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: AP
Dec 1, 2005
In one book, crazed Chinese communist guerrillas spray benevolent Japanese troops with cyanide. In another, savage Korean immigrants massacre innocent Tokyo residents in the wake of World War II.
If this sounds like a reversal of Japan's history of aggression in Asia, that is just what the authors intend. The scenes appear in two best-selling examples of a growing literary genre in Japan: nationalist comics. The trend, typified by the runaway hits `
Source: AP
Dec 1, 2005
President Bush signed a bill Thursday authorizing a statue of civil rights leader Rosa Parks in the Capitol's Statuary Hall. The bill gives the Capitol Architect's office two years to obtain a statue.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 30, 2005
The bicentenary of the battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon's greatest victory, is to be shunned by France's two leading politicians. Their absence comes amid an escalating row over whether to fete the emperor as a great leader or denounce him as a dictator.
Neither President Jacques Chirac nor his prime minister, Dominique de Villepin - an ardent admirer of Napoleon - will take part in the official ceremonies to mark the French army's defeat of Austrian and Russian forces on Dec 2, 1805.
Source: Haaretz
Nov 30, 2005
Genetic testing will not be performed on the bones of Jewish inmates discovered in a Holocaust-era mass grave during construction on a U.S. military camp near Stuttgart, according to a decision by Ulrich Goll, justice minister of the German state of Baden-Wurttemberg.
On completion of the police investigation, the remains will be transferred to the Jewish community of Stuttgart for burial.The Israel Police, which had initially been asked to assist the Germans in
Source: NYT
Nov 30, 2005
Steven Spielberg's film about Israel's revenge for the killing of its athletes by Palestinian guerrillas at the 1972 Munich Olympics opens in three weeks, but the Oscar-winning director has made surprisingly little effort to publicize it.
Leaders of Jewish and Muslim groups as well as diplomats and foreign policy experts will preview ``Munich'' before its U.S. release on December 23, but Spielberg has shied away from the media hype and costly promotional campaigns that typically pre
Source: Times Online (UK)
Nov 30, 2005
THE Pope is set to abolish the concept of Limbo, overturning a belief held by Roman Catholics since the Middle Ages.
Limbo has long been held to be the place where the souls of children go if they die before they can be baptised. However, a 30-strong international commission of theologians summoned by the late John Paul II last year to come up with a “more coherent and illuminating” doctrine in tune with the modern age is to present its findings to Pope Benedict XVI on Friday.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 30, 2005
For decades after Indian independence the now dusty field in north Delhi where George V staged his sumptuous 1911 Coronation Durbar went to rack and ruin. A tangle of trees and thorny scrub slowly engulfed a towering statue of the monarch and Emperor of India, intended to inspire fear and awe in his subjects.On this open ground, now hemmed in by slums and a dual carriageway, Britain made a lavish statement of imperial power - or overweening vanity.
In Delhi poli
Source: Editor & Publisher
Nov 30, 2005
Was this past Sunday's "Doonesbury" -- which had George W. Bush defending the burning of Yale University fraternity initiates with a brand in 1967 -- fact or fiction?
"Totally fact-based," replied Garry Trudeau, in response to an E&P e-mail query. "Bush's comment in panel seven is a direct quote, which is why I put it in quotation marks. In the original Yale Daily News expose, we ran a photo of a pledge's seared backside."
Source: Romanesko
Nov 30, 2005
LeRoy Gore lost his newspaper, the Sauk Prairie Star, after organizing a "Joe Must Go" campaign to recall Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy in 1954. Bill Wineke says Gore once explained why he was willing to take on a guy like McCarthy knowing that he faced personal destruction as a result: "I've wondered sometimes about people like me who take up crusades -- I think any newspaper man has a penchant for exhibitionism -- you wonder how much of it is high principle and how much is a compulsio
Source: NYT
Nov 30, 2005
After spending $71,000, rejecting the work of two sculptors and arguing for two years, Rocky Mount, N.C., has scrapped plans to honor the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with a bronze statue.
"The Council just felt that this was a no-win situation," said Peter F. Varney, assistant city manager, explaining the 4-to-2 City Council vote on Monday to abandon the effort to commemorate Dr. King's November 1962 visit with a statue in a local park.
