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: Seattle Times
November 3, 2005
In college, Samuel Alito led a student conference that urged legalization of sodomy and curbs on domestic intelligence, a sweeping defense of privacy rights that he said were under threat by the government and the dawning computer age.
President Bush's nominee for the Supreme Court, in a report written years before ubiquitous personal computers made electronic privacy the everyday concern it has become, warned of the potential for abuses by officials and companies collecting data on
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 expan
Source: Japan Focus
November 2, 2005
In 2002, “Japanese who had been orphaned in China” (Chugoku zanryu koji) filed a lawsuit against the Japanese State before the Tokyo Metropolitan Circuit Court. Since then, orphans have brought similar lawsuits before the lower courts in fifteen locations throughout Japan. The number of these plaintiffs has now reached 2,025. In Osaka, 111 orphans brought a suit before the district court in 2003. On July 6 th, 2005, the court will hand down a verdict to the first thirty-two plaintiffs. Their ave
Source: NYT
November 3, 2005
DETROIT, Nov. 2 - In this, Rosa Parks's adopted hometown, the first row on hundreds of city buses sat empty on Wednesday, saved for the memory of Mrs. Parks and all she had done on another bus miles from here 50 years ago.
And so, as the politicians, the civil rights leaders, the famous musicians and the ministers packed into a massive church here to honor Mrs. Parks with formal speeches, ordinary people also swapped stories about her as they went about their days, to work and back,
Source: CNN
November 3, 2005
PASS CHRISTIAN, Mississippi As Hurricane Katrina approached, local historians were confident a vault filled with precious pre-Civil War pictures, maps and documents cataloguing the history of this Gulf Coast community would be safe.
Hopes were high after the storm passed. The former bank building that served as the Pass Christian Historical Society headquarters washed away, but its vault still stood. Workers opened it to find wet, sopping papers -- the ruined history of a seaside to
Source: Wa Po
November 2, 2005
Eight years ago, a trio of federal appellate judges heard the case of Beryl Bray, a housekeeping manager at a Marriott hotel in Park Ridge, N.J., who alleged that she was denied a promotion because she was black. Two of the judges concluded that Bray had shown a lower court enough evidence of discrimination that she deserved a jury trial.
But the third judge, Samuel A. Alito, disagreed, writing that the hotel had merely committed "minor inconsistencies" in its rules for fi
Source: Xinhuanet
November 3, 2005
China plans to abolish legal distinctions between urban residents and peasants in 11 provinces as the government tries to slow the country\'s surging wealth gap and reduce social unrest, media reports said Wednesday.Under an experimental program, local governments in those provinces will allow peasants to register as urban residents and to have the same rights to housing, education, medical care and social security that city dwellers have.
If carried out as advertised, the program w
Source: USA Today
November 2, 2005
If truth is war's first casualty, the Iraq Museum in Baghdad has the scars to prove it.More than two years after the museum, home to the remains of mankind's most ancient cities, was pillaged by an army of looters, thousands of the stolen objects have yet to be recovered.
And it appears that civilian and military experts may never agree on exactly what happened at one of the world's most prized museums or on who should have protected these treasures.Matthew Bogd
Source: AFP
November 3, 2005
Vietnam on Thursday described as a "historic fact" a US report that false intelligence given to the White House in 1964 led to the first major escalation of the Vietnam War.Reacting to the report, Vietnamese foreign ministry spokesman Le Dung told AFP: "Everybody knows that the Tonkin Gulf event in 1964 was created by the then US administration, using it as a reason to extend war to the whole territory of Vietnam. This is a historic fact."
Source: AP
November 3, 2005
Historians in Pass Christian, Miss., were confident a vault filled with precious pre-Civil War pictures, maps and documents cataloging the history of this Gulf Coast community would be safe as Hurricane Katrina approached.
