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 27, 2006
Records the Freedmen's Bureau used to reconnect families — from battered work contracts to bank forms — will be placed online in part of a new project linking modern-day blacks with their ancestors.
The Virginia Freedmen Project plans to digitize more than 200,000 images collected by the Richmond bureau, one of dozens of offices established throughout the South to help former slaves adjust to free life.
Gov. Timothy M. Kaine on Thursday unveiled the project and a state
Source: Yale Daily
October 30, 2006
While a Brown University committee recently completed a report detailing the University's historical ties to slavery, Yale has not focused significant attention on its own ties since 2002, when the law school and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition teamed up on a conference entitled "Yale, New Haven and American Slavery." While Yale has no current plans to undertake a report similar to Brown's, some professors and students said they think the Un
Source: Independent (UK)
October 27, 2006
Fifteen years after the first Gulf War, and three years after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, a UN commission is still paying out hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation to the victims of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
The latest payments, totalling $417.8m (£220m), were made yesterday to governments and oil companies for losses and damages stemming from the Kuwaiti occupation, bringing the total paid out to more than $21bn (£11bn). The total claims that have been approved
Source: AP
October 26, 2006
Dodge City has a rich history as an Old West frontier town, where cowboys and gunslingers could take a break from the trail and get their fill of saloons and brothels.
Today, the tidy town built on meatpacking and rodeos is again plagued by gunfighters. But this time they're in street gangs, some of which have second-generation members as young as 11. The drug of choice is methamphetamine and the weapons range from automatic rifles to baseball bats.
"When it was
Source: Independent (UK)
October 27, 2006
Plans for a major German exhibition documenting the way the Nazis used trains to send thousands of Jewish children to the gas chambers have been blocked by the head of the state-owned rail network. That has provoked a furious row with Chancellor Angela Merkel's government.
The exhibition, "11,000 Jewish children - with the Reichsbahn to death", was conceived by the German Nazi-hunter Beate Klarsfeld. It has already been shown at railway stations through France where its d
Source: AP
October 26, 2006
Secret documents released Friday showed that British authorities lied to cover up the fate of a naval commander who died during a scuba diving spy mission near a warship used by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
Cdr. Lionel "Buster" Crabb, a decorated Royal Navy veteran, disappeared while diving near Portsmouth in southern England on April 19, 1956. Navy chiefs said Crabb was presumed dead after failing to return from a dive to test underwater equipment.
The
Source: UPI
October 27, 2006
A massive geological survey by the Chinese government is expected to answer a 500-year-old question -- the exact length of the Great Wall of China.
China's Administration of Cultural Heritage and its Bureau of Surveying and Mapping are organizing a scientific survey to discover everything they can about the Great Wall, the Xinhua state news agency reports.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 27, 2006
A soldier who survived the Charge of the Light Brigade but died in poverty to be buried in a pauper's grave was honoured yesterday in a -ceremony attended by his modern-day Army regiment.
Thomas Warr was with the 11th Hussars when he was one of the noble 600 who charged the Russian guns in Crimea in 1854.
He remained in the Army for a further six years before returning to his home town, Dorchester, where he died in 1916, aged 87. He was given a full military fun
Source: monstersandcritics.com
October 29, 2006
The West knows it as 'the Suez Crisis' or, more commonly, 'Operation Musketeer'; the Israelis call it 'Operation Kadesh,' and to the Arab states it is simply the 'Tripartite Aggression.'
However it is called, it divided the West, pitting Britain and France against the United States, and for a moment imperilled the 'special relationship' between London and Washington forged during World War II by Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.
It began at 4.59 p.m. on October
Source: NYT
October 29, 2006
N 1947, the county clerk in Los Angeles refused to marry Andrea Perez and Sylvester Davis. They were of different races, and a California law said that “all marriages of white persons with Negroes, Mongolians, members of the Malay race or mulattoes are illegal.” The next year, the California Supreme Court, by a vote of 4 to 3, struck down that law in Perez v. Sharp.
