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: Citizen Outreach Petition
Nov 3, 2005
The Carson City (NV) school district says 11th-grade history teachers should start teaching American history at the Civil War period and move forward. But one experienced, award-winning teacher is standing up to this History-Lite policy and is insisting on teaching about our nation's colonial and Founding eras. And he might lose his job over it. Citizen Outreach is asking people to sign an online petition to save his job. Meet Joe Enge.
Joe is an a
Source: Seattle Times
Nov 3, 2005
In college, Samuel Alito led a student conference that urged legalization of sodomy and curbs on domestic intelligence, a sweeping defense of privacy rights that he said were under threat by the government and the dawning computer age.
President Bush's nominee for the Supreme Court, in a report written years before ubiquitous personal computers made electronic privacy the everyday concern it has become, warned of the potential for abuses by officials and companies collecting data on
Source: Times-Picayune
Nov 3, 2005
An 1878 map of New Orleans' settled areas shows that most of the city's 200,000 residents at the time clustered in a narrow swath along the Mississippi River, settling on the natural levees created by periodic floods.
It was still a good idea 127 years later. The city's old footprint corresponds closely to the small area that remained dry in the disastrous floods that came after Hurricane Katrina.
Indeed, the storm served up an unwelcome reminder that the city's expan
Source: NYT
Nov 3, 2005
DETROIT, Nov. 2 - In this, Rosa Parks's adopted hometown, the first row on hundreds of city buses sat empty on Wednesday, saved for the memory of Mrs. Parks and all she had done on another bus miles from here 50 years ago.
And so, as the politicians, the civil rights leaders, the famous musicians and the ministers packed into a massive church here to honor Mrs. Parks with formal speeches, ordinary people also swapped stories about her as they went about their days, to work and back,
Source: CNN
Nov 3, 2005
PASS CHRISTIAN, Mississippi As Hurricane Katrina approached, local historians were confident a vault filled with precious pre-Civil War pictures, maps and documents cataloguing the history of this Gulf Coast community would be safe.
Hopes were high after the storm passed. The former bank building that served as the Pass Christian Historical Society headquarters washed away, but its vault still stood. Workers opened it to find wet, sopping papers -- the ruined history of a seaside to
Source: Xinhuanet
Nov 3, 2005
China plans to abolish legal distinctions between urban residents and peasants in 11 provinces as the government tries to slow the country\'s surging wealth gap and reduce social unrest, media reports said Wednesday.Under an experimental program, local governments in those provinces will allow peasants to register as urban residents and to have the same rights to housing, education, medical care and social security that city dwellers have.
If carried out as advertised, the program w
Source: AFP
Nov 3, 2005
Vietnam on Thursday described as a "historic fact" a US report that false intelligence given to the White House in 1964 led to the first major escalation of the Vietnam War.Reacting to the report, Vietnamese foreign ministry spokesman Le Dung told AFP: "Everybody knows that the Tonkin Gulf event in 1964 was created by the then US administration, using it as a reason to extend war to the whole territory of Vietnam. This is a historic fact."
Source: AP
Nov 3, 2005
Historians in Pass Christian, Miss., were confident a vault filled with precious pre-Civil War pictures, maps and documents cataloging the history of this Gulf Coast community would be safe as Hurricane Katrina approached.
Hopes were high after the storm passed. The former bank building that served as the Pass Christian Historical Society's headquarters washed away, but its vault still stood. Workers opened it and found wet, sopping papers – the ruined history of a seaside town. Mos
Source: Environmental News Network
Nov 3, 2005
The farm of Daniel Webster, one of New England’s greatest statesmen, has been acquired and will be protected by the Trust for Public Land, the national conservation organization announced today.
