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
May 21, 2008
The last surviving Topeka plaintiff in the Brown v. Board of Education case that led to the landmark ruling outlawing school desegregation has died at 88.
Zelma Henderson died Tuesday in Topeka, six weeks after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
In 1950 she signed onto the litigation on behalf of her children challenging Topeka's segregated schools. In all, 13 black parents, including the Rev. Oliver Brown, took part in the federal court case.
Oliver B
Source: Newsweek
May 21, 2008
Pinpointing the moment that defines Edward M. Kennedy's 45-year Senate career is, to say the least, a bit of a challenge. The Massachusetts senator has played critical roles in legislation ranging from his first bill, an overhaul of the American immigration quota system, up through No Child Left Behind and the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007; his political allies easily span the political spectrum. But his biographer, Adam Clymer, believes there is one moment that stands out as particularly tellin
Source: NYT
May 21, 2008
Hamilton Jordan, a self-proclaimed “political animal” and campaign whiz-kid who, at age 26, ran a successful campaign for governor and, at age 31, a successful presidential campaign for Jimmy Carter, eventually becoming the president’s chief of staff and top confidant, died Tuesday at his home in Atlanta. He was 63.
Mr. Jordan was surrounded by friends and family — including his son Hamilton Jr., who was able to make it from Europe to his father’s bedside — when he lost a long battl
Source: Matt Bai in the NYT Magazine
May 18, 2008
Among his fellow combat veterans in the Senate, past and present, [John McCain] is the only one who has continued to champion the war in Iraq; by contrast, Kerry, Webb and Hagel have emerged in the years since the invasion as unsparing critics of American involvement there. (In a new book, Hagel, who voiced deep concerns about Iraq even as he voted for the war resolution in 2002, predicts that the war will turn out to be “the most dangerous and costly foreign-policy debacle in our nation’s hist
Source: WaPo
May 19, 2008
When Hillary Rodham Clinton questioned rival Barack Obama's ties to 1960s radicals, her comments baffled two retired Bay Area lawyers who knew Clinton in the summer of 1971 when she worked as an intern at a left-wing law firm in Oakland, Calif., that defended communists and Black Panthers.
"She's a hypocrite," Doris B. Walker, 89, who was a member of the American Communist Party, said in an interview last week. "She had to know who we were and what kinds of cases we w
Source: Wire News Network
May 19, 2008
President Lyndon Baines Johnson ("LBJ") has been described in many ways -- as a bold dreamer, a progressive, a "can do" President, who had the drive and the knowledge to help transform many of his dreams into reality. The Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation, as part of the year-long centennial celebration commemorating President Johnson's 100th birthday (August 27, 1908), is hosting a series of events in Washington, D.C., to celebrate the remarkable life and legacy of Lyndon Bai
Source: AP
May 17, 2008
Being dead since 1940 hasn't kept Idaho
U.S. Sen. William Borah from being inserted squarely
into 2008 presidential politics after Democratic
candidate Barack Obama took issue with President
Bush's borrowing of a quote from Borah.
In a speech Thursday