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: Telegraph (UK)
October 17, 2006
Britain's most distinguished explorers are to argue the case tomorrow for Sir Wally Herbert, the Yorkshire-born polar pioneer, to be recognised as the first man to reach the North Pole by muscle power alone.
They say Sir Wally's achievements have been hugely underestimated.
Record books currently show that Robert Peary, an American, was the first to reach 90 degrees North on April 6, 1909, but at a testimonial gala in honour of Sir Wally, 71, the explorers Pen Hadow and
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 17, 2006
A woman who claims to be the secret love child of Juan Perón, the former Argentine leader, has forced authorities to carry out a paternity test while his body is being moved to a new burial place.
Martha Holgado, 72, claims to be the product of a brief affair between Gen Perón and her mother, Maria Demerchi, reportedly a married socialite, when Gen Perón was a young army officer.
After battling objections from the Perón family for more than a decade for her claim to be
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 17, 2006
The slave trade and its abolition 200 years ago could become a compulsory subject in schools, it emerged yesterday.
The move is being considered as part of a review of diversity within the National Curriculum ordered by Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary.
Many teachers are already bringing the issue of slavery into history lessons
The development was revealed by David Lammy, the Culture Minister, in a speech highlighting preparations to mark the bicenten
Source: AP
October 16, 2006
BUDAPEST, Hungary -- Officials unveiled a memorial Monday honoring a Swiss representative of the International Red Cross who helped save thousands of people, including Jews, in Hungary at the end of World War II.
The commemorative plaque at Pannonhalma Abbey was dedicated to Eduard Benedek Brunschweiler, who took charge of the site in October 1944 and kept it under Red Cross protection until Soviet forces expelled him in April 1945. Some 3,000 people, mostly children, spent the end
Source: NYT
October 17, 2006
For more than a decade, one piece of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s informal biography has been that she was named for Sir Edmund Hillary, the conqueror of Mount Everest. The story was even recounted in Bill Clinton’s autobiography.
But yesterday, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign said she was not named for Sir Edmund after all.
“It was a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter, to great results I might add,” said Jennifer Hanley, a spokeswoman
Source: NYT
October 17, 2006
Wang Guangmei, the widow of President Liu Shaoqi and a powerful figure in China before she was imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution, died Friday in Beijing. She was 85.
Her death was confirmed by a family member.
Ms. Wang was once widely known in China as its beautiful, articulate, sophisticated first lady.
Liu Shaoqi was president from 1959 to 1967, when he became one of the first high-level officials to be denounced as a “capitalist roader” and purg
Source: Daily India
October 17, 2006
A letter documenting the famous Christmas Day truce of 1914 when guns fell silent along the Western Front, and feuding German and British soldiers engaged in a friendly soccer match in the icy mud of No Man's Land in France, has been found 92 years after it was first written. The letter, written in the British trenches by a British private, details the truce when the Kaiser's soldiers and British Tommies exchanged pleasantries and celebrated Christmas together, and engaged i
Source: David McNeill at the website of Japan Focus
October 15, 2006
In late August, just over a week before Princess Kiko gave birth, Newsweek Japan commissioned this freelance journalist to contribute an article on the succession issue. With most of the country expecting a baby boy, the remit was to write a ‘very outspoken, opinionated’ piece on how ‘foreign experts’ viewed the latest developments in Japan’s imperial drama, with the emphasis on a single rhetorical question: wouldn’t a girl be better?
In November 2005, as the debate on changing the
Source: Inside Higher Ed
October 16, 2006
Institutional review boards — never designed for oversight of journalism programs or surveys by sociology majors — have gone way beyond their mandates and purpose, to the detriment of scholarship, says a new report from the American Association of University Professors.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
October 16, 2006
A civil-rights organization filed a lawsuit on Friday in a state court in Baltimore alleging that Maryland has failed to follow its own and federal laws with regard to historically black institutions in the state.
"This case is about the ability of historically black colleges and universities to attract students of all races, to ensure that the programs that they offer are distinguished and not duplicated" at nearby institutions that are traditionally white, said David J.
Source: WaPo
October 16, 2006
House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) shows no sign of resigning over the Mark Foley-House page scandal. But the mere suggestion that he might do so raises an intriguing political and constitutional question: Who would replace him while Congress is in recess?
