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: USA Today
September 27, 2005
Officials and historians from seven midstate communities are trying to create a Civil War heritage trail to lure tourists to towns that played a role in the Civil War before the battle of Gettysburg.
The trail, to be completed in time for next year's travel season, will include York, Wrightsville and Hanover as well as Harrisburg, Carlisle, Chambersburg and Gettysburg, all affected when the Army of Northern Virginia entered Pennsylvania in the summer of 1863.
Source: NYT
September 27, 2005
President Bush said Monday that he and Congress should immediately begin discussing whether to amend federal law so the military could take responsibility right away in natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina.
"I don't want to prejudge the Congress's discussion on this issue because it may require change of law," Mr. Bush said, apparently referring to the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, written in response to the huge federal military presence in the South during Reconstruct
Source: LAT
September 27, 2005
Attorneys for the J. Paul Getty Museum have determined that half the masterpieces in its antiquities collection were purchased from dealers now under investigation for allegedly selling artifacts looted from ruins in Italy.Italian authorities have identified dozens of objects in the Getty collection as looted, including ancient urns, vases and a 5-foot marble statue of Apollo.
The Italians have Polaroid photographs seized from a dealer's warehouse in Switz
Source: CNN
September 26, 2005
Now, two centuries later, states are promoting the National Road's historic, cultural and recreational sites as a way to lure tourists from the interstates where speed is the big draw. The road served as a gateway to the West in the early decades of the 19th century, before the expansion of the railroads. It was heavily traveled by stagecoaches and wagons carrying pioneers, adventurers, traders and other travelers.In Ohio, a stately red brick inn once frequented by pre
Source: CNN
September 26, 2005
The European Parliament has called on European Union member states to support its proposal for promoting the route of the former Iron Curtain dividing Eastern and Western Europe as a tourist trail.EU lawmakers said they wanted the 4,250-mile route to preserve the memory of the continent's division, promote a European identity and celebrate the reunification of Europe.
The trail would start at the Arctic Sea and lead along Finland's border with Russia, thro
Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch
September 26, 2005
Facing a current deficit of about $400,000, Executive Director Waite Rawls is certain things will only get worse. During his presentation today to a General Assembly subcommittee studying the cost and feasibility of relocating the White House, a national Historic Landmark, and the 108-year-old museum, Rawls spelled out just how bad it is likely to get. And, for the first time, he admitted that the historic institution is out of options."You have to face real
Source: US Department of State
September 26, 2005
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) special agents recovered and seized 322 pre-Columbian artifacts from Peru after a joint investigation by ICE and the Broward Sheriff's Office (BSO) of Broward County, Florida, according to a September 23 press release issued by ICE. ICE, which is an agency within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said that the recovered Peruvian artifacts "date as far back as 1500 B.C."The stolen antiquities were di
Source: Chicago Tribune
September 25, 2005
This summer and fall, in a rare turn of events, Beijing is commemorating the victims of Japanese war crimes through the eyes of a foreigner: Minnie Vautrin, a missionary educator from Secor, near Bloomington. In a communist country where the United States is often attacked in media and the arts, an official dance drama tells of the massacre in Nanjing as witnessed by the American woman.When Japanese troops stormed into Nanjing in 1937, murdering 300,000 Chinese and rap
Source: Reuters
September 25, 2005
Israel's ruling Likud party, which faces a leadership showdown between Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and longtime rival Benjamin Netanyahu over the timing of party primaries, has a history of acrimonious power struggles.1986 - Chaotic party convention breaks up in fistfights during a power struggle between then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Sharon and David Levy.
