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: NY Sun
August 12, 2005
From the Chicago Sun-Times:
In a letter written during the heart of the Civil War in the summer of 1863, the Confederate soldier confidently boasts of heading to Mississippi to take on the Union army.
We "are going to Vicksburg to give the yanks a fight,'' he wrote to his family in Louisiana. "I think that we have the yanks in a trap.''
As it turns out, he was wrong. The city fell to the North after nearly 20,000 soldiers from both sides were killed.
August 12, 2005
He produced a torrent of memorandums explaining why the Reagan administration was right to oppose new provisions in the Voting Rights Act that had just passed the House with an overwhelming majority.
He drafted op-ed articles for his boss, Attorney General William French Smith, and he circulated talking points warning that Congress - by trying to make it easier to prove voting rights violations - was on the verge of creating "a quota system for electoral politics." He scri
Source: Pacific News Service
August 11, 2005
The intersection at 116th Street and Avalon Boulevard is often referred to as the flash point or epicenter of the 1965 Watts riot, but for Tommy Jacquette, it was simply a place to “kick it.”Forty years ago today, at an apartment complex seemingly untouched by time, Jacquette was hanging out with the other “young bloods” of the block playing Bid Whiz and drinking beer on a blistering summer evening in August. It was an hour or so after the frenetic arrest of 21-year-ol
Source: NYT
August 11, 2005
The Sept. 11 commission was warned by a uniformed military officer 10 days before issuing its final report that the account would be incomplete without reference to what he described as a secret military operation that by the summer of 2000 had identified as a potential threat the member of Al Qaeda who would lead the attacks more than a year later, commission officials said on Wednesday.The officials said that the information had not been included in the report becaus
Source: David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
August 11, 2005
The author of a book cited by Harry Belafonte in presumed defense of his controversial statements about Jews and Hitler has denounced Belafonte for distorting his work.Belafonte had dismissed the presence of African-Americans in the Bush administration on the grounds that there were "a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of [Adolf Hitler's] Third Reich." (CNS News, August 5, 2005)
After Belafonte's baseless statement was strongly criticized by The Dav
Source: Bloomberg News
August 11, 2005
As Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney weighs a presidential race, the former business executive brings assets, liabilities and one wild card: his Mormon religion. Religion hasn't played a major role in a presidential race since John F. Kennedy was the first Roman Catholic elected 45 years ago. Yet Romney's membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, nicknamed the Mormon Church, may complicate his courtship of Republican social conservatives and the e
Source: AFP
August 10, 2005
Drawn on a wooden frame to the execution site, hanged until almost dead, but still conscious, castrated, disembowelled and finally beheaded, bodies quartered and displayed with the head in public to deter others -- Britain historically dealt mercilessly with traitors.
The centuries-old charge of betraying the monarch and his or her government no longer carries the death penalty, but it is still one of the gravest crimes on the statute books and condemns those found guilty to life im
Source: Australian Broadcasting Corporation
August 9, 2008
The Western Australian Government has purchased what is being described as the most significant private collection of Aboriginal records and photographs in Australia.The 74,000 individual records and more than 7,000 photographs were gathered over 30 years by Northam genealogist Jan Goodacre.
The State Government, with help from the Commonwealth, has paid $300,000 for the material that will be used to help members of the Stolen Generations trace famil
Source: Medical News Today
August 11, 2005
New research from The University of Manchester dispels the myths around death and working-class Britain by suggesting that the expression of grief amongst this social class in fact increased during periods of poverty.
In the first book to cover the experience of the working-class attitude to death in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, Julie-Marie Strange, a lecturer in Modern British History at the University, argues against the common consensus that the poor did not mourn their dead.
