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: AP
Sep 23, 2006
Athens, Sept. 23(AP): Police have recovered a revered religious icon, stolen from a monastery in southern Greece, following an intense five-week investigation that involved roadblocks, telephone surveillance and helicopter searches, authorities said on Saturday.
The 700-year-old icon of the Virgin Mary, credited with having healing powers and performing miracles, was stolen on Aug. 18 from a cliff-top convent near the town of Leonidio, some 300 kilometers (185 miles) southwest of At
Source: NYT
Sep 23, 2006
In a bitterly worded letter, the Israeli ambassador to the United States on Friday accused the Council on Foreign Relations of making a “terrible mistake” by inviting President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran to a meeting with the group earlier this week.
“Some of those upset with the council’s decision have compared it to hypothetically inviting Hitler to a meeting in the 1930’s,” the ambassador, Daniel Ayalon, wrote to the council’s president, Richard N. Haass. “In fact, meeting with
Source: NYT
Sep 23, 2006
Among its oceangoing sisters, the S.S. Stockholm has always been infamous as the ill-fated vessel that struck and sank the Italian liner Andrea Doria in dense fog off Nantucket 50 years ago. The collision — on July 25, 1956 — resulted not only in 51 deaths and the daring rescue of hundreds from the swells of the Atlantic; it also assured a name for the Stockholm as “the death ship” of the high seas.
Nonetheless, on Wednesday morning, there it was: sailing through the narrows, up the
Source: NYT
Sep 23, 2006
Even 200-year-old political cartoons aren’t immune from the PBS censor’s blurring machine when they depict naked male genitalia. David Grubin, the writer, producer and director of “Marie Antoinette,” a documentary portrait of the French queen, right, to be broadcast on Monday night, was asked this week by PBS stations to blur the images on two phantasmagorical political cartoons shown in the film. The fear was that, unedited, they would violate the Federal Communications Commission’s indecency s
Source: NYT
Sep 23, 2006
All the authors currently clamoring for a seat on Oprah Winfrey’s couch might do well to send copies of their books to the latest publishing tastemaker: Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez.
Ever since Mr. Chávez held up a copy of a 301-page book by Noam Chomsky, the linguist and left-wing political commentator, during a speech at the United Nations on Wednesday, sales of the book have climbed best-seller lists at Amazon.com and BN.com, the online site for the book retailer Barnes &am
Source: Copley News Service
Sep 22, 2006
Eileen R. Mackevich, co-founder and president of the Chicago Humanities Festival from 1989 to 2005, has been chosen to be executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission.
Mackevich was selected from three finalists because of her high energy level and her fundraising abilities, Rep. Ray LaHood, R-Peoria, said Thursday. The commission is significantly behind in its plans to raise $100 million for events commemorating the 16th president's 200th birthday in 2009, he said. L
Source: Reuters
Sep 22, 2006
A dealer of antique treasures who admitted stealing
more than $3 million in rare maps was resentful of the world's top
libraries and acted to finance his rich tastes and rising debt,
prosecutors said on Thursday.
Shedding light into why Edward Forbes Smiley III stole 98 of the world's
most precious maps over seven years, papers filed in Connecticut's U.S.
District Court said he initially acted because he felt he had been wronged
and slighted."Although he had a large degree of acce
Source: CNN
Sep 22, 2006
RICHMOND, Virginia (AP) -- Bill Cosby on Friday called on each American to contribute $8 to help build a national slavery museum amid the battlefields of the Civil War.
Cosby, who already has committed $1 million to the project, joined Richmond Mayor L. Douglas Wilder on Friday in launching a new campaign to raise $100 million toward the Fredericksburg museum's $200 million price tag.
"The incentive is that they would join in with the rest of the United States of A
Source: The Gazette (Montreal)
Sep 22, 2006
One of the country's leading war historians has amassed disturbing evidence that German troops trying to surrender during the First World War were "frequently executed" by Canadian soldiers gripped by fear or hungry for revenge.
In a lengthy article that appears in the latest Journal of Military History, the field's top scholarly publication, Canadian War Museum historian Tim Cook explores the complex and volatile "politics of surrender."
He found, i
Source: The Boston Globe
Sep 22, 2006
In the pantheon of Founding Fathers, John Adams is usually considered an also-ran. There is no memorial to him in Washington, no portrait of him on US currency, no singular achievement that is drilled into the heads of schoolchildren from Maine to California.
