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: Independent Online (South Africa)
July 25, 2007
President Vladimir Putin said no one should try to make Russia feel guilty about one of the most notorious episodes of the Stalinist era -the so-called Great Purge of 1937 - saying that "in other countries even worse things happened."Speaking at a televised meeting on Thursday with social studies teachers, Putin noted that 2007 is the 70th anniversary of a year that many Russians regard as a synonym for state-sponsored terror. It is an anniversary that has, however
Source: Newsweek
July 30, 2007
Dick Cheney may be a taciturn man, writes author Stephen F. Hayes, but the vice president can become animated discussing doomsday scenarios. In his new biography, "Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President" (578 pages. HarperCollins. $27.95), Hayes tells the story of the Cheney family, sitting around their new big-screen TV in Jackson Hole, Wyo., on a recent Fourth of July, watching the 1997 movie "The Peacemaker." Starring George Cl
Source: NYT
July 25, 2007
When Portuguese television viewers recently voted the former dictator António de Oliveira Salazar “the greatest Portuguese who ever lived” — passing over the most celebrated kings, poets and explorers in the nation’s thousand-year history — the broadcaster RTP braced itself for a strong reaction. But what ensued resembled a national identity crisis.
First the left howled in protest, demanding to know how a man who had sent his enemies to concentration camps in Africa could be revere
Source: NYT
July 25, 2007
Almost half the nation’s school districts have significantly decreased the daily class time spent on subjects like science, art and history as a result of the federal No Child Left Behind law’s focus on annual tests in reading and math, according to a new report released yesterday.
The report, by the Center on Education Policy, a Washington group that studies the law’s implementation in school districts nationwide, said that about 44 percent of districts have cut time from one or mo
Source: Alexander Solzhenitsyn interview published in the NYT
July 23, 2007
[Question]: Thirteen years ago when you returned from exile, you were disappointed to see the new Russia. You turned down a prize proposed by Gorbachev, and you also refused to accept an award Yeltsin wanted to give you. Yet now you have accepted the State Prize which was awarded to you by Putin, the former head of the FSB intelligence agency, whose predecessor the KGB persecuted and denounced you so cruelly. How does this all fit together?
Solzhenitsyn: The prize in 1990 was propos
Source: NYT
July 25, 2007
After more than two years of public tumult, the University of Colorado Board of Regents voted Tuesday to fire a professor whose remarks about the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks led to a national debate on free speech. But it was the professor’s problems with scholarship that the board cited as the cause for his termination.
The professor, Ward L. Churchill, was dismissed on the ground that he had committed academic misconduct by plagiarizing and falsifying parts of his scholarly re
Source: AP
July 23, 2007
Trees and grasses like those that members of the Chickasaw and Choctaw nations saw when they stopped along a stretch of Coleman Creek may soon grow again at the site where the Indians rested during the Trail of Tears relocation.
The University of Arkansas at Little Rock on Thursday started tearing down buildings on the five-acre site on the southeastern border of its campus. The buildings, including a former restaurant with pilings driven into the creek, are in the waterway's flood
Source: LiveScience
July 23, 2007
The Dark Ages had a few more proverbial light bulbs on than once thought, at least when it came to issues of the body.
People living in Europe during early Medieval times (400—1200 A.D.) actually had a progressive view of illness because disease was so common and out in the open, according to the research presented at a recent historical conference.
Instead of being isolated or shunned, the sick were integrated into society and taken care of by the community, the eviden
Source: AP
July 24, 2007
Mark Twain had hoped that a president or two might visit his gothic Victorian home in Hartford someday.
On Tuesday, he got his belated wish _ almost.
First lady Laura Bush, a personal fan of Twain's writings, took a private tour of the home. She is the only first lady to visit the house, according to the Mark Twain Home & Museum officials. No president has yet toured the rooms, designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany.
"It's a real big deal for us. It'
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 25, 2007
Inauspiciously, the first day of [Tony Blair's] trip [to the Middle East] marked the anniversary of the "saddest day in Jewish history'' - the Tisha Be'av commemoration of the destruction of the temples of Solomon and Herod in Jerusalem. This unfortunate coincidence should remind Mr Blair that history will stalk him every step of the way - and not always ancient history.
