of the "lost army&quo
Source: International Herald Tribune
Jul 22, 2007
When terrorists tried to blow up civilians in London and Glasgow, Gordon Brown, the new British prime minister, responded in his own distinctive way.
What had just been narrowly averted, he said, was not a new jihadist act of war but instead a criminal act. As if to underscore the point, Brown instructed his ministers that the phrase "war on terror" was no longer to be used and, indeed, that officials were no longer even to employ the word "Muslim" in connection
Source: Boston Globe
Jul 22, 2007
W hen the First National Bank of Ipswich closed a branch office in Rowley several months ago, staff members made quite a find in the vault. The stamp on a canvas money bag, dated 1966, indicated that the bag contained $1,000 in dimes. Its actual contents turned out to be worth a pretty penny more.
Inside the bag was a fragile leather-bound book stuffed with hundreds of pages of cramped handwritten notes. To all appearances, the book contained records of the First Congregational Chur
Source: Baltimore Sun
Jul 22, 2007
Five years ago, Stanford Makashule Gana quit the African National Congress, the storied anti-apartheid movement of Nelson Mandela that has come to dominate politics and government in South Africa.
It was a brave move. But then the 18-year-old college student did something even bolder for a poor, black villager: He joined the Democratic Alliance, the small but vociferous opposition often dismissed as the "white party."
"Coconut," he vividly recalls pa
Source: Times (UK)
Jul 22, 2007
THE government is set to reject a 500m pounds road scheme which is seen as vital to preserving the status of Stonehenge as a World Heritage site.
A tunnel more than a mile long would have taken the A303 trunk road under the extensive prehistoric landscape in which the stone circle stands. A new visitor centre had also been planned.
Despite 20 years of work by English Heritage, which manages Stonehenge, and several planning inquiries costing 25m pounds, a senior governme
Source: BBC
Jul 21, 2007
President Vladimir Putin has been credited with making Russia either stronger or more aggressive, depending on your point of view, but history has yet to deliver the final verdict as the fluctuating views of past Russian leaders clearly illustrate.
Tsar Nicholas and his family were executed on 17 July 1918
Tsar Nicholas II and his whole family were shot.
Almost 60 years later, the house where they were killed was knocked down.
The communists we
