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 Australian
May 27, 2006
A POSTMODERN interpretation of history that analyses the use of language and challenges the truth of historical facts has had its day, influential historian Henry Reynolds said yesterday.
Declaring himself to be ''an old-fashioned historian'', Professor Reynolds said postmodernism had provided an interesting take on the language of history but ''it just goes round and round, with lots of lights and colours and doesn't get you anywhere''.
''I think the postmodernist move
Source: The Guardian
May 27, 2006
Historian Bettany Hughes will attempt to rescue Helen of Troy from "28 centuries of male fantasy" when the Guardian Hay festival begins in earnest today.
Hughes has written the first scholarly book about the mythical Helen, whose abduction by Paris caused the 10-year Trojan war. She will tell the festival that historians from Plutarch onwards have ignored Helen as a serious figure, preferring to reduce her to an object of sexual obsession. "She walks through history f
Source: NYT
May 26, 2006
A grass-roots commission that investigated the 1979 shooting deaths of five communist organizers by members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party laid the bulk of blame for the violence on Thursday on the Greensboro police, who knew that the white supremacists had planned to attend the "Death to the Klan" march, but failed to take action.
The "single most important element that contributed to the violent outcome of the confrontation was the absence of police
Source: Sam Roberts in the NYT
May 25, 2006
Hungry for gold, committed to converting savages and seeking a shortcut to the Orient, on May 14, 1607, settlers landed on a marshy peninsula they christened Jamestown.According to an official account, they came ashore "never to leave." Except for one thing. By the end of the 17th century, after creating a legacy that included slavery and profiteering from tobacco, the Jamestown settlement had all but vanished. Jamestown, Va.'s permanent population toda
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
May 26, 2006
Britain's largest union of university instructors, which convenes this weekend for its last annual meeting before merging with another faculty union, is expected to vote on Monday on two controversial resolutions related to Israel and the Palestinian conflict. Both resolutions have been widely criticized and are thought to be unlikely to succeed, and one calling for a boycott of Israeli academics who do not speak out against the Israeli government has prompted particular outrage.
Source: frontpagemag.com
May 26, 2006
After more than two decades on the air, Oprah finally discovered the Holocaust. After more urgent, worthy show topics--"Teens Addicted to Oral Sex," "Gospel Singer Addicted to Porn," "the Gorgeous Men of Decorating," and "Oprah & Stedman Visit the Dog Whisperer with their Doggie Daughter"--finally there was time for the Holocaust.
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation of American Scientists
May 26, 2006
For the third year in a row the Office of Vice President Dick Cheney has refused to disclose data on its classification and declassification activity, in an apparent violation of an executive order issued by President Bush."The Office of the Vice President (OVP), the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), and the Homeland Security Council
(HSC) failed to report their data to ISOO this year," the Information Security Oversight Of
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation of American Scientists
May 26, 2006
The Information Security Oversight Office reported a nine percent drop in overall classification activity in its new annual report for FY 2005.Total classification activity (including "original" and "derivative"
classification) dropped from the record high 2004 level of 15.6 million classification actions to 14.2 million, almost identical to the 2003 level.
"ISOO views the decrease reported in classification, particularly af
Source: National Security Archive
May 26, 2006
Today the National Security Archive announces the publication of the most comprehensive collection ever assembled of the memoranda of conversations (memcons) involving Henry Kissinger, one of the most acclaimed and controversial U.S. diplomats of the second half of the 20th century.Published on-line in the Digital National Security Archive (ProQuest) as well in print-microfiche form, the 28,000-page collection is the result of a seven-year effort by the National
Source: NYT
May 26, 2006
Facing indignant demands from Egypt's antiquities chief, a corporate sponsor of a touring King Tut exhibition opening today in Chicago agreed yesterday to relinquish an ancient sarcophagus that is kept at its company headquarters.
Zahi Hawass, the hard-charging secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, learned of the artifact's existence on Wednesday at a preview for the press at the Field Museum. At the event, Randy Mehrbert, a representative of Exelon, the giant
Source: BBC
May 22, 2006
The mysterious "London stone" is going to be rescued from a building due to be demolished. Does it mean that London is going to be saved from an ancient legend?
