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: Guardian
Sep 29, 2006
In September 1909, two women seen honing their skills at a shooting range caused panic in the British government and fears of a plot to assassinate the prime minister, according to documents released today.
The government and police records, released by the National Archives in Kew, reveal that an informant had warned that the women were members of the suffragette movement - the "half-insane women" then picketing the House of Commons to demand votes for women - and that o
Source: Email to HNN from Meredith Woods
Sep 29, 2006
Due to copyright issues, the series has not been seen on public television
since the mid-1990s or available for video distribution, but finally through
renewed funding from the Ford Foundation and the Gilder Foundation, EYES will be
re-broadcast this October on three successive Monday nights on public television
as part of the AMERICAN EXPERIENCE on OCTOBER 2, 9, 16 at 9 pm.
CHECK YOUR LOCAL LISTINGS. Programs 1 and 2 will air as a two-hour block
and the same is true for the rest
Source: Houston Chronicle
Sep 29, 2006
High-tech detective work apparently has found the missing "a" in one of the most famous phrases ever spoken.
Astronaut Neil Armstrong's first words from the surface of the moon on July 20, 1969, now can be confidently recast, according to the research, as, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."
It is the more dramatic and grammatically correct phrasing that Armstrong, now 76, has often said was the version he transmitted to NA
Source: NYT
Sep 29, 2006
After months of negotiations, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, on Thursday formally turned over 13 archaeological treasures to Italy that cultural officials here say were looted from Italian soil.
At a signing ceremony at the Italian Cultural Ministry, Malcolm Rogers, the Boston museum’s director, pledged his institution’s cooperation in halting plunder in archaeological source countries.
“We’re committed to seeing the end of illegal excavations and the illicit trade in
Source: LAT
Sep 29, 2006
Empress Maria Fyodorovna, the Danish-born mother of Russia's last czar, was reburied Thursday next to her son and husband in the Romanov family crypt in St. Petersburg nearly eight decades after her death in exile.
Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexei II presided over the day's pomp-filled ceremonies, which were attended by hundreds of domestic and foreign dignitaries, including members of various branches of European royalty and about 50 Romanov descendants."
Source: Wa Po
Sep 29, 2006
On the opening page of a small leather-bound book in a University of Virginia library, graduate student Robert Stilling found an inscription in brownish-gray ink. It was a poem by Robert Frost, in the poet's own hand, unknown and, Stilling believes, unpublished.
"It's like coming across a ruin," he said, finding a poem that Frost seemed to have abandoned.
"It was a complete bolt out of the blue," said Ted Genoways, editor of the Virginia Quarterly Re
Source: Weston Mercury
Sep 28, 2006
ARCHAEOLOGISTS will soon be uncovering a rare Iron Age settlement in a North Somerset village.
The ancient site at Goblin Combe Environmental Centre in Cleeve is the only known Iron Age settlement in Britain not to have been dug up.
The trees and plants currently covering the site will be cleared this winter in preparation for a team of archaeologists to study the site in detail.
Source: AP
Sep 28, 2006
Rose Kennedy, for one brief shining moment the most powerful mother in America, went over President Kennedy's head in 1962 to write directly to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. For that, she got a playful scolding from her son.
She wrote a letter asking the Russian leader to autograph photographs of his meeting with her son, and Khrushchev complied.
"Would you be sure to let me know in the future any contacts you have with heads of state. ..." John Kennedy wr
Source: BBC
Sep 28, 2006
The mayor of Grantham has said Baroness Thatcher should be honoured with a statue in the town.
The grocer's daughter, who went on to be prime minister from 1979 until 1990, was born in Grantham and went to Kesteven and Grantham Girls' School.
She was the longest serving prime minister for more than 150 years.
The town's Conservative MP Quentin Davies is also in favour of a statue. But he said Margaret Thatcher had told him she was not keen on the idea.
Source: Independent (UK)
Sep 28, 2006
New research by a leading British historian has cast serious doubt on its fundamental proposition: that the Austrian-born queen's sexual indiscretions precipitated the 1789 revolution which delivered her to her fate at la guillotine.Simon Burrows, of Leeds University, has uncovered evidence that the salacious pamphlets which revealed the queen had been promiscuous with lovers of both sexes were not distributed until after the revolution had started - a finding that dispels t
Source: macon.com
Sep 28, 2006
For five days last week, deep-sea cameras snapped countless photographs of the wreck of the USS Macon.
