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: MSNBC
Oct 3, 2005
The liberal Chief Justice Earl Warren is today regarded as a towering figure in the law. Yet before President Dwight D. Eisenhower named him chief, Warren hadn't spent a day as a judge. In fact, a host of big names on the court got their courtroom start on the highest court in the land. They include the trailblazing John Marshall, Byron White — nominated by President John F. Kennedy — Harlan Fiske Stone, William O. Douglas and Louis Brandeis.In fact, of the 109 justices who
Source: Associated Press
Oct 3, 2005
Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers gave $1,000 to Democrat Al Gore's unsuccessful presidential bid in 1988 _ and 12 years later contributed to the effort to end Gore's chance of winning the White House.
In 1988, Miers, then a lawyer in private practice, donated $1,000 to Gore, the Tennessee Democrat then seeking the party's presidential nomination, according to Federal Election Commission reports. Gore eventually bowed out and Michael Dukakis secured the nomination.
Source: Wa Po
Oct 3, 2005
Harriet Ellan Miers was born in Dallas on Aug. 10, 1945. Miers received her bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1967 and JD in 1970 from Southern Methodist University. Upon graduation, she clerked for U.S. District Judge Joe E. Estes from 1970 to 1972. In 1972, Miers became the first woman hired at Dallas's Locke Purnell Boren Laney & Neely.In March 1996, her colleagues elected her the first woman president of Locke, Purnell, Rain & Harrell, at that time
Source: Wa Po
Oct 3, 2005
For many Americans, both Indian and otherwise, the term "redskin" is a grotesque pejorative, a word that for centuries has been used to disparage and humiliate an entire people, but an exhaustive new study released today makes the case that it did not begin as an insult.
Smithsonian Institution senior linguist Ives Goddard spent seven months researching its history and concluded that "redskin" was first used by Native Americans in the 18th century to distinguish
Source: NYT
Oct 2, 2005
Franzi Groszmann, who was believed to be among the last survivors of the parents who put their London-bound children on trains to escape Nazi persecution, in the famed Kindertransport, died on Sept. 20 in Manhattan. She was 100.
Deborah Oppenheimer, producer of the 2000 movie "Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport," announced the death.Ms. Oppenheimer, whose own mother was a Kindertransport child, said she believed that Mrs. Groszm
Source: Rogr Pulvers in Japan Times
Oct 2, 2005
He would have turned 80 this month. And in our time of ill-lived religious fanatics and retrograde policy planners, we feel his loss all the more.
Lenny Bruce, brilliant U.S. satirist and comedian, pointed his whip and lashed out at America's hypocrites, whether high-toned charlatans of the church or "some of my best friends are Negro" liberals.His heyday was the decade between 1955 and 1965, when several leading stand-up comics turned philosophical an
Source: Boston Globe
Oct 2, 2005
A man smashed a display case at the Wisconsin Historical Society to steal a Revolutionary War-era book worth $5,000, authorities say. He claimed he wanted to read it. Matthew Brooke, 26, was charged Friday with felony theft of library materials and criminal damage to property. He went to the Historical Society on Thursday, according to a criminal complaint, and smashed the window on a second-floor antique display case with his elbow. He allegedly swiped the "Pennsylvani
Source: History Carnival
Oct 1, 2005
A twice-monthly roundup of the best history blogging, with rotating hosts. This edition is hosted by Lisa Roy Vox, at The Apocalyptic Historian.
Source: Financial Times (London)
Oct 1, 2005
The voices of Beijing’s political propagandists echo through the National Museum of China’s exhibition to mark the 600th anniversary of the voyages of the eunuch admiral Zheng He - and some of the visitors traipsing through the museum’s cavernous halls are clearly listening.
Popular appreciation for Zheng is hardly spontaneous, however. The exhibition, now at the National Museum in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, is part of an effort to establish the 15th-century navigator as China’s ne
Source: NYT
Oct 1, 2005
The NYT profiles Viktor Sukhodrev, the king of interpreters, who in a career of nearly 30 years was present at more superpower summitry, more deal-making, more brinkmanship than any of the men who flanked him.
EISENHOWER and Khrushchev. Carter and Brezhnev. Reagan and Gorbachev. In almost every photograph there is a slim, dark-haired man standing in the middle, anonymous but indispensable: Sukhodrev, the Soviet interpreter.
