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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: BBC News
SOURCE: BBC News (5-10-07)
The move to shelve EU plans to enforce metrication by 2009 comes after a long campaign by pro-imperial groups, including the Metric Martyrs.
The European industry commissioner has ruled that imperial weights and measures can be displayed indefinitely alongside metric measurements.
Pro-metric campaigners said keeping the dual labelling system was "crazy".
Tory industry spokesman, Giles Chichester, said he had EU confirmation that the marking of goods using both metric and imperial systems could "continue indefinitely".
[Ed. note: The Imperial system, a collection of English units, was legislated in 1824. Various units date back to Roman, Anglo-Saxon, and medieval times.
["The Metric Martyrs are a group of British food sellers and greengrocers who tried to sell their produce in imperial units only i.e. without reference to metric units. They were fined for failure to allow use of metric units and other offences. They fought the fines in a two-year court battle (2000-2002) which they ultimately lost. British law does not, as of 2007, prohibit the use of imperial units for this purpose; the group were fined for not using metric units simultaneously. The group has become a symbol of the anti-metrication movement in Britain. The main defendant in the case, Steve Thoburn, died of a heart attack in 2004." --Wikipedia]
SOURCE: BBC News (5-10-07)
[Ed. note: The BBC is prevented from repeating what was leaked, but the New York Times is not restricted, and says today,"In November 2005, The Daily Mirror...reported that the memorandum quoted a threat in April 2004 by President Bush —- denied in Washington and London —- to bomb the offices of the television network Al Jazeera in Doha, Qatar.]
One day, perhaps 30, 50 or 100 years in the future, the contents will be revealed and British and American historians and journalists will pore over it at the Public Records Office.
By the time it is released its contents will no longer be embarrassing or damaging for those involved...
David Keogh...was asked to photocopy and distribute the memo to a select group of mandarins but when he read it he felt morally obliged to get it into the public domain...he handed it to his friend Leo O'Connor, who was a researcher working for the Labour MP...
On Wednesday both were convicted of breaking the Official Secrets Act.
But the contents of the memo remained the"elephant in the room".
The judge, the jury, the defendants and the lawyers knew what it contained but journalists and members of the public were forbidden from knowing and were excluded from court at various stages...
[An anti-Iraq war Labour MP said,]"I don't think this is anything to do with national security. It's all to do with protecting the name of President Bush and possibly Prime Minister Blair."
Campaigners believe the Keogh case proves the need for a public interest defence to be enshrined in the Official Secrets Act...
Julie-Ann Davies, of the Campaign for Reform of the Official Secrets Act,...said:"There is a line in the sitcom Yes, Minister when someone says: 'The Official Secrets Act is there to protect officials, not secrets' and that is the danger. Who is watching the watchmen?
"If the state says it's not in the public interest to know then there is always a window for corruption and abuse of the system."
SOURCE: BBC News (5-8-07)
The rare defence works on the Westmoreland House site will have to be recorded and removed if they are confirmed as genuine.
The finds have put back Comer Homes' plans for 200 flats and a complex for arts group Kumba on the site.
Name of source: Times (of London)
SOURCE: Times (of London) (5-10-07)
The country’s most famous tea master has risked controversy by unveiling a new style of tea ceremony. It is aimed at young Japanese, old people and foreigners who cannot tolerate the painful sitting position required to perform the traditional rite.
For the first time, members of Urasenke, the biggest of the ''schools'' of tea, will be permitted to sit with legs crossed in front of them –- rather than sitting on their heels in the formal seiza posture traditionally required. To those who can manage it, seiza is an expression of attentiveness, discipline and respect; but to many people it is a formula for pins and needles, impaired circulation and unbearable cramp.
''This is the modern obstacle-free version of making tea,'' said Sen Soshitsu, the 16th generation Grand Master of Urasenke, and the closest thing to a pope of tea. ''I want to make this new style of tea popular among the people.''
SOURCE: Times (of London) (5-10-07)
Or so it was widely thought, until the long-lost gallantry award turned up in a chest in his son’s attic in the Isle of Mull last summer.
The officer known as ''Mad Jack'' for his near-suicidal feats of daring had instead thrown the dress ribbon into the river. The medal itself will now be auctioned at Christie’s in London on June 6, where it is expected to fetch up to £25,000, about 200 times the value of an average First World War Military Cross (MC).
