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: CNSnews.com
Jun 26, 2007
For what is believed to be the first time in its history, the U.S. Senate will on July 12 be opened with a Hindu prayer, the Senate Chaplain's Office confirmed Monday.
For more than 200 years, the Senate has opened each workday with a prayer usually delivered by the Senate Chaplain, currently Barry Black, a Seventh Day Adventist. It is common, however, for senators to recommend religious leaders from their home states to serve as guest chaplains.
Rajan Zed, a Hindu cha
Source: PRNewswire
Jun 26, 2007
Ancestry.com, the world's leading online family history resource, today launched more than 7.5 million names in U.S. Indian Censuses, the largest online collection of Native American family history records. Taken by the Bureau of Indian affairs, the censuses document some 150 years of Native American family history. These censuses create an intimate portrait of individuals living on all registered Indian reservations between 1885 and the 1940s.
Source: Baltimore Sun
Jun 26, 2007
Under blue tents in Cockeysville, archaeologists scrub shards of pottery with toothbrushes. Nearby, small flags jut from the grass and a hole reveals a stone foundation and steps.
It might seem an unlikely place for an archaeological project, just a short distance from Interstate 83 and a light rail stop. But it's where a team of archaeologists working with the Maryland State Highway Administration is unearthing the remnants of a small plantation where slaves, free blacks and Europe
Source: NYT
Jun 26, 2007
Gen. Nguyen Chanh Thi, a popular and flamboyant South Vietnamese senior officer whose firing in the spring of 1966 set off civil warfare within his own country at the same time it was fighting the Communist north, died Saturday in Lancaster, Pa. He was 84.
Matthew Kalafat, his son-in-law, announced the death.
General Thi administered a huge swath of the northern part of South Vietnam when his chief rival in the ruling military junta, Air Vice Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky, the
Source: National Security Archive
Jun 26, 2007
The full "family jewels" report, released today by the Central Intelligence Agency and detailing 25 years of Agency misdeeds, is now available on the Archive's Web site. The 702-page collection was delivered by CIA officers to the Archive at approximately 11:30 this morning -- 15 years after the Archive filed a Freedom of Information request for the documents.
The report is available for download in its entirety and is also split into smaller files for easier download.
Source: Reuters
Jun 26, 2007
The CIA worked with three American mobsters in a botched "gangster-type" attempt to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro in the early 1960s, according to documents released by the CIA on Tuesday.
The CIA hauled the skeletons out of its closet by declassifying hundreds of pages of long-secret records that detail some of the agency's worst illegal abuses during about 25 years of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying and kidnapping.
CIA Director Micha
Source: CNN
Jun 26, 2007
Germany has barred the makers of a movie about a plot to kill Adolf Hitler from filming at German military sites because its star Tom Cruise is a Scientologist, the Defense Ministry said on Monday.
Cruise, also one of the film's producers, is a member of the Church of Scientology which the German government does not recognize as a church. Berlin says it masquerades as a religion to make money, a charge Scientology leaders reject...The decision drew a
Source: Newsweek
Jun 26, 2007
A group of conservative Christians staged their own celebration of the 400-year anniversary of the historic colony—and blasted the official commemoration as politically correct folly that failed to recognize Jamestown's importance as the beachhead of American Christianity.Fifteen miles from Williamsburg, Va., in Charles City County, on a country road dominated by plantations turned bed-and-breakfasts, 4,000 ultra-conservative, largely home-schooling Christians gathered to co
Source: Boston Globe
Jun 26, 2007
A resolution calling on Japan to officially apologize for pressing thousands of women into sexual servitude in World War Two won strong approval on Tuesday from a U.S. congressional committee.The resolution introduced by Japanese-American lawmaker Mike Honda was approved 39 to 2 by the U.S. House of Representatives International Relations Committee in a step that allows the nonbinding measure to move to the full house.
