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: NY Sun
June 20, 2006
Two Pulitzer Prize-winning scholars are asserting that the collection of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s papers, going on exhibit tomorrow at Sotheby's and being auctioned on June 30, is not worth any research institution's investment of between $15 million and $30 million, given the conditions of the sale, under which the King estate retains copyright control. These constraints have undermined previous attempts to sell the collection.
At the same time, Mayor Bloomberg's recen
Source: Romanesko
June 21, 2006
That Dan Rather's last weeks and days at CBS should be marked by turbulence seems somehow appropriate for him, "although through the years he has been among the most ferociously loyal of company men where CBS News was concerned," says Tom Shales. "Rather's in-house enemies were up in the corporate stratosphere, not down in the trenches with the hard-working journalists."Click on the Source link above for a list of stories about Dan Rather's departur
Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch
June 21, 2006
The Museum and White House of the Confederacy, struggling financially for several years, got more bad news yesterday with the General Assembly's approval of a two-year state budget.
The museum would receive just $50,000 of a $700,000 grant the downtown institution had requested for fiscal 2006-08.
"We anticipated a one-time grant to help us temporarily sustain our operation and allow us to plan a more financially secure future," said Carlton P. Moffat Jr., cha
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
June 21, 2006
A federal survey that tracks the impact of government programs on households would survive the budget ax under a spending bill approved on Tuesday by the U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee.
The Survey of Income and Program Participation, which is known as SIPP, examines income, health-insurance coverage, and use of government programs. It had been targeted for elimination under President Bush's proposed budget for the Commerce Department in the 2007 fiscal year,
Source: Education Week
June 21, 2006
Just before the Fourth of July weekend in 1966, the U.S. Office of Education quietly released a report that would shake the beliefs upon which many educators and social reformers had staked their work.
Titled “Equality of Educational Opportunity,” the mammoth, 737-page study reached the unsettling conclusion that school might not be society’s great equalizer after all.
On the eve of the 40th anniversary of that study, now better known as the Coleman Report, researchers cont
Source: Hancooki.com
June 20, 2006
SEOUL (Yonhap) - A massive collection of 12th-century Korean pottery has been excavated from the sea floor on South Korea¡¯s southwest coast where a reclamation project is underway, archaeologists said Tuesday.
The archaeologists from National Maritime Museum in Mokpo, South Cholla Province, said they have found 780 bluishgreen bowls and plates from the Koryo Kingdom (916~1392) near the maritime town of Kunsan, North Cholla Province.
Source: Guardian
June 21, 2006
Modern medical science has exposed the villainy of the crocodile mummy sellers of Hawara, more than 2,000 years after they defied the edict of a Pharaoh and turned neatly bandaged bundles of rubbish into a nice little earner.
Before the reopening this month of the Egyptian Galleries at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, curators took their animal and human mummies to the city's Addenbrooke's Hospital, as part of a £1.5m re-display of the internationally renowned collection, which dates in par
Source: Payvand
June 20, 2006
A team of German archeologists will come to Iran to carry out joint excavations with Iranian experts in Chehr Abad historical mine where the four salt men had been discovered. Following the visit of two Iranian archeologists to Germany and Austria, the condition for a joint cooperation between Iranian and German archeologists was prepared and a team of archeologists of Bochum Mining Museum of Germany is to come to Iran to carry out excavations in Chehr Abad histo
Source: BBC
June 21, 2006
A painting by Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele, missing for more than 60 years after it was stolen by the Nazis in 1938, has fetched £11.7m at auction. The painting surfaced last year when an anonymous collector asked Christie's for a valuation.
It was returned to the family of its original owner, who sold it on Tuesday.
Source: WaPo
June 21, 2006
House Republican leaders on Wednesday postponed a vote on renewing the 1965 Voting Rights Act after GOP lawmakers complained it unfairly singles out nine Southern states for federal oversight."We have time to address their concerns," Republican leaders said in a joint statement. "Therefore, the House Republican Leadership will offer members the time needed to evaluate the legislation."