Thomas Venning, director of the book and mansucript department at Christie’s,...[said,]
''Around the time that he threw the ribbon into the Mersey, Robert Graves was helping to persuade Sassoon’s colonel not to court-martial him. The Army sent him to Craiglockhart Hospital to be treated for shellshock, where he met Wilfred Owen.'' [The award-winning Regeneration trilogy by novelist Pat Barker is based on Sassoon, Owen, and the military psychiatrist W.H.R. Rivers.]...
[The poet died in 1967. A stepson of Sassoon's only child,] who is selling the medal on behalf of the family, said yesterday: ''I had no idea it even existed. Like most people, I thought it had been thrown into the Mersey.
''I found it while clearing out the attic of the family property on Mull. Bizarrely, it was in a treasure chest, like a pirates’ chest, covered in cobwebs and long-dead insects. The ID tag was there too, along with the revolver in an old Jiffy bag and some poetry medals.''
SOURCE: Times (of London) (5-9-07)
"Tiggers Don’t Like Honey," by Ernest H. Shepard, was created to illustrate a 1958 edition of A. A. Milne’s The World of Pooh, but was cut from the printed version.
[Story includes illustration.]
SOURCE: Times (of London) (5-9-07)
The German Government has now earmarked €6.3 million (£4 million) for the project: fitting together about 600 million shreds of secret police files ripped up in panic by Stasi agents after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.
When the puzzle is complete, the files are likely to shed light on some of Germany’s most elusive secrets –- on betrayed politicians, on Communist attempts to recruit Nato secretaries and foreign academics, on undercover operations across the globe.
“Even the small samples we have glued together so far have shown that the files deal with important matters,” says Günter Bormann, of the government agency in charge of analysing the Stasi archives.
Until now employees at the agency have been sticking the pieces together by hand, spreading the fragments across large desks and trying to find names, handwriting and signatures that match.
Since 1991, 25 officials have painstakingly processed 350 sacks of paper secrets. Altogether there are 16,250 sacks –- at the present rate it would take several centuries to solve the Stasi jigsaw.
Name of source: New York Times
SOURCE: New York Times (5-10-07)
In February 1965, a black farmer, Jimmie Lee Jackson, 26, was shot by Alabama state troopers who were suppressing a voting rights demonstration in Marion in the Black Belt. Historians have said the killing indirectly helped lead to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The identity of the killer has long been known, James B. Fowler, a retired trooper, and on Wednesday Mr. Fowler’s lawyer, George Beck of Montgomery, said he could ''only assume'' that Mr. Fowler was the subject of the indictment...
Mr. Fowler, 73, has admitted the killing in interviews but insisted that the shooting was in self-defense as Mr. Jackson tried to grab the trooper’s gun.
SOURCE: New York Times (5-8-07)
These stark reminders of the hazards of newsgathering will be displayed at the new Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue, scheduled to open on Oct. 15.
Cranes still hover over its steel-and-glass structure, but workers have now installed the facade’s showstopper —- a 50-ton, 74-foot-high marble engraved with the First Amendment —- and are preparing the exhibitions.
Slowly, the Newseum —- a bigger, more dramatic, higher-tech reinvention of of the former Newseum in Arlington, Va. —- is taking shape. More than six years in the making and costing $435 million, it may be one of the world’s most expensive museums now under construction. It is certainly among the most prominent, perched on the last buildable site on the presidential inaugural parade route between the Capitol and the White House...
Peter S. Prichard, president of the Newseum and a former editor in chief of USA Today, said that the original Newseum, which opened in 1997, drew 2.2 million visitors over its five years. ''It was like a pilot project,'' he said. ''We got to see what worked and what didn’t, and we saved all the comment cards.''
Name of source: AP
SOURCE: AP (5-9-07)
Now, one of his original computers is going to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.
The 42-year-old chairman and chief executive of Texas-based Dell Inc. donated a collection of materials Wednesday to the Smithsonian, including his employee badge, one of the company's newest computers and a PC Limited computer from 1985.
The objects will join an Altair computer, a first-generation IBM PC and an original Apple Macintosh in the museum's collection.
"If we do our jobs right, I suspect that much of the technology developed right now in 2007 will be ready for the museum in another two or three years or so," said Dell, who dropped out of the University of Texas at Austin 23 years ago when his business took off.
SOURCE: AP (5-9-07)
The yellowed, brittle material was found in the urn during excavation in the southern town of Argos, a Culture Ministry announcement said Wednesday...
