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: The Washington Post
July 18, 2006
The once-secret shelter built to house members of Congress in the event of a nuclear attack reopens to tourists after a two-year renovation, but the $15 million monument to the Cold War still has some secrets.
About 70 percent of the 113,000-square-foot bunker, deep under the posh Greenbrier resort, will become a secure repository for data and documents. "It's being converted from people storage to data storage," said Linda Walls, manager of the Greenbrier's bunker tours.
Source: USA Today
July 18, 2006
Meet Kathleen McGowan, novelist and self-proclaimed descendant of a union between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. McGowan, who says she is from the "sacred bloodline" Brown made famous in his mega-selling novel, says she's ready to cope with people who think she's crazy or a heretic.
But among believers are her powerful literary agent and the editors at New York publisher Simon & Schuster, who are throwing their weight behind her autobiographical religious thriller The Expec
Source: The South China Morning Post
July 18, 2006
A compulsory undergraduate course on ethnic relations started yesterday amid charges it is racist and will drive the races apart instead of bringing them together. Critics said this was because the course textbook blames minority Chinese and Indians for race riots.
It also glosses over their contribution to nation building and treats the ruling National Front as Malaysia's saviour. Opposition leaders are demanding the government withdraw the university course textbook, which was wri
Source: NYT
July 17, 2006
Thousands gathered in Reading, Pa., to relive an era. [Click on the Source link above to watch video.]
Source: LAT
July 16, 2006
Sutter's gold brought Henry Hamilton to California in 1849, and the black
gold of printer's ink lured him to Los Angeles.
Pro-slavery and hot-tempered, he became an outspoken critic of President
Lincoln. He was a Southern sympathizer whose weapon of choice was the city's
first newspaper, the Los Angeles Star.
Armed with his printing press and a vision of a pure white society, Hamilton
aimed to divide California into two states, one slave and one free.
During the Civil W
Source: Wa Po
July 16, 2006
First, it was a slave port. Later, it was a thriving center of black life. Today, it's a virtually all-white enclave. Why?
It was a shocking discovery . Flipping through files at the local library a few months ago for a school project, my 16-year-old son chanced upon the deeds of the house in which we live. He already knew it was one of the oldest in Georgetown; now he learned that in 1807, it was owned by a Thomas Turner and valued at $3,500. But it was the valuation of this other
Source: Meet the Press
July 16, 2006
Newt Gingrich:
... I mean, this is absolutely a question of the survival of Israel, but it’s also a question of what is really a world war. Look what you’ve been covering: North Korea firing missiles. We say there’ll be consequences, there are none. The North Koreans fire seven missiles on our Fourth of July; bombs going off in Mumbai, India; a war in Afghanistan with sanctuaries in Pakistan. As I said a minute ago, the, the Iran/Syria/Hamas/Hezbollah alliance. A war in Iraq funded
Source: Japan Times
July 15, 2006
V-Day, a global movement to stop violence against women and girls, is putting the "comfort women's" crusade for reparations in its spotlight for 2006. As part of the activities, in the summer of 2006 the Global Campaign will include celebrity benefit performances of "The Vagina Monologues" in Seoul and Tokyo, with the voices of comfort women in a monologue written by playwright and V-Day founder Eve Ensler. The organization's goal is to draw international attention and suppo
Source: Boston Globe
July 15, 2006
A group of researchers will travel from Connecticut to North Carolina this week to map the wreck of the USS Monitor, the famed Civil War gunboat that sank in a storm during the Civil War.
The mapping project, parts of which will be broadcast live at the Institute for Exploration at Mystic Aquarium, starts Monday in the waters off Cape Hatteras, N.C.
It is expected to yield some of the most comprehensive information to date on the wreck, which is upside down on the ocean floor
Source: NYT
July 15, 2006
The Supreme Court’s decision last month striking down the administration’s plans to try detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was widely hailed as a sweeping triumph for judicial supremacy, individual liberty and international law. In its most striking holding, the court said that a provision of the Geneva Conventions concerning the humane treatment of prisoners applied to all aspects of the conflict with Al Qaeda.
