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: Montreal Gazette
Sep 21, 2005
We think of the library as a quasi-sacred institution - a shrine to the works of great thinkers, philosophers, writers and historians. As such, it offers comforting proof that knowledge and wisdom transcend politics and ideology. Or do they? In his latest documentary, Save and Burn, Montreal filmmaker Julian Samuel offers a sobering reflection on the baser forces that have threatened libraries over the years.An impressive group of experts - including Robin Adams, a librarian
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pennsylvania)
Sep 21, 2005
This week at the Hilton Pittsburgh about 800 public historians are expected to gather for the American Association for State and Local History's annual conference. Unlike academic historians, public historians work with and for the public, mostly in museums, libraries and archives, historical societies and in the media.Does America have too many house museums? How about historical markers -- are we littering the landscape with too many of those?
How and why shou
Source: NYT
Sep 21, 2005
New Orleans: Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, toured several historic neighborhoods here on Monday, accompanied by a host of local housing preservationists, in an effort to remind officials that in the rush to clean up New Orleans, all should be mindful of its architectural legacy. Standing in front of the Preservation Resource Center in a warehouse district near downtown, Mr. Moe said he saw hope for the city's history despite the destruction, although he
Source: NYT
Sep 21, 2005
he Belleview Biltmore Hotel still exudes some of the grandeur of a time when tycoons like its builder, the railroad magnate Henry Plant, spared little expense to entertain visitors. There is a ballroom with a stained-glass ceiling, a hidden stairway for children and their nannies, and hallways wide enough for hoop skirts.
But the romance of the hotel has faded, replaced by an acrimonious fight over whether it should be saved.
Source: BBC
Sep 21, 2005
A US writers' group is suing internet search engine Google, claiming that its plan to digitise major library book collections infringes author copyright.The Authors Guild has filed a lawsuit in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.
The lawsuit seeks class action status, seeks damages and demands an injunction against further infringements.
The suit names as co-plaintiffs The Authors Guild and writers Herbert Mitgang, Betty Mi
Source: Radio Praha
Sep 21, 2005
The Czech Republic is a country with a fascinating industrial heritage all too often overshadowed by the Renaissance or the Baroque. Anyone who has ever travelled through Prague's formerly working-class districts of Karlin and Holesovice, for example, or has cycled in the north or east of the country, will have taken note of beautiful but crumbling 19th century factories, forgotten textile plants and old mills, falling apart girder by girder, brick by brick.There have been s
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Sep 21, 2005
There will be no rush to judgment on the approximately 100,000 buildings in New Orleans damaged by Hurricane Katrina, and there will be no demolitions without public review. "The vast majority of those structures can be saved," said Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, who toured the city this week. "I'm confident we can avoid the wholesale demolition some of us were worried about." Moe's comments came at the
Source: NYT
Sep 20, 2005
Mexican prosecutors filed long-awaited charges on Monday against former President Luis Echeverria for a 1968 student massacre by soldiers and police that was the bloodiest moment of a brutal crackdown on dissidents.In the latest test of President Vicente Fox's pledge to punish those responsible for past repression, a special prosecutor presented genocide and kidnapping charges against Echeverria and seven others for the October 2, 1968, blood bath at a student rally in
Source: Wa Po
Sep 20, 2005
The Washington-based Center on Education Policy reported this year that because of No Child Left Behind 27 percent of school systems say they are spending less time on social studies, and nearly 25 percent say they are spending less time on science, art and music. Several elementary school programs have shown good results by inserting science, social studies, art and music into reading lessons, rather than removing them from the curriculum. The Core Knowledge program, based in Charlottesville, h
Source: Guardian
Sep 20, 2005
Iqbal Sacranie, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, writes in an op ed in the Guardian that Britain needs to remember all of the victims of genocide, not just Jewish victims. The Muslim Council of Britain, along with other faith-based organisations, received a consultation paper from the Home Office in 1999, proposing the establishment of a National Holocaust Memorial Day.
