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: LAT
Jan 26, 2006
He was a man for whom the term muckraker was coined, a crusading journalist and novelist who never hesitated to expose scandal at the highest levels of government and business. But now the integrity of Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Upton Sinclair is being questioned 38 years after his death because of the discovery of a letter he wrote in 1929.Quotes from the letter in recent news reports make it seem that the man who exposed the horrors of the meat-packing indus
Source: Boston Globe
Jan 26, 2006
It's a birthday bash being heard around the world. The cobblestoned and turreted city of Mozart's birth was the focal point for Friday's 250th anniversary celebrations -- but the sound of the master's music was being heard around the globe.Orchestras halls and opera houses worldwide planned performances of his works. Piano students scheduled Mozart marathons and puppeteers were planning jubilee performances as hundreds of cities across five continents toasted the musical gen
Source: Guardian (UK)
Jan 26, 2006
By a clear majority, the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe yesterday backed a controversial motion demanding that the continent's 46-member human rights watchdog formally condemns "the crimes of totalitarian communist regimes".More than 60 members of the body's 315-seat assembly, made up of MPs from Europe's parliaments, were due to speak in a debate on a report by the conservative Swedish MP Goran Lindblad, which argued that 15 years after the collap
Source: Newsweek
Jan 26, 2006
Last September, Russia and Germany signed a deal to build a $5 billion gas pipeline running 1,200 kilometers under the Baltic from Vyborg near St. Petersburg to Greifswald on Germany's northeastern coast. The pipeline's projected route passes close to two of Tershkov's dumps, in the Gotland and Bornholm basins. Environmentalists in Russia and the Baltic states fear that construction could disturb the submerged and rusting shells and poison the sea. "It is very dangerous to build the pipelin
Source: Reuters
Jan 26, 2006
A South Korean appeals court on Thursday ordered two U.S. chemical firms to pay 63.1 billion won ($65.2 million) in damages to 20,000 of the country's Vietnam War veterans for exposure to defoliants such as Agent Orange. The Seoul High Court overturned two lower court decisions and found Dow Chemical Co. and Monsanto Co. negligent for manufacturing defoliants used by the U.S. military in the Vietnam War with an excess dioxin content, according to court papers.
&
Source: Toqueville Connection
Jan 26, 2006
A bitter row over a French law that recognises the "positive role" of colonialism appeared to be close to resolution Thursday after President Jacques Chirac asked for the controversial clause to be struck off the statute books.The president accepted advice from a parliamentary committee to resort to a rarely-used constitutional procedure in order to remove the offending article -- which appears in a government bill passed a year ago providing financial compensation
Source: Bangor Daily News
Jan 26, 2006
Ed Rice was home doing chores on Jan. 16 when an envelope arrived via FedEx. What he found inside, he said, made his jaw drop. Rice, the author of a book about legendary Indian Island baseball player Louis Sockalexis, who played in 94 games for the Cleveland Spiders from 1897 to 1899, now has what he believes to be the most compelling piece of evidence that Sockalexis was in fact the first American Indian to play major league baseball.Although Rice wrote "Baseball
Source: Reuters
Jan 26, 2006
Filmmaker Steven Spielberg has torn open another old wound in Germany just as the country where the Holocaust was designed and the 1972 Olympics massacre happened prepares for the world's spotlight again. The American's new film "Munich" was launched in 400 cinemas across Germany on Thursday after weeks of intense media coverage that revived unwanted memories of the shockingly inept handling of events that led to the slaying of 11 Israeli athletes.
Mag
Source: CBC
Jan 26, 2006
German officials have announced a plan to build a new centre documenting the crimes of the Nazi secret service at the site of the group's former headquarters in Berlin.Representatives from the federal and Berlin's municipal government announced the new venture Wednesday, saying that they had chosen a local architecture firm to complete the project, estimated to cost nearly $25 million US.
