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: NYT
August 20, 2006
Two books on Lincoln and one on polio. Oh, and a Camus novel. It was “The Stranger” that caught everyone’s attention when the White House told of the books that President Bush was taking to Texas on his ranch vacation. Last year, he toted books about a czar, a plague and salt — no French philosophers.This business of the most powerful man in the world announcing his current reading list, presumably to demonstrate a restless intellect (although there’s no pop quiz to see whet
Source: NYT
August 20, 2006
BUSINESS bashing by politicians in America has a long history, including rhetoric far more inflammatory than the denunciations being directed at Wal-Mart this year by some Democrats, who sometimes sound as if they are running against the company instead of another politician.
A NEW CAMPAIGN Protesters against Wal-Mart in Illinois this summer objected to the health care coverage provided to workers.
Wal-Mart is under attack for paying too little, providing benefits that are to
Source: Yahoo
August 20, 2006
American students often get the impression from history classes that the British got here first, settling Jamestown, Va., in 1607. They hear about how white Northerners freed the black slaves, how Asians came in the mid-1800s to build Western railroads.
The lessons have left out a lot.
Forty-two years before Jamestown, Spaniards and American Indians lived in St. Augustine, Fla. At least several thousand Latinos and nearly 200,000 black soldiers fought in the Civil War.
Source: Baltimore Sun
August 13, 2006
With its pillars and stone walls on a prominent hilltop in Ellicott City, the Patapsco Female Institute was once a 19th-century vision of a Greek temple: an academy to educate and refine young ladies and "future mothers."
But in southern Anne Arundel County, a humble, even homely one-room structure built several decades later was all the Nutwell School could offer its students.The myth of the little red schoolhouse has only a kernel of truth, say
Source: freeforumzone
August 15, 2006
Two German teenagers meet each other at a POW camp among tens of thousands of fellow soldiers rounded up by the Allies at the end of the Second World War. One ends up being Germany's most celebrated postwar writer and 1999 Nobel Prize winner for Literature, and the other becomes Pope.
Here is the translation of a most interesting story from AGI, an Italian news agency...
Source: Wa Po
August 18, 2006
Amateur historian Matthew M. Aid made news this spring by exposing a secret federal program to remove thousands of public documents from the National Archives. It turns out that Aid harbored a secret of his own.
Twenty-one years ago, while serving as a staff sergeant in the U.S. Air Force in England, Aid was court-martialed for unauthorized possession of classified information and impersonating an officer, according to Air Force documents. He received a bad-conduct discharge and wa
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 18, 2006
ROMANIA'S leading political and media figures are rushing to confess that they were informers for the feared Securitate as the nation prepares for the files of the old secret police to be opened.
Several well-known politicians and journalists in recent days have admitted co-operating with the Securitate - desperate to pre-empt disclosures that would reveal their role as spies for the former Communist regime.More than 16 years after the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu
Source: BBC
August 17, 2006
An MP is asking the UK Government to investigate pardoning soldiers who took part in the biggest mutiny of WWII, BBC Scotland has learned.
Anne Begg, who represents Aberdeen South, believes almost 200 Scottish soldiers who refused orders at Salerno in Italy in 1943 were not cowards.
Every man involved would have been court martialled, imprisoned and some were sentenced to execution.
Ms Begg spoke out after it emerged shot WWI soldiers would be pardoned.
Source: BBC
August 17, 2006
A lost diary documenting the last days of a famous Scottish physician has been discovered in a second hand bookshop.
The diary depicts the life of Sir James Young Simpson, who discovered the anaesthetic properties of chloroform in Edinburgh in the 19th Century.
It was handed in to the Shelter bookshop in the Stockbridge area of the city by an anonymous donor.
Source: Boston Globe
July 25, 2006
A National Park Service advisory panel will recommend today that the agency be given the power to designate National Heritage Areas without congressional approval, a move that could give the green light to long-delayed plans for a Heritage Area west of Boston.
Recognition as a National Heritage Area -- a geographic area of national historical significance that qualifies for millions of dollars in federal grants -- requires an act of Congress, a process that preservation groups say i
Source: Guardian
August 7, 2006
Christopher Columbus, the man credited with discovering the Americas, was a greedy and vindictive tyrant who saved some of his most violent punishments for his own followers, according to a document uncovered by Spanish historians.