The cylindrical urn also contained dried pomegranates —- offerings linked with the ancient gods of the underworld —- along with ashes and charred human bones from an early 7th century B.C. cremation.
[Archaeologist Alkistis] Papadimitriou said the material was preserved for nearly 3,000 years by the corroding copper urn. "Copper oxides killed the microbes which normally destroy fabric," she told The Associated Press.
SOURCE: AP (5-9-07)
Col. Vidoje Blagojevic, 56, was the wartime commander of the Bratunac brigade that took part in the worst post-World War II massacre in Europe by helping separate Muslim men from women and herding them into buses before the men were driven away and later murdered...
A five-judge appeals panel at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal said Blagojevic should have been acquitted on the genocide charge because the original trial judges ruled that he did not know of the mass murders and only provided logistical support. That meant he did not share in the intent to commit genocide, said presiding appeals judge Fausto Pocar.
SOURCE: AP (5-9-07)
A panel of bishops and cardinals at the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints approved a declaration on Pius' virtues Tuesday and passed it to Pope Benedict XVI, according to a Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Ciro Benedettini.
If Benedict signs the document, it will be the first major step toward possible beatification for Pius. The Vatican would then have to confirm a miracle attributed to Pius' intercession for him to be beatified, and another miracle for him to be made a saint.
SOURCE: AP (5-7-07)
At about 98 feet long, the Indian Head on the side of Mount Pemigewassett [visible off Exit 33 on I-93] is nearly 60 feet longer than the Old Man of the Mountain was, but it never attracted much attention in part because the Old Man profile was more distinct and easily visible from the highway.
Stew Weldon of the Indian Head Resort told the New Hampshire Union Leader newspaper that interest in the Indian Head has surged since the Old Man crumbled.
Related Links
Indian Head (AP photo) Old Man of the Mountain, before and after (PBS)
SOURCE: AP (5-9-07)
Those excavating the site discovered the foundation wall Monday when they broke through a 19th century basement floor. After checking plans and measurements from historical records, Jed Levin, an archeologist with the National Park Service, said Tuesday, "We're now certain. It's the bow window."
Architectural historians say the curved window that expanded the house's State Room was a model for oval rooms in the White House, which was being built in Washington, D.C., when Washington and Adams lived in Philadelphia in the 1790s.
"It's the prototype of the Oval Office," said Douglas Heller, an Independence Hall Association board member.
SOURCE: AP (5-8-07)
The government was hoping the gesture would begin a process of reconciliation between ethnic Estonians and Russian-speakers, 10 days after Estonia was hit by riots over the decision to move the Bronze Soldier statue from downtown Tallinn to a cemetery outside the city center...
''For many, the end of World War II means the victory of freedom over tyranny, and for many it means one violent regime was replaced by another,'' Estonia's government, president and parliament said in a joint statement.
Related Links
In Moscow, Putin honors fallen Russian soldiers Estonia row clouds Russia's Victory Day celebration
SOURCE: AP (5-8-07)
Michael David Schreiber's legs were broken by the stone, and the family name on the gravestone left the letter ''V'' imprinted on his thigh, Merrillville Officer Ray Smith said...
Schreiber, 22, of Merrillville faces charges of criminal trespassing, criminal mischief and public intoxication, police said. He also might be ordered to pay for damage to 14 headstones, Police Chief Nicholas Bravos said. Estimated damage totaled about $8,400, Bravos said.
SOURCE: AP (5-6-07)
As its title implies, Stealing Lincoln's Body by Thomas J. Craughwell (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) is devoted to Lincoln after, as Craughwell writes in the first sentence, "the last tremor of life" left his body.
Craughwell details a little-known plot to steal the 16th president's remains from his tomb in Springfield, Ill., in 1876 -- 11 years after he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth.
SOURCE: AP (5-7-07)
Beth Sholom, a soaring glass-and-concrete temple just outside Philadelphia, began welcoming worshippers nearly 50 years ago. On Sunday, the National Park Service recognized it as one of the architect's greatest achievements...
The towering, flat-topped spire is constructed out of concrete, steel, aluminum and glass. It's the only synagogue Wright created during his 70-year, 1,000-project career. Wright died in 1959, six months before Beth Sholom was first used.
Beth Sholom was one of three Wright buildings given status as National Historic Landmarks recently. The others are the Hollyhock House in Los Angeles and the Price Tower in Bartlesville, Okla. They join other Wright buildings on the list, including his home in Oak Park, Ill., Fallingwater in western Pennsylvania and Taliesen West in Arizona.