Sixty years ago, the use of the King David by the British colonial government of what was then called Palest
Source: http://www.freep.com
July 23, 2007
Michigan schools don't spend a substantial amount of time on the riot. Some may not cover it at all.
"There isn't anything that mandates it," said David Hales, a social studies consultant with the Wayne Regional Educational Service Agency.
State standards for social studies allow plenty of opportunities for coverage of the civil rights movement, but they don't specifically mention either civil rights or the Detroit riot. Proposed new standards do, suggesting i
Source: AP
July 24, 2007
Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn has
accused the West of trying to ignore and sideline
Russia.
The 88-year old author, who documented the murderous
Soviet prison camp system based on his own seven-year
experience as a prisoner of the gulag, said the
Western criticism of Russia was often unfair,
according to an interview with Der Spiegel magazine
republished Tuesday in the Russian daily Izvestia.
"Of course, Russia is not a democratic country yet. It
is only starting to bu
Source: Jewish Community Alliance of Maine
July 23, 2007
Israel's Education Ministry says it is offering a new textbook for Arab third-graders acknowledging for the first time that the creation of the Jewish state was a tragedy for Palestinians.The textbooks for the upcoming school year give the Jewish narrative of the events of 1948 and 1949 when Israel's creation drew an invasion by Arab armies in a conflict that displaced some 700,000 Palestinians. They point out Jews' historical connection to the Holy Land and their need for a
Source: caboodle.hu
July 24, 2007
Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány has asked historian János Kenedi to lead a seven member panel to draw up a list of secret service documents not yet transferred to the State Security Services Historical Archives. "The team will make recommendations on improving the conditions of accessing former state security documents for research and making them public," government spokesman Dávid Daróczi announced yesterday.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
July 23, 2007
Now, like a sixth grader caught scribbling “BU + GWB” in a notebook, Baylor officials will apparently be forced to confess their daydreams [of hosting the Bush library] in public. A Texas judge on Monday instructed the university to answer questions about whether it believes its library proposal is a dead letter, the Dallas Morning News reported today.
The unusual ruling arose in a lawsuit filed against SMU by Gary Vodicka, a Dallas resident who asserts that the university improperl
Source: Salon
July 23, 2007
By late last week, the fight between the Bush White House and Congress over the firings of nine U.S. attorneys seemed to be leading toward possible contempt charges for some former administration officials. The Bush administration had previously asserted executive privilege over certain documents and witnesses sought by Congress in its investigation of the firings, even directing former White House counsel Harriet Miers to disobey a subpoena ordering her to appear before Congress. Democratic leg
Source: Denver Post
July 24, 2007
Sen. Ken Salazar played a key role in a nasty partisan spat on the Senate floor. So nasty that Senate leaders have rewritten history to get rid of it. The Senate purged from the Congressional Record a vote taken on legislation from Salazar, an amendment stating the Senate's opposition to President Bush pardoning Lewis "Scooter" Libby. The Senate defeated that amendment 47-49. But there's no official record that vote ever occurred.
That's fine with Sala
Source: WaPo
July 23, 2007
Domestication of food and fiber plants in the New World — as well as the emergence of communities built around farming — appears to have occurred earlier than previously believed.Researchers from four institutions, including the Agriculture Department, reported in the journal Science that they have determined certain cultivated plant material from northern Peru to be 9,240 years old.
The researchers, led by Vanderbilt University anthropologist Tom Dillehay, date
Source: Der Spiegel
July 24, 2007
A forgotten monument to Hitler's ideology has emerged from a 70-year time warp -- a castle built in the 1930s to train a new Nazi elite. Vacated by the Belgian army last year, it sheds light on the systematic brainwashing that churned out a generation of fanatics. Now it's being spruced up to teach visitors about the perils of indoctrination.Deep in the Eifel region of western Germany, a stone-clad reminder of Hitler's racist ideology towers above the surrounding wooded hill
Source: NYT
July 23, 2007
ANDERSEN AIR FORCE BASE, Guam — To take part in its annual exercises with the United States Air Force here last month, Japan practiced dropping 500-pound live bombs on Farallon de Medinilla, a tiny island in the western Pacific’s turquoise waters more than 150 miles north of here....
“The level of tension was just different,” said Capt. Tetsuya Nagata, 35, stepping down from his cockpit onto the sunbaked tarmac.
The exercise would have been unremarkable for almost any o
