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This page features brief excerpts of news 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.
Highlights
Breaking News
This page features brief excerpts of news 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. Because most of our readers read the NYT we usually do not include the paper's stories in HIGHLIGHTS.
Name of source: NYT
SOURCE: NYT (12-10-05)
"I'm absolutely convinced that some day, 50 or 60 years from now, an American president will be speaking to an audience saying, 'Thank goodness a generation of Americans rose to the challenge and helped people be liberated from tyranny,' " Mr. Bush said. " 'Democracy spread and the world is more peaceful for it.' "
During last year's campaign, Mr. Bush often spoke of his friendship with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan, remarking that a bitter enemy that Mr. Bush's father fought against in World War II has become a close friend and ally. He expanded on the theme during his recent trip in Asia, with Mr. Koizumi at his side, and used it again today to argue that history would prove him right in deciding to invade Iraq.
"Something happened between the time that my dad and your relatives signed up in World War II and I'm talking peace with Koizumi," he said. "And what happened was, Japan became a democracy."
Many outside experts and even some of Mr. Bush's own aides question his reliance on the comparison, noting that Japan was a unified state before World War II, but that Iraq has always been divided along religious and regional lines.
"It may sound too simple, but this is a comparison the president believes in deeply," one of his senior aides said when Mr. Bush was in Asia, declining to be quoted by name in discussing the president's thinking. "It's the argument he knows his presidency will be judged by."
SOURCE: NYT (12-8-05)
''It's a sad day. The buses have all been overhauled and they were OK for several more years,'' said Rustom Battiwalla, 37, a former bus driver who came to London on Friday from the western city of Bristol.
SOURCE: NYT (12-8-05)
But Israel's first official response to the movie, which is set to open in the United States on Dec. 23, came with a shrug: It's not so great for Israel, but so what?
It's a Hollywood movie," said Ehud Danoch, the Israeli consul general in Los Angeles, who attended a screening of "Munich" here Monday night.
Mr. Danoch said he had found plenty to object to in the two-and-a-half-hour film, which stars Eric Bana as the leader of a hit squad of Mossad agents dispatched by Prime Minister Golda Meir to hunt down and kill the Palestinians responsible for the massacre, in which 11 Israeli athletes were slain, along with other terrorists not directly linked to the attack. He said that the movie made it seem as if Israel's response alone had caused an escalation in terrorism, calling this pure fiction.
He argued, above all, that the film unfairly drew a moral equivalency between the Israeli assassins and their targets - both explicitly, in dialogue in which the Israelis question their own actions and Palestinians defend theirs, and implicitly, as when the camera shifts from a television broadcast showing the names of the 11 athletes to an Israeli official showing the photographs of the 11 Palestinian targets.
"And so it's 11 for 11," Mr. Danoch said in an interview at the consulate. "It's equal, it's balanced. It's these for those." But, he continued "those were Olympic sportsmen who were murdered in the most disgusting and horrible way, and these were the guys who did it."
SOURCE: NYT (12-8-05)
It was a 45-foot-long section of a stone wall that archaeologists believe is a remnant of the original battery that protected the Colonial settlement at the southern tip of the island. Depending on which archaeologist you ask, it was built in the 1760's or as long ago as the late 17th century.
Either way, it would be the oldest piece of a fortification known to exist in Manhattan and the only one to survive the Revolutionary War period, said Joan H. Geismar, president of the Professional Archaeologists of New York City.
SOURCE: NYT (12-8-05)
On the morning of Aug. 9, 1945, three days after the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the B-29 Superfortress named the Bockscar dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki, killing and wounding tens of thousands and leaving much of the city in ruin. Within days of those atomic strikes, Japan surrendered, ending World War II.
"My station was in the navigator's compartment, and I had a hole about eight inches in diameter to look out," he told Time magazine on the 60th anniversary of the atomic strikes. "I was the weaponeer - basically, I was in charge of the bomb. We flew to the rendezvous point, where we'd meet two other airplanes, one with instruments to measure the blast and another holding observers. The observer plane didn't show up. We circled, and after about 35 minutes I said to Sweeney, 'Damn it, proceed to the first target.'
"Kokura was the target, but the bombardier couldn't locate it because the area was clouded. So the navigator took us to Nagasaki. We had gotten a report that the area was clear, but we noticed undercast clouds. By this time, we'd used almost an hour's gas at the rendezvous point, and the engineer was really sweating it. It was going to be nip and tuck. I went up to Sweeney and said, 'We're going to be able to make one run on this target - if we're lucky.' I told him to be prepared to use radar. This was in contradiction with orders we'd received that prohibited us from bombing without a visual target sight."
"We were making our approach on radar and getting ready to drop when Beahan cries out, 'I've got the target,' " he recalled, referring to Kermit Beahan, the bombardier. "As we'd gotten over Nagasaki, Beahan had looked into the undercast and saw that it had holes in it. He synched the cross hairs of his bomb-sight telescope and released the bomb."
SOURCE: NYT (12-7-05)
At the front of a bus, previously reserved for white riders, is Rosa Parks, face turned to the window to her left, seemingly lost in thought as she rides through Montgomery, Ala. In the seat behind her is a young white man looking to his right, his face hard, almost expressionless. The two, the only figures visible on the bus, seem a few inches and a universe apart, each seemingly looking at and for something utterly different.
Everyone knows her. No one knows him.
Except for Catherine Chriss, his daughter. And, like his identity, hidden in plain sight, unknown even to the veterans of that era still living, what's most telling about the real story of the black woman and the white man is how much of what we think we know is what we read into the picture, not what's there.
The man on the bus, Nicholas C. Chriss, was not some irritated Alabama segregationist preserved for history but a reporter working at the time for United Press International out of Atlanta. He died of an aneurysm at 62 in 1990. Mrs. Parks died at 92 on Oct. 24, a few weeks short of the 50th anniversary of her refusal to give up her seat on the bus to a white man.
Mr. Chriss, who also worked for The Los Angeles Times and The Houston Chronicle, publicly disclosed his role in the picture just once. It was three paragraphs in the middle of a 2,183-word article he wrote for The Chronicle in 1986 about his experiences covering the civil rights movement.
He explained that the picture was taken on Dec. 21, 1956, the day after the United States Supreme Court ruled Montgomery's segregated bus system illegal. (Actually, the ruling had come a month earlier, but it was not until Dec. 20 that the district court entered the order putting it into effect.) He said that he boarded the bus in downtown Montgomery and that he and Mrs. Parks were the only riders up front.
He wrote: "It was a historic occasion. I was then with the United Press International wire service. A UPI photographer took a picture of Mrs. Parks on the bus. It shows a somber Mrs. Parks seated on the bus looking calmly out the window. Seated just behind her is a hard-eyed white man.
"Each anniversary of that day, this photograph is brought out of musty files and used in various publications around the world. But to this day no one has ever made clear that it was a reporter, I, covering this event and sitting behind Mrs. Parks, not some sullen white segregationist! It was a great scoop for me, but Mrs. Parks had little to say. She seemed to want to savor the event alone."
SOURCE: NYT (12-7-05)
On Thursday, this little-spoken-about place, the physical embodiment of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was intended to prevent Chinese laborers from entering the country, received long-awaited recognition when President Bush signed into law the Angel Island Immigration Station Restoration and Preservation Act.
The legislation, a result of a 35-year effort by the nonprofit Angel Island Immigration Foundation, authorizes up to $15 million to establish a museum and genealogical research center on the island and to help preserve two original structures, including barracks with chicken-wire clerestories and melancholy graffiti - eloquent poems carved on wooden walls and routinely puttied and painted over by the authorities. The immigration station, nestled in a eucalyptus grove on the largest island in the bay, is a national historic landmark, though it is closed to the public.
