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: Inside Higher Ed
May 12, 2006
One of Britain's two major faculty unions — the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education — is getting ready to vote on a resolution that would call on members to consider staying away from Israeli colleges or professors unless they specifically oppose a series of policies opposed by the union. The proposal has reignited tensions over anti-Israel boycotts that became quite intense last year when the other major union in British academe started its own boycott and then call
Source: Inside Higher Ed
May 12, 2006
Ward Churchill’s lawyers are threatening to sue the University of Colorado at Boulder if it goes through with an additional investigation of the controversial professor, The Rocky Mountain News reported. A faculty panel is expected to release findings next week on a series of misconduct charges against Churchill. But new research misconduct charges have surfaced, and Boulder is getting ready to look into those as well.
Source: Wa Po
May 11, 2006
A powerful congressional committee, citing the "exceptionally high" salaries of executives at the Smithsonian Institution, amended an appropriations bill yesterday to say no salary at the museum complex should be higher than the $400,000 the president of the United States is paid.
In 2005, Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence M. Small received a base salary of $573,832, according to records the House Appropriations Committee released yesterday. In a boisterous meeting, the panel
Source: NYT
May 11, 2006
In recent months a floodlet of books has been published about President Bush, his administration and the war in Iraq. They range widely in perspective: there are books by reporters, by administration insiders and by counterterrorism and economic experts; books with conservative, liberal and nonpartisan points of view; books that offer a wide-angle window on the administration; and books that zero in on particular aspects of the war in Iraq.
Yet taken together with earlier volumes, t
Source: Wa Po
May 11, 2006
The country has John G. Roberts Jr. as its newest chief justice. What it doesn't have is an answer to the mystery of the missing file of his work papers on affirmative action.
The file, compiled during Roberts's tenure as an associate counsel in the Reagan White House, vanished in July when lawyers from the Bush administration were reviewing the materials at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., as part of a vetting process before Roberts's formal nomination
Source: Phyllis McClure in the newsletter of the Education Gadfly
May 11, 2006
HIGHLIGHT: Federal officials have found that every state they checked considered middle and high school history teachers highly qualified if they were licensed in the field of social studies rather than in history itself, as the law demands. [Phyllis McClure, an independent researcher, tracks implementation of No Child Left Behind for the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights.]
NCLB requires all states, at the end of the current school year, to prove that t
Source: BBC
May 11, 2006
Neolithic man, thought to be the world's first farmer, was not as peaceful as previously thought, new research has suggested.
A study of remains kept in UK museums found neolithic man ran a one-in-14 chance of getting a cracked skull.
Archaeologist Dr Rick Schulting from Queen's University, Belfast said 350 skulls dated between 4000 and 3200 BC from southern England were examined.
He said the study "challenged" the myth of neolithic man being peacefu
Source: Wa Po
May 11, 2006
The Smithsonian's Arts and Industries Building, the second oldest structure on the Mall and a national landmark, was named an endangered historic place yesterday by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Designed by architect Adolf Cluss and built between 1879 and 1881, the building was the Smithsonian's first museum. The building has served many purposes. It was at one time the home of the Star-Spangled Banner. It also housed a popular children's theater. President James Gar
Source: Christian Science Monitor
May 11, 2006
If you've kept up with the publishing industry lately, you've heard of Kaavya Viswanathan. The Harvard sophomore got a $500,000 advance from publishing firm Little, Brown, and Co. for her book, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got A Life." But her own life took a sour turn after she was accused of copying several passages of her novel either directly or indirectly from books by Megan McCafferty, Sophie Kinsella, Meg Cabot, and Salman Rushdie. It's the most high-profile accusat
Source: BBC
May 11, 2006
BERLIN A film about the old East German secret police has been making headlines in Germany after an actor alleged in an accompanying book that his former wife was a real-life Stasi informer. Hundreds of thousands of people have come to search the old Stasi files in the last 15 years to find out that their friends, neighbours or even family members had been secret police informers.
Now, one of these cases is dominating the German media an
Source: Yahoo
May 11, 2006
An Indian archaeologist is praying for a respite from a heat wave engulfing the Taj Mahal town of Agra, warning that heavy dust in the dry air could permanently scar the marble monument to love.