It was unclear whether the legislation would come up this
Source: NYT
June 21, 2006
Now American conservatism can claim another mark of distinction: an encyclopedia all its own.
It is a big deal, in terms literal — 997 pages — and metaphorical. Few insults have stung the movement's thinkers as much as the barb from Lionel Trilling, the literary critic, who said conservatives had no ideas, "just irritable mental gestures."
A half-century later, 251 contributors have weighed in, not so irritably, with a four-pound response.
Source: NYT
June 21, 2006
DNA tests have furnished a double surprise for Thomas R. Robinson, an associate professor of accounting at the University of Miami. The first was being told he was descended from Genghis Khan. The second was learning last week that the first test was wrong.
Mr. Robinson's own caution was one cause of this vicissitude. His temporary induction into the Mongol royal house began in April, when he received a call from Oxford Ancestors, an English DNA testing company he had asked in 2003
Source: The Guardian Unlimited
June 21, 2006
The French president, Jacques Chirac, unveiled his great cultural legacy to the country yesterday, a new museum for indigenous art which he promised would inspire "peace and tolerance" in the world.
But even as Mr Chirac announced in the presence of the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, that he was giving a voice to "peoples humiliated and scorned", questions lingered over whether the museum was rehashing colonial cliches, why exhibits appeared to be scantily lab
Source: asahi.com
June 20, 2006
CHANCAY, Peru--Japanese researchers said they have discovered--with the unintended help of looters--what appears to be a temple ruins at least 4,800 years old that could be one of the oldest in the Americas.
The temple is believed to have been built before or around 2600 BC when Peru's oldest known city, Caral, was created, the researchers said.
The ruins were found in the ruins of Shicras located in the Chancay Valley about 100 kilometers north of Lima. The team star
Source: Boston Globe
June 19, 2006
Juneteenth Day commemorates June 19th, 1865, when Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, and ended two and a half years of white resistance to President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation by issuing a general order that said:
''The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and
Source: Romenesko
June 20, 2006
Dick Cheney says he called then New York Times reporter Jim Naughton the morning after the election in 1976 and offered him an exclusive interview with President Ford on what it was like to lose. "It was because Naughton had been so outrageous," says the vice president. "For a couple of years he'd managed to make everybody the butt of the joke. What was especially rewarding was that when we promised him the exclusive interview if he'd be up at Camp David that Saturday. Of course,
Source: Yahoo
June 13, 2006
Scientists at a British university hope to use digital technology in reassembling some 300,000 tiny fragments of an 800-year-old Jewish philosopher's oeuvre. The University of Manchester's Center for Jewish Studies is reassembling the life works of Moses Maimonides, a scholar and writer whose findings were hugely influential on modern Judaic thought.
A British government grant of $670,000 will fund the center's use of digital imaging software, a crucial ai
Source: Deutsche Welle
June 19, 2006
Germans have a hard time when it comes to defining their national identity. The National Museum of German Art and Culture in Nuremberg takes up the challenge in an exhibition entitled "What is German?"
What is German? Matthias Hamann should know since he spent three years curating an exhibition of the same name for the National Museum of German Art and Culture in Nuremberg. "We found that there is no general answer to the question," Hamann said. "'What is Ge
Source: stonepages.com
June 18, 2006
ar-Ilan University researchers have found a cache of 120,000 wild oat and 260,000 wild barley grains at the Gilgal archaeological site near Jericho
(Israel) that date back 11,000 years - providing evidence of cultivation during the Neolithic Period. The research, performed by Drs. Ehud Weiss and Anat Hartmann of BIU's department of Land of Israel studies and Prof.
Mordechai Kislev of the faculty of life sciences, appears in the journal Science.
Source: The Times (UK)
June 20, 2006
A mystery that has tantalised art scholars for centuries moved closer to resolution today when part of a scandalous Renaissance fresco came to light after almost 400 years.The fresco, painted by the early Renaissance artist Pinturicchio (1454-1513) for the Borgia apartments in the Vatican, showed the Borgia Pope Alexander VI kneeling at the feet of the Madonna and Child and cradling the infant Jesus’s right foot in his hand.
But it was an open secret at the Borg
