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: Newsletter of the Institute for Public Accuracy
Sep 18, 2006
After Ellsberg revealed the Pentagon Papers -- top-secret government
documents which showed a pattern of governmental deceit about the
Vietnam War -- in 1971, the Nixon White House indicted him for a
possible 115-year sentence, used the White House"plumbers" to
burglarize his doctor's office, conducted warrentless wiretaps against
him and attempted to physically assault him at a Capitol Hill rally. He has just authored a piece in the forthcoming issue of Harper's
magazine,"
Source: The Daily Telegraph (LONDON)
Sep 18, 2006
AMERICAN benefactors have paid to restore a North Yorkshire church's 14th-century stained-glass window, the design of which is thought to have been the model for the Stars and Stripes.
The window at Selby Abbey was donated by the English ancestors of George Washington, the first president of the United States. It shows the coat of arms of his forebears, the de Wessyngtons, which depicts three spiked spur wheels above two red bars across a white shield. Washington is known to have us
Source: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sep 18, 2006
In the past month, the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology research vessel has surveyed 6 square miles of the ocean bottom outside the mouth of Winyah Bay, searching for the 500-year old flagship of the expedition that established America's first colony --- on the Georgia coast.
"If the Spanish had this kind of navigation gear in the 16th century, we probably wouldn't be out here looking for this ship now," grins archaeologist Jim Spirek, looking up fr
Source: NYT
Sep 18, 2006
It’s little wonder that ABC’s mini-series “The Path to 9/11” drew stinging criticism earlier this month for its invented scenes, fabricated dialogue and unsubstantiated accounts of how the Clinton and Bush administrations conducted themselves in the years encompassing the World Trade Center attacks of 1993 and 2001.
A more puzzling question is why ABC spent $30 million on what, since it lacked commercials, amounted to a five-hour public service announcement.
While the t
Source: Reuters
Sep 18, 2006
At this great distance in our history, everybody of every political shading can be extreme in the defense of Barry Goldwater and it's no vice.
It might not be a virtue, either, but it is quite remarkable how his image has survived, as reflected in a warm and friendly 90-minute biographical documentary on HBO, ``Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater.''
Granddaughter CC Goldwater produces with Tani Cohen and director Julie Anderson, programming the usual talking expert
Source: WCAX
Sep 18, 2006
FORT EDWARD, N.Y. When colonial soldiers had some down time, they often occupied themselves with two of the few diversions from frontier duty -- drinking and smoking.
Along the banks of the upper Hudson River, an archaeology project has uncovered 250-year-old evidence of a site where soldiers did plenty of both during the French and Indian War.
Numerous artifacts -- including bottles and clay pipes -- have been found at what's believed to be the site of a sutler's store that
Source: BBC
Sep 18, 2006
The 600-year-old bronze silhouette of a snarling dog unearthed on Teesside is baffling archaeologists.
The 9in-long "Hound of Hartlepool" was found by Tees Archaeology before building work began on the new Headland Sports Hall.
The dog has now been cleaned up and conserved by Durham University experts who are trying to work out what it is.
They believe it was nailed to a house and may have been a weathervane or a "Beware of the Dog" sign.
Source: Salt Lake Tribune
Sep 18, 2006
The Smithsonian has agreed to change the factual errors in the captions on a pair of portraits of early church leaders Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, after a Mormon scholar asked the Smithsonian Institution to correct the mistakes and a perceived negative slant in the text. Elder Ralph W. Hardy Jr., the area authority for the Washington region and a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' Quorum of the Seventy, contacted prominent Mormon scholar Richard
Source: Reuters
Sep 18, 2006
The Vatican opened its secret archives on the papacy of Pius XI between 1922 and 1939 on Monday and said "unjust opinions" concerning its relations with Jews in the pre-World War Two period would be overturned.A source said some 60 people had come to the archives on the first day asking to consult the mass of documents, which consist of some 30,000 files totalling millions of pages.
While the archives are for the papacy of Pius XI (born Achille Ratti),
Source: NYT
Sep 18, 2006
STONEWALL, Miss., Sept. 11 — In the fearful cosmos of the segregationist South, the integrated swimming pool occupied a special place: race-mixing carried to an intimate level.
So it was that when integration came to this old mill town in the 1970’s, its magnificent pool, 100 feet long and 30 feet wide, the summer delight of generations of white children, had to close, people here thought. It was filled in with truckloads of red southern Mississippi dirt, covered over and forgotten
Source: David Remnick in the course of an interview posted at the New Yorker following his 23 page profile of Clinton
Sep 17, 2006
Clinton's concern with his reputation came up again last week, when his aides reportedly helped persuade ABC to re-edit a miniseries about the run-up to 9/11. How concerned is he with shaping how he's remembered?