"Ellis Island was created to let Europeans in," said Robert E. Barde, deputy director of the Institute of Business and Economic Research at the University of California, Berkeley, who is writing a book on immigration. "Angel Island was created to keep the Chinese out." The Exclusion Act, repealed in 1943 when China became America's ally in World War II, was the culmination of decades of anti-Chinese sentiment in the aftermath of an economic depression that resulted in mob violence and lynching.
SOURCE: NYT (12-6-05)
Mr. Gibson's television production company is developing a four-hour miniseries for ABC based on the self-published memoir of Flory A. Van Beek, a Dutch Jew whose gentile neighbors hid her from the Nazis but who lost several relatives in concentration camps.
It is not expected that Mr. Gibson will act in the miniseries, nor is it certain yet that his name, rather than his company's, will be publicly attached to the final product, according to several people involved in developing it. Nor is it guaranteed yet that the project will be completed and broadcast.
But Quinn Taylor, ABC's senior vice president in charge of movies for television, acknowledged that the attention-getting value of having Mr. Gibson attached to a Holocaust project was a factor.
"Controversy's publicity, and vice versa," Mr. Taylor said.
ABC brought in Mr. Gibson's company, Con Artists Productions, after an independent producer, Daniel Sladek, pitched the network on Ms. Van Beek's story. With her husband, Felix, Ms. Van Beek survived the sinking of a passenger ship by a German mine, followed by three years in hiding during the German occupation of Holland, before emigrating to the United States in 1948.
SOURCE: NYT (12-6-05)
The report includes data from more than 3,000 institutions, among them museums, historical societies, government archives, libraries, scientific organizations and universities.
"There is not the luxury of time with many of these collections," said Kristen Laise, the director of the research project. "All it takes is a few bad decisions, a flood or other emergency, a low funding period, and the damage can be irreparable."
Environmental hazards pose the greatest threat to collections, the report says. Inconsistent temperatures and high humidity can lead to mold, warping, severe drying and general deterioration. Ultraviolet rays in buildings with poor controls cause documents and textiles to fade, and pollutants in the air can cause harmful chemical reactions.
Even large institutions with staff conservators face challenges. At the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the hides of the museum's celebrated African elephants are deteriorating from unstable climate controls. Conservators spent more than a year evaluating the hall in which they are displayed and are now working on stabilizing conditions there.
Some well-intentioned preservation efforts of the past are in desperate need of updating, the report says. A 200-page book containing Boston town records from 1634 to 1660 was treated in the 1930's with cellulose acetate, considered the best protection against mold at that time. Conservators have since discovered that cellulose acetate breaks down over time, producing a vinegarlike odor. Without updated preservation, the book now "smells just like a Greek salad," said John McColgan, deputy archivist for the City of Boston. After consulting the Northeast Document Conservation Center in Andover, Mass., the city determined that it would need to raise $10,000 to restore the volume, he said.
Beyond lacking proper storage environments and conservation care, 80 percent of institutions have no plan for protecting their collections in an emergency. In one case detailed in the report, about 1,400 boxes of archaeological artifacts at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, N.M., were soaked when a ruptured hot water pipe at an off-site storage center flowed undetected for nearly 24 hours last year.
SOURCE: NYT (12-6-05)
Mr. Clark, son of a Supreme Court justice appointed by President Harry S. Truman, made his mark in the Johnson years with his role as a Justice Department official in drafting the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, liberal landmarks of the age. But for most of the last 40 years, he has steered an unconventional passage of his own. It has been a journey that has taken him on many a far-flung venture abroad, and across America, to embrace some of the era's most notorious figures.
It is a remarkable roll call, the men who have had him at their side at times of confrontation with America and its government: Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya, Slobodan Milosevic of the former Yugoslavia, Charles Taylor of Liberia; and, at home, fringe figures like the Branch Davidian leader David Koresh, the right-wing gadfly Lyndon LaRouche, and Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who is serving a life term in an American jail for his role in the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993.
Then there is Mr. Hussein. The two men met in Baghdad for the first time during the Persian Gulf war in 1991, and at least four more times during the 1990's, when Mr. Clark opposed the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq after Mr. Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and renewed when he failed to comply with United Nations inspector teams searching for unconventional weapons. Now, Mr. Clark is one of three foreigners - the others are a Qatari and a Jordanian - on Mr. Hussein's five-man defense team, and Mr. Clark finds himself explaining, as so often before, how a former Texas liberal finds himself working in support of a man as notorious as Mr. Hussein.
One thing that seems reasonably certain is that Mr. Clark is not in it for the money. In the interview on Sunday - at the Rashid Hotel in Baghdad's heavily fortified international zone, a short bus ride from the bombed-out former Baath Party headquarters that has been remodeled for the trial - Mr. Clark was asked about his fee for representing Mr. Hussein. Mr. Hussein's hidden wealth has been a matter of keen speculation since his son Qusay, on the eve of American troops' sweep into Baghdad in April 2003, sent a flatbed truck to Iraq's central bank to make off with steel trunks containing at least $1 billion in cash.
"Not a penny," said Mr. Clark, who added that he had taken no fee from many of his more contentious clients. What about the air fares on his shuttles between Baghdad and New York, where Mr. Clark lives with his wife, Georgia, in a Greenwich Village condominium? "Economy class," he said, $1,400 for the 13-hour leg from New York to Amman, Jordan, and a 500-mile additional leg to Baghdad. Mr. Clark made the journey twice in the last week, sandwiching legal work in New York between appearances at the Hussein trial. While the air fares have been paid with the Hussein legal team's funds, he said, he was paying for meals and taxi rides himself.
Name of source: Ottawa Citizen
SOURCE: Ottawa Citizen (12-10-05)
Squabbling over crucial roof repairs between the three Christian communities that share custodianship of Jesus's birthplace is endangering the 1,500-year-old basilica.
Large holes in the 500-year-old lead roof have let rainwater flood inside for years. It streams down the walls and threatens to wash away Crusader-era murals and destroy Byzantine mosaics.
A botched repair by the Greeks, in which the roof was given a waterproof lining, has created new problems, as condensation now eats into the plaster and rots wooden beams.
The most authoritative survey for decades found the wood was so badly damaged that a large truss was only being prevented from crashing to the floor by friction.
But while the three communities accept that repairs are needed, mutual suspicion means they cannot agree on how to carry them out. The impasse means that each year the winter, rains destroy more of the church's once magnificent interior.
"The Church of The Nativity should be a symbol of what we are as Christians, not a symbol of disunity and disagreement," said Father Michele Piccirillo, a Catholic priest and archeological expert. "The condition of the roof is unbelievably bad, and it must be settled, not just for the benefit of the church, but for all Christianity.''
Name of source: David Honigmann in the Financial Times (London, England)
SOURCE: David Honigmann in the Financial Times (London, England) (12-10-05)
Bettany Hughes's Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore (Jonathan Cape Pounds 20) traces the cultural ripples left by Helen: a villain to medieval moralists, rehabilitated by Eleanor of Aquitaine, traduced by Hollywood.
Greeks and Trojans clashed in deadly earnest centuries later. As Tom Holland recounts in Persian Fire: The First World Empire, Battle for the West (Little, Brown Pounds 20), the Emperor Xerxes, leading a force to subdue the rebellious Greek city states, first sacrificed 1,000 oxen to Athena at the supposed site of Troy. In subsequent years, the united defiance of the Greek cities was hailed as a shining moment for democratic "western" values. In fact, as Holland records, the Greeks defeated the Persians by a mixture of luck and some idiosyncratic moments of courage and tactical brilliance.
