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: Press Release -- George Mason University's Center for History and New Media (CHNM)
Jan 16, 2006
The compelling images and stories seared into the
memories of all who lived through last year’s hurricanes will endure through an online
hurricane archive. Anyone may visit the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank: Preserving
Stories from Katrina, Rita, and Wilma at http://www.hurricanearchive.org to read the
submissions of others before contributing their own memories and pictures to this
growing collection. All experiences related to the storms are s
Source: News Channel 8 (Bethesda, Maryland)
Jan 16, 2006
An important piece of history has been slated for preservation on this Martin Luther King holiday.
A slave cabin that was once home to Josiah Henson has been deeded to the Maryland National Capital Parks and Planning Commission. Henson was the inspirational model for Harriet Beecher Stowe's title character in the abolitionist novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin."As a slave, Henson was once the property of the 500 acre Riley family farm in what is now Bethesda. He
Source: Las Vegas Sun
Jan 16, 2006
An arbitration court has determined Austria is legally obligated to return five paintings by Gustav Klimt to the heir of a Jewish family who owned them, according to a ruling made public on Monday.
The ruling, which is not binding, indirectly supported the family's claims that the pictures were stolen by the Nazis. Lawyers for both the family and the government have said they would abide by the court's recommendation to end a seven-year legal struggle over who owns the paintings, es
Source: Baltimore Sun
Jan 16, 2006
1968. To many, that is a year when it seemed that the center would not hold - on campuses throughout America, in Paris and Prague, in Chicago at the Democratic Convention, in Washington where marchers converged, in Vietnam where war raged.
And, of course, in Los Angeles and Memphis, the cities where the year's turbulence was punctuated with the sound of an assassin's bullets cutting down Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King.
King would have turned 77 today.
Source: International Herald Tribune
Jan 16, 2006
Twenty-seven years after the brutal Khmer Rouge regime was driven from power, it appears that at least some of its leaders may soon be put on trial for causing the deaths of nearly one-fourth of the Cambodian population.Next month, the head of a United Nations administrative team is expected to arrive and set up shop in Cambodia. Foreign and Cambodian judges, prosecutors and staff are being selected now for the mixed international tribunal.
Diplomats
Source: UPI
Jan 16, 2006
A copyright on audio tapes of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 I Have a Dream speech means many students never get to hear it. Educators and historians say that is affecting the legacy of the civil rights leader, The Washington Post reported. It lessens the historical saliency of King for younger kids, said Robert Brown, assistant dean of undergraduate education at Emory University in Atlanta.
All of King's speeches and papers are owned by his family, whic
Source: USA Today
Jan 16, 2006
While the city builds better levees and new homes, a mayoral arts commission is recommending that the city not forget to reclaim its legacy as the birthplace of jazz. The commission recommends building a National Jazz Center, which would be a museum, performance hall, recording studio and archive rolled into one.The recommendations — which were to be presented to Mayor Ray Nagin on Tuesday — also call for creating new artistic districts, increasing the teaching of arts in sc
Source: NYT
Jan 15, 2006
AS the toll of American dead and wounded mounts in Iraq, some economists are arguing that the war's costs, broadly measured, far outweigh its benefits.
Studies of previous wars focused on the huge outlays for military operations. That is still a big concern, along with the collateral impact on such things as oil prices, economic growth and interest on the debt run up to pay for the war. Now some economists have added in the dollar value of a life lost in combat, and that has fed ant
Source: NYT
Jan 15, 2006
William Matthew Byrne Jr., the federal judge who presided over the trial of Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers in the 1970's, died in LA Thursday night. He was 75.Although he worked as a federal prosecutor and was named by President Richard M. Nixon in 1970 to head the Commission on Campus Unrest, Judge Byrne is best remembered as the Pentagon Papers judge. He got the case the same year he arrived on the bench.
Daniel Ellsberg, a m
Source: NYT
Jan 15, 2006
The phrase Unesco World Heritage site has been crossing from the lips of travel agents and popping up more and more on travel Web sites. That's no coincidence: the list has grown steadily from the first 12 in 1978 to 812 today, and includes everything from the Statue of Liberty, the Taj Mahal and Angkor Wat to the Wooden Churches of Southern Little Poland and the Orkhon Valley Cultural Landscape in Mongolia.
