Special Interest Glance
To mark Columbus Day In 2004, the Medieval and Renaissance Center in UCLA published the final volume of a compendium of Columbus-era documents. Its general editor, Geoffrey Symcox, leaves little room for ambivalence when he says, “This is not your grandfather’s Columbus….
While giving the brilliant mariner his due, the collection portrays Columbus as an unrelenting social climber and self-promoter who stopped at nothing - not even exploitation, slavery, or twisting biblical scripture - to advance his ambitions…. Many of the unflattering documents have been known for the last century or more, but nobody paid much attention to them until recently.
Professor Noam Chomsky may be among America's most enduring anti-war activists. But the leftist intellectual's anthology of post 9/11 commentary is taboo at Guantanamo's prison camp library, which offers books and videos on Harry Potter, World Cup soccer and Islam.
A photograph of the Iranian president holding up his identity card during elections in March 2008 clearly shows his family has Jewish roots. A close-up of the document reveals he was previously known as Sabourjian – a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver.
Authors, artists and musicians are due to gather at a library in San Francisco to protest against the banning of books in schools and libraries in the US. The event, part of the 27th annual Banned Books Week, has been organised by the American Library Association.
A recently retired Roman Catholic bishop from Nova Scotia has been charged with possessing and importing child pornography.
There’s no kill switch for the Internet, no secret on-off button in an Oval Office drawer. Yet when a Senate committee was exploring ways to secure computer networks, a provision to give the president the power to shut down Internet traffic to compromised Web sites in an emergency set off alarms.
The king was a gorilla called Titus. Although he had been deposed by his son, death seemed to have restored him to his full glory. The mighty silverback was once the dominant head of a tight-knit group of the great apes whose kingdom was on the eastern slopes of the Visoke volcano in Rwanda's border lands, and a vital figure in the battle for the survival of the species.
