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
August 12, 2005
IN March 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson eyed one of the toughest unfinished tasks he had inherited from John F. Kennedy: creation of a national health care program for the elderly. With typical ambition and determination, he told his aide on health care, Wilbur Cohen, "We're going to spend the rest of our lives if necessary passing medical care." Fifteen months later, on July 30, 1965, Johnson traveled to Independence, Mo., and with Harry Truman at his side, signed the legislation t
Source: NYT
August 12, 2005
For those seeking clues to the judicial philosophy of John G. Roberts, documents from his years as a lawyer in the White House counsel's office during the Reagan administration provide revealing evidence. in 1983, Mr. Roberts addressed a proposed constitutional amendment setting a 10-year term of office for federal judges. The Justice Department opposed the measure on the ground that life tenure was critical to judicial independence. Mr. Roberts did not disagree, but noted that the framers had a
Source: Chicago Trib
August 12, 2005
Neighbors have kind words to say about Osyp Firishchak, a retired North Side carpenter, but the U.S. Justice Department says he played a role in one of history's darkest chapters. On Monday, Firishchak, 86, is scheduled to go on trial in Chicago over allegations that more than 60 years ago he was part of a Nazi-controlled Ukrainian police unit that transported tens of thousands of Jews to their deaths in concentration and labor camps.
Nearly 20 cases are pending in courts around the count
Source: Las Vegas Sun
August 12, 2005
Presidents since George Washington have made appointments during congressional recesses to fill positions in the executive and judicial branches. Under the Constitution, the president can make temporary appointments while the Senate is in recess, without Senate approval. The appointment lasts through the end of the following one-year session of Congress. Following are some of the more notable recess appointments.
Source: Times of India
August 12, 2005
Why are parents in Gujarat fuming? The answer lies in textbooks that — despite being full of distortions and language errors — are being taught across the state's classrooms. They say, these books are clearly not teaching students history. So, Bhaven Patel, father of a class IX student in Ahmedabad, is not amused. As the state education department refuses to withdraw the class IX social sciences textbook, ridden with errors and misrepresentations, he feels it will leave a wrong impact on impress
Source: Telegraph
August 12, 2005
The publishers of a book that accuses British intelligence of murdering Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the SS in Nazi Germany, say they will not withdraw the work even though its claims are based on forged documents. Himmler's Secret War, by Martin Allen, is not only still on sale in bookshops but until last Friday was advertised on the website of Chrysalis Books as a "staff recommendation" to readers.
Source: Wa Po
August 12, 2005
A central principle of the future National Museum of African American History and Culture will be that the varied stories of African Americans have broad meaning to all people. "The notion that African American history has limited meaning should be a concern for all of us," said Lonnie G. Bunch, the founding director of the planned museum that will be part of the Smithsonian Institution. For instance, he explained, he's been troubled by a survey in the 1990s in which 81 percent of whit
Source: Guardian
August 12, 2005
The lengths to which the Soviet authorities were ready to go in their efforts to block publication of Boris Pasternak's epic novel about 20th-century Russia, Doctor Zhivago, was revealed by a letter published yesterday. After the book was rejected by the authorities, Pasternak passed his manuscript to the leftwing Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who had it translated and printed in the west. In messages to those involved in what was to be the literary coup of the century, Pasternak c
Source: BBC
August 12, 2005
George Orwell'sdilapidated home in India will soon get a welcome makeover. The writer of dark cult novels like Animal Farm and 1984 was born Eric Arthur Blair in the tiny town of Motihari in the eastern state of Bihar in 1903. More than a century after Orwell's birth, his first home - a crumbling, one-storey building near the abandoned indigo warehouse where his father worked - is home to a local English teacher. Now plans are afoot to build a museum and a stadium and put up a statue of the writ
Source: Jacksonville
August 12, 2005
In 1836, a war party burned 21 plantations along the St. Johns River,making off with hundreds of slaves and permanently crippling the North Florida sugar industry. For more than 150 years, most historians believed only Seminole Indians and their free black allies conducted the raids. But a growing, if controversial, body of research points toward a conspiracy between the black warriors -- known as Black Seminoles or maroons -- and the plantation slaves. That would make North Florida the locus fo
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
August 12, 2005
More than 200 academics from the United States, Armenia, Turkey, and elsewhere have signed an open letter to the president of Armenia expressing their "grave concern" at the arrest and detention of a Ph.D. candidate from Duke University. The student, Yektan Turkyilmaz, a Turkish citizen, was arrested on June 17 as he was leaving Armenia for Turkey with about 100 secondhand books he had legally purchased. Mr. Turkyilmaz is a candidate for a degree in cultural anthropology, and his disse
Source: Wa Po
August 12, 2005
In the early 1980s, a young intellectual lawyer named John G. Roberts Jr. was part of the vanguard of a conservative political revolution in civil rights, advocating new legal theories and helping enforce the Reagan administration's effort to curtail the use of courts to remedy racial and sexual discrimination. Just 26 when he joined the Justice Department as a special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith, Roberts was almost immediately entrusted to counsel senior department offici
Source: Telegraph
August 12, 2005
THE Indian capital should be renamed Dehli to correct a 150-year-old mistake, according to historians in India.
