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
Oct 27, 2006
A massive geological survey by the Chinese government is expected to answer a 500-year-old question -- the exact length of the Great Wall of China.
China's Administration of Cultural Heritage and its Bureau of Surveying and Mapping are organizing a scientific survey to discover everything they can about the Great Wall, the Xinhua state news agency reports.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 27, 2006
A soldier who survived the Charge of the Light Brigade but died in poverty to be buried in a pauper's grave was honoured yesterday in a -ceremony attended by his modern-day Army regiment.
Thomas Warr was with the 11th Hussars when he was one of the noble 600 who charged the Russian guns in Crimea in 1854.
He remained in the Army for a further six years before returning to his home town, Dorchester, where he died in 1916, aged 87. He was given a full military fun
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 27, 2006
English Heritage is to rewrite the histories of its properties to include any links that they may have with slavery.
It said yesterday that it wanted to reveal the often untold "sad" history of great estates and houses whose wealth may have been built on slave labour in former British colonies.
Maria Adebowale, an English Heritage commissioner, said the histories of many dynasties had been written for a white, middle-class audience. She said the organisatio
Source: WaPo
Oct 27, 2006
"Something there is that doesn't love a wall," wrote Robert Frost in "Mending Wall." The poem is in part about being driven nuts by a neighbor who ceaselessly repeats "Good fences make good neighbors."
As part of his own version of a good neighbor policy, President Bush signed into law yesterday the "Secure Fence Act of 2006." It authorizes construction of 700 miles of new walls along parts of the 1,951-mile-long border from San Ysidro, Calif.
Source: Media Matters
Oct 27, 2006
On Fox News, Ann Coulter asserted that Democrats "ought to be picking up 60 or 70 seats" in the House of Representatives in this November's midterm elections or "they may as well go away as a party." Coulter based her assertion about Democratic gains on her false claim that "[t]he average of the midterm election pickup since World War II is about 40 seats." In fact, since World War II, the average gain in the House after a midterm election has been about 25 seats.
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Oct 27, 2006
In the 1980s, many colleges adopted diversity requirements, typically telling students that they had to take at least one course about a non-Western culture or about an American minority group. These requirements frequently set off heated debates, with proponents talking about the need for diversity, and critics shouting about political correctness.
Williams College is in the process of changing such a requirement — with far more civility than characterized many of those ’80s discus
Source: Times Online (UK)
Oct 27, 2006
A LUXURIOUS brothel that once entertained wealthy clients in Pompeii has been opened as a visitor attraction after painstaking restoration.
The two-storey structure, which features erotic frescoes that leave little to the imagination, is expected to become one of the ancient city’s top draws. Officials who unveiled it yesterday emphasised that the year-long restoration had been carried out in the interests of archaeology — and to save the frescoes — rather than prurience. The broth
Source: Reuters
Oct 27, 2006
A judge on Friday ordered the arrest of former
Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet for crimes related to a secret detention
center used in the years following his 1973 coup.
Judge Alejandro Solis ordered the arrest of Pinochet for 36 cases of
kidnapping, one of homicide and for 23 cases of torture at the Villa
Grimaldi, a political detention center run by Pinochet's secret police
where thousands of people were tortured between 1974 and 1977.
Source: Newsweek
Oct 27, 2006
The CIA won't say so, but the U.K. initially opposed war in Iraq. A new book by Tyler Drumheller, former chief of the CIA's European ops, describes how, the day after 9/11, a "powerful delegation from a very close European ally" visited CIA Director George Tenet at HQ. In his book "On the Brink," Drumheller says the foreign-team leader said "his government stood by us ... and that we could count on it for any and all support." But the foreign rep cautioned, "I
Source: Times
Oct 27, 2006
Israel has urged the Vatican to halt procedures putting Pius XII, the controversial wartime Pope, on the path to sainthood.Oded Ben-Hur, the Israeli Ambassador to the Holy See, said: “I am asking the Vatican to block the beatification process for Pius XII.” He added that the process should be halted until archives relating to the Second World War were opened to scholars.
