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
April 29, 2006
MONTGOMERY, Ala. -- Gov. Bob Riley has signed legislation that sets up a process to pardon civil rights icon Rosa Parks and hundreds of others arrested for violating segregation-era laws.
Riley signed the bill April 21 without making an official announcement, Jeff Emerson, the governor's communications director, said Thursday.
Those arrested or family members of those deceased would have to request the pardons under the bill, which passed April 17.
The bill
Source: NYT
April 29, 2006
Florence Latimer Mars, who defied the society into which she was born to write a searing book about the effects of the 1964 killings of the civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Earl Chaney on her hometown, Philadelphia, Miss., died on Sunday at her home there. She was 83. The author of "Witness in Philadelphia," published in 1977 by the Louisiana State University Press, she repeatedly spoke out against the Ku Klux Klan and other forces o
Source: NYT
April 30, 2006
AN intelligence leaker is a hero, risking career and more to reveal warrantless eavesdropping, interrogations bordering on torture, prisons out of reach of American law. Or the leaker is a villain, whose treachery endangers the lives of American operatives, exposes intelligence methods and scares off foreign agents.
Or a little bit of both.
In fact, American intelligence leaks have created divisions since the Revolutionary War, when the pamphleteer Thomas Paine publiciz
Source: The Age (Australia)
April 30, 2006
A burnt olive tree has helped to resolve a controversy over dating key events in the Mediterranean that took place more than three millennia ago.The new dates would change the chronology of the Minoans, Greeks, Cypriots and others by a century and question Egyptian chronology and the genesis of Classical civilisation.
The rewriting of the history of the Aegean has come, in part, from a study of charcoal and seed samples from sites dated to between 1700BC and 140
Source: Canoe News (Canada)
April 30, 2006
A plan to downplay linguistic conflict in Quebec's high school history lessons is getting a failing grade from some teachers and politicians who feel it offers an "ultra-federalist" view of the past. The proposed changes to compulsory Grade 10 Quebec and Canadian history classes - leaked to media outlets last week - stresses ideas and inclusiveness instead of divisive events."It represents a departure from the traditional framework of history structured aroun
Source: Boston Globe
April 30, 2006
Built in the late 1920s, the Narkomfin apartment building was designed as the perfect environment for new Soviet Man. A monument to the utopian communist ideals that spilled forth after the Bolshevik revolution, the six-story complex behind the US Embassy was a place where bourgeois decadence was expected to give way to collective existence. Today this decaying, forgotten masterpiece of modernist architecture faces two possible futures: collapse, or conversion into a hotel.
Source: ABC 27 (Harrisburg, PA)
May 1, 2006
A federal judge is ordering the National Park Service to pay $4 million to the owners of an observation tower that once stood near Gettysburg National Military Park. The federal government took the land by eminent domain in 2000 and demolished the steel structure as part of a campaign to restore the area to the way it looked during the Civil War.
Landowner Hans Engrenn, a 77-year-old resident of New Oxford, says he's relieved but he and his wi
Source: CNN
April 29, 2006
Born in the Great Depression, it has weathered economic hardship, world war, labor strikes, murder, terrorist fears, and even a plane crash.
The Empire State Building, once the tallest building in the world and again the tallest in New York City, is turning 75 years old on Monday.
A yearlong celebration is planned for the building, consisting mainly of monthly light shows, according to Lydia Ruth, spokeswoman for the corporation that runs the building.
Source: BBC News
April 29, 2006
A collection of memorabilia from the Titanic is believed to have broken a world record at auction. Among more than 370 lots in the sale in Wiltshire was a miniature portrait retrieved from the ocean, which sold for £58,000.
It was said to be a world record price for a piece of Titanic memorabilia.
Source: Timesonline (UK)
April 29, 2006
FLOAT out beyond the Crusader city walls, Roman aqueduct and 19th-century mosque. Then descend through a cloud of quicksilver bubbles 20ft and 2,000 years to Herod The Great’s sunken harbour.
Here, just off Caesarea port, a unique underwater archaeological park opened yesterday, showcasing 80,000sq m of a sunken harbour built by the biblical king of the Jews for Caesar Augustus.