You couldn't get much less of a romantic setting for an historic monument. It's in a kerbside cage, stuck on the wall of a sports shop in Cannon Street due for demolition.
But this is the neglected setting of the London Stone - an ancient and mysterious object mentioned by Shakespeare, William Blake a
Source: The Daily Telegraph
May 26, 2006
A Chinese government minister apologised yesterday for half a century of relentless destruction of the nation's heritage, including much of the old city of Beijing.
Architectural historians and the United Nations' cultural organisation Unesco have criticised the impact of the rush to modernisation and Sun Jiazheng, the culture minister, said the government had broken its own laws in allowing redevelopment of its medieval heritage."Some cities have unilatera
Source: The Washington Post
May 26, 2006
The Smithsonian Institution is locked into its semi-exclusive television contract with Showtime Networks Inc. for 30 years, Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence M. Small told a House oversight committee yesterday.
Filmmakers, historians and members of Congress have criticized the contract, which has never been made public. Small disclosed several other details about the deal:
* The Smithsonian is guaranteed $500,000 a year, and can earn additional money i
Source: LAT
May 26, 2006
Leopold Engleitner toiled in three Nazi concentration camps for refusing to renounce his faith as a Jehovah's Witness.
In the decades after the war, he tried to tell his tale but rarely found an audience. Now, at 100, he finally is reaching listeners, thanks to the efforts of an Austrian filmmaker who was taken with his story of endurance.
Engleitner has toured the United States since May 1, sharing his life story to encourage others to stick by their principles. His la
Source: Chicago Sun Times
May 26, 2006
A Chicago executive who found himself in unexpectedly hot water over antiquities this week defused a potentially sensitive international incident Thursday by offering to relinquish possession of an ancient Egyptian coffin.
Exelon CEO John Rowe, an amateur historian, has long kept a 2,600-year-old Egyptian sarcophagus in his office, bought in 1998 from a Chicago antiquities dealer. But he came under sudden attack for this Wednesday at a preview event for "Tutankhamun and the Gol
Source: ABS-CBN (Manila)
May 26, 2006
Six decades after the Holocaust, Poland fears the world is forgetting Nazi Germany was responsible for the wartime concentration camps meant to wipe out European Jewry.It says the phrase "Polish death camps" has been popping up in newspapers around the world in recent years in reports about camps the Nazis built on occupied territory in today's Poland.
Warsaw takes the issue so seriously that it has started a campaign to ensure the phrase "Nazi Ge
Source: Inside Higher Ed
May 25, 2006
Ward Churchill, the controversial University of Colorado professor found guilty by a faculty panel of multiple forms of academic misconduct, has released a detailed defense. In a six-page reply, he questioned the process under which he was investigated, the standards the committee applied, and its conclusions. He characterized the process as “the latest step in CU’s ongoing attempt to fire me for political speech and, more fundamentally, for scholarship which challenges the orthodox ‘canon’ of h
Source: Washington Times
May 25, 2006
The FBI has torn down a Detroit-area barn acting on new information from a 75-year-old inmate on the 1975 disappearance of former Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa.
The 30-by-100 foot barn on a horse farm in Milford Township, Mich., came down Wednesday based on information from Donovan Wells. He is a prisoner at a federal medical facility in Kentucky whose former lawyer said was too scared for his own life to tell the FBI everything he knew in 1976.
Source: National Geographic News
May 5, 2006
Just days after the rare discovery of an untouched royal Maya tomb in Guatemala comes news of plundered Maya treasure in that same Central American country.
Looters have stolen a rare and exquisitely carved 1,500-year-old stone box from a cave near the city of Cancuén, experts told the National Geographic Society this week. Archaeologists expressed dismay that the artifact was stolen, saying the theft was most likely to benefit a collector in the United S
Source: People's Daily Online
May 25, 2006
Archaeologists have developed a clear image of a 2,000-year-old imperial garden found in south China's Guangdong Province by studying more than 100,000 seeds found in an ancient well at the relic site.
Various kinds of vegetation, including banyans and waxberries, were planted more than 2,000 years ago in the imperial garden, which belonged to the ancient state of Southern Yue, archaeologists report.
The garden is the oldest imperial garden to be excavated in China.
