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: NYT
November 6, 2005
In his 15 years on the federal appeals court in Philadelphia, Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. has provided just a few direct statements on the intense legal debate over how power should be shared between the federal government and the states.
To some scholars, those occasions have been revealing and significant and suggest that if confirmed to the Supreme Court, Judge Alito might be an aggressive leader in expanding state authority at the expense of the federal government.
Source: Wa Po
November 6, 2005
Israeli archaeologists said Saturday they have discovered what may be the oldest Christian church in the Holy Land on the grounds of a prison near the biblical site of Armageddon.
The Israeli Antiquities Authority said the ruins are believed to date back to the third or fourth centuries and include references to Jesus and images of fish, an ancient Christian symbol."This is a very ancient structure, maybe the oldest in our area," said Yotam
Source: NYT
November 5, 2005
In 1969, Eric Bogle, a high school dropout, sometime accountant and former singer in a Beatles-style band, emigrated from Scotland to Australia in search of money and adventure.
Before the move, he had started writing songs somewhat like the ones his grandfather, a noted Scottish balladeer, used to sing. But nothing amounted to much.
Then in 1971, with Australia embroiled in Vietnam alongside the United States, Mr. Bogle sat down to write what would become one of the
Source: Seattle Times
November 6, 2005
Now in its third year on the trail, The Discovery Expedition of St. Charles, Mo., has traveled more than 4,100 miles on the Ohio, Mississippi, Missouri, Snake and Columbia rivers. The group is re-enacting the more than 8,000-mile expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, which was commissioned in 1803 and ended in 1806.
On this 21st century journey some have flipped their boats; others wintered in a cabin so cold the snow never melted off a woodpile stacked inside; and some
Source: Russell Riley in the Wa Po
November 6, 2005
While much of Washington has been focused over the past week on reports about Vice President Cheney's early discussions of Valerie Plame's identity, little notice has been given to something equally surprising about these revelations -- their source. Investigators looking into the case reportedly found evidence of these meetings in former vice presidential aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's own notes of conversations he had with Cheney.
White House alumni across political lin
Source: BBC News
November 5, 2005
Guy Fawkes could have changed the face of London if his 1605 plot had not been foiled, explosion experts have said. His 2,500 kg of gunpowder could have caused chaos and devastation over a 490-metre radius, they have calculated.
Fawkes' planned blast was powerful enough to destroy Westminster Hall and the Abbey, with streets as far as Whitehall suffering damage, they say. Early in the morning of 5 November 1605, Guy Fawkes was discovered in a cellar
Source: Michael Beschloss in Newsweek
November 2, 2005
Presidents fall into second-term slumps for different reasons. More important for President Bush is how they get out of them. Roosevelt gained an unprecedented third term by convincing the country that he alone was equipped to shield them against the growing threats from Hitler and the imperial Japanese. Ronald Reagan shook off the albatross of Iran-contra by joining Mikhail Gorbachev to wind down the cold war. Straining to survive the Monica Lewinsky mess, Bill Clinton boasted that he was respo
Source: NYT
November 3, 2005
President Jacques Chirac of France opened a memorial to deportees of the anti-Nazi resistance today near the city of Strasbourg and the site of the sole World War II concentration camp on French soil.
"Never forget the victims of the darkest chapters of mankind's history," Mr. Chirac told a gathering of former inmates and officials at the Struthof-Natzweiller camp, built by the Nazis in 1941 in the mountains of Alsace, a region that was annexed by Germany during the war.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
November 4, 2005
A Bar-Ilan University archaeologist is under investigation by the Israel police in the wake of allegations that he illegally possessed a scroll fragment dating from the second century AD. But the archaeologist, Hanan Eshel, says he acted in good faith to rescue a valuable find that antiquities dealers were seeking to sell. "Eshel was brought in for questioning after we received formal complaint from the Antiquities Authority that he was holding a scroll that
Source: Press Release New-York Historical Society
November 3, 2005
A one-in-fifteen million long shot comes true as a 249-year-old paper trail leads to the discovery of a colonial American slave’s descendants.
