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.
August 10, 2005
An Israeli archaeologist says she has uncovered in East Jerusalem what may be the fabled palace of the biblical King David. Her work has been sponsored by a conservative Israeli research institute and financed by an American Jewish investment banker who would like to prove that Jerusalem was indeed the capital of the Jewish kingdom described in the Bible.
Other scholars are skeptical that the foundation walls discovered by the archaeologist, Eilat Mazar, are David's palace. But they
August 10, 2005
Almost 30 years after his death, Mao remains the sacred symbol that China dare not touch. His massive portrait still looms above the entrance to the Forbidden City. His face is on every banknote in the country. Yet while he continues to be worshipped in China, a shocking new book has concluded that Mao was the bloodiest mass murderer in history, a sadistic thug who enjoyed torture and was willing to sacrifice half of China's population for his dream of global domination. The biography, based on
August 10, 2005
President Bush is getting the kind of break most Americans can only dream of: nearly five weeks away from the office, loaded with vacation time.
The president departed yesterday for his longest stretch yet away from the White House, arriving at his Crawford ranch in the evening for a round of clearing brush, visiting with family and friends, and tending to some outside-the-Beltway politics. It is the longest presidential retreat in at least 36 years.
The August getaway
August 10, 2005
Military masterstroke or crime against humanity? President Harry S. Truman's decision to unleash the horror of nuclear war on Japan in 1945 sparked one of history's most fierce debates. Now, as the 60th anniversary nears of the twin atomic bomb strikes in the final days of World War II, there is new scrutiny of the reasoning that led to the first, and only use in anger of the ultimate weapon.Rea
August 10, 2005
Paul Vickery doesn't always like the characters he portrays in this summer's Chautauqua celebration in Greeley.
Take Sen. Joe McCarthy, for example. Vickery, a history professor at Oral Roberts University, does a pretty good job of mimicking the speech pattern, body language and thinking of the late Wisconsin senator who spearheaded the anti-communist movement of the 1950s.
But just because he does a good McCarthy doesn't mean he has to like the man.
&qu
August 10, 2005
"Our end drifts nearer," wrote poet Robert Lowell. "The moon lifts/radiant with terror."
From his precarious Cold War perch, in the poem "Fall 1961," Lowell caught the defining horror of the age in that compact image. Even the moon, under the threat of man's nuclear devastation, takes on a luminous vulnerability. Anything, everything might be destroyed -- and thereby becomes more desperately cherished. Mary McCarthy called the dawn of the nuclear era th
August 10, 2005
In Louisa, Va., where Union and Confederate forces once battled, military history buffs assemble on a farm a few weekends each summer to reenact the Vietnam War.
Most of the men and women at the Virginia event were in their thirties and forties -- too young to have experienced the action firsthand but too old to escape the war's grip. Their fathers served in Vietnam, like Robby Gouge's, or they grew up watching it on the news.
As the 90-degree heat and his 50-pound ruck
August 10, 2005
Only a short decade ago, many descendants of the victims of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre despaired that the nation would ever mature enough to properly honor the memories of their murdered relatives. "The whole truth of Sand Creek needs to be fully understood by the non-Cheyenne as well as the Cheyenne," descendant and tribal historian John Snipes, Jr., told Rocky Mountain PBS in 1996 in an interview for the documentary Tears in the Sand. "And that's something that's real hard and
August 10, 2005
What's your major? Around the world, college undergraduates' time-honored question is increasingly drawing the same answer: economics.
U.S. colleges and universities awarded 16,141 degrees to economics majors in the 2003-2004 academic year, up nearly 40% from five years earlier, according to John J. Siegfried, an economics professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., who tracks 272 colleges and universities around the country for the Journal of Economic Education.
