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
Oct 21, 2005
Fear of opening the door to expanded gambling has doomed a proposed legislative study of granting state recognition to native American tribes in Arakansas. At a meeting yesterday, members of the House and Senate committees on state agencies and governmental affairs decided not to take up the matter.
A state Department of Finance and Administration official pricked the interest of lawmakers yesterday. He cautioned that state recognition of Indian tribes and groups could hasten federa
Source: AP
Oct 21, 2005
Next month, the National Park Service will launch a two-year study of sites around the nation where work was done on the Manhattan Project -- the top-secret effort to help produce the first atomic bomb. The government wants to determine if the bomb sites should be included in the park system, and that is sparking controversy.
Supporters say the parks would document an incredible technological achievement made under severe secrecy and time pressures.
Source: Bob Weber in the Gazette (Montreal)
Oct 20, 2005
It's almost an article of faith for some Inuit that their people were driven off the land and into towns in the 1950s by a systematic government and RCMP plan to kill the sled dogs they depended on.
But according to an interim RCMP inquiry report into the charges, released late Tuesday, it just isn't so.
"The preliminary findings of the review team is that there is no evidence of an organized mass slaughter of Inuit sled dogs by RCMP members in Nunavik and Nunavut
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 20, 2005
Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, is to face a High Court action brought by the authors of the 1982 non-fiction book The Holy Blood, and the Holy Grail, who allege that his blockbuster was based on their decade of research.
Speaking ahead of a preliminary hearing of the case next week, Richard Leigh, 62, one of the writers, said: "I don't begrudge Brown his success. I have no particular grievance against him, except for the fact that he wrote a pretty bad novel."
Source: ABC
Oct 20, 2005
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's fifth visit to the Yasukuni shrine this week on a drizzly morning set off angry protests in Asia. China canceled a visit by the Japanese foreign minister, no small thing. Yasukuni holds the remains of 14 Class A war criminals hanged after World War II, and is regarded as symbol of Japan's perceived failure to atone for its killing sprees in and brutal occupation of Asia 60 years ago.
Yet a prime reason why that wish may not come true is found on th
Source: NYT
Oct 20, 2005
A block of four United States airmail stamps with the airplane in the center famously - and erroneously - printed upside down was auctioned yesterday evening in New York for $2,970,000, a world record for a stamp item.
The 1918 stamp, known to collectors as the Jenny because of the Curtiss JN-4 biplane depicted in the design, was the first American issue for air postage. Its value was set at 24 cents.
But of roughly two million printed, 100 bore the topsy-turvy center p
Source: NYT
Oct 20, 2005
The Supreme Court stripped Gen. Augusto Pinochet of his immunity from prosecution in connection with $27 million that he and his wife and children are said to have illegally obtained and deposited in overseas accounts. As a result, the 89-year-old former dictator can now be charged with tax fraud, perjury and use of falsified documents, and prosecutors have said they plan to do so. Similar legal rulings in the past that allowed General Pinochet to be accused of murder and human rights abuses wer
Source: Elsevier
Oct 20, 2005
A balanced scholarly sudy of the impact of the Iraq War on libraries and archives has been published on a site open to all readers. The author of the study is Ian M. Johnson, a British scholar. Summary The early reports that appeared during and immediately after the 2003 war and subsequent civil disorder in Iraq provoked public and professional concern about the impact on libraries and archives services. However, many of the early reports were later prove
Source: New York Magazine
Oct 20, 2005
Did Jewish intelligence evolve in tandem with Jewish diseases as a result of discrimination in the ghettos of medieval Europe? That’s the premise of a controversial new study that has some preening and others plotzing. What genetic science can tell us—and what it can’t.Last summer, Henry Harpending, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Utah, and Gregory Cochran, an independent scholar with a flair for controversy, skipped cheerfully into the center of th
Source: Press Release: NYU Wagner's Brademas Center for the Study of Congress
Oct 20, 2005
A lot has changed in the 30 years since Congress passed the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act, which assured Federal ownership of the tapes and papers of the Nixon presidency.
The John Brademas Center for the Study of Congress at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service will host a day-long Symposium on Presidential and Public Papers, to explore the history of the legislation, its role today and current issues in archiv
Source: The Independent (London)
Oct 20, 2005
Napoleon's imprisonment in 1815 and his death six years later gifted St Helena its place in history and cemented the island in the popular imagination as a byword for isolation.
