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: New York Times
May 17, 2007
Scientists working with the Defense Department have found evidence that a low-level exposure to sarin nerve gas —- the kind experienced by more than 100,000 American troops in the Persian Gulf war of 1991 —- could have caused lasting brain deficits in former service members.
Though the results are preliminary, the study is notable for being financed by the federal government and for being the first to make use of a detailed analysis of sarin exposure performed by the Pentag
Source: Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News (Federation of American Scientists)
May 17, 2007
More than five years after it was completed, the Department of Energy last year finally released a landmark historical account of U.S. production of highly enriched uranium (HEU) from 1945 to 1996.
Conceived a decade ago as a bold initiative to set a new standard for international transparency and government accountability, the HEU study was released under pressure as an unwilling concession to the rule of law, i.e. the Freedom of Information Act.The story of the five
Source: Telegraph
May 17, 2007
GUSEN, Austria -- Outwardly, number 18 Unteregartenstrasse in the charming Austrian village of Gusen has hardly changed in 60 years.
The iron gates of its drive remain the same. The arch under its first floor window, and the long low cottage off to one side are still identical. Only the people inside are different.
Today the buildings are home to middle class Austrian families. Few would guess that until 1945, number 18 was the gatehouse to Gusen concentration camp, and the low cot
Source: DPA (German Press Agency)
May 17, 2007
MONTREAL -- Cost concerns led a 1985 Air India flight to take off from Toronto despite credible information that a terrorist attack was imminent, an inquiry into the two-decade-old bombing heard Wednesday.
The revelation was the latest in a litany of security oversights, unheeded warnings and miscommunication among security officials in the days before Air India Flight 182 was blown from the sky, killing 329 people.
The lapses are a catalogue of missed opportunities: re
Source: Discovery News
May 17, 2007
Pre-Islamic Middle Eastern regions were home to mysterious snake cults, according to two papers published in this month's Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy journal.
From at least 1250 B.C. until around 550 A.D., residents of what is now the Persian Gulf worshipped snakes in elaborate temple complexes that appear to have been built for this purpose, the studies reveal.
The first paper, by archaeologist Dan Potts of the University of Sydney, describes architecture and relics dat
Source: AP
May 17, 2007
About two weeks ago, archaeologist Tom Kutys thought he'd found a stone wall when he came across mortared capstones in a trench at the state park that once was the site of French and British forts. Instead, archaeologists at Point State Park believe they very well might have uncovered long-buried remnants of Fort Duquesne, Pittsburgh's original fort...
"It argues that there may be extensive other evidence of Fort Duquesne," [archaeologist Brooke] Blades said. "People
Source: eWeek
May 17, 2007
The Hewlett-Packard Garage, a 12-foot by 8-foot shed at 367 Addison Ave. in Palo Alto, Calif., now stands beside such hallowed sites as the Alamo, Carnegie Hall and the White House.
The National Park Service on May 17 declared the site where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard began their partnership in 1938 a National Historic Landmark, among those sites and some 2,400 others considered historically significant by the agency.
The garage, which first appeared in Palo Alto cit
Source: Live Science
May 17, 2007
Abraham Lincoln might have been in the early stages of a life-threatening type of smallpox when he delivered his Gettysburg Address, lauded as one of history's greatest speeches and an archetype of genius brevity...
The researchers suggest Lincoln's physicians downplayed the severity of his illness in an effort to reassure the public that their president was not dying...Though some historians recognize that Lincoln was ill following his Gettysburg speech i
Source: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
May 17, 2007
Several hundred people gathered in front of the 17th-century Bernardine monastery complex in Minsk on May 16 to protest planned reconstruction work to convert the monastery into a hotel, Belapan reported.
The baroque-style complex, located near Belarus's main Orthodox cathedral, includes a former monastery and a former Roman Catholic church, which currently houses state archives.
The protest coincided with Solidarity Day, which has been observed by the Belarusian demo
Source: AP
May 17, 2007
PARIS -- A few years ago, Israel's prime minister claimed France was infected with ''the wildest anti-Semitism'' and urged French Jews to flee. From the far right came the charge that France's troubles were the fault of immigrants. From the left, the blame was laid on capitalism and free markets.