SOURCE: AP (5-8-07)
Sixty-two years after the end of World War II on May 8, 1945, people like Preusch -- a teenager when her grandmother began helping fugitive Jews -- are being honored with a museum in Berlin.
Israel recognized gentiles who helped Jews escape the Holocaust as early as 1963, and honored 443 Germans at the Yad Vashem Memorial as ''Righteous among the Nations.'' But similar honors have been long delayed at home.
The ''Silent Heroes'' museum is to open in 2008 in an old tenement building in the center of Berlin. It will be based in Otto Weidt's former workshop for the blind, where several Jews survived in a secret room, and include two more floors that are vacant and still under renovation.
Name of source: International Herald Tribune
SOURCE: International Herald Tribune (5-9-07)
The most astonishing of the six world auction records set on Tuesday is the $25.52 million that was paid for Cézanne's watercolor "Nature Morte au melon vert" (Still life with a green melon). When last seen at auction in London at the British Rail Pension Fund on April 4, 1989, the work on paper had then set a world record for a Cézanne drawing at £2.35 million, then the equivalent of $4.3 million...
Until this week, Impressionist and Modern master works on paper were seen as the preserve of sophisticated connoisseurs, unlikely to appeal to the wider public of art buyers. The rapid dwindling of Impressionist art supplies is the primary cause of this transfer of interest to drawings.
Three world records set for paintings on Tuesday likewise reflect the search for alternatives to the vanishing masterpieces of Impressionist and Modern art enhanced by the most famous signatures.
SOURCE: International Herald Tribune (5-9-07)
"What would possess someone to build a tunnel like this next to the heaviest building in Barcelona, the most visited monument in Spain?" said Jordi Bonet, who leads a team of 20 architects working to complete the 125-year-old basilica.
Name of source: Fredericksburg (Va.) Free Lance-Star
SOURCE: Fredericksburg (Va.) Free Lance-Star (5-9-07)
The 40-pound, 172-year-old edition of "The Devotional Family Bible" entered the McFadden house in the Todds Tavern area of Spotsylvania County by chance [at a yard sale]...
And so began a journey that would lead Kay through history, from the inauguration of America's first president to the world's first trans-Atlantic flight and beyond...
Name of source: Telegraph
SOURCE: Telegraph (5-10-07)
Ruth Kelly, the Communities Secretary, told Dorset county council she did not regard its road proposal as being in conflict with the rules on the protection of nationally significant landscapes or wildlife.
The 3.5-mile relief road between Dorchester and Weymouth will speed up traffic to the marina in Portland that will be used for the 2012 Olympics.
The road runs through a protected ancient woodland and will cut huge chalk gashes out of the Dorset Downs area of outstanding natural beauty.
The area is at the heart of the landscape made famous by Thomas Hardy's novels.
Name of source: Independent
SOURCE: Independent (5-10-07)
Count Carl-Eduard von Bismarck, a 46-year-old MP in Chancellor Angela Merkel's ruling conservative party and former New York banker turned manager of the Bismarck family's country estate outside Hamburg, was elected to the German parliament in 2005.
But yesterday he was the focus of criticism from conservatives in his constituency in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein who demanded that he resign his seat because he hardly ever attended parliamentary sessions or party meetings.
Name of source: San Francisco Chronicle
SOURCE: San Francisco Chronicle (5-9-07)
Mendez's parents and four other Latino families in Orange County had sued four school districts, in Mendez vs. Westminster, and the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the decades-old federal doctrine of "separate but equal" violated the U.S. Constitution.
It was in their case that NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall tried out the winning arguments he was to make in Brown vs. Board of Education before the U.S. Supreme Court, which outlawed segregation nationwide in its decision on the case in 1954...
The U.S. Postal Service plans to release a boldly colored stamp in September honoring the ruling's 60th anniversary.
The day in 1943 when 8-year-old Sylvia and her younger brothers were turned away from Westminster Elementary because of their dark skin and Spanish last name remains vivid to her.
SOURCE: San Francisco Chronicle (5-9-07)
The 78-year-old professor and Holocaust survivor, who is in town to receive a lifetime achievement award from the Koret Foundation, said he remained "surprised and shocked that there are so many people who deny the Holocaust.''
Surrounded by nearly a dozen police officers and private security guards, Wiesel spoke at a press conference whose location was kept secret until reporters' identities could be verified.
