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
November 29, 2005
Poland is risking further strains in relations with Russia by throwing open Cold War-era archives that include a 1979 Soviet retaliation plan that envisaged nuclear strikes on western European cities in the event of a war with NATO.
The map foresaw the nuclear annihilation of Poland and was dotted with red mushroom clouds over the German cities of Munich, Cologne, Stuttgart and the site of NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium.
It was revealed Friday by Polish Defense
Source: USA Today
November 29, 2005
Claudette Colvin has been all but lost to history in this quintessential Southern city where the modern civil rights movement began 50 years ago.
She was arrested for refusing to give her seat on a city bus to a white passenger — nine months before Rosa Parks' same act of quiet defiance launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott in December 1955.From here, the civil rights movement swept across the South, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. becoming its primary voice. Park
Source: NYT
November 29, 2005
Amherst, MA: Whoa, those of you who think that Potter in children's books means only Harry. There is another Potter in the field, by the name of Beatrix (1866-1943), and that Harry character has a long way to go before topping her more than 100 years of success. Her "Tale of Peter Rabbit," first published in 1902, is still picking up new readers.
Although her cutesies - like Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter - may not have gone to wizard school, they bring as much mischi
Source: AP
November 29, 2005
With the death of Rosa Parks, the 50th anniversary of her arrest and the historic bus boycott it sparked will focus on the protest's lesser-known foot soldiers.
While Parks was remembered for helping start the modern civil rights movement by refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man on Dec. 1, 1955, it took some 40,000 blacks in Montgomery to back her with their own defiance.Led by the Montgomery Improvement Association and its president, the Rev.
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation of American Scientists.
November 28, 2005
The evolution of the U.S. signals intelligence capability from Pearl Harbor to the establishment of the National Security Agency in 1952 is the subject of a newly declassified NSA history volume.
The internal history traces "the struggle between centralized and decentralized control of SIGINT, interservice and interagency rivalries, budget problems, tactical versus national strategic requirements, the difficulties of mechanization of processes, and the rise of a strong bureaucr
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation of American Scientists.
November 28, 2005
Government agencies are making increased use of exemptions from the Freedom of Information Act to withhold information that would have been released in the past, according to a new study.
The study by the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government compared FOIA responses and denials in 2000 and 2004. It found that unclassified information was increasingly being withheld from FOIA requesters using exemptions for intra- or interagency memoranda, internal personnel rules and practic
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 25, 2005
When Gertrude Bell died in 1926, thousands of Iraqis lined the streets to watch the funeral parade of the woman described in obituaries across the world as "Mesopotamia's uncrowned queen".
Miss Bell, a renowned archaeologist, brilliant linguist and Arabist, had drawn up the new state's borders and become the confidante of the country's first Hashemite monarch, King Faisal.
She wrote to her father: "As we rode back through the [Baghdad] suburb where all th
Source: LAT
November 27, 2005
Thousands of members of at least five Indian tribes in southern Louisiana were affected by the hurricanes. They include various bands of the Biloxi-Chitimacha, as well as Muskogees.
"There's been a total devastation of homes, communities, jobs and lifestyle," said Brenda Dardar Robichaux, principal chief of the United Houma Nation.Tribal leaders said it is important that their members remain near ancestral land and worried that many might eventua
Source: Guardian
November 28, 2005
As Nigeria holds its first ever carnival, should Christians and Muslims condemn the event as pagan and barbaric? The carnival organisers say the four-day event will unite the country and bring in foreign exchange.
The colour, elegance and cultural diversity of Nigeria will be on show with masquerades, a durbar ensemble of horses and traditional circus performances. But Nigeria's religious leaders claim carnival is not African, arguing that it will p
Source: Newsweek
November 21, 2005
President George W. Bush is close to deciding where he'll build his presidential library. In Washington this week, four Texas universities will make final pitches to a selection committee led by Don Evans, a longtime Bush friend and former Commerce secretary, and Marvin Bush, the president's brother. Finalists include the University of Dallas, Baylor University, Southern Methodist University and a consortium led by Texas Tech University. Nearly a dozen Texas groups had vied for the library, incl
Source: NYT
11-26-05`
They have the awkwardness of amateur home videos: background noise, long silences, people looking away from the camera. But inside a booth at the New-York Historical Society, visitors to the exhibition "Slavery in New York" are recording their reactions, creating snapshot reflections on race and history in the nation's largest city.
