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: NPR (audio)
Nov 15, 2006
President Bush travels to Vietnam this week for a summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. He's the second U.S. president to visitcommunist Vietnam since the war ended in 1975.
In Vietnam, the publication of a wartime diary written by an idealistic young doctor has captured the imagination of readers, and become a runaway best-seller. The diary of Dang Thuy Tram was rescued from destruction by an American soldier.
In December 1969, Frederick Whitehurst w
Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch
Nov 15, 2006
Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, Prince Philip, will visit Jamestown in May to celebrate the historic settlement's 400th anniversary.
The queen announced the visit in a speech today launching a new session of the British Parliament.
At about the same time, President Bush released a statement welcoming the royal couple "for a state visit to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Jamestown Settlement.
Source: Independent Institute
Nov 15, 2006
In Leeds, a former police station has found new life as a bar and restaurant, while the old Shoreditch town hall in the East End of London has become a venue for community events. Yet, all around the country many public buildings are facing an uncertain future through simple neglect of their worth, English Heritage says.
The conservation body warns that many of the nation's redundant town halls, fire stations, courts, schools and libraries are in serious danger of decaying over the
Source: BBC
Nov 15, 2006
130 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Teddy Roosevelt became the first president to travel outside the country while in office, visiting Panama to inspect the progress of building the strategically-crucial canal.
It seems extraordinary today that the "leader of the free world" should not venture abroad but, in November 1906, both the presidency and technology were hugely different from what they are today.
In 1906, just three years
Source: Newsday
Nov 15, 2006
Fox plans to broadcast an interview with O.J. Simpson in which the former football star discusses "how he would have committed" the slayings of his ex-wife and her friend, for which he was acquitted, the network said.
The two-part interview, titled "O.J. Simpson: If I Did It, Here's How It Happened," will air Nov. 27 and Nov. 29, the TV network said.
Simpson has agreed to an "unrestricted" interview with book publisher Judith Regan, Fox
Source: NYT
Nov 15, 2006
The old chestnut tree visible from Anne Frank’s attic window in Amsterdam that comforted her as she hid from the Nazis from 1942 to 1944 is diseased and rotten and must be cut down, the city council said. Experts estimate the tree’s age at 150 to 170 years. The Anne Frank House Museum, where the tiny apartment has been preserved, said that grafts had been taken from the chestnut and that it hoped to replace it. Anne Frank made several references to it in her diary. “Nearly every morning I go to
Source: NYT
Nov 15, 2006
FUKUOKA, Japan — Graying but walking with ramrod-straight backs, Chinese men in their 70s and 80s quietly toured a coal-mining museum here recently. But in a moment of recognition reaching back to their youth, the sight of a shovel, a rake and a vise made them call out the Japanese names for the antiquated tools.
The words were seared in the memories of the men, who otherwise spoke no Japanese, when they were forced to toil in slavelike conditions in southern Japan’s mines during Wo
Source: Reuters
Nov 14, 2006
A stamp that initially appeared to be a rare 1918 "Inverted Jenny," used by a Florida voter to mail an absentee ballot last week, is probably a fake, an official with the American Philatelic Society said on Tuesday.
After viewing photographs of the stamp, which turned up on a ballot envelope in Fort Lauderdale, officials with the U.S. stamp collectors' organization said they found inconsistencies that led them to believe it was a reproduction.
The Inverted Jen
Source: The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
Nov 14, 2006
A leading Holocaust research institute is challenging a museum's suggestion that paintings created by an Auschwitz prisoner really belong to the infamous Nazi war criminal, Dr. Josef Mengele.
The controversy concerns portraits that Mengele forced Auschwitz prisoner Dina Babbitt to paint of Gypsy prisoners on whom he was performing sadistic medical experiments. (Mrs. Babbitt, now 83, resides in northern California.) The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, in Poland, later acquired sev
Source: NYT
Nov 14, 2006
Archaeologists, it seems, will dig anything, even latrines. Sometimes this uncovers the stuff of scholarly evidence.
Over a hill, a discreet distance from and out of sight of the ruins of Qumran, near the Dead Sea, a broad patch of soil appeared to be discolored. Two archaeological sleuths had reasons to suspect this may have been Qumran’s toilet. Soil samples yielded the desiccated eggs of human intestinal parasites.
