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: BBC
Nov 27, 2006
Prime Minister Tony Blair has voiced his "deep sorrow" over Britain's role in the slave trade on Monday - a trade that helped Britain become one of the world's greatest powers in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Slavery had been illegal in Britain since 1102, but there were no laws to stop the use of slaves to toil in the fields and plantations of the growing empire.
Soon after the discovery of North America and the setting up of British colonies, the native popul
Source: CNN
Nov 27, 2006
On Monday, Tony Blair will issue, if not a full formal apology, at least a statement of "deep sorrow" for Britain's role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, a business that, between the 16th and 19th centuries, forcibly transported an estimated three million black Africans across the Atlantic and into servitude in the New World. The statement will appear in the New Nation, a British Afro-Caribbean community magazine. Blair's comments come in advance of the 200th an
Source: http://thinkprogress.org
Nov 27, 2006
The New York Daily News reports, “President Bush and his truest believers are about to launch their final campaign — an eye-popping, half-billion-dollar drive for the Bush presidential library.”
Bush is attempting to raise $500 million to build his library and a think tank at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Bush fund-raisers hope to get approximately $250 million from what they call “megadonations” of $10 million to $20 million each. Among the candidates for “megadonations,
Source: Media Matters
Nov 27, 2006
On the November 25 broadcast of National Public Radio's Weekend Edition, former Clinton special counsel Lanny Davis claimed that "Democrats have been intolerant" and repeated the false claim that former Pennsylvania Gov. Bob Casey Sr. was "refused the microphone at the [1992] Democratic National Convention because he was pro-life." As Media Matters for America has noted, several opponents of abortion rights were given speaking slots at the 1992 convention.
Davis
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Nov 27, 2006
A letter written by the author Lewis Carroll in 1890 has been restored to Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library after a librarian noticed a description of the document on the Internet auction site eBay, The Hartford Courant reported. The eBay seller, a Utah-based collector who had purchased the letter from another seller without knowing it had been stolen, returned it to Yale after discovering its shady provenance. The campus police are investigating how and when the letter
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Nov 27, 2006
Dartmouth College’s president and athletics director issued pre-Thanksgiving apologies for a series of incidents that have angered American Indian students and professors.
Following a meeting with Native American leaders, Dartmouth President James Wright sent a letter to the campus expressing concern about “racist and insensitive” behavior that Indian students have experienced. “I apologize on behalf of the college,” he wrote.
Wright acknowledged that much of the behavi
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Nov 27, 2006
Brown University’s October report elucidating the institution’s early ties to slavery has stepped up the pressure on other colleges to delve deeply into their own pasts and fully acknowledge their institutional links to slavery, Nazi Germany and other disgraced ideas.
Colleges are accustomed to taking more contemporary moral stances, whether by divesting from Sudan or ” kicking Coke” to protest alleged labor and environmental practices. But a new model for social responsibility — ba
Source: WaPo
Nov 27, 2006
For two women, so much comes down to this: a fragment of bone and the lick of a love letter.
Military scientists recently compared the bone recovered in a North Vietnamese jungle where an Air Force pilot's plane went down 40 years ago to saliva on letters he had sent his wife. It was a DNA match, they announced. At last, they said, the remains of Col. Charles J. Scharf had been found.
What they couldn't have known, however, was how differently that announcement would af
Source: AP
Nov 27, 2006
France's Socialists formally launched Segolene Royal's candidacy yesterday to compete in a fierce presidential race with high stakes for her and her party: Royal wants to be France's first female president and the Socialists are desperate to win back power after 12 years under Jacques Chirac.
"Together we are opening a beautiful page in the history of France. A new hope has risen in France, like a gathering wave that can only grow," Royal told a crowd of 1,500 at a Paris
Source: Independent (UK)
Nov 27, 2006
Some 562 men, women and children made up the human cargo of the slave ship Feroz. Crammed beneath grate-covered hatchways between the decks, left to stew amid the stench of faeces and rotting bodies, each bore the mark of their owner, branded on their skin with a red-hot iron.
After boarding the ship bound for Brazil, Reverend Robert Walsh wrote: "The space was so low that they sat between each other's legs and [were] stowed so close there was no possibility of their lying dow
Source: Independent (UK)
Nov 27, 2006
Winston Churchill was a closet science fiction fan who borrowed the lines for one of his most famous speeches from HG Wells, says new research.