If the Ionian cities were an affront to Persia, 2,000 years later Constantinople was a "bone in the throat of Allah". Roger Crowley's Constantinople: The Last Great Siege of 1453 (Faber Pounds 16.99) tells of the last days of the city, besieged and taken by the Turkish emperor Mehmet. Once again, stark accounts of a clash between east and west are crude. Western Europeans made little attempt to come to the aid of their orthodox fellows, and other European colonies on the eastern Mediterranean temporised frantically in an attempt not to alienate the Turks.
The frontline shifted. Jonathan Keates takes up the story in The Siege of Venice (Chatto & Windus Pounds 20). In 1848, the disparate parts of Italy revolted against their various masters. Venice was besieged by the Austrians, and held out valiantly for 500 days. Times had moved on since 1453, so the defeated defenders were exiled rather than impaled. But the cause of Italian unification persisted, and drew its rhetorical strength in some part from the language of the Greeks' similar struggle, which dated back to the days of Themistocles.
[Other books: David McCullough's 1776. A.N.Wilson's After the Victorians. James Shapiro's 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare.
Name of source: Courier Mail (Queensland, Australia)
SOURCE: Courier Mail (Queensland, Australia) (12-10-05)
The ramifications of that claim remain unresolved, as does the fate of money left in a four-year-old government reparation fund which closes at the end of the month.
ome suggest the real amount now owed could run to $3 billion with financial interest, plus proper compensation, and they argue this paternal system enforced a "consequential poverty" in Aboriginal settlements.
Thus the Beattie Government's $55.4 million "buy-off"' was an insult, says historian and advocate Dr Ros Kidd. "Given the Government's stance and limitations on the amounts, and who was paid," she says, "the community thinks it was a pathetic gesture and the deadline almost irrelevant. The offer was so flawed, it never met what was needed."
From 1904 to 1970, the Aborigines' Protection Board confiscated wages, the money placed in trust funds for the "betterment" of indigenous people and some pocket money handed over.
A one-off, all-inclusive state offer -- $2000 for those born before 1956 and $4000 for those pre-1951 -- closes on December 31 but many Aborigines will not get a cent from this $55.4 million fund.
There could, say the critics, be as much as $35 million left unclaimed.
Tiga Bayles, a member of a black community's working party on the issue, says the group has always encouraged people to lodge claims. "Get in there and get the bloody money, time's running out," he says.
Kidd spent 15 years researching the issue and says much of the enforced savings went missing.
Name of source: Australian
SOURCE: Australian (12-10-05)
Tribunal president Graeme Neate said it had criticised some anthropologists for conducting themselves as advocates for Aborigines instead of impartial experts.
"That means the court ultimately gives less weight to their evidence," he said.
Mr Neate said anthropologists and historians had a pivotal role in native title claims, but the pool of experts was small and of "variable quality".
And because anthropologists frequently had long-term relationships with particular groups of Aborigines, he said, their ability to give objective evidence was sometimes open to attack.
Mr Neate's criticism comes after Tasmanian academic Michael Connor attacked the High Court for accepting what he said was a mistaken view of history in the Mabo native title judgment.
The Mabo judgment relies in part on the work of historian Henry Reynolds, whose work has been criticised in Dr Connor's book The Invention of Terra Nullius and in Keith Windshuttle's book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History.
Mr Neate said the tribunal had long been concerned about problems with the credibility of some expert witnesses in native title cases.
But it was dealing with the problem by giving less weight to those witnesses who viewed themselves as advocates for native title claimants.
Name of source: LAT
SOURCE: LAT (12-10-05)
A group of 92 lawmakers in the House will attempt next week to force a vote on legislation that would revoke the principle of "birthright citizenship," part of a broader effort to discourage illegal immigration.
The push to change the citizenship policy is backed by some conservative activists and academics. But it could cause problems for the White House and the Republican Party, which have been courting Latino voters. GOP officials fear the effort to eliminate birthright citizenship will alienate a key constituency, even if the legislation ultimately is rejected by Congress or the courts.
The principle at issue rests on the first sentence of the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868 to guarantee the rights of emancipated slaves: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside."
Some lawmakers advocating tougher immigration laws contend that the amendment has been misinterpreted for decades. Conservatives maintain that although illegal immigrants are subject to criminal prosecution and are expected to abide by U.S. laws and regulations, they are not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States in the full sense intended by the amendment's authors — and their children therefore fall outside the scope of its protection.
Name of source: Xinhuanet
SOURCE: Xinhuanet (12-9-05)
He announced the creation of a mission to "evaluate the actions of parliament in the fields of memory and history" and issue a report within three months, as the French government faces mounting pressure to revoke a law that casts a positive light on the country 's colonial past.
"Like all nations France has known greatness but also difficult times. There have been moments of light but also moments of darkness. It is a legacy which we must assume in its entirety," Chirac said in a statement.
"History is the key to a nation's cohesion, but it only takes a little for history to become an agent of division, for passions to inflame and the wounds of the past to re-open," he said.
"The law's job is not to write history. The writing of history is the task of historians," he said.
Name of source: Email to HNN and Tulane Website
SOURCE: Email to HNN and Tulane Website (12-9-05)
From INSIDE HIGHER EDUCATION:
On Thursday Tulane announced the cuts it is making in the face of $200 million in recovery costs and a projected budget shortfall next year.
The positions of 230 faculty members — 65 of them tenured, and 180 of whom are in the medical school — will be eliminated. Tulane is also cutting its athletic program from 16 teams down to 8. Five academic programs — four in engineering, plus exercise and sport science — will also go.
The professors whose jobs are being eliminated have the option of working at their salaries for one additional year, said Mike Strecker, a Tulane spokesman. But they will not receive additional payments and those who leave immediately will not be paid, he said.
University officials said that 86 percent of Tulane’s students will return to campus in January, and that applications for next academic year are coming in at a normal, pre-Katrina pace. Officials said they do not expect to significantly reduce the size of future undergraduate classes, but that all full-time faculty members will be required to teach undergraduates. Still, some faculty members thought that some of the remaining programs would have to shrink, but that the quality of education will remain, or even improve with the increased teaching for undergraduates from full-time faculty members.
While Tulane officials had few details about how the medical school would operate in the wake of the cuts, they said that it would focus on teaching and that the eliminated positions were research oriented. The medical school will remain in Texas for the spring semester. The medical school is in downtown New Orleans, and a dearth of patients in the area means slim pickings for clinicians. “We have tried to make the reductions as strategically and humanely as possible,” said President Scott S. Cowen in a statement.
The cuts will save Tulane $44 million from its $600 million-plus operating budget.
Name of source: National Security Archive
SOURCE: National Security Archive (12-9-05)
The State Department cable was not mentioned in the report of the 9/11 Commission which investigated how U.S. intelligence failed to detect planning for the terrorist attacks, using civilian airliners, on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Archive analyst Barbara Elias.
The National Security Archive released the cable, and a CIA memorandum, "We're at War," written by then director George Tenet, as it prepared to commemorate its 20th anniversary on Friday. "Obtaining the declassification of these documents on the war on terrorism epitomized two decades of work to bring transparency and accountability to relevant issues in U.S. foreign policy," said Archive Executive Director Thomas Blanton. "American citizens not only have a right to know, they have a need to know."