Wiesel was assaulted Feb. 1 in an elevator at the Argent Hotel, allegedly by Eric Hunt of New Jersey. Hunt, 22, who allegedly told Wiesel he wanted to interview him and then grabbed Wiesel and tried to drag him into a guest room at the hotel, was arrested three weeks later after bragging about the assault on a Web site.
SOURCE: San Francisco Chronicle (5-8-07)
At high noon, in the middle of low tide, two large pieces of a wrecked 19th century clipper ship decided to poke out above the sand and reveal their long-hidden selves to the world...
The visible parts of the shipwreck were nothing more than two 10-foot-long arrangements of lumber in the shape of a V, poking about a foot or so above the shoreline near the end of Noriega Street, and separated by about 200 feet of sand. One V was the bow of the ship and the other V was the stern.
That was it. Everything else was up to the imaginations of passers-by...
Actually, a historian for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area said the wreckage was surely that of the three-masted clipper ship King Philip, which was built in Maine in 1856. According to the records, which are frequently less romantic than the speculation, she spent much of her career carrying bird manure fertilizer around the world. In her last years, she carried lumber from the Pacific Northwest to San Francisco.
On Jan. 25, 1878, she was towed by a tug through the Golden Gate, then laid anchor to allow the tug to assist a nearby vessel in distress, according to historian Stephen Haller. The anchor didn't hold, however, and the King Philip drifted onto the sand at Ocean Beach, where she foundered.
Fortunately, everyone got off safely, which could be why the King Philip never got the fuss made over it as did a certain other vessel that hit an iceberg 34 years later.
The King Philip made a brief appearance in 1980, Haller said, when El Niño currents washed away an unusually large amount of sand. But no one had seen the ship since.
Name of source: AFP
SOURCE: AFP (5-9-07)
"I am free," exclaimed Posada Carriles, 79, on Miami's Radio Mambi, shortly after the judge in El Paso, Texas dismissed all seven charges linked to his sneaking into the United States and lying to immigration authorities.
"Thank God, you, all of my brothers, the people in Cuba .. for this victory," said Posada Carriles, who is accused by Cuba and Venezuela of masterminding a 1976 plane bombing that killed 73 people...
But Cuba reacted with anger at the release of the man they called "the Bin Laden of the hemisphere."...
Posada Carriles was jailed in Venezuela in 1976 for allegedly masterminding the downing of a Cuban jet off Barbados.
He escaped in 1985, was sentenced to eight years in jail in Panama for a 2000 bomb plot to assassinate Cuban President Fidel Castro, and was pardoned four years later.
SOURCE: AFP (5-8-07)
Blair, who is expected to announce his resignation plans this week, hailed the restoration of self-rule in Northern Ireland, which the province hopes will finally bury the dark decades of sectarian violence.
Asked in Belfast whether Iraq would overshadow his achievements in Northern Ireland, Blair told BBC television..."The most important thing you can do as a prime minister...is do what you believe to be right and for the rest, history will make its judgement."
Name of source: Washington Post
SOURCE: Washington Post (5-9-07)
The 23-year-old ethnic Russian, who is an Estonian citizen, had never visited the bronze statue of a Soviet Red Army soldier whose relocation from central Tallinn to a military cemetery on April 26 sparked riots by ethnic Russians here and a siege of the Estonian Embassy in Moscow...
Estonia was part of the Soviet Union for close to five decades, a period many Estonians view as an occupation. Large numbers of Russian civilians moved here, often resented by the locals. When independence came in 1991, the Russians found themselves a vulnerable minority and sometimes continued to look to Moscow to defend their interests. But the cross-border debate of recent days, for all its fury, has disguised a growing distance between Russia and some of those ethnic kin 16 years later, concerning not just history and the fate of the statue but, increasingly, the place of ethnic Russians in an independent Estonia.
Related Links
Estonia: Bronze Soldier had to go Estonians and Russians argue it out with flowers When giants fought in Estonia
SOURCE: Washington Post (5-9-07)
The museum "does not have funding now or in the foreseeable future to rehabilitate" the 126-year-old building, the Smithsonian's facilities director, William W. Brubaker, said in a briefing paper sent to Congress.
The alternative is to find a partner to "redevelop and operate the building under a long-term lease, and thereby return this important building to productive use," according to the document.
The ornate brick exhibition hall is the second-oldest building on the Mall, after the Smithsonian Castle. Last year the National Trust for Historic Preservation declared it an endangered historic place and called it "an empty relic."