He told me that he liked a biography by John Harris, "The Survivor," that is not entirely complimentary, but he thought it was quite good and accurate and fair. So he's not interested in only his own hagiographies, although no one resists his hagiographers. But h
Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sep 17, 2006
On a cloudy Monday night a century ago this month, a dozen white lawmen and armed civilians marched into Brownsville, a black neighborhood on the southern edge of Atlanta, and started arresting anyone with a weapon.
It was the third day of the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, the worst outbreak of racial violence in the city's history. Whites had done almost all of the bloodletting so far, and authorities feared blacks were plotting reprisals.As they headed back for the
Source: Fox News
Sep 17, 2006
BUDAPEST, Hungary — Thousands of faithful on Sunday attended the beatification of a Hungarian nun who helped save the lives of dozens of Jews during World War II.
The beatification proclamation for Sara Salkahazi, issued by Pope Benedict XVI, was read out by Cardinal Peter Erdo, Hungary's Primate and Archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest, during a Mass held outside St. Stephen's Basilica.
"She was willing to assume risks for the persecuted ... in days of great fear,&q
Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sep 17, 2006
When civil rights demonstrations embroiled Atlanta during the early 1960s, the institutional memory of another disturbance decades before tugged at the men who ran the city's newspapers.
The press, they knew, had been implicated in the worst racial carnage in Atlanta history: the 1906 race riot.
"All of us at the paper were acutely aware of it," remembers Eugene Patterson, who became editor of The Atlanta Constitution when Ralph McGill rose to publisher. "
Source: NYT
Sep 17, 2006
One of Thomas H. Kean Jr.’s earliest political memories is watching his father, Gov. Thomas H. Kean Sr., deliver the keynote address at the Republican National Convention in 1988, when George H. W. Bush was nominated for president.
Now, Mr. Bush is one of many of the former governor’s powerful friends helping support the younger Mr. Kean’s bid to unseat Senator Robert Menendez, as patrimony has helped propel a relatively inexperienced state legislator into one of the tightest races
Source: NYT
Sep 17, 2006
Pope Benedict XVI sought Sunday to extinguish days of anger and protest among Muslims by issuing an extraordinary personal apology for having caused offense with a speech last week that cited a reference to Islam as “evil and inhuman.”
“I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address,” the pope told pilgrims at the summer papal palace of Castel Gandolfo, “which were considered offensive.’’
“These were in fact quotations from a medi
Source: Wa Po
Sep 17, 2006
Driving along the outskirts of Washington on a late summer afternoon, you sometimes spot a head peeping out of a ragged patch of black-eyed Susans, and you wonder: What is that lawn jockey doing there? Who put him there? Why?
Plaster saints -- we know what those stand for. On a more whimsical note, the same goes for the garden gnome, the stag, the Dutch girl with the fishing rod.
But the lawn jockey? He's a ghost from the days of plantations and magnolias, fox hunts and
Source: AOL News
Sep 16, 2006
The Toyama No. 5 apartment block is quiet at midday - laundry flapping from balconies, old people taking an after-lunch stroll. But the building and its nearby park may be sitting on a gruesome World War II secret.
A wartime nurse has broken more than 60 years of silence to reveal her part in burying dozens, perhaps hundreds, of bodies there as American forces occupied the Japanese capital.
The way experts see it, these were no ordinary casualties of war, but possible
Source: NYT
Sep 16, 2006
TASH-BASHAT, Kyrgyzstan — The forest stands overhead in the dusty mountain air, a dense composition of fir trees on a slope, planted by labor gangs decades ago.
Its right angles are sharp and clear, forming a square cross with an upraised arm on one side and a turned-down arm on the other. Viewed from this remote village, the effect strongly suggests a living swastika, a huge and chilling symbol, out of place and time.
This is the so-called Eki Naryn swastika, a man-mad
Source: NYT
Sep 16, 2006
Four generations of descendants of Annie Moore Schayer, the first immigrant to be processed on Ellis Island, gathered yesterday in New York for the first time to celebrate her rediscovery — and their own — and to raise money for a headstone for her unmarked grave in Calvary Cemetery in Queens.
The first contributions, of $500 each, came from Brian G. Andersson, the city’s commissioner of records, and Patricia Somerstein of Long Beach, N.Y., Annie’s great-niece. They donated their sh
