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: Howard Kurtz in the Wa Po
Nov 9, 2005
After a year of silence about the biggest scandal in CBS News history, Mary Mapes has plenty to say -- about George W. Bush, Karl Rove, Les Moonves, her father, bloggers, the mainstream press and others who she believes contributed to her downfall.What took her so long?
CBS producer Mary Mapes with British soldiers and a young Afghan in Afghanistan in 2001. (Family Photo)
"I was extremely battered," she said in an interview yesterda
Source: Xinhuanet
Nov 9, 2005
The Chinese might have learned to adorn themselves with periwigs more than 2,000 years ago, said archeologists who unearthed a skeleton wearing a hairpiece from an ancient tombs in southwest China's Sichuan Province.
The wig, found on the lower part of the skull, was made of hemprope, says Zhang Rong, a heritage repairs technician with a local museum in Liangshan prefecture, where the finding was reported. Zhang said she had consulted several seasoned hemp knit
Source: AP
Nov 9, 2005
Archeologists said Wednesday they have unearthed burial mounds dating back to the third millennium B.C. which they believe contain remains and trinkets from ancient Aryan nomads.
Historian Hakob Simonian said Wednesday that the four mounds were among 30 discovered about 35 miles west of the Armenian capital Yerevan, containing beads made of agate, carnelian and as well as the remains of what appears to be a man, aged 50-55.Also found were remains of domesticated
Source: AP
Nov 9, 2005
New York University's graduate teaching assistants are expected to go on strike today. At issue is NYU refusal to recognize the teaching assistants as a union and negotiate with them.From 2000 until August of this year, about 1,000 teaching and research assistants were represented by Local 2110 of the United Automobile Workers. But when their contract expired on August 31st, NYU said it would no longer recognize a graduate student union.
The universi
Source: History Today
Nov 9, 2005
Parts of an ancient lighthouse considered one of the Seven Wonders of the World have been discovered in the Egyptian city of Alexandria. French marine archaeologists discovered the foundations of the Lighthouse of Pharos in the entrance to the city’s harbour. The Alexandria Lighthouse was built in around 270BC by the Greek architect Sostratus and was then one of the tallest buildings in the world, with three layered towers at a height of 440ft. The first lighthouse in the wo
Source: LAT
Nov 8, 2005
Italian authorities have identified more than 100 allegedly looted antiquities at six leading museums in the United States as well as galleries, private collections and museums in Europe and Asia.
According to Italian court records, prosecutors have used a trove of captured Polaroid photographs to trace objects to Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Toledo Museum of Art and Princeton University Art Museum, in addition to the J. Paul Getty Museum and
Source: Cleveland Plain Dealer
Nov 8, 2005
Rep. Sherrod Brown wrote to Sen. Mike DeWine last Friday, voicing concern about Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito's labor record. Brown's language was crisp -- and was plagiarized. Roughly 90 percent of what Brown, an Avon Democrat, wrote in his letter was lifted from an Internet posting by a blogger, as Brown's office acknowledged Monday when The Plain Dealer presented the similarities.
Brown had not credited the blogger, Nathan Newman of NathanNewman.org, or any other source.
Source: NYT
Nov 8, 2005
In an apparent slip, a top American intelligence official has revealed at a public conference what has long been secret: the amount of money the United States spends on its spy agencies.
At an intelligence conference in San Antonio last week, Mary Margaret Graham, a 27-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency and now the deputy director of national intelligence for collection, said the annual intelligence budget was $44 billion.The number was
Source: NYT
Nov 8, 2005
Distaste for the police in France has roots in clashes between demonstrators and the police in the 1960's, historians say. Those clashes, notably during demonstrations against the war in Algeria in 1965 and then during the student-worker protests in 1968, caused a rift between civil society and the police, and gave a lasting stigma to the police.
''The 1960's were the end of the neighborhood cop in France,'' said Cmdr. Alain Jackel, who leads the C.R.S. commandos in Champigny-sur-M
Source: Wa Po
Nov 8, 2005
More than 2 1/2 years after looters sacked Iraq's National Museum in Baghdad, Iraqi authorities and police forces throughout the world are still searching for thousands of stolen items, including a handful of the most famous artifacts in history.
