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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: LAT
SOURCE: LAT (8-1-07)
In a sweeping deal to end years of controversy, the J. Paul Getty Museum agreed today to return to Italy 40 antiquities from its collection, including several masterpieces and its prized 5th century BC statue of Aphrodite, a touchstone of its collection.
The draft agreement, reached over a furious exchange of faxes late Tuesday night, includes broader cultural cooperation and loans. It is expected to be finalized in the coming days. With the deal, the Getty will avoid a threatened cultural embargo due to be imposed today and will settle its long-standing dispute with Italy over the purchase of antiquities illegally excavated and smuggled out of the country.
The agreement marks the most significant victory yet for Italy's decade-long campaign to repatriate artifacts stolen from the country and bought by American museums. Earlier agreements with the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts included fewer important objects than the deal with the Getty, which has from the beginning been the most deeply implicated in Italian's investigation.
The draft agreement, reached over a furious exchange of faxes late Tuesday night, includes broader cultural cooperation and loans. It is expected to be finalized in the coming days. With the deal, the Getty will avoid a threatened cultural embargo due to be imposed today and will settle its long-standing dispute with Italy over the purchase of antiquities illegally excavated and smuggled out of the country.
The agreement marks the most significant victory yet for Italy's decade-long campaign to repatriate artifacts stolen from the country and bought by American museums. Earlier agreements with the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts included fewer important objects than the deal with the Getty, which has from the beginning been the most deeply implicated in Italian's investigation.
Wednesday, August 1, 2007 - 20:42
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Name of source: NYT
SOURCE: NYT (8-1-07)
Supreme Court justices guard their medical privacy fiercely, and Chief Justice Roberts has proved no exception. All that he authorized the court’s public information apparatus to disclose were the bare facts of the incident on Monday and his release from a Rockport, Me., hospital on Tuesday “to resume his vacation,” as Kathleen Arberg, the court spokeswoman, put it. No further information would be forthcoming, Ms. Arberg said.
The chief justice was following the model of his former boss and mentor, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who once described reporters as vultures for their interest in his treatment for dependency on a prescription pain reliever.
In the 11 months between his diagnosis of thyroid cancer and his death in September 2005, Chief Justice Rehnquist never confirmed that he had the anaplastic form of the disease, which, unlike the more common forms, is invariably fatal and usually kills within a year.
“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” he said when asked about his retirement plans some six weeks before his death.
The chief justice was following the model of his former boss and mentor, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who once described reporters as vultures for their interest in his treatment for dependency on a prescription pain reliever.
In the 11 months between his diagnosis of thyroid cancer and his death in September 2005, Chief Justice Rehnquist never confirmed that he had the anaplastic form of the disease, which, unlike the more common forms, is invariably fatal and usually kills within a year.
“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” he said when asked about his retirement plans some six weeks before his death.
Wednesday, August 1, 2007 - 20:39
SOURCE: NYT (8-1-07)
A 62-year-old sculpture of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima is getting the heave-ho from the museum on the aircraft carrier Intrepid while the ship is docked in Staten Island for an overhaul, museum officials and the sculpture’s owner said yesterday.
The five-ton sculpture, which served as a model for the United States Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Va., has been on display at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum since 1995. But museum officials, who are starting to renovate the ship’s interior, said they declined to buy the sculpture from its owner, Rodney Hilton Brown, and asked him to remove it from the ship by September.
Mr. Brown, a Manhattan mortgage banker who acquired the sculpture from its creator, Felix de Weldon, is now searching for another museum that will make space for the piece, which is 16 feet long and, with its flag, 20 feet high.
The five-ton sculpture, which served as a model for the United States Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Va., has been on display at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum since 1995. But museum officials, who are starting to renovate the ship’s interior, said they declined to buy the sculpture from its owner, Rodney Hilton Brown, and asked him to remove it from the ship by September.
Mr. Brown, a Manhattan mortgage banker who acquired the sculpture from its creator, Felix de Weldon, is now searching for another museum that will make space for the piece, which is 16 feet long and, with its flag, 20 feet high.
Wednesday, August 1, 2007 - 12:05
SOURCE: NYT (8-1-07)
Norma Gabler, a Texas homemaker who recoiled at material in her children’s textbooks and became the public face of a crusade with her husband to rid schoolbooks of content they considered antifamily, anti-American and anti-God, died on July 22 in Phoenix. She was 84....
From its origins at the Gablers’ kitchen table in Hawkins, Tex., in 1961 to its incorporation as Educational Research Analysts in 1973, the mom-and-pop textbook-criticism enterprise grew to occupy a prominent niche in the nation’s conservative pantheon. For more than four decades, the couple influenced what children read, not just in Texas but around the country....