SOURCE: Washington Post (5-9-07)
The discovery dusted off the competing Israeli and Palestinian claims to the region between Bethlehem and the Judean desert. Israeli settler leaders said the reported find of the Jewish king's tomb supported their historic right to the area, while Palestinians expressed fears that it would be used as a pretext to increase Jewish settlement construction south of Jerusalem...
Shaul Goldstein, a leader of the Gush Etzion settlement bloc south of Jerusalem, told the Ynetnews Web site that"the discovery is further proof of Gush Etzion's direct link to the history of the Jewish people and Jerusalem."
Nabil Khatib, the Palestinian Authority's director of the Bethlehem district, said international law prohibits Israel from removing artifacts found in the occupied territories."This is robbery of Palestinian artifacts," he said.
Related Links
Herod: The Bible's biggest villain (Independent) Israeli archaeologist driven to find king's tomb
SOURCE: Washington Post (5-9-07)
The unanimous voice vote came just days after tribal chiefs danced, drummed and greeted Queen Elizabeth II on her visit to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, the first permanent settlement by the English in what they called the New World.
Steve Adkins, chief of the Chickahominy tribe, who watched from the House gallery, said it has been hard for Virginia Indians to ask for something they have felt they've had for centuries. "But today is historic, that in the eyes of the federal government, they've restored our status," he said.
Adkins said the tribes, which have been recognized by the state of Virginia in recent years, want federal recognition not just for their pride and to preserve their culture but for access to housing and health grants, as well as scholarships available only to children in federally recognized tribes. Without federal recognition, he said, Virginia Indians have been "stigmatized" and seen as in "inferior" by the 562 federally recognized Indian tribes.
Name of source: DPA (German Press Agency)
SOURCE: DPA (German Press Agency) (5-9-07)
''With the approval, the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall will be renamed as Taiwan Democracy Hall,'' said Cabinet spokeswoman Chen Mei-ling in a news conference...
The latest move was another step in a sustained campaign by the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government to eradicate the legacy of the late Nationalist leader.
Chiang, who once ruled China, brought the Nationalist troops to Taiwan after being defeated by the Chinese Communists at the end of a civil war in 1949. He set up an interim government on the island in 1949 and died in 1975. [Madame Chiang died in 2003, age about 105.] He was succeeded by his son Chiang Ching-kuo, who died in 1988.
Name of source: Asia Times (Hong Kong)
SOURCE: Asia Times (Hong Kong) (5-8-07)
Chinese leaders...are enthusiastically supporting a revival of the ancient philosophical traditions of Confucianism and Taoism. Late last month, for example, the government sponsored a six-day forum dedicated to the interpretation and promotion of Tao Te Ching (or Dai De Jing, "The Book of the Way and Its Virtue"), the foundational text of Taoism, both as a school of thought and a religion, written 2,500 years ago by Lao Zi [Lao Tzu].
The forum, hosted simultaneously in Hong Kong and Xian, capital of Shaanxi province, reportedly cost US$1 million to stage and received widespread coverage in the state media...
In their quest to find a moral center, the leadership is also allowing room for religious imports such as Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, but the ancient Chinese traditions are clearly the main selling points...
A return to ancient wisdom, leaders hope, will create a more moral society with a heightened sense of the importance of relationships -- especially the hierarchical relationships of Confucianism that command obedience.
In September 2005, the government brought Confucius back from the dead with a lavish birthday party for [K'ung-fu-tzu or] Master Kong, who lived from 551-479 BC and was vilified by Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution for his "feudal mentality". More than 3,000 people, including international guests, attended the celebration in the sage's birthplace, the city of Qufu in Shandong province...
Not long ago, it was risky to mention Confucius unless it was to denounce him; now there are Confucian schools sprouting up all over the country. Indeed, a professor [Yu Dan] at Beijing Normal University has become a media celebrity through a series of lectures she delivered on the Analects of Confucius, the bible of Confucianism, in appearances on China Central Television (CCTV) last year.
Related Links
Anxiety, emptiness fuel Confucius craze in China
Name of source: CHN (Cultural Heritage News Agency, Tehran)
SOURCE: CHN (Cultural Heritage News Agency, Tehran) (5-9-07)
Discovery of this unique treasury has faced archaeologists with a large number of unknown questions including the ownership of these items. Remains of four earthenware jars have been also discovered along these coffins.
The two U-shape coffins were placed inside a cubbyhole with their handles clinched to the body of the coffins. The tomb was constructed by rubble stones, nothing has remained from which. Activities of bulldozers have caused serious damages to the discovered coffins as well...
