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: AP
Mar 5, 2007
WASHINGTON -- The Smithsonian Institution's chief auditor was named its permanent inspector general Monday —- nine months after her predecessor quit, citing shrinking resources to detect and prevent fraud at the massive museum and research complex.
The appointment comes as auditors investigate the Smithsonian's business units and compensation for top executives...
The Smithsonian Board of Regents appointed [A. Sprightly] Ryan to the permanent post. She reports directly
Source: AP
Mar 5, 2007
CONCORD, N.H. -- Bill Gardner is a modest man with an awesome power: the ability to set the date of the nation's earliest presidential primary.
In 31 years as New Hampshire's secretary of state, Gardner has not hesitated to upset the best-laid plans of other states or national political parties by moving up the date -- and he's poised to do it again in 2008.
The Democratic National Committee wants to squeeze Nevada between Iowa's leadoff caucuses on Jan. 14 and the New
Source: AP
Mar 5, 2007
EDGEFIELD, S.C. -- The Rev. Al Sharpton traveled Monday to Strom Thurmond's birthplace to visit the grave of a Thurmond relative who held one of Sharpton's ancestors as a slave.
Sharpton's trip to this rural town also included a visit to a cemetery where slaves are buried in graves marked only by small stones. He urged all blacks to explore their histories despite "the ugly things it might reveal."
The civil rights leader recently learned of his family's link
Source: McClatchy-Tribune Information Services
Mar 5, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe vowed in parliament Monday that his government would not apologize for military brothels that enslaved women during World War II, even if the U.S. Congress urges him to do so.
But Abe's provocative comments Monday and similar remarks last week may boomerang, and boost the chances for passage of a House resolution calling on Japan to make an official, formal apology for the kidnapping and imprisonment of up to 200,000 women in Asia dur
Source: AP
Mar 5, 2007
RAMALLAH, West Bank -- The Hamas-run Education Ministry has ordered an anthology of Palestinian folk tales pulled from school libraries, reportedly over mild sexual innuendo, the most direct attempt by the Islamic militants to impose their beliefs on Palestinian society.
The book ban angered and worried many Palestinians, who have feared that Hamas would use last year's election victory to remake the Palestinian territories according to its hard-line interpretation of Islam.
Source: Arizona Republic
Mar 5, 2007
Today's technology has proved to be a double-edged sword: There's no dispute that it has improved our lives, but it also has caused us to lose history as fast as we make it.
Correspondence is by e-mail; hit delete and it's wiped out. Thousands of photographs are taken; few are printed. Official records are increasingly digital.
With our fingers poised over the delete button, what will be left of our culture for historians?
Scientists say we have to take st
Source: AP
Mar 5, 2007
BERKELEY, Calif. -- Thieves have stolen a Nobel Prize gold medal from a museum diplay case at the University of California, Berkeley.
The medal was awarded for the Nobel Prize in physics in 1939 to the late physicist Ernest O. Lawrence for the invention of the cyclotron and was the first ever won by a university faculty member.
The medal had been stored in a locked display case at the Lawrence Hall of Science, a hands-on science museum in the hills above the Berkeley ca
Source: NYT
Mar 5, 2007
Thomas F. Eagleton, a former United States senator whose legislative accomplishments were overshadowed by his removal as the Democratic vice presidential candidate in 1972 after revelations of mental illness and electroshock therapy, died yesterday in Richmond Heights, Mo. He was 77 and lived outside St. Louis in Clayton, Mo.
The cause was a combination of heart, respiratory and other ailments, a family spokesman said.
Mr. Eagleton took a leading role on legislative iss
Source: Findlaw
Mar 5, 2007
North Carolina-Even as the U.S. Department of Justice was announcing a fresh look at unsolved civil rights-era killings around the South, a Mississippi Delta prosecutor was closing the books on perhaps the most notorious of those cold cases - the brutal 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till.To some, the Leflore County grand jury's decision not to return an indictment in the case following an exhaustive three-year federal investigation was a sign that not much has changed in
Source: NYT
Mar 5, 2007
Britain and Ireland are so thoroughly divided in their histories that there is no single word to refer to the inhabitants of both islands. Historians teach that they are mostly descended from different peoples: the Irish from the Celts, and the English from the Anglo-Saxons who invaded from northern Europe and drove the Celts to the country’s western and northern fringes.