But the British Government has had a belated change of heart over its remotest prison colony and is seeking to turn the outpost of Empire into a modern-day paradise island, fit for five-star tourists.Pitted against them is an alliance of conservationists concerned the island's unique bio
Source: Omaha World-Herald (Nebraska)
Oct 19, 2005
A new exhibit at the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum in College Station, Texas, will feature 4,500 square feet of displays filled with contemporary and historic photographs, artifacts, maps and timelines covering the development of America's railroads.
Trains: Tracks of the Iron Horse -- which will include a section on presidential train travel -- will open Nov. 7 and run through July 30. The museum is located on the campus of Texas A&M University.
Source: The San Francisco Chronicle
Oct 19, 2005
A tiny piece of Homer has finally reached home after an odyssey longer than the one endured by the original Odysseus, happy UC Berkeley scholars said Tuesday.
At a celebratory ceremony, the campus gingerly offered a glimpse of scraps of Homer's "Odyssey" and other invaluable texts on ancient papyrus that were unearthed in Egypt more than a century ago but experienced a delivery delay on their way to the Berkeley campus."This is an exciting day for
Source: The Courier Mail (Queensland, Australia)
Oct 19, 2005
Mad, crazy, tacky, and a sick joke. And these are just some of the more family-friendly reactions to NSW MP Danna Vale's scheme for a Gallipoli theme park in Victoria.
Ms Vale's Gallipoli park proposal -- mooted for the Mornington Peninsular -- yesterday earned her widespread condemnation from the Opposition, colleagues, veterans and historians alike.Talkback callers lampooned the park idea with one sarcastically proposing a tourist excursion complete with a bul
Source: Boston Globe
Oct 19, 2005
Taunton Residents endured a second day of nerve-racking waiting with no end in sight, as an aged, failing wooden dam just outside downtown strained to protect the city's commercial and residential hub from potentially catastrophic flooding.
"It could go on for days," said Mayor Robert Nunes of the crisis that had forced the indefinite evacuation of a nearly 3-square mile area of this sprawling, working- class city.Just north of downtown, the Whittenton
Source: Press Release
Oct 19, 2005
Free Press Publisher/Editor Bob Fitrakis and Senior Editor/Columnist Harvey Wasserman have been cited by "Project Censored" for their coverage of the theft of the 2004 election as writers of one of the Most Censored stories of the year.
The pair have published numerous stories in the past year which claim that the Republicans stole the election of 2004. Wasserman is the author of"Harvey Wasserman's History Of The United States."
Sonoma State University’s Proj
Source: MSNBC
Oct 19, 2005
A tiny, hand-painted sign mounted on a flimsy barbed wire fence warns visitors to Peru’s Nazca lines: “No entry. Area off-limits.” It’s not much of a deterrent. The latest threat to the vast U.N. World Heritage site, where enigmatic shapes and lines, stylized figures of birds and animals were etched in the desert 2,000 years ago, is a camp of around 30 shacks that appeared in August.The rudimentary straw-matting huts are pitched in the dry earth on the fringe of
Source: NYT
Oct 19, 2005
Arthur W. Wang, co-founder of the intrepid publishing house of Hill & Wang, which took a chance on the early work of Elie Wiesel and Roland Barthes and was known for its Dramabooks series and books on American history, died on Friday in Wellesley, Mass. He was 87. The cause was complications of Alzheimer's disease, Mr. Wang's wife, Mary-Ellen, said.
[Eric Foner recalled in an email to HNN that Mr. Wang published an extraordinary list of history books. "I always felt he lov
Source: Press Release from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
Oct 19, 2005
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History has released a new book entitled, “Early American Abolitionists: A Collection of Anti-Slavery Writings 1760-1820” which restores to view some of the extensive anti-slavery literature that flourished in early America. The book reprints fifteen anti-slavery texts that, almost without exception, have been out of print for nearly two centuries.
The twelve students who each contributed one chapter to the book were the first ever to be name
Source: NYT
Oct 19, 2005
Did Archimedes really produce a death ray 2,200 years ago? According to Greek and Roman historians, he set Roman warships afire with a polished mirror that focused the sun’s rays from afar during the siege of Syracuse. Last year the Discovery Channel program "MythBusters" declared the story a myth after failing to reproduce the feat.
The program intrigued David Wallace, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When he presented the death ray as an offbeat
