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: NYT
Apr 4, 2007
The parallels are striking: bold new Congressional majorities swept into power by public dissatisfaction with White House policies. The administration and Congress digging in for a test of wills over federal spending. A watershed presidential election looming.
Memories of the rancorous 1995 budget fight between President Clinton and leaders of the Republican revolution are casting a distinct shadow over the current impasse between President Bush and Congressional Democrats on Iraq.
Source: New York Times
Apr 4, 2007
WASHINGTON -- As the Smithsonian’s museum directors filed into a conference room at the organization’s headquarters here Wednesday for their monthly meeting, Cristián Samper had some difficulty getting in the door. That’s because so many people stopped him in the hallway to shake his hand and wish him luck. “I feel like I’m on a receiving line,” he said.
In a way, he was. Just two days before, Mr. Samper, 41, had been catapulted from director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of
Source: New York Times
Apr 4, 2007
ATLANTA -— Less than a year after a dramatic eleventh-hour deal by a coalition of civic leaders saved a large trove of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s papers and personal items from the auction block, a new cache of his documents has surfaced for sale to the highest bidder.
The owner of an Atlanta auction house, Paul Brown, said he was given the papers by an elderly Maryland woman who wished to remain anonymous.
Mr. Brown said the woman told him she had accepted
Source: Salt Lake Tribune
Apr 4, 2007
WASHINGTON -- A Japanese-American internment camp in southern Utah that confined some 8,000 people during World War II will join the ranks of some of the most historic sites in America.
The Interior Department announced Wednesday that the Topaz Camp, near Delta about 140 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, will be recognized as a National Historic Landmark...
The camp, now mainly a windswept field, was used during the war to jail Japanese-Americans and recent immigrants as racial fear
Source: AP
Apr 4, 2007
PHILADELPHIA -- A 40-year-old intern with the National Archives pleaded guilty Wednesday to stealing 164 Civil War documents, including the War Department's announcement of President Lincoln's death, and selling most of them on eBay.
Denning McTague, who worked at a National Archives and Records Administration facility in the city last summer as an unpaid intern, pleaded guilty to one federal count of stealing government property.
The stolen documents are valued at abou
Source: Reuters
Apr 4, 2007
DAMASCUS -- Iraqi film director Basim Kahar says the homeland he remembers in two films set for release this month is no longer recognizable to his generation of secular artists.
"Khatoun (the Ladies)" tells the stories of 62 Iraqi actresses who left Iraq in phases, most of them after the U.S. invasion four years ago. "Ambassador in a Cafe" is about Abu Haloub, a leftist Iraqi exile who has for years been going to Rawda cafe in Damascus, and sits at the same tabl
Source: Christian Science Monitor
Apr 4, 2007
ATLANTA -- As he treks across the Dixie roads he traveled as a young FBI agent in the mid-1960s, Jim Ingram gets a similar question from many people about his quest to solve murder cases dating back to the civil rights era.
"We say, 'Look, a law has been broken, and we're committed,'" says Mr. Ingram, who came out of retirement at the FBI's request. "Then they say, 'Why are you doing this now?' Ingram answers: "Because it was not carried to its final conclusion 4
Source: Guardian
Apr 4, 2007
The love life of the IRA leader Michael Collins will be exposed to fresh scrutiny when letters about his relationship with his fiancée and the wife of a society portrait painter are auctioned. The correspondence is among 600 lots in an Irish independence sale in Dublin on April 17.
Letters and diaries from Moya Llewelyn Davies, a close friend of Collins, record her memories of the IRA commander. In a series of diary entries and letters to a friend, Mrs Llewelyn Davies - who it has b
Source: Kyodo News
Apr 4, 2007
KASHIHARA, Japan -- The Cultural Affairs Agency began work Tuesday to disassemble the stone chamber of the seventh- to eighth-century Takamatsuzuka tomb in the ancient village of Asuka, Nara Prefecture, for outdoor reassembly in a bid to preserve its colorful wall paintings designated as national treasures.
This is the first time the agency has taken apart a stone chamber containing national treasures.
It plans to take out 16 pieces of stone from the roughly 1,300-year-old chamber ov
Source: Scott McLemee in Inside Higher Education
Apr 4, 2007
Longtime readers of Intellectual Affairs may recall that this column occasionally indulges in reference-book nerdery. So it was a pleasant but appropriate surprise when the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford provided a copy of its new edition of the very first dictionary of the English language. It has been out of print for almost 400 years, and the Bodleian is now home to the one known copy of it to have survived.
