This page features brief excerpts of stories published by the mainstream
media and, less frequently, blogs, alternative media, and even obviously
biased sources. The excerpts are taken directly from the websites cited in
each source note. Quotation marks are not used.
Source: http://www.news.com.au
September 16, 2007
A SCHOOL in northern France was evacuated yesterday after a nine-year-old girl took a World War II handgrenade to show to the class.
Her teacher had asked students to bring an unusual object to school, according to deputy police chief Vincent Roberti.
The girl obliged, pulling a grenade her brother had found out of her bag.
The teacher "immediately reacted, putting the weapon in a plastic bag, taking it to the courtyard and warning the school principal
Source: ynetnews.com
September 11, 2007
An indictment was filed at the Tel Aviv District Court Tuesday against the eight youths arrested Sunday on suspicion of being members of a neo-Nazi cell in Petah Tivka. Three of the defendants are minors.
The eight are charged on counts of racially-motivated aggravated assault, conspiring to commit a crime, distributing inciting materials, possessing racist materials and weapons and issuing threats. State prosecutors have asked the court to extend the defendants' arrests until court
Source: ynetnews.com
September 15, 2007
While the country reels from the arrest of a neo-Nazi cell in central Israel, a vibrant underground trade of Holocaust-era items continues to thrive.
Bravery citations, identification papers, handguns, daggers, helmets and other wartime mementos belonging to Third Reich soldiers have all been the highlights of secretive auctions and private exchanges over the past 10 years.
An SS uniform can cost anywhere between $1,500- $10,000, medals and citations cost around $100-$2
Source: AP
September 17, 2007
Constitution Day is here and many teenagers know little about commemorating the document's signing.
A study being released Monday by a foundation that focuses on journalism and the First Amendment found that 51 percent of high school students questioned had not heard of the day when they are required by law to learn about the Constitution.
The occasion is usually observed on or around Sept. 17, the day the document was adopted in 1787.
Just one in 10 studen
Source: Telegraph (UK)
September 17, 2007
The rich history of Army uniforms will be celebrated in a new set of Royal Mail stamps to go on sale.
om the flamboyance of a 17th-century cavalryman to the familiar camouflage of the modern-day soldier, the set shows almost 350 years of Army history.
The stamps, which go on sale on Thursday, are the first in a series of three issues on a military theme. The Army set will be followed by RAF uniforms next year and Royal Navy uniforms in 2009.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
September 17, 2007
A decade ago, Republicans were vying to eliminate the Education Department, deriding it as a wasteful expansion of federal authority.
Today, they led a ceremony outside its headquarters here not only to celebrate the department, but to name the building after a trademark big-government Democrat: Lyndon Baines Johnson.
“Forty years ago,” Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said at the sun-splashed ceremony, describing her department’s humble beginnings, “Education was
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
September 14, 2007
It was good of God, a catty observer wrote more than a century ago, to marry Thomas and Jane Carlyle together, “and so make only two people miserable instead of four.”
That’s a famously unkind cut at two of the central figures of the Victorian era, prolific writers who captured the spirit of this time of burgeoning industrialism and empire in their many letters. But readers can now decide for themselves whether the Carlyles were shallow creeps or keen observers (or both) because Du
Source: Jeff Stein in Congressional Quarterly
September 14, 2007
No matter President Bush’s assurances of an “enduring relationship” with Iraq, it’s not soon to plan for a swift evacuation of Baghdad, says the CIA man at the center of the chaos when the Vietnam War ended three decades ago.
The swift retreat of the South Vietnamese Army in the face of an enemy offensive was as much of a surprise to American commanders in Saigon as a complete Iraq government collapse is unimaginable to U.S. leaders today, says Frank Snepp, who was the CIA’s top ana
Source: NYT
September 17, 2007
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — After white parents in this racially mixed city complained about school overcrowding, school authorities set out to draw up a sweeping rezoning plan. The results: all but a handful of the hundreds of students required to move this fall were black — and many were sent to virtually all-black, low-performing schools.
Black parents have been battling the rezoning for weeks, calling it resegregation. And in a new twist for an integration fight, they are wielding an unu
Source: NYT
September 10, 2007
A simple wooden cross hanging from his neck, the Rev. Rubén Capitanio sat before a microphone on Monday and did what few Argentine priests before him had dared to do: condemn the Roman Catholic Church for its complicity in the atrocities committed during Argentina’s “dirty war.”
