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: Ottawa Citizen
Sep 13, 2005
Brian Mulroney's memiors, written with Peter C. Newman, create a stir Canadian press.For a dozen years, since Brian Mulroney left politics and returned to Montreal, he has tried to recast his record and rehabilitate his reputation. He has had the time and space that former leaders need to put between themselves and their people and their prejudices.
...
Leaders who may have been unpopular when they left office, such as Pierre Elliott Trudeau, often grow in stat
Source: The New Zealand Herald
Sep 13, 2005
Labour elder stateswoman Whetu Tirikatene-Sullivan is urging voters to protect the Maori seats by voting for the Maori Party. Warning of "an uprising" if National abolishes the seats, Mrs Tirikatene-Sullivan, the Labour MP for Southern Maori for 29 years, said Parliament "is the lion's den in Maori, te ana raiona, and we need our gladiators in there".Labour elder stateswoman Whetu Tirikatene-Sullivan is urging voters to protect the Maori seats by voting
Source: The Australian
Sep 13, 2005
Sydney academic Andrew Fraser is to publish his contentious views on race and culture in a Victorian university law journal only weeks after his own university banned him from teaching. Professor Fraser, of Macquarie University, said the acceptance of his 6800-word article by the peer-reviewed journal of Deakin University law school vindicated his stand. The article, Rethinking the White Australia Policy, will appear later this month, and argues that the latest science supports the decision by t
Source: Chicago Sun-Times
Sep 13, 2005
A financial services firm in line to be co-underwriter of a $1.5 billion O'Hare Airport bond issue acknowledged Monday that its founding partners owned not one, but several, slaves during the Civil War era and that, "in all likelihood," it "profited significantly" from slavery."This is a sad part of our heritage. . . . We're deeply apologetic. ... It was a terrible thing. . . . There's no one sitting in the United States in the year 2005, hopef
Source: LAT
Sep 13, 2005
Ansel Adams, the venerated photographer, was notably scrupulous about recording the details of his craft — camera apertures, shutter speeds, film type — as he documented the Western outback in monochrome. But he also was notoriously poor at writing down dates.
Now a team of Texas astronomers has found that one of Adams' photos of the Yosemite backcountry, a solitary shot from Glacier Point of the moon rising over saw-toothed peaks beside a pillow of clouds, was misdated by four year
Source: WSJ
Sep 12, 2005
A new survey sponsored by the Federalist Society and the Wall Street Journal of 130 prominent professors of economics, history, law, and political science, places George W. Bush in the middle of the pack. The survey was conducted in Feb.-March 2005. George W. Bush comes in average (at 19), but ahead of Bill Clinton (22) and Calvin Coolidge (23). GW, Lincoln and FDR are 1, 2, 3. Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Pierce, Harding and Buchanan are considered failures. Of the postwar presidents three make i
Source: NYT
Sep 12, 2005
In 1966, the Supreme Court held that the poll tax was unconstitutional. Nearly 40 years later, Georgia is still charging people to vote, this time with a new voter ID law that requires many people without driver's licenses - a group that is disproportionately poor, black and elderly - to pay $20 or more for a state ID card. Georgia went ahead with this even though there is not a single place in the entire city of Atlanta where the cards are sold.
Source: WP
Sep 12, 2005
Sometime between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago, the Neanderthals abruptly disappeared after a run of perhaps 200 millennia in the Near East, west Asia and, most notably, in the ice age caves of Europe. On that score, there is no dispute.
How this happened, and why, is another matter. For years, paleontologists have argued about whether anatomically modern humans invading from the east either wiped out the Neanderthals or out-innovated them; or, alternatively, whether Neanderthals and
Source: Washington Post
Sep 12, 2005
Last month, Henry "Hank" Crumpton, a revered master of CIA covert operations, formally came in from the cold.Crumpton gained almost mythical fame after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks -- always anonymously. He is the mysterious "Henry" in the Sept. 11 commission report, which notes he persistently pressed the CIA to do more in Afghanistan before Osama bin Laden's terrorist spectaculars. Two key proposals to track al Qaeda were turned down.