The symbolic statement of U.S. Congressiona
Source: San Fransicso Chronicle
Jun 26, 2007
The CIA released hundreds of pages of internal reports Tuesday on assassination plots, secret drug testing and spying on Americans that triggered a scandal in the mid-1970s.The documents detail assassination plots against foreign leaders such as Fidel Castro, the testing of mind-altering drugs like LSD on unwitting citizens, wiretapping of U.S. journalists, spying on civil rights and anti-Vietnam war protesters, opening of mail between the United States and the Soviet
Source: History Carnivals Aggregator (blog)
Jun 26, 2007
A blog carnival is a regular round-up of blog posts on a subject. There are a number of history-related carnivals:Carnival of Bad History, June 25Asian History Carnival, June 25Carnival of Genealogy
Source: AP
Jun 26, 2007
Charles W. Lindberg, one of the U.S. Marines who raised the first American flag over Iwo Jima during World War II, has died. He was 86.
Lindberg, who died Sunday in Edina, Minn., spent years explaining that it was his patrol, not the one in the famous Associated Press photograph by Joe Rosenthal, that raised the first flag there.
On Feb. 23, 1945, Lindberg and five other Marines fought their way to the top of Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi. He was awarded the Silver Star fo
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, is published by the Federation of American Scientists
Jun 26, 2007
The arcane details of national security classification policy became
the stuff of late night comedy as White House officials struggled to
justify the peculiar refusal of Vice President Dick Cheney to comply
with the oversight requirements established by President Bush's
executive order on classification.
For two successive days, the White House press briefing was dominated
by incredulous reporters who wondered how the Vice President could
claim that he both was and was not part of th
Source: http://en.epochtimes.com
Jun 25, 2007
Recently, a Chinese archaeological team working in Hanchen City, Shaanxi Province, excavated an ancient tomb from the Zhou Dynasty ((1046-221 B.C.) and discovered many precious historical relics. Inside one chamber they found four wooden figurines with color painted design. To this day, these figurines are the earliest known in China. They have been dated 500 years older than the terracotta soldiers and horses of the Qin Dynasty (221-205 B.C.)
The cemetery of the Zhou Dynasty in Lia
Source: Newsweek
Jun 25, 2007
Fred Thompson has a gift for knowing just what to say to anyone, in any situation. In 1998, when Thompson was a Republican senator and a single man about town, New York socialite Georgette Mosbacher invited him to accompany her on an overseas trip. Thompson couldn't go, and summoned the full measure of his Tennessee charm in letting her down. "I am sitting here with a long face and broken heart as I contemplate sunsets on the Mediterranean, which I will not see," he wrote to Mosbacher
Source: ABC News
Jun 25, 2007
A diamond-adorned sword once owned by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant brought a winning bid of more than $1.6 million in an auction of Civil War items.
The sword given to Grant, who later became the 18th president, was one of the marquee items among the 750 to be auctioned Sunday and Monday by Heritage Auction Galleries of Dallas.
Source: NYT
Jun 25, 2007
One entry, dated April 14, 1954, was about I. F. Stone, who was described as being a writer from New York. Mr. Stone, it was noted, condemned Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s “persecution of innocent citizens” and likewise the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the Senate’s corresponding committee....
From 1940 to 1975, thousands of reports like these were part of extensive files compiled by the F.B.I. while it carried out a clandestine surveillance campaign on the National L
Source: http://www.inrich.com
Jun 25, 2007
Barbara Jackson-Bowens doubts she would have made it -- not across the ocean shackled side by side in a slave ship, up the James River to Richmond and then along the riverbank on a 3-mile march from the Manchester dock in the dark.
Yesterday, she came to that riverbank to pay homage to those who did survive. She was among the early arrivals at a Juneteenth celebration commemorating freedom from slavery.
An afternoon of ceremonies, speeches, music and dance preceded a to
Source: BBC
Jun 25, 2007
Archaeologists have revived the debate over whether a spectacular Bronze Age disc from Germany is one of the earliest known calendars.
The Nebra disc is emblazoned with symbols of the Sun, Moon and stars and said by some to be 3,600 years old.
Writing in the journal Antiquity, a team casts doubt on the idea the disc was used by ancient astronomers as a precision tool for observing the sky.
They instead argue that the disc was used for shamanistic rituals.
Source: NYT Mag
Jun 24, 2007
In many ways, the dispute between Yale and Peru is unlike the headline-making investigations that have impelled the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to repatriate ancient artifacts to their countries of origin. It does not revolve around criminal allegations of surreptitious tomb-raiding and black-market antiquities deals. But if the circumstances are unique, the background sentiments are not. Other countries as well as Peru a