Source: Poynteronline/Romanesko
August 10, 2005
New York Times science writer William L. Laurence became a staunch advocate of the atomic bomb long before the atomic bomb was ever dropped, says David Goodman. He tells Bob Garfield:"What Laurence wrote was that he felt no, quote, 'pity or compassion for the poor devils' who were about to die." Goodman and his sister, Amy, write in the Baltimore Sun:"[L
Source: Ottawa Citizen
August 10, 2005
Hundreds of Canadian and British soldiers held as prisoners of war during the American Revolution lie buried in a Pennsylvania farm field that is now the focus of a bitter legal battle between a housing developer and heritage advocates.The struggle over the former site of Camp Security -- a sprawling prison compound near the present-day city of York that was used to house captured Red Coats between 1781 and 1783 -- recently resulted in it being named one of the top 10 most t
Source: Secrecy News
August 10, 2005
American military casualties from the Revolutionary War to the present day are tabulated in a new report from the Congressional Research Service.Notable findings include these:
** During the period between the Revolutionary War and the
Persian Gulf War, it was the Civil War that produced the most American fatalities, when Union statistics and Confederate estimates are taken into account.
** World War II was the first war in which there were m
Source: Armenia Liberty
August 10, 2005
After a century of neglect and decades of political wrangling, Turkey has begun restoring Akhtamar, a thousand-year-old Christian church at a time when Turkish leaders face intense pressure from the European Union to improve their treatment of minorities.
The 2 million Turkish Lira ($1.5 million) restoration, ordered and paid for by the Turkish government, began in May and is raising hopes that a small, cautious thaw in relations between Turkey and neighboring Armenia could expand.
Source: Hindustan Times
August 10, 2005
According to confidential letters provided to documentary makers in India, Winston Churchill was using Mohammad Ali Jinnah to create the "great divide" — the schism between Hindus and Muslims in India.
Two independent film-makers commissioned to make a docu-drama on Jinnah laid their hands on the confidential correspondence between the two leaders which smacks of Churchill’s bias against Hindus.In a letter to Jinnah dated August 3, 1946, Ch
Source: NYT
August 10, 2005
Members of the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11 terror attacks called on Congress to determine whether the Pentagon withheld intelligence information showing that a secret American military unit had identified Mohammed Atta and three other hijackers as potential threats more than a year before the attacks.The former commission members said the information, if true, could rewrite an important chapter of the history of the intelligence failures befor
Source: LAT
August 9, 2005
Workers repairing a sewage pipe in the Old City of Jerusalem have discovered the biblical Pool of Siloam, a freshwater reservoir that was a major gathering place for ancient Jews making religious pilgrimages to the city and the reputed site where Jesus cured a man blind from birth, according to the Gospel of John.The pool was fed by the now famous Hezekiah's Tunnel and is "a much grander affair" than archeologists previously believed, with three tiers of stone stai
Source: BBC
August 10, 2005
"Japan - reveal the truth! Admit the crime! Officially apologise! Punish the criminals!" South Korean protesters chant every Wednesday outside the Japanese Embassy in Seoul.
They are the survivors of the brutal, Asia-wide system of sex slaves for the Imperial Japanese Army, which the military government encouraged and helped to operate for 13 years, from 1932 until the end of World War II in 1945.They were euphemistically called "comfo
Source: Expatica (Netherlands)
August 10, 2005
Germany's new Left Party, which polls show will win 12 per cent next month's general election, draws on a concept of 'National Socialism' from the Nazi era, a prominent German historian alleged on Wednesday.
"This is not an accident - it's intentional," said Goetz Aly who recently published a book arguing that Hitler's Nazis won allegiance by creating a huge social welfare state funded by property stolen from the Jews and people in Third Reich-occupied Europe.
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
August 10, 2005
Tucked in the far corner of Nagasaki Peace Park sits a small monument next to a memorial featuring a streetcar platform ruined by the atomic bomb. The simple marker is easy to miss, a lonely tribute to the non-Japanese survivors of atomic destruction. Their numbers are unknown, and their struggle for recognition and financial assistance continues six decades later. A 1,000-man camp in Nagasaki is believed to have been destroyed when the bomb fell 60 years ago Tuesday. A grou
Source: NYT
August 9, 2005
One of the icons of modern American culture now resides in a nondescript warehouse about 30 miles north of San Francisco, in a windowless, climate-controlled, heavily-alarmed room built like a bomb shelter that is called simply the Vault.There, in towering rows of 13,000 audiotapes, 3,000 videotapes and about 250,000 feet of traditional 16-millimeter film lives the recorded history of the Grateful Dead, one of the seminal American rock bands.
The Grateful
