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: Wa Po
Aug 21, 2005
"The Star-Spangled Banner" is one of America's grandest symbols. Yet historians fear that the origin of the song first penned as a poem by Francis Scott Key is easily forgotten or, worse, unknown -- even in Washington DC. Key penned the poem in honor of U.S. efforts in the War of 1812, the British-American war that brought the country new confidence and patriotism. So historians have teamed up with politicians to commemorate the war, parts of which were fought up and down the Chesapea
Source: Herald Sun (North Carolina)
Aug 21, 2005
DURHAM -- Covered with soot and coal dust from the heating fires of a bygone era, a batch of 19th- and early 20th-century legal records has emerged from a courthouse cubbyhole to weave a human drama involving long-dead drunkards, adulterers, businessmen, stable keepers and ordinary people in crisis. There are tales of bawdy houses, financially encumbered horses, business disputes and broken marriages, not to mention -- in the words of one document --"tippling, whoring, fighting and cursing.
Source: LAT
Aug 21, 2005
With more and more U.S. troops dying in Iraq, emotions on the American home front are increasingly conflicted. Is this a breakthrough moment, when public sentiment shifts dramatically against a conflict, as it did during the latter part of the Vietnam War? Or is it just a low point in a war that ultimately the country will be proud to have waged? "When Americans see the war that is being fought as somehow connected to larger purposes, that makes the wa
Source: NYT
Aug 21, 2005
An exhibit of anti-Semitic imagery will debut next March. Its organizer, a London physician named Simon Cohen, has single-mindedly gathered nearly 300 items of anti-Semitica, from medieval depictions of Jews murdering Christian children to Nazi propaganda denigrating Jews as subhuman parasites to modern anti-Israel imagery supposedly based on anti-Semitic stereotypes. Cohen is an Orthodox Jew. (There are two kinds of people who collect anti-Semitica, a collector once d
Source: NYT
Aug 21, 2005
After a Mississippi grand jury indicted the 80-year-old Edgar Ray Killen in January for the killings of three civil rights workers in 1964, his trial was described as the last in a series of reckonings over the unpunished wrongs of the era.But just when the dredging up of the past was supposed to be ending, it seems to have begun in earnest. Prosecutors, politicians and the descendants of victims are digging at ever more obscure cases, calling for re-examinations even
Source: NYT
Aug 21, 2005
John G. Roberts Jr. arrived at Harvard in the fall of 1973, a nascent conservative from a Catholic boarding school in the Republican Midwest, transplanted to Cambridge, Mass., at a time when campus conservatism seemed to be in hibernation. Prep school Marxists blustered about armed struggle, and students picketed liquor stores for carrying a boycotted wine. Conservatives were casually dismissed as a joke. Judge Roberts, President Bush's Supreme Court nominee, spe
Source: BBC
Aug 21, 2005
Hundreds of people gathered at the Cenotaph in central London on Sunday to observe the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II hostilities in the Far East - and to honour those who fell. But with veterans getting older each year, are enough of us taking time to remember the sacrifices of those who served in the so-called "forgotten war"? The campaign in the Far East took on that description because the fighting that continued there into the summer o
Source: Lawrence Journal-World
Aug 21, 2005
One hundred and forty-two years ago today, William C. Quantrill and his band of more than 300 Missouri ruffians rode into Lawrence, murdered most of the menfolk and set fire to all but a few homes and businesses. In a span of three hours, 85 women were widowed, and 250 children lost their fathers. For Lawrencians — then and now — Quantrill personified evil.“In and around 1863, certainly, if you lived in Lawrence, you lived in fear of Quantrill. He was the devil i
Source: CNN
Aug 21, 2005
Former Polish President General Wojciech Jaruzelski Sunday apologized for the first time for ordering Polish troops to take part in the Moscow-led crackdown on the Prague Spring socialist reform movement in 1968.Speaking to Czech state television on the 37th anniversary of the crackdown, Jaruzelski, Polish defense minister at the time, said the invasion of another Warsaw Pact nation was "very painful for me."
"But, in 1968, I was the defense
Source: The Times (UK)
Aug 21, 2005
With the 700th anniversary of the death of William Wallace looming, Scots are preparing for a festival of misty-eyed commemoration. However, one of Scotland’s leading historians is about to spoil the party by claiming that the country’s greatest nationalist icon could equally be regarded as a unionist hero. Professor Tom Devine will argue that Wallace’s reputation has significantly changed over the centuries and that middle-class Victorians viewed him as responsible for the Union of 1707.