In his urgent "We're at War" memo written five days after the 9/11 attacks to his top deputies, CIA Director George Tenet demanded an urgent and "unrelenting focus" on "bringing all of our operational, analytical, and technical capabilities to bear--not only to protect the US both here and abroad from additional terrorist attacks--but also, and more importantly, to neutralize and destroy al-Qa'ida and its partners."
The confidential memo called for "absolute and total dedication as a leadership team" and stated that he and his deputies would "translate the urgency of the difficult tasks ahead to the men and women we lead by our behavior and actions." In waging the war on terrorism, Tenet wrote, "we must lead... Never has our professionalism and discipline been at a greater premium."
The memo was obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by National Security Archive senior fellow, Jeffrey Richelson. It was first identified in Bob Woodward's bestselling book, Bush At War.
Name of source: Wa Po
SOURCE: Wa Po (12-9-05)
Rick Harlan Schneider is one of a growing number of planners whose solution is rethinking the Mall itself, reconfiguring and expanding the space, the way a Senate commission did about 100 years ago when the Lincoln Memorial was built on swampland that became the western axis of one of the nation's premier public spaces.
"Ultimately, the Mall is not a collection of museums and memorials. That's not what the Mall was intended to be. It's a living, lively place, and it can keep changing," said Judy Scott Feldman, chairman of the National Coalition to Save Our Mall, the group that has spent the past two years championing another move as bold as the one involving the Lincoln Memorial.
Feldman's plan to expand the Mall to include East Potomac Park is an attempt to solve the problem of memorial clutter by creating more space that would be considered prime Mall real estate. It would be big enough to include more of the strolling, biking and ballgames that get crowded out by museums while making room for more monuments.
Her group hosted the forum this week that featured the ideas of six architects. They created plans for marinas, water taxis, shopping, restaurants, museums and fantastical bridges. One design would move the Supreme Court to East Potomac Park, creating a triangle, with the Capitol and the White House, to represent the judicial, legislative and executive branches of government.
SOURCE: Wa Po (12-6-05)
Lonnie Ali, the boxing champ's wife, could barely hold back tears as she stood in the shadow of the $75 million center, with its soaring butterfly roof and its dozens of exhibits, replete with LeRoy Nieman paintings of "the Greatest" in his glory days.
The dream, however, has received little financial support from prominent black Americans. After a two-year campaign, only one monied black contributor, ex-heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis, who is British, gave a substantial amount, $300,000.
The Ali Center's experience is not unique. In recent years there has been a proliferation of black-oriented museums, memorials and cultural centers that cost millions to run. But some museum executives wonder how well they will fare when several existing institutions are struggling and corporate sponsorships often do not cover the costs of day-to-day operations. Among the problems, some experts say, is a lack of contributions from black people -- especially prominent entertainers and athletes -- whose history is celebrated by these institutions.
"We have yet work cut out for us to cultivate the interest of African Americans and athletes of many cultures," said Michael Fox, executive director of the Ali Center. "It hasn't happened yet at the level we expected. I think it has been a disappointment to date."
To be sure, black people are, in fact, generous when it comes to charitable contributions. A 2003 study reported in the Chronicle of Philanthropy noted that black Americans who give to charity donate 25 percent more of their discretionary income than white donors.
In the Coalition for New Philanthropy's 2004 study of minority giving in the New York City area, black Americans of all age groups contributed just slightly more than the nation's other two major ethnic groups, Latino and Asian. But art museums and cultural centers were low on the priority list of all minority groups.
As the Ali Center fundraisers discovered, their money goes instead to churches, schools and scholarships.
Name of source: Perspecitves (American Historical Association)
SOURCE: Perspecitves (American Historical Association) (12-9-05)
SOURCE: Perspecitves (American Historical Association) (12-9-05)
According to data published by R. R. Bowker LLC, the company that publishes the annual guide Books in Print, the number of new history titles published fell 7.4 percent—from 10,439 to 9,662 books—from 2003 to 2004.1 Despite the decline, this is still the second highest number of history books produced, almost 50 percent higher than the number of titles produced in 1993 (the first year with comparable data).
Name of source: USA Today
SOURCE: USA Today (12-9-05)
Shayt will take these and other artifacts from one of the nation's worst natural disasters to the National Mall in Washington, where someday they will go on display.
Shayt wants objects that capture all that New Orleans is - and all that the storm damaged or destroyed.
He got a basket, for instance, that the Coast Guard used to rescue people stranded when the levees broke on Aug. 29. He has a cot from the Superdome, where people waited in misery to be evacuated from the city.
"Rather than generic objects, we want specific objects that tell individual stories of the hurricane, of survival, of the response and the recovery," Shayt says.
Many others also are looking for tactile remembrances of Katrina. Local museums, historians and artists are grabbing objects before they become part of the world's largest trash heap. They hope to create an evocative record of the tragedy for future generations.
SOURCE: USA Today (12-8-05)
Shayt will take these and other artifacts from one of the nation's worst natural disasters to the National Mall in Washington, where someday they will go on display.
Shayt wants objects that capture all that New Orleans is — and all that the storm damaged or destroyed.
Many others also are looking for tactile remembrances of Katrina. Local museums, historians and artists are grabbing objects before they become part of the world's largest trash heap. They hope to create an evocative record of the tragedy for future generations.
Name of source: AP
SOURCE: AP (12-9-05)
Now, 42 years after Kennedy's assassination, the place he called home may finally erect a statue to honor the 35th president. A sculptor has nearly completed what would be Cape Cod's first Kennedy statue. The 6-foot, 400-pound bronze cast will be walking barefoot on a mound of real sand accented with live eel grass.
This is not the first attempt to erect a Kennedy statue near the beaches where the president learned to swim and played touch football with his Navy buddies from PT-109.
In 2000, bad press killed a concept that depicted an impossible scene: the president strolling with his arm around a 38-year-old John F. Kennedy Jr., the son who was a toddler when a gunman shot his father in Dallas in 1963. The work, titled "What Could've Been," also memorialized Kennedy Jr., who died in a 1999 plane crash.
"They trashed it," said the sculptor, David Lewis, who had designed the project with the help of the Kennedy family and had the approval of the Town Council. "Some people just couldn't get their mind around this artistic concept."
A Cape Cod Times editorial called the memorial "tacky" and "odd." The Kennedy family soon nixed the project, and checks were sent back to donors.
Although there are streets, schools and airports named for Kennedy and other presidents across the country, there are few statues, said presidential historian Robert Dallek, author of the 2003 biography "An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917 to 1963."
"Getting these (statues) erected is not a simple business," Dallek said. "Politics linger on."
SOURCE: AP (12-8-05)
Beneath layers of chipping gray paint, however, is a nearly forgotten piece of the human story - one of longing, disappointment, fear and rage, etched as poems into the decaying wood panels by immigrants held for weeks or months during enforcement of Chinese exclusionary laws.
"I'm heartsick when I see my reflection, my handkerchief is soaked in tears," reads one poem carved in Chinese characters on a first-floor wall. "I ask you, what crime did I commit to deserve this?"
This and dozens of other poems have been the focus of a $50 million, three-phase state parks restoration project underway at the Angel Island Immigration Station on the 470-acre island in San Francisco Bay. A mix of federal, state and private money is funding the project.
Before work began in August, a team of scholars combed the station's barracks and hospital, locating every visible piece of writing on the walls. It's the first-ever attempt at creating such a record, and scholars are using it to find out more about the life of detainees.
Until now, the most comprehensive account was the 1980 book "Island," which published more than 100 Angel Island poems, said Charles Egan, a Chinese Studies professor at San Francisco State University and a lead scholar on the new project. But the collection, based on 1930s-era manuscripts by two detainees who reportedly copied poems off the walls, never was physically corroborated.