The researchers say this could well be evidence supp
Source: AP
Nov 14, 2006
A paternity claim by a 72-year-old woman claiming to be the daughter of late Argentine strongman Juan Peron hit a new bump Tuesday with revelations that a privately commissioned DNA test found no relation.
Martha Holgado has maintained for years through the courts that she is the product of a brief affair between Peron and her mother. The third wife of former President Peron, Maria Estela Martinez de Peron, commissioned the DNA test on a sample of Peron's bones after insisting the l
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 14, 2006
Baroness Thatcher will be invited by the Government to play a major role in the 25th anniversary commemorations of the Falklands conflict next year, it was announced yesterday.
The former prime minister, who led the country in the campaign to retake the South Atlantic islands after they were invaded by Argentina in 1982, is expected to take part in the ceremonies despite recent ill health.
Source: NYT
Nov 14, 2006
At the southern end of Madagascar lie four enormous wedge-shaped sediment deposits, called chevrons, that are composed of material from the ocean floor. Each covers twice the area of Manhattan with sediment as deep as the Chrysler Building is high.
On close inspection, the chevron deposits contain deep ocean microfossils that are fused with a medley of metals typically formed by cosmic impacts. And all of them point in the same direction — toward the middle of the Indian Ocean where
Source: NYT
Nov 14, 2006
Many conservative Christians say they believe that the president’s support for Israel fulfills a biblical injunction to protect the Jewish state, which some of them think will play a pivotal role in the second coming. Many on the left, in turn, fear that such theology may influence decisions the administration makes toward Israel and the Middle East....
Now, in tandem with the Israeli government, many evangelical Christians have focused on a new villain, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ah
Source: CBS 8 (San Diego)
Nov 14, 2006
It's settled. Basketball really did evolve from a childhood game called "Duck on a Rock." Such are the revelations contained in a newly unearthed trove of personal documents, photographs and mementos from basketball's founder, James Naismith.The items, including handwritten diaries and typed notes, were discovered last spring, when Naismith's granddaughter, Hellen Carpenter, went down to her basement to look for an old family photograph.
Instead, she f
Source: BBC
Nov 14, 2006
A German man deported from the US has gone on trial in the Germany city of Mannheim for alleged Holocaust denial.Germar Rudolf published a study saying the Nazis did not use gas to kill Jews at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
The prosecution says he "represented the Holocaust as invention" and used the internet to spread his documents.
If found guilty, Mr Rudolf will face up to five years in prison. He has already been given an jail sent
Source: La Times
Nov 14, 2006
Following directions in the Dead Sea Scrolls, archeologists have found the latrines used by the sect that produced the scrolls, discovering that efforts to achieve ritual purity inadvertently exposed members to intestinal parasites that shortened their lives. The young male zealots who established their sect at Qumran chose a life of austerity and isolation, but they could not have foreseen the hardships created by their religiously imposed toilet practices, researchers said Monday.
Source: NYT
Nov 14, 2006
William Alfred Shea was off by a decade and a half.
He once predicted that 15 minutes after he died, his name would be taken off the Queens stadium where the New York Mets play baseball. It took 15 years instead.
But Mr. Shea got the big picture right. Nothing lasts forever, certainly not a name on the facade of a ballpark, certainly not when huge bucks are at stake and corporate egos need nourishing.
For 42 years, the Mets’ home field has been called Shea
Source: NYT
Nov 14, 2006
The Montauk Point Lighthouse was commissioned by President George Washington and completed in 1796 and may be the most recognized landmark on Long Island. If left unprotected, it could also be a few good storms away from falling down its steadily eroding bluff into the ocean.
So the Army Corps of Engineers is embarking on a $14 million plan to save the lighthouse by building a sea wall of boulders to protect the bluff. But a group of surfers say the boulders that would save the ligh
Source: The State.com
Nov 13, 2006
The remains of hundreds of ancient people once buried in South Carolina continue to be stored in archives across the state five years after their existence was made public — despite efforts by tribal groups to recover and rebury them.
One set of remains stored by federal officials at the Savannah River Site might be as many as 6,000 years old, said Barbara Morningstar Paul, the state program coordinator for Native American Affairs.
Leaders of tribes with people still li