Source: NCH SUMMARY
Aug 21, 2005
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) reports that cultural anthropologist Yektan Turkyilmaz was released from prison on 16 August 2005.NCH SUMMARY
On 17 June 2005, Yektan Turkyilmaz (?1972-), a Turkish citizen of Kurdish origin, a Ph.D. student of cultural anthropology and a fellow at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, United States, was arrested at Yerevan airport and imprisoned for at
Source: NYT
Aug 21, 2005
More and more people are claiming to have discovered their indigenous ancestries. But what, exactly, makes someone a Native American?On a crisp morning in March at the Jaycee Fairgrounds near Jasper, Ala., the powwow was stirring. Amid pickups with bumper stickers reading ''Native Pride'' and ''The earth does not belong to us. We belong to the earth,'' small groups gathered to check out the booths selling Indian rugs, dancing sticks, homemade knives and genealogy books. On o
Source: NYT
Aug 20, 2005
Decorated with spirals and migration symbols, Nathan Begay's multicolored jar resembles an ancient assemblage of shards. But it's actually a synthesis of historical and modern: Mr. Begay, a 46-year-old artist of Hopi and Navajo descent, created it five years ago. Its inclusion with some 2,000 other objects in the Phoenix-based Heard Museum's new exhibition of its permanent collection here reflects a sweeping change in the way museums are presenting Native American art. Rather than focusing on an
Source: LAT
Aug 20, 2005
Brian Flemming's "Bat Boy: The Musical" was praised by critics but appalled some fundamentalists with its references to incest and other dark themes. Flemming's latest project is just as likely to disturb conservative Christians. The 39-year-old Angeleno has made an hourlong documentary titled "The God Who Wasn't There." In it, the former born-again Christian argues that the biblical Jesus never lived, but is a mythological figure like Paul Bunyan.Initial
Source: Independent (UK)
Aug 20, 2005
The Da Vinci Code has sold more than 20 million copies across the world. So now it is to be a film. This week the film-makers are in Lincoln (Britain). They would have preferred to be in Westminster Abbey because it is there (something to do with the tomb of Sir Isaac Newton) that the trail in the book leads. But the Abbey authorities refused, saying "…we cannot commend or endorse the contentious and wayward religious and historic suggestions made in the book". Luc
Source: BBC
Aug 20, 2005
An original Albert Einstein manuscript has been unearthed at a university in the Netherlands by a student. Rowdy Boeyink stumbled on the document while he was researching papers belonging to an old friend of Einstein. The paper shows the German genius working on his last major theory -- the Quantum theory of the monatomic ideal gas.It examines how atoms of a gas behave at extremely low temperatures, in a theory developed in collaboration with Indian physicist Satyendra Nath
Source: CNN
Aug 20, 2005
The major general was so well known that even his abbreviated signature -- "B. Arnold" -- was sufficient on a pass to ensure anyone safe passage. Now, thanks to a nearly $164,000 matching grant from Save America's Treasures, a public-private partnership between the National Park Service and the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the NY State Museum can work to preserve fragile artifacts. Those include the Arnold note that led to his undoing as a traitor.
Source: NYT
Aug 19, 2005
A private commission led by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III is proposing new steps to strengthen state election procedures and recommending that Congress require the political parties to hold four regional presidential primaries in election years rather than allowing states to hold primaries whenever they wish.
The bipartisan panel, called the Commission on Federal Election Reform, said it was responding to flaws in the system exposed b
Source: NYT
Aug 19, 2005
On May 17, 1999, a week into the hunt, the Makah killed a 30-ton gray whale, striking it with harpoons and then killing it with a gunshot to the back of the head.
That rainy spring day remains etched in the minds of many Makah as a defining moment in their efforts to reach back to their cultural and historical roots. It was their first kill in seven decades, and it was their last since they were stopped by court rulings. They have asked the federal government for permission to resum
Source: NYT
Aug 19, 2005
The Vatican has published a meticulous account of Pope John Paul II's final days, vividly describing his last hours and providing an official chronology of his death.
According to the report, which runs more than 200 pages, John Paul's final words were, "Let me go to the house of the Father," which he uttered about six hours before dying in his apartment on April 2.
