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: Dyersburg, TN State Gazette
January 19, 2006
The Tennessee Civil War Sourcebook, a new tool for historians, students or anyone interested in the Civil War, is now available at www.tennessee.civilwarsourcebook.com. The sourcebook chronicles the military, economic, social and political history associated with the Civil War in Tennessee. Information in the sourcebook comes from diaries, period newspapers, official Civil War records, ship deck logs, letters and hist
Source: Find Law/AP
January 19, 2006
A former congressman, a Harvard historian, and a retired UCLA professor have quit the advisory board of a conservative alumni group at the University of California, Los Angeles, after learning it is offering students money to supply tapes and notes exposing professors who allegedly express left-wing political views.
Former Rep. James Rogan, a Republican who served two terms, sent an e-mail Wednesday to Andrew Jones, head of the Bruin Alumni Association, saying he didn't want his nam
Source: NYT
January 18, 2006
Sen. Barack Obama and other black Democrats are defending Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's description of the House of Representatives as a ''plantation.'' First lady Laura Bush says Clinton's remark was ''ridiculous.''
Clinton, D-N.Y., a potential presidential candidate for 2008, did not retreat from the ''plantation'' remark, telling reporters the term accurately describes the ''top-down'' way the GOP runs Congress.First lady Laura Bush, en route home
Source: Israel National News
January 18, 2006
There will be a meeting tonight in Washington DC to discuss the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's failure to document the role Islamic groups played in the Holocaust, as well as the Museum's silence in response to recent Holocaust denials and anti-Semitic remarks attributed to Muslim leaders. The gathering is sponsored by the International Society for Sephardic Progress (ISFSP), Holocaust Museum Watch (hmwatch.org), AMCHA - The Coalition for Jewish Concerns, and other groups.
About 25
Source: Romanesko
January 18, 2006
David Simon says if we agree to the definition of plagiarism implied in both Baltimore City Paper’s coverage of the Michael Olesker flap and the Baltimore Sun’s response, then perhaps every rewrite man is a plagiarist. "So, too, for reporters who routinely write stories using morgue clippings for background, or who work to catch up on a competitor’s reportage and err by not independently confirming every single detail. So, too, for every columnist who ever used reported material -- either h
Source: UPI
January 18, 2006
A survey by geneticist Daniel Bradley finds about 2 percent of men who say they have the blood of early Irish kings are telling the truth.
Bradley and colleagues at Trinity College in Dublin found 20 percent of men in northwestern Ireland carry a distinctive genetic signature on their Y chromosomes, possibly inherited from Niall of the Nine Hostages -- a 5th century A.D. king who some historians have regarded as more myth than fact, The New York Times reported Wednesday.
Source: AP
January 18, 2006
The traditional Winchester rifles carried by pioneers, movie stars and Wild West lawmen will be discontinued in March, a Belgian manufacturer said Wednesday, confirming the end of an American icon that became known as "The Gun that Won the West."Once the U.S. Repeating Arms plant closes March 31, the only new rifles carrying the famous Winchester name will be the modern, high-end models produced in Belgium, Japan and Portugal. The older mode
Source: CNN
January 18, 2006
A UCLA alumni group is offering students up to $100 per class to supply tapes and notes exposing professors who allegedly express extreme left-wing political views at the University of California, Los Angeles.
One of the professors calls it McCarthyism.The year-old Bruin Alumni Association says it is concerned about professors who use lecture time to press positions against President Bush, the military and multinational corporations, amon
Source: LAT
January 18, 2006
A fledgling alumni group headed by a former campus Republican leader is offering students payments of up to $100 per class to provide information on instructors who are "abusive, one-sided or off-topic" in advocating political ideologies.
The year-old Bruin Alumni Assn. says its
"Exposing UCLA's Radical Professors" initiative takes aim at faculty "actively proselytizing their extreme views in the classroom, whether or not the commentary is relevant t
Source: Network of Concerned Historians
January 18, 2006
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) reports once again about death threats against members of a Guatemalan forensic anthropology team. These teams carry out excavations of mass graves to collect historical evidence about past atrocities and are therefore of great concern to historians.FACTS OF THE CASE
The Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG), and in particularly anthropologist Fredy Peccerelli, its executive director, an
Source: NYT
January 17, 2006
A prominent Chinese lawyer and collector unveiled an old map on Monday that he and some supporters say should topple one of the central tenets of Western civilization: that Europeans were the first to sail around the world and discover America.
