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: Las Vegas Sun
January 16, 2006
An arbitration court has determined Austria is legally obligated to return five paintings by Gustav Klimt to the heir of a Jewish family who owned them, according to a ruling made public on Monday.
The ruling, which is not binding, indirectly supported the family's claims that the pictures were stolen by the Nazis. Lawyers for both the family and the government have said they would abide by the court's recommendation to end a seven-year legal struggle over who owns the paintings, es
Source: Baltimore Sun
January 16, 2006
1968. To many, that is a year when it seemed that the center would not hold - on campuses throughout America, in Paris and Prague, in Chicago at the Democratic Convention, in Washington where marchers converged, in Vietnam where war raged.
And, of course, in Los Angeles and Memphis, the cities where the year's turbulence was punctuated with the sound of an assassin's bullets cutting down Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King.
King would have turned 77 today.
Source: International Herald Tribune
January 16, 2006
Twenty-seven years after the brutal Khmer Rouge regime was driven from power, it appears that at least some of its leaders may soon be put on trial for causing the deaths of nearly one-fourth of the Cambodian population.Next month, the head of a United Nations administrative team is expected to arrive and set up shop in Cambodia. Foreign and Cambodian judges, prosecutors and staff are being selected now for the mixed international tribunal.
Diplomats
Source: UPI
January 16, 2006
A copyright on audio tapes of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 I Have a Dream speech means many students never get to hear it. Educators and historians say that is affecting the legacy of the civil rights leader, The Washington Post reported. It lessens the historical saliency of King for younger kids, said Robert Brown, assistant dean of undergraduate education at Emory University in Atlanta.
All of King's speeches and papers are owned by his family, whic
Source: USA Today
January 16, 2006
While the city builds better levees and new homes, a mayoral arts commission is recommending that the city not forget to reclaim its legacy as the birthplace of jazz. The commission recommends building a National Jazz Center, which would be a museum, performance hall, recording studio and archive rolled into one.The recommendations — which were to be presented to Mayor Ray Nagin on Tuesday — also call for creating new artistic districts, increasing the teaching of arts in sc
Source: BBC News
January 14, 2006
A hotel known as a haunt of US novelist Ernest Hemingway has been destroyed in a fire in the Bahamas. The blaze broke out on Friday morning at the Compleat Angler on the island of Bimini, 50 miles (80km) off Florida. Hemingway is said to have drunk at The Compleat Angler between fishing trips around Bimini.
The site was a key tourist attraction.
"It's a tremendous pain to bear," Bimini Chief Councillor Natasha Bullard-Rolle s
Source: Wa Po
January 14, 2006
The goal of reuniting Muslims under a single flag stands at the heart of the radical Islamic ideology Bush has warned of repeatedly in recent major speeches on terrorism. In language evoking the Cold War, Bush has cast the conflict in Iraq as the pivotal battleground in a larger contest between advocates of freedom and those who seek to establish "a totalitarian Islamic empire reaching from Spain to Indonesia."
The enthusiasm of the extremists for that vision is not disput
Source: NYT
January 14, 2006
Over the years, the city that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called home has grown accustomed to stagnation and disrepair at the institution established in his name by Coretta Scott King in 1968, even as it has paid her sons six-figure salaries.
But now as Mrs. King is recovering from a stroke that left her partly paralyzed and unable to speak, problems at the nonprofit institution, the King Center, have become so bad that some family members are pushing to sell its buildings.
Source: BBC News
January 13, 2006
A map due to be unveiled in Beijing and London next week may lend weight to a theory a Chinese admiral discovered America before Christopher Columbus. The map, which shows North and South America, apparently states that it is a 1763 copy of another map made in 1418.
If true, it could imply Chinese mariners discovered and mapped America decades before Columbus' 1492 arrival. The map, which is being dated to check it was made in 1763, faces a lot of scepticism from experts.
Source: CNN
January 13, 2006
The central Ohio city of Westerville, once known as the "dry capital of the world," is dry no more.
A pizza parlor on Thursday became the first establishment in Westerville's uptown business district to legally serve a beer since 1875.