But opening today at the Boston Public Library is the first public exhibition of the second president's vast personal library, a priceless collection of 3,802 works whose breadth helps show why this Braintree farmer is gaining
Source: NYT
Sep 22, 2006
In his early 20’s, John R. Koza and fellow graduate students invented a brutally complicated board game based on the Electoral College that became a brief cult hit and recently fetched $100 for an antique version on eBay.
By his 30’s, Dr. Koza was a co-inventor of the scratch-off lottery ticket and found it one of the few sure ways to find fortune with the lottery.
Now, a 63-year-old eminence among computer scientists who teaches genetic programming at Stanford, Dr. Ko
Source: NYT
Sep 22, 2006
The Defense Department’s inspector general on Thursday dismissed claims by military officers and others who had insisted that a secret Pentagon program identified Mohamed Atta and other terrorists involved in the Sept. 11 attacks before the attacks occurred.
The inspector general’s office, which acts as the Defense Department’s internal watchdog, said in a report that its investigators found no evidence to suggest that the intelligence program, known as Able Danger, had identified M
Source: Reuters
Sep 21, 2006
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel has opened to the public an underground archaeological exhibit near Jerusalem's most sensitive shrine, drawing fire from Palestinians who say the project endangers the foundations of the holy site.
Israel's opening of an archaeological tunnel near al-Haram al-Sharif, the site of the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque where the biblical Jewish Temples once stood, sparked Palestinian anger in 1996. Sixty-one Arabs and 15 Israeli soldiers were kill
Source: Haaretz
Sep 21, 2006
Prior to Jonathan Pollard's failed attempt to seek refuge in the Israeli Embassy in Washington on November 21, 1985, the Federal Bureau of Investigation did not suspect that he may have been spying for Israel.
In fact, even though he was a civilian analyst for U.S. Naval Intelligence, the FBI did not even know that Pollard was Jewish. This, according to a new book, "Capturing Jonathan Pollard" (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2006) by Ronald J. Olive, the retired office
Source: Reuters
Sep 21, 2006
BERLIN - An 83-year-old German woman deported from the United States for concealing her Nazi past as a concentration camp guard is a war criminal and should be prosecuted, the Simon Wiesenthal Center said on Thursday.
Efraim Zuroff, head of the agency that tracks Nazis, said that U.S. authorities deserved praise for their diligence in finding Elfriede Lina Rinkel, who reportedly never told her late husband, a concentration camp survivor, of her past.
The U.S. Justice De
Source: Philip Graitcer in the Voice of America News
Sep 21, 2006
September 22nd marks the 100th anniversary of an infamous 1906 race riot in the southern U.S. city of Atlanta, Georgia. Mobs of white men killed dozens of African-Americans during the 4-day rampage. The violence received worldwide newspaper attention at the time, but has now been largely forgotten. Still, many believe the legacy of the 1906 Atlanta riots continues to influence race relations in the city. A group of Atlantans is preparing to mark the centennial and use the occasion to open a new
Source: NYT
Sep 21, 2006
The New-York Historical Society announced that it would mount a $3.5 million exhibition, “New York Divided: Slavery and the Civil War,” to open on Nov. 17. The show will present about 300 artifacts, documents, drawings, maps and other images in a sequel to last year’s exhibition “Slavery in New York,” which drew 175,000 visitors. The time frame of the first show ended in 1827, when black New Yorkers celebrated emancipation in New York State. Dr. Louise Mirrer, the society’s president, said the n
Source: AP
Sep 21, 2006
The U.N. address by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has had an unexpected impact -- on the best seller lists of Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com.
At the start of his talk Wednesday, during which Chavez referred to President Bush as ''the devil,'' Chavez held up a book by Noam Chomsky, ''Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance,'' and recommended it to everyone in the General Assembly, as well as to the American people.
''The people of the United
Source: Jewish News Weekly
Sep 21, 2006
A 1938 diary written near the end of Pope Pius XI’s papacy confirms his opposition to fascism was hardening as the outbreak of World War II grew closer, a historian said Tuesday, Sept. 19, after examining documents in the Vatican’s just-opened secret archives.The diary quoted Pius as saying, “I won’t be afraid. I prefer to beg for alms” than to give into pressures from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime, said French historian Philippe Chenaux.
Th
Source: LAT
Sep 21, 2006
It took more than half a century to fulfill Theodor Herzl's dream of a Jewish state. But it would take Israel even longer to meet Herzl's more intimate last wishes: to have his children buried next to him.
On Wednesday, more than seven decades after their deaths, the bodies of two of Herzl's children were laid to rest here near the grave of the famed Zionist leader, whose public legend left little room for the unhappy saga of his troubled children.
The solemn ceremony f
