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: AP
October 31, 2006
P.W. Botha, the apartheid-era president who led South Africa through its worst racial violence and deepest international isolation, died Tuesday. He was 90.
Botha died at his home on the southern Cape coast at 8 p.m., according to the South African Press Association. "Botha died at home, peacefully," Capt. Frikkie Lucas was quoted as saying.
The African National Congress issued a statement expressing condolences and wishing his family "strength and comf
Source: AP
October 31, 2006
The Headless Horseman and Ichabod Crane returned to Sleepy Hollow for Halloween, and this time they won't disappear afterward into the mists of legend.
Just in time to frighten young trick-or-treaters, an 18-foot-high steel sculpture of the Horseman and his gangly patsy was erected Tuesday alongside Route 9, not far from the grave of Washington Irving, author of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow."
A cheer rose from a crowd of about 50 as the rust-colored structur
Source: AP
October 31, 2006
The Foreign Legion isn't what it used to be. Murderers on the run are no longer welcome, and unhappy recruits have a year to back out without being branded deserters.
These days a bigger issue faces the 175-year-old force that made its name fighting France's overseas battles in jungle and desert. Its key role -- to be a crack professional force available for rapid, no-questions-asked deployment in far-flung conflicts -- has all but evaporated.
In campaigns from Algeri
Source: AP
October 31, 2006
An unpublished sonnet that Sylvia Plath wrote in college while pondering themes in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel "The Great Gatsby" will appear Wednesday in a Virginia online literary journal.
Plath, who committed suicide in 1963 at age 30, wrote "Ennui" in 1955 in her senior year at Smith College, said Anna Journey, a graduate student in creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University. While researching Plath archives at Indiana University, Journey discovered
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 31, 2006
In the 18th century, porcelain was so coveted by Europeans that they called it "white gold". Not much has changed. A porcelain lion and lioness are expected to smash the world record for Meissen when they are sold at Christie's in December.
Though the beasts, made in the 1730s, are chipped, suffer from cracks and have a slightly haughty air, Rodney Woolley, Christie's top ceramics expert, has valued them at up to £5 million — £1.5 million above the previous record price f
Source: International Herald Tribune
October 29, 2006
Democrats have spent three decades trying to exorcise the ghost of Senator George McGovern, whose unsuccessful 1972 presidential campaign calling for a withdrawal from Vietnam crystallized his party's image as soft on national defense.
But surveying the midterm elections last week, McGovern, 84, said he sees an opportunity for an anti-war campaign in the 2008 presidential race. "I would love to be running again if I were 25 years younger," he said in an interview from his Montan
Source: WaPo
October 31, 2006
It could be the perfect Halloween treat -- or trick -- for that person who
already has everything else: a gallows.
About to be auctioned is the gallows that was built to hang anarchist
labor organizers convicted in the Haymarket Affair in the late 19th
century. It continued to be used for decades to hang some of Chicago's
most infamous criminals.
Since 1977 the gallows has stood in a Wild West theme park run by two
history-buff brothers in small-town Union, Ill. Before that it h
Source: Reuters
October 29, 2006
Thousands of Buddhists gathered in India's western city
of Mumbai on Sunday to lay to rest part of the ashes and bones of Lord
Buddha in a ceremony resurrected after almost 2000 years.
Monks in flowing orange robes chanted hymns from scriptures as the remains
were lowered into a shallow pit on top of a 90-ft (27 metres) high stone
dome, as part of celebrations to mark the 2250th anniversary of the
spiritual leader's enlightenment.
Organisers of the ceremony said this was the fir
Source: Reuters
October 30, 2006
BEAUFORT, North Carolina (Reuters) - Nearly three centuries ago, the
notorious pirate Blackbeard ran aground in his ship, the Queen Anne's
Revenge, off what is now a North Carolina beach town.
This month, a crew of 13 heads out to sea each day, hoping for
clear-enough weather to dive the 20 to 25 feet (6 to 7.5 metres) to the
ocean bottom to excavate what they believe is Blackbeard's ship.
The team has found cannons, a bell, lead shot of all sizes, gold dust,
pewter cups and med
Source: CBS Evening News
October 30, 2006
At the hilltop presidential library where Ronald Reagan is buried and his life is on display, his widow, Nancy Reagan, and political luminaries gathered on Monday to celebrate the beginning.
As CBS News correspondent Jerry Bowen reports, 40 years ago Monday, Reagan was elected governor of California.
