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: Financial Times (London)
August 22, 2005
When Alan Greenspan attended his first Washington Nationals baseball game at the start of this month, he received a hero's welcome. Security guards urged the Federal Reserve chairman to sit in an air-conditioned executive suite but Mr Greenspan, a true baseball fan, chose a seat in the stands in the heat of the Washington summer. The 79-year-old central banker, who for 18 years has presided over the setting of US interest rates, was cheered as he arrived. People nearby asked him to autograph the
Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
August 22, 2005
Some images from the Japanese surrender to Gen. Douglas MacArthur, 60 years ago Sept. 2, are burned into the world's photo album. Taken from above or from the side, the pictures show MacArthur or a Japanese representative signing papers at a desk on the deck of the battleship USS Missouri. Today, a fresh perspective on the historic event has emerged, courtesy of a cache of pictures found by a metro Atlanta man in a dusty attic in San Diego. All but one of the pictures, taken by an unknown Navy p
Source: Wa Po
August 21, 2005
"The Star-Spangled Banner" is one of America's grandest symbols. Yet historians fear that the origin of the song first penned as a poem by Francis Scott Key is easily forgotten or, worse, unknown -- even in Washington DC. Key penned the poem in honor of U.S. efforts in the War of 1812, the British-American war that brought the country new confidence and patriotism. So historians have teamed up with politicians to commemorate the war, parts of which were fought up and down the Chesapea
Source: Herald Sun (North Carolina)
August 21, 2005
DURHAM -- Covered with soot and coal dust from the heating fires of a bygone era, a batch of 19th- and early 20th-century legal records has emerged from a courthouse cubbyhole to weave a human drama involving long-dead drunkards, adulterers, businessmen, stable keepers and ordinary people in crisis. There are tales of bawdy houses, financially encumbered horses, business disputes and broken marriages, not to mention -- in the words of one document --"tippling, whoring, fighting and cursing.
Source: LAT
August 21, 2005
With more and more U.S. troops dying in Iraq, emotions on the American home front are increasingly conflicted. Is this a breakthrough moment, when public sentiment shifts dramatically against a conflict, as it did during the latter part of the Vietnam War? Or is it just a low point in a war that ultimately the country will be proud to have waged? "When Americans see the war that is being fought as somehow connected to larger purposes, that makes the wa
Source: Siskiyou Daily News
August 22, 2005
President Bush compared the fight against terrorism to both world wars and other great conflicts of the 20th century as he tried to reassure an increasingly skeptical public on Monday to support U.S. military involvement in Iraq. As he did in last year's election campaign and more recently as war opposition has risen, Bush reminded his listeners of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 _ reciting the date five times in a 30-minute speech.Besides his references to Sept. 11
Source: BBC
March 8, 2006
The 700th anniversary of the death of William Wallace is due to be marked in Scotland and London. Since being hung, drawn and quartered on 23 August, 1305, Wallace has become a cultural icon. SNP MSP Christine Grahame has called on the UK Government to instruct the flying of the Saltire above Edinburgh Castle on Tuesday.
Edinburgh Castle is an official flag station for the British Army and the SNP said such a move would be the first time the Saltire has been flo
Source: NYT
August 20, 2005
Decorated with spirals and migration symbols, Nathan Begay's multicolored jar resembles an ancient assemblage of shards. But it's actually a synthesis of historical and modern: Mr. Begay, a 46-year-old artist of Hopi and Navajo descent, created it five years ago. Its inclusion with some 2,000 other objects in the Phoenix-based Heard Museum's new exhibition of its permanent collection here reflects a sweeping change in the way museums are presenting Native American art. Rather than focusing on an
Source: LAT
August 20, 2005
Brian Flemming's "Bat Boy: The Musical" was praised by critics but appalled some fundamentalists with its references to incest and other dark themes. Flemming's latest project is just as likely to disturb conservative Christians. The 39-year-old Angeleno has made an hourlong documentary titled "The God Who Wasn't There." In it, the former born-again Christian argues that the biblical Jesus never lived, but is a mythological figure like Paul Bunyan.Initial
Source: Independent (UK)
August 20, 2005
The Da Vinci Code has sold more than 20 million copies across the world. So now it is to be a film. This week the film-makers are in Lincoln (Britain). They would have preferred to be in Westminster Abbey because it is there (something to do with the tomb of Sir Isaac Newton) that the trail in the book leads. But the Abbey authorities refused, saying "…we cannot commend or endorse the contentious and wayward religious and historic suggestions made in the book". Luc
Source: Toledo Journal
August 22, 2005
The scenes are graphic. The charred body of a Black man is juxtaposed with a burning chicken. A shackled Black leg is shown next to the leg of a chained elephant. A woman is branded next to a panel of a chicken getting branded. The message is unmistakable: animals are suffering the same fate as African-American slaves. That’s the point of a controversial campaign by the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). The online exhibit has been placed on hold amid a flurry of protests.