[Provincial archaeologist Abdul-Reza Peymani said,] ''There are also some objects which have never be seen before in any historic site and we do not know about their antiquity.''
One of the most interesting artifacts discovered in this treasury is the five rings of power. Archaeologists are in search for discovering to whom this five power ring belonged.
Name of source: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
SOURCE: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (5-8-07)
[T]eaching has once again become difficult, for a different reason -- the moves by Russian authorities to scale back what they saw as the liberties taken by new history texts.
One such text is Igor Dolutskii's "National History, 20th Century," which served as a textbook for half a million students across Russia over the past 10 years, and which has now lost its Education Ministry seal of approval.
Related Links
South Korea protests Japan's new history text
SOURCE: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (5-8-07)
The announced was made to the daily Gazeta by General Aleksandr Kirilin, director of the armed forces' commemorative center.
The paper says the figure represents an increase of 200,000 over an estimate issued by the Defense Ministry in 1993.
Estimates put at more than 25 million the total number of Soviet civilian and military war dead.
Name of source: Anniston (Ala.) Star
SOURCE: Anniston (Ala.) Star (5-9-07)
And Cager Lee Jr. and his children and grandchildren want to talk about Jimmie Lee Jackson now, after all these years, because today in Selma a special grand jury will convene to consider whether to indict the trooper who shot him, James Bonard Fowler of Geneva.
A number of historical works say Jackson was shot while trying to protect his mother, Viola Jackson, from baton-wielding troopers that night. It’s a version his family stands by.
Fowler, however, told The Star in February 2005 that although he did shoot Jackson during a melee in a restaurant called Mack’s Café, just off the town square, he fired in self-defense as Jackson was trying to take his gun. One of the last surviving troopers who was in the Café with Fowler that evening, R.C. Andrews, told The Star recently that he stands by an affidavit he wrote soon after the shooting, a statement that is similar to Fowler’s.
Cager Lee Jr. was not in Marion that night. He was in the hospital in Birmingham. But his father, Cager Lee Sr., was there and was beaten by troopers along with his sister, Viola.
Cager Lee Jr. did make it to the funeral, an event that he said helped crystallize the civil rights movement.
Name of source: USA Today
SOURCE: USA Today (5-8-07)
This fall, more than five years after Pearl was murdered while reporting in Pakistan, Nomani will lead a for-credit journalism seminar at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., that seeks to investigate the circumstances of his death.
"Journalists are a lot like the Marines," Nomani says. "We can't leave the truth behind. We couldn't save Danny, but we have to come together to try to find the truth that's left behind."
Classes such as these are not unusual in the world of collegiate journalism...
Nomani has a list of dozens of questions she hopes the course will be able to answer, including why Pearl was kidnapped, who financed and distributed the video of his death, what story Pearl was chasing, and whether Omar Saeed Sheikh, whom police have said was identified by others involved in the crime as the mastermind, had ties to Pakistani intelligence. Sheikh has been convicted and sentenced to death for his role in the plot; he is in jail in Pakistan awaiting an appeal, Nomani says.
The timing is right for the Georgetown project because in the years since Pearl's death, some American and Pakistani officials have retired, which frees them to speak more candidly, says Pearl's father, Judea Pearl.
The class will interview sources primarily in the USA, especially in Washington, although Nomani says she has identified people who will be flying through Washington and the group hopes to interview. She also says journalists in Nepal, Pakistan and the Middle East have volunteered to conduct field reporting.
Name of source: Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer
SOURCE: Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer (5-2-07)
For four decades, the 124-year-old oil painting has been rolled up in cylinders and stored at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem. Now, three unidentified investors from the Triangle have revived hope that people might see the cylindrical panorama again.
The trio paid at least $10 million for the painting, known as a cyclorama. Now they hope to find an institution that will buy it, construct a big round building, and put it on public display, according to the dealer who arranged the sale.
Name of source: NPR
SOURCE: NPR (4-26-07)
Dan Brown is in charge of the Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield, near Atlanta. He controls 3,000 acres of national land. It's the land outside the battlefield preserve that is being eaten up by development.
"This acreage right here across the street is now all condos. These 64 acres...[have] been bulldozed and they're building about 100 homes," Brown said. "I met with a developer two days ago on these 20 acres here, and they'll be putting subdivisions here."
