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: CNSNews.com
August 17, 2009
Hawaii turns 50 years old as the 50th state Friday, but there will be no grand parades, no dazzling fireworks, no lavish displays of native culture.
Organizers of the observation are not even willing to call it a party. It is simply a "commemoration," one that is sensitive to a painful history of the Hawaiian monarchy's overthrow and unresolved claims of Native Hawaiians.
The main event is a low-key daylong conference reflecting on Hawaii's place in the world.
Source: CNSNews.com
August 17, 2009
A commander in chief fighting two wars, President Barack Obama plans to thank veterans for their service on Monday while pressing his commitments to wind down the Iraq war and redouble efforts in Afghanistan.
The president is slated to address members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars gathered in Arizona at the organization's annual convention.
"He'll talk about where we are currently in both those two conflicts. He'll talk about what we owe the men and women in unif
Source: CNSNews.com
August 17, 2009
A dredging project to remove pollutants from the bottom of the Hudson River was resumed Tuesday, five days after it was halted due to the contamination it was causing in the river.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) project, which is being carried out by General Electric (GE), aims to remove chemicals known as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from the river floor.
PCBs were used in transformers and capacitors from the 1940s until they were banned in 1977 and dump
Source: BBC
August 17, 2009
Prehistoric artwork has been discovered by an amateur archaeologist at a Perthshire mountain range.
The ancient carvings were discovered by rock art enthusiast George Currie at Ben Lawers, near Loch Tay.
Mr Currie discovered a piece of rock which has more than 90 cup marks, which are circular depressions in the stone.
Some of the cups have rings around them and a number of linear grooves can also be seen, with some still showing the individual blows of cr
Source: BBC
August 17, 2009
Bronze memorials to British soldiers killed in the world wars have been stolen in north London by thieves thought to have sold them for scrap.
The plaques, which also list civilians killed in the Blitz, were taken from a memorial in Broomfield Park, Enfield.
It comes after the 204th British serviceman died in Afghanistan. Some 179 UK troops have now died in Iraq.
Source: BBC
August 17, 2009
A World War II bomb has been discovered during work to excavate a plane in a North Yorkshire field.
The 500lb explosive was found on farmland at Ebberston, off the A170, during the RAF-licensed project to excavate and restore a wartime plane.
An army bomb disposal unit attended and a 500m (1,640ft) cordon was set up.
The villages of Ebberston and Allerston will be evacuated while the bomb is detonated in a controlled explosion at 1500 BST on Tuesday.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 14, 2009
Fredrick Toben, an Australian man who was convicted earlier this year of publishing anti-Semitic material on the internet, has started a three-month jail term after his appeal was quashed.
Toben who is wanted in Germany on charges of denying the Holocaust was found guilty in May of 24 counts of contempt of a 2002 court ruling that barred him from publishing anti-Semitic material on the website of his organisation, the Adelaide Institute.
The material found to be in bre
Source: CNN
August 17, 2009
So ill he could not move, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart supposedly sang parts of his final masterpiece, "Requiem," from his deathbed. Two centuries later, the exact cause of the Austrian composer's premature death, in December 1791 at age 35, is still a mystery.
Theories abound. It's known that his entire body was so swollen he couldn't turn over in bed; some say jealous rivals poisoned him, while others suggest scarlet fever, tuberculosis, or lethal trichinosis from undercooked
Source: The Wall Street Journal
August 18, 2009
Russian hackers hijacked American identities and U.S. software tools and used them in an attack on Georgian government Web sites during the war between Russia and Georgia last year, according to new research to be released Monday by a nonprofit U.S. group.
In addition to refashioning common Microsoft Corp. software into a cyber-weapon, hackers collaborated on popular U.S.-based social-networking sites, including Twitter and Facebook Inc., to coordinate attacks on Georgian sites, the
Source: Media Matters
August 17, 2009
(The following is from Media Matters, a liberal media watchdog)
On August 14, the Drudge Report, Rush Limbaugh, and O'Reilly Factor guest host Laura Ingraham featured a recording of Ronald Reagan speaking in 1961 against"socialized medicine" for the American Medical Association's Operation Coffee Cup Campaign against Medicare. Neither Drudge, Limbaugh, nor Ingraham, however, noted that Reagan was speaking out against an early version of Medicare, which has become very popular since
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education
August 14, 2009
Hebrew University of Jersualem has apologized for saying that a donor who bequeathed it more than $100,000 was a homeless woman in New York, the Daily News reports. Rather, Ida Fischer was an Austrian Jewish refugee who fled Vienna with her mother in 1938 after the Nazis killed her father.
