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: AP
October 2, 2008
The state Board of Education says it recently discovered what students yawning through social studies class may already know -- their textbooks are boring.
Members of the board, which routinely approves books for schools statewide, said the publications were so dull they recently tried to reject the list of social studies texts.
They later changed their minds after state schools chief Suellen Reed urged the group to approve the books so that schools could buy them at
Source: Times (UK)
October 3, 2008
Archaeologists believe that they have found the spot where the Roman legions landed to begin the conquest of England in AD43.
A stretch of Roman shoreline has been uncovered during excavations at Richborough in Kent that is now two miles from the sea because of silting. Two thousand years ago it was the shore of a large lagoon where the Emperor Claudius's troops landed after the crossing from Boulogne.
The Roman landing place was discovered during excavations at Richbor
Source: LAT
October 3, 2008
Thousands of Mexicans marched across their nation's capital Thursday to demand justice for victims of a 1968 massacre of students by government troops -- contemporary Mexico's most traumatic atrocity and one that remains unresolved.
Survivors of that bloody night 40 years ago and Mexicans who had not been born then joined forces, chanting "Dos de octubre! No se olvide!" (Oct. 2! Don't forget!) as they converged on the downtown Zocalo plaza.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 3, 2008
The Roman-era sculptures were located 8ft under water in a submerged port at Mandraki, on the western side of Kythnos, a Greek island in the Cyclades.
Greece's culture ministry said the statues consisted of a stone torso of a man in armour as well as another figure - the bearded head of another man.
In a statement, the ministry said it did not yet know whether the torso and the head were both taken from the same figure, but that the torso stood 4.5ft high.
It is not clear who the statues repr
Source: http://www.ascribe.org/
October 1, 2008
Nearly 20,000 Catholics from around the world have sent paper and electronic postcards to Vatican organizers of the Synod on the Word and to their Bishop delegates, asking them to restore women leaders such as Mary of Magdala and Phoebe to lectionary texts from which they have been deleted. The Synod begins October 5 in Rome, and will be in session until October 27.
Spearheaded by the Cleveland based FutureChurch, the two year project also asks synod leaders to invite women b
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 4, 2008
More than 60 years after the end of the war, a plaque dedicated to the women was unveiled by the Grand Union Canal next to the National Waterways Museum in Stoke Bruerne, Northamptonshire.
The ceremony was led by Roger Hanbury, chief executive of the Waterways Trust, on a morning of carnival atmosphere, which featured wartime songs and Union Jack flags draped from surrounding windows.
Four of the surviving "Idle Women" - the canal equivalent of the Land Girls
Source: NYT
October 4, 2008
At a tumultuous meeting of anti-Vietnam War militants at the Chicago Coliseum in 1969, Bill Ayers helped found the radical Weathermen, launching a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol.
Twenty-six years later, at a luncheon meeting about school reform in a Chicago skyscraper, Barack Obama met Ayers, by then an education professor. Their paths have crossed sporadically since then, at a coffee Ayers hosted for Obama's first run for office, on the schools
Source: AP
October 2, 2008
Deborah Anderson had heard the urban legends about the contraceptive effectiveness of Coca-Cola products for years. So she and her colleagues decided to put the soft drink to the test. In the lab, that is.
For discovering that, yes indeed, Coke was a spermicide, Anderson and her team are among this year's winners of the Ig Nobel prize, the annual award given by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine to oddball but often surprisingly practical scientific achievements.
Source: Guardian (UK)
October 2, 2008
The best view of a newly discovered archaeological site in Kent is from the trains thundering past a few feet away. Passengers heading towards the Ramsgate ferry ports glance incuriously out at what was a jungle of brambles and nettles a few weeks ago, not realising that they are seeing almost 2,000 years of history rewritten.
The recently uncovered structure at Richborough is a small medieval dock, neatly constructed by joining up double-decker-bus-sized lumps of Roman walls which
Source: AP
October 3, 2008
They are the stories we heard from our grandparents, the pictures we studied in history books — bread lines stretching around street corners, shantytowns sheltering the unemployed, small-town banks with darkened windows.
Today's financial crisis is hardly that grim, though it does share some similarities with the economic collapse of the 1930s — both were preceded by a housing boom, a long period of cheap credit and a falling stock market. But those same similarities may offer some
Source: http://www.wausaudailyherald.com
October 3, 2008
Ron Lippi knew he was looking at an important discovery this summer after the dirt was brushed away from the ancient stone foundation.