"It allows our young people to understand, really, how this city was born and who carried the brunt of the prosperity that we see in New
Source: NYT
November 26, 2005
Paul Revere Williams, who designed the Morris Landau House, could not have lived in the tony Holmby Hills section of Los Angeles when the home was built there.
Williams was black, and in 1936, the year he completed the red brick English-country-style residence, African-Americans were barred by restrictive covenants and prevailing biases from owning property in the best parts of the city.Williams, a pre-eminent Southern California architect, lived ins
Source: NYT
November 27, 2005
LASSE HALLSTROM recently shot a film that retells a decades-old story some of the players would rather forget. Speaking by phone from New York, Mr. Hallstrom, the highly regarded Swedish director, was clear about one thing: to make a movie about Clifford Irving isn't necessarily to love him.
Mr. Irving is still remembered as the writer who nearly pulled off one of the most audacious scams in publishing: an "autobiography" of Howard Hughes, based on in-person interviews of
Source: NYT
November 27, 2005
As Princeton admitted a growing number of minority students, Concerned Alumni charged repeatedly that the administration was lowering admission standards, undermining the university's distinctive traditions and admitting too few children of alumni. "Currently alumni children comprise 14 percent of each entering class, compared with an 11 percent quota for blacks and Hispanics," the group wrote in a 1985 fund-raising letter sent to all Princeton graduates.
Among the group'
Source: NYT
November 27, 2005
On Wednesday, Sotheby's is to auction two such images, known by the names of early owners: the Constable-Hamilton Portrait and the Munro-Lenox Portrait. They are being offered by the New York Public Library as part of a broader sell-off that has drawn some criticism, and are expected to fetch, respectively, from $10 million to $15 million and $6 million to $8 million. So what makes one Washington more valuable than another?
"When we were assessi
Source: NYT
November 27, 2005
On Dec. 12, the Federal District Court in Los Angeles will hear a lawsuit filed by a consortium of Christian high schools against the University of California system for refusing to credit some of their courses when their students apply for admission.
Among those courses are "Christianity's Influence in American History" and "Christianity and American Literature," both of which draw on textbooks published by Bob Jones University of Greenville, S.C., which describ
Source: NYT
November 28, 2005
Until recently, few in Newark, Ohio, thought it strange that golfers whacked little white balls across ground once hallowed to an ancient community.The Hopewell Indians used sharp sticks and clamshells here 2,000 years ago to sculpture seven million cubic feet of dirt into a sprawling lunar observatory and the spiritual center of their far-flung empire.
Today it is an easy Par 3 flanked by sand traps shaped like kidney beans.
But now there is an ea
Source: NYT
November 28, 2005
The Auschwitz-Birkenau museum in Poland has bought 81 musical scores once played by the camp's prisoner orchestra, Agence France-Press reported. The scores, which belonged to an anonymous Polish collector, include works by Verdi, Josef Rixner, Carl Robrecht, Heinrich Strecker and Franz von Suppé. Many are handwritten and bear the seal of the camp, a museum spokesman said. The scores are signed by prisoners who were in the orchestra, using their inmate numbers.
Source: Sydney Morning Herald
November 28, 2005
An expensive campaign to boost Germans' low self-confidence has backfired after it emerged that its slogan was first coined by the Nazis. The €30 million ($48 million) Du Bist Deutschland (You Are Germany) project was meant to inspire Germans to stop moaning and do something for their country.But now a historian from Ludwigshafen has provoked an uproar with his discovery that the same Du Bist Deutschland cry was used at Nazi rallies in the 1930s. Stefan Morz found photograph
Source: Daily Telegraph (Sydney, Australia)
November 28, 2005
If proof were needed that Aussies like a drink, then the discovery of a pub cellar built just 13 years after European settlement should be enough.
The remains of what is believed to be one of the oldest pubs in the country were found by construction workers at a development site in Parramatta.Just a metre below the surface, workers unearthed the cellar belonging to the Wheatsheaf Hotel -- which stood on the corner of Marsden and Macquarie Sts from 1801 to 1808.