In 2003, in another 4-to-3 decision, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court authorized gay marriages, and it invoked
Source: NYT
October 28, 2006
It reads like a typical Victorian melodrama: an impoverished young woman, “strangely, wildly and darkly beautiful,” becomes a governess in a wealthy household, and, behold, a French count falls for her and wants to sweep her away.
But there’s a crucial difference: It is race-torn America; the heroine is mulatto; the book, “The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride,” is believed by some scholars to be the first novel ever published by an African-American woman.
Julia C. Col
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 27, 2006
English Heritage is to rewrite the histories of its properties to include any links that they may have with slavery.
It said yesterday that it wanted to reveal the often untold "sad" history of great estates and houses whose wealth may have been built on slave labour in former British colonies.
Maria Adebowale, an English Heritage commissioner, said the histories of many dynasties had been written for a white, middle-class audience. She said the organisatio
Source: WaPo
October 27, 2006
"Something there is that doesn't love a wall," wrote Robert Frost in "Mending Wall." The poem is in part about being driven nuts by a neighbor who ceaselessly repeats "Good fences make good neighbors."
As part of his own version of a good neighbor policy, President Bush signed into law yesterday the "Secure Fence Act of 2006." It authorizes construction of 700 miles of new walls along parts of the 1,951-mile-long border from San Ysidro, Calif.
Source: Media Matters
October 27, 2006
On Fox News, Ann Coulter asserted that Democrats "ought to be picking up 60 or 70 seats" in the House of Representatives in this November's midterm elections or "they may as well go away as a party." Coulter based her assertion about Democratic gains on her false claim that "[t]he average of the midterm election pickup since World War II is about 40 seats." In fact, since World War II, the average gain in the House after a midterm election has been about 25 seats.
Source: Inside Higher Ed
October 27, 2006
In the 1980s, many colleges adopted diversity requirements, typically telling students that they had to take at least one course about a non-Western culture or about an American minority group. These requirements frequently set off heated debates, with proponents talking about the need for diversity, and critics shouting about political correctness.
Williams College is in the process of changing such a requirement — with far more civility than characterized many of those ’80s discus
Source: BBC
October 26, 2006
Twelve years after South Africa's remarkable political transition, there is often heated debate, especially in the Afrikaans-speaking community, about many of the name changes that have been made to streets, towns and provinces since the African National Congress came to power in 1994.
For the most part, the names that have disappeared have been those of white Afrikaners, many of them prominent during the days of apartheid.
OR Tambo International is South Africa's bus
Source: Times Online (UK)
October 27, 2006
A LUXURIOUS brothel that once entertained wealthy clients in Pompeii has been opened as a visitor attraction after painstaking restoration.
The two-storey structure, which features erotic frescoes that leave little to the imagination, is expected to become one of the ancient city’s top draws. Officials who unveiled it yesterday emphasised that the year-long restoration had been carried out in the interests of archaeology — and to save the frescoes — rather than prurience. The broth
Source: Reuters
October 27, 2006
A judge on Friday ordered the arrest of former
Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet for crimes related to a secret detention
center used in the years following his 1973 coup.
Judge Alejandro Solis ordered the arrest of Pinochet for 36 cases of
kidnapping, one of homicide and for 23 cases of torture at the Villa
Grimaldi, a political detention center run by Pinochet's secret police
where thousands of people were tortured between 1974 and 1977.
Source: Newsweek
October 27, 2006
The CIA won't say so, but the U.K. initially opposed war in Iraq. A new book by Tyler Drumheller, former chief of the CIA's European ops, describes how, the day after 9/11, a "powerful delegation from a very close European ally" visited CIA Director George Tenet at HQ. In his book "On the Brink," Drumheller says the foreign-team leader said "his government stood by us ... and that we could count on it for any and all support." But the foreign rep cautioned, "I
Source: Newsweek
October 30, 2006
Is Harold Ford Jr. really doing as well as the polls suggest? Is he conceivably on his way to becoming the first black Southern senator since Reconstruction? The answer may well be yes, but Ford can hardly take that for granted. As black candidates reaching out to largely white constituencies have discovered in the past, when it comes to measuring political popularity there are lies, damned lies—and polls, on which they rest their fate at their peril.
The phenomenon was first widely