Source: NYT
Nov 30, 2005
A veteran black lawmaker urged prosecutors to reopen investigations of 10 bombings that rocked homes and churches during the yearlong Montgomery bus boycott, which was begun in 1955 after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. With 50th anniversary events starting this week, the legislator, State Representative Alvin Holmes, a Democrat, sent memorandums to federal, state and local prosecutors requesting investigations into the bombing of five homes, four churches and a c
Source: NYT
Nov 30, 2005
Defying high anticipation, one of two portraits of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart that have been in the New York Public Library's collection for more than a century failed to sell at Sotheby's yesterday in an auction that had generated advance controversy.
The other portrait, which had been owned by Alexander Hamilton and depicted Washington seated with a sword across his lap, sold for $8.1 million to an unidentified telephone bidder. Sotheby's predicted that it would go for $1
Source: NYT
Nov 30, 2005
Southern universities often find themselves struggling to temper Confederate imagery without alienating alumni and donors.SEWANEE, Tenn. - The flags from Southern states disappeared from the chapel. The ceremonial baton dedicated to a Confederate general who helped found the Ku Klux Klan vanished. The very name of the University of the South was tweaked, becoming Sewanee: The University of the South, with decided emphasis on Sewanee.
It all seemed eminently sens
Source: National Geographic
Nov 30, 2005
Meteorologists are describing the 2005 hurricane season with one word: unprecedented.
"Absolutely, as far as we know, this was unprecedented," said Keith Blackwell, a researcher at the University of South Alabama's Coastal Weather Research Center in Mobile. There's a long list of reasons why this hurricane season, which ends Wednesday, will be regarded as one for the ages:
• The 26 named storms that formed made it the m
Source: Itar-Tass (Belarus)
Nov 30, 2005
A memorial for the victims of Soviet repressions was vandalised on the north-eastern outskirt of Minsk on Wednesday. The vandals broke about a dozen crosses, tore down memorial plaques and icons, and scratched a Nazi swastika on one of them. They also damaged the marble memorial bench donated by the U.S. people to Belarus and installed more than 10 years ago during President Bill Clinton’s visit to the country. Research done by historians and archaeologists at the beginning
Source: Haaretz
Nov 30, 2005
German-born Pope Benedict XVI, who grew up during Hitler's rise to power, condemned the Nazi attempt to exterminate Jews on Wednesday as a "project of death" that will remain forever an indelible stain on human history.
In his strongest comments on the Holocaust since his election in April, the 78-year-old Pope spoke about a Biblical psalm recalling the destruction of Jerusalem in the Old Testament and the Babylonian exile of Jews.Addressing thou
Source: The Australian
Nov 30, 2005
With the hammer and sickle fluttering from shop fronts and odes to the revolution blaring across the capital, Laos has geared up to celebrate 30 years of communism.
In what was arguably the final act of the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese backed Pathet Lao communists who had overrun the landlocked Southeast nation formally created the Lao People's Democratic Republic on December 2, 1975.For the nation's five million people, and in particular its present rulers
Source: Yahoo News
Nov 30, 2005
The main building of the Library of Congress was evacuated Wednesday morning while a hazardous materials team investigated what people in the building said was a suspicious odor.
Capitol Police officer Dan Kurtz said two people in the Jefferson Building, located across the street from the Capitol, complained of feeling faint. One was treated at the scene and another was taken to a local hospital.
Source: USA Today
Nov 30, 2005
[by John Seigenthaler, a retired journalist]
"John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960's. For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven." -- Wikipedia
This is a highly personal story about Internet character assassination. It could be your story.[Editor's Note: This is a longer th
Source: Christian Science Monitor
Nov 30, 2005
In the past, it might have taken decades for a war memoir to be published. Today, half a dozen books address a conflict less than three years old.Not every publisher was impressed when Chris Ayres pitched a book in 2004 about his adventures as an unprepared young reporter plopped into the middle of the Iraq war a year earlier.
"The biggest criticism was that it was old," recalls Mr. Ayres, a Los Angeles-based correspondent for the Times of London who e
