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: Houston Chronicle
Sep 21, 2010
AUSTIN — As a Muslim who grew up going to Texas public schools — and sees challenges facing today's Muslim students — Imam Islam Mossaad said he was taken aback by a resolution to be considered Friday by the State Board of Education asserting the need to fend off a pro-Islamic, anti-Christian bias in textbooks.
"There are Muslim students who even feel they have to change their name. They have to create some other ethnicity, so that their classmates don't say, 'Oh, here comes Os
Source: BBC
Sep 21, 2010
Germany's wartime past played a part in encouraging young Germans to take an interest in Scottish culture, according to a Scots academic.
Germans account for the biggest overseas uptake at Skye's Gaelic college and large numbers also attend summer schools on the Western Isles.
Dr Donald William Stewart, of the University of Edinburgh, has been studying Germany's Celtic connections....
Source: AP
Sep 21, 2010
A Montana resident believed to be the world's oldest man celebrated his 114th birthday Tuesday at a retirement home in Great Falls.
Walter Breuning was born on Sept. 21, 1896, in Melrose, Minnesota, and moved to Montana in 1918, where he worked as a clerk for the Great Northern Railway for 50 years.
His wife, Agnes, a railroad telegraph operator from Butte, died in 1957. The couple had no children....
Source: AOL News
Sep 21, 2010
(Sept. 21) -- UFOs have monitored and possibly tampered with American nuclear weapons, according to a group of former Air Force officers who will make their claims public next week at a Washington, D.C., news conference.
"While most of the incidents apparently involved mere surveillance, in a few cases, a significant number of nuclear missiles suddenly and simultaneously malfunctioned, just as USAF security policemen reported seeing disc-shaped craft hovering nearby," says
Source: Vancouver Sun
Sep 21, 2010
Nearly 70 years after a famous Second World War incident in which a Canadian ship rammed and sank a German submarine in the Mediterranean Sea, the only survivor of the doomed U-boat and perhaps the last living sailor from HMCS Ville de Quebec have rediscovered each other via the Internet -- two former enemies now forging a poignant, long-distance friendship via e-mail.
The remarkable reunion came about after a California newspaper published a story last November featuring the wartim
Source: USA Today
Sep 21, 2010
Volcanoes wiped out the Neanderthals some 40,000 years ago, suggest archeologists, setting the stage for modern humans in Europe.
Stumpy but strong, the Neanderthals disappear from the European fossil record by about 30,000 years ago, replaced about that time by modern-looking humans. In the upcoming October Current Anthropology journal, researchers led by Liubov Golovanova of Russia's ANO Laboratory of Prehistory in St. Petersburg report that volcanic dust deposits in a cave in the
Source: Statesville Record & Landmark
Sep 21, 2010
Before the Friends of Fort Dobbs Board started soliciting others for donations toward the $2.6 million fort reconstruction project, the group wanted to show its own dedication.
On Tuesday, the 14-member board presented North Carolina Historic Sites Director Keith Hardison with a check for $500,000 at its annual membership meeting at the Fort Dobbs Historic Site.
“We are thrilled,” said board chairman Ralph Bentley. “Every board member has pledged. This is a great start.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 21, 2010
t was always thought the Titanic sank because its crew were sailing too fast and failed to see the iceberg before it was too late.
But now it has been revealed they spotted it well in advance but still steamed straight into it because of a basic steering blunder.
According to a new book, the ship had plenty of time to miss the iceberg but the helmsman panicked and turned the wrong way.
By the time the catastrophic error was corrected it was too late and the
Source: BBC News
Sep 21, 2010
Workers building a substation in California have discovered 1,500 bone fragments from about 1.4 million years ago.
The fossil haul includes remains from an ancestor of the sabre-toothed tiger, large ground sloths, deer, horses, camels and numerous small rodents.
Plant matter found at the site in the arid San Timoteo Canyon, 85 miles (137km) south-east of Los Angeles, showed it was once much greener.
The bones will go on display next year.
The f
Source: WaPo
Sep 21, 2010
The anonymous call came in the middle of the night, from a phone booth near Madison, Wis. "Hey, pig!'' a male voice warned. "There's a bomb in the math research building.''
