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: UPI
Feb 16, 2007
URBANA, Ill. -- After years of debate, the University of Illinois is retiring Chief Illiniwek, its American Indian sports team mascot.
Illinois was one of 18 universities sanctioned by the NCAA in 2005 for keeping mascots and imagery deemed "hostile and abusive." By dropping the American Indian mascot, who has danced at athletic events since 1926 in a feathered headdress and Indian regalia, the university regains eligibility to host NCAA championship events.
C
Source: New York Times
Feb 16, 2007
No United States senator has been elected president since John F. Kennedy in 1960, but former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani is challenging an even more formidable historical hurdle: No former mayor has been elected president since Grover Cleveland of Buffalo in 1884 and Calvin Coolidge of Northampton, Mass., in 1924.
And no mayor has ever become president without serving first in some other elective office beyond City Hall.
“Should Rudolph Giuliani attain the presidency in
Source: Washington Post
Feb 16, 2007
During floor debate on the Iraq war yesterday, Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) quoted Abraham Lincoln as advocating the hanging of lawmakers who undermine military morale during wartime.
"Congressmen who willfully take action during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs, and should be arrested, exiled or hanged," Young declared.
One problem: Lincoln never said such a thing.
Conservative scholar J. Michael Waller did, in an
Source: Independent
Feb 16, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Four decades after he was executed by Bolivian troops and 10 years after scientists claimed to have discovered his remains, doubts have been raised over whether the bones and skeleton interned in the mausoleum in Cuba are really those of Che Guevara.
An investigation carried out by a Spanish-Mexican magazine claims that Cuban specialists were not telling the truth when in, 1997, they said that they had discovered the revolutionary's remains, along with those of six of
Source: Times (of London)
Feb 16, 2007
A previously unseen Turner watercolour is published for the first time in The Times today after its owner’s decision to sell a collection of 14 important works.
'A Swiss Lake, Lucerne', which was unrecorded because it has been in private hands until now, is among the shimmering landscapes that make up the finest collection of watercolours by the 19th-century master to come on the market in decades.
They are expected to send prices soaring to around £15 million at Sotheb
Source: Telegraph
Feb 16, 2007
Repairs to Stalin's depot threaten St Basil's
By Adrian Blomfield in Moscow
Last Updated: 2:06am GMT 16/02/2007
Like any dictator fearful of his people, Joseph Stalin had a contingency plan to prevent a popular revolution.
Unknown to the Muscovites that shivered their way along the cobblestones above, he hid a unit of his best and most powerful tanks in the basement of the Lower Trading Rows on the eastern perimeter of Red Square.
If the
Source: Times (of London)
Feb 16, 2007
Paul Kagame, the Rwandan President, says that his country will cement its bitter divorce from France and the French-speaking world, which he holds responsible for the 1994 slaughter of up to one million of his countrymen, by joining the Commonwealth later year.
“There are many benefits for us in joining the Commonwealth — cultural, economic, political,” he told The Times.
Mr Kagame has been invited to attend the next Commonwealth summit as an observer. “I hope they will then approve our me
Source: AP
Feb 16, 2007
ATHENS -- Sections of an ancient Greek theater were discovered on Thursday during construction work in an Athens suburb, archaeologists said.
Until now, only two such buildings were known in the ancient city where western theater originated more than 2,500 years ago.
Fifteen rows of concentric stone seats have been located so far in the northwestern suburb of Menidi, according to Vivi Vassilopoulou, Greece's general director of antiquities.
Source: Live Science
Feb 15, 2007
The number of children a woman in America has in her lifetime declined during the past two centuries, and it's not just because of the birth control pill.
Historians are closing in on the socio-economic and cultural factors in family downsizing, a trend also found in most of Western Europe.
"There are two reasons fertility rates can decline," said J. David Hacker, a SUNY Binghamton historian. "One explanation is that marriage declines. Not as many women g
Source: The Gramophone (UK)
Feb 15, 2007
It was already one of the strangest stories the classical music world had witnessed. But the discovery of the late English pianist Joyce Hatto as the greatest instrumentalist almost nobody had heard of, appears to have taken a bizarre, even potentially sinister turn.