But as the list expands each year, many, including Unesco staff members, ar
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
Jan 15, 2006
A descendant seeks a pardon for John Donahoe, hanged in the Molly Maguire era, on grounds his trial was tainted.
Now, nearly 130 years after the gallows floor dropped in the prison, Donahoe's great-great-granddaughter is leading a fight to persuade Pennsylvania to officially pardon the member of the infamous Molly Maguires known as "Yellow Jack."
He was not the cold-blooded killer of a mine boss in the 1870s, insists Margaret Mary Traynor. And at the very lea
Source: NYT
Jan 14, 2006
A new look at the DNA of the Ashkenazi Jewish population has thrown light on its still mysterious origins.
Until now, it had been widely assumed by geneticists that the Ashkenazi communities of Northern and Central Europe were founded by men who came from the Middle East, perhaps as traders, and by the women from each local population whom they took as wives and converted to Judaism.
But the new study, published online this week in The American Journal of Human Genetics
Source: NYT
Jan 14, 2006
Presidents since at least Andrew Jackson have issued statements as they signed legislation into law, but Samuel A. Alito Jr., President Bush's Supreme Court nominee, helped to introduce an innovation in that practice when he was a lawyer in the Reagan administration.
The new twist, as Edwin Meese III, then the attorney general, explained in a Feb. 25, 1986, speech, was to urge courts to look to the president's signing statement for evidence of "what that statute really means.&
Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jan 14, 2006
ATLANTA On a humid Saturday night in 1906, an Atlanta newsboy named Mendel Romm went downtown to pick up papers for delivery. He talked about what he saw for the rest of his life.
"When he got to Five Points, they were having a race riot," says his son, 77-year-old Mendel Romm Jr. of Buckhead. "They were pulling people off the streetcars and lynching them right there. My father was so scared he ran all the way home."
The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot is the
Source: pacificnews.org
Jan 14, 2006
Vietnamese on the Internet have been complaining that the March conference on Vietnam at the JFK Library in Boston lacks Vietnamese participation. The conference is the first sponsored by all of the presidential libraries. Quang X. Pham, a Vietnamese American author, is asking for help from Vietnamese American list serve for representation on the upcoming conference:
First of all, this conference dwarfs the Oakland Museum's effort. Most likely C-SPAN will have l
Source: BBC News
Jan 14, 2006
A hotel known as a haunt of US novelist Ernest Hemingway has been destroyed in a fire in the Bahamas. The blaze broke out on Friday morning at the Compleat Angler on the island of Bimini, 50 miles (80km) off Florida. Hemingway is said to have drunk at The Compleat Angler between fishing trips around Bimini.
The site was a key tourist attraction.
"It's a tremendous pain to bear," Bimini Chief Councillor Natasha Bullard-Rolle s
Source: Wa Po
Jan 14, 2006
The goal of reuniting Muslims under a single flag stands at the heart of the radical Islamic ideology Bush has warned of repeatedly in recent major speeches on terrorism. In language evoking the Cold War, Bush has cast the conflict in Iraq as the pivotal battleground in a larger contest between advocates of freedom and those who seek to establish "a totalitarian Islamic empire reaching from Spain to Indonesia."
The enthusiasm of the extremists for that vision is not disput
Source: NYT
Jan 14, 2006
Over the years, the city that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called home has grown accustomed to stagnation and disrepair at the institution established in his name by Coretta Scott King in 1968, even as it has paid her sons six-figure salaries.
But now as Mrs. King is recovering from a stroke that left her partly paralyzed and unable to speak, problems at the nonprofit institution, the King Center, have become so bad that some family members are pushing to sell its buildings.
Jan 14, 2006
On January 11 Inside Higher Education reported that David Horowitz"admitted that he had no evidence to back up two of the stories he has told multiple times to back up his charges that political bias is rampant in higher education." The story bore the headline,"Retractions From David Horowitz," and was published after Horowitz appeared at a state legislative hearing in Pennsylvania held to investigate charges of political bias.
Source: Art Newspaper
Jan 13, 2006
Robert Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, is to establish the city’s first task force “dedicated to investigating and prosecuting antiquities theft and trafficking” according to Matthew Bogdanos, the lawyer who is to head the unit. Mr Bogdanos is better known as the US Marine Corps Reserves colonel who led the investigation into the looting of the Baghdad Museum and helped recover more than 5,000 artefacts.
Mr Bogdanos is returning to his civilian work as assistant distri
