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: Reno Gazette Journal
February 2, 2006
Students must navigate through changes in their student loans after the U.S. House passed a budget reconciliation bill Wednesday that cuts a record $11.9 billion in government-backed student loan programs.The cut in student loans, the largest in the program's history, represents nearly a third of the almost $40 billion Congress backed to reduce the federal deficit during the next five years. The Senate approved the bill in December and it now goes to President Bush, who is e
Source: NYT
February 2, 2006
Conservative lawyers in the administration of President Ronald Reagan had an ambitious agenda. They wanted the courts to pay closer attention to the Constitution's text, to fashion a more limited role for the federal government, to allow religion to have a larger presence in public life, to use skepticism in reviewing race-based classifications in the law and to stop the expansion of protections for criminal defendants.Many of those ideas, considered bold, and even ext
Source: Inside Higher Education
February 2, 2006
Boycotts of academic institutions are antithetical to academic freedom and should not be used as a means of protest, according to a new policy being adopted by the American Association of University Professors.The policy follows considerable controversy in the last year over a boycott declared by Britain’s main faculty union against two Israeli universities. The AAUP and many other faculty groups condemned the boycott, which was ultimately withdrawn. But tensions
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
February 1, 2006
"African American Lives," a two-night, four-part PBS series is scheduled for February 1 and 8. The host and executive co-producer is Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of the department of African and African-American studies at Harvard. Gates has assembled eight notably successful African-Americans, among them the media entrepreneur Oprah Winfrey, the legendary music producer Quincy Jones, and the film star Whoopi Goldberg. Each participant, along with Gates, is the subject of some seri
Source: Romanesko
February 1, 2006
The Times has opened its archives to Ric Burns for his two-part, four-hour PBS documentary. Burns tells Gabriel Sherman he'll cover the history of the paper from its founding in 1851 to today."We’re going to cover the warts and all. For example, you don’t want to look too closely at the reporting the paper did during the Holocaust -- but we will."
Source: Independent (London)
February 1, 2006
Jack the Ripper, despite never having been identified, has been chosen in a poll as the "worst" Briton of the past 1,000 years. The serial killer who preyed on prostitutes in the Whitechapel area of London in 1888 has lost none of his notoriety. Nearly 5,000 people voted for their least favourite figure from a shortlist representing each century over the past millennium in a poll for BBC History Magazine.
The Ripper received 24 per cent of
Source: Irish Times
February 1, 2006
The European Court of Human Rights ruled yesterday that a French historian fined for calling the Catholic Church anti-Semitic and partly responsible for the Holocaust had been deprived of his right to free speech.The court overturned a French court's 1998 ruling that Paul Giniewski had defamed the church by saying that it harboured a deep-rooted anti-Semitism that had "readied the ground where the idea and realisation of Auschwitz sprouted."
He was ori
Source: IHT
February 1, 2006
History, it has been said, is what a country wants to remember and tries to forget - a definition that tends to undermine the notion of learning from past mistakes. Yet, as France is discovering, different versions of history have a way of reappearing uninvited. And then things can get complicated.The violence this past autumn in some French immigrant banlieues, or suburbs, is a case in point. At one level, it was about alleged police brutality, discrimination, u
Source: Baltimore Jewish Times
January 31, 2006
The French government has asked Arno Klarsfeld, the son of famous Nazi-hunters, to help decide the fate of a contentious law that seeks to interpret the country's colonial history.Arno Klarsfeld, 39, seems to attract attention in France with everything he does, including when he took Israeli citizenship and served two years in the border police during the recent intifada.
Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy asked Klarsfeld to issue what amounts to an officia
Source: Birmingham.co.uk
January 30, 2006
A vast monastic drain, dating from about 1230, has been unblocked at a historic abbey, the National Trust has revealed.The drain was infilled in the 16th century and the work has uncovered a builder's dump full of fascinating archaeology.
The Trust carried out excavations of the monastic drain at Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire to help understand the present-day problems with damp in the building, which includes famous medieval cloisters.