As governor and viceroy of the Indies, Columbus imposed iron discipline on the first Spanish colony in the Americas, in what is now the Caribbean country of Dominican Republic. Punishments included cutting off people's ears and noses, parading women naked
Source: cronaca
August 16, 2006
After almost 50 years, one of Malta’s most intriguing Roman catacombs has been re-discovered by officers of the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage within a traffic roundabout close to the Malta International Airport on Friday.
The important archaeological discovery was made at Hal Resqun, a site on the outskirts of Gudja. The discovery consists of a Roman Catacomb which had been originally excavated by Sir Temistocles Zammit in 1912. However since then the catacomb has been compl
Source: Business Week
August 18, 2006
Switzerland's supreme court dismissed a lawsuit accusing International Business Machines Corp. of aiding the Nazi Holocaust because too much time has elapsed, the Gypsy organization that filed the case said Friday.
Gypsy International Recognition and Compensation Action said it had been given notice of the decision by the Federal Tribunal in Lausanne that the statute of limitations applied to the case. It said the court's explanation would be released in several weeks.
Source: NYT
August 18, 2006
Far fewer Vietnam veterans suffered from post-traumatic stress as a result of their wartime service than previously thought, researchers are reporting today, in a finding that could have lasting consequences for the understanding of combat stress, as well as for the estimates of the mental health fallout from the Iraq war.
The report, published in the journal Science and viewed by experts as authoritative, found that 18.7 percent of Vietnam veterans developed a diagnosable stress di
Source: NYT
August 18, 2006
Two philatelic experts have announced a discovery that seems likely to renew one of the longest-running controversies among stamp collectors.
Ken Lawrence and Richard C. Celler, both respected for their expertise in 19th-century stamps, have found evidence that a group of stamps long held to be fakes may be genuine and potentially worth as much as $10 million.
“This is one of the most exciting stamp stories of the last 100 years,” said Donald Sundman, president of the M
Source: NYT
August 17, 2006
JAKARTA, Indonesia, Aug. 14 — For more than two decades, the brutal military occupation of East Timor, a distant, impoverished territory, brought Indonesia little but disdain and dishonor on the world stage. The ending, a bloody rampage by Indonesian-backed militias after a vote for independence in 1999, further curdled the nation’s reputation and left a bitter mood at home, where the loss of East Timor was treated as a subject best left untouched.
Source: NYT
August 17, 2006
In what might be the final major disclosure of records from New York’s worst calamity, the city yesterday released recordings of 1,600 emergency calls made on Sept. 11, 2001. With the voices of callers removed for privacy considerations, only the 911 operators can be heard on most of the calls. The recordings were released in response to a freedom of information request for a variety of city records made by The New York Times in January 2002. After the administra
Source: NYT
August 17, 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 11 — Beneath the clinical glare of fluorescent lights in a collection of makeshift laboratories here, the victims of mass murder under Saddam Hussein are slowly brought back to life. For two years, a team of forensic scientists from around the world has sifted through bones, clothes, identity papers and spent bullet casings exhumed from mass graves to build criminal cases against Mr. Hussein and to reconstruct the victims’ final moments.
Source: NYT
August 17, 2006
Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, the former president of Paraguay whose harsh and capricious 35-year hold on power made him South America’s most enduring dictator during the cold war and gave him the aura of a character out of a Gabriel García Márquez novel, died yesterday. He was 93.
The cause of death was a stroke, The Associated Press said, citing information from a grandson, Alfredo Domínguez Stroessner.
General Stroessner had lived in Brazil since 1989, moving there afte
Source: Independent (UK)
August 17, 2006
He was born in Liverpool in 1911, a product of the romance between the Fuhrer's brother and his Irish sweetheart. Now the extraordinary story of William Patrick Hitler is coming to the stage.The year 1911 was one of Liverpool's most turbulent. Tension among the city's seamen was to spill over into a general transport strike that would paralyse the "Second Port of the Empire" for 72 days and bring hardship to the thousands of families dependent on the men's wages.
