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: Michael Beschloss in Newsweek
Nov 2, 2005
Presidents fall into second-term slumps for different reasons. More important for President Bush is how they get out of them. Roosevelt gained an unprecedented third term by convincing the country that he alone was equipped to shield them against the growing threats from Hitler and the imperial Japanese. Ronald Reagan shook off the albatross of Iran-contra by joining Mikhail Gorbachev to wind down the cold war. Straining to survive the Monica Lewinsky mess, Bill Clinton boasted that he was respo
Source: AP
Nov 2, 2005
The outgoing president of Randolph-Macon College in Virginia, Roger Martin is an Oxford-trained church historian. His successor is a career fundraiser who brought in about $3 billion for his last two employers.
The appointment last week of Robert Lindgren to lead the small, 175-year old liberal arts college about 15 miles north of Richmond is the latest example of a trend in higher education: Schools are looking for more than a scholar these days when they hire a president.
Source: NYT
Nov 2, 2005
Rosa Parks, the unassuming seamstress whose small act of defiance on a city bus 50 years ago helped spark the modern civil rights movement, was to be lain to rest today in Detroit after a lavish funeral service attended by dignitaries and thousands of others.Beginning at dawn, people began lining up around the cavernous Greater Grace Temple, in Mrs. Park's adopted hometown, and the line still wrapped around two blocks as the services got under way.
"The wor
Source: CNN
Nov 2, 2005
In the early decades of the University of North Carolina, servants kindled fires in students' rooms and cut wood to fuel stoves. The 216-year-old school, which takes pride in being the nation's oldest public university, is now airing a shameful side of its past -- those servants were slaves. The university is using records and photographs that archivists have uncovered to present a fuller story of the school's beginnings."This university was built by slaves
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, and published by the Federation of American Scientists
Nov 2, 2005
In an extraordinary procedural maneuver that exposed partisan tensions over intelligence oversight, Senate Democrats forced the Senate into a rare closed session for more than two hours until they won agreement from the majority to get a progress report on the status of the Senate Intelligence Committee's long-deferred review of pre-war intelligence on Iraq.The Senate floor debate preceding and following the closed session featured unusually blunt statements on t
Source: Harvard Crimson
Nov 2, 2005
Arguing that new state curriculum guidelines on the Armenian genocide deprive students of the complete historical picture, two local teachers and a high school student have signed on as plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit against the Massachusetts Department of Education.
The historical account in question is a two-year span during World War I in which anywhere from 600,000 to 1.5 million Armenians were deported by the Turkish government and killed or allowed to die. While these events
Source: CNN
Nov 2, 2005
A coin collector paid a record $8.5 million for a set of rare coins said to have been a gift from former President Andrew Jackson to the King of Siam.Steven L. Contursi, president of Rare Coin Wholesalers, bought the set of 19th century gold, silver and copper coins from an anonymous owner described only as "a West Coast business executive," according to Donn Pearlman, the buyer's publicist.
"It's the largest single transaction for a single item e
Source: History Today
Nov 2, 2005
The US Army complained to the British Government in the Second World War regarding the dangers posed to their GIs by London’s prostitutes. Scotland Yard files covering the period from 1942-43 just released by The National Archives in Kew reveal concerns on both sides of the Atlantic over the levels of venereal disease contracted by American soldiers.Girls named the ‘Piccadilly Commandos’ who frequented clubs such as Woolly Lamb and the Clipper Club and plied their trade arou
Source: Romanesko
Nov 1, 2005
"I must answer the bloggers, the babblers and blabbers, and the true believers who have called me everything from 'feminazi' to an 'elitist liberal' to an 'idiot,'" writes Mary Mapes. "If I was an idiot, it was for believing in a free press that is able to do its job without fear or favor. ...I didn't know that the attack on our story was going to be as effective as a brilliantly run national political campaign, because that is what it was: a political campaign."
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Nov 1, 2005
Thomas A. Matrka has his master’s degree in engineering from Ohio University and a good job in the private sector as a mechanical engineer. So why is he still spending so much time and energy trying to prove that as many as 30 master’s theses in the university’s engineering college contain unoriginal work?