The project located most of those poems and found about 60 new ones.
Meanwhile, park contractors are busy restoring the station to the way it looked in the days when it was known as the Ellis Island of the West, the main gateway for immigrants crossing the Pacific. From 1910 until fire destroyed part of the station in 1940, it processed about 1 million immigrants, including 175,000 Chinese.
But unlike Ellis Island, where most immigrants only stayed several hours, Angel Island held Chinese immigrants for an average of two or three weeks, some for nearly two years, as officials verified their immigration status.
SOURCE: AP (12-6-05)
Librarians discovered that two bound volumes of Collyer's Eye from the 1920s were missing this fall, around the time the White Sox won their first World Series in 88 years, said associate university librarian Karen Schmidt.
"As there was more and more interest in what the White Sox were doing, we began receiving more questions about their history," Schmidt said. "As those questions began to mount ... we began to understand the volumes were missing and that they are very, very rare."
University police are working with library officials to find the books.
Collyer's Eye was a weekly sports and gambling tabloid that wrote just days after the end of the 1919 World Series that games allegedly were fixed. Eight players were accused of participating in a gambling scheme to throw the series and banned from baseball for life in the "Black Sox Scandal."
The missing volumes contain copies of the newspaper from April 1920 to April 1922, and April 1924 to April 1926. The library still has the volume containing the earliest story on the scandal, from October 1919. But later stories on the case are missing.
Librarians and historians said the copies at the University of Illinois library could be the only publicly accessible reports on the scandal.
Name of source: KSTP-TV
SOURCE: KSTP-TV (12-9-05)
The slippers are one of four remaining pair of the ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in the filming of the 1939 classic movie.
The famous shoes are owned by Hollywood memorabilia collector Michael Shaw and were on loan to the museum for the summer. Shaw had also loaned the slippers to the museum for the 2004 summer. The slippers were to have been returned to Shaw after Labor Day.
Four pair of ruby slippers remains today. One has been at the Smithsonian since 1979; another sold at Christie's in 2000 for $660,000.
Name of source: Science Daily
SOURCE: Science Daily (12-9-05)
The discovery was made earlier this year in Guatemala at the site of Naachtun, a Maya city located some 90 kilometres through dense jungle north of the more famous Maya city of Tikal. The woman's face, carved on a stone monument called a stela [STEE-la] – and in an artistic style never before seen – suggests women played significant roles in early Maya politics.
"I've worked in the Maya area a long time and I've never seen anything like it," says Dr. Kathryn Reese-Taylor, the director of the U of C-led Naachtun project. "We have images of queens, who ruled both singly and with their husbands or sons, depicted on stelae later in Maya history beginning in the early 6th century AD. But this stela is completely unique in style and likely dates to the 4th century AD."
The woman could be a figure from Maya history, but researchers are tantalized by the possibility she might be a mythical figure. Hieroglyphic inscriptions of the Late Classic period (600-900 AD) mention female deities, but none have ever been discovered on a stela. "If this is a patron deity, then it is extremely rare," Reese-Taylor says. "When hieroglyphic texts do mention women, it is usually in the context of being either someone's mother or someone's wife."
The stela measures two metres in height, one metre in width, and 50 centimetres in depth. It was buried by the Maya inside an ancient building after their city was attacked and the inscriptions on the stela were hacked off by the invading forces. The burial was a reverential act meant to honour the individual whose image was carved on the monument. An infant's burial accompanied the stela.
"This represents an extraordinary event in the history of Naachtun and we were really lucky to find it," Reese-Taylor says.
Dr. Julia Guernsey, a professor of Precolumbian Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, says the gender of the figure portrayed on the stela is unquestionably significant.
Name of source: Inside Higher Ed
SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed (12-8-05)
Meanwhile, Andrei Chira, a freshman, continues to wear the armband, which he says is part of standing up for what he believes in.
Chira said Wednesday that the band – which depicts a symbol similar to a swastika — is his way of showing support for National Socialism. Believers in the “Blood & Honour” philosophy have traditionally been associated with “white pride and white power,” according to the Web site of the American National Socialist Party.
However, Chira said that racial and ethnic issues are not the reason he wears the band and that he doesn’t support anti-Semitism and racism. Rather, he ascribes to the philosophy that it’s important to “think about what you believe in,” and he said he favors the concept of nationalism over party affiliation.
Chira grew up in Irvine, California after his family moved there from Romania when he was 4. In high school, he said, he often wore pins that proclaimed his support for National Socialism.
Name of source: Reuters
SOURCE: Reuters (12-7-05)
"I think it's necessary to view seriously the pain that we have inflicted on the people of South Korea and China in the past and Japan must also always have a feeling of reflection and consideration as a neighbour," Aso said in a speech.
He urged Chinese and South Koreans to pay heed to Japan's track record after World War Two, saying its actions in the 60 years since have demonstrated its desire for peace and a will not to repeat past wrongs.
Resentment towards Japanese aggression before and after World War Two still lingers in China and South Korea. Japan invaded and occupied parts of China from 1931 to 1945 and colonised the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945.
In a news conference ahead of Aso's speech, a South Korean envoy blamed the actions of Japanese leaders for chilled relations.
"Most disturbing is moves ... on the part of some influential leaders of Japan in responsible positions constantly pulling us, both the Japanese and the Koreans, back to memories of the unhappy past," South Korean Ambassador to Japan Ra Jong-yil said.
"However hard we may try to forget about the past, put the unfortunate past behind, some people are constantly reminding us ... rubbing salt to the wounds, scratching the old wounds so they would not heal," Ra said.
SOURCE: Reuters (12-8-05)
His comments, reported by Iran's official IRNA news agency from a news conference he gave in the Saudi Arabian city of Mecca, follow his call in October for Israel to be "wiped off the map", which sparked widespread international condemnation.
"Some European countries insist on saying that Hitler killed millions of innocent Jews in furnaces and they insist on it to the extent that if anyone proves something contrary to that they condemn that person and throw them in jail," IRNA quoted Ahmadinejad as saying.
"Although we don't accept this claim, if we suppose it is true, our question for the Europeans is: is the killing of innocent Jewish people by Hitler the reason for their support to the occupiers of Jerusalem?" he said.
"If the Europeans are honest they should give some of their provinces in Europe -- like in Germany, Austria or other countries -- to the Zionists and the Zionists can establish their state in Europe. You offer part of Europe and we will support it."
Historians say six million Jews were killed in the Nazi Holocaust. Ahmadinejad's remarks drew swift rebukes from Israel and Washington.
Raanan Gissin, a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, said in Tel Aviv that Ahmadinejad was voicing "the consensus that exists in many circles in the Arab world that the Jewish people ... do not have the right to establish a Jewish, democratic state in their ancestral homeland".
"Just to remind Mr. Ahmadinejad, we've been here long before his ancestors were here," Gissin said. "Therefore, we have a birthright to be here in the land of our forefathers and to live here. Thank God we have the capability to deter and to prevent such a statement from becoming a reality."
Name of source: Chicago Tribune
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune (12-8-05)
But after opening the dusty, bound volumes Tuesday night, he realized they were the missing editions of a rare sports newspaper credited with first reporting the 1919 White Sox gambling scandal.
With his find, Kraft became a library hero and the Case of the Missing Collyer's Eye was solved--sort of. It remains unclear how the large volumes returned to the library Tuesday night, the day the Tribune published a story about the missing books.
The volumes include newspapers from 1920 to 1922 and 1924 to 1926.