Lippi, 59, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin Marathon County who specializes in archaeology, immediately noticed the trademarks of Incan stonework: The outer sections of the foundation were made with stones hand-chiseled and sanded to fit together perfectly, and the inside was filled with looser rocks and clay dirt.
Source: http://www.theroot.com
October 3, 2008
Not since the civil rights movement, when stars like Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte and Sammy Davis Jr. led marches and protest rallies, have so many black Hollywood denizens actively engaged in the political process.
In his bid for the presidency, Barack Obama has engaged a new cadre of African-American celebrities, drawn to his campaign's themes of change, hope and cooperation.
"This election is very important to my future, my children's future and the future
Source: http://www.lifesitenews.com
October 1, 2008
Representative John LaBruzzo (R - Metairie) recently proposed fixing the welfare problem in New Orleans by offering poor women $1000 to be sterilized, a suggestion that New Orleans Archbishop Alfred Hughes has condemned as "blatantly anti-life" and eugenic in nature.
Louisiana Rep. LaBruzzo proposed the plan last week, which may also include vasectomies for poor men as well as a tax incentive for richer, better-educated citizens to have more children. LaBruzzo aims to ste
Source: Independent (UK)
October 3, 2008
"This is the Wartime Broadcasting Service. This country has been attacked with nuclear weapons." In the normally prosaic world of public safety announcements, they were probably the two most chilling sentences ever recorded in readiness for release across Britain's airwaves.
But secret documents released today, revealing for the first time the full text of the warning to be broadcast by the BBC in the event of a nuclear war, show that Whitehall was obsessed as much with th
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 4, 2008
Lieutenant Commander Mannert Abele was killed when the USS Grunion went down with all hands on July 30, 1942, after fighting a Japanese freighter in the North Pacific Ocean.
His sons Bruce, 78, Brad, who recently died aged 75, and John Abele, 72, started searching for the wreck after a Japanese war historian pinpointed the area where he believed the Grunion sank.
Yutaka Owasaki told the brothers he had translated the journal of a military officer who commanded the Kan
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 3, 2008
Detailed notes of discussions during the Suez crisis of 1956 taken by the Cabinet Secretary Sir Norman Brook show the extent to which the British Government sought to cover up its "collusion" with Israel as a pretext for invasion of Egyptian territory after Nasser's nationalisation of the strategically important waterway.
Previous documents have confirmed that Eden held secret talks with French officials in October 1956 to formulate a plan in which Israel was to attack Eg
Source: BBC News
October 4, 2008
British courts should refuse to act on an EU arrest warrant requesting the extradition of an alleged Holocaust denier, a senior Lib Dem has said.
Australian citizen Dr Gerald Toben was remanded in custody after his arrest by British police at Heathrow Airport.
German authorities allege Dr Toben published material online "of an anti-Semitic and/or revisionist nature".
But home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne said holocaust denial is not a crime in th
Source: Independent (UK)
October 3, 2008
Two metres beneath the Kent countryside, archaeologists have found the beginning of British history. Excavations at Richborough in east Kent have uncovered the original beach – now two and a half miles from the sea – where the Roman legions started their conquest of Britain almost 2,000 years ago. The site represents the moment Britain's prehistory ended and its history began.
The archaeologists from English Heritage have only exposed four square metres of the beach, but the discove
Source: Times (UK)
October 3, 2008
The most senior Yugoslav army officer to be charged with war crimes in Bosnia and Croatia went on trial yesterday in The Hague.
General Momcilo Perisic, the former Chief of General Staff of the Yugoslav Army, pleaded not guilty to thirteen charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including aiding and abetting the Bosnian Serb siege of Sarajevo, and the Bosnian Serb forces which massacred up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys after the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995.
Source: Archaeology Magazine Blog
September 26, 2008
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Iceland chafed mightily against the moratorium levied by the International Whaling Committee on hunting the world’s endangered cetaceans. According to whaling advocates, Iceland possessed a tradition of subsistence whaling stretching back to the 12th century: Icelanders, they claimed, had long depended on supplies of whale meat and had developed a real taste for this fare. Environmentalists, however, suspected darker motives. Icelandic whalers, they charged,
