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: Inside Higher Ed
September 19, 2006
Last week, Drew University informed faculty members and graduate students in English and the department of modern history and literature that it planned a review of the two departments’ Ph.D. programs. That announcement alone would not have been news: Such reviews are commonplace and, at a time of heightened scrutiny of doctoral education and the quality of higher education generally, would seem like sound policy.
But Drew’s approach raised eyebrows and, in some circles, hackles, fo
Source: Wa Po
September 19, 2006
At a debate in Tysons Corner yesterday between Republican Allen and Democrat Webb, WUSA-TV's Peggy Fox asked Allen, the tobacco-chewing, cowboy-boot-wearing son of a pro football coach, if his Tunisian-born mother has Jewish blood.
"It has been reported," said Fox, that "your grandfather Felix, whom you were given your middle name for, was Jewish. Could you please tell us whether your forebears include Jews and, if so, at which point Jewish identity might have ended?&
Source: Media Matters
September 19, 2006
While discussing Pope Benedict XVI's recent controversial comments about Islam, MSNBC political analyst Pat Buchanan declared three times that Islam "is a fighting faith." During the discussion, which took place on the September 18 edition of MSNBC's Scarborough Country, host Joe Scarborough asked: "[D]espite the fact ... there are Muslim extremists ... do you not think that this pope should ... reach out to moderate Muslim regimes?" Buchanan replied, "How do you think I
Source: LAT
September 19, 2006
When the Macon was launched in 1933, the giant dirigible was more than just the biggest object ever to sail through the skies. To a nation laid low by the Depression, it was a symbol of hope. "Floating majestically in the sky, the Macon is a sight thrilling to every American and an impressive symbol of our Navy's airpower," crackled a newsreel of the day. Newspapers called the Macon "the queen of the airways."
Thousands would gaze skyward when the Macon's immense
Source: Wa Po
September 19, 2006
To glimpse the brave new Japan of Shinzo Abe -- the hawkish 51-year-old poised to replace Junichiro Koizumi as prime minister next week -- take a peek inside the eighth-grade history classes at this city's prestigious Tamagawa Academy.
Using new textbooks with lessons hailed by Abe as the foundation of a more confident nation, junior high students at the elite private school are this year being taught something that has been largely taboo in post-World War II Japan -- to take pride
Source: AOL News
September 16, 2006
The Toyama No. 5 apartment block is quiet at midday - laundry flapping from balconies, old people taking an after-lunch stroll. But the building and its nearby park may be sitting on a gruesome World War II secret.
A wartime nurse has broken more than 60 years of silence to reveal her part in burying dozens, perhaps hundreds, of bodies there as American forces occupied the Japanese capital.
The way experts see it, these were no ordinary casualties of war, but possible
Source: Cox News Service
September 18, 2006
GEORGETOWN, S.C. ˜ Two miles off a deserted beach, the research vessel
C-Hawk, its course plotted by satellite navigation signals, makes a
180-degree turn and heads back the way it came.
One mile and it will turn again, recording the ocean floor's magnetic
profile as systematically as if it were a tractor plowing a field.
In the past month, the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and
Anthropology research vessel has surveyed 6 square miles of the ocean
bottom outside the mouth of
Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
September 17, 2006
On a cloudy Monday night a century ago this month, a dozen white lawmen and armed civilians marched into Brownsville, a black neighborhood on the southern edge of Atlanta, and started arresting anyone with a weapon.
It was the third day of the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, the worst outbreak of racial violence in the city's history. Whites had done almost all of the bloodletting so far, and authorities feared blacks were plotting reprisals.As they headed back for the
Source: The Raw Story
September 18, 2006
At a closed door meeting of the Armed Services Committee, Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) said that with better intelligence the South would have won the Civil War, today's Roll Call is reporting.
Conflicting reports have emerged about what was said, one from a source to Roll Call's “Heard on the Hill” column, the other from a spokesperson for Chambliss.
According to Roll Call's source, Chambliss said, “We need better intelligence. If we had better intelligence in the Civil
Source: NYT
September 19, 2006
Several years ago, a fire buff named Micheal Boucher began a project about death. Mr. Boucher wanted to compile a list of every firefighter killed in the line of duty since 1865, the year the paid Fire Department of New York was founded.