Historian Andreas Nachama, former head of the Jewish Community in Berlin a
Source: Newsday
Jan 26, 2006
Bowing to a parent's complaint, school officials have stricken a book from an elementary school's Black History Month reading list because it contains a racial slur. "The teachers may see this as an example of something they can help fix, but we believe at fourth grade the children do not have the maturity to truly understand it," said parent Lisa Rex, whose complaint prompted the action.Published in 1995, "The Well" by Mildred Taylor is about a black fam
Source: Daily Telegraph (Australia)
Jan 26, 2006
Australian teachers have rejected Prime Minister John Howard's push to overhaul the teaching of history, saying his criticisms do not reflect what is happening in Australian schools.Kate Cameron, the immediate past national president of the History Teachers' Association, said Mr Howard of all people should know the Commonwealth had invested millions of dollars into the teaching of history.
She said the Prime Minister woould soon realise his claims that young peo
Source: ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
Jan 26, 2006
The New South Wales Teachers Federation has accused the Prime Minister of attacking school teachers in his call for students to be taught more about Australian history.The New South Wales Teachers Federation President Angelo Gavrielatos says history is adequately being taught in schools.
"The Prime Minister's comments were ill-informed and dishonest and aimed at attacking and denigrating Australia's teachers," he said.
The Federal Oppositi
Source: Bloomberg News
Jan 25, 2006
Pennsylvania handed over Valley Forge National Historical Park, where George Washington's troops spent the winter of 1777-78, to the National Park Service 30 years ago. Governor Edward G. Rendell now says he may want it back. Plans to build a $100 million American Revolution museum at Valley Forge, 20 miles northwest of Philadelphia, are ``in crisis,'' Rendell said in a letter last month to Interior Department Secretary Gale Norton. The U.S. government should consider return
Source: National Geographic News
Jan 25, 2006
Drawing on evidence from animal remains—largely the bones of a mountain goat species called the Caucasian tur—scientists in the republic of Georgia have determined that Neandertals at a site were as capable hunters as the modern humans who later lived in the area. "[Neandertal] hunting patterns were indistinguishable in terms of the species they targeted and the ages of the animals they killed," said lead study author Daniel Adler, a paleoanthropologist
Source: China View
Jan 25, 2006
Cliff paintings of hunters in rugged remote northwestern China appear to prove that Chinese were adept skiers as early as the Stone Age, Xinhua said Monday. The paintings in Altay, in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, "have been verified as humans hunting while skiing and, therefore, archaeologists can prove the Altay region to be a place of skiing some 100 to 200 centuries ago," the news agency said.
Wang Bo, a noted researcher with th
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Jan 25, 2006
Historians are only cautiously optimistic about healthier job prospects. Over the past few years, the number of graduate students entering doctoral programs in history has been rising again, while the proportion of faculty members approaching retirement age has been falling. Those trends could collide to create more competition for fewer job openings in the future.A report on the history job market for 2004-5 shows that faculty jobs advertised in the history associati
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation of American Scientists
Jan 25, 2006
The Bush Administration rejected a Congressional initiative in 2002 that would have lowered the legal threshold for conducting surveillance of non-US persons under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act from "probable cause" that the target is a terrorist or agent of a foreign power to "reasonable suspicion."Administration officials said at the time that the legislative proposal was unnecessary and possibly unconstitutional.
Yet in a speec
Source: NYT
Jan 25, 2006
Ramping up the administration's defense of its domestic eavesdropping program, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales on Tuesday invoked the lessons of George Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt in justifying President Bush's broad power to wage war against terrorism.Mr. Gonzales, in his speech, cited the arc of history in justifying an expansive view of presidential power. He said the country's "long tradition of wartime enemy surveillance," often without wa
Source: FamousPlagiarists.com
Jan 25, 2006
The website is run by John P. Lesko, an assistant professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University, who is also responsible for a new scholarly journal, Plagiary: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication, and Falsification. The webste features brief analyses of all the famous history plagiarism cases from Ambrose to Goodwin to H.G. Wells. A color-coded meter ranks the threat they pose to good scholarship.
Source: The Guardian Unlimited
Jan 25, 2006
£2bn train tunnel linking Europe to Asia faces delays as dig unearths 5th-century port. Lost treasures of Constantinople test Turkey's 21st-century ambitionDeep in the soft black earth beneath the cleared slum tenements of old Istanbul, Metin Gokcay points to neatly stacked and labelled crates heaped with shattered crockery. "That's mostly old mosaics and old ceramics," said the Istanbul city archaeologist. "And over there we found bones and coins."