Source: NYT
August 21, 2005
An exhibit of anti-Semitic imagery will debut next March. Its organizer, a London physician named Simon Cohen, has single-mindedly gathered nearly 300 items of anti-Semitica, from medieval depictions of Jews murdering Christian children to Nazi propaganda denigrating Jews as subhuman parasites to modern anti-Israel imagery supposedly based on anti-Semitic stereotypes. Cohen is an Orthodox Jew. (There are two kinds of people who collect anti-Semitica, a collector once d
Source: NYT
August 21, 2005
After a Mississippi grand jury indicted the 80-year-old Edgar Ray Killen in January for the killings of three civil rights workers in 1964, his trial was described as the last in a series of reckonings over the unpunished wrongs of the era.But just when the dredging up of the past was supposed to be ending, it seems to have begun in earnest. Prosecutors, politicians and the descendants of victims are digging at ever more obscure cases, calling for re-examinations even
Source: NYT
August 21, 2005
John G. Roberts Jr. arrived at Harvard in the fall of 1973, a nascent conservative from a Catholic boarding school in the Republican Midwest, transplanted to Cambridge, Mass., at a time when campus conservatism seemed to be in hibernation. Prep school Marxists blustered about armed struggle, and students picketed liquor stores for carrying a boycotted wine. Conservatives were casually dismissed as a joke. Judge Roberts, President Bush's Supreme Court nominee, spe
Source: Donny George, head of the Iraq Museum, in an email to Francis Deblauwe, founder of Iraq Crisis
August 18, 2005
The reconstruction work in the Iraq museum is continuing, the last phase of the security project is going on now, surveillance cameras outside the museum are being installed, motion detectors inside all the halls and electronic switches are all over, the control room is almost finished. This was after the earlier phases of good strong fences and gates, redoing roofs, and iron bars for all the windows of the museum. More work will be done very soon, that includes repai
Source: Washington University in St. Louis
August 17, 2005
Those high-tech, air-filled, light-as-a-feather sneakers on your feet are a far cry from the leather slabs our ancestors wore for protection and support. But believe it or not, our modern day Nikes and Reeboks are direct descendents of the first supportive footwear that new research suggests came into use in western Eurasia between 26,000 and 30,000 years ago. Erik Trinkaus, Ph.D., the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor of Physical Anthropology, derived those dates by an
Source: BBC
August 21, 2005
Hundreds of people gathered at the Cenotaph in central London on Sunday to observe the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II hostilities in the Far East - and to honour those who fell. But with veterans getting older each year, are enough of us taking time to remember the sacrifices of those who served in the so-called "forgotten war"? The campaign in the Far East took on that description because the fighting that continued there into the summer o
Source: Lawrence Journal-World
August 21, 2005
One hundred and forty-two years ago today, William C. Quantrill and his band of more than 300 Missouri ruffians rode into Lawrence, murdered most of the menfolk and set fire to all but a few homes and businesses. In a span of three hours, 85 women were widowed, and 250 children lost their fathers. For Lawrencians — then and now — Quantrill personified evil.“In and around 1863, certainly, if you lived in Lawrence, you lived in fear of Quantrill. He was the devil i
Source: CNN
August 21, 2005
Former Polish President General Wojciech Jaruzelski Sunday apologized for the first time for ordering Polish troops to take part in the Moscow-led crackdown on the Prague Spring socialist reform movement in 1968.Speaking to Czech state television on the 37th anniversary of the crackdown, Jaruzelski, Polish defense minister at the time, said the invasion of another Warsaw Pact nation was "very painful for me."
"But, in 1968, I was the defense
Source: Wa Po
August 22, 2005
Amid tears and their grandchildren's shouts of glee, 58 Japanese Americans sent to internment camps during World War II received diplomas Sunday, finally earning recognition from the communities they were forced to leave more than half a century ago. The honorees, wearing colorful leis and sashes, walked down the aisle of Los Angeles Trade Technical College's auditorium. Some needed canes, a few were in wheelchairs, and more than a few had tears in their eyes.