But geneticists who have tested DNA throughout the British Isles are edging toward a different conclusion. Many
Source: AP
Mar 5, 2007
NEW YORK —- Once it formed the northern edge of the city, with a wall built by African slaves to keep out raiding Indians. Later, it was where the Bill of Rights was adopted, George Washington was sworn in, the New York Stock Exchange was founded under a sycamore tree, J.P. Morgan made his fortune and New York experienced its first terrorist attack.
All that was before the 1929 crash that led to the Great Depression, which probably more than any other event turned Wall Street, origi
Source: Guardian
Mar 5, 2007
In his quiet office at the British Museum, among the portraits of long-dead explorers and copies of 3,000-year-old inscriptions, one of the greatest experts on the archaeology of the Middle East has a series of maps of Iranian nuclear installations spread out across his desk.
John Curtis's maps fill him with foreboding: because they show how many of Iran's nuclear plants are perilously close to ancient cultural sites.
Natanz, home to a uranium enrichment plant, is renow
Source: Reuters
Mar 5, 2007
TOKYO -- Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said on Monday Japan will not apologise again for forcing women to act as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers in World War II even if a U.S. House of Representatives resolution demanding an apology is adopted.
But Abe said he stood by a 1993 Japanese government apology that acknowledged that the military played a role in setting up and managing wartime brothels and that coercion was used.
"I have to say that even if the reso
Source: AP
Mar 4, 2007
ROME —- A bronze horse, possibly the work of the Parthenon sculptor, went on display Friday at a Rome museum after a decades-long restoration.
The horse was returned to the Capitoline Museums following a $680,000 restoration that began in the late 1970s, museum director Anna Mura Sommella said.
Leaning on its hind legs with its head held back, as if preparing to break into a wild dash, the horse is one of the few surviving bronze equestrian statues from Greek times —- a
Source: NYT
Mar 4, 2007
FALSE advertising is part of the problem, and it’s right there in the name: alternative minimum tax.
“Minimum,” when the tax was conceived, meant that even the wealthiest Americans, with their buffet of deductions, loopholes and shelters, would still pay some income tax.
“Alternative,” added to the name of the tax 21 years ago, suggests a choice, but it’s not much of one for one in four taxpayers this year who must pay using this calculation unless Congress comes up wit
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Mar 4, 2007
GUATEMALA CITY -- Some things Maria Emilia Garcia, a 79-year-old retired schoolteacher, will never get used to.
Nearly 23 years ago, her son Fernando -- a 26-year-old union leader at a local bottling plant -- disappeared after being stopped at a police checkpoint."We canvassed the hospitals, morgues, the police stations, and never got answers," said Garcia."We were supposed to accept that he vanished into thin air."
Ten years have passed since Guatemala's peace accords ended a 36-yea
Source: AP
Mar 4, 2007
THE HAGUE, Netherlands -- Ramush Haradinaj, who was once a nightclub bouncer and martial arts expert and rose to become a guerrilla chieftain and Kosovo's prime minister, faces trial in which he is accused of mounting an ethnic cleansing campaign against Serbs.
His future will be decided by a panel of U.N. judges in the war crimes trial opening Monday in which he and two others are accused. They are pleading innocent, and many Kosovars believe it is their struggle against Serbian ru
Source: WaPo
Mar 4, 2007
Punctuating a fundamental change in American family life, married couples with children now occupy fewer than one in every four households -- a share that has been slashed in half since 1960 and is the lowest ever recorded by the census.
As marriage with children becomes an exception rather than the norm, social scientists say it is also becoming the self-selected province of the college-educated and the affluent. The working class and the poor, meanwhile, increasingly steer away fr
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Mar 4, 2007
Medford, Ore. -- Pat Hardy hefted two book bags stuffed with "cozy murder mysteries" through the snow to Ella Fitzsimmons' front door at the Blue Spruce Mobile Estates trailer park.
"I brought you extra, because this will be your last delivery," said Hardy, who has been bringing the bloodless whodunits to the homebound 78-year-old every month for the last several years.
Fitzsimmons' literary lifeline will be cut April 7, when Jackson County in southern O
Source: AP
Mar 4, 2007
PARIS -- France's culture minister will approve the construction of an annex to the Louvre Museum in Abu Dhabi, his office said Saturday, despite criticism in art circles that the government is playing loose with France's artistic treasures.
Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres will sign an accord in the United Arab Emirates on Tuesday paving the way for establishing the affiliate of the celebrated Paris museum, his office said, without providing details.