1990 - Leading the Likud hawks, Sharon seizes microphone to shout down Shamir at a rancorous party co
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
September 26, 2005
An academic conference on Turkey's controversial
"Armenian question" took place over the weekend in Istanbul, despite legal maneuvering by Turkish nationalists that had threatened to prevent it. The conference was originally to have taken place in May, but was postponed at the last minute under pressure from government officials. The conference, titled "Ottoman Armenians During the Demise of the Empire: Issues of Democracy and Scientific Re
Source: Norman Solomon, Media Beat Column
September 26, 2005
It’s reasonable to estimate that more than a quarter of a million people demonstrated against the Iraq war on Saturday in Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco and other U.S. cities. The next day, the Washington Post front-paged a decent story that described “the largest show of antiwar sentiment in the nation’s capital since the conflict in Iraq began.” But more perfunctory back-page articles were typical in daily papers across the country. And over the weekend, many TV news watchers saw li
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
September 26, 2005
Following an outcry from social conservatives, Haworth Press announced last week that it had canceled the publication of an edited volume on homosexuality in classical antiquity. The conservative activists had complained that one of the book's chapters -- an essay by Bruce L. Rind, an adjunct instructor in psychology at Temple University -- amounted to a defense of present-day sexual relationships between men and adolescent boys. The press has not made the full text of the b
Source: NYT
September 26, 2005
A lot of Camelot - the Camelot of John F. Kennedy, not of Arthurian legend - has been squeezed into a warehouse in East Harlem. There, in a bright, white room in the basement, a crew of auction house employees born after Kennedy was assassinated is scrambling to prepare for an auction in December. Their boss at the auction house, Arlan Ettinger of Guernsey's, is old enough to remember where he was on Nov. 22, 1963, though not old enough to have voted in 1960. Mr. Ettinger ob
Source: NYT
September 26, 2005
Emerging from years of civil war that left more than 100,000 dead and thousands more unaccounted for, Algeria is not alone in the world as it tries to figure out how to get beyond a brutal past. History is filled with wrenching stories of neighbors killing neighbors in nations divided along ideological, ethic and religious lines.
But where other nations, like South Africa, Rwanda, Argentina and even the former Soviet Union, have promoted reconciliation through public debate and pub
Source: Inside Higher Ed
September 26, 2005
Recent decades have opened up history faculties so that they include more female and minority scholars. But a new report released by the American Historical Association says that in key respects history departments are becoming “less diverse.” Top doctoral programs are admitting Ph.D. students from a narrow group of mostly private institutions and top departments are in turn hiring from a narrow range of institutions, the report says.The preference of elite insti
Source: Deutsche Presse-Agentur
September 26, 2005
Right and left-wing nationalists joined forces in Istanbul on Saturday to protest the start of an academic conference looking into the massacres of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in Turkey during
and after the First World War.
Hundreds of police officers were on duty at Bigli University ensuring that only those invited to the conference were allowed onto the campus while protesters shouted pro-Turkish slogans outside. There
were no reports of violence.
Source: Haaretz
September 26, 2005
American Jewish leaders have launched a new campaign aimed at pressuring Eastern European countries to live up to their promises to compensate Holocaust survivors and to return stolen property to the families of those who perished at the hands of the Nazis. One Jewish leader described the campaign as "a final offensive" to get these countries, most of which are former members of the Soviet bloc, to give top priority to the problem."These countries have a
Source: Telegraph (UK)
September 26, 2005
Revelations about sex in Britain a few years after the war, including the disclosure that one in five women had an extra-marital affair, have been discovered in a university archive. Long before Britain could be thought to encourage a permissive society, one in five men confessed to a homosexual experience and one in four said he had sex with prostitutes.Most women complained that their husbands were terrible in bed. These were the findings of the 1949 Mass Obser
Source: NYT
September 25, 2005
In fall 2001, not long after hundreds of makeshift hospital beds had been set up at Chelsea Piers to receive injured survivors from the World Trade Center - beds that were never used - Tom A. Bernstein, president of Chelsea Piers, envisioned reclaiming ground zero with the power of an idea.
The idea was freedom, embodied in an institution that would transmit its value to future generations. To build it, Mr. Bernstein said in 2004 he expected "years of intense labor, contentious
Source: Washington Post
August 23, 2005
Syria is trying to negotiate a deal to prevent punitive action by the United Nations if, as is widely expected, the Damascus government is linked to the Feb. 14 assassination of Lebanon's former prime minister, according to U.S. and European officials.
Over the past month, the government of President Bashar Assad has been inquiring about the potential for a deal, roughly equivalent to what Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi did to end tough international sanctions imposed for his country
