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: CBS Evening News
October 11, 2006
World War II must have seemed like ancient history to Caitlin Bitsco, a suburban teenager, before she discovered her link to it through two generations and a drawer full of secrets, CBS News correspondent Richard Schlesinger reports. "There's a lot of papers here. I don't know how he carried them around and how he kept all of them," Caitlin says.
She’s referring to papers from cigarette packs. The packs were dropped in Red Cross packages over a
Source: Newsday
October 10, 2006
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina -- The remains of former Argentine political strongman Juan Domingo Peron are to be reburied in a new mausoleum during a ceremony next week, organizers said Tuesday.
Leaders of the Peronist movement the populist politician founded 61 years ago will attend the ceremony.
The move of Peron's remains from a Buenos Aires cemetery to suburban San Vicente comes amid the run-up to next year's presidential election -- a traditional time for reinvoking t
Source: Times Online (UK)
October 10, 2006
THE Pope is taking steps to revive the ancient tradition of the Latin Tridentine Mass in Catholic churches worldwide, according to sources in Rome.
Pope Benedict XVI is understood to have signed a universal indult — or permission — for priests to celebrate again the Mass used throughout the Church for nearly 1,500 years. The indult could be published in the next few weeks, sources told The Times.
Use of the Tridentine Mass, parts of which date from the time of S
Source: Times Online (UK)
October 11, 2006
A COLD WAR relic was last night flying above North Korea trying to answer the question the world is asking: did Kim Jong Il tell the truth about his inaugural nuclear test? The last surviving Constant Phoenix, a nuclear-test sniffing aircraft commissioned by President Eisenhower, has so far failed to detect radioactive isotopes from the atmosphere.
There was still “no definitive proof” that a nuclear device had been detonated at an underground facility in northeast North Korea, acc
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 9, 2006
For the first time since the Anglo-Saxons bowed to Norman might at the Battle of Hastings, 1066, the annual re-enactment show is within a missile's throw of properly imitating the original.
More than 3,000 fighters, a three-fold increase on the previous "Mega Battle" of 2000, are massing in full war dress this week to play out a specially extended script, to commemorate the best-known date in British history.
Men are marching from Yorkshire and Kent, and from
Source: San Jose Mercury News
October 10, 2006
The first atlas ever printed sold for a record $3.9 million at auction on Tuesday.
The sale at Sotheby's of the 1477 edition of Claudius Ptolemy's landmark atlas established a new record for any atlas ever sold at auction.
Source: BBC
October 11, 2006
A UK-led team is challenging cherished ideas on Greek mythology by proposing an alternative site for Ithaca.
The island was said to be the home of Odysseus, whose 10-year journey back from the Trojan War is chronicled in Homer's epic poem the Odyssey.
Most people think the modern-day Ionian island of Ithaki is the location.
But geologists are this week sinking a borehole on nearby Kefalonia in an attempt to test whether its western peninsula of Paliki is
Source: Yahoo
October 8, 2006
FORT EDWARD, N.Y. - This history-rich Hudson River community has yielded a museum's worth of 18th-century military artifacts over the decades, from musket balls to human skeletons. But a colonial soldier's daily lot wasn't all fighting and bloodshed. They had their share of down time, and that's where the sutler came in, offering for sale two of the few diversions from frontier duty: alcohol and tobacco.
A five-year-long archaeological project has unearthed the 250-year-old site of
Source: National Security Archive
October 11, 2006
On September 26, 2006, the Department of Defense's Washington Headquarters Services duly released, as a result of an administrative appeal, unredacted versions of 1971 charts depicting U.S. strategic force levels first published in a public report by Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird. This was, as it should have been, a routine decision to correct a mistake. Pentagon reviewers had previously treated the charts, which included numbers of U.S. strategic missiles and bombers, among other weapons sy
Source: Nation
October 23, 2006
John Friedman writes: At a recent hearing before the Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, attorneys for slave descendants asked a three-judge panel to send their slavery reparations suit back for a further hearing to the US district court. A judge there had dismissed it last year, ruling that the statute of limitations had expired and that the plaintiffs had no legal standing. The twenty plaintiffs include Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, the attorney who first uncovered a corporate link to slavery, a
Source: Washington Times
October 11, 2006
SANTA CRUZ, Boliva -- An emotional visit by Aleida Guevara to mark the 39th anniversary of the slaying of her legendary father, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, has revived bitter arguments over the revolutionary's legacy and Bolivia's current ties with Cuba.