The answer, it appears, is on a piece of paper locked away in the House clerk's office.
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Source: Christian Science Monitor
October 17, 2006
Genovese nobleman or Catalan pirate? Adventurous explorer or greedy tyrant? What if the Italian gentleman who discovered America was in fact a brutal torturer and slave owner? And what if he wasn't even Italian?
Schoolchildren may learn about a daring hero who proved the Earth wasn't flat, but because his biography is pocked with holes, Christopher Columbus is a figure around whom elaborate theories and enigmatic rumors have long circulated. This year, the 500th anniversary of his d
Source: Scientific American
October 13, 2006
Those hoping to trace their ancestry to a particular African tribe are unlikely to find a perfect match, according to a new genetic study. Researchers report that mitochondrial DNA isolated from African-Americans matched up to distinct African ethnic groups in fewer than 10 percent of cases, based on a partial database of African DNA samples. Broader or more probabilistic ancestries are still possible, however.
An individual's genes are a link to the past that stretches across any
Source: NYT
October 16, 2006
The early-Renaissance sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti spent 27 years creating the monumental gilded bronze doors for the eastern portal of the Baptistery in the Piazza del Duomo in Florence. And it has taken teams of conservators just about as long to restore them.
Their 10 panels depict scenes from the Old Testament, intricately illustrated in high and low relief. When the three-ton, 20-foot-tall doors were completed, in 1452, Michelangelo pronounced them grand enough to adorn the entra
Source: Independent (UK)
October 16, 2006
Memories of more than 50,000 Holocaust survivors are being made available to British schoolchildren through a video project devised by Steven Spielberg.
The first schools-specific use of the Hollywood director's 10-year project to record the testimonies of Holocaust survivors is being launched at Pimlico School in south London today - 60 years after the first Nazi war criminals were hanged.
Through the Recollections DVD programme, students can learn about the Holocaust
Source: Newsday
October 15, 2006
Thousands of people were evacuated from their homes in the central German city of Hanover on Sunday as experts disposed of three World War II bombs, police said.
The three bombs, thought to be American-made, were dropped in an Allied bombing raid in October 1943, and were located with the help of aerial photos.
Two were buried in an open area, while the third was close to a house. All were embedded at depths up to 21 feet.
Fire service spokesman Alfred F
Source: Toronto Star
October 15, 2006
It lasted less than two weeks, from the first euphoric student
demonstrations in Budapest on Oct. 23 till its final bloody end on
Nov. 4, when it was crushed by Soviet tanks, but the Hungarian
Revolution of 1956 left an indelible mark on Cold War politics and
continues to resonate today. Thanks to the work of historians rooting
through newly released materials, the world's first televised
revolution is now seen as a classic case of how the Cold War deformed
international rel
Source: Drake Bennett in the Boston Globe
October 15, 2006
This week President Bush will sign the Military Commissions Act of 2006, as the detainee bill is officially called, into law. And yet, despite its significance, politically the legislation seems barely to have registered. ‘‘I haven’t seen the slightest evidence that it’s had the slightest impact on any race in America,’’ says Charlie Cook, publisher of The Cook Political Report and a widely respected political analyst. ‘‘I don’t think it’s cutting for or against either party in the slightest deg
Source: USA Today
October 12, 2006
MOUNT VERNON, Va. — Forget what you think George Washington looked like — that familiar face on the dollar bill — because he didn't. In fact, the Father of Our Country was not always well served by his portraitists (or his dentists).
This becomes all the more apparent after a visit to the new Mount Vernon museum and visitors' orientation center, which opens Oct. 27 at the first president's 18th-century estate in the Virginia countryside south of the national capital named for him. I
Source: Columbus Dispatch
October 15, 2006
They sit in boxes, file cabinets and folders, these ledgers from the late 1800s, brittle handwritten pages slipped into plastic sleeves and yellowed computer punch cards with a few lines of notes.
The records detail nearly every object the Ohio Historical Society owns.
They tell stories of a Dayton doctor who removed a shawl pin from an 8-year-old girl’s throat in the 1860s, or of Jesuit priests who gave cobalt blue porcelain sticks to American Indians as a sign of resp