It is no ordinary “museum” — no chattering schoolchildren, no queues, no headphones, and the onl
Source: Wa Po
April 30, 2006
The Congressional Medal of Honor Society reports that there are 113 living recipients of the nation's highest military award, but an FBI agent said impostors outnumber the true heroes.
"There are more and more of these impostors, and they are literally stealing the valor and acts of valor of the real guys," said Tom Cottone, who tracks such pretenders in addition to his work on an FBI violent crime squad in West Paterson, N.J.Some fakers me
Source: NYT
April 29, 2006
The board overseeing the Smithsonian Institution will review the institution's recent contract to develop an on-demand cable television channel with Showtime Networks, the Smithsonian's top executive said yesterday. The decision came after a congressional subcommittee that oversees the Smithsonian's financing asked in a letter for a review ''to determine whether it violates the spirit if not the letter of the Smithsonian Trust.''
The contract for the television channel, which aims t
Source: National Security Archive
April 28, 2006
Today the National Security Archive publishes for the first time 30 recently declassified U.S. government documents disclosing the existence of a highly secret policy debate, during the first year of the Nixon administration, over the Israeli nuclear weapons program. Broadly speaking, the debate was over whether it was feasible--either politically or technically--for the Nixon administration to try to prevent Israel from crossing the nuclear threshold, or whether the U.S. should find some "
Source: cronaca.com
April 25, 2006
Israel's consul general in New York said Sunday that the world needs to take a tougher stance with Iran and warned that a "strong" and "determined" Israel will never allow another Jewish Holocaust.
[...] pledged a commitment to keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who denies the Holocaust and has repeatedly expressed his desire for Israel’s destruction.
“This is not an Israeli issue,” the consul
Source: NYT
April 27, 2006
A Chicago City Council member said Wednesday she has dropped her controversial effort to erect an honorary street sign for a slain Black Panthers leader.
Alderman Madeline Haithcock had sponsored an ordinance to designate a short section of street for Fred Hampton, who was state chairman of the Black Panther Party. He was killed with another Black Panther in 1969 when Chicago police raided Hampton's apartment in search of guns.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
April 27, 2006
Efforts to probe Mexico's so-called dirty war suffered another setback this week as the country's Supreme Court denied a request to reopen an investigation into a 1971 attack by pro-government forces that left 12 students dead.
In a 7-to-3 decision on Monday, the justices ruled that investigations into the case had been concluded and should not be pursued further. Mexico City officials had asked the court to allow a new investigation after a judge rejected their 2005 arrest warrant
Source: NYT
April 27, 2006
In a long delayed conclusion to a dark chapter of Canadian history, negotiators have reached an agreement to compensate 80,000 Native Canadians who attended a government-financed school system where many suffered physical and sexual abuse.
The widespread incidence of alcoholism, family violence and incest in many Native Canadian communities has long been linked to the experiences of generations who attended the so-called residential schools, which were dedicated to forced assimilati
Source: CBS
April 27, 2006
The government improperly sealed hundreds of previously public CIA, Pentagon and other records by reclassifying them as secret on questionable grounds, an internal review said Wednesday.The National Archives' audit of thousands of records withdrawn from public view since 1995 contends that one of every three was resealed without justification.
The investigation covered historical records held by the National Archives. But it comes amid broader debate on classify
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation of American Scientists
April 27, 2006
In 1970, the U.S. spent $6 billion on intelligence, according to a newly published account of a meeting that President Richard M. Nixon held with his Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board in July 1970.
"The President stated that the US is spending $6 billion per year on intelligence and deserves to receive a lot more for its money than it has been getting," stated the record of the meeting, which was published in the latest volume of the State Department's Foreign Relations
Source: Discovery News
April 27, 2006
Only 21 finalists remain in the final stretch of the public's selection of the new seven most noteworthy landmarks in the world, the Swiss-based New7Wonders Foundation has told Discovery News.
The goal of the project is to revise the original "seven ancient wonders of the world," since only one — the pyramids of Egypt — still exists today. Finalists for the new group are, in alphabetical order: the Acropolis in Athens; the Alhambra in Gran
