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: NYT
Aug 1, 2006
Historians of science are taking a new and lively interest in alchemy, the often mystical investigation into the hidden mysteries of nature that reached its heyday in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries and has been an embarrassment to modern scientists ever since.There was no place in the annals of empirical science, beginning mainly in the 18th century, for the occult practices of obsessed dreamers who sought most famously and impossibly to transform base met
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Aug 1, 2006
If scholarly publishing had an endangered-species list, the art monograph would be at the top. At least that's the perception of many art historians as they struggle to publish their work.
"Between dwindling sales and the soaring costs of acquiring illustrations and the permission to publish them, this segment of the publishing industry has become so severely compromised that the art monograph is now seriously endangered and could very well outpace the silvery minnow in its rus
Source: NYT
Aug 1, 2006
MADISON, Wis., July 26 — Sipping on a bottle of water and holding a book about the history and future of Islam, Kevin Barrett ticked off a few examples of what he saw as evidence that the Sept. 11 attacks had been an “inside job.”
As children zoomed by on tricycles and shot basketballs at a community center near his home, Mr. Barrett, 47, described how some news orgainzations (the French daily newspaper Figaro and Radio France International, in fact) had reported that an agent from
Source: Yahoo News
Aug 1, 2006
Life in the Iron Age may have been nasty, brutish and short but people still found time to style their hair and polish their fingernails -- and that was just the men. These are the findings of scientists who have been examining the latest preserved prehistoric bodies to emerge from Ireland's peat bogs -- the first to be found in Europe for 20 years.One of the bodies, churned up by a peat-cutting machine at Clonycavan near Dublin in 2003, had raised Mohawk-style hair, held in
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Aug 1, 2006
California joined the ranks of the National Football League and Major League Baseball on Monday, when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and first lady Maria Shriver announced the creation of a hall of fame to honor great Californians.The first 13 inductees into the California Hall of Fame -- the newest addition to the California Museum of History, Women and the Arts -- will be Cesar Chavez, Walt Disney, Amelia Earhart, Clint Eastwood, architect Frank Gehry, the Hearst family, AIDS
Source: Tehran Times
Jul 31, 2006
TEHRAN -- Road construction and railroad development are threatening the 6000-year-old Yaqut-Tappeh mound near Behshahr in Iran’s northern province of Mazandaran, the Persian service of CHN reported on Sunday.
A team of archaeologists recently began excavations at Yaqut-Tappeh to save artifacts from sections of the site which will be buried under the road being constructed for Amirabad Port.
Railroad construction previously destroyed over 3000 square meters of the site
Source: NYT
Jul 31, 2006
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — Headed for what she called “conservative boot camp,” Christina Pajak grabbed the essentials: dress sandals, her Bible and “The Politics of Prudence” by Russell Kirk, the celebrated writer who a half-century ago gave the conservative movement its name.If she had not found Kirk, he would have found her. At a monthlong retreat for college conservatives here, he was both required reading and a source of after-hours debate among students excite
Source: The Independent
Jul 31, 2006
Some months ago builders were clearing a piece of wasteland in southern Brittany when they struck an enormous hunk of granite. The developer was no historian but he knew instantly what the obstacle must be: the remains of a buried "menhir" or neolithic standing stone. He ordered a bulldozer to shove the stone underground again before any passing busybody spotted it. He did not want the work on his six seaside bungalows to be halted for a prolonged archaeological dig.
Britt
Source: National Security Archive
Jul 31, 2006
The Bush White House's reported interest in using nuclear weapons against Iran's nuclear energy complex is but the most recent example of how American officials since the administration of Harry S. Truman have given serious thought to employing such weapons in crisis situations. Details about one of these episodes were revealed today in a set of formerly top secret documents published by the National Security Archive that appear to confirm rumors and secondhand reports that President Richard M.
Source: Reuters
Jul 31, 2006
School children fond of chanting "No more pencils, no more books" may finally have their wish. What began as a long-shot attempt last year by Pearson Plc (PSON.L: Quote, Profile, Research) to sell California educators digital materials to teach history and politics, collectively known in U.S. schools as social studies, has become reality in what could be the first large-scale step to eliminate books from classrooms. Pearson, the world's biggest publishe
Source: Concord Monitor
Jul 30, 2006
There are dozens of villages like Thornton Gore in the White Mountain National Forest, abandoned by settlers in favor of homesteads in the West, life in New Hampshire's growing cities or a steady wage in factories to the south. The forest has reclaimed hundreds more neglected sawmills and the sites of countless logging camps, pushing birch tress and frost heaves up through once sturdy and seemingly permanent structures.
