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: Yonhap
September 13, 2006
A U.S. House committee passed Thursday the first resolution ever holding Japan accountable for sexual enslavement of women during its colonial occupation of Asia in the past century.
The International Relations Committee endorsed H.Res. 759 in a consensus vote to say Japan should formally acknowledge and accept responsibility for enslaving young women, known as "comfort women."
Two previous resolutions on comfort women, submitted in 2001 and last year, had b
Source: LAT
September 7, 2006
BAGAN, Myanmar - The bricklayers are paid $1.35 a day to rebuild the ancient ruin: a small, 13th century temple reduced by time to little more than its foundation.
But they have no training in repairing aged monuments, and their work has nothing to do with actually restoring one of the world's most important Buddhist sites. Instead, using modern red bricks and mortar, they are building a new temple on top of the old.
They work from a single page of drawings suppli
Source: NYT
September 14, 2006
Annie Moore is memorialized by bronze statues in New York Harbor and Ireland and cited in story and song as the first of 12 million immigrants to arrive at Ellis Island. Her story, as it has been recounted for decades, is that she went west with her family to fulfill the American dream — eventually reaching Texas, where she married a descendant of the Irish liberator Daniel O’Connell and then died accidentally under the wheels of a streetcar at the age of 46.The
Source: Michael Goldfarb writing in Newsday
September 10, 2006
Today in Britain, Bush is loathed across the political spectrum, and Blair's unwillingness to distance himself from the President lies at the heart of his troubles. Blair's biographer Anthony Seldon puts it bluntly: “He has sacrificed his premiership for that relationship.”
Last Thursday while visiting a London school, Blair publicly announced - against his will - that he would be resigning within a year. As if to remind the Prime Minister why he had been put in this position, a pr
Source: Wa Po
September 13, 2006
President Bush said yesterday that he senses a "Third Awakening" of religious devotion in the United States that has coincided with the nation's struggle with international terrorists, a war that he depicted as "a confrontation between good and evil."
Bush told a group of conservative journalists that he notices more open expressions of faith among people he meets during his travels, and he suggested that might signal a broader revival similar to other religious
Source: NYT Opinionator
September 11, 2006
News flash: Made-for-TV movies are not unimpeachable sources of truth. Two conservative columnists join the liberal critics of the ABC docudrama “The Path to 9/11.” John Podhoretz, writing in The New York Post, says it is “entirely unworthy of your time”:
The real truth about the failures of the U.S. government under both Clinton and Bush is not, as “The Path to 9/11? would have it, that the diabolical nature of the al Qaeda threat was obvious and unmistakable and that it was
Source: NYT Editorial
September 12, 2006
The first half of ABC’s dramatic mini-series “The Path to 9/11,” which drew fierce advance partisan reaction last week over its portrayal of Clinton administration officials, drew an estimated 13 million viewers Sunday night, several million more than a rebroadcast of a CBS documentary about Sept. 11 but far fewer than NBC’s opening-week National Football League game.
In response to complaints from former members of the Clinton Administration and their supporters, ABC edited several
Source: San Jose Mercury News
September 8, 2006
When Stanford University economics professor and Hoover Institution fellow George P. Shultz delivered his prestigious Kissinger Lecture at the Library of Congress, he used entire paragraphs that had been previously published in a Yale University journal.
The former Secretary of State says he had no idea. The man who collaborated on the speech says the passages were lifted from a journal article he had written himself, so what's the problem?
On the Stanford University ca
Source: Inside Higher Ed
September 11, 2006
Jesuit leaders on Friday announced that their predecessors and the then-leaders of Gonzaga University concocted a false story to explain the sudden departure of Rev. John Leary from the Gonzaga presidency in 1969. They said at the time that Father Leary had “health problems.” The truth was that he had been given 24 hours by the Spokane police to either leave town or face arrest on charges that he was abusing boys and young men while he was serving as the university’s president.