"When Ronald Reagan was elected governor, he blew everybody's expectations of him losing out of the water," says historian Douglas Brinkley, a CBS News consulta
Source: NEH (July/Aug. 2006)
October 30, 2006
The first known depiction of a human face in stone . . . A vase documenting the daily tasks that defined activity as people built a future in the Fertile Crescent . . . Towering walls that heralded the end of rootless wanderings and the beginning of urban society . . . They have all come from sites in what we now call Iraq, and they are irreplaceable evidence of our species' cultural evolution.
The locations--Uruk and Ur--that gave birth to these treasures are in peril. The cradle o
Source: From an excerpt from Out of Iraq, by George McGovern and William Polk
October 30, 2006
Some American facilities have done enormous and irreparable damage. Astonishingly,
one American camp was built on top of the Babylon archaeological site, where American troops
flattened and compressed ancient ruins in order to create a helicopter pad and fueling stations.
Soldiers filled sandbags with archaeological fragments and dug trenches through unexcavated areas
while tanks crushed 2,600-year-old pavements. Babylon was not the only casualty. The 5,000-year-
old site at Kish was a
Source: LAT
October 26, 2006
QUEEN VICTORIA would not have been amused. The recent revival of Victoriana as hip Hollywood décor — fainting chaises, nailhead-studded wing chairs, carved spider-leg and hoof-foot tables and vintage taxidermy — would have sent the prudish monarch scrambling for smelling salts. They are the kind of parlor pieces that would make Morticia Addams and cartoon Goth tween Emily the Strange feel right at home. When we say stuffed animals, we don't mean the kind at Build-A-Bear.
What is old
Source: MSNBC
October 30, 2006
Today, it sounds like a spring-break splurge on the order of "Girls Gone Wild": Drink huge quantities of beer, get wasted, indulge in gratuitous sex and pass out — then wake up the next morning with the music blaring and your friends praying that everything will turn out all right.
But back in 1470 B.C., this was the agenda for one of ancient Egypt's most raucous rituals, the "festival of drunkenness," which celebrated nothing less than the salvation of humanity.
Source: Times Online (UK)
October 30, 2006
HE WAS awkward, absent-minded and had no head for business, according to his obituary in The Times. But today Adam Smith will have his reputation fixed as the father of modern economics as he becomes the latest historical figure to appear on the £20 note.
Smith, who died in 1790, having lived out his days as a quiet Customs official with his mother, will become the first Scotsman to appear on a Bank of England note when he replaces Edward Elgar next spring.
Source: AP
October 28, 2006
Eighty years after his death, the name Harry Houdini remains synonymous with escape under the most dire circumstances. But Houdini, the immigrants' son whose death-defying career made him one of the world's biggest stars, was more than a mere entertainer.
A new biography of the legendary performer suggests that Houdini worked as a spy for Scotland Yard, monitored Russian anarchists and chased counterfeiters for the U.S. Secret Service — all before he was possibly murdered.
Source: Times Online (UK)
October 28, 2006
WILLIAM LINDESAY, the Briton who in 1987 became the first foreigner to run the length of the Great Wall of China, is putting the finishing touches to an almost equally ambitious project.
His exhibition of photographs of the Great Wall at the Beijing Capital Museum in January, titled Great Wall Revisited, will show the changes wrought in the past century by Man and Nature.
Source: BBC
October 27, 2006
A Mozart opera cancelled for fears of protests over depicting the beheading of Muhammad is go ahead in Berlin.
The Deutsche Oper in the German capital said the production of Idomeneo will be staged after it received a new security assessment from the police.
Four performances of the opera were dropped in September after the risks of staging it were deemed "incalculable".
The decision, taken in the wake of the Danish Muhammad cartoons row, spa
Source: Monterey Herald
October 27, 2006
Monterey Mayor Dan Albert announced Friday morning the city is offering a $5,000 reward for the return of the Dennis the Menace statue.
Albert and other city officials gathered at the site of Dennis the Menace Park on Friday to issue the announcement. Park workers discovered that the statue, which is valued at up to $30,000, was missing Thursday morning.
Source: Reuters
October 27, 2006
Thirty years ago Jorge Julio Lopez was kidnapped and tortured under Argentina's dictatorship. Last month he vanished again at the end of a human rights trial in which he was a key witness, and the government's efforts to find him have turned up little.
Lopez testified in the case against former police commissioner Miguel Etchecolatz, who was sentenced to life in prison in September for crimes committed during Argentina's 1976-1983 "dirty war."
His disappearanc