The Gablers had a two-barreled strategy: in addition to pressing issues of ideology, interpretation and philosophy, the Gablers ferreted out errors of fact. In 2001, Time magazine reported that their “scroll of shame” of textbook mistakes since 1961 was 54 feet long. In the early 1990s, Texas fined publishers about $1 million for failing to remove hundreds of factual errors the Gablers had found in 11 history books.
An example: A textbook said that Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina had supported the tariff of 1816. He opposed it.
But the Gablers’ most important battles concerned bigger issues, like making publishers define marriage as a lifelong union between a man and a woman.
From its origins at the Gablers’ kitchen table in Hawkins, Tex., in 1961 to its incorporation as Educational Research Analysts in 1973, the mom-and-pop textbook-criticism enterprise grew to occupy a prominent niche in the nation’s conservative pantheon. For more than four decades, the couple influenced what children read, not just in Texas but around the country....
The Gablers had a two-barreled strategy: in addition to pressing issues of ideology, interpretation and philosophy, the Gablers ferreted out errors of fact. In 2001, Time magazine reported that their “scroll of shame” of textbook mistakes since 1961 was 54 feet long. In the early 1990s, Texas fined publishers about $1 million for failing to remove hundreds of factual errors the Gablers had found in 11 history books.
An example: A textbook said that Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina had supported the tariff of 1816. He opposed it.
But the Gablers’ most important battles concerned bigger issues, like making publishers define marriage as a lifelong union between a man and a woman.
Wednesday, August 1, 2007 - 12:03
Name of source: Chicago Tribune
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune (8-1-07)
The neighborhoods along Chicago's southern lakefront have been so thoroughly studied that sociologists sometimes confront each other, notebooks and tape recorders in hand, as if they were competing for choice territory....
Chicago's South Side is "the most studied place in the world," according to Howard Becker, one of the most influential of American sociologists. Pattillo's book, published this year, is the latest to explore the Black Belt, the area's historic name.
Not only do scholars trip over each other in the community, the titles of their books echo each other. Allan Spear's "Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920" released in 1967, was followed by Arnold Hirsch's "Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 1940-1960," published in 1998.
Chicago's South Side is "the most studied place in the world," according to Howard Becker, one of the most influential of American sociologists. Pattillo's book, published this year, is the latest to explore the Black Belt, the area's historic name.
Not only do scholars trip over each other in the community, the titles of their books echo each other. Allan Spear's "Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920" released in 1967, was followed by Arnold Hirsch's "Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 1940-1960," published in 1998.
Wednesday, August 1, 2007 - 13:37
Name of source: Monsters and Critics
SOURCE: Monsters and Critics (8-1-07)
Memorial ceremonies across Poland Wednesday marked the 63rd anniversary of the tragic Warsaw Uprising of Polish Home Army (AK) partisans against occupying Nazi German forces, bent on systematically destroying the Polish capital and its population during World War Two.
With Poland's post-war communist authorities bent on trivializing the Home Army's wartime drive for Polish sovereignty, the uprising was relegated to the margins of history until the demise of communism in 1989.
For over 40 years, the communist regime branded it a hopeless suicide mission which had been 'irresponsibly' ordered by Poland's wartime government-in-exile in Britain.
But in 2004, the 60th anniversary of the event finally saw the opening of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising Museum, a multi-media facility devoted to documenting one of the most dramatic episodes of Polish history.
Wednesday, August 1, 2007 - 12:30
Name of source: Hindustan Times (India)
SOURCE: Hindustan Times (India) (8-1-07)
Stung by the costly exercise of rescuing a draft article of Mahatma Gandhi from an auction, the government has decided to evolve a national policy on the acquisition and preservation of Gandhi manuscripts.
The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, in consultation with the Ahmedabad-based Navjeevan Trust - the sole custodian of all Gandhi manuscripts - is preparing a legal brief which will be sent to Indian missions abroad to help them acquire Gandhi's letters found in possession of collectors or individuals wanting to make a quick buck.
The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, in consultation with the Ahmedabad-based Navjeevan Trust - the sole custodian of all Gandhi manuscripts - is preparing a legal brief which will be sent to Indian missions abroad to help them acquire Gandhi's letters found in possession of collectors or individuals wanting to make a quick buck.
The legal brief will be sent after being vetted by the culture and justice ministries, Mridula Mukherjee, director of the NMML, told IANS in an interview.
The government is not just focussing on acquiring Gandhi's letters in private possession abroad, but will also have a national policy to ensure that Gandhi's letters are acquired from individuals without much fuss and possibly without paying anything, Mukherjee said.
The idea is to prevent the commercialisation of the Mahatma's letters and articles, she stressed.
Wednesday, August 1, 2007 - 12:26