Hopes were high after the storm passed. The former bank building that served as the Pass Christian Historical Society's headquarters washed away, but its vault still stood. Workers opened it and found wet, sopping papers – the ruined history of a seaside town. Mos
Source: Environmental News Network
November 3, 2005
The farm of Daniel Webster, one of New England’s greatest statesmen, has been acquired and will be protected by the Trust for Public Land, the national conservation organization announced today.
“We are proud to have acquired the home of one of America’s legendary historic figures,” said Whitney Hatch, director of TPL’s New England office. “Webster Farm is significant, both in New Hampshire and nationally, and protecting it for future generations will protect an important part of Am
Source: Hampton Roads, Va. Daily Press
November 2, 2005
A rare temporary field kitchen used by occupying British Revolutionary War soldiers has been unearthed on the campus of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. It's a find that initially puzzled archaeologists.
The only other known Revolutionary War-era field kitchen is at Valley Forge, Pa., where two were discovered, archaeologists said. "We weren't sure what we had," said Tom Bodor, director of cultural resources at The Ottery Group, a Maryland-based firm hired to cond
Source: Fox News
November 2, 2005
Fox News has published a chronology of flu pandemics throughout recorded history.
Source: Press Release from Dera, Roslan & Campion
November 2, 2005
NOVA plans to broadcast a new documentary, HITLER’S
SUNKEN SECRET, which claims to uncover "new evidence about an enduring mystery." It's the story of the sinking of a "Norwegian ferry sabotaged in a daring resistance operation during WWII." The ferry was thought to be carrying heavy water useful in the creation of a Nazi nuclear bomb. The press release ...
This new documentary involves one of the last remaining puzzles from World W
Source: Network of Concerned Historians
November 2, 2005
The English Section of International PEN and the Network for Education and Academic Rights (NEAR) is drawing attention once again to the case of writer Rakhim Esenov (78 years old) in connection with his historical novel, The Crowned Wanderer, set during the period of the Mogul Empire. The Network of Concerned Historians is asking historians to answer an appeal by PEN for help.NCH SUMMARY
On 23 February 2004, Russian citizen Rakhim Esenov (?1926-), writer, histo
Source: AP
November 2, 2005
The outgoing president of Randolph-Macon College in Virginia, Roger Martin is an Oxford-trained church historian. His successor is a career fundraiser who brought in about $3 billion for his last two employers.
The appointment last week of Robert Lindgren to lead the small, 175-year old liberal arts college about 15 miles north of Richmond is the latest example of a trend in higher education: Schools are looking for more than a scholar these days when they hire a president.
Source: NYT
November 2, 2005
Rosa Parks, the unassuming seamstress whose small act of defiance on a city bus 50 years ago helped spark the modern civil rights movement, was to be lain to rest today in Detroit after a lavish funeral service attended by dignitaries and thousands of others.Beginning at dawn, people began lining up around the cavernous Greater Grace Temple, in Mrs. Park's adopted hometown, and the line still wrapped around two blocks as the services got under way.
"The wor
Source: CNN
November 2, 2005
In the early decades of the University of North Carolina, servants kindled fires in students' rooms and cut wood to fuel stoves. The 216-year-old school, which takes pride in being the nation's oldest public university, is now airing a shameful side of its past -- those servants were slaves. The university is using records and photographs that archivists have uncovered to present a fuller story of the school's beginnings."This university was built by slaves
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, and published by the Federation of American Scientists
November 2, 2005
In an extraordinary procedural maneuver that exposed partisan tensions over intelligence oversight, Senate Democrats forced the Senate into a rare closed session for more than two hours until they won agreement from the majority to get a progress report on the status of the Senate Intelligence Committee's long-deferred review of pre-war intelligence on Iraq.The Senate floor debate preceding and following the closed session featured unusually blunt statements on t
Source: Harvard Crimson
November 2, 2005
Arguing that new state curriculum guidelines on the Armenian genocide deprive students of the complete historical picture, two local teachers and a high school student have signed on as plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit against the Massachusetts Department of Education.
The historical account in question is a two-year span during World War I in which anywhere from 600,000 to 1.5 million Armenians were deported by the Turkish government and killed or allowed to die. While these events
