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: AP
July 22, 2006
It seems a typical scene of urban decay: abandoned buildings, crumbling walls, trash and broken wine bottles.
Yet it's more than 1,500 years old. Engineers uncovered these ruins of an ancient Byzantine port during drilling for a huge underground rail tunnel.
Like Romans, Athenians and residents of other great historic cities, the people of Istanbul can hardly put a shovel in the ground without digging up something important.
Source: The New York Times
July 24, 2006
Suddenly, after years of obscurity in his native land, attention is being paid to Arno Breker, the German sculptor whose monumental neo-Classical figures so vividly expressed Nazi racial ideology that he became known as ''Hitler's favorite sculptor.''
First there was a debate over two Breker statues that stand near the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, where the World Cup final was held earlier this month. A few critics argued, without success, that they should have been removed, or covere
Source: Wa Po
July 24, 2006
You could be forgiven for thinking the television images in the experiment were from 2006. They were really from 1982: Israeli forces were clashing with Arab militants in Lebanon. The world was watching, charges were flying, and the air was thick with grievance, hurt and outrage.
There was only one thing on which pro-Israeli and pro-Arab audiences agreed. Both were certain that media coverage in the United States was hopelessly biased in favor of the other side.
Source: NYT
July 23, 2006
IT has stood for centuries, a slope of gleaming white houses climbing in steps from the sea like a construction of sugar cubes. It gave this Mediterranean port the nickname la Blanche, the white one. But despite the romance surrounding the old quarter, known as the Casbah and once home to pirates and freedom fighters, it is literally imploding from neglect.
Unesco has declared it a World Heritage site, and the Algerian government has designated it a protected landmark, to no avail.
Source: The Washington Post
July 23, 2006
If the shipwreck on the floor of Lake Michigan is indeed the Griffon, a French fur-trading ship that sank on its maiden voyage in 1679, it may contain archaeological treasures such as the skeleton of a "giant" sailor named Luc the Dane.
The wreck was discovered in 2001 by private explorer and Fairfax County resident Steve Libert. Libert says archaeological studies present good evidence that it is the Griffon, the oldest known shipwreck in the Great Lakes.
Source: US News & World Report
July 21, 2006
In a report to be released Monday, an American Bar Association task force will recommend that Congress pass legislation providing for some sort of judicial review of presidential signing statements. Some task force members want to give Congress the right to sue over the signing statements; other task force members will not characterize what sort of judicial review might ultimately emerge.
Source: CNN
July 22, 2006
MONROE, Georgia The dirt road that led to Moore's Ford bridge is paved now, and the creaky wooden bridge has been replaced with a sleek concrete span. But the black letters "KKK" sprayed on the new bridge's face offer an eerie reminder of the terrible events that happened here 60 years ago.
Bobby Howard brushes back a leafy tree branch, revealing a half-dozen more racist scribblings. He sniffs his disgust, but he is not surprised. He has long forsaken his personal safety
Source: Chicago Sun-Times
July 23, 2006
Like many of the other activists who converged Saturday on the South Side to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Chicago Freedom Movement, Aquil Charleton wasn't born when Martin Luther King marched in Chicago in 1966.
But Charleton, 26, who runs the Crib Collective, a youth activism organization in North Lawndale, still hears echoes.
"The civil rights movement wasn't just a period of time," said Charleton. "There are young people today who are very
Source: Newhouse News
July 20, 2006
Solly Ganor survived the death camp at Dachau. But at 79, he doesn't know if he will survive what an odd Holocaust Web site, run by a Jewish refugee in Massachusetts, has done to his reputation.
Ganor, who lives in Israel, wrote a well-received memoir in 1995 -- "Light One Candle: A Survivor's Tale." He began lecturing about his experience in schools in the United States, Israel, Europe and Japan.
But for the last couple of years, if you run a Google search on
Source: NYT
July 22, 2006
Ghosts are what people around here call the fading hex signs that the Pennsylvania Dutch began painting on their barns more than two centuries ago.
