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: CanWest News Service
November 6, 2006
The Canadian government had detailed lists of political activists and subversives it planned to arrest in the aftermath of a nuclear war or other national emergency, keeping such plans on the books until at least the early 1980s, according to new records obtained by an Ottawa historian.Anywhere from 700 to 2,500 people, including babies, would have been held in internment camps before being shipped off to more permanent detention facilities.
Cold War historian J
Source: NYT
November 5, 2006
Spain has sometimes been slow to recognize its own treasures. Miguel de Cervantes was slipping into obscurity after his death until he was rescued by foreign critics. El Greco’s paintings were pulled from oblivion by the French. The Muslim palace of Alhambra had fallen into neglect before the American author Washington Irving and others wrote about it in the 1800s.
Now, 500 years after expelling its Jews and moving to hide if not eradicate all traces of their existence, Spain has be
Source: Washington Times
November 2, 2006
[I]n spite of Americans' tendency to zip by them, historical road markers are making a comeback, thanks in part to new state programs that have reinvigorated an old genre.
New, more detailed, markers are filled with tales of ordinary people doing extraordinary things, and the organizations behind them want to ensure that their groups get recognized for their contributions to our collective history.
"We want to tell more of the story," says Scott Arno
Source: NYT
November 5, 2006
TEHRAN, Nov. 4 — Every year on this day, rallies in Tehran and around the country mark the anniversary of the takeover of the United States Embassy here in 1979. This year, with Iran’s fiery president at odds with the United States over the country’s nuclear program, is certainly no exception.
But it has been a long time since the three former student leaders who organized the takeover — and who became reformist politicians — have participated.
In a recent interview, on
Source: NYT
November 5, 2006
They inhabit distant points on the political spectrum. But in one sense, privileged family pedigree, President George W. Bush and Ned Lamont, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Connecticut, could not be more alike.
For starters, their forebears were inducted into America’s ruling class at roughly the same time and place: Wall Street during the waning days of the robber barons a century ago.
Over the subsequent decades, the two families co-existed in strikingly simil
Source: Newsweek
November 6, 2006
his week, the 200-year-old neoclassical Baltimore Basilica will reopen its weighty oak doors after a two-year, $32 million face-lift. The restoration of America's first Roman Catholic cathedral is a triumph for preservationists, both for its history and design: it's considered the masterpiece of architect Benjamin Latrobe, best known for his work on the U.S. Capitol. After a dingy decline, the Basilica's lofty interior has been refashioned according to Latrobe's elegantly simple intentions, espe
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
November 3, 2006
Bad Arolsen, Germany -- The largest archive of Nazi files is supposed to provide documentation to former World War II slave laborers so they can qualify for compensation. Hope that the victims would benefit in their lifetimes was raised earlier this year when 11 nations, including Germany, Israel and the United States, agreed to make the archives more widely available.
But critics say the process remains so slow that tens of thousands -- now in their 80s and 90s -- will never see a
Source: AP
November 3, 2006
For Emily Dickinson, death was never too far from the imagination. The topic fueled her writing, making for some of the most memorable lyrics in American poetry.
Now, death is posing a bit of a puzzle for the caretakers of her homestead.
While making improvements to the grounds of the Emily Dickinson Museum on Halloween, workers unearthed the gravestone of one of the poet's relatives.
But exactly what Gen. Thomas Gilbert's headstone was doing under 18 inche
Source: Scotsman.com
November 3, 2006
TOURISTS exploring Britain's ancient spiritual heritage are better off visiting Scotland's stone circles than "noisy, overcrowded" Stonehenge, according to research by the National Geographic Traveller.
In a survey of the world's best-known heritage sites, the magazine described the famous Megalithic attraction in the south-west of England as a "mess", lacking "charm and magic".
Instead, the magazine recommends the unspoilt stone circles
Source: AP
November 2, 2006
Conservators trying to restore a 1,900-year-old statue of Venus have put their heads together with airline maintenance inspectors who usually scrutinize welds and repairs in jet engines for any cracks.
Officials at the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University this summer bought the Roman marble statue and its head, which had broken off sometime in the past 170 years.
On Thursday, they enlisted the help of Delta Air Lines inspectors at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Inte
Source: Independent (UK)
November 3, 2006
One hundred years ago today, on 3 November 1906, Alois Alzheimer, psychiatrist and pathologist, presented the first case of the disease that later came to bear his name in Tubingen Germany. The patient, Auguste D, developed dementia in her 50s and was so restless and confused that doctors prescribed balneotherapy - day long immersion in a lukewarm bath - to soothe her. When she was at her worst they knocked her out with chloroform.
