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: WaPo
Oct 16, 2006
House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) shows no sign of resigning over the Mark Foley-House page scandal. But the mere suggestion that he might do so raises an intriguing political and constitutional question: Who would replace him while Congress is in recess?
The answer, it appears, is on a piece of paper locked away in the House clerk's office.
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Source: NYT
Oct 16, 2006
The early-Renaissance sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti spent 27 years creating the monumental gilded bronze doors for the eastern portal of the Baptistery in the Piazza del Duomo in Florence. And it has taken teams of conservators just about as long to restore them.
Their 10 panels depict scenes from the Old Testament, intricately illustrated in high and low relief. When the three-ton, 20-foot-tall doors were completed, in 1452, Michelangelo pronounced them grand enough to adorn the entra
Source: Independent (UK)
Oct 16, 2006
Memories of more than 50,000 Holocaust survivors are being made available to British schoolchildren through a video project devised by Steven Spielberg.
The first schools-specific use of the Hollywood director's 10-year project to record the testimonies of Holocaust survivors is being launched at Pimlico School in south London today - 60 years after the first Nazi war criminals were hanged.
Through the Recollections DVD programme, students can learn about the Holocaust
Source: Observer
Oct 15, 2006
The solution to the darkest of all Agatha Christie mysteries may be at hand. What lay behind her extraordinary 11-day disappearance in 1926? Several plausible theories have competed for favour over the years, but biographer Andrew Norman believes he is the first to find one that satisfies every element of the case.
In his study of the writer's life published this autumn, Norman uses medical case studies to show that Christie was in the grip of a rare but increasingly acknowledged m
Source: David McNeill at the website of Japan Focus
Oct 15, 2006
In late August, just over a week before Princess Kiko gave birth, Newsweek Japan commissioned this freelance journalist to contribute an article on the succession issue. With most of the country expecting a baby boy, the remit was to write a ‘very outspoken, opinionated’ piece on how ‘foreign experts’ viewed the latest developments in Japan’s imperial drama, with the emphasis on a single rhetorical question: wouldn’t a girl be better?
In November 2005, as the debate on changing the
Source: Newsday
Oct 15, 2006
Thousands of people were evacuated from their homes in the central German city of Hanover on Sunday as experts disposed of three World War II bombs, police said.
The three bombs, thought to be American-made, were dropped in an Allied bombing raid in October 1943, and were located with the help of aerial photos.
Two were buried in an open area, while the third was close to a house. All were embedded at depths up to 21 feet.
Fire service spokesman Alfred F
Source: Toronto Star
Oct 15, 2006
It lasted less than two weeks, from the first euphoric student
demonstrations in Budapest on Oct. 23 till its final bloody end on
Nov. 4, when it was crushed by Soviet tanks, but the Hungarian
Revolution of 1956 left an indelible mark on Cold War politics and
continues to resonate today. Thanks to the work of historians rooting
through newly released materials, the world's first televised
revolution is now seen as a classic case of how the Cold War deformed
international rel
Source: Drake Bennett in the Boston Globe
Oct 15, 2006
This week President Bush will sign the Military Commissions Act of 2006, as the detainee bill is officially called, into law. And yet, despite its significance, politically the legislation seems barely to have registered. ‘‘I haven’t seen the slightest evidence that it’s had the slightest impact on any race in America,’’ says Charlie Cook, publisher of The Cook Political Report and a widely respected political analyst. ‘‘I don’t think it’s cutting for or against either party in the slightest deg
Source: Columbus Dispatch
Oct 15, 2006
They sit in boxes, file cabinets and folders, these ledgers from the late 1800s, brittle handwritten pages slipped into plastic sleeves and yellowed computer punch cards with a few lines of notes.
The records detail nearly every object the Ohio Historical Society owns.
They tell stories of a Dayton doctor who removed a shawl pin from an 8-year-old girl’s throat in the 1860s, or of Jesuit priests who gave cobalt blue porcelain sticks to American Indians as a sign of resp
Source: NYT
Oct 15, 2006
Married couples, whose numbers have been declining for decades as a proportion of American households, have finally slipped into a minority, according to an analysis of new census figures by The New York Times.
