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: Times-Picayune (New Orleans)
February 1, 2007
Lesley Herrmann says there are a couple of ways to convince teens that school at the new Saturday Academy of American History at Karr High School in Algiers is a good idea.
"It looks very good on your resume," said Herrmann, executive director of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. "Also, it's a perk. The courses are very interesting and entertaining," covering material beyond the regular classroom.
Plus, there are no tests, grades or h
Source: NYT
February 1, 2007
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts has sold a painting by Thomas Eakins to help it buy another.
Yesterday it announced that it had sold “The Cello Player,” an 1896 portrait that it had owned since 1897 (and that until Sunday had been at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as part of the exhibition “Americans in Paris, 1860-1900”) to raise the money to pay for “The Gross Clinic,” a revered work the academy is buying with the Philadelphia Museum of Art from Thomas Jeffer
Source: Telegraph
February 1, 2007
A portrait of Adolf Hitler's foreign minister will remain hanging in the German embassy in London, the Berlin government has insisted.
It is defying calls to take down the picture, seen by critics to be "honouring a Nazi".
The Left party in Germany has campaigned for the removal of the oil painting of the convicted war criminal Konstantin Freiherr von Neurath, but the government rejected its motion in the Bundestag.
It said that the painting was a
Source: Mark Mardell's Europe Diary at the website of the BBC
February 1, 2007
There are too many freshly-cut flowers lying next to pictures of teenage boys in Kosovo.
On a hillside surrounded by snow-capped mountains, I am looking at the graves of those who died fighting for the Kosovo Liberation Army. A portrait of a young man in uniform is etched into the shiny marble head stone of each one, an Albanian flag flutters above every grave. The last person who lies here was killed only six years ago, the oldest grave is just 11 years old...
It was t
Source: New York Times
February 1, 2007
A federal judge abruptly adjourned a hearing yesterday on the settlement of a dispute over unpaid life insurance policies of Holocaust victims after a Miami lawyer and a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp raised objections.
Judge George B. Daniels of Federal District Court in Manhattan gave no explanation for ending the session that he had convened to determine the fairness of a settlement in which an Italian insurance company agreed to provide several million dollars to Holocaus
Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch
February 1, 2007
The General Assembly would express "profound regret" for Virginia's role in slavery and for "historic wrongs visited upon native peoples" in the latest version of a proposed apology that cleared a House panel yesterday...
The committee accepted a substitute...which calls for the assembly to express "its profound regret for the commonwealth's role in sanctioning the immoral institution of human slavery, in the historic wrongs visited upon native peoples, and
Source: AP
February 1, 2007
Large steel columns from the fallen twin towers have been found beneath a service road being excavated at ground zero in the search for long-buried Sept. 11 remains, officials said Wednesday.
The surprising discovery of World Trade Center steel in the past week raises more questions about what was left at ground zero in the cleanup after the 2001 attacks and how the service road was created in the first place.
The steel, found during a dig for human remains that has yie
Source: BBC News
January 28, 2007
Khaled Mahameed admits his museum, in Nazareth in northern Israel, is small. But he believes it is unique.
According to Mr Mahameed, it is the first and only Arab run centre for promoting the study of the Holocaust.
The museum contains a collection of just 60 photographs depicting the genocide with Arabic captions explaining the scenes. The pictures were purchased from Yad Vashem - the Israeli national Holocaust memorial.
Mr Mahameed firmly believes that it
Source: Times (of London)
February 1, 2007
BEIJING -- China has accused Taiwan of trying to promote independence by rewriting its history textbooks.
The revised books for secondary school students will cease to refer to the mainland, or “our country” or “this country” and substitute the word China, emphasising the view that the island is not a part of China.
Yang Yi, the spokesman for China’s policymaking Taiwan Affairs Office, accused Taipei of playing tricks and insisted that Taiwan remained an inseparable par
Source: AFP
February 1, 2007
PARIS -- France has submitted 14 citadels and fortifications built by Marshal Vauban, the 17th-century military engineer, for a place on Unesco’s list of World Heritage sites [to mark the tricentenary of his death]...
The 14 sites include the French port city of Saint-Malo and its fortifications, left; a royal fort on the Brittany island of Belle Île, renovated by Vauban in 1689; the citadel in the eastern town of Besançon; and a mountain fort in southeastern Briançon.
