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: The Irish Times
September 28, 2006
A Polish priest has defied his Church superiors by naming nine Catholic clerics among 37 people who he says spied on him for the communist-era secret police.
Fr Henryk Jankowski, who was a well-known supporter of the pro-democracy Solidarity union, is allowed as a so-called victim of the communist regime to study his security service file and publish the names of people who informed on him.
But leaders of the Polish Catholic Church have opposed the publication of former
Source: The Jerusalem Post
September 28, 2006
Watercolors and sketches attributed to Adolf Hitler sold for double their estimated price at an auction Tuesday, eliciting the ire of Holocaust survivors and Jewish groups. Anybody who buys and sells Hitler's works is trading in the death of tens of millions of people including six million Jews said Yosef Lapid, the chairman of the Yad Vashem Council and a Holocaust survivor. He strongly condemned the auction as something no just person would participate in."
"This is some
Source: Chicago Tribune
September 28, 2006
The Chicago Historical Society's new name, the Chicago History Museum, may do little to bring in new visitors. But the lowrider in the lobby? That might turn a few heads. The blue, custom-built 1978 Monte Carlo embodies the museum's idea of today's Chicago: modern, lively and multicultural. And if the lowrider's juiced-up hydraulics, swiveling driver's seat and fuzzy dice don't accomplish getting visitors' attentions, the inscription on the car's hood should do the job.
Source: Indianapolis Star
September 28, 2006
Silas Simmons was handed a photograph and asked if he recognized anyone in it. He fixed his eyes on the sepia image and moved his curled fingers over the glass and frame, soaking in the faces for more than 20 silent seconds.
It was a picture of the 1913 Homestead Grays, a primordial Pittsburgh-area baseball team that played before the Negro leagues were even born. His mind, Simmons said, needed time to connect the faces to positions to names. He was entitled to the delay; next month
Source: Berkeley Lab Release
September 27, 2006
Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Bar-Ilan University have discovered unusually high concentrations of silver in samples of many different types of pottery from excavations in Jerusalem of the late Second Temple period, the first century BCE (Before the Common Era) through 70 CE (Common Era). This is the first study ever conducted on silver in archaeological ceramics.David Adan-Bayewitz, Associate Profess
Source: Guardian
September 28, 2006
The compass which helped to create the legend of Lawrence of Arabia, steering him across the desert on a camel during the Arab revolt against the Turks in 1916-18, was sold yesterday for £264,000 [about US$500,000], together with a cheap watch and an inscribed cigarette case.
The startling price at the Christie's auction - paid by an anonymous telephone bidder, vastly over a top pre-sale estimate of £16,000 - was testament to the world's enduring fascination with a slight, awkward
Source: NYT
September 27, 2006
Iva Toguri D’Aquino, the Japanese-American convicted of treason in 1949 for broadcasting propaganda from Japan to United States servicemen in World War II as the seductive but sinister Tokyo Rose, died Tuesday in Chicago. Mrs. D’Aquino, who served more than six years in prison but steadfastly denied disloyalty and received a presidential pardon in 1977, was 90.
Her death, at a Chicago hospital, was confirmed by a nephew, William Toguri, who said only that Mrs. D’Aquino had died of
Source: Wichita Eagle
September 27, 2006
George Washington: General. President. Whiskey purveyor? Yep. In his later years, Washington's Mount Vernon estate housed one of fledgling America's largest and most profitable distilleries, capable of producing 11,000 gallons a year at a time when most liquor makers could muster only a few hundred.
"It was a major commercial operation . . . it was as good as any whiskey that was being made," said Dennis Pogue, a historian at Mount Vernon.
Source: Thomas Blanton in a press release issued by the National Security Archive
September 27, 2006
In a series of recent public statements, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has again denied that the Clinton administration presented the incoming administration of President George W. Bush with a "comprehensive strategy" against al-Qaeda. Rice's denials were prompted by a September 22 Fox News interview with Bill Clinton in which the former president asserted that he had "left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy" with the incoming Bush administration in January 2001. In a
Source: AP
September 27, 2006
Gather 'round, boys and girls, for a titillating Halloween tale: The Petrified Body of Lake Placid.
Mabel Douglass was the first dean of the New Jersey College for Women, which was renamed in her honor back in 1955. But in 1933, she was a retiree who went out in a canoe one day -- and simply disappeared.