Mr. Boucher knows the world of firefighters. He is a Fire Department dispatcher, the person who sends firefighters to fires, sometimes to their deaths. The work can leave one with a heavy, if misplaced, feeling of accountability, and Mr. Boucher, a
Source: NYT
September 19, 2006
Princeton University, one of the leading universities in black studies, yesterday announced an expansion in its program, including at least a doubling in the number of faculty members, the introduction of a major for undergraduates and the creation of a new center for teaching and research on race in America.Shirley M. Tilghman, Princeton’s president, said in a telephone interview yesterday that she hoped the effort would help the university contribute greater insights to is
Source: NYT
September 19, 2006
Junichiro Koizumi swept to power in 2001 promising to “destroy” his ruling Liberal Democratic Party and, by extension, Japan’s encrusted postwar order. To a remarkable extent, he succeeded — though hardly as radically as he had hoped. When Mr. Koizumi, 64, retires on Sept. 26, he will leave a Japan with new bearings: a smaller central government, greater faith in free markets and a new assertiveness in world affairs.
But his vision of a new Japan has already produced a backlash amon
Source: NYT
September 19, 2006
How sad — if unsurprising — to hear that the heirs of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer are indeed cashing in, as planned, and selling four Klimts at Christie’s in November. A story about justice and redemption after the Holocaust has devolved into yet another tale of the crazy, intoxicating art market.
Wouldn’t it have been remarkable (I’m just dreaming here) if the heirs had decided instead to donate one or more of the paintings to a public institution? Or, failing that, to negotiat
Source: NYT
September 19, 2006
Many Muslims insisted Monday that Pope Benedict XVI did not go far enough in his apology on Sunday for the offense caused by a speech he gave last week that discussed Islam and holy war.
In the southern Iraqi city of Basra, protesters burned an effigy of the pope, and an Iraqi group linked to Al Qaeda posted a warning on a Web site threatening war against “worshipers of the cross.”
The supreme leader in Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called the pope’s remarks “the latest
Source: Financial Times
September 19, 2006
Indonesian authorities have launched a criminal investigation into a group of historians and education ministry officials over new school texts offering an alternative version of events surrounding the failed 1965 coup that led to the rise of former President Suharto.Schoolchildren were taught throughout Mr Suharto’s 32-year rule that the then-general led a successful campaign to eliminate the Indonesian Communist party, or PKI, after a failed communist coup on September 30
Source: CBS
September 18, 2006
Nearly four decades after the Gee's Bend ferry stopped running, a new vessel is once again crossing the Alabama River, connecting the mostly black residents of Gee's Bend to Camden, the seat of Wilcox County.
For 78-year-old Willie Quill Pettway, it's long overdue.
"Yeah, I want it to come back. That's what you call winning," Pettway says. "It didn't last. Treating me wrong don't last."
The "wrong" that Pettway is talking ab
Source: Inside Higher Ed
September 18, 2006
Scholars who work on large archival projects have struggled during the Bush administration. The president has repeatedly proposed eliminating the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, which is one of the two federal programs that supports the intense, decades-long projects that involve editing and publishing of collections of documents. Congress has saved the program, but just barely.
Now the National Endowment for the Humanities has revamped the rules for the oth
Source: Newsletter of the Institute for Public Accuracy
September 18, 2006
After Ellsberg revealed the Pentagon Papers -- top-secret government
documents which showed a pattern of governmental deceit about the
Vietnam War -- in 1971, the Nixon White House indicted him for a
possible 115-year sentence, used the White House"plumbers" to
burglarize his doctor's office, conducted warrentless wiretaps against
him and attempted to physically assault him at a Capitol Hill rally. He has just authored a piece in the forthcoming issue of Harper's
magazine,"
Source: The Daily Telegraph (LONDON)
September 18, 2006
AMERICAN benefactors have paid to restore a North Yorkshire church's 14th-century stained-glass window, the design of which is thought to have been the model for the Stars and Stripes.
The window at Selby Abbey was donated by the English ancestors of George Washington, the first president of the United States. It shows the coat of arms of his forebears, the de Wessyngtons, which depicts three spiked spur wheels above two red bars across a white shield. Washington is known to have us
Source: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
September 18, 2006
In the past month, the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology research vessel has surveyed 6 square miles of the ocean bottom outside the mouth of Winyah Bay, searching for the 500-year old flagship of the expedition that established America's first colony --- on the Georgia coast.
"If the Spanish had this kind of navigation gear in the 16th century, we probably wouldn't be out here looking for this ship now," grins archaeologist Jim Spirek, looking up fr
