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: Ottawa Citizen
August 22, 2006
One of the greatest archeological mysteries in Canadian history — the precise whereabouts of French explorer Jacques Cartier’s 1541 settlement near present-day Quebec City — has been solved after experts matched the shard of a broken plate found at suburban Cap Rouge with an identical, 465-year-old porcelain treasure held by the famed Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.
The startling discovery of Cartier’s short-lived Fort Charlesbourg-Royal, announced Friday by Quebec Premi
Source: NYT
August 22, 2006
“I may be the only person, the only presidential candidate who never carried the state in which he was born,” President Bush said Monday.
Uh, no, Mr. President. There have been quite a few, actually. Some are known only to historians, while others are famous. You might even call one a household name, Mr. President, depending on which household.... Al Gore, for instance. History buffs will remember that he failed to carry Tennessee in 2000. But while Tennessee is
Source: Boston Globe
August 22, 2006
Loreta Janeta Velazquez sounded like a mythical figure: a Cuban-born woman raised in New Orleans, where she masqueraded as a male soldier and fought in the Civil War. With a fake mustache, beard, and a soldier's uniform, the Latina enlisted in the Confederate Army in 1861 as Lieutenant Harry T. Buford , without her husband's knowledge.
``When I heard about Loreta, I was like, ` Why would a Cuban woman join the Confederacy? What is a Velazquez doing in 19th - century America?' "
Source: NYT
August 21, 2006
Ten years after a Republican Congress collaborated with a Democratic president to overhaul the nation’s welfare system, the implications are still rippling through policy and politics.
The law, which reversed six decades of social welfare policy and ended the idea of free cash handouts for the poor, was widely seen as a victory for conservative ideas. When it was passed, some opponents offered dire predictions that the law would make things worse for the poor. But the number o
Source: Australian
August 21, 2006
THE states are continuing to claim the Howard Government is bullying them into reinstating traditional history teaching in schools, despite having been officially invited to contribute to last week's history summit in Canberra.
The Australian has learned that federal Education Minister Julie Bishop wrote to all states and territories last month to seek their input to the summit.
''I am very willing to work with the states and territories ... to further strengthen the p
Source: NYT
August 21, 2006
Facing a charge of genocide for trying to annihilate Iraq’s Kurdish minority, Saddam Hussein defiantly refused to enter a plea as his second trial began today, and insisted that he was still president of the country.
Mr. Hussein sat stone-faced in a courtroom in the fortified Green Zone of Baghdad, listening as prosecutors gave a detailed account of how Mr. Hussein and six co-defendants embarked on an eight-stage military campaign in 1988 to eliminate the Kurds from swaths of their
Source: Wa Po
August 20, 2006
Spread across the Smithsonian's 18 museums, nine research centers and the National Zoo are 13 million photographs. In the hallways and laboratories are about 700 collections of photos. Harnessing them into a form that gives researchers and the public some access has long been a goal for Smithsonian caretakers.
But like a lot of things at the Smithsonian, you had to know where to go to find what you were looking for. Some photos were locked away in the researchers' storehouses.
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
August 21, 2006
Retired Chronicle photographer Joe Rosenthal, who won the Pulitzer Prize and international acclaim for his soul-stirring picture of the World War II flag-raising on Iwo Jima, died Sunday in Novato.
Rosenthal, 94, retired from The Chronicle in 1981 after a distinguished 35-year career and many professional honors, but the flag-raising picture was his masterpiece for which he will always be remembered.
The Pulitzer Committee in 1945 described the photo as "depicting
Source: Wa Po
August 21, 2006
The Bush administration has begun designating as secret some information that the government long provided even to its enemy the former Soviet Union: the numbers of strategic weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during the Cold War.
The Pentagon and the Department of Energy are treating as national security secrets the historical totals of Minuteman, Titan II and other missiles, blacking out the information on previously public documents, according to a new report by the National Sec
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
August 21, 2006
The crime novelist Patricia Cornwell has promised to donate 82 works by the English Impressionist painter Walter Sickert to Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum, The Art Newspaper reports. The collection, which the British newspaper says is worth millions of dollars, was assembled while Ms. Cornwell was writing a controversial book in which she concludes that Sickert was Jack the Ripper. The book, Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper—Case Closed, was published in 2002.
