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: Knight Ridder
November 2, 2005
The bronze bust of Jaafar al Mansour, who founded Baghdad in the eighth century, stood in the center of a traffic circle in northwestern Baghdad and was used by nearly everyone as a reference point: 'near the statue,' 'a kilometer past the statue.' It was a symbol of the city, without politics or sectarianism, until Oct. 19, when terrorists reduced it to rubble with a roadside bomb.It's especially troubling to residents, ... because it celebrated Baghdad's storie
Source: Baltimore Sun
November 8, 2005
No, you probably can't get college credit for watching the scandalous adventures of Desperate Housewives, but if you look hard enough on American campuses you'll find an occasional course on literature of the suburbs, a seminar discussing Crabgrass Frontier and other discourses on the growth of suburbia.
Increasingly, if still a bit disdainfully, academia is beginning to pay attention to the 'burbs, home for years now to at least half of all Americans.&quo
Source: Slate
November 8, 2005
Slate's Timothy Noah is taking the Washington Post to task for declining to mention that Fred Malek, an investor in the club that wants to bring major league baseball back to the US capital, disgraced himself in the Nixon administration by taking a nose count of Jews in the Bureau of Labor Statistics (at Nixon's request). Noah notes that the last time Malek's counting was mentioned by the Post was June 30.
Source: History Today
November 9, 2005
Parts of an ancient lighthouse considered one of the Seven Wonders of the World have been discovered in the Egyptian city of Alexandria. French marine archaeologists discovered the foundations of the Lighthouse of Pharos in the entrance to the city’s harbour. The Alexandria Lighthouse was built in around 270BC by the Greek architect Sostratus and was then one of the tallest buildings in the world, with three layered towers at a height of 440ft. The first lighthouse in the wo
Source: History Today
November 2, 2005
Around 1.5million men in China today are descendants of one man linked with the last dynasty of emperors. A geneticist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Dr Chris Tyler-Smith discovered the genes of Giocangga could be traced to a huge percentage of today’s population in north-east China and Mongolia. Giocangga was the grandfather of Emperor Nurhaci, a Manchurian tribal leader who died in 1626 and founded the Qing dynasty, which ruled from 1644-1912. The results of the s
Source: NYT
November 8, 2005
In an apparent slip, a top American intelligence official has revealed at a public conference what has long been secret: the amount of money the United States spends on its spy agencies.
At an intelligence conference in San Antonio last week, Mary Margaret Graham, a 27-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency and now the deputy director of national intelligence for collection, said the annual intelligence budget was $44 billion.The number was
Source: NYT
November 8, 2005
Distaste for the police in France has roots in clashes between demonstrators and the police in the 1960's, historians say. Those clashes, notably during demonstrations against the war in Algeria in 1965 and then during the student-worker protests in 1968, caused a rift between civil society and the police, and gave a lasting stigma to the police.
''The 1960's were the end of the neighborhood cop in France,'' said Cmdr. Alain Jackel, who leads the C.R.S. commandos in Champigny-sur-M
Source: Wa Po
November 8, 2005
More than 2 1/2 years after looters sacked Iraq's National Museum in Baghdad, Iraqi authorities and police forces throughout the world are still searching for thousands of stolen items, including a handful of the most famous artifacts in history.
U.S. military sources say forces in Iraq have no systematic way of investigating the missing objects, and in the ongoing insurgency neither U.S. nor Iraqi forces can justify using scarce manpower to guard sites in the countryside, where wid
Source: Daily Princetonian
November 8, 2005
The senior thesis of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito '72, which along with some 300 others was lost during the 1970s, resurfaced Monday when Alito's thesis adviser provided a copy to the University.
Walter Murphy, the McCormick Professor in Jurisprudence Emeritus, sent a copy of the thesis, which concerned the Italy's highest court, to the University's Mudd Manuscript Library. The document's preface was made available Monday night, and the full 134-page document will be avai
Source: Washington Times
October 15, 2005
It is the collection of a lifetime -- thousands of artifacts, including diaries, uniforms, weapons, flags and soldiers' accouterments, that tell the story of the Civil War in the Trans-Mississippi Theater. Amassed by retired radiologist Tom Sweeney of Springfield, Mo., many items in the collection have been used for illustrations in the Time-Life book series on the Civil War. Now it all belongs to the National Park Service in a $4.5 million deal that includes not only the artifacts, but the muse
Source: BBC News
July 7, 2005
In 1937, 4,000 Basque children were brought to Britain to escape the horrors of the Spanish Civil War.
