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
May 17, 2006
WEIMAR It would be hard to say whether, in her work of acquiring old literary treasures, there are more thrills or more disappointments for Katja Lorenz. For she has the seemingly enviable, but sometimes not so enviable, job of using somebody else's money to buy first editions of late Renaissance and Enlightenment classics.
Certainly, it was a wonderful success a few months ago when for a mere 5,900 euros (about $7,500), she purchased a pristine copy of "A Natural History of Bi
Source: NYT
May 17, 2006
There are now nearly 200,000 ethnic Vietnamese in Orange County, most of them living around the cluster of towns known as Little Saigon, 45 miles southeast of Los Angeles. Like other communities of immigrant refugees, Little Saigon seethes with feuds and factions.
In the intense early years, five Vietnamese-American journalists were killed in the United States, apparently by a radical anti-communist group. Mr. Do chose not to visit his mother in Vietnam before she died, fearing repr
Source: NYT
May 17, 2006
Lou Carrol, an unknown traveling salesman from Texas whose spontaneous act of generosity one summer day in 1952 — packing a puppy into a crate and shipping it to two little girls in Washington named Tricia and Julie — has been credited with altering the course of American history, died on April 3 in Highland Park, Ill. He was 83 and lived in Barrington Hills, Ill.
Mr. Carrol's death, which was made widely public only recently, was reported by the Solimine Funeral Home, in Lynn, Mass
Source: NYT
May 17, 2006
On the sacred walls and inside the dark passageways of ancient ruins in Guatemala, archaeologists are making discoveries that open expanded vistas of the vibrant Maya civilization in its formative period, a time reaching back more than 1,000 years before its celebrated Classic epoch.
The intriguing finds, including art masterpieces and the earliest known Maya writing, are overturning old ideas of the Preclassic period. It was not a kind of dark age, as once thought, of a cul
Source: The Daily Telegraph
May 17, 2006
This summer, it is likely that hordes of gum-chewing, cathedral-exploring, tomb-clambering tourists - usually sent to try the patience of Britain's clergy - will be made suspiciously welcome. Vicars will be monitoring closely as coach parties disgorge fat-walleted adults and their noisy children, interested in nothing but the gift shop.
For as those who run Westminster Abbey have found, one particular best-selling book has set cash registers ringing out like cathedral bells in a num
Source: CNN
May 16, 2006
The death register from the Mauthausen concentration camp contains rows of neatly printed names. The times of execution are each two minutes apart. The date is April 20, 1942 -- Adolf Hitler's 53rd birthday.
"Every second minute there is another prisoner and this goes on for pages," says Udo Jost, an archivist at the International Tracing Service (ITS) which looks after the world's biggest collection of documents from World War Two.
"They shot 300 prisone
Source: CBS4Denver
May 16, 2006
Embattled University of Colorado ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill has been hit with another allegation of research misconduct.
A University of Minnesota faculty member said Churchill used one of her photos in a publication without permission. She added that the caption he wrote for it exaggerated the facts.
Source: Business Week
May 16, 2006
As "source nations" put pressure on museums to return antiquities, a new code of conduct for the art world may be in the making.
Back in 1998, with help from prominent local donors, the St. Louis Museum of Art cobbled together $499,000 to buy a beautiful ancient Egyptian burial mask. The piece, one of the gems of the museum's collection, recently became controversial when the Egyptian government demanded its return, contending it had been stolen from a warehouse in the lat
Source: ansa.it
May 16, 2006
Rome, May 16 - The Tuscans' proud claim to be the descendants of the ancient Etruscans has taken a knock .
A DNA comparison of Etruscan skeletons and a sample of living Tuscans has thrown up only "tenuous genetic similarities", said lead researcher Guido Barbujani of Ferrara University .
"If the Tuscans were the direct descendants of the Etruscans the DNA should be the same," said Barbujani, a genetecist who coordinated the study with Stanford Univer
Source: NYT
May 16, 2006
The headline news from President Bush's immigration speech on Monday was troops to the border, but in substance and tone the address reflected the more subtle approach of a man shaped by Texas border-state politics and longtime personal views.
In an effort to placate conservatives, Mr. Bush talked tough about cracking down on immigrants who slip across the United States' long border with Mexico.