"I got the sense that someone heard the news stories and had an attack of conscience and decided to drop them off," said Kraft, 28, a visiting assistant librarian for digital resources, who said he saw the books while strolling through the reference room to straighten up and check if anyone needed help.
"It was a conspicuous location," he said. "It is in a very visible place, one of the first tables when you walk in the room, but it is semiprivate," with chest-high stacks of books surrounding the table.
Librarians at the Urbana-Champaign campus realized the 1920s volumes of Collyer's Eye, a weekly sports and gambling newspaper, were missing earlier this fall around the same time the White Sox were on their way to winning the team's first World Series in 88 years.
Kraft spotted the books at about 9 p.m. on the third table from the entrance of the 2nd-floor reference room. He said he did not see them during a walk through the room two hours earlier. Kraft called another librarian to share the good news and locked them in his office overnight.
University police said in a news release that they do not plan to fingerprint the fragile volumes because it could harm them.
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune (12-7-05)
They were pieces of a skull that had surrounded one of the greatest musical minds of all time, Ludwig van Beethoven's. At least, that's what the visitor said.
On Tuesday morning, Walsh stood at a lectern at Argonne National Laboratory, near Darien, and verified what some had suspected about the great composer who was plagued for three decades by digestion problems, chronic abdominal pain, irritability and depression: He had died from lead poisoning.
So confounded and distressed by his plight, which also included extremely foul body odor and halitosis, Beethoven left written requests that a physician examine his body after his death to determine the cause of his demise in hope of saving others from the same fate.
Using advanced X-ray technology at Argonne, scientists helped confirm that Beethoven, who died in 1827 at age 56, had 60 times more lead in his system than what is considered average today.
"Now, 178 years later, we're finally fulfilling the request of Ludwig van Beethoven," Walsh said. "There were a few bureaucratic obstacles to leap over."
But the obstacles--which included finding a lab that could test the skull fragments thoroughly without damaging them and then getting approval to do the work--were conquered almost three years ago when Walsh teamed with Argonne physicists Ken Kemner, Derrick Mancini and Francesco DeCarlo.
Validating the authenticity of the bones was more complicated. It wasn't exactly "The Da Vinci Code," but the saga had moments of scientific, artistic and historic drama.
Name of source: Boston Globe
SOURCE: Boston Globe (12-8-05)
Speaking to reporters at an Islamic summit in the Muslim holy city of Mecca, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad implied that European countries backed the founding of Israel in the Middle East in 1948 out of guilt over the Holocaust.
"Some European countries insist on saying that during World War II, Hitler burned millions of Jews and put them in concentration camps," Ahmadinejad said. "Any historian, commentator or scientist who doubts that is taken to prison or gets condemned."
"Let's give some land to the Zionists in Europe or in Germany or Austria, so they can have their government there," he said. "They faced injustice in Europe, so why do the repercussions fall on the Palestinians? Offer a piece of land from Europe, and we will back this decision and will not attack this government."
"Those who are occupying and ruling Jerusalem, what is the origin of their fathers? ... Most of them have no roots in Palestine, but they are holding the destiny of Palestine in their hands and allow themselves to kill the Palestinian people," he said.
Name of source: Email sent to HNN
SOURCE: Email sent to HNN (12-8-05)
PETITION
John Sexton
President
New York University
This is in reply to your letter of November 28, 2005, stipulating the deadline of December 5, 2005 for striking Graduate Assistants to return to work or face the consequences of loss of stipend and ineligibility to teach.
The undersigned are international graduate students: some have withheld labor since November 9, some have continued to work, some others do not have teaching or research obligations this semester. Among the undersigned, those who have continued working have been influenced in their decision by direct or indirect intimidation. Out of those who are striking, some will return to work and others will not. Those returning to work will do so in fear of the legal and financial consequences that the implementation of your threats may carry and not at all out of agreement with your arguments. Those who continue to strike will do so in spite of those possible consequences, and in full awareness of the particular risks entailed. But we are all equally outraged and will not be silenced.
We, as international students, feel especially vulnerable to your antagonizing, intimidating and outrageous threats. Many of us have had to deal with increasingly restrictive U.S. immigration policies, enhanced surveillance and record-keeping and with hostility when being questioned by immigration officers. Some of us have suffered the threat of deportation. Thus, we are concerned with maintaining our legal status in this country.
NYU has stated that ourlegal status is not in danger, yet the administration is fully cognizant of the fact that our student visas are contingent on our continued status as full-time students and our ability to cover our living expenses, which in turn depends on our stipends and salaries. Our status prevents us to a great extent from working outside campus, as well as from applying for external grants and loans. If loans in US dollars were granted to us by NYU, as the administration has proposed, it would be extremely difficult to repay them when we return to our home countries.
We were invited to this institution to study and work and we came eagerly, expecting to find an environment of respect and mutual consideration conducive to academic advancement. But the administration's recent threats to our well-being have significantly harmed our confidence in NYU. Such a loss of confidence can be reversed by the administration. Under the current conditions we cannot encourage prospective students from our respective countries to come to NYU. By refraining from doing so, we are following the lead of faculty from NYU and other prestigious institutions. A good part of NYU's strength comes from its international students. Hence, the administration's present position weakens the institution as a whole.
We all share a commitment to academic integrity and the rights of workers, as well as a deep belief in the possibility to resolve conflicts through amicable negotiations. We therefore support the Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC) and will continue in various ways to argue and fight for a reasonable contract for our labor.
NYU was the first and only private university inthe United States to recognize a union of Graduate Assistants. That was unprecedented, and laudable. NYU now threatens Graduate Assistants with actions detrimental to their finances and careers. This is also unprecedented, and deplorable. We therefore strongly condemn these threats as signaling a sharp decline in NYU's intellectual and ethical position in the academic and labor community.
We believe that the administration can easily rectify its unethical position and palliate the antagonism it has created by withdrawing the threats and dropping the ultimatum. It is NYU's ethical responsibility to recognize the rights of workers and to engage in the constructive dialogue that has made this university an outstanding academic institution.