It was 1970, the height of student demonstrations against the Vietnam War. The pig, in the vernacular of the times, was a police dispatcher. And the bomb was real, a novel device that exploded minutes later on the University of Wisconsin campus, causing massive damage and killing a researcher who was th
Source: NYT
Sep 21, 2010
LONDON — After she died earlier this month, a frail 89-year-old alone in a flat in the British seaside town of Torquay, Eileen Nearne, her body undiscovered for several days, was listed by local officials as a candidate for what is known in Britain as a council burial, or what in the past was called a pauper’s grave.
But after the police looked through her possessions, including a Croix de Guerre medal awarded to her by the French government after World War II, the obscurity Ms. Nea
Source: NYT
Sep 21, 2010
Huguette M. Clark always had a place in the society pages, but rarely, if ever, was she the headliner. She was listed as a guest of this engagement dinner and that party. Her charitable contributions were noted, not celebrated.
Now, at age 104, Ms. Clark has continued her life in the shadows, shunning her multimillion-dollar homes and spending the past two decades in hospitals. Her visitors have primarily been limited to her medical staff and to Wallace Bock, her lawyer, and Irving
Source: NYT
Sep 21, 2010
BERLIN — As anti-immigrant sentiment continues to sweep across Europe, generating a right-wing populist wave from the shores of the Mediterranean to the chilly reaches of Scandinavia, there is growing concern that such politics could take root here, too, in the fertile ground of financial uncertainty, rising anti-Muslim sentiment and a widening political vacuum left by the misfortunes of the once mighty Christian Democratic Union....
Since the end of World War II, German laws, polit
Source: New American Media
Sep 21, 2010
EDITOR’S NOTE [FROM NEW AMERICAN MEDIA]: Eminent scholar and historian Franz Schurmann, who co-founded Pacific News Service in 1970, passed away on August 20, 2010. Richard Rodriguez, a long-time editor and writer with PNS, remembered him in a powerful eulogy delivered Sept. 19 at UC Berkeley Alumni House.
Franz Schurmann was a terrible driver.
I remember once, after lunch, in his car, he was still talking about the Peloponnesian War or Richard Nixon in China or the spi
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 21, 2010
Three paintings have come to light in which the unknown artist, believed to be from northern Italy , depicts scenes in the 1650s in which ordinary people are wearing what appears to be an early denim fabric - centuries before it was worn by the cowboys of the American Wild West or Hollywood stars of the 1950s.
In one picture, a peasant woman, wearing a skirt that appears to be made of denim, mends a piece of clothing.
In another, a teenage girl wearing a torn blue skir
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Sep 21, 2010
The New York Times has made reference to research universities consistently over its many years of publication. But in the last half century, the newspaper has grown less interested in the universities and more interested in their researchers, according to a new study.
A team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign analyzed 60 years’ worth of Times archives in an attempt to find out how its coverage of research universities has evolved since World War II. The researchers f
Source: WaPo
Sep 21, 2010
...Last week Jon Stewart, the host of The Daily Show, announced that he will hold the Rally to Restore Sanity, a satirical response to Glenn Beck's teary August demonstration to "restore America."
That same day, Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report says he's going to counter with the "March to Keep Fear Alive," mocking the Al Sharpton march that countered Beck's....
In 1894, the brigades of unemployed men who marched from Ohio to Washington to deman
Source: AFP
Sep 21, 2010
Iraq has recovered more than 600 historical artefacts that had been stolen and then recovered but mistakenly stored in a warehouse in the country for around two years, a minister said on Monday.
The 638 items include statues, spearheads and glass cups that were taken from Iraq and actually returned to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's office in late 2008, but only accounted for recently.
The items, some dating to the third millennium BC, had been stored in a warehouse alo
Source: BBC
Sep 21, 2010
As world experts grapple with ways to contain global warming, researchers gathered in Egypt are seeking answers from the country's pharaonic past to help tackle environmental problems of the present.
A three-day conference opened on Sunday with experts hoping to understand how the ancient Egyptians, who were capable of erecting the famous Giza pyramids, dealt with climate change.
The conference is the first of its kind to be held in Egypt, where archaeology has always t
Source: BBC
Sep 21, 2010
Archaeologists will use scanners to carry out a survey of land in a town in Northamptonshire in perparation for a planning application.
The team will be working in Daventry, once home to Anglo Saxons, a priory and now a thriving market town.
Northamptonshire Archaeology will carry out a series of small-scale digs in a field off Eastern Way and Ashby Road.
This work is part of a proposed town centre development and must be carried out to support a planning a