“They’re compromising the value of the degree of honest students by not distinguishing between the plagiarism and the honest works,” says Matrka. He has spent lunch hours poring o
Source: Ottawa Citizen
Nov 1, 2005
The National Security Agency has been blocking the release of an article by one of its historians that says intelligence officers falsified documents about a disputed attack that was used to escalate the Vietnam War, a researcher says. Matthew Aid, who asked for the article under the Freedom of Information Act last year, said it appears officers at the NSA made honest mistakes in translating interceptions involving the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident. That was a reported North Vietnamese attack on
Source: THE DAILY TELEGRAPH (LONDON)
Nov 1, 2005
Nazi veterans were protected from prosecution for war crimes by the former East German secret police, the Stasi, a historian claims in a new book.The Stasi put former high-and middle-ranking Nazis to work as spies, Henry Leide said, quoting secret Stasi files as yet unseen by the public.
Leide, who is on the committee responsible for the Stasi archives, traced the careers of 35 of Hitler's close followers and discovered that they had found unlikely refuge in the
Source: BBC News
Nov 1, 2005
Portugal has marked 250 years since a devastating earthquake and tsunami that killed thousands of people. Church bells rang for 15 minutes as the country's capital, Lisbon, reflected on the 1755 quake that flattened the city. Up to one-third of Lisbon's 275,000 inhabitants died in the disaster, with thousands more dead in Morocco, Spain and even Italy. Plans for elaborate commemorations were toned down after the Indian Ocean quake in 2004, which killed over 200,0
Source: AP
Nov 1, 2005
More than two centuries of Protestant domination on the Supreme Court will end if Samuel Alito is confirmed as its next justice. For the first time in the nation's history, five Roman Catholics -- a majority -- would be on the high court.Yet news that the son of an Italian immigrant father, someone who grew up in a suburban New Jersey parish where he served as a lector and later married, doesn't carry quite the power it might have in the days when Kennedys ran fo
Source: NYT
Nov 1, 2005
The 1991 abortion case on which the confirmation of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. to the Supreme Court may hinge arrived at his Philadelphia-based federal appeals court at a moment of great ferment in the development of abortion law.
The Supreme Court's 7-to-2 majority for abortion rights, as expressed in the 1973 Roe v. Wade opinion, had eroded to the vanishing point. The center of gravity was held by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, whose position was difficult to parse and appeared to b
Source: NYT
Nov 1, 2005
Throughout his life - ever since he resolved his high school indecision between his dream of a career in baseball or a life in law - the self-effacing Judge Alito, President Bush's new choice for the Supreme Court, has made his mark with quiet dedication rather than showy display. He has cloaked his formidable intellect in modesty, an attribute both surprising and endearing to colleagues in high-octane legal circles.
While Judge Alito, 55, has built a reputation for decency, he has
Source: AP
Nov 1, 2005
The Smithsonian Institution has named a Howard University alumna as director of the Anacostia Museum and Center for African American History and Culture. It's a homecoming of sorts for Camille Giraud Akeju, who lived in Washington during her college years and interned at the Smithsonian. The 55-year-old is currently the president of the Harlem School of the Arts and has spent most of her career in New York.
Source: BBC News
Oct 31, 2005
A loyalist paramilitary group, the Loyalist Volunteer Force, says it is to stand down in response to the IRA move to decommission arms in September. Kevin Connolly examines the background and implications.
The short but turbulent history of the Loyalist Volunteer Force mixed bouts of savage blood-letting with bizarre and unpredictable political gestures. The organisation was created when a faction of the UVF in Portadown rejected the decision of the
Source: NYT
Oct 31, 2005
Egyptian archaeologists, who normally scour the desert in search of treasures of the past, have discovered that one of the greatest caches of antiquities may well be in the basement of the Egyptian Museum. For the last century, artifacts have been stored away in crates there and forgotten, often allowed to disintegrate in the dank, dusty cavern.
Forgotten until now. The recent theft and recovery of three statues from the basement have prompted antiquity officials in Egypt to redoubl
Source: Reuters
Oct 31, 2005
Israel introduced a watershed resolution in the U.N. General Assembly on Monday that designates January 27 as an annual commemoration day for the 6 million Jews and other victims murdered in the Nazi Holocaust during World War Two.
The measure, expected to be approved on Tuesday by consensus, rejects any denial that the Holocaust took place. It also urges members to "inculcate" future generations with the lessons on the genocide so it would not be repeated in the future.
