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: Michiko Kakutani in the NYT
Oct 10, 2006
As the war in Iraq drags on, and more and more is learned about the missteps and misrepresentations made in the walkup to the war, it becomes clear that former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell — who harbored serious doubts about the wisdom of invasion and who frequently found himself an outsider in an administration dominated by neo-conservative hawks — was prescient about a host of issues, from the difficulties of rebuilding a postwar Iraq to the need for higher troop levels and multilateral
Source: NYT
Oct 10, 2006
A collection of some 10,000 papers, books and other personal items that belonged to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has been returned to Atlanta and will go on public display in January, officials at Morehouse College announced Monday.
The material, which has been housed at Sotheby’s, the New York auction house, since 2003, was saved from the auction block in June after a group of business and civic leaders, led by Mayor Shirley Franklin of Atlanta, raised $32 million to buy th
Source: Scott McLemee in the WaPo
Oct 10, 2006
No fresh campaign of slander against I.F. Stone has been launched in quite some time. A worrisome situation: It suggests that his influence has waned, that the danger of his example has been safely contained. Following his death in 1989, Stone was, for a while, lauded as the conscience of his profession by journalists who once might have crossed the street to avoid him. Posthumously, they were suddenly on a first-name basis with "Izzy," whose four-page weekly newsletter regularly scoop
Source: Norwich Bulletin
Oct 9, 2006
After an hour of hearing fifth-grade teacher Erin Rygielski teach about Christopher Columbus and his crew enslaving Arawak Indians, burning them and lopping off limbs, Shyanne Horner said she was shocked.
"The Indians had their own opinions and Columbus had his; why couldn't he just go back (to Europe)?" said Horner, 10, of Norwich, a student at John B. Stanton Elementary School. "Columbus changed everything."
Across the country, some teachers are sh
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 9, 2006
For the first time since the Anglo-Saxons bowed to Norman might at the Battle of Hastings, 1066, the annual re-enactment show is within a missile's throw of properly imitating the original.
More than 3,000 fighters, a three-fold increase on the previous "Mega Battle" of 2000, are massing in full war dress this week to play out a specially extended script, to commemorate the best-known date in British history.
Men are marching from Yorkshire and Kent, and from
Source: Reuters
Oct 9, 2006
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico's Teotihuacan, once the center of a sprawling pre-Hispanic empire, is set to become the launch pad for an attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial life.
Starting on Tuesday, enthusiasts from around the world will have a chance to submit text, images, video and sounds that reflect human nature to be included in the message.
Those contributions -- part of media company Yahoo's "Time Capsule" project -- will be digitalized and b
Source: NYT
Oct 9, 2006
FRANKFURT, Oct. 8 — With 903 pages of densely packed text, themes that range from incest to genocide, and an unrepentant Nazi SS officer as the hero, a new book by the American author Jonathan Littell does not seem an obvious candidate to be the toast of the Frankfurt Book Fair.
One more thing: It’s in French.
Yet “Les Bienveillantes,” which translates as “The Kindly Ones,” has taken the Frankfurt fair, the world’s largest booksellers’ convention, by storm. Publishing e
Source: NYT
Oct 9, 2006
The Arendt centennial is now being celebrated with conferences and lectures in locations ranging from Germany to South Korea, from Kosovo to Australia (information: hannaharendt.org/conferences/conferences.html), and one theme keeps recurring. When Arendt analyzed totalitarianism, introduced the idea of the “banality of evil,” emphasized distinctions between private and public life and tried to articulate a new philosophy that would reconsider the nature of thinking and judging after both had be
Source: Weekly Standard
Oct 9, 2006
A fascinating historical footnote to the story of Sen. George Allen's Jewish forebears appeared last week in Washington Jewish Week. Rafael Medoff reports on the discovery by Time magazine in 1939 that Secretary of State Cordell Hull's "entry in Who's Who wrongly stated that his wife's last name was Whitney, which was her married name from her first marriage." Hull's wife, Frances Witz, was the daughter of a Jewish immigrant from Austria--a fact he feared would doom his presidential ho
Source: Yahoo
Oct 8, 2006
FORT EDWARD, N.Y. - This history-rich Hudson River community has yielded a museum's worth of 18th-century military artifacts over the decades, from musket balls to human skeletons. But a colonial soldier's daily lot wasn't all fighting and bloodshed. They had their share of down time, and that's where the sutler came in, offering for sale two of the few diversions from frontier duty: alcohol and tobacco.
