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: US News & World Report
Jul 21, 2006
In a report to be released Monday, an American Bar Association task force will recommend that Congress pass legislation providing for some sort of judicial review of presidential signing statements. Some task force members want to give Congress the right to sue over the signing statements; other task force members will not characterize what sort of judicial review might ultimately emerge.
Source: The Independent
Jul 21, 2006
Christopher Columbus was a despot who ruled his subjects with an iron fist, according to documents that have emerged 500 years after his death. The man who discovered America for Europe routinely tortured slaves and starved his subjects in colonies on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola.
Columbus was known to have mistreated native people when he was viceroy in Santo Domingo, the capital of today's Dominican Republic, at the end of the 15th century. But until now it had been put down
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation of American Scientists
Jul 21, 2006
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 law that is supposed to govern surveillance of foreign intelligence targets within the U.S., has had an unusually dynamic legislative history.
It has been modified in a hundred ways on at least a dozen occasions.
Despite the demonstrated adaptability of this statute, the Bush Administration chose to conduct its NSA Terrorist Surveillance Program outside of the legally binding FISA framework and has not sought to amend it.
Source: Daily Yomiuri
Jul 21, 2006
Emperor Showa was displeased that Yasukuni Shrine enshrined Class-A war criminals from World War II together with war dead, it was learned Thursday from a memorandum written by a former Imperial Household Agency official who has since died.
"That is why I've since stopped visiting [the shrine]. That is how I feel in my heart," the emperor was quoted as saying in the memo written by then Imperial Household Agency Grand Steward Tomohiko Tomita in 1988 and released Thursday
Source: Wa Po
Jul 21, 2006
Mary Tilghman watches from her window as archaeologists sift the earth of Wye House Farm, her Eastern Shore property. Buttons and an iron ring, pig bones and a broken spoon: Over three centuries, her family helped the growth of a new American economy and, on this plantation, built an empire on the backs of slaves.
This is where the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass lived for a couple of years, as a child slave of about 7. The work confirms his descriptions of the physical place
Source: Newhouse News
Jul 20, 2006
Solly Ganor survived the death camp at Dachau. But at 79, he doesn't know if he will survive what an odd Holocaust Web site, run by a Jewish refugee in Massachusetts, has done to his reputation.
Ganor, who lives in Israel, wrote a well-received memoir in 1995 -- "Light One Candle: A Survivor's Tale." He began lecturing about his experience in schools in the United States, Israel, Europe and Japan.
But for the last couple of years, if you run a Google search on
Source: Hiram Hover (blog)
Jul 20, 2006
The Seventh edition of the Carnival of Bad History is at Hiram Hover's blog.
A"blog carnival" is a regular roundup of blog writing on a subject. The Carnival of Bad History covers mistakes, distortions and illogic and serves both to entertain -- let's face it, it's fun! -- and educate.
Source: NYT
Jul 20, 2006
The sensitive surveillance equipment hidden in the room picked up a comment about a box of condoms on display, and another about a red telephone. “I had one just like that,” a man could be heard saying, in German. Then came another voice speaking English with a British accent. “There must be a microphone around here someplace,” it said.
Indeed there was, and the fact that the British visitor to Berlin’s new DDR Museum — D.D.R. being the German initials for the German Democratic Repu
Source: NYT
Jul 20, 2006
Cambodia’s former king demanded Wednesday that the bones of Khmer Rouge victims be cremated according to Buddhist tradition, rather than displayed “for the pleasure of tourists.”
With efforts under way to try former leaders of the Khmer Rouge, who laid waste to Cambodia during their rule from 1975 to 1979, the former king, Norodom Sihanouk, has attacked government claims that the bones must be kept as evidence.
Cambodia is dotted with evidence of the Khmer Rouge’s destr
Source: AP
Jul 20, 2006
Railroad tracks dip into the harbor next to an old, square, brick building in this rapidly gentrifying post-industrial waterfront.
The tracks enter the water by design, not decay.
As part of the new Frederick Douglass-Isaac Myers Maritime Park, which opened June 28, they help re-create the nation's first black shipyard, complete with a marine railway like those that once pulled ships from the harbor for repair in the days before modern drydocks.
Baltimor
Source: WSJ
Jul 19, 2006
Paging Sacagawea: Lewis and Clark have lost their way again.