Source: Merco Press (Uruguay)
Sep 12, 2005
Chilean Army Commander in chief General Juan Emilio Cheyre said that as far as the Army was concerned "the matter of September 11 is closed" referring to the September 11, 1973 bloody coup which installed the military regime of General Augusto Pinochet.The Army commemorated the day with a private Mass Sunday morning honouring the soldiers killed in the coup that overthrew Socialist President Salvador Allende and brought Pinochet to power. However the elderly former
Source: NYT
Sep 11, 2005
The National Constitution Center has something for everyone: life-size statues of the document's framers, slave shackles beside the Dred Scott display and a copy of the 1962 petition from Clarence Earl Gideon, the Florida drifter whose legal battle won every accused criminal the right to a lawyer. Late last month, one of the museum's chief boosters walked through, looking weak from Hodgkin's disease but showing no signs at age 75 of waning tenacity. His blue suit crisp, his few hairs white, he p
Source: Chosunilbo
Sep 11, 2005
Dozens were injured when groups calling for the removal of a statue of U.S. general Douglas MacArthur clashed with police in Incheon's Freedom Park on Sunday. The clashes came four days ahead of the 55th anniversary of the Incheon Landing of UN forces led by MacArthur that marked a turning point in the Korean War.Some 4,000 members of progressive groups who had gathered in Sungeui Stadium in Incheon's Nam-gu started marching on the park at 1 p.m. to demand the withdrawal of
Source: WP
Sep 11, 2005
Forcing all first-year students to read the same classic texts by Homer, Plato and Virgil used to be fairly common at U.S. colleges. But the academic rebellions of the 1960s and 1970s led to more student choice and less contact with dead white male writers of classic literature and philosophy. But recently, there has been a return to idea of core courses for freshmen.
Source: Pittsburg Post-Gazette
Sep 11, 2005
It was 78 years ago, in an era far different from the present, that hundreds of thousands of flooded Mississippi River valley residents spent months in temporary housing. They received meals from the Red Cross. They cursed the federal government's failure to help. In many cases, they left their hometowns and started anew in strange places hundreds of miles away. Yet New Orleans itself was spared heavy damage. Still, the scope of the devastation from that Great Mississippi Flood may most closely
Source: SF Chronicle
Sep 11, 2005
As San Franciscans prepare to celebrate the centennial of the city's triumph over the great earthquake and fire of 1906, we are reminded by events in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina of the darker side to such cataclysms.
When San Francisco Mayor Eugene Schmitz made his way down Market Street on April 18, 1906, on the morning of the disaster, he observed saloons in full swing and evidence that looting had already taken place. He ordered that all alcohol sales be suspended.
Source: CNN
Sep 11, 2005
In a country where movements of tired, poor and huddled masses are an intrinsic part of who we are, the unprecedented mass exodus of people from their homes in the Gulf Coast region -- more than half a million people -- could unleash changes for years to come.
"We've never faced this type of relocation because of a natural disaster. It's likely to have an enormous impact on our entire country," he said Steven Hahn, a University of Pennsylvania history professor who chronic
Source: Rocky Mountain News
Sep 10, 2005
Seven charges of possible research misconduct leveled against University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill are being forwarded for full investigation, a CU official announced Friday.
The allegations, including charges of plagiarism, misuse of others' work, misrepresenting his sources and fabrication of material he presented as fact, could lead to the tenured ethnic studies professor's firing.
Source: Guardian (UK)
Sep 10, 2005
Long before the bra-burning 60s, equal rights were topical for Enlightenment women in the 18th century, who challenged male preserves of politics and science. In 1732, Laura Bassi was awarded a doctorate in natural philosophy from the University of Bologna; a few months later she was appointed to a professorship there. For 45 years she taught philosophy, mathematics and Newtonian physics. She received two further professorships and corresponded with leading scientists across
Source: boingboing
Sep 10, 2005
Libraries and history/archives organizations are attempting to salvage as many of the historic artifacts as possible from New Orleans and other areas. Obviously, efforts to save human lives and care for survivors are first priority. But history professionals say that private resources offered to salvage irreplacable artifacts have been blocked by -- you guessed it -- government red tape.
Source: NYT
Sep 10, 2005
There has been no healing, really. Four years have passed since the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, and the road to recovery at ground zero looks bleaker than ever. A rebuilding effort that was originally cast as a symbolic rising from the ashes has long since turned into a hallucinogenic nightmare: a roller coaster ride of grief, naïveté, recriminations, political jockeying and paranoia.The Freedom Tower, promoted as an image of the city's resurrecti
