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
Jan 29, 2006
THEY were the grandest of all the neighbors along the Mississippi Gulf Coast: splendid manors with names like Tullis-Toledano, Beauvoir and Grasslawn, squeezed in among the giant moss-covered oak trees. More than any road sign could, they announced that a bit of the old South had endured.
Source: NYT
Jan 29, 2006
Even as Haiti prepares to pick its first elected president since the rebellion two years ago, questions linger about the circumstances of Bertrand Aristide's ouster — and especially why the Bush administration, which has made building democracy a centerpiece of its foreign policy in Iraq and around the world, did not do more to preserve it so close to its shores.
Source: NYT
Jan 29, 2006
More than four years later, the written record of life inside the mayor's office in the chaotic weeks after Sept. 11 is emerging for the first time from city archives. At once insightful, poignant and banal, the documents vividly portray an administration toiling in the shadow of catastrophe, grappling with basic needs, fielding requests for help and offers of advice, and coping with an unrelenting dirge of wakes and funerals. They also provide the occasional glimpse of Mr.
Source: NYT
Jan 29, 2006
Beginning more than 200 years ago, the Cowan family has kept letters written to one another, as well as correspondence with eminent outsiders like Ralph Waldo Emerson, sermons given by preachers in the family and multipart essays sent home while traveling. The collection, at least 75,000 documents totaling hundreds of thousands of pages filling 200 boxes, is one of the largest private family troves that has turned up in recent years.It has been stored in attics, sheds
Source: SF Chronicle
Jan 29, 2006
The restructuring announced by Ford, which follows similar moves by General Motors, demonstrates among other things that autoworkers are expendable, and that tens of thousands of people -- and their families -- are about to be cast adrift at a time of economic uncertainty.This isn't how communities are stabilized. It's how they're eviscerated.
There was a time when Ford took a diametrically opposite approach to its workers, a trailblazing recognition that
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Jan 28, 2006
Actor Morgan Freeman reignited debate over whether Black History Month is necessary when he called the observance "ridiculous" on national television."You're going to relegate my history to a month?" Freeman asked in an interview broadcast on"60 Minutes" in December."I don't want a black history month.
Black history is American history."
Some African Americans agree that the observance belittles black history. But most prominent African Americans and h
Source: Baltimore Sun
Jan 28, 2006
Baltimore's Fort McHenry should have a new visitors center in time for the bicentennial anniversary of the War of 1812, with the help of an $11 million federal grant, officials announced yesterday.The money -- included in a recently approved transportation bill -- is expected to help complete decades of planning to replace a building that National Park Service officials believed was too small and limited from the time it opened in 1964.
Source: NYT
Jan 28, 2006
What is probably the world's richest sunken treasure — the Sussex, a British warship that went to the bottom of the Mediterranean in 1694 with a cargo of coins now worth up to $4 billion — has become embroiled in a bitter diplomatic dispute that pits Spain against Britain, the United States and an American company that wants to salvage the wreck. The conflict turns on arcane and often disputed aspects of international law that govern sovereign waters and the righ
Source: Baltimore Sun
Jan 28, 2006
Interest grows in projects to honor a heroic Dorchester County, Maryland native.There is a growing chorus of voices who think there ought to be a new museum here in Dorchester, where Tubman was born, to house artifacts associated with the Underground Railroad heroine, Civil War spy and nurse.
"We realize the value of Harriet Tubman now - people have opened their eyes and can see her importance," said Kay McKelvey, a retired teacher who runs an after-s
Source: Discovery News
Jan 27, 2006
Archaeologists have unearthed a 3,000-year-old skeleton of a man who appears to be clutching a dagger and is posed as though he were about to thrust the weapon into something, or someone, according to a Cultural Heritage News report from Iran. The unusual burial is the first of its kind for Iran, and possibly for the rest of the world.