When President Bush issued a proclamation in 2002 creating a Lewis and Clark Bicentennial celebration, tourism officials from Virginia to Oregon pounced on it as a potential blockbuster. But as the three-year celebration enters its homestretch, participating communities are still waiting for the Lewis and Clark gravy train to leave the station.
"It's the great Lewis and Clark letdown," says Dave Hunt
Source: BBC
Jul 19, 2006
A team of divers from the University of Bristol is to investigate the wreck of a fireship which sank off the Isles of Scilly nearly 300 years ago. . . The tragedy, which cost the lives of 1,500 Royal Navy seamen, sparked the competition for the 'discovery of longitude' and resulted in the design of the Harrison chronometer.
Source: Newsletter of Secrecy News, which is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the
Jul 19, 2006
"In the 1958 1968 decade, the U.S. Government approved four covert
programs to try to influence the direction of Japanese political
life," the State Department revealed this week in the latest volume
of Foreign Relations of the United States, the official history of
U.S. foreign policy.
"Concerned that potential electoral success by leftist political
forces would strengthen Japanese neutralism and eventually pave the
way for a leftist government in Japan, the Eisenhower administration
Source: AP
Jul 19, 2006
Years before desegregation sit-ins made national headlines in 1960, college students in Wichita, Kan., and Oklahoma City stubbornly refused to leave whites-only lunch counters. They were threatened with beatings, but held fast and won their battles, laying the groundwork for a movement that would spread across the country.
The often overlooked demonstrators, all former NAACP youth members, were being recognized Wednesday — nearly 50 years later — at the annual convention of the Nati
Source: The Daily Telegraph
Jul 19, 2006
THE earliest Englishmen were the same as their modern counterparts, contemptuous of foreigners and snobbish about their neighbours, according to researchers. New computer models of the process of colonisation demonstrate that, by refusing to let their daughters marry the locals, and never inviting them to share even the smallest crumb from the Anglo-Saxon table, our genetic ancestors slowly but surely ethnically cleansed the country.
For the past 50 years and more, historians, archa
Source: The Australian
Jul 19, 2006
IT is almost impossible to miss. Red Bluff leans over the Indian Ocean like an imposing big brother, jutting out from one of many remote stretches of the West Australian coastline. Reinhold von Malapert didn't miss it. In charge of a tiny wooden lifeboat packed with 56 other sailors from the Kormoran, the massive reddish headland would have stood out like a beacon as the boat rolled towards it in November 1941. Six days earlier von Malapert, chief communications officer of the Kormoran, the Germ
Source: North Shore Times Advertiser (New Zealand)
Jul 18, 2006
The United States planned to invade Auckland, New Zealand almost a century ago if the emerging superpower had gone to war with Japan, then a British ally, a US intelligence document reveals.The document includes intelligence reports on North Head, Fort Takapuna and Mt Victoria. It recommends the Manukau Harbour as the best invasion point.
The plan involved landing heavy guns on Rangitoto Island to shell forts on the North Shore.
Although the documen
Source: BBC
Jul 18, 2006
An apartheid society existed in early Anglo-Saxon Britain, research suggests.
Scientists believe a small population of migrants from Germany, Holland and Denmark established a segregated society when they arrived in England.
The researchers think the incomers changed the local gene pool by using their economic advantage to out-breed the native population.
The team tells a Royal Society journal that this may explain the abundance of Germanic genes in England today
Source: History Today
Jul 18, 2006
As much as 30% of Egypt’s ancient monuments could still be underground according to secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Cairo, Zahi Hawass.
Speaking whilst excavations began on the latest tomb to be unearthed in the Valley of the Kings, Hawass commented that a great proportion of Egypt’s history was buried under existing modern towns, including, perhaps the tomb of famous Egyptian monarch, Queen Nefertiti.
This latest tomb is known as KV 62 and
Source: NYT
Jul 18, 2006
That a victim of a Palestinian suicide bombing would seek legal redress from an American museum might seem baffling to the uninitiated. But for Daniel Miller, 27, it is simply a way of extracting justice from a government that he blames for his suffering.
Because Iran helped to train and support members of Hamas, the militant group that carried out the attack along a Jerusalem shopping promenade in 1997, Mr. Miller and four other Americans who survived the attack decided to seek dam