Source: CDNN
August 20, 2006
The ocean has revealed a secret 120 years old on the most remote island in the Hawaiian chain. In July, state workers happened upon the wreck of the full-rigged ship Dunotter Castle, vintage Falls of Clyde, in 25 feet of crystal clear water off Kure Atoll, the last island beyond Midway.
The wreck made headlines in 1886 after seven survivors sailed 52 days and 1,200 miles in an open boat and were picked up off Kaua'i. A voyage to rescue crew members remaining on Kure set out the next
Source: Middle East Times
August 21, 2006
A team of Peruvian and US archaeologists have discovered prehistoric stone tools and weapons some 10,000 years old in an Andean town, the National Institute of Culture announced Friday.
Stone axes, spearheads, and weapons were found in the main square of San Pedro de Chavin de Huantar, an Andean town some 400 kilometers (250 miles) north of Lima, officials said.
"This discovery represents exceptional evidence of the presence of inhabitants in the Pleistocene era,
Source: Press Release -- The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
August 21, 2006
In the wake of the new disclosure that Mel Gibson has been involved with a Holocaust-denial group in Australia, The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies is urging Jewish and other organizations that recently extended speaking invitations to Gibson to withdraw them.
Wyman Institute director Dr. Rafael Medoff said: "Holocaust-denial is a form of antisemitism, and Gibson's involvement with Holocaust-deniers in Australia indicates that his apology for his recent antisem
Source: cronaca
August 17, 2006
A painting of Mary Queen of Scots, one of only two thought to have been made in her lifetime, has been discovered - in the National Portrait Gallery's very own store. The portrait was bought for £50 by the gallery in 1916 at Christie's. But later it was written off as an 18th century fake and was left to gather dust.
Source: Time
August 6, 2006
It's not hard to understand the vogue for spiritualism that developed in the late 19th century. With religion under serious challenge from science, the afterlife--which religion affirmed and science scoffed at--became a subject of nervous fascination. Respectable people held parlor séances. Celebrity spiritualists like D.D. Home even made house calls. In 1869 three witnesses in a London residence reported that Home levitated, floated out a window and drifted back in through the window of another
Source: Baltimore Sun
August 20, 2006
Harpers Ferry, W.Va -- Retracing early path of civil rights group
The elderly woman sat in the shade, painstakingly penning her autograph onto yet another program.
Precisely 100 hundred years ago, in almost the exact spot, her grandfather, W.E.B. Du Bois, spoke words that electrified the civil rights movement at a historic meeting that many people have never heard of.
"We will not be satisfied to take one jot or tittle less than ou
Source: Wa Po
August 20, 2006
For more than 60 years, they kept their military secrets locked deep inside and lived quiet lives as account executives, college professors, business consultants and the like.
The brotherhood of P.O. Box 1142 enjoyed no homecoming parades, no VFW reunions, no embroidered ball caps and no regaling of wartime stories to grandchildren sitting on their knees.
Almost no one, not even their wives, in many cases, knew the place in history held by the men of Fort Hunt, alluded
Source: Deborah Nelson and Nick Turse in the LA Times
August 20, 2006
In early 1973, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Creighton Abrams received some bad news from the service's chief of criminal investigations.
An internal inquiry had confirmed an officer's widely publicized charge that members of the 173rd Airborne Brigade had tortured detainees in Vietnam.
But there was a silver lining: Investigators had also compiled a 53-page catalog of alleged discrepancies in retired Lt. Col. Anthony B. Herbert's public accounts of his war experiences.
Source: NYT
August 20, 2006
Lydia, Duchess of Bedford, an English aristocrat who helped transform Woburn Abbey, her second husband’s ancestral home in Bedfordshire, into a pioneering and satisfyingly lucrative example of blueblood tourism, died July 25 in Chertsey, Surrey, England. She was 88.
Her death came after she was injured in a fall, said Paul de Fraine, personal assistant to the present duke.
After inheriting Woburn Abbey in 1953, with its staggering estate taxes and annual heating bills o
Source: NYT
August 20, 2006
LA PLATA, Argentina, Aug. 14 — The horrific events under a military dictatorship — murders, kidnappings, torture, rapes, the abduction and sale of infants — had gone unpunished for nearly 30 years. But last year Argentina’s Supreme Court overturned a pair of amnesty laws, and now the trials of military and police officials accused of human rights violations are finally under way.In late June, the first trial, involving a police commissioner general named Miguel Etchecolatz,