Source: WSJ
September 12, 2006
Guido Mussolini is not exactly the spitting image of his infamous relative. When a bald man with a prominent brow and an imperious frown entered the briefing room of Rome's foreign press club last Friday, the hacks who'd gathered for an appearance by the 61-year-old grandson of the Fascist dictator leaned forward for a better look. But the object of their attention turned out to be one of Mr. Mussolini's lawyers.Guido Mussolini is not exactly the spitting image o
Source: Tarek Kahlaoui in H-ISLAMART
September 11, 2006
A new report (Ar.) appeared in Middle East Online by their correspondant in
Baghdad gives an update on the status of the Iraqi artworks lost from the"Iraqi Museum of Art" (apparently of modern art; originally founded in 1909 and
was called"Mathaf al-Fannanin al-Ruwwad"/the Museum of early artists; it was
moved in the 1990s to"al-Markaz al-Iraqi lilfunun"/The Iraqi Center of Arts).
It quotes the"director of the Museum" Huda Siddiq al-Nu'aymi (also the
daughter of an Iraqi painter, Ahmad Sidd
Source: BBC
September 9, 2006
A Japanese legend claims that Jesus escaped Jerusalem and made his way to Aomori in Japan where he became a rice farmer. Christians say the story is nonsense. However, a monument there known as the Grave of Christ attracts curious visitors from all over the world.
Source: Stone Pages
August 27, 2006
Archaeologists working at the ancient settlement of Tavium located in Yozgat province in central Turkey have discovered more than 70 previously unknown ancient settlements. The central province, best known for the Chalcolithic Period discoveries at its Alisar Tumulus and the Hittite era artifacts at Kerkenes, is likely to hold much more archaeological wealth than previously believed, and archaeologists said the new findings would shed more light on history.
Source: Stone Page
August 27, 2006
The discovery of a neolithic complex of caves in Greece suggests not all cavemen were club-wielding, nomadic hunter-gatherers, but included some farmers and shepherds. They even had the Stone Age equivalent of a toolshed. Evidence of such homebody cave dwellers comes from a recent excavation of a cave complex dating from 5300-3900 BCE. The abode features plastered floors and evidence of crop-growing and an attached stable nearby.
Source: Deutsche Welle
September 11, 2006
The restored Green Vault at Dresden's Royal Palace, one of Germany's most celebrated museums, was unveiled more than 60 years after World War II bombs reduced it to rubble.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel was one of a number of guests on hand to at the official opening ceremony on Friday.
"This is a meaningful moment for our entire country, and a good day for Europe," she said, accompanied by France's European Minister Catherine Colonna. "More than six
Source: World Today (Australia)
September 11, 2006
As the United States marks the fifth anniversary of September the 11th attacks, bitter debate is rippling across political lines over how the history of those events is being written.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is maintaining that there is a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq, despite the Senate report dismissing that.
Leading conservative author Ann Coulter has decided to take on the widows who are challenging the Bush administration over the investigation of the
Source: Time Magazine
September 3, 2006
A Scripps-Howard poll of 1,010 adults last month found that 36% of Americans consider it "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that government officials either allowed the attacks to be carried out or carried out the attacks themselves. Thirty-six percent adds up to a lot of people. This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a mainstream political reality.
Although the 9/11 Truth Movement, as many conspiracy believers refer to their passion, has been largely ignored by
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, is published by the Federation of American Scientists
September 12, 2006
Two partially declassified reports issued by the Senate Intelligence Committee last week that were critical of pre-war intelligence on Iraq remain significantly overclassified, according to Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who said he would seek further disclosure.
Furthermore, portions of the two Intelligence Committee reports that were withheld conceal "certain highly offensive activities" and "deeply disturbing information," said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.).
Source: NYT Editorial
September 11, 2006
Lori Ringhand, a professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law, examined the voting records of the Supreme Court justices from 1994 to 2005. Because judicial activism is a vague concept, she applied a reasonable, objective standard. In the study, which is forthcoming in Constitutional Commentary, justices were considered to have voted in an activist way when they voted to overturn a federal or state law, or one of the court’s own precedents.
The conservative justices were f
Source: Alan Wolfe in the Sunday NYT Book Review
September 10, 2006
David Horowitz, once a Marxist theoretician and Black Panther enthusiast, is now a right-wing political activist whose main target is academia. Leftists dominate American university faculties, Horowitz believes, and they use tenure and control over the classroom to propagate anti-American extremism. His "Academic Bill of Rights," which states that students should be graded and professors hired without reference to their political or religious beliefs, has inspired legislation in 18 sta