Source: NYT
Oct 1, 2005
A Japanese court on Friday handed a rare victory to opponents of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visits to a war shrine, ruling that the visits violated Japan's constitutional separation of religion and the state. Experts said the ruling by the Osaka High Court probably would not force the Japanese prime minister to stop visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japan's war dead, including those hanged for criminal conduct during World War II. But they called it a symbol
Source: NYT
Oct 1, 2005
The Algerian authorities said Friday that voters overwhelmingly approved a referendum that the president had promoted as a way for Algeria to move past the killing and violence of a civil war that spanned more than a decade. This nation's referendum on Thursday was an emotional moment for many Algerians, who had to decide whether to accept their president's request to forget the violence of a civil war that left more than 100,000 people dead and to offer amnesty to many of those responsible.
Source: NYT
Oct 1, 2005
People in Louisiana are worried about where all that FEMA money will end up. This, after all, is the state where supporters produced bumper stickers reading "Vote for the Crook. It's Important" to urge a hold-your-nose vote for Edwin W. Edwards for governor in 1991 against the former Klansman David Duke. (Both eventually ended up in prison). It is a place that the author A. J. Liebling described as America's answer to Lebanon, where the chapter on Louisiana in V. O. Key Jr.'s classic b
Source: LA Times
Oct 1, 2005
The illicit trade in art and antiquities has often been compared to trafficking in drugs or guns. Both trades are international in scope, require a sophisticated smuggling operation and are driven by demand in wealthy nations. But the analogy ends there.
Art enriches society. Furthermore, the vast majority of U.S. and European museums are respectable institutions run by conscientious professionals who do their best to act responsibly under what are often challenging circumstances. B
Source: NYT
Oct 1, 2005
Last year King Mohammed VI, Hassan's son, established the official Equity and Reconciliation Commission, to lay bare what Moroccans often call the terror of his father's rule and to establish reparations for some 13,000 victims. In Morocco, many reformers believe, an essential first step in the creation of a more democratic country is an open reckoning with the abuses that the system spawned in the past. That effort shows the profound limits that real change faces even among Arab nations that h
Source: The Guardian (London)
Oct 1, 2005
Historians seeking an accurate record of how Winston Churchill governed Britain from his Whitehall bunker in the darkest days of the blitz will from next January be able to read the contemporary notes taken by the cabinet secretary at the time, breaking a tradition which has protected these documents for more than 60 years. The decision to release the notebooks follows pressure from Lord Phillips, the new lord chief justice, to publish the notebooks under the Freedom of Information Act.
Source: Financial Times (London, England)
Oct 1, 2005
A dinner thrown by the vice-chancellor of Oxford University this week for some of his research stars may at first glance have appeared unremarkable.
But it was a striking example of the attempts by John Hood to sell his vision of how to protect Oxford's future by embracing sweeping reforms. In particular, he wants Oxford to become more like the leading US universities, such as Harvard and Yale, by focusing more on lucrative research.A dinner thrown by the vice-c
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Oct 1, 2005
The California state Parks Department and a nonprofit foundation have begun a $50 million project to restore Angel Island's Imigration Station during an era when it was U.S. government policy to drastically limit the number of Chinese and Asian immigrants.Hundreds of heartfelt poems were carved into the walls by those detained there. As much as anything, it will be the poems that provide a window into the station's past.
"Here, we actually have talking wall
Source: Times.Dispatch.com
Oct 1, 2005
ROANOKE -- The city's oldest neighborhood, which includes the childhood home of civil-rights legend Oliver Hill Jr., has been added to the Virginia Landmarks Register by the state Department of Historic Resources.Gainsboro, a 73-acre, 33-block tract north of the Norfolk Southern railroad tracks and west Interstate 581, was first developed about 1835 and was initially known as Big Lick.
For many years, the neighborhood was the economic, cultural and residential h
Source: Washington Times
Oct 1, 2005
The latest battle of Trafalgar is getting ugly.
Mayor Ken Livingstone wants to erect a statue of former South African President Nelson Mandela in Trafalgar Square alongside monuments to British military heroes. City officials oppose the idea and, in a showdown this week, one of Britain's most respected sculptors dubbed the proposed Mandela statue "mediocre." "Suppose I had proposed, in a moment of euphoric bipartisanship, to erect a statue of [fo