Source: WP
August 10, 2005
An Internet video that depicts the Nazi death camp Auschwitz as a rave party drew sharp criticism Wednesday from a Jewish rights group, which urged authorities to have it removed from European Web sites.The three-minute video titled "Housewitz" a pun on house music and Auschwitz casts Nazi soldiers as DJs. It alternates black-and-white still photos of Holocaust atrocities with color images of youths at an outdoor party. And it advertises a "Free ta
Source: The Guardian
August 10, 2005
When it comes to a duel between DePaul university political science professor Norman Finkelstein and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz over Finkelstein's upcoming book, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, gigantic bombast feels like an understatement. It is a row that has spilled on to the pages of most of the nation's prominent newspapers and gone all the way to the desk of California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Like the two professors
August 10, 2005
David Brooks, in the NYT:
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the rate of family violence in this country has dropped by more than half since 1993. I've been trying to figure out why.
A lot of the credit has to go to the people who have been quietly working in this field: to social workers who provide victims with counseling and support; to women's crisis centers, which help women trapped in violent relationships find other places to live; to police forces an
August 10, 2005
Earlier this year, though, the foundation that oversees the Herndon Home fired the staff and closed the mansion, a national historic landmark that operated as a museum open to the public.
With no one to care for the building, it now faces another problem: Water damage caused by a leaky roof.
Hardest hit was the music room, one of the most memorable in the two-story 15-room white-columned mansion.
Heavy rains weakened a plaster wall, causing an 18th-century
August 10, 2005
In an unusual collaboration among scientists and humanists, a Cornell University team has demonstrated a novel method for recovering faded text on ancient stone by zapping and mapping 2,000-year-old inscriptions using X-ray fluorescence (XRF) imaging.
The research, carried out at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS), applies a nondestructive chemical analysis technique widely used in geology, archaeology and materials science.
"X-ray fluorescence im
August 10, 2005
The rusty iron coffin stubbornly resisted hammer and chisel as researchers in a warm Smithsonian laboratory sought a glimpse of an American who lived more than a century and a half ago.
``This is a person and we want to tell this person's story. She is our primary obligation,'' anthropologist Doug Owsley said as the lid was lifted to reveal a young body wrapped in a brown shroud.
The coffin was found in April by utility workers digging in Washington.
August 10, 2005
Michael Newman, a lecturer in peace and conflict studies at London Metropolitan University, was in Japan to mark the 60th anniversary of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima. Here he reflects on the experience and the affect the bomb had on the country, then and now.Read the full article.
August 10, 2005
Japanese lawmakers on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed a resolution that plays down this country's militarist policies in World War II, less than two weeks before ceremonies take place across Asia marking the 60th anniversary of the war's end on Aug. 15.
Though expressing "regret" for the wartime past, the resolution omitted the references to "invasion" and "colonial rule" that were in the version passed on the 50th anniversary.
The action wi
August 10, 2005
Robert Rankin, a retired Kansas University linguistics professor, is compiling a dictionary and grammar of the Kansa, or Kaw, Indians. With the help of a one-year, $40,000 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Rankin is hustling to finish his Kaw dictionary and grammar manual. “I have about 4,500 entries in the dictionary now,” Rankin said. “I have another 1,000 to 1,500 to get to.”
August 10, 2005
The mother of a Turkish researcher facing up to eight years in prison for attempting to take old books out of Armenia pleaded with the authorities in Yerevan on Monday to set him free and end his controversial prosecution.
Gulsin Turkyilmaz spoke to RFE/RL after visiting her 33-year-old son Yektan in a maximum security prison in Yerevan where he has been kept since his arrest on June 17. “I hope that they won’t imprison him,” she said. “If he knew that [he is violating Armenian laws
August 10, 2005
Supreme Court nominee John Roberts worked behind the scenes for a coalition of gay-rights activists, and his legal expertise helped them persuade the Supreme Court to issue a landmark 1996 ruling protecting people against discrimination because of their sexual orientation.
Then a lawyer specializing in appellate work, the conservative Roberts helped represent the gay activists as part of his law firm's pro bono work. While he did not write the legal briefs or argue the case before t