But the decision included an escape clause. “Nothing prevents the
Source: NYT
July 15, 2006
A museum portraying day-to-day life in Communist East Germany is to open in Berlin today. The privately financed Museum for Culture in the German Democratic Republic shows many authentic objects and their function, documenting a way of life that disappeared with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. For example, visitors can sit in a Trabant car, look at a standard living room and experience secret-police surveillance.
Source: NYT
July 15, 2006
A Mississippi judge refused today to let Edgar Ray Killen out of prison while he appealed his conviction in the killing of three civil rights workers by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964.
Mr. Killen’s manslaughter conviction in June 2005 was hailed as a long-awaited victory for the civil rights movement and a redemption for the small town of Philadelphia, Miss., outside of which the killings occurred. Mr. Killen was sentenced to 60 years in prison for organizing the death of James Earl Chan
Source: Prospect Magazine
July 15, 2006
Communism was a humour-producing machine. Its economic theories and system of repression created inherently funny situations. There were jokes under fascism and the Nazis too, but those systems did not create an absurd, laugh-a-minute reality like communism.
Communist jokes were a way to criticise and outmanoeuvre the system, but they were also something more than this. They comprised a secret language between citizens—membership of a club to which the government was not invited (or
Source: LAT
July 14, 2006
HADLEY TOWNSHIP, Ill. — Sandra McWorter knelt on the soil and gingerly swept through the dirt with a tiny brush to find hints of her heritage.
The clues hidden beneath the wild grasses and rolling hills could give McWorter insight into what life was like for her pioneer ancestors in the Land of Lincoln. "Free Frank" McWorter bought his freedom from slavery and came here in 1831 to build New Philadelphia — the first town in the U.S. legally settled, platted and surveyed by
Source: Times Online (UK)
July 14, 2006
PRIVATE handwritten notes by the man who led the hunt for Jack the Ripper naming the chief suspect were given to Scotland Yard’s Black Museum yesterday.
Chief Inspector Donald Swanson kept quiet for years but in retirement, frustrated that the murderer had escaped justice, could not resist scribbling notes in the margin of his boss’s memoirs, naming the man that they both believed had become the world’s most famous serial killer.
The m
Source: scotsman
July 14, 2006
His face is one of the best known in the art world, and as the Netherlands celebrates the 400th anniversary of Rembrandt's birth, his life and work retain few secrets. But did you know he was once a Nazi icon?
An exhibition at the Dutch Resistance Museum in Amsterdam recalls the Nazis' largely forgotten mission to incorporate the Dutch painter into fascist ideology, and win sympathy in the Netherlands, which they occupied in 1940.
Source: NYT
July 13, 2006
The far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen is headed to court for injudicious comments he made last year about the Nazis’ wartime activities in France. The trial will decide whether he is guilty of “complicity in contesting crimes against humanity and complicity in justifying war crimes” by telling a right-wing weekly magazine last year that “in France, at least, the German occupation was not particularly inhumane, although there were some blunders, inevitable in a country of 550,000 square kilomete
Source: Gettysburg Times
July 14, 2006
Another round of rehabilitative tree cuts are scheduled to commence next week at Gettysburg National Military Park — the biggest parcel to be axed, Park Service officials say, comprises about 50 acres adjacent to West Confederate Avenue. The rehabilitation project, which officially began during the summer of 2000, relates to GNMP’s ongoing initiative of reshaping prominent battlefield portions to their 1863 Civil War appearances.In the 143 years since the Battle of Gettysbur
Source: The Independent
July 14, 2006
Seventy years on from the start of the Spanish Civil War, Madrid is trying to come to terms with its past by rescuing - and making public - millions of documents from around the world that help shed light on one of the darkest periods in its history. As the country prepares to remember the beginning of the war next week, the government has published an array of diplomatic reports, personal letters, documentary films and secret police files held in 12 countries including Britain, Russia, France,
Source: The Independent
July 14, 2006
A couple of handwritten sentences in the margins of a book are claimed to have solved Britain's greatest murder mystery: the identity of Jack the Ripper. The notes, written more than 80 years ago by the detective leading the hunt for the serial killer, name a Polish barber called Aaron Kosminski as the chief suspect for the multiple murders.
The Metropolitan Police officer wrote that Kosminski was identified as the Ripper by a witness but because the suspect was insane he could not