A five-year-long archaeological project has unearthed the 250-year-old site of
Source: Independent (UK)
Oct 8, 2006
A British spy and close friend of Winston Churchill was deeply implicated in the Zinoviev Letter, the most notorious political forgery in British history. The publication of a letter purporting to be from Soviet officials four days before the 1924 general election helped to sweep Ramsay MacDonald's government from power. But the correspondence mobilising "sympathetic forces" in Labour was later found to be a fake.
Now a new official history, based on a
Source: Boston Globe
Oct 8, 2006
Some books are warped. The ink on notes is fading, and many pages are torn.
This is the state of a large portion of Ernest Hemingway's papers and books left at his home in Cuba, Finca Vigia . For about 46 years, this grand collection of Hemingway-scribed documents, books, letters, and manuscripts has sat quietly at his former retreat, weathering hurricanes, humidity, and time.
Now, a rare collaboration between American nonprofit groups and the Cuban government may prese
Source: NYT
Oct 8, 2006
FOR much of the nuclear age, nations that sought the ultimate weapon kept their intentions and test sites veiled in secrecy, hidden from public view and foreign governments. The first detonations by the United States and the Soviet Union were top secrets and India’s test in 1998 caught American intelligence agencies by surprise.
No more, or so it seems. North Korea all but yelled “look at me” in announcing that it plans to conduct its first nuclear test, which experts say might come
Source: NYT
Oct 8, 2006
President Bush, who chose to tear down the status quo in Iraq and unleash violent instability in the name of liberty, has not hesitated to draw a straight line from Budapest to Baghdad.
He has compared the Iraqi government’s pursuit of democracy to that of the patriots of 1956 and told Hungarians: “We’ve learned from your example, and we resolve that when people stand up for their freedom, America will stand with them.”
That has a ring to it and the stamp of post-cold-w
Source: NYT
Oct 8, 2006
Rosa Parks — civil rights symbol in life, marketing phenomenon in death — has become the centerpiece of the kind of posthumous peddling usually associated with athletes and Hollywood stars. While licensing experts estimate the current value of selling Mrs. Parks’s image at only six figures a year, they say that over time millions of dollars will be made by those who control her likeness. Mrs. Parks’s courage and standing have also made her one of the few recent African-American political figures
Source: NYT
Oct 8, 2006
VALLE DE LOS CAÍDOS, Spain — Lingering support for the dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco, often hard to detect in Spain, rises readily to the surface here at his grave, which is encased in a huge austere monument 30 miles north of Madrid.
His normally reticent defenders speak less guardedly about their admiration for him, while the passionate hold spirited political rallies on each anniversary of his death.
But Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero has propose
Source: NYT
Oct 8, 2006
A crucial witness in the trial of a notorious human rights abuser has been missing for nearly three weeks, and authorities and rights groups here say they fear he may have been abducted and killed in a new campaign to intimidate prosecutors, judges and witnesses in cases that have not yet gone to court.
The disappearance of Jorge Julio López, 77, a retired construction worker and former political prisoner, has awakened a host of old fears among Argentines. Some worry that it is a si
Source: Reuters
Oct 8, 2006
Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has added his voice to a
growing chorus of Turkish protests over French plans to make it a crime to
deny that Armenians suffered"genocide" at the hands of Ottoman Turks in
World War One.
The French parliament is due to discuss the bill, proposed by the
Socialist opposition, on October 12.
Turkey strongly denies charges that some 1.5 million Armenians perished at
the hands of Ottoman Turks in a systematic genocide, saying large numbers
of both Chri
Source: NYT
Oct 8, 2006
Thirty years ago, long before liquids and gels were restricted on airliners, a tube of Colgate toothpaste may have brought a plane down from the sky.
Cubana Airlines Flight 455 crashed off the coast of Barbados on Oct. 6, 1976, killing all 73 people aboard. Plastic explosives stuffed into a toothpaste tube ignited the plane, according to recently declassified police records.
Implicated in the attack, but never convicted, was Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban exile who has
Source: Guardian
Oct 7, 2006
After over 20 years of argument and countless millions spent on consultants and planning inquiries over the state of Stonehenge, a leading expert last night proposed a radical solution: do nothing. The government's long overdue decision on the roads which strangle the world's most famous prehistoric monument is ardently awaited by archaeologists and local residents alike, after two public inquiries and last summer's lengthy public consultation.
Last night Professor Peter Fowler