"Here's to a new tradition in Westerville," local jeweler Bill Morgan said as he raised his plastic cup of Budweiser at Michael's Pizza.
January 14, 2006
On January 11 Inside Higher Education reported that David Horowitz"admitted that he had no evidence to back up two of the stories he has told multiple times to back up his charges that political bias is rampant in higher education." The story bore the headline,"Retractions From David Horowitz," and was published after Horowitz appeared at a state legislative hearing in Pennsylvania held to investigate charges of political bias.
Source: Inside Higher Ed
January 11, 2006
Editor: David Horowitz Response below. Many faculty leaders have worried that this week’s hearings by a Pennsylvania legislative committee would turn into just the kind of professorial inquisition that they have feared the “Academic Bill of Rights” might set off.
But as hearings ended in Philadelphia Tuesday, critics of the Academic Bill of Rights were saying that they had scored key points. David Horowitz, the conservative activist who has led the push for the hearings
Source: BBC News
January 13, 2006
Scientists claim to have solved the murder mystery of the baby that holds the key to all of humanity's ancestry.
For decades, scientists have argued over what killed the 2m-year-old Taung Child, found in 1924: the first ape-man fossil to be discovered in Africa.
Some scientists had believed the child was killed by leopards.
Prof Lee Berger challenged this, suggesting that the Taung child was attacked from above by a bird. But u
Source: BBC News
January 13, 2006
Middlesex University is to suspend its history courses, blaming falling numbers of applicants.
Source: Independent (UK)
January 13, 2006
Spanish scientists are to test the DNA of hundreds of Catalans with the surname Colom to prove that Christopher Columbus, far from the Italian gentleman he has long been believed to be, was in fact a pirate born in Catalonia.The experiment, in determining whether any of the participants are related to the explorer, is designed to clarify the disputed origins of the man who made landfall in America in 1492. While historians have mostly reckoned he was born in Genoa in 1451, a
Source: BBC News
January 13, 2006
The government has been urged to fund the return to Belfast of a ship described as an "important building block" in a Titanic tourist project.
North Belfast MP Nigel Dodds says cash is needed to bring back SS Nomadic, the last of the White Star ships.
The ship, built at Harland and Wolff the year before the Titanic, was used as a tender to take first-class passengers to and from the great liner.
It is currently in Le Harve, France, and will be auctio
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation of American Scientists.
January 12, 2006
Among the mistakes and misrepresentations that led to the U.S. war in Iraq, one of the most shocking is the failure to correctly assess the financial costs of the war.
Never mind the low comedy of AID Administrator Andrew Natsios, who told Americans in 2003 that Iraqi reconstruction would cost taxpayers no more than $1.7 billion (Secrecy News, 12/08/05).
Now it appears that even estimates in the hundreds of billions of dollars may "underestimate the War's true cost
Source: BBC News
January 13, 2006
Almost half of Europe's Jews are descended from just four women, according to a new study. Scientists studied the mitochondrial DNA - passed from mother to daughter - of 11,000 women of Ashkenazi Jewish origin living in 67 countries.
The Ashkenazis moved from the Mid-East to Italy and then to Eastern Europe, where their population exploded in the 13th Century, the scientists say. The four women are thought to have lived in the Middle East about 1,000 year
Source: The Guardian (London)
January 11, 2006
The soldiers of Benito Mussolini's Nazi puppet republic should be accorded the same status as wartime resistance fighters and regular combatants, the Italian government will argue in a bill to be placed before parliament today.The bill would recognise the 200,000 soldiers of the Italian Social Republic as "military combatants", but would make no difference to the state benefits enjoyed by several thousand of the former members still alive.
But the cont
Source: NYT
January 13, 2006
The Italian government has relayed a formal proposal to the Metropolitan Museum of Art that would grant the museum special access to long-term loans in exchange for the return of 20 works of Greek and Roman art that the Italians say were illegally removed from their country. The proposed accord, a copy of which was provided to The New York Times, would specifically absolve the museum of any knowledge of wrongdoing and avert possible legal steps against the museum by the Italian government.