Name of source: Newsweek
SOURCE: Newsweek (5-7-07)
Smith described putting an Indian in a “dungeon” to make his brother return a stolen pistol by dawn the next day—or face execution. By the time the brother returned with the pistol, however, the captive was unconscious. The brother furiously accused Smith of double-crossing him, but Smith offered him a deal: if he would promise to never again steal firearms, he would restore the brother to life. A stiff drink did the trick—and the archeology suggests how Smith brought the Indian back from the dead: the captive had been knocked unconscious by carbon monoxide poisoning from the unventilated fire, a state that can sometimes be reversed with a liquid stimulant.
Name of source: Discovery News
SOURCE: Discovery News (5-8-07)
Published recently on the physics Web site, http://www.arXiv.org, maintained at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, the research examined the orientation of virtually all Roman towns in Italy.
"It emerged that these towns were not laid out at random. On the contrary, they were planned following strong symbolic aspects, all linked to astronomy," Giulio Magli, of the mathematics department at Milan’s Polytechnic University, told Discovery News.
Part of a wider study published in Magli's book Secrets of the Ancient Megalithic Towns, the research examined the orientation of some 38 towns in Italy.
Magli explained that ancient Roman writers, including Ovid and Plutarch, documented how the foundation of a new town took into account the flight of birds and astronomical references.
"However, the link between Roman towns and sky symbolism has never been fully investigated," Magli said.
Name of source: Christian Science Monitor
SOURCE: Christian Science Monitor (5-9-07)
"A month ago when the cockatoos were flocking and the wattle bushes were flowering, we saw that as signs of rain," says Jeremy Clark, chief executive of the Brambuk Aboriginal Cultural Centre in the Grampian Mountains of Victoria State. "Sure enough, we've just had two weeks of rain."
Where meteorologists base their prognostications on satellites and synoptic charts, generations of Aborigines have observed the behavior of animals and the continent's flowering of plants.
More than two centuries after the first British settlement was established in 1788, there is a belated recognition that 40,000 years of Aboriginal lore may contribute to the complicated science of Australia's capricious climate.
Name of source: Haaretz (Tel Aviv)
SOURCE: Haaretz (Tel Aviv) (5-8-07)
The inscription describes King Seleucus IV's appointment of senior Greek clerk Olympiodorus to oversee sanctuaries in Israel and surrounding areas. In the first letter, King Seleucus IV informs his deputy Heliodorus of the appointment and the second and third announces more minor appointments.
"The Seleucids had a highly organized bureaucracy," explains David Mevorah, curator of archaeology at the Israel Museum. "They took pains to publicize all correspondence pertaining to appointments of senior clerks on columns placed in sites under the jurisdiction of those same clerks."
Name of source: ANI (Asian News International)
SOURCE: ANI (Asian News International) (5-8-07)
Archaeologists from Wisconsin, the Research Institute of Humanities and Nature, Tokyo and the Department of Archaeology, Punjab University, say they have discovered a rare copper seal, a terracotta block, three wedge-shaped bricks, pottery with distinct potter marks and four unicorns from the dried-out channel of the Hakra river...
Talking to the Dawn, Dr. Masih said that the copper seal dates back to 2000-2500 B.C., and added that the study of the seal would hopefully reveal interesting features.
“This is the first time that a copper seal has been found in Cholistan, whereas the earlier explorers Aurel Stein and Dr Rafique Mughal could not find any such seal throughout their combing of Cholistan in 1925 and 1974-77,” said Dr. Masih...
From the same area, Dr Masih said, a terracotta tablet with three pictographs on one side and a yogi on the other side made the entire complex very interesting from iconographical point of view...
He said four unicorns were slightly different from unicorns earlier found in Harappa.
Name of source: Cambridge Evening News
SOURCE: Cambridge Evening News (5-8-07)
The Tasmanian Aboriginal community wants the university to follow the lead of the Natural History Museum [in London] and return the specimens.
The museum has agreed to hand over four remains and is currently locked in talks with representatives from the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC) who are trying to stop them scientifically testing 13 others.
And while representatives are in England they hope to reclaim remains held by...Oxford University and National Museums Scotland.
Name of source: ABC (Australia)
SOURCE: ABC (Australia) (5-5-07)
It is expect President Vladimir Putin will ratify the move in time for next week's commemorations marking the end of World War II in Europe.
If so, Russians will again have the Soviet version of the victory banner for next week's Victory in Europe parade in Moscow.
For many Russians, especially the elderly, its symbolism is immense.