The Chinese map, which was drawn in 1763 but has a note on it saying it is a reproduction of a map dated 1418, presents the world as a globe with all the major continents rendered with an exactitude that European maps did not have for at leas
Source: NYT
January 17, 2006
President Bush saluted the memory of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Monday, saying Dr. King, like Rosa Parks, who died last year, "roused the dozing conscience of a complacent nation."
In remarks here to commemorate Dr. King's birthday, Mr. Bush invoked the religious faith held by Dr. King and Mrs. Parks, another symbol of the civil rights movement, in describing freedom not as "a grant of government, but a gift from the author of all life." And he said t
Source: NYT
January 17, 2006
Another Oprah book club pick has raised the issue of fact vs. fiction.
Barnes & Noble.com and Amazon.com both said Tuesday that they were making changes to certify Elie Wiesel's ''Night'' as nonfiction. Barnes & Noble.com is removing the book from its fiction list, while Amazon.com is also changing the categorization of ''Night'' and revising an editorial description to make clear that it does not consider the book a novel.
''We hope to make these changes as qui
Source: NYT
January 15, 2006
AS the toll of American dead and wounded mounts in Iraq, some economists are arguing that the war's costs, broadly measured, far outweigh its benefits.
Studies of previous wars focused on the huge outlays for military operations. That is still a big concern, along with the collateral impact on such things as oil prices, economic growth and interest on the debt run up to pay for the war. Now some economists have added in the dollar value of a life lost in combat, and that has fed ant
Source: NYT
January 15, 2006
William Matthew Byrne Jr., the federal judge who presided over the trial of Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers in the 1970's, died in LA Thursday night. He was 75.Although he worked as a federal prosecutor and was named by President Richard M. Nixon in 1970 to head the Commission on Campus Unrest, Judge Byrne is best remembered as the Pentagon Papers judge. He got the case the same year he arrived on the bench.
Daniel Ellsberg, a m
Source: NYT
January 16, 2006
It is clear to anyone attending a convention or visiting historic sites here that Ben Franklin is not only alive 300 years after he was born but that he has also been cloned. Several times.
Franklin has always had a big presence in Philadelphia. Mayor John F. Street and others have recently endorsed renaming the 30th Street train station in his honor. And the city's yearlong celebration of his 300th birthday has created a huge demand for the small cadre of people who portray him.
Source: NYT
January 16, 2006
"François Mitterrand was the last king of France," said Jacques Attali, one of his closest advisers and author of a best-selling biography about him. "France today is no longer a truly independent nation, but not yet part of a global European nation. We're in a no man's land. There is a longing for a monarch and a request for a stronger president."In his 14-year reign, Mitterrand hid his cancer from the public. He tried to prevent the reunification
Source: NYT
January 14, 2006
A new look at the DNA of the Ashkenazi Jewish population has thrown light on its still mysterious origins.
Until now, it had been widely assumed by geneticists that the Ashkenazi communities of Northern and Central Europe were founded by men who came from the Middle East, perhaps as traders, and by the women from each local population whom they took as wives and converted to Judaism.
But the new study, published online this week in The American Journal of Human Genetics
Source: NYT
January 14, 2006
Presidents since at least Andrew Jackson have issued statements as they signed legislation into law, but Samuel A. Alito Jr., President Bush's Supreme Court nominee, helped to introduce an innovation in that practice when he was a lawyer in the Reagan administration.
The new twist, as Edwin Meese III, then the attorney general, explained in a Feb. 25, 1986, speech, was to urge courts to look to the president's signing statement for evidence of "what that statute really means.&
Source: Art Newspaper
January 13, 2006
Robert Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, is to establish the city’s first task force “dedicated to investigating and prosecuting antiquities theft and trafficking” according to Matthew Bogdanos, the lawyer who is to head the unit. Mr Bogdanos is better known as the US Marine Corps Reserves colonel who led the investigation into the looting of the Baghdad Museum and helped recover more than 5,000 artefacts.
Mr Bogdanos is returning to his civilian work as assistant distri