Temperatures hovered this week at 45 Celsius (115 degrees Fahrenheit) in the city, 200 kilometres (124 miles) south of New Delhi, as a heat wave that has killed 60 people nationwide in the past week dragged on.
The Yamuna River, which runs behind the 17th-century white Mughal t
Source: Wa Po
May 11, 2006
New evidence from Canada and Alaska suggests that climate change, rather than human hunting, may have played the key role in a great die-off of mammoths, horses and other large North American mammals that began more than 10,000 years ago.
"It was a special time of greater warmth and moisture," said paleoecologist R. Dale Guthrie of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. "The arid steppe receded, the short grass became more lush, and then the forest came in. The mammot
Source: NYT
May 10, 2006
The last piece of the World Trade Center still standing aboveground — a battered but recognizable staircase used by hundreds to flee the inferno of 9/11 — is one of the most endangered historical places in America, the National Trust for Historic Preservation said yesterday.That is because it stands in the way of an office tower designed by Norman Foster of London and planned by Larry A. Silverstein, president of Silverstein Properties.
"Silvers
Source: El Defensor Chieftain (NM)
May 10, 2006
A New Mexico archeologist told an audience at First Baptist Church on Sunday night that he believes he has found the biblical city of Sodom. According to the Book of Genesis in the Bible, God destroyed the city with fire and brimstone because of the inhabitants' evil behavior.
Steven Collins, dean of the College of Archaeology and Biblical History at Albuquerque's Trinity Southwest University, and his group spent several weeks last winter excavating Tall el-Hammam, a site in Jordan
Source: Knight Ridder
May 10, 2006
Photographers for the old Soviet TASS news agency labored under censors and government demands that their work promote official ideology. But they also enjoyed prestige and privileged access as they chronicled seven decades of the remarkable and the mundane.
Now directors of the successor ITAR-TASS agency lament that much of the vast archive of more than 1 million photos sits in wooden filing cabinets in the agency's dilapidated headquarters, with no plans and no money to dig
Source: Times of India
May 10, 2006
PATNA: Hundreds of antiquities kept in the store room of the Patna Museum are missing. These antiquities had been found in various excavations conducted at Katra (Muzaffarpur), Taradih (Bodh Gaya) and Balirajgarh (Darbhanga) during the 1980s and 1990s.
Surprisingly, all these antiquities are not catalogued in any of the records of the state archaeology department. These antiquities were kept in two separate dilapidated rooms located on the backyard of the Patna Museum building for
Source: BBC
May 10, 2006
Archaeologists have unearthed a large Roman cemetery in a Gloucestershire gravel quarry.
More than 100 people are believed to have been buried at the site, near Fairford, which dates back 1,600 years.
It is thought the dead were interred according to their age, as children's bodies have been found in one area with adults in another section.
Source: BBC
May 10, 2006
A French envoy has said her country did profit from slavery as it officially commemorates the victims of the trade for the first time.
"It profited from the commerce in human beings... ripped from the African homeland," Junior Co-operation Minister Brigitte Girardin said in Senegal.
She was visiting a notorious slave island off the coast of Senegal.
In Paris, President Jacques Chirac said facing up to the colonial past was a "key to national coh
Source: American Historical Association
May 10, 2006
Responding to a recent letter from Lawrence Small, Secretary of the Smithsonian, AHA President Linda Kerber questioned the Institution's obfuscation about the contractual arrangement between the Smithsonian and Showtime, praised recent congressional intervention on the issue, and supported the recent actions of its affiliate, the Society of American Historians, in suspending Smithsonian Press as a publisher-member.In a letter unanimously endorsed by the Associati
Source: Terry George in the Wa Po
May 10, 2006
Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life hero of the movie "Hotel Rwanda," is being denounced by some in his country as a traitor and a criminal. Perhaps he helped bring some of this abuse on himself, but none of it is deserved. As director and producer of the film, I'd like to explain.To make a film of a true story you must compress timelines, create composite characters and dramatize emotions. When it came to making "Hotel Rwanda" -- the story of ho