Newspapers around the world had initially quoted a Hebrew University spokesman as saying that the late donor had lived out of a shopping cart in Manhattan. In its article last week, The Jerusalem
Source: LA Times
August 15, 2009
Bill Geary, 88, a cattle rancher from Montana, paused today to look at pictures and maps detailing the carnage of the World War II battle on the island of Peleliu.
Geary, who fought there as a Marine, was succinct in his assessment.
“It was a nasty place,” he said as he walked a passageway dubbed the Hall of Heroes aboard the amphibious assault ship named for the battle.
What was nasty about it? Geary was asked. “Everything,” he said, “absolutely everything
Source: Chron (Houston Chronicle)
August 17, 2009
Scratch Henry Cisneros, but add Dolores Huerta, Dr. Hector P. Garcia, Sandra Cisneros, Henry B. Gonzalez and Irma Rangel to the list of important Hispanic figures that Texas school children might be discussing in the future.
State education leaders are still in the early stages of writing new curriculum standards for social studies that will shape future history and geography books.
And by the time those new textbooks arrive in fall 2013, a majority of the children atte
Source: PressofAtlanticCity.com
August 16, 2009
Gov. Jon S. Corzine today signed a bill establishing a Veterans' Oral History Foundation during his visit with 2,750 soldiers of the New Jersey Army National Guard's 50th Infantry Brigade Combat Team (IBCT) at the Atlantic City Convention Center.
The bill signing is part of a two-day event featuring a Career, Education and Support Services Expo for veterans.
"The Veterans' Oral History initiative will preserve and provide a vivid and far-reaching account of the personal
Source: SF Chronicle
August 16, 2009
The skulls and bones of Japanese war dead from World War II's Battle of Saipan are being kept at UC Berkeley in apparent violation of the Geneva Conventions for the protection of war victims, The Chronicle has learned.
The remains of several Japanese soldiers or civilians removed from the island of Saipan in 1945 by a Navy doctor are housed on storage shelves maintained by the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology on the UC Berkeley campus, museum officials have confirmed.
Source: Independent (UK)
August 17, 2009
A former chief of defence staff warned Margaret Thatcher's government in 1985 that its "perfunctory" dismissal of UFO sightings near an RAF base shared with the US Air Force in Suffolk could turn into a political "banana-skin" because it was unexplained.
In a letter to Michael Heseltine, Mrs Thatcher's defence secretary at the time, the late Lord Hill-Norton said the sightings of unidentified flying objects in Rendelsham Forest by USAF personnel in December 1980
Source: Times (UK)
August 17, 2009
The Scottish government appears to have buckled under pressure from the Obama Administration and abandoned its plans to release the Lockerbie bomber this week.
Senior sources said that there was “no chance” of Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi being sent back to Libya on Wednesday as had been expected.
The plan to release the convicted terrorist, who has dropped his appeal against conviction, and return him to his native Libya, was thrown out after the intervention of Hillar
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
August 17, 2009
Liechtenstein's reigning prince has angered German Jews by invoking the Holocaust to defend his country's banking secrecy laws.
The latest flare-up of fractious relations between the tiny Alpine principality and its much larger neighbor to the north stemmed from comments in a weekend interview Prince Hans-Adam II gave for Liechtenstein's national holiday.
The prince took aim particularly at Germany, which has been pressuring Liechtenstein to clamp down on confidential b
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
August 17, 2009
The Vatican has accused Britain and the U.S. of complicity in the Nazi extermination of Jews.
It claims the Allies deliberately did nothing to either rescue Jews or destroy the death camps.
An article in L'Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper, says Allied governments knew the Nazis were planning to exterminate the Jews as early as 1942.
But instead of bombing the concentration camps and the railways supplying them, they reacted by first sup
Source: BBC
August 17, 2009
Reprieve said the men were arrested by British troops in Iraq in 2004, handed to the US and "illegally rendered" to Bagram Air Force Base.
It says the men are among hundreds held "beyond the rule of law".
The Ministry of Defence said it had no reason to believe the allegations about their welfare were accurate.
It had previously told Reprieve, which is seeking to represent the men, that it would violate their rights under the Data Pro