Thirty years later, on a shelf about 90 feet down in the lake, her perfectly preserved body was discovered by divers. Her petrified remains were finally interred in Bro
Source: Guardian
September 27, 2006
Argentinian school children are to be treated to a revised version of history with a new secondary school textbook accusing Britain of illegally "colonising" the Falkland Islands, writes Laura Smith.
According to the new tome, British forces arrived secretly on the islands, took them by force from the Spanish and have refused to discuss the island's sovereignty with Argentina ever since.
The British version of events - that it took formal possession in 1765 af
Source: Yahoo
September 27, 2006
MARLBOROUGH, Mass. - A riches-to-rags story could be unfolding in Horatio Alger's hometown. As this Boston suburb gets ready for its 11th annual Horatio Alger Street Fair, town leaders are considering dropping Alger's name from the festival next year because of allegations of pedophilia against the 19th-century children's author.
In the 1860s, Alger quietly resigned as a Unitarian minister at a church on Cape Cod after he was accused of assaulting two boys — an incident that is old
Source: The Independent (London)
September 27, 2006
Neanderthal finds are like prehistoric buses. You wait for tens of thousands of years, and then two important revelations come along together. French and Belgian archaeologists have found proof that Neanderthals - mankind's closest relatives - were living in near-tropical conditions, hunting rhinoceros and elephant, close to what is now France's Channel coast 125,000 years ago.
No traces of Neanderthal activity have previously been found in north-west Europe during this period - a 1
Source: The Washington Post
September 27, 2006
Pvt. Francis Lupo was buried again yesterday. This time he'll get a headstone of white marble. Soldiers of the Army's Old Guard carried his coffin up a gentle slope and set it down on polished rails above his grave. A chaplain commended his soul to God. Three rifle volleys sounded, and taps floated on the Indian summer breeze.
Then it was over, and the young soldiers of the burial detail marched off. The few dozen people who had come to pay their respects at Arlington National Cemet
Source: ISI website
September 26, 2006
FINDING 1: America's colleges and universities fail to increase knowledge about America's history and institutions, [according to a new study by the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute].
If the survey were administered as an exam in a college course, seniors would fail with an overall average score of 53.2 percent, or F on a traditional grading scale.
Though a university education can cost upwards of $200,000, and college students on average leave campus $19
Source: Toronto Globe and Mail
September 27, 2006
Mona Lisa had recently given birth to a baby, a team of Canadian and French scientists announced Tuesday, so her mysterious smile may have expressed the weary joy of a mother with a newborn.
Using infrared technology that allowed them to see beneath a layer of varnish, the researchers found that Leonardo da Vinci's model had a gauzy layer over her dress they say was typically worn by pregnant women of the time, or mothers who had recently given birth. The filmy robe was called a gu
Source: NYT
September 26, 2006
When Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite and more powerful explosives, died in 1896, he bequeathed the bulk of his fortune to create five annual prizes honoring ingenuity. The chemistry, medicine and physics prizes have come to be widely regarded as the most esteemed in their fields. The two others, literature and peace, are more controversial.
Yet in a little known story, the Nobel Prizes, the first of which will be announced on Monday, almost never came to be, largely b
Source: Regnum News Agency (Russia)
September 26, 2006
Famous actor-director Mel Gibson has staged a surprise presentation of his new movie at the Fantastic Fest in Austin (USA).
Gibson presents his new Apocalypto picture about Mayan civilization, on which he is working right now and screened some footage from the film. At the promotion screening, Gibson drew parallels between the Mayan civilization and the current situation in the United States, concerning the Iraqi operation.
As Kinoafisha reports, the film depicts coll
Source: Independent (UK)
September 26, 2006
Standing seven feet tall, Admiral Zheng He towered over his crew at the prow of his legendary treasure ship. Setting out six centuries ago on the first of seven landmark voyages, he reached south-east Asia, India, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and as far as the east coast of Africa. Some say he may even have made it to America.
The exploits of the intrepid Ming Dynasty explorer known as the Three-Jewelled Eunuch, a devout Muslim of Mongolian descent from Yunnan province, still res
Source: Copley News Service
September 22, 2006
Eileen R. Mackevich, co-founder and president of the Chicago Humanities Festival from 1989 to 2005, has been chosen to be executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission.
Mackevich was selected from three finalists because of her high energy level and her fundraising abilities, Rep. Ray LaHood, R-Peoria, said Thursday. The commission is significantly behind in its plans to raise $100 million for events commemorating the 16th president's 200th birthday in 2009, he said. L