They have launched a campaign to correct the "mis-spelling", which they say happened during British rule because the colonialists could not pronounce Hindi names.
K M L Misra, a former head of history at Agra College, said: "For 800 years Delhi was called Dehli but the British couldn't manage the breathy sound of Hindi and the spelling of the ci
Source: Telegraph
August 12, 2005
IN AN attempt to revive interest in the legacy of Charles de Gaulle, a pounds 10 million museum is to be built in his home village.
Colombey-Les-Deux-Eglises, where France's most famous modern statesman lived between 1934 and his death in 1970, has always been viewed as a place of political pilgrimage.
More than 500,000 people a year once visited the village, which is 125 miles east of Paris. But, as a new generation of French men and women lose interest in past reputat
Source: Christian Science Monitor
August 12, 2005
The most recent effort to assess US actions during the summer of 1945 is Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's "Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan," a landmark book that brilliantly examines a crucial moment in 20th-century history.
Beyond evaluating the American dimension of the story, Hasegawa, a historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara, considers two related themes: the "tangled relationship" between the Soviet Union and Japan in the wa
Source: Australian
August 12, 2005
A LAW professor banned from taking classes after making alleged racist remarks should be allowed to continue teaching at a Sydney university, Federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson says.
The minister tonight weighed into the controversy involving Macquarie University's Associate Professor Andrew Fraser, who was locked out of his classroom today and replaced as a lecturer on the orders of the university's vice-chancellor, Professor Di Yerbury.
Professor Yerbury said Profess
Source: NYT
August 12, 2005
When the school board in Odessa, the West Texas oil town, voted unanimously in April to add an elective Bible study course to the 2006 high school curriculum, some parents dropped to their knees in prayerful thanks that God would be returned to the classroom, while others assailed it as an effort to instill religious training in the public schools. Hundreds of miles away, leaders of the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools notched another victory. A religious advocacy group bas
Source: NY Daily News
August 12, 2005
You might think Dagwood Bumstead's idea of a 75th-anniversary celebration would be to eat a sandwich that includes four tomatoes, six wedges of cheese, a head of lettuce, two slices of pizza, a bottle of Tabasco sauce and a leg of lamb.
Then lie down on the sofa for a nap.
You might think Blondie Bumstead's idea of an anniversary celebration would be to try on dresses all afternoon at Tudbury's with Tootsie Woodley.
But for their anniversary, they've got bi
Source: xinhuanet.com
August 12, 2005
Canada's military grilled hundreds of immigrants and refugees who settled in the country at the height of the Cold War for valuable information, says a new study by a historian from the University of Toronto. The Joint Intelligence Bureau, a section of the Defense Department which handled secret information on economic and military matters, set up an interrogation unit in 1953 to debrief newcomers from Hungary, Poland and other countries, the Canadian Press (CP) reported Monday, citing a report
Source: Poynter
August 12, 2005
Many news organizations reported that Gerry Thomas, who died July 18, came up with the idea of a frozen turkey meal in 1951 after Swanson execs asked employees how to get rid of 520,000 pounds of surplus turkey. "Great story, but it didn't happen," writes Roy Rivenburg. "One of the dirty little secrets of journalism is that reporters rarely have time to investigate every claim people make about their pasts. If you want to embellish, just fool one reporter for one article, then you