For years, the signs have been abandoned to weather and time. But though their brightly colored stars, framed with ornate rosettes and images of tulips, have paled, the ghosts have lingered as the shadows of a vanishing local tradition. The oldest are but stains on cracked wood panels. Others, just barely visible, stare quietly from behi
Source: NYT
July 22, 2006
Concerned about the effects of the hostilities in Israel and Lebanon, two American archaeological groups urged combatants there to honor the 1954 Hague Convention, which calls for parties in armed conflict to minimize damage to cultural sites. In a statement yesterday, the American Schools of Oriental Research and the Archaeological Institute of America identified World Heritage sites in both countries that are endangered by the fighting. Among them are the biblical sites of Megiddo and Hazor an
Source: NYT
July 22, 2006
The question has popped up all over Internet sites frequented by Islamic militants: Should your average God-fearing jihadist support Hezbollah in its battle against the Zionist aggressors and their American lap dogs?
The answer seems a foregone conclusion, given the hatred of Israel across much of the Muslim world.Suspicions among Sunnis over growing Shiite power — and a backlash by Shiites — have come to the fore during the Iraq war and fighting in
Source: NYT
July 22, 2006
Robert C. Mardian, a lawyer for President Richard M. Nixon’s re-election campaign whose conviction on charges of conspiring to cover up the administration’s involvement in the Watergate break-in was overturned, died Monday at his vacation home in San Clemente, Calif. He was 82 and lived in Phoenix.
The cause was complications of lung cancer, his son Robert told The Associated Press.
Mr. Mardian, who had resigned as assistant attorney general to work on Nixon’s campaign,
Source: The Daily Telegraph
July 22, 2006
THERE is some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England, but the locals would rather you did not go there. The land in question is a simple patch of wood-fringed shoreline lapped by the musical turquoise waves of Kealakekua Bay on Hawaii's Big Island.
It was here that Capt James Cook was killed by natives in 1779. It was in these waters that his dismembered remains were laid to rest by the sailors from Resolution. His death was regarded by Britons and foreigners as a cruel
Source: The Independent
July 21, 2006
Christopher Columbus was a despot who ruled his subjects with an iron fist, according to documents that have emerged 500 years after his death. The man who discovered America for Europe routinely tortured slaves and starved his subjects in colonies on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola.
Columbus was known to have mistreated native people when he was viceroy in Santo Domingo, the capital of today's Dominican Republic, at the end of the 15th century. But until now it had been put down
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation of American Scientists
July 21, 2006
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 law that is supposed to govern surveillance of foreign intelligence targets within the U.S., has had an unusually dynamic legislative history.
It has been modified in a hundred ways on at least a dozen occasions.
Despite the demonstrated adaptability of this statute, the Bush Administration chose to conduct its NSA Terrorist Surveillance Program outside of the legally binding FISA framework and has not sought to amend it.
Source: The Australian
July 19, 2006
IT is almost impossible to miss. Red Bluff leans over the Indian Ocean like an imposing big brother, jutting out from one of many remote stretches of the West Australian coastline. Reinhold von Malapert didn't miss it. In charge of a tiny wooden lifeboat packed with 56 other sailors from the Kormoran, the massive reddish headland would have stood out like a beacon as the boat rolled towards it in November 1941. Six days earlier von Malapert, chief communications officer of the Kormoran, the Germ
Source: Newsletter of Secrecy News, which is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the
July 19, 2006
"In the 1958 1968 decade, the U.S. Government approved four covert
programs to try to influence the direction of Japanese political
life," the State Department revealed this week in the latest volume
of Foreign Relations of the United States, the official history of
U.S. foreign policy.
"Concerned that potential electoral success by leftist political
forces would strengthen Japanese neutralism and eventually pave the
way for a leftist government in Japan, the Eisenhower administration
Source: Daily Yomiuri
July 21, 2006
Emperor Showa was displeased that Yasukuni Shrine enshrined Class-A war criminals from World War II together with war dead, it was learned Thursday from a memorandum written by a former Imperial Household Agency official who has since died.
"That is why I've since stopped visiting [the shrine]. That is how I feel in my heart," the emperor was quoted as saying in the memo written by then Imperial Household Agency Grand Steward Tomohiko Tomita in 1988 and released Thursday
Source: Wa Po
July 21, 2006
Mary Tilghman watches from her window as archaeologists sift the earth of Wye House Farm, her Eastern Shore property. Buttons and an iron ring, pig bones and a broken spoon: Over three centuries, her family helped the growth of a new American economy and, on this plantation, built an empire on the backs of slaves.
This is where the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass lived for a couple of years, as a child slave of about 7. The work confirms his descriptions of the physical place