"This was something in its day,"said antique book de
Source: Yahoo
Jul 30, 2006
NEW YORK - The sound of the blast was unearthly, and the tremor was felt 100 miles away in Philadelphia. The night sky over New York Harbor turned orange. People were jolted from bed and windows shattered within 25 miles. The Statue of Liberty, less than a mile away, was damaged by a rain of red-hot shards of steel. Frightened immigrants on Ellis Island were hastily evacuated to Manhattan.
The epicenter of the blast — a small island called Black Tom
Source: NYT
Jul 30, 2006
No military conflict in modern times has divided Americans on partisan lines more than the war in Iraq, scholars and pollsters say — not even Vietnam. And those divisions are likely to intensify in what is expected to be a contentious fall election campaign.The latest New York Times/CBS News poll shows what one expert describes as a continuing “chasm” between the way Republicans and Democrats see the war. Three-fourths of the Republicans, for example, said the Un
Source: NYT
Jul 30, 2006
New research from around the world has begun to reveal a picture of humans today that is so different from what it was in the past that scientists say they are startled. Over the past 100 years, says one researcher, Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago, humans in the industrialized world have undergone “a form of evolution that is unique not only to humankind, but unique among the 7,000 or so generations of humans who have ever inhabited the earth.”
The difference does not i
Source: AP
Jul 29, 2006
A list of incumbent senators who have lost their primaries since 1950:
Year Senator Party State
2002 Robert C. Smith R N.H.
1996 Sheila Frahm R Kan.
1992 Alan Dixon D Ill.
1980 Mike Gravel D Alaska
1980 Jacob Javits R N.Y.
1980 Donald Stewart D Ala.
1980 Richard Stone D Fla.
1978 Clifford Case R N.J.
1976 James Buckley C N.Y.
1974 J.W. Fulbright D Ark.
1974 Howard Metzenbaum D Ohio
1972 David Gambrell D Ga
Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Jul 29, 2006
Beginning in 1864 and continuing for approximately 60 years, whites across the United States conducted a series of racial expulsions, driving thousands of blacks from their homes to make communities lily-white.
In at least a dozen of the most extreme cases, blacks were purged from entire counties that still today remain almost exclusively
white, according to the most recent census data.The expulsions often were violent and swift, and they stretched
Source: NYT
Jul 29, 2006
Kang Joung Ho has been trying for 60 years to find out what happened to his father, who was brought to Japan as a forced laborer in 1943.
The only information he has found so far is that his father was forced to be a coxswain on a wooden ship that moved supplies for the Imperial Japanese Army in the South Pacific.
"I was once told by Japan's welfare ministry that it does not have any records on my father," Kang said. "I think Japan should disclose all doc
Source: AP
Jul 29, 2006
The caretakers of Ernest Hemingway's Key West home want a federal judge to intervene in their dispute with the U.S. Department of Agriculture over the six-toed cats that roam the property.
More than 50 descendants of a multi-toed cat the novelist received as a gift in 1935 wander the grounds of the home, where Hemingway lived for more than 10 years and wrote ''A Farewell to Arms'' and ''To Have and Have Not.''
The Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum disputes the USDA's cla
Source: NYT
Jul 29, 2006
On a field re-created inside the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Mo., 10 bronze, life-size statues are in the middle of a game: Satchel Paige is on the mound, pitching to Josh Gibson. Martin Dihigo is at bat. Cool Papa Bell, Oscar Charleston and Leon Day are in the outfield. Buck Leonard, Pop Lloyd, Judy Johnson and Ray Dandridge are the infielders. All are in the Baseball Hall of Fame.But there is an 11th statue. It stands alone, wearing a Kansas C
Source: NYT
Jul 29, 2006
DENVER, July 28 — Few symbols of the cold war carry the clanging, into-the-bunker resonance of Cheyenne Mountain, home of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, better known as Norad.
The mountain, about 80 miles south of here on the Front Range, was carved out in the 1960’s to house the early warning system for nuclear war, and its accouterments and image became the stuff of a whole generation’s anxieties.
But those anxieties shifted after the fall of the Soviet