U.S. military sources say forces in Iraq have no systematic way of investigating the missing objects, and in the ongoing insurgency neither U.S. nor Iraqi forces can justify using scarce manpower to guard sites in the countryside, where wid
Source: Slate
Nov 8, 2005
Slate's Timothy Noah is taking the Washington Post to task for declining to mention that Fred Malek, an investor in the club that wants to bring major league baseball back to the US capital, disgraced himself in the Nixon administration by taking a nose count of Jews in the Bureau of Labor Statistics (at Nixon's request). Noah notes that the last time Malek's counting was mentioned by the Post was June 30.
Source: Daily Princetonian
Nov 8, 2005
The senior thesis of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito '72, which along with some 300 others was lost during the 1970s, resurfaced Monday when Alito's thesis adviser provided a copy to the University.
Walter Murphy, the McCormick Professor in Jurisprudence Emeritus, sent a copy of the thesis, which concerned the Italy's highest court, to the University's Mudd Manuscript Library. The document's preface was made available Monday night, and the full 134-page document will be avai
Source: Baltimore Sun
Nov 8, 2005
No, you probably can't get college credit for watching the scandalous adventures of Desperate Housewives, but if you look hard enough on American campuses you'll find an occasional course on literature of the suburbs, a seminar discussing Crabgrass Frontier and other discourses on the growth of suburbia.
Increasingly, if still a bit disdainfully, academia is beginning to pay attention to the 'burbs, home for years now to at least half of all Americans.&quo
Source: BBC
Nov 8, 2005
A German Holocaust denier who has regularly lavished praise on Adolf Hitler has gone on trial in Germany.
The case was delayed as soon as it had started, when the judge dismissed a member of Ernst Zuendel's defence team for having a racist conviction. He denies inciting racial hatred and spreading Nazi propaganda. He faces up to five years in jail if convicted.
Mr Zuendel once published a book called The Hitler We Loved and Why, and described the fo
Source: BBC News
Nov 7, 2005
In 430BC, during the Peloponnesian war against their great rival Sparta, the people of Athens were hit by a deadly disease that has defied diagnosis to this day. By the end of the plague Athens had lost a third of its army. The Greek historian Thucydides survived a bout of this unknown killer and left a vivid account of its symptoms, which make for frightening reading. "People in good health were all of a sudden attacked by violent heats in the head, and red
Source: UPI
Nov 7, 2005
A new history exam in Britain has the backing of the Historical Association to "sex up" exams to make them more accessible for the less academic.
The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority has awarded a contract to develop a pilot exam that would link history to related vocational areas of learning such as national heritage, museums, galleries, historic sites, archaeology, tourism, archives and media, the Daily Telegraph Saturday. "There is now a
Source: cbs5.com (San Francisco)
Nov 7, 2005
Three kinds of looters raided Iraq's museums, said the man in charge of Iraq's collection of antiquities--common criminals, collectors, and many who had inside knowledge of the museums.
Iraq's archeological heritage remains at risk, according to Dr. Donny George, director of the Iraq Museum and chairman of Iraq's State Board of Antiquities and Heritage. Violence in the country has made even the daily commute a life or death situation.Not long a
Source: NYT
Nov 7, 2005
When Israeli authorities wanted to expand the Megiddo Prison, they tapped their captive labor pool and put dozens of inmates to work digging inside the compound here that is ringed with coiled razor wire and guard towers.
As is common practice in Israel, the site underwent a check for possible archaeological ruins before heavy equipment could be moved in. Last week, the inmates discovered a Christian religious site that Israel's Antiquities Authority said may date to the third centu
Source: NYT
Nov 7, 2005
It remains to be seen what kind of justice Judge Alito might turn out to be, if he gets the chance: whether, for instance, he is the upper-case conservative that the right may hope for and many on the left fear. An examination of several chapters in his life suggests he is conservative by temperament, upbringing and experience - conditions that appear to have shaped his approach to life and his work more than any narrow ideological niche."There are people in
Source: Jerusalem Post
Nov 7, 2005
An 84-year-old Nazi war criminal serving two life sentences for the murder of 18 Jews has died in a British jail, authorities said Monday.
Anthony Sawoniuk, the only person to be convicted of Nazi war crimes in a British court, died in Norwich Prison, in eastern England, on Sunday, a Home Office spokeswoman said. During a war crimes trial in Britain in 1999 Sawoniuk pleaded innocent to involvement in Nazi genocide in Eastern Europe more than 50 years earlier, bu