"My father was brutally assassinated by the Bolivian army," said Miss Guevara during a weekend pilgrimage to the small village of La Higuera on the arid eastern foothills, where a sick and emaciated Guevara spen
Source: Ashland Daily Tidings (Ashland, VA)
October 11, 2006
In some parts of the country, the Civil War is still being fought. And perhaps nowhere are the aftershocks and viewpoints as evident as in Richmond, where a new museum is attempting to tell the history of the war from three angles. That would be: the Union, the African-American and the Confederate. The American Civil War Center argues in its inaugural 10,000-square-foot exhibition, "In the Cause of Liberty," that each of the three had distinct ideas about freedom.
Source: Press Release -- Total Assault LLC
October 10, 2006
In Iraq, Reagan did not want the horrors of Saddam Hussein’s massacre against the
Kurds to come out, because then he would have to do something to stop him. In Bosnia,
world television coverage of the genocide convinced the international community to
step in...but only after 200,000 had been murdered.
In Rwanda, Bill Clinton did not want the true horrors to come out ...because then he
would have to do something. And now, in Darfur, George Bush has finally declared the
desol
Source: Reuters
October 9, 2006
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico's Teotihuacan, once the center of a sprawling pre-Hispanic empire, is set to become the launch pad for an attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial life.
Starting on Tuesday, enthusiasts from around the world will have a chance to submit text, images, video and sounds that reflect human nature to be included in the message.
Those contributions -- part of media company Yahoo's "Time Capsule" project -- will be digitalized and b
Source: Sydney Morning Herald
October 10, 2006
Lovers of Roman-era art and archaeology can thank the Vatican's parking problem for the discovery of one of the ancient world's best preserved necropolises - right inside the tiny city-state's walls.
The necropolis was opened three years after it was unearthed by workers who were breaking ground for a new garage to ease the Vatican's dearth of parking space.
"We found the kind of things that have usually been lost in past excavations in Rome," said Giandomenic
Source: Michiko Kakutani in the NYT
October 10, 2006
As the war in Iraq drags on, and more and more is learned about the missteps and misrepresentations made in the walkup to the war, it becomes clear that former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell — who harbored serious doubts about the wisdom of invasion and who frequently found himself an outsider in an administration dominated by neo-conservative hawks — was prescient about a host of issues, from the difficulties of rebuilding a postwar Iraq to the need for higher troop levels and multilateral
Source: NYT
October 10, 2006
A collection of some 10,000 papers, books and other personal items that belonged to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has been returned to Atlanta and will go on public display in January, officials at Morehouse College announced Monday.
The material, which has been housed at Sotheby’s, the New York auction house, since 2003, was saved from the auction block in June after a group of business and civic leaders, led by Mayor Shirley Franklin of Atlanta, raised $32 million to buy th
Source: Scott McLemee in the WaPo
October 10, 2006
No fresh campaign of slander against I.F. Stone has been launched in quite some time. A worrisome situation: It suggests that his influence has waned, that the danger of his example has been safely contained. Following his death in 1989, Stone was, for a while, lauded as the conscience of his profession by journalists who once might have crossed the street to avoid him. Posthumously, they were suddenly on a first-name basis with "Izzy," whose four-page weekly newsletter regularly scoop
Source: List for Discussion of History of Journalism and Mass Communication JHISTORY@H-NET.MSU.EDU
October 7, 2006
The H-Net forum for journalists is featuring a lively exchange about a publisher's decision not to pay for articles it commissioned for the Encyclopedia of American Journalism History.
The book is scheduled to be published in 2007 by Routledge, an imprint of Taylor & Francis. James McGrath Morris reports that after he wrote several entries he was told that the publisher now is in need of fewer entries than anticipated after deciding to reduce the three-volume set to one volume.
"T
Source: NYT
October 9, 2006
FRANKFURT, Oct. 8 — With 903 pages of densely packed text, themes that range from incest to genocide, and an unrepentant Nazi SS officer as the hero, a new book by the American author Jonathan Littell does not seem an obvious candidate to be the toast of the Frankfurt Book Fair.
One more thing: It’s in French.
Yet “Les Bienveillantes,” which translates as “The Kindly Ones,” has taken the Frankfurt fair, the world’s largest booksellers’ convention, by storm. Publishing e