An exhibit at the NY Historical Society tells the poignant story of Priscilla, a 10-year old African girl kidnapped into slavery in 1756, whose exile began in Sierra Leone and ended in Charleston, South Carolina. Using a rare and unbroken document trail that began 249 years ago, scholars have traced Priscilla’s origin in Africa, her exile on the mi
Source: Washington Times
November 4, 2005
The State Department said yesterday that it has closed its investigation into reports that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, took part in the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, even though no conclusion has been reached. The investigation stalled because the Iranian government refused to answer questions from Washington, said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack. "We've arrived at a point where really the ball is in the Iranians' court to answer those unanswered que
Source: MarketWatch,
November 4, 2005
Google Inc. marked an important step in the history of recorded information Thursday by opening up the first virtual library on the Web.
Google said it's making available the first large collection of public books via Google Print. The books range from U.S. Civil War history texts to government documents. The digitized books are not subject to copyright laws because they were never bound by these laws or copyright law has expired. All books published prior to 1923 are considered to
Source: NYT
November 4, 2005
A statistical model developed by Lee Epstein, a professor of law and political science at Washington University, and her colleagues, which incorporates newspaper editorials and other sources, suggests that confirmations have steadily grown more polarized over ideology in recent decades.
Since 1937, her model shows, the importance of nominees' qualifications has not changed. But ideology took on greater importance beginning in the 50's, with Brown v. Board of Education and conservati
Source: NYT
November 4, 2005
Adam Frydman went back to a field on the grounds of Poland's Maidanek to look for prized possessions buried by concentration camp victims--like himself. He held two rings that had been buried there, inches below the ground, by inmates facing death. He and his father and brother were imprisoned there 62 years ago. Four Maidanek survivors who live in Australia came here with Israeli archaeologists, Israeli and European amateur investigators and British and American docu
Source: BBC
November 4, 2005
Russia is celebrating a new national holiday - but few people know why. The Day of People's Unity was created last year after the parliament scrapped the 7 November public holiday marking the Bolshevik uprising in 1917.
The new 4 November holiday marks the end of Polish occupation almost four centuries ago, and the Kremlin hopes that it will help boost patriotism. Correspondents say polls show only 8% could name the new holiday, while over 60% opposed dropping Revolution Day.
Source: Times-Picayune
November 3, 2005
An 1878 map of New Orleans' settled areas shows that most of the city's 200,000 residents at the time clustered in a narrow swath along the Mississippi River, settling on the natural levees created by periodic floods.It was still a good idea 127 years later. The city's old footprint corresponds closely to the small area that remained dry in the disastrous floods that came after Hurricane Katrina.
Indeed, the storm served up an unwelcome reminder that the city's
Source: The Scotsman
November 3, 2005
Scotland risks losing the biggest collection of Jacobite art and artefacts in Britain, a national treasure trove that is potentially a major tourist draw, it is being warned.There are more than 300 items in the Drambuie collection of Jacobite art, ranging from a hand-written letter from Prince Charles Edward Stuart and historic glassware cut with secret codes, to miniature and full-length portraits.
Earlier this year, the Drambuie liqueur company said its collec
Source: The Independent (London)
November 4, 2005
A French eyewitness account of the country's dramatic defeat at the Battle of Trafalgar has been discovered, shedding light on the historic battle.Details of the sea battle, in which British boats chased and captured the French vessels, appear in the helmsman's log. The document, taken from the French ship Mont Blanc, was discovered by researchers from the British National Archives among the vessel's muster roll, the lists of payments to the crew on board.
Alist
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
November 3, 2005
Google has added the initial batch of scanned library books to a searchable index, the first fruits of the company's controversial partnership with five major research libraries.
The Library Project, part of the company's Google Print program, has been digitizing library books for nearly a year, in an arrangement with Harvard and Stanford Universities, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and the University of Oxford, in England, as well as the New York Public Library. But unti
Source: Citizen Outreach Petition
November 3, 2005
The Carson City (NV) school district says 11th-grade history teachers should start teaching American history at the Civil War period and move forward. But one experienced, award-winning teacher is standing up to this History-Lite policy and is insisting on teaching about our nation's colonial and Founding eras. And he might lose his job over it. Citizen Outreach is asking people to sign an online petition to save his job. Meet Joe Enge.
Joe is an a
