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: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Nov 21, 2005
Pittsburgh's 250th anniversary is three years away, but plans are under way for an elaborate celebration that could cost as much as $9.9 million to promote, produce and advertise, according to a report circulating among potential funders.Two local consultants, paid $50,000 by the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, are recommending that regional officials get several things done by 2008 to boost the profile of Pittsburgh and change its image nationally.
Source: The Guardian
Nov 21, 2005
The future of Spain's monarchy was cast into doubt yesterday by an opinion poll showing the country's younger voters would rather live in a republic.The poll in El Mundo newspaper - on the 30th anniversary of the re-establishment of the monarchy after the dictator Francisco Franco died - suggested almost a quarter of Spaniards considered themselves republicans. A 50% increase in declared republicans over five years was the result of a surge in the number of 18 to 29-year-old
Source: NYT
Nov 21, 2005
If his name is unfamiliar, it may be because George M. Elsey is the last Washington aide infected with what Franklin D. Roosevelt archly called "a passion for anonymity." Mr. Elsey is certainly among the last men living who worked in the Roosevelt White House, as a young Naval reservist in the top-secret Map Room, transmitting communications and tracking troop positions in World War II.Now 87 and preparing to leave Washington after more than 60 years to be cl
Source: NYT
Nov 21, 2005
The files promise a collection of new evidence for victims of human rights abuses during a a 36-year civil conflict.Last summer, authorities from the Guatemalan human rights ombudsman's office, searching a munitions depot here, discovered what appear to be all the files of the National Police, an agency so inextricably linked to human rights abuses during this country's 36-year civil conflict that it was disbanded as part of the peace accords signed in 1996.
At
Source: WP
Nov 20, 2005
The bright sun sparkles on the cold waters of the fjord, forcing the gray-haired man to squint slightly. "This is where I come to think," Odd Bjorn Fure says without breaking his gaze.
From a balcony on the central tower of the fortresslike Villa Grande, he stares out over the treetops toward a cargo ship heading slowly out to sea. "And I'm sure Quisling came here to think, too," he adds.
Vidkun Quisling was the head of Norway's collaborationis
Source: NYT
Nov 20, 2005
Fourteen years ago, Moscow's summer was filled with sheer exuberance. The Soviet Union was suddenly gone, separated into 15 different states and a thousand pieces. People were afraid, but many believed Russia would turn democratic naturally, like a whole nation taking a sudden breath of fresh, free air after being too long underwater.
On the night of Aug. 22, 1991, several construction cranes and a crowd of about 50,000 determined people gathered in central Moscow to seal that promi
Source: AP
Nov 20, 2005
History is supposed to teach lessons. Past flu pandemics, it turns out, don't teach much about whether today's bird flu will become a human killer or just make some scientists and officials look like Chicken Little.
In a viral sense, the sky has fallen three times in the last century - in 1918, 1957 and 1968 - when "super-flu" strains killed millions more people than annual flu epidemics.Back then, there weren't surveillance systems or modern genetic t
Source: Los Angeles Times
Nov 19, 2005
An analysis of skull fragments from German composer Ludwig van Beethoven confirms that he suffered from lead poisoning for many years, a possible cause for his dour demeanor, researchers said Thursday."Beethoven had hoped that some day it would be revealed why he acted the way he did," said Paul Kaufmann, the owner of the skull fragments, who loaned them to the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies at San Jose State University.
"He was see
Source: NYT
Nov 19, 2005
A Turkish book publisher said Friday that the government was suing it for distributing a translated book that the government charges is critical of the Turkish identity, army and state and the founder of the republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
The publisher, Fatih Tas, the owner of Aram Publishing, could face three years in jail for issuing the book, "Spoils of War: The Human Cost of America's Arms Trade" by John Tirman, which focuses on military sales to Turkey. It was publ
Source: NYT
Nov 19, 2005
In their graphic and unflattering drawings of Japan's fellow Asians and in the unapologetic, often offensive contents of their speech bubbles, two $10 comic books reveal some of the sentiments underlying Japan's worsening relations with the rest of Asia.