Sincerely,
Waiel Abdelwahed, Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies
Mariana Amato, Spanish and Portuguese
Magali Armillas-Tiseyra, Comparative Literature
Severine Autesserre, Politics
Anurima Banerji, Performance Studies
Clarissa Behar, French
Diego Benegas, Performance Studies
Claudio Benzecry, Sociology
Leslie-Ann Bolden, Sociology
Paola Bonifazio, Italian
Alexandra Borer, Institute of French Studies
Michiel Bot, Comparative Literature
Nathalie Bouzaglo, Spanish and Portuguese
Anna Brigido, Comparative Literature
Lina Britto, History
Elda L. Cantú-Castillo, Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Ipek A. Celik, Comparative Literature
Gabriel Chaves, Physics
Elizabeth Chavez, Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Wei-chi Chen, History
Teresa Colombo, Biology
Valeria Coronel, History
Hector Martin Crocce, Physics
M. Zeynep Dadak, Cinema Studies
Santiago Deymonnaz, Spanish and Portuguese
Munir Fakher Eldin, Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies
Rong Fan, Physics
Miao Feng, History
Christian Gerzso, English
Luca Grisa, Physics
Javier Guerrero, Spanish and Portuguese
Carolin Hagelskamp, Community Psychology
Ellen Xiang He, Comparative Literature
Matthias Heymann, Courant Institute
Katharina Ivanyi, Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies
Simon Jackson, History
Anuja Jain, Cinema Studies
Ronnie Jansson, Physics
Pablo Jercog, Physics
Jelena Karanovic, Anthropology
Yilmaz Kocer, Economics
David Koffman, Hebrew and Judaic Studies, History
Christof Konig, Courant Institute
Monika Krause, Sociology
Azra Krek, Physics
Frederic Laliberte, Courant Institute
Sanghyuk Lee, Physics
Pia Leighton, Spanish and Portuguese
Christophe Litwin, French
Mariano Lopez-Seoane, Spanish and Portuguese
Sudhir Mahadevan, Cinema Studies
Aldo Marchesi, History
Morad Masjedi, Physics
Silvana Melitsko, Economics
Lina Meruane, Spanish and Portuguese
Shayoni Mitra, Performance Studies
Al Saeed Momin, Courant Institute
Alessandra Montalbano, Italian
Gulseren Mutlu, Economics
Osamu Nakano, History
Jeppe B. Nielsen, French
Yigal Nizri, Hebrew & Judaic Studies, History
Rachel O'Connell, English
Alan Page, English
Richard Parra, Spanish and Portuguese
Yaakov Perry, Comparative Literature
Marco Polin, Physics
Stéphanie Ponsavady, French
Sebastian Pueblas, Physics
Vicente Rodriguez Ortega, Cinema Studies
Wu Ron Ying-Ronin, Physics
Stephen Russell, Hebrew and Judaic Studies
Marco Scalvini, Italian
Hillina Seife, History
Jenny Shaw, History
Mariano Siskind, Comparative Literature
Fedor Soloiev, Courant Institute
Federico Sor, History
Yunus Sozen, Department of Politics
Yi Sun, Comparative Literature
Gail Super, Law and Society
Smita Tripathi, Spanish and Portuguese
Aristotelis Tsirigos, Courant Institute
Basak Tug, History, Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies
Ross Tulloch, Courant Institute
Z. Umut Turem, Law and Society
Javier Uriarte, Spanish and Portuguese
Alejandra Uslenghi, Comparative Literature
Yeliz Utku, Chemistry
Agnes Veto. Hebrew and Judaic Studies
Emily Wilbourne, Music
Lorraine Wong, Comparative Literature
Atilla Yilmaz, Courant Institute
Name of source: CNN
SOURCE: CNN (12-7-05)
Four F-15s flown by the Hawaii Air National Guard roared above the bay, including one jet that veered off from the group to symbolize the 2,390 people killed. The USS Chaffee passed by the sunken USS Arizona, where more than 900 sailors remain entombed.
The crowd, which included about 20 Pearl Harbor survivors, observed a moment of silence at 7:55 a.m. -- the exact time the surprise attack began in 1941.
"December 7, 1941, was not just a day of infamy. In many ways it was a day of discovery for America and for the world. It changed us, it hurt us, it made us stronger -- as did September 11," said Adm. Michael G. Mullen, the Navy's most senior sailor.
SOURCE: CNN (12-6-05)
The deal would settle the lawsuit that Lillie Belle Allen's family filed against the city and five former police officers.
It also calls for the creation of a memorial to Allen and Henry Schaad, a white city policeman who also was shot to death during 10 days of rioting in the summer of 1969.
"I thank God we've finally come to closure," said Hattie Dickson of York, one of Allen's sisters, who joined other family members and city officials at a news conference.
York Mayor John Brenner apologized to Allen's family.
"We are very sorry for your loss, and I know no monetary settlement and no community dialogue will bring back Lillie Belle Allen," he said.
The case had been scheduled to go to trial in April.
The settlement, to be paid by city taxpayers, still must be approved by the five-member city council, which was scheduled to take a vote Tuesday night.
SOURCE: CNN (12-5-05)
The hull pieces were a crucial part of the ship's structure and make up a bottom section of the vessel missing when the wreck was first located in 1985, the researchers said.
After the bottom section of the hull broke free, the bow and stern split, said Roger Long, a naval architect who analyzed the find.
David Brown, a Titanic historian, estimated before the latest find that the stern took 20 minutes to slide into the water.
"It turns out the Titanic was more merciful. It was over more quickly," Brown said.
The newly found hull sections, located about a third of a mile from the stern of the wreck, were examined during an expedition in August sponsored by The History Channel.
On Monday, Titanic experts met at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to discuss their analysis of the find for a documentary to be aired on the cable channel on February 26.
Name of source: Sun-Sentinel (FL)
SOURCE: Sun-Sentinel (FL) (12-7-05)
These days, few cast their minds back to Pearl Harbor, and some people under 30 are hard pressed to recite what happened on that "Day of Infamy" exactly 64 years ago.
"I have no idea whatsoever," said Kristina Krakehl, 23, of Boca Raton.
It's not really that significant," Brinsley Elliott, 20, of Fort Lauderdale, said after being told why Dec. 7, 1941, is notable in U.S. history.
Although President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called Dec. 7, 1941, "a date which will live in infamy," it's been three generations and six decades since the Japanese air attack on the Navy base in Hawaii thrust the United States into World War II. The nation's collective consciousness has moved on, embracing more urgent events like the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Pearl Harbor is relegated to a "museum quality" memory, one scholar says, rather than one more meaningful.
"I talk to people and they say, `Oh, you were at Pearl Harbor? Where's that?'" said Bill Merz, 83, of Hollywood, an Army vet who survived the battle. "They have to be reminded. It's a shame."
Name of source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pennsylvania)
SOURCE: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pennsylvania) (12-7-05)
"It's good they're not judging each other on something their grandparents did years ago, but we do want them to know what happened," said Mary K. O'Donnell, a high school social studies teacher in the Hempfield Area School District (Pittburgh). The district has dozens of Japanese students whose parents work at nearby companies, including the Sony Corp. plant.
Ms. O'Donnell uses a Power Point presentation that focuses on the statistics of the attack.
The presentation includes "a lot of visuals of the actual ships hit, then I put up stats on how many were killed and wounded, and how many ships went down. Then I let them talk about it."
The approach seems to work: "I don't think what happened in World War II impacts personal relationships between American and Japanese students here at school," she said.
The approach is different at the Pittsburgh Japanese School in O'Hara.
The history textbook used by its 100 students contains only one sentence about Pearl Harbor. It says: "In 1941, Japan attacked the American military harbor in Hawaii."
The school, open only on Sundays, tries to preserve Japanese culture for its kindergarten to 12th-grade students. Instructors said they spend little time dealing with the subject of World War II at all.
"The most important lesson about war is, we never repeat and we need to seek for world peace," said Yoshihiko Saeki, the school principal.
Donald Goldstein, co-author of "At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor," said in American classrooms, Pearl Harbor is taught as a cautionary lesson to always be prepared.
"Nobody in Japan talks about it," continued Dr. Goldstein, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. "The dropping of the atomic bomb is where their [wartime] history begins."
Dr. Goldstein, who has researched Pearl Harbor for 50 years, said there are still people of the quickly declining World War II generation in this country who have hard feelings about the attack and the Japanese people.
Name of source: Netscape News
SOURCE: Netscape News (12-7-05)
Retired vice admiral Frederick Ashworth, who served as weaponeer aboard a B-29 bomber dubbed "Bockscar" and responsible for the technical performance of the 4.5-ton bomb known as "Fat Man," passed away in Phoenix, Arizona, on Saturday afternoon, following a series of unsuccessful heart surgeries, said Glen Smith, a godson of the late admiral.
Contemporaries remember Ashworth as a key player in the Manhattan Project, a supersecret US government initiative launched in the middle of World War II to equip the United States with a nuclear arsenal.
The heart of the project, which at its peak employed over 130,000 people and cost a total of nearly two billion dollars, was located at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where Ashworth, at the time a Navy commander, held a highly-classified job.