Even before they arrived there was controversy about the operation, as many people believed such an act would contravene the UK's stance of non-intervention in the war.
However, after the destruction of Guernica by German bombers, there were increasing fears for the safety of the civilian population in nearby Bilbao.The children were cared
Source: BBC News
November 7, 2005
In 430BC, during the Peloponnesian war against their great rival Sparta, the people of Athens were hit by a deadly disease that has defied diagnosis to this day. By the end of the plague Athens had lost a third of its army. The Greek historian Thucydides survived a bout of this unknown killer and left a vivid account of its symptoms, which make for frightening reading. "People in good health were all of a sudden attacked by violent heats in the head, and red
Source: BBC
November 8, 2005
A German Holocaust denier who has regularly lavished praise on Adolf Hitler has gone on trial in Germany.
The case was delayed as soon as it had started, when the judge dismissed a member of Ernst Zuendel's defence team for having a racist conviction. He denies inciting racial hatred and spreading Nazi propaganda. He faces up to five years in jail if convicted.
Mr Zuendel once published a book called The Hitler We Loved and Why, and described the fo
Source: The Art Newspaper
November 2, 2005
As the US considers China’s request for restrictions on the import of archaeological material, the question of China’s alleged organised plunder of Tibetan artefacts is about to come under US congressional scrutiny. The move is likely to be seized upon by dealers in the US who oppose restrictions on the trade in Chinese artefacts. Dana Rohrabacher, a conservative Republican representative in the United States Congress and a long-standing critic of China’s human rights recor
Source: UPI
November 7, 2005
A new history exam in Britain has the backing of the Historical Association to "sex up" exams to make them more accessible for the less academic.
The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority has awarded a contract to develop a pilot exam that would link history to related vocational areas of learning such as national heritage, museums, galleries, historic sites, archaeology, tourism, archives and media, the Daily Telegraph Saturday. "There is now a
Source: Japan Focus
November 3, 2005
Illustrator and caricaturist Arthur Syzk, a Polish Jew born in 1894, fled Nazism for America in 1940. There he applied his considerable talent to war propaganda – so successfully that the American press often described him as a “one man army” against fascism.
A 2002 exhibition of Szyk’s work at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington sparked a revival of interest in the artist in the US and Europe, but until a recent Foreign Correspondent Club exhibition, Szyk was
Source: cbs5.com (San Francisco)
November 7, 2005
Three kinds of looters raided Iraq's museums, said the man in charge of Iraq's collection of antiquities--common criminals, collectors, and many who had inside knowledge of the museums.
Iraq's archeological heritage remains at risk, according to Dr. Donny George, director of the Iraq Museum and chairman of Iraq's State Board of Antiquities and Heritage. Violence in the country has made even the daily commute a life or death situation.Not long a
Source: NYT
November 7, 2005
When Israeli authorities wanted to expand the Megiddo Prison, they tapped their captive labor pool and put dozens of inmates to work digging inside the compound here that is ringed with coiled razor wire and guard towers.
As is common practice in Israel, the site underwent a check for possible archaeological ruins before heavy equipment could be moved in. Last week, the inmates discovered a Christian religious site that Israel's Antiquities Authority said may date to the third centu
Source: NYT
November 7, 2005
It remains to be seen what kind of justice Judge Alito might turn out to be, if he gets the chance: whether, for instance, he is the upper-case conservative that the right may hope for and many on the left fear. An examination of several chapters in his life suggests he is conservative by temperament, upbringing and experience - conditions that appear to have shaped his approach to life and his work more than any narrow ideological niche."There are people in
Source: Jerusalem Post
November 7, 2005
An 84-year-old Nazi war criminal serving two life sentences for the murder of 18 Jews has died in a British jail, authorities said Monday.
Anthony Sawoniuk, the only person to be convicted of Nazi war crimes in a British court, died in Norwich Prison, in eastern England, on Sunday, a Home Office spokeswoman said. During a war crimes trial in Britain in 1999 Sawoniuk pleaded innocent to involvement in Nazi genocide in Eastern Europe more than 50 years earlier, bu