It was around a year ago that Gramophone’s critics began to champion this little-known lady, whose discs –- miraculous performances, released by her husband William Barrington-Coupe on the tiny label Concert Artist –- w
Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch
Feb 15, 2007
On the same grounds that once served as the Capitol of the Confederacy, the past seeped into the present yesterday as a House panel discussed Abraham Lincoln and slavery.
The House Rules Committee tabled a measure pushed by state Sen. Henry L. Marsh III, D-Richmond, that sought to establish a commission to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the 16th president's birth, which will occur Feb. 12, 2009.
"Lincoln is regarded by many as the most outstanding president of
Source: Detroit Free Press
Feb 15, 2007
If you were an African American in one of a number of predominantly white, Detroit-area towns in the late 1890s, you probably knew the tacit rule: Get out of town before sunset.
Today you'll still see the legacy of these so-called sundown towns, thousands of which sprang up all over the United States after Reconstruction and flourished through the civil rights era.
Such towns have been documented by sociologist James Loewen in his 2005 book "Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimen
Source: National Geographic News
Feb 15, 2007
In the crystal-clear waters of a Florida spring, decades-old remains are defying identification, tantalizing experts who are trying to solve a Suwannee River mystery.
Local legend has it that the remains are all that's left of the steamboat Madison, a floating general store that chugged up and down the Suwannee in the mid-19th century...
The river touches eight Florida counties as it meanders from its source in the Okefenokee Swamp in southern Georgia to the Gulf of Mex
Source: AP
Feb 15, 2007
PARIS -- France rejected an asylum appeal from the widow of late Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana on Thursday, saying she was at the heart of the regime responsible for her country's 1994 genocide.
The French refugee agency originally rejected Agathe Habyarimana's request on Jan 4. The case went before the Appeals Commission for Refugees, which denied her appeal Thursday.
The decision came nearly three months after Rwanda cut off diplomatic relations with Paris ove
Source: AP
Feb 15, 2007
AUSTIN, Tex. -- On Aug. 4, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson had a busy day juggling his civil rights initiative, a growing crisis in the Gulf of Tonkin and the discovery of the bodies of three missing civil rights workers in Mississippi.
He also got a call from the first lady with a gentle reminder about dinner and a quick "I love you."
Under a new Web-based archive project launched Thursday, audio and visual records of Johnson's day are just a mouse click away
Source: Reuters
Feb 15, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Three women who were forced into sexual servitude by Japan in World War II on Thursday told the U.S. Congress harrowing tales of abuse and said they rejected Japanese official apologies as an insult.
The now elderly "comfort women" -- a Japanese euphemism for the estimated 200,000 mostly Asian women forced to provide sex for Japan's soldiers -- testified in a debate on a House of Representatives resolution calling on Japan to apologize for that practice.
Source: AP
Feb 15, 2007
MASHPEE, Mass. - The tribe that shared in the first Thanksgiving celebration received federal recognition Thursday as a sovereign American Indian nation, 32 years after it began its quest.
The ancestors of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe were at the area where Plymouth was founded long before the Pilgrims arrived, but their population was nearly wiped out by war and disease.
The roughly 1,500 members of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe learned last March that the Bureau of India
Source: Prensa Latina (Havana, Cuba)
Feb 15, 2007
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador -- The more than 460 minors who disappeared in the 12-year combat between the guerrillas and the Army during the Salvadorian Civil War are searched for by the humanitarian organization Pro-Search, at the request of the relatives."We still have an unresolved matter with the families of those boys and girls who disappeared during the 1980-1992 armed conflict, assured Ester Alvarenga, general director of Pro-Search.
The director pointed out that 323 of the 787 missing c
Source: BBC News
Feb 15, 2007
Peter Hain has apologised for Northern Ireland's involvement in the slave trade, or as it was back then, simply Ireland.
While there was opposition to slavery across the island there were also men who made fortunes out of the exploitation of slaves.
Part of Belfast's commercial and industrial advances of the time were linked to trade with the slave economies of the West Indies.
Waddell Cunningham, founding president of the Belfast Chamber of Commerce and fi
Source: BBC News
Feb 15, 2007
Turkey is to send an inspection team to survey excavation work being carried out near the Temple Mount or Haram al-Sharif in East Jerusalem...
The work on an ancient mound near Jerusalem's holiest site has caused widespread anger in the Muslim world.
Israel is now showing the work live on the internet in a bid to calm Muslim fears the site is being damaged...<http://www.antiquities.org.il/home_eng.asp>