Pius XII, formerly the papal nuncio to Germany and later Pius XI’s Secretary of State as Car
Source: LAT
Oct 26, 2006
QUEEN VICTORIA would not have been amused. The recent revival of Victoriana as hip Hollywood décor — fainting chaises, nailhead-studded wing chairs, carved spider-leg and hoof-foot tables and vintage taxidermy — would have sent the prudish monarch scrambling for smelling salts. They are the kind of parlor pieces that would make Morticia Addams and cartoon Goth tween Emily the Strange feel right at home. When we say stuffed animals, we don't mean the kind at Build-A-Bear.
What is old
Source: AP
Oct 26, 2006
Dodge City has a rich history as an Old West frontier town, where cowboys and gunslingers could take a break from the trail and get their fill of saloons and brothels.
Today, the tidy town built on meatpacking and rodeos is again plagued by gunfighters. But this time they're in street gangs, some of which have second-generation members as young as 11. The drug of choice is methamphetamine and the weapons range from automatic rifles to baseball bats.
"When it was
Source: AP
Oct 26, 2006
Secret documents released Friday showed that British authorities lied to cover up the fate of a naval commander who died during a scuba diving spy mission near a warship used by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
Cdr. Lionel "Buster" Crabb, a decorated Royal Navy veteran, disappeared while diving near Portsmouth in southern England on April 19, 1956. Navy chiefs said Crabb was presumed dead after failing to return from a dive to test underwater equipment.
The
Source: BBC
Oct 26, 2006
Twelve years after South Africa's remarkable political transition, there is often heated debate, especially in the Afrikaans-speaking community, about many of the name changes that have been made to streets, towns and provinces since the African National Congress came to power in 1994.
For the most part, the names that have disappeared have been those of white Afrikaners, many of them prominent during the days of apartheid.
OR Tambo International is South Africa's bus
Source: AP
Oct 26, 2006
Nineteen .45-caliber cartridges buried in northeastern France may mark the spot where Sgt. Alvin York became America's most celebrated soldier of World War I, a research team said Thursday.
The Sergeant York Discovery Expedition said that after four years of work, it found the cartridges buried 2 to 4 inches in soil near the village of Chatel-Chehery where York single-handedly took out a nest of German machine guns.
Source: Reuters
Oct 26, 2006
Ancient human footprints discovered in the Mexican
desert may be among the oldest in the Americas, researchers said on
Wednesday.
The 13 footprints found in Cuatro Cienegas in the northern state of
Coahuila are fossilized in stone less than an inch (2 cm) deep and are
around the age of the oldest known footprints in North or South America."We believe they could be between 10,000 and 15,000 years old," said
archeologist Yuri de la Rosa."The research we have done on Cuatro
Cienegas
Source: WaPo
Oct 26, 2006
In some parts of the country, the Civil War is still being fought.
And perhaps nowhere are the aftershocks and viewpoints as evident as in Richmond, where a new museum is attempting to tell the history of the war from three angles. That would be: the Union, the African American and the Confederate.
The American Civil War Center, which opens today, argues that each of the three had distinct ideas about freedom -- and few would challenge that. Its inaugural 10,000-square-
Source: NYT
Oct 26, 2006
When the historic Tabernacle, the egg-shaped building that is home to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, reopens next year after a lengthy face-lift and seismic retrofit, visitors will find something new: the pews.
The loss of the original, and uncomfortable, pine pews, handmade in 1867 and meticulously etched and painted to look like oak, angers many Mormons, whose religion is strongly defined by its history and its forebears’ hardships.
Kim Farah, a spokeswoman for the Chur
Source: NYT
Oct 26, 2006
Benjamin Meed, a leading advocate for Jewish Holocaust survivors who in the decades after the war gathered them together by the tens of thousands, reuniting people with friends, neighbors and family members presumed to have been lost forever, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.
The cause was pneumonia after a long illness, his son, Steven, said.
A survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, Mr. Meed was at his death the president of the American Gathering of Jewish
Source: Daniel Kovach
Oct 26, 2006
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