The dig, carried
Source: Quad City Times
January 31, 2006
Last July, San Francisco’s county supervisors voted 8-3 against bringing the vintage World War II battleship Iowa to San Francisco as a permanent tourist attraction. Some opponents said they were taking a stand against both the war in Iraq and a military that boots out gays and lesbians, a powerful faction in local politics. But now, advocates of the move are trying to woo the supervisors with a promise to create a privately funded dockside museum that will tell the story of minorities in the mi
Source: ChennaiOnline
January 30, 2006
India's largest peer body of historians today deplored the increasing intervention of political parties in modification and deletion of historical facts from textbooks saying it amounted to gross interference in academics.Briefing newspersons at the end of the three-day Congress, IHC vice president and leading historian Irfan Habib said the peer body condemned all attempts of interference in freedom of academic debates and research.
"Noisy demonstrati
Source: BBC News
January 30, 2006
A stumbling visitor to a top museum has destroyed a set of priceless vases which stood on a shelf for 40 years. The 300-year-old Qing vases were among the best known artefacts at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
The visitor is said to have slipped on a loose shoelace and fallen down a staircase bringing the vases crashing down as he tried to steady himself.
The vases, donated in 1948, were said to hold a "significant value" and were
Source: NYT
January 31, 2006
Archaeologists found the remains of at least 180 people – European, Indian and African – in a cemetery near the ruins of a colonial church in Campeche, Mexico. The particular mix of strontium in the teeth of the four, the researchers concluded, showed that they were born and spent their early years in West Africa. Some of their teeth were filed and chipped to sharp edges in a decorative practice characteristic of Africa.
Because other evidence indicated th
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 31, 2006
One of the last great mysteries of the history of the independent Welsh nation was apparently solved yesterday by a group of English historians working for the BBC.For centuries, people living in and around the chicken farm called Pen y Bryn on top of a hill overlooking the Menai Straits in Caernarvonshire have been convinced that it is a royal place.
More than that, they all firmly believed that the 36-acre farm was the last remnant of the palace of Llywelyn, t
Source: BBC News
January 31, 2006
Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso has backtracked on his controversial call for the emperor to visit a war shrine despised by China and South Korea. Mr Aso said the visit was impossible "under the current situation", but he hoped it would happen in the future.
The Yasukuni shrine, which honours 2.5m war dead, has been avoided by Japanese emperors ever since 14 top World War II criminals were enshrined there in 1978.
Prime Minister Junic
Source: Financial Times (London)
January 31, 2006
France's President Jacques Chirac yesterday called for the "indelible stain" of slavery to be remembered in a national day of commemoration on May 10, the first of its kind in Europe.Mr Chirac described the holiday, marking the day the French senate passed a law recognising slavery as a crime against humanity in 2001, as a chance to "show the way" to other countries by exhibiting France's "glory and strength".
"The grande
Source: NYT
January 31, 2006
Coretta Scott King, known first as the wife of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., then as his widow, then as an avid proselytizer for his vision of racial peace and nonviolent social change, died early today at Santa Monica Hospital, in Baja California, Mexico, near San Diego. She was 78. Mrs. King was admitted to the hospital last Thursday, said her sister, Edythe Scott Bagley. She died about 1 a.m., said Lorena Blanco, a spokeswoman for the United States consulate in Tijuana.
Source: NYT
January 30, 2006
After nearly a century of political infighting and delay, the Smithsonian Institution on Monday selected a prominent space on the Mall near the Washington Monument as the site of its National Museum of African-American History and Culture.Supporters of the project, including many black cultural, political and academic leaders, who labored for years to have the museum approved, greeted the selection by the Board of Regents, the institution's governing body, with elation.
Source: NYT
January 29, 2006
More than four years later, the written record of life inside the mayor's office in the chaotic weeks after Sept. 11 is emerging for the first time from city archives. At once insightful, poignant and banal, the documents vividly portray an administration toiling in the shadow of catastrophe, grappling with basic needs, fielding requests for help and offers of advice, and coping with an unrelenting dirge of wakes and funerals. They also provide the occasional glimpse of Mr. Giuliani's personal a