But the real theme of his speech was that the nation can be, as he phrased
Source: Inside Higher Ed
May 16, 2006
Ward Churchill committed multiple, “deliberate” acts of academic misconduct, according to a review by a faculty panel, released today by the University of Colorado at Boulder.
While the panel was unanimous in its findings about Churchill’s conduct, it was divided about whether he should lose his tenured position as professor — as politicians and many others have been demanding for more than a year. Three of the panel’s five members believe that the violations of academic standards a
Source: MSNBC
May 16, 2006
As younger, inexperienced teachers are thrown into classrooms to meet new federal standards, as much as 90 percent of the burden of instruction rests on textbooks, said Frank Wang, a former textbook publisher who left the field to teach mathematics at the University of Oklahoma.
And yet, few if any textbooks are ever subjected to independent field testing of whether they actually help students learn.
“This is where people miss the boat. They don’t realize how importan
Source: CNN
May 16, 2006
A female mummy with complex tattoos on her arms has been found in a ceremonial burial site in Peru, the National Geographic Society reported Tuesday.
The mummy was accompanied by ceremonial items including jewelry and weapons, and the remains of a teenage girl who had been sacrificed, archaeologists reported.
The burial was at a site called El Brujo on Peru's north coast near Trujillo.
They said the woman was part of the Moche culture, which thrived in the
Source: CBS
May 16, 2006
Millions of Nazi files that describe the mechanics of mass murder were a step closer to being opened to researchers following an agreement Tuesday by an 11-nation panel that has kept the archive locked away since World War II, officials said.
But first the draft must be signed by government ministers in Berlin — a date has not been set — and be sent back to the countries for ratification, said Paul Mertz, the Luxembourg Foreign Ministry official who is the chairman of the commissio
Source: NBC17.com
May 16, 2006
ATLANTIC BEACH, N.C. -- Underwater archaeologists plan to raise a cannon Wednesday from what's presumed to be the pirate Blackbeard's sunken flagship and put it on display -- for an hour.
"If you don't see it then, you won't see it for awhile," said Mark Wilde-Ramsing, project director for the Queen Anne's Revenge Project.
The public can get a glimpse of the cannon from noon to 1 p.m. at Fort Macon State Park.
Source: BBC
May 16, 2006
The SS Nomadic, the last of the White Star ships and a vital link to the Titanic story, will return to Belfast in July.
The Northern Ireland Office bought the ship at an auction in Paris for £171,320 in January.
Social Development Minister David Hanson said a submersible barge will be used to bring the ship home.
He said this would present "the least risk to successfully transporting the 95-year old vessel".
Source: BBC
May 16, 2006
A letter written by former prime minister Stanley Baldwin where he pays tribute to Hitler as "a remarkable man" is to go on sale at auction next month.
Baldwin wrote in glowing terms about the German leader to a friend in 1936, talking of his "great achievements", three years before World War II.
The letter, from the MP for Bewdley, Worcestershire, will be auctioned at Ludlow Racecourse, Shropshire.
Baldwin was prime minister three times be
Source: NYT Editorial
May 16, 2006
Turkey's self-destructive obsession with denying the Armenian genocide seems to have no limits. The Turks pulled out of a NATO exercise this week because the Canadian prime minister used the term "genocide" in reference to the mass killings of Armenians in Turkey during and after World War I. Before that, the Turkish ambassador to France was temporarily recalled to protest a French bill that would make it illegal to deny that the Armenian genocide occurred. And before that, a leading T
Source: NYT
May 16, 2006
George Crile, a television news producer who specialized in attacking difficult, controversial subjects, most famously in a documentary for CBS alleging that Gen. William C. Westmoreland and his military colleagues deliberately underestimated enemy troop numbers in the Vietnam War, died yesterday at his home in Manhattan. He was 61.Mr. Crile, who spent much of his career working on the CBS program "60 Minutes," took on formidable topics, many in foreign
Source: The Washington Post
May 16, 2006
He may have been born in Genoa, but he wrote in indifferent Latin or in good Spanish -- never in Italian. He had French connections, married a Portuguese woman, may have been Jewish, may have lived in Catalonia and died May 20, 500 years ago this week, in the Spanish city of Valladolid.
To commemorate this event, researchers led by Spanish forensic pathologist José Antonio Lorente Acosta are comparing the DNA of Columbus's illegitimate son, Fernando, with DNA from hundreds of possib