Nicolas Sarkozy's election as president confounds these premises and stereotypes: The French could have picked Socialist Segolene Royal, a colonel's daughter with something of a Joan of Arc
Source: Lee White, National Coalition for History (NCH)
May 17, 2007
In response to the release of the 2006 results for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for U.S. history and civics, Senators Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN) have re-introduced legislation (S. 1414) to establish a new, 10-state pilot program under the NAEP to assess and improve the knowledge of American history and civics.
The Senators plan to consider the legislation as part of the upcoming reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act. The S
Source: New York Times
May 17, 2007
After more than 50 years American Heritage, the magazine that furnished not just the minds but, in its original hardcover format, the dens of generations of American history buffs, is suspending publication, its editor, Richard F. Snow, said last week.
The bimonthly magazine, which is owned by Forbes Inc., has been for sale since January, and in the absence of a buyer, Mr. Snow said, the publishers have decided to put the next issue, June-July, on indefinite hold. For at least the t
Source: AP
May 17, 2007
A University of Colorado committee has recommended that a controversial professor accused of faulty research be suspended for one year rather than fired.
Ward Churchill, a tenured professor of ethnic studies, touched off a national firestorm with an essay that compared some of the 2001 World Trade Center victims to Adolf Eichmann, a key planner of the Holocaust.
It was some of his other work, however, that led an interim chancellor of the Boulder campus and another comm
Source: AP
May 17, 2007
The divided Koreas sent trains lumbering through their heavily armed border for the first time in more than half a century Thursday, reaching another symbolic milestone in a reconciliation process often hindered by the North's nuclear weapons ambitions.
Firecrackers and white balloons filled the skies near the border as a five-car train started rolling north on a restored track on the west side of the peninsula. On the eastern side, a North Korean train crossed into the South on ano
Source: Independent
May 17, 2007
PARIS -- President Nicolas Sarkozy took office promising to create a new France, rooted in pride in the values of an "old France" of hard work, discipline, patriotism and self-sacrifice.
After the traditional, rather stiff ceremony of inauguration...Sarkozy added a gut-wrenching speech paying tribute to young resistance martyrs of the Second World War..He said his first act as president would be to order the final letter home of a condemned resistance
Source: Times (of London)
May 17, 2007
ROME -- Mosaics from the fabled Gardens of Lucullus, one of the pioneering influences on gardening, have been brought to light after 2,000 years by archaeologists in Rome.
The vast terraced gardens, or Horti, covered what is now the built-up area above the Spanish Steps. The first known attempt in the West to “tame nature” through landscaping, the gardens were laid out around a patrician villa in the middle of the 1st century BC by Lucius Licinius Lucullus, one
Source: Times (of London)
May 17, 2007
With only a few words of Mandarin and some satellite photos to guide them, a British couple have become the first people to walk the entire length of the Great Wall of China.The 3,000-mile trek across some of the most inhospitable terrain on Earth took Tarka L’Herpiniere and his girlfriend, Katie-Jane Cooper, 167 days, walking up to 30 miles a day.
Their journey took them from baking deserts where temperatures peaked at more than 40C (104F) to snow-capped mountains where
Source: Telegraph
May 17, 2007
Marion Countess Yorck von Wartenburg, who has died aged 102, was among the last survivors of the Kreisau Circle, the group of intellectuals opposed to Hitler from which sprang the attempt to kill him with a bomb in July 1944.The circle derived its name from having met several times at the country estate of Helmuth Count Moltke. Yet though Moltke was the Kreisauers' driving force, they owed their harmony to the more measured temperament of Peter Count Yorck von Wartenburg, Ma
Source: Washington Post
May 17, 2007
In a collision of 21st-century science and decades-old conspiracy theories, a research team that includes a former top FBI scientist is challenging the bullet analysis used by the government to conclude that Lee Harvey Oswald alone shot the two bullets that struck and killed President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
The"evidence used to rule out a second assassin is fundamentally flawed," concludes a new article in the Annals of Applied Statistics written by former FBI lab metallurgist Wil
Source: Telegraph
May 17, 2007
The Archbishop of Canterbury last night declared that schoolchildren in mixed communities should be taught British history and traditions in a bid to better understand the national identity.
Dr Rowan Williams said that children needed to understand how cultures evolved and the origins of the values and traditions which society now held.
A proper education "would enable a measure of literacy in respect of the language and the imagery of the majority", he said.