Source: Telegraph
February 1, 2007
CAPE COAST, Ghana -- Under the battlements ringing Cape Coast Castle, Britain's former colonial seat in Ghana, a guide showed two dozen schoolgirls the underground passage linking the slave dungeons to the Door of No Return.
Until Britain led the world in outlawing the transatlantic slave trade 200 years ago next month, countless Africans shuffled through here to cramped ships waiting beyond the pounding surf.
But hundreds of Ghanaian girls the same age as those on thei
Source: Washington Post
February 1, 2007
QATIF, Saudi Arabia -- Fawzia al-Hani dropped her black veil over her face and wept softly on Sunday, enveloping herself in the sadness of the last days of Imam Hussein, grandson of the prophet Muhammad and Shiite Islam's most tragic and revered martyr.
The women in the packed community center commemorating Ashura, the anniversary of Hussein's death in A.D. 680, watched on a projection screen as a turbaned cleric described how Hussein set out with a small band of family and follower
Source: WaPo
January 31, 2007
Deep in the Pomeranian forest, hidden among the groves of scraggly pine and birch, the World War II bomb squad is hard at work.
The flatlands of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, a sparsely populated state that covers northeastern Germany, are still littered with thousands of tons of unexploded ordnance from the Nazi era. There are cluster bombs, mortar shells, hand grenades, rockets. Most were manufactured and abandoned by the Third Reich, but there are also plenty of aging but still
Source: WaPo
January 31, 2007
As Neil Armstrong prepared to take his "one small step" onto the moon in July 1969, a specially hardened video camera tucked into the lander's door clicked on to capture that first human contact with the lunar surface. The ghostly images of the astronaut's boot touching the soil record what may be the most iconic moment in NASA history, and a major milestone for mankind.
Millions of television viewers around the world saw those fuzzy, moving images and were amazed, even me
Source: Stone Pages
January 29, 2007
A Swiss-led team of archaeologists has discovered pieces of the oldest African pottery in central Mali, dating back to at least 9,400 BCE. The sensational find by Geneva University's Eric Huysecom and his international research team, at Ounjougou near the Unesco-listed Bandiagara cliffs, reveals important information about man's interaction with nature. The age of the sediment in which they were found suggests that the six ceramic fragments - discovered between 2002 and 2005 - are at least 11,40
Source: BBC
January 31, 2007
Taiwan has defended changes to new history textbooks which have been strongly criticised by rival China and some opposition lawmakers in Taiwan. Taiwan's prime minister is the latest official to weigh in on this controversy.Su Tseng Chang has strongly defending changes to the high school history textbooks and backing his education minister.
During the weekly cabinet meeting, he said students should be taught about their own country and their history.
Source: Washington Post
January 27, 2007
MOSCOW -- Into one of the most sordid episodes in Russian literary history, the Soviets' persecution of Boris Pasternak, author of "Doctor Zhivago," a Russian historian has injected a belated piece of intrigue: the CIA as covert financier of a Russian-language edition of the epic novel.
Ivan Tolstoy, who is also a broadcaster for Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, writes in a forthcoming book that the CIA secretly arranged for the publication of a limited Russian-languag
Source: AP
January 31, 2007
NORFOLK, Va. -- A cargo tag that traveled 3,000 miles from England to America's first permanent English settlement nearly four centuries ago is about to take a much longer journey: [about 4 million miles] into space.
The tag will fly aboard the space shuttle Atlantis, scheduled for launch March 15, NASA announced Wednesday. After the mission, NASA will return the tag to Historic Jamestowne for display in its new archaeological museum.
The voyage honors one of the first
Source: USA Today
January 31, 2007
The discovery of a large, prehistoric settlement 2 miles from Stonehenge suggests that the famous stone rings were an ancient memorial, not a Stone Age observatory, archaeologists said Tuesday.
A community of hundreds of people lived there about 2500 B.C., during the time Stonehenge was erected, say the scientists, led by Mike Parker Pearson of the United Kingdom's Sheffield University. Inhabitants most likely raised Stonehenge as a monument to their dead, who were buried there cere
Source: AP
January 31, 2007
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. -- Some of Bill Clinton's friends and family remember the Arkansas native as a charismatic boy destined for greatness, while others recall him as a shy youth who played the clarinet.
Such first impressions are among the text of 28 interviews documenting the former president's early years in Hope and Hot Springs as part of a project that aims to make Clinton the most documented president ever.
The interviews were released Tuesday by the Pryor Center for