They also point to Japan's longstanding unease with the rest of Asia and its own sense of identity, which is akin to Britain's apartness from the Continent. Much of Japan's history in the last century and a half has been guided by t
Source: NYT
Nov 19, 2005
President Roh Moo Hyun of South Korea urged Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan to stop visiting a nationalistic Japanese war memorial in a meeting here between the leaders on Friday, saying the visits raised fears of a revival of Japanese militarism.The bilateral talks, which took place on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting, took place just a month after Mr. Koizumi's latest trip to the Yasukuni Shrine, a memorial that co
Source: NYT
Nov 19, 2005
Congress agreed Friday to place a statue of civil rights leader Rosa Parks in the Capitol's Statuary Hall.
Parks, who died Oct. 24 at age 92, refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Ala., bus in 1955 -- an act of civil disobedience that helped spark the civil rights movement.
Both the House and the Senate approved by voice vote a bill placing the statue in the Capitol and sent the legislation to President Bush for his signature.
Source: NYT
Nov 19, 2005
A federal jury in Memphis yesterday found a former military colonel from El Salvador responsible for crimes against humanity during that country's civil war in the 1980's and ordered him to pay $6 million in damages.
The nine-member jury found that the colonel, Nicolás Carranza, had "command responsibility" for the torture of a Salvadoran who was forced to confess falsely to killing an American military adviser, Lt. Cmdr. Albert Schaufelberger, in 1983.
Source: BBC News
Nov 18, 2005
A man has invoked the 1689 Bill of Rights to fight a £60 parking fine from Worcester City Council at a tribunal. Robin de Crittenden, 67, of Willenhall, near Wolverhampton, argues the bill protects people from having to pay fines until convicted by a court. He said the challenge aimed "to put the politicians back in their kennels".
The National Parking Adjudication Service reserved judgment on the case but is expected to notify the parties
Source: Rick Shenkman, reporting for HNN
Nov 18, 2005
UPDATED COPY 11-21-05
Seven months after deciding to switch its annual convention from San Francisco to San Jose so its members wouldn't have to cross a picket line, the Organization of American Historians says it has struck a secret deal with the two hotels which lost money as a result of the change in venues.
San Francisco's Hilton Hotel had claimed it was owed $390,000 for booked rooms and meeting halls. The San Jose Doubletree said it was owed $42,000 for rooms that we
Source: AP
Nov 18, 2005
PHILADELPHIA The National Museum of American Jewish History is planning to build a new facility that could raise its profile and accommodate at least four times more visitors.
The museum, which is in the midst of a 100 (M) million dollar fundraising campaign, plans to acquire and raze a building on a prime corner of Independence Mall. That’s half a block from the museum’s current downtown site.With a more prominent location within a block of the Liberty Bell and
Source: Romanesko
Nov 18, 2005
Star-Telegram editors launched an investigation after a reader noticed that a Nov. 10 story by Ken Parish Perkins included a paragraph without attribution that appeared verbatim in Entertainment Weekly. Editors then found several stories and columns over about a two-year period in which the TV critic used either whole sentences or long phrases in sentences that were taken from other newspapers, magazines and Web sites verbatim without attribution.
Source: NYT
Nov 18, 2005
In late 1505, Pope Julius II asked the Swiss, an impoverished people at that time before bank secrecy, whose exports consisted mainly of their own sons, to dispatch 200 soldiers to Rome to serve as his personal palace guard.
Swiss mercenaries once served in a number of European countries, most notably as the guard of the French kings, but the papal guard is the only one to have survived.
So this year the veterans of the guard throughout the valleys and mountains of Swi
Source: NYT
Nov 18, 2005
Some famous people never leave their hometowns. Some never go back. And some have tangled, breakup-filled, yet enduring love affairs. So it is with Muhammad Ali and Louisville.
This is the self-proclaimed Gateway to the South where Ali was born Cassius Clay 63 years ago, where he grew up in a modest bungalow on the all-black west side, where a color line determined where he could shop, eat and see movies.
But it was also here that a white police officer named Joe Martin
Source: Amazon.com
Nov 18, 2005
It was the year of books named after years, and our favorite of those, and of any history book in 2005, was Charles C. Mann's eye-opening survey of new discoveries about the vibrant civilizations in the Americas before the arrival of Europeans, 1491. The other books include: 2. A Great Improvisation : Franklin, France, and the Birth of America by Stacy Schiff
3. At Day's Close: Night in Times Past by A. Roger Ekirch
4. History on Trial : My D