Dr Richard Toye, a history lecturer at Cambridge University, has discovered that the phrase "the gathering storm" - used by Churchill to describe the rise of Nazi Germany - had been written by Wells decades earlier in The War of the Worlds, which depicts an attack on Britain by Martians. Dr Toye also identified similarities betwee
Source: NYT
Nov 27, 2006
BAD NEUENAHR-AHRWEILER, Germany: At the end of a serpentine road here, flanked by pinot noir vineyards, an unmarked door is cut into a hillside. Behind it lies one of the most secret places in the former West Germany: a vast subterranean bunker to shelter the government in the event of a nuclear war.
That door finally swung open this week — nine years after this cold war relic had been consigned to history — as the German government broke ground on a project to turn the bunker into
Source: NYT
Nov 27, 2006
An ambitious international project to decipher 1,000-year-old moldy pages is yielding new clues about ancient Greece as seen through the eyes of Hyperides, an important Athenian orator and politician from the fourth century B.C. What is slowly coming to light, scholars say, represents the most significant discovery of Hyperides text since 1891, illuminating some fascinating, time-shrouded insights into Athenian law and social history.
Source: WaPo
Nov 27, 2006
It took Bill Clinton months to get his feet planted again after the 1994 defeat. But he did recover and went on to win reelection two years later. So too did Ronald Reagan bounce back from the 1986 midterm elections, which cost his party the Senate. As President Bush struggles to recover from a similar thrashing, his advisers are studying the Clinton and Reagan models for lessons to revive his presidency.Historical comparisons are always fraught with peril, since each presid
Source: WaPo
Nov 26, 2006
Sometimes they'd arrive quiet as spies in those segregated towns and grab a place at a rooming house. It wouldn't take long to find out which neighborhood it might be wise to avoid come nightfall.
But then the story would ignite and they'd be right in the center of the mayhem. Full of adrenaline and with a deadline to beat.
Emmett Till raised from swampy Mississippi waters.
Freedom buses afire on the scuffed dirt of Alabama.
Those black childre
Source: Times Online (UK)
Nov 26, 2006
TONY BLAIR is to express his “deep sorrow” for Britain’s role in the slave trade tomorrow, but his carefully worded comments will fall short of the full apology demanded by campaigners.
In a characteristic piece of positioning, the prime minister will issue a statement to the black community newspaper New Nation, atoning for the country’s involvement in the trade nearly 200 years ago.
But it will disappoint those who wanted the prime minister to make an apology in a parliam
Source: NYT
Nov 26, 2006
SOME old soldiers don’t even fade away. They keep on fighting, trapped in their own past as the world around them changes, ghosts of a long-dead war.
“I have the duty to liberate my country!” shouted Ly Tong, wearing bright yellow prison pajamas, through a double screen of wire mesh at Bangkok’s central jail.
“The only thing that matters is, the Communists still control my country,” he shouted over the hubbub in the caged visiting area recently. “I’m a pilot. This is wh
Source: NYT
Nov 26, 2006
Is Iraq in a civil war?
Though the Bush administration continues to insist that it is not, a growing number of American and Iraqi scholars, leaders and policy analysts say the fighting in Iraq meets the standard definition of civil war.
The common scholarly definition has two main criteria. The first says that the warring groups must be from the same country and fighting for control of the political center, control over a separatist state or to force a major change in p
Source: Yahoo News
Nov 26, 2006
Statues weighing up to five tonnes and thought to be of one of ancient Egypt's greatest pharaohs, Ramses II, have been found northeast of Cairo, Egypt's Supreme Antiquities Council said in a statement on Sunday. Ramses II ruled Egypt from 1304 to 1237 BC, and presided over an era of great military expansion, erecting statues and temples to himself all over Egypt. He is traditionally believed to be the pharaoh mentioned in the biblical story of Moses.
"Many
Source: LAT
Nov 25, 2006
Robert M. Gates, President Bush's nominee to lead the Pentagon, advocated a bombing campaign against Nicaragua in 1984 in order to "bring down" the leftist government, according to a declassified memo released by a nonprofit research group.
The memo from Gates to his then-boss, CIA Director William J. Casey, was among a selection of declassified documents from the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal posted Friday on the website of the National Security Archive,