“The attitude of the church was scandalously close to the dictatorship” that killed more than 15,000 Argentines and tortured tens of thousands more, the priest told a panel of three judges here, “to such an
Source: Telegraph (UK)
September 17, 2007
He was a young man, like so many others, who fell on the battlefield at Passchendaele. Aged just 29, Private Jack Hunter died in the arms of his younger brother, Jim, who buried him there, on the front line, in a shallow grave.
Once the guns had fallen silent, Jim returned to look for his brother's body, but the ground had been chewed up by artillery and he could find no trace. So the story remained, unfinished, when Jim himself died, aged 86 in 1977, calling to Jack with his final
Source: http://www.qciobserver.com
September 14, 2007
While scrambling around on Huxley Island doing an archeological survey in August, grad student Jenny Storey made an exciting discovery - a new cave under the roots of a blown down tree. Upon entering the cave she found an ancient stone knife blade lying on top of bare rock. "A drip of water coming down from the cave roof had washed away the dirt and exposed the knife blade," said Daryl Fedje, Parks Canada coastal archeologist and leader of a team working on a project to uncover evidenc
Source: Discovery Channel News
September 14, 2007
he ancient Egyptians were not the only ones to mummify their dead, according to a study in this month's Antiquity Journal that claims prehistoric Scottish people created mummies too.
The researchers do not think the Egyptians influenced the Scots, but that mummification arose independently in the two regions.
Source: http://www.smh.com.au
September 15, 2007
A CACHE of charcoal, stone tools and artefacts unearthed to make way for a high-rise apartment block has been found to be 30,000 years old, more than doubling the accepted age of Aboriginal settlement in Sydney.
The discovery, to be presented to an archaeological conference opening at the University of Sydney next weekend, was the result of a dig originally set up to search for signs of convict era occupation.
It is the oldest evidence yet found of humans occupying what
Source: http://www.timesofmalta.com
September 15, 2007
A series of tombs and silos, probably dating back to the Bronze Age and early Roman period, have been discovered on the site set to become the new US Embassy, in Ta' Qali.
A team of nine archaeologists and students have been working at the site since August in a bid to survey the area as thoroughly as possible because a number of the structures - which are in very bad shape - may now be buried again under the new pentagon-shaped compound that will house the new embassy.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
September 17, 2007
The proposed sale of a rare bronze statue, looted from Beijing by British and French soldiers in 1860, has run into powerful opposition from China, where there is rising anger over the millions of Chinese antiquities held by foreign museums and collectors.
The beautifully preserved bronze horse head, which originally adorned the summer residence of China's ancient emperors, will be the centrepiece of Sotheby's autumn auction in Hong Kong next month. It is expected to fetch up to £5
Source: AP
September 16, 2007
Deep in Shari Klages' memory is an image of herself as a girl in New Jersey, going into her parents' bedroom, pulling a thick leather-bound album from the top shelf of a closet and sitting down on the bed to leaf through it.
What she saw was page after page of ink-and-watercolor drawings that convey, with simple lines yet telling detail, the brutality of Dachau, the Nazi concentration camp where her father spent the last weeks of World War II. ...
Now, she finally want
Source: AFP
September 16, 2007
Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, for years an inscrutable seer on the economy, is causing a stir by alleging in his new memoir that "the Iraq war is largely about oil."
Greenspan, who as head of the US central bank was famous for his tight-lipped reserve, is uncharacteristically direct in "The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World," also accusing President George W. Bush of abandoning Republican principles on the economy.
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Source: NYT
September 15, 2007
Joe O’Donnell’s glowing legacy outlived him by less than a week. The man recalled by some as “The Presidential Photographer” with a knack for having a camera to his eye at just the right moment, became instead someone described as a fraud who hijacked some of the 20th century’s most famous images and claimed them as his own.
Mr. O’Donnell, a retired government photographer, died on Aug. 9 in Nashville at age 85. Obituaries published nationwide, including one in The New York Times on
Source: NYT
September 16, 2007
Oration and recitation, once staples of the American school system, have largely been phased out. Rhetoric programs at universities have narrowed, merged with communications departments, or been eliminated altogether.
“We don’t have that kind of oral culture anymore,” said Prof. James Engell, author of “The Committed Word: Literature and Public Values,” who teaches a rhetoric course at Harvard. “We are in a culture that devalues our sense of memory.” Back when John Quincy Adams was