Today, treatment has changed, but little else. Alzh
Source: Robert Schmuhl in the CS Monitor
November 2, 2006
[Robert Schmuhl is a professor of American studies and journalism at the University of Notre Dame. His collection of essays, "In So Many Words: Arguments and Adventures," has just been published.]
Following the ins and outs of this year's midterm elections can make a voter feel trapped in a time warp.
Parallels to 1994 abound with great frequency: dissatisfaction with one-party control in Washington, anemic approval marks for Congress and the president, naggi
Source: NYT
November 3, 2006
For all his exultation in fleeing slavery to New York on the Underground Railroad, Frederick Douglass recalled how formidable the city soon seemed. “The loneliness overcame me,” he wrote of his first perch upon liberty in 1838, before he blazed into history as the articulator of African-Americans’ determination to shuck slavery. “There I was in the midst of thousands, and yet a perfect stranger,” Douglass recorded of his early glimpse of New Yorkers. “I dared not to unfold to any of them my sad
Source: NYT
November 1, 2006
WHEN Joan Hotson turned 65, she says, each of her five daughters began angling to inherit The Book.
They knew it wasn’t going to happen any time soon, but they were quite determined,” Ms. Hotson said. The object of their interest was a long out-of-print cookbook, “Pillsbury’s Best 1000 Recipes: Best of the Bake-Off Collection,” published in 1959. Ms. Hotson received her copy, including recipes for Chocolate Pixie Cookies and Orange Kiss-Me Cake, as a wedding present in 1962.
Source: Independent (UK)
November 2, 2006
He was the man who helped win the Battle of Britain and whose invention went on to lay the foundations for a host of modern life-saving technologies. Yet more than 30 years after his death, Sir Robert Watson-Watt, the father of radar, is almost forgotten - one of the great unsung heroes of the Second World War.
Now, an international fundraising appeal has been launched to commemorate his achievements. The recently formed Watson-Watt Society wants to raise £50,000 to build a memoria
Source: Times Online (UK)
November 2, 2006
The ashes of the child conceived aboard the Titanic by a runaway couple, whose romance inspired the blockbuster film, have been scattered on to the Atlantic.
Yesterday the crew of a new Tamar Class lifeboat off Padstow, Cornwall, scattered the remains of Ellen Walker, who died, aged 92, in October last year.
The tragic story of the love affair between her parents, Henry Morley, 37, a married Worcester shopkeeper, and Katy Phillips, a 19-year-old shop assistant, is tho
Source: AP
November 1, 2006
The Stardust, the neon-wrapped casino with a mobbed-up past whose 1,065 rooms once set the standard for size on the Las Vegas Strip, witnessed its last roll of the dice Wednesday.
Wistful longtime employees and loyal gamblers gathered for a last farewell to the iconic 48-year-old institution, which is to be razed early next year to make way for Boyd Gaming Corp.'s planned $4 billion Echelon Place resort.
Source: Hartford Courant
November 1, 2006
Researching the travels of the French army through Connecticut during the American Revolution, historian Mary M. Donohue assumed that, in all likelihood, any physical evidence of the exact route was exceedingly scarce, if not lost to the ages. Likewise, finding tangible evidence of the campsites and taverns where soldiers and officers spent their nights seemed unlikely.
"I think there was some feeling on our part that, well, a lot has happened in 225 years; `I can't imagine we
Source: Discovery Channel
November 3, 2006
Leonardo da Vinci may have had an Arab heritage, according to Italian researchers who have isolated and reconstructed the Renaissance master's fingerprint. The fingerprint represents the only biological trace of the Florentine genius, said Luigi Capasso, an anthropologist at Chieti University. "It is actually the first evidence of Leonardo's corporeality," Capasso told Discovery News. Indeed, nothing is left of the painter, engineer, mathematician, philosopher and
Source: NYT
November 1, 2006
Harry Houdini is still dead and still not talking. Efforts to reach him yesterday failed.
The expectations were not terribly high at an annual séance held on Halloween, the day on which Houdini died in 1926. Teller, the quieter half of Penn and Teller, showed up, saying, “I’d be stunned if Houdini showed up, and so would he.”
So the question was whether Houdini — the master escape artist, the man who could slip out of handcuffs and arise from tomblike burials — would es
