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: Weekly Dig
Mar 28, 2007
In 1775, the Essex Gazette published this account of a fatal Tory assault on Boston’s Liberty Tree: “Armed with axes, they made a furious attack upon it. After a long spell of laughing and grinning, sweating, swearing, and foaming, with malice diabolical, they cut down a tree because it bore the name of Liberty.”
For years, the tree had served as a flashpoint for all manner of incendiary violence and insurrection, both before and during the Revolutionary War. The mildly terrorist B
Source: Linux.com
Mar 28, 2007
The Library of Congress, where thousands of rare public domain documents relating to America's history are stored and slowly decaying, is about to begin an ambitious project to digitize these fragile documents using Linux-based systems and publish the results online in multiple formats.
Thanks to a $2 million grant from the Sloan Foundation, "Digitizing American Imprints at the Library of Congress" will begin the task of digitizing these rare materials -- including Civil W
Source: CNN
Mar 28, 2007
The arrest of two women teachers on charges of having sex with their male students has brought cries of lingering racism in one of South Carolina's most conservative counties and evoked some of the South's oldest and deepest-seated racial taboos.
Both women are white. The boys -- six in all -- are black....
In the town of Laurens, where one of the teachers taught, an old movie theater has been converted into a Ku Klux Klan museum and paraphernalia store called The Redne
Source: AP
Mar 28, 2007
WASHINGTON -- A congressional committee approved a resolution yesterday calling for expediting the opening of millions of Nazi files on concentrations camps and their victims.
Earlier this month, an 11-nation body overseeing the long-secret archive set procedures to open the records stored in Bad Arolsen, Germany by the end of the year. All the member countries must ratify an agreement adopted last year to end the 60-year ban on using the files for research.
The resolut
Source: Live Science
Mar 28, 2007
Ancient Peruvian aristocrats dismembered their less well-off neighbors as a scare tactic, new archaeological finds suggest.
Several deformed corpses were found during recent excavations at the burial necropolis of El Trigal, a once-downtrodden community located in the Nazca province of Peru and dating to the 1st century A.D.
Members of nearby wealthier communities looking to send a message about their power may have been responsible for the mutilations, say archaeologis
Source: Reuters
Mar 28, 2007
LONDON -- Two historians have lost another legal battle in British courts over claims that U.S. author Dan Brown plagiarized their ideas for his blockbuster novel "The Da Vinci Code."
Three of Britain's senior judges dismissed the appeal by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh against an earlier High Court ruling which had also rejected their claims.
The decision leaves the historians facing estimated legal costs of three million pounds ($6 million).
Source: Reuters
Mar 28, 2007
TUSKEGEE, Ala. -- The first black U.S. Air Force unit will finally receive national recognition this week for fighting a double war -- one against the Nazis abroad, the other against racial segregation at home.
President George W. Bush will honour the surviving members of the Tuskegee Airmen with a Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian award given by Congress, at a ceremony on Thursday at the U.S. Capitol...
But just as their success is being recognised, one as
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Mar 28, 2007
A new study has found that 311 American colleges and universities offer programs in black studies, according to an article in Diverse: Issues in Higher Education. But a majority of the programs are in the East and the West — the two regions of the country with the fewest black residents. The study was conducted by Abdul Alkalimat, a professor of sociology and the director of Africana studies at the University of Toledo.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Mar 28, 2007
When Edward H. Blickstein picked up a copy of Vladimir de Pachmann: A Piano Virtuoso's Life and Art, by Mark Mitchell, published by Indiana University Press, he was"absolutely stunned" -- but not by Mr. Mitchell's fresh new take on the subject.
As a young man, Mr. Blickstein had been turned on to Pachmann (1848-1933) by his piano teacher. For almost half a century, on and off, he toiled on his own biography of the once-legendary Chopin interpreter whose onstage antics earned
Source: The Scotsman (Edinburgh)
Mar 28, 2007
Urgent action must be taken to safeguard Scotland's few remaining historic pubs, the author of a new guide has warned.Scotland's True Heritage Pubs, to be launched at Leslie's Bar in Edinburgh today, lists only about 120 that have kept the same bar for at least 40 years.
During this time, most pubs have gone through a number of refits and typically Scottish features, such as a central bar in the main room, have been lost..."We want to try to preserve t
Source: Times (of London)
Mar 28, 2007
ROME -- Long-lost illustrations by Galileo of the Moon’s surface as he saw it through his telescope have come to light after four centuries.