"He is holding a 26-centimeter dagger and appears to be making a forward thrust," said archaeologist Ali Mahfor
Source: NYT
Jan 27, 2006
Democrats in Georgia and Alabama, borrowing an idea usually advanced by conservative Republicans, are promoting Bible classes in the public schools.The Democrats who introduced the bills said they hoped to compete with Republicans for conservative Christian voters. "Rather than sitting back on our heels and then being knocked in our face, we are going to respond in a thoughtful way," said Kasim Reed, a Georgia state senator from Atlanta and one of the sponsors of t
Source: NYT
Jan 27, 2006
The speaker of Russia's Parliament snubbed a call by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe for former Communist countries to reassess their repressive histories and to "condemn them without any ambiguity." On Wednesday, the assembly, which represents legislators from European countries, called for governments to confront their nations' former policies of starvation, mass executions and concentration camps. Yesterday, Boris Gryzlov, the Russian speaker
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Jan 27, 2006
Although the academic boycott a British faculty union imposed on two Israeli universities last spring has been overturned, anti-Israel bias continues to harm scholars and distort research, said participants in a conference here this week at Bar-Ilan University. Scholars and public figures from the United States, Britain, and Israel said that virulent anti-Israel sentiment, much of it emanating from the academic left, has created an atmosphere in which students and faculty me
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Jan 27, 2006
Scholars issue draft "declaration" calling for expanded role of religion in curriculum and student life -- at religious and secular colleges."To live in America is to live in a religiously charged atmosphere,” and that includes colleges — whether they like it or not. With those words, William M. Sullivan, a senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, summed up why 25 scholars — from a range of disciplines and faiths — have been workin
Source: National Security Archive
Jan 27, 2006
The nation's leading history and political science associations, along with a number of prominent scholars of the Presidency and the Vietnam War, yesterday filed an amicus brief in a lawsuit brought by University of California, Davis, Professor Larry Berman. The case involves Berman's effort to obtain release under the Freedom of Information Act of two almost 40-year-old CIA memos to President Johnson.Represented by Matthew W.S. Estes, the scholars seek to alert
Source: MSNBC
Jan 27, 2006
The flight, and the lost crewmembers, deserve proper recognition and authentic commemoration. Historians, reporters, and every citizen need to take the time this week to remember what really happened, and especially to make sure their memories are as close as humanly possible to what really did happen.If that happens, here's the way the mission may be remembered:
Few people actually saw the Challenger tragedy unfold live on television.
T
Source: Yahoo News
Jan 27, 2006
Sixty-one years after the liberation of the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz, the grimmest symbol of the murder of six million Jews in World War II, ceremonies across Europe marked the first international Holocaust remembrance day.They came amid a storm provoked by an Iranian plan to stage a conference questioning the Holocaust, which Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has described as a "myth."
At the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in southern Pol
Source: Chicago Tribune
Jan 27, 2006
Salvador Guilliem dangles on a narrow beam over the sunken remains of a mural painted by Indians shortly after the Spanish Conquest. Guilliem, an archeologist, points out the newly excavated red, green and ochre flourishes in one of the earliest paintings to show the mixing of the two cultures. The vivid scene of animals real and mythical cavorting around the edge of lakes that once shimmered in Mexico City was painted by Aztec Indians in the early 1530s during a rare, brief
Source: AP
Jan 27, 2006
Abraham Lincoln's appearance and historical documents that note his especially clumsy gait have long caused researchers to puzzle over whether he may have had a genetic disorder called Marfan syndrome. Now, members of the president's family tree are wondering if Lincoln had a different, incurable hereditary disease called ataxia that affects the coordination it takes to walk, write, speak and swallow. Researchers at the University of Minnesota have discovered a gene mu
Source: Reuters
Jan 27, 2006
Author James Frey confessed to Oprah Winfrey on Thursday that he made up details about every character in his memoir ``A Million Little Pieces'' and the talk show host apologized to her viewers, saying she felt ``duped.''``I have been really embarrassed by this,'' said Winfrey, whose praise for Frey's book in September helped make it the top-selling book on nonfiction lists in the United States last year.
``I really feel duped,'' she told Frey on her tele