The American Community Survey, released this month by the Census Bureau, found that 49.7 percent, or 55.2 million, of the nation’s 111.1 million households in 2005 were made up of married couples — with and without children — just shy of a majority and down from more than 52
Source: NYT
Oct 15, 2006
Winifred Bennett, an amateur historian whose casual suggestion at the dinner table 10 years ago that DNA testing might establish whether Thomas Jefferson fathered children by his slave Sally Hemings helped rewrite history, unsettle families and raise enduring questions about sex, race and the American past, died on Oct. 7 at her home in Arlington, Va. She was 71.
The cause was kidney failure, said her daughter, Phoebe Bennett.
As a result of Mrs. Bennett’s idea, an inte
Source: NYT
Oct 15, 2006
Gerry E. Studds, the first openly gay member of Congress and a demanding advocate for New England fishermen and for gay rights, died early Saturday at Boston University Medical Center, his husband said.
The cause was a vascular illness that led Mr. Studds to collapse while walking his dog on Oct. 3 in Boston. He was 69.
From 1973 to 1997, Mr. Studds (whose first name was pronounced GAIR-ee) represented the Massachusetts district where he grew up, covering Cape Cod and t
Source: NYT
Oct 15, 2006
IN May 1980, the pollster Richard Wirthlin huddled with his presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan, to plot a course through what looked like a daunting landscape for their party. Just over half the country told pollsters that they were Democrats or leaned that way, compared with just 30 percent that said they were Republicans — a gap that had held steady more or less since the New Deal.
The rest is political history. By winning over millions of white working-class Democrats, Mr. Rea
Source: AP
Oct 14, 2006
CHAVILLE, France A statue commemorating the World War I era massacre of Armenians was stolen, local authorities said on Saturday, two days after French lawmakers approved a controversial bill that would make it a crime to deny that mass killings of Armenians in Turkey amounted to genocide.
The bronze monument, installed in front of the train station in the Paris suburb of Chaville in 2002, went missing between Friday night and Saturday morning, said authorities for the Haut-de-S
Source: Houston Chronicle
Oct 14, 2006
Here's what history tells us about the Spanish conquest of Mexico: Armed with modern weapons and Old World diseases, several hundred Spanish soldiers toppled the Aztec empire in 1521. And by the end of the century, the invaders' guns, steel and germs had wiped out 90 percent of the natives.
It's a key piece of the "Black Legend," the tales of atrocities committed by the Spanish Inquisition and colonizers of the New World. But it may be just that legend, according to Rodol
Source: Times Online (UK)
Oct 14, 2006
One of the enduring secrets of the life of Samuel Pepys - what became of his 17-year-old inamorata Deb Willet after Mrs Pepys flung her out of the family home - has been solved by documents found in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
Pepys, whose nine-year diary provides an incomparable insight into life in late 17th-century England, took an instant shine to Deb, who was half his age, when she arrived to be a "waiting gentlewoman" to his wife Elizabeth. And she, the niece of
Source: NYT
Oct 14, 2006
Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature this week, went on television Friday to criticize the French parliamentary vote that would make it a crime to deny that the Ottoman Turks’ mass killing of Armenians constituted genocide.
In a telephone interview broadcast live on the private television network NTV, Mr. Pamuk, who faced criminal charges for his statements acknowledging the massacre, said France had acted against its own fundamental principles of
Source: Discovery News
Oct 13, 2006
Nine Neolithic-era buildings have been excavated in the Stonehenge world heritage site, according to a report in the journal British Archaeology.
The structures, which appear to have been homes, date to 2,600-2,500 B.C. and were contemporary with the earliest stone settings at the site's famous megalith. They are the first house-like structures discovered there.
Julian Thomas, who worked on the project and is chair of the archaeology department at Manchester University
Source: Scientific American
Oct 13, 2006
Those hoping to trace their ancestry to a particular African tribe are unlikely to find a perfect match, according to a new genetic study. Researchers report that mitochondrial DNA isolated from African-Americans matched up to distinct African ethnic groups in fewer than 10 percent of cases, based on a partial database of African DNA samples. Broader or more probabilistic ancestries are still possible, however.
An individual's genes are a link to the past that stretches across any
Source: Times Online (UK)
Oct 13, 2006
DICTATORS may decide the fate of their unhappy subjects but they are pretty poor at gunning down wild game.
That became plain yesterday as the personal cook of Erich Honecker spilled the beans on the way that the East German Communist leader cheated on his hunting expeditions.
Official photographs of Honecker’s catch in the 1970s and 1980s show hundreds of hares arranged in circles or a clutch of proud tyrants inspecting slaughtered stags.
In fact, says