The five watercolours are in Galileo’s own copy of Sidereus Nuncius (The Starry Messenger) [published in Venice in 1610] in which he gave details of his revolutionary" celestial discoveries"...
The illustrations show the Moon with ochre and light brown shadings, highlighting the Moon’s craters and valleys. They do not feature in any other
Source: Washington Post
Mar 28, 2007
A day after Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence M. Small's resignation, the names of possible successors began to circulate.
Cristián Samper, 41, a respected biologist and the director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, was named acting secretary on Monday, and though it was purely water cooler talk, his stock seemed to be up...
Other potential successors to Small from the top rungs of Smithsonian management are Deputy Secretary Sheila Burke and Ned Rif
Source: Washington Post
Mar 28, 2007
Mike Marceau and O.P. Ditch both served in the Vietnam War. But one's dedication to the military mission became the other's disillusion. The conflict set them on profoundly different paths in life, propelled them into activism over the war in Iraq and deposited them on opposite sides of the barricades at this month's antiwar march on the Pentagon...
With the war in Iraq going on for four years, Vietnam vets on both sides of the issue have begun to take leading roles in trying to sha
Source: Telegraph
Mar 28, 2007
The Argentine veteran never talked about the war.
When Jorge Martire met his wife-to-be, Maria Laura, he omitted to mention that he had recently gone through hell in the Falklands...
Then in 1992, a decade after the end of the conflict in the Falklands, something inside him snapped...
In his hospital bed, being treated for atypical psychosis -- known by veterans as"Malvinas syndrome" after the Argentine name for the islands -- it all finally came flooding o
Source: Guardian
Mar 28, 2007
ROME -- Giovanni Passannante did not achieve much in life. The Italian cook turned anarchist failed in 1878 to kill the king with a kitchen knife, then went insane in solitary confinement on Elba.
Now his brain, still pickled in a glass box in Rome's crime museum, is at the centre of a row over whether to give him some peace, dragging in his home town mayor, actors, writers and politicians...
After emerging from the crowd in Naples in 1878 during a visit by Umberto I, t
Source: Telegraph
Mar 28, 2007
Editor's note: The British Library has just opened its 'Sounds Familiar: Accents and Dialects' website, featuring 671 recordings and sound clips. A map with this Telegraph story shows the regions where 'bath' is pronounced with 'a' or 'aa' or 'ah'.
The grarse spreading out from its London roots is gradually stifling the graaas, but one of Britain's leading accent experts said yesterday that a larf will never drown out a laff.
Students of the voices that make up a patchwork q
Source: Telegraph
Mar 28, 2007
Scholars call it"Darwin's delay," a reference to the best-known case of dithering in science, in which the great English naturalist sat on his theory of evolution for decades because he was so fearful its findings would be mauled by religious leaders and powerful figures in the establishment.
Today, that long-held belief within the scientific community is rebutted by a leading Darwinian scholar.
Dr John van Wyhe, a Cambridge University academic and director of the Complete Work of Ch
Source: Guardian
Mar 28, 2007
Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, took part in a secret court session which concealed the amount of inheritance tax avoided by the Queen on her mother's death, it was disclosed yesterday.
Lord Goldsmith arranged, with the high court judge Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss in 2002, that details of the Queen Mother's will should be kept secret. This emerged yesterday after the Guardian successfully applied to open up a private court hearing challenging the secrecy of royal wills.
In a he
Source: Discovery News
Mar 27, 2007
A titanic burp of protons from the sun in 1859 appears to have temporarily weakened Earth's ozone layer, say scientists studying ice cores from Greenland. The evidence of the massive radiation event is in the form of an excessive amount of ozone-related nitrates in the ice from that year.
The huge September 1859 solar flare appears to have gushed 6.5 times the protons of the largest flare seen by modern science —- which was in 1989...
"The flare itself was observed
Source: AFP
Mar 27, 2007
LISBON -- For almost two centuries people from around the world have flocked to a pastry shop in Lisbon for a creamy custard tart made according to a recipe that has been kept secret since it was bought from a monastery in the early 1800s.
The cavernous establishment located near the tombs of Portugal's kings and queens is the only place that sells the tiny "pasteis de Belem," named after the riverside neighbourhood where the shop is located.
"There is no