Available [May 1] as The First English Dictionary, 1604 (d
Source: UPI
Apr 4, 2007
ATLANTA -- U.S. scientists have discovered ancient Greeks unwittingly created a sophisticated acoustic filter while building a fourth century B.C. theater at Epidaurus.
Despite many attempts to replicate the Epidaurus theater's design, the Greeks never achieved the same acoustic effect that allowed people in the back rows to hear music and voices with amazing clarity.
Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have...discovered it's not the slope or the wind -- it's th
Source: Honolulu Advertiser
Apr 4, 2007
U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne today announced the designation of Washington Place in Honolulu as a national historic landmark.
The former home of Queen Lili'oukalani — the last reigning monarch of the Hawaiian kingdom — is among one dozen new national historic landmarks recognized for their importance in interpreting the heritage and history of the United States.
The others established today are in Massachusetts, Ohio, California, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Utah,
Source: Reuters
Apr 4, 2007
KIGALI -- To much of the outside world, Paul Rusesabagina is a hero who saved 1,200 people from genocide in events depicted in the Oscar-nominated film "Hotel Rwanda".
But as the genocide's 13th anniversary approaches in his native Rwanda, a bitter row has erupted between Rusesabagina and critics, including President Paul Kagame, who say he is profiting from the victims' misery and rewriting Rwanda's history for his own gain...
The 2004 movie depicting Rusesab
Source: Reuters
Apr 4, 2007
MOSCOW -- Plans to build a memorial to the 333 hostages killed three years ago in the Beslan school siege have sparked a row between Christians and Muslims in Russia.
The local Russian Orthodox diocese says it will build a church in the grounds of Beslan's school No. 1 to commemorate the victims -- half of them children -- killed in a clash between insurgents and Russian troops.
But one of Russia's leading Muslim clerics has accused the Orthodox church of trying to hija
Source: AFP
Apr 4, 2007
ATHENS -- Greek archaeologists have uncovered an intact tomb and what was likely a Roman theatre on the Ionian Sea island of Cephalonia, the culture ministry announced Wednesday.
The findings include a space of about eight metres long and six metres wide (26 feet by 20 feet) with a vaulted tomb, a stone coffin and two funeral vases, among other items, the ministry said.
The front of the tomb is "particularly interesting," according to the ministry, with a ston
Source: National Geographic News
Apr 4, 2007
The charred bones that were long believed to be remains of St. Joan of Arc don't belong to the French heroine but are instead the remains of an Egyptian mummy, a new study has shown.
Philippe Charlier, a forensic scientist at the Raymond Poincaré Hospital in Paris, France, obtained permission last year to study the relics from the church in Normandy where they are housed.
The relics were said to have been retrieved from the French site where Joan was burned at the stake
Source: Independent
Apr 4, 2007
BARCELONA -- It was a spy story with a plot out of James Bond. During the Falklands War, Argentina planned to blow up a British warship in Gibraltar.
The main protagonist was a former left-wing guerrilla turned spy who specialised in mine attacks on warships.
A Spanish film-maker, Jesus Mora, has made a documentary about Operation Algeciras. For many years, no one in authority would admit the plot existed but Mora got the former Spanish prime minister Leopoldo Calvo Sot
Source: New York Times
Apr 4, 2007
PARIS -— ...Another previously undiscovered [Irène] Némirovsky novel has been unearthed. A powerful tale of love, betrayal and death in a Burgundy village, “Chaleur du Sang” —- provisionally titled “Fire in the Blood” in English —- was published to warm reviews here in March. [It will be published in the U.S. by Knopf this fall.]
What makes this case unusual, as many readers have since learned, is that “Suite Française” was written from 1940 to 1942 and was only published more than
Source: AP
Apr 4, 2007
TOKYO -- China's premier urged his Japanese counterpart not to visit a Tokyo war shrine at the center of tensions over Japan's past military aggression in Asia, a news report said Wednesday.
Speaking to Japanese media in Beijing ahead of a three-day visit to Japan next week, Wen Jiabao said that "individual Japanese leaders have visited (the shrine) numerous times and hurt the feelings of the Chinese people," Kyodo News agency reported.
"I hope this will
Source: Washington Post
Apr 4, 2007
RICHMOND, Va. -- This is what the Museum of the Confederacy, the onetime "Shrine of the South," has come down to:
Attendance has dropped by nearly half over the past decade. The museum has been losing about $400,000 each year for a decade. Employees have been laid off, hours curtailed. A recent report by a panel of outside experts in museum management concluded that the 117-year-old institution was at a "tipping point" that was going to affect "its very exis