The MCB has always denounced the monstrous cruelty and inhumanity th
Source: Times Online (UK)
Sep 20, 2005
A HUGE cache of KGB records smuggled out of Moscow after the fall of communism reveal that in the 1970s India was one of the countries most successfully penetrated by Soviet intelligence. A number of senior KGB officers have testified that, under Indira Gandhi, India was one of their priority targets. “We had scores of sources through the Indian Government — in intelligence, counter-intelligence, the defence and foreign ministries and the police,” said Oleg Kalugin, once the youngest general in
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Sep 20, 2005
When Kanye West blasted President Bush’s treatment of poor black people in New Orleans after Katrina hit, the rapper unintentionally set off a hurricane of words in Florida.The Independent Florida Alligator, the student newspaper, ran a cartoon last week that criticized West’s statements by showing him holding a large playing card marked “The Race Card,” and having Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, exclaim with scorn at West: “Nigga Please!” Since the cartoon ran, th
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Sep 20, 2005
Sergio Aguayo revels in exploring contradictions. He is a former gang member fighting for human rights. A left-wing academic who writes books with gringos. A scathing critic of Mexican politics who has run for office -- twice. When Mr. Aguayo labels his life as "schizophrenic," he is referring to more than his maneuvers outside the conservative halls of the elite College of Mexico, where he has held the post of research professor in international relations since 1977. He sees his life
Source: Archaeological Institute of America
Sep 20, 2005
The Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) announces a new educational program first implemented earlier this year at the Marine Corps base at Camp LeJeune in North Carolina. In the first four months some 2,000 troops en route to Iraq and Afghanistan have benefited from presentations on the archaeology, history and cultural heritage of the region by experts in the field. The AIA plans to expand the program to other military bases in the near future. “The troops curr
Source: Washington Times
Sep 20, 2005
The National Trust for Historic Preservation (NTHP) announced yesterday that it had picked the Arkansas delta country and the central Kentucky heartland for a pilot rural preservation project to help the states revitalize their countrysides. The two regions will divvy up $745,000 in funds meant to keep these regions strategically down home. "It's the small details, the small places that work to knit a region together. The little country store, the churches, the b
Source: NYT
Sep 20, 2005
Members of an Argentine indigenous organization are trying to legally block the display of the remains of 500 year old Inca children at the Museum of High Altitude Archaeology in Salta, saying it dishonors their "little brothers and sisters." Rival museum officials in Buenos Aires dismiss the exhibit as morbid. And the explorer who discovered the bodies six years ago worries that a rushed showing could permanently damage them. Their facial features are clear, and t
Source: NYT
Sep 20, 2005
New Orleans: Behind padlocked gates on Rue Conti in the French Quarter, the ghosts of 306 years were waiting in wax. Poured in layers some four decades ago in Paris, the figures inside the Musée Conti traced this city's cultural gumbo from Sieur de Iberville's rediscovery of the Mississippi River through the corrupt governments of Huey P. Long and Edwin W. Edwards, with stops at Storyville, the haunted house of the evil Madame Lalaurie and a riverboat gambling den. Had they melted? No.
Source: NYT
Sep 20, 2005
Simon Wiesenthal, the death camp survivor who dedicated the rest of his life to tracking down fugitive Nazi war criminals, died today at his home in Vienna. He was 96. His death was announced by Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. After hairbreadth escapes from death, two suicide attempts and his liberation by American forces in Austria in 1945, Mr. Wiesenthal abandoned his profession as an architectural engineer and took on a n
Source: David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
Sep 20, 2005
A book about America's failure to rescue Jews from the Holocaust helped convince then-Vice President George H. W. Bush to order the U.S. airlift of 900 Ethiopian Jewish refugees to Israel in 1985, a U.S. ambassador has revealed.John R. Miller, a former Congressman(R-WA), who is now the U.S. ambassador for combating human trafficking, revealed the episode for the first time in public, in a statement presented to more than 200 participants in a September 18 conference at
Source: The Australian
Sep 20, 2005
The Family Court has been talking to men's rights groups in an effort to become more "father-friendly". The court is also making its staff who deal with families undergo training to help them better understand the male perspective in divorce.THE Family Court has been talking to men's rights groups in an effort to become more "father-friendly".
The court is also making its staff who deal with families undergo training to help them better under