“We are proud to have acquired the home of one of America’s legendary historic figures,” said Whitney Hatch, director of TPL’s New England office. “Webster Farm is significant, both in New Hampshire and nationally, and protecting it for future generations will protect an important part of Am
Source: Guardian
Nov 2, 2005
The British government operated a secret torture centre during the second world war to extract information and confessions from German prisoners, according to official papers which have been unearthed by the Guardian. More than 3,000 prisoners passed through the centre, where many were systematically beaten, deprived of sleep, forced to stand still for more than 24 hours at a time and threatened with execution or unnecessary surgery.Some are also alleged to have
Source: History Today
Nov 2, 2005
Around 1.5million men in China today are descendants of one man linked with the last dynasty of emperors. A geneticist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Dr Chris Tyler-Smith discovered the genes of Giocangga could be traced to a huge percentage of today’s population in north-east China and Mongolia. Giocangga was the grandfather of Emperor Nurhaci, a Manchurian tribal leader who died in 1626 and founded the Qing dynasty, which ruled from 1644-1912. The results of the s
Source: The Art Newspaper
Nov 2, 2005
As the US considers China’s request for restrictions on the import of archaeological material, the question of China’s alleged organised plunder of Tibetan artefacts is about to come under US congressional scrutiny. The move is likely to be seized upon by dealers in the US who oppose restrictions on the trade in Chinese artefacts. Dana Rohrabacher, a conservative Republican representative in the United States Congress and a long-standing critic of China’s human rights recor
Source: Knight Ridder
Nov 2, 2005
The bronze bust of Jaafar al Mansour, who founded Baghdad in the eighth century, stood in the center of a traffic circle in northwestern Baghdad and was used by nearly everyone as a reference point: 'near the statue,' 'a kilometer past the statue.' It was a symbol of the city, without politics or sectarianism, until Oct. 19, when terrorists reduced it to rubble with a roadside bomb.It's especially troubling to residents, ... because it celebrated Baghdad's storie
Source: Japan Focus
Nov 2, 2005
In 2002, “Japanese who had been orphaned in China” (Chugoku zanryu koji) filed a lawsuit against the Japanese State before the Tokyo Metropolitan Circuit Court. Since then, orphans have brought similar lawsuits before the lower courts in fifteen locations throughout Japan. The number of these plaintiffs has now reached 2,025. In Osaka, 111 orphans brought a suit before the district court in 2003. On July 6 th, 2005, the court will hand down a verdict to the first thirty-two plaintiffs. Their ave
Source: Wa Po
Nov 2, 2005
Eight years ago, a trio of federal appellate judges heard the case of Beryl Bray, a housekeeping manager at a Marriott hotel in Park Ridge, N.J., who alleged that she was denied a promotion because she was black. Two of the judges concluded that Bray had shown a lower court enough evidence of discrimination that she deserved a jury trial.
But the third judge, Samuel A. Alito, disagreed, writing that the hotel had merely committed "minor inconsistencies" in its rules for fi
Source: USA Today
Nov 2, 2005
If truth is war's first casualty, the Iraq Museum in Baghdad has the scars to prove it.More than two years after the museum, home to the remains of mankind's most ancient cities, was pillaged by an army of looters, thousands of the stolen objects have yet to be recovered.
And it appears that civilian and military experts may never agree on exactly what happened at one of the world's most prized museums or on who should have protected these treasures.Matthew Bogd
Source: Hampton Roads, Va. Daily Press
Nov 2, 2005
A rare temporary field kitchen used by occupying British Revolutionary War soldiers has been unearthed on the campus of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. It's a find that initially puzzled archaeologists.
The only other known Revolutionary War-era field kitchen is at Valley Forge, Pa., where two were discovered, archaeologists said. "We weren't sure what we had," said Tom Bodor, director of cultural resources at The Ottery Group, a Maryland-based firm hired to cond
Source: Fox News
Nov 2, 2005
Fox News has published a chronology of flu pandemics throughout recorded history.
Source: Press Release from Dera, Roslan & Campion
Nov 2, 2005
NOVA plans to broadcast a new documentary, HITLER’S
SUNKEN SECRET, which claims to uncover "new evidence about an enduring mystery." It's the story of the sinking of a "Norwegian ferry sabotaged in a daring resistance operation during WWII." The ferry was thought to be carrying heavy water useful in the creation of a Nazi nuclear bomb. The press release ...
This new documentary involves one of the last remaining puzzles from World W
Source: Network of Concerned Historians
Nov 2, 2005
The English Section of International PEN and the Network for Education and Academic Rights (NEAR) is drawing attention once again to the case of writer Rakhim Esenov (78 years old) in connection with his historical novel, The Crowned Wanderer, set during the period of the Mogul Empire. The Network of Concerned Historians is asking historians to answer an appeal by PEN for help.NCH SUMMARY
On 23 February 2004, Russian citizen Rakhim Esenov (?1926-), writer, histo