In dark waters some 1,500 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, archaeologists searched for relics from the world's largest rigid airship, which crashed off California's Big Sur in 1935.
They found and photographed the airship's hangar bay, which contained four Sparrowhawk biplanes and their detached landing gear. Through the camera lens on a remotely operated u
Source: NYT
Sep 28, 2006
There are those who say that in the Internet age the rules of grammar and style are dead. But the people at the University of Chicago Press, publisher of the Chicago Manual of Style, are not among them.
And so starting tomorrow the manual — sometimes known as publishing’s Miss Manners — will be available online by subscription, meaning that those who need to know, pronto, whether it is ever all right to capitalize the first letters of e. e. cummings’s name will no longer have to sea
Source: NYT
Sep 28, 2006
A map dealer who stole nearly 100 rare maps valued at $3 million from Yale and other institutions was sentenced to three and a half years in prison on Wednesday after a federal judge credited him for helping the authorities retrieve most of the items taken.
Representatives of the institutions that were looted, who had traveled long distances to lobby for a stiff sentence, left the court saying they were deeply disappointed with the punishment given the map dealer, Edward Forbes Smil
Source: NYT
Sep 28, 2006
They call her the “Black Hawk Down” lady.
And in the corner of her dirt yard, beneath rags drying in the sun and next to a bowl of filthy wash water, she keeps a chunk of history that most Americans would probably like to forget.
It is the battered nose of a Black Hawk helicopter, from one of the two that got shot down in Mogadishu on Oct. 3, 1993, in an infamous battle that killed 18 Americans, led to a major foreign policy shift and spawned a big movie.
Source: monstersandcritics.com
Sep 28, 2006
St Petersburg - The remains of the Danish-born mother of Russia's last tsar, Maria Fyodorovna, were finally laid to rest Thursday near the former Russian capital St Petersburg in accordance with her wishes.
At a service attended by dignitaries and royalty from both countries, her casket was interred at the Peter and Paul Cathedral in the Peterhof Palace, next to her husband, Tsar Alexander III.
Earlier in the day, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Alexy
Source: AP
Sep 28, 2006
France has ended a decades-old system of inequality by bringing lagging pensions of war veterans from former colonies into line with those of their French counterparts whose retirement payment is two-thirds higher.
Africans who fought in French wars welcomed the move, while lamenting that it was too late. The government's decision was not retroactive, as some had demanded.
President Jacques Chirac called it ''an act of justice and recognition for all those who came from
Source: NPR (audio)
Sep 28, 2006
Researchers have infected mice with a replica of the deadly 1918 flu virus. As expected, all the mice died within days. But not because the virus directly destroyed the lungs. Instead, it triggered an overwhelming and self-destructive immune response. That fits with emerging research on one way viruses kill.
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, is published by the Federation of American Scientists
Sep 28, 2006
The Bush Administration's use of Presidential signing statements to
assert objections to enacted legislation reflects an attempt to expand
and consolidate Presidential authority at the expense of Congress,
according to a new analysis from the Congressional Research Service."It seems evident that the Bush signing statements are an integral part
of the Administration's efforts to further its broad view of
presidential prerogatives and to assert functional and determinative
control over al
Source: The Jerusalem Post
Sep 28, 2006
Watercolors and sketches attributed to Adolf Hitler sold for double their estimated price at an auction Tuesday, eliciting the ire of Holocaust survivors and Jewish groups. Anybody who buys and sells Hitler's works is trading in the death of tens of millions of people including six million Jews said Yosef Lapid, the chairman of the Yad Vashem Council and a Holocaust survivor. He strongly condemned the auction as something no just person would participate in."
"This is some
Source: The Irish Times
Sep 28, 2006
A Polish priest has defied his Church superiors by naming nine Catholic clerics among 37 people who he says spied on him for the communist-era secret police.
Fr Henryk Jankowski, who was a well-known supporter of the pro-democracy Solidarity union, is allowed as a so-called victim of the communist regime to study his security service file and publish the names of people who informed on him.
But leaders of the Polish Catholic Church have opposed the publication of former