"I think his title was chief operating officer, and he actually helped with the work on the bomb in Los Alamos," Smith said.
After the world's first nuclear test in the New Mexican desert outside of Alamogordo on July 1945, Ashworth was dispatched to Tinian Island in the Pacific and put in charge of the so-called "Destination Team", a group of 54 scientists, engineers and Navy weapons specialists whose job was to assemble the bombs "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" and keep them ready for delivery.
"Little Man" was dropped on Hiroshima from aboard the "Enola Gay," where Captain William Parsons, a close Ashworth associate from the Manhattan Project, served as a weaponeer.
Smith said that Ashworth's job aboard "Bockscar" was "to pull the safety plug and install the actual plugs that were activating the bomb before it was lowered out of the plane."
After the war, Ashworth took active part in Operation Crossroads designed to gauge the effectiveness of various types of nuclear attacks on naval ships.
Name of source: WP
SOURCE: WP (12-2-05)
The site is on a narrow terrace at the edge of the Kidron Valley, which sheers away from the Old City walls, in a cliffside area the Bible describes as the seat of the kings of ancient Israel.
What is taking shape in the rocky earth, marked by centuries of conquest and development, is as contested as the neighborhood of Arabs and Jews encircling the excavation. But the Israeli archaeologist Eilat Mazar believes the evidence she has uncovered during months of excavation and biblical comparison points to an extraordinary discovery.
She believes she has found the palace of King David, the poet-warrior who the Bible says consolidated the ancient Jewish kingdom around the 10th century B.C. and expanded its borders to encompass the Land of Israel. Others are doubtful.
"There is sometimes a reality, a very precise reality, though maybe not all true, described in the Bible," Mazar said. "This is giving the Bible's version a chance."
Mazar's find is emerging at the nexus of history, religion and politics, volatile forces that have guided building, biblical scholarship and war in this city for millennia. Even before the findings have been assembled in a scientific paper, the discovery is prompting new thinking about when Jerusalem rose to prominence, the nature of the early Jewish kingdom, and whether the Bible can be used as a reliable map to archaeological discovery.
SOURCE: WP (12-6-05)
The engineering study did not make an explicit recommendation. The Smithsonian Board of Regents and an advisory council of the African American museum discussed the 198-page Site Evaluation Study yesterday in a closed session. Their assessment of the findings is another step in the selection of a site. The regents are expected to announce their choice late next month.
The report, prepared by Plexus Scientific, an engineering firm, and architects PageSoutherlandPage, was made public yesterday.
The four sites under consideration include two on the Mall: the Washington Monument site, between Constitution Avenue and Madison Drive just west of 14th Street; and the Smithsonian's Arts and Industries Building, on the Mall near Ninth Street, next to the Hirshhorn Museum.
The other two spots, both near the Mall: the Liberty Loan Building property at 14th Street and Maine Avenue near the Tidal Basin, and Banneker Overlook, at the southern end of the L'Enfant Promenade.
Many supporters of the museum and President Bush have said the museum should be on the Mall.
The new museum would be part of the Smithsonian; officials there have estimated it would cost $300 million to $500 million. The study says costs could range from $356 million to $1.4 billion in 2006 dollars.
The building is expected to be 350,000 square feet -- roughly the size of the National Museum of the American Indian. The Monument site and Banneker Overlook offer the most space.
Name of source: Guardian
SOURCE: Guardian (12-4-05)
But now the authors find themselves in a bitter battle with some of the world's leading China experts, who have united to unleash a barrage of criticism of the book in general, and, in particular, of its sourcing - the subject of a ten-point reply from the authors in the forthcoming edition of the London Review of Books.
The central thrust of the book is that Mao was a sadistic monster, worse than Hitler or Stalin, and responsible for 70 million deaths. His Marxism was a shallow mask for selfishness.
His reputation as a military leader and champion of the peasants was a sham, argue the book's authors. Portraying Mao as a creature of Stalin, the authors say that, far from moving China forward, he did nothing good, ruthlessly eliminating rivals, starving millions, provoking wars and treating his wives abominably.
By concentrating on the man and his misdeeds, critics say, the book does not explain the context of Mao's rise, his ability to hold power for 26 years and his international impact. 'More needs to be taken into account than a simple personalisation of blame,' one leading historian, Jonathan Spence of Yale, wrote in the New York Review of Books
Yesterday Jung Chang and Jon Halliday told The Observer: 'The academics' views on Mao and Chinese history cited represent received wisdom of which we were well aware while writing our biography of Mao. We came to our own conclusions and interpretations of events through a decade's research.' ...
Name of source: Romanesko
SOURCE: Romanesko (12-6-05)
Name of source: History Today
SOURCE: History Today (11-28-05)
SOURCE: History Today (12-6-05)
Name of source: BAJR Website
SOURCE: BAJR Website ()
"We, the undersigned cultural organizations, are deeply concerned about the safety of Susanne Osthoff and her escort, and we appeal for Susanne’s swift release so that she may be reunited with her family. An archaeologist and humanitarian aid worker, Susanne has worked tirelessly for many years to aid the Iraqi people and to preserve the cultural treasures of Iraq for all Iraqis. She is truly a friend to all the people of Iraq. We appeal to those holding Susanne for her safe release, and for the safe release of her escort, and trust that you will return them to their families who love them."
The statement was signed by: "World Archaeological Congress ... Society for American Archaeology ... Archaeological Institute of America[,] Archaeologists for Human Rights ... Register of Professional Archaeologists ... Lawyers’ Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation[,] Global Heritage Fund ... Society for Historical Archaeology ... Saving Antiquities for Everyone – SAFE ... ICON – World Monuments Fund ... American Academic Research Institute in Iraq ..." (see: http://www.archaeos.org/iwa)
Meanwhile, the British Archaeological Jobs Resource is circulating a petition.
Name of source: Baltimore Sun
SOURCE: Baltimore Sun (12-6-05)
None of them ever returned.
And nearly 50 years after the General Textile Mills factory closed overnight, it looks the same, stopped in time, a haunting archive of the industrial life that once flourished in remote mountain towns like this one in Western Maryland.
Inside the century-old building, amid the dampness and dust, the old-fashioned twisting and spinning machines stand silent. Workbenches are pushed beneath the heavy machinery, with its symmetrical rows of wooden spindles and bobbins.
Fire pails hang from hooks on the factory floor. Handwritten ledgers list the names of "Bobbin Boys," the young runners. In the front office, next to metal file cabinets full of old invoices, is an IBM typewriter. In the cellar is an April 7, 1949, dye recipe. And scattered about, just as the last mill workers left them, are lunch bags, umbrellas, workplace shoes - and the superintendent's hat.
"Everything's here. I'd really like to see it preserved," says Herb Crawford, 71, a retired automotive teacher who bought the mill with a partner in 1978.
His dream is to turn it into a museum. He wants to showcase the mill's history, from the 1907 opening through its heyday, when coal miners' wives and children worked long shifts to produce the reams of fine silk yarn that was shipped to New York's garment district and worldwide.
Despite strong interest from state and national historic groups, though, Crawford has been unable to breathe new life into the mill. He and his partner want to recoup their initial investment. But the coal region has fallen on hard times, and no buyer has come forward.
Now the three-story brick building is beginning to crumble. Many windows are broken. Paint is flaking. The roof leaks. Crawford climbs up regularly to patch the roof. But he had a heart attack a few years ago, and his wife wants him to stop.
"I've pumped my life into this. I'm getting to be an old guy," he says, "and I just can't keep doing it."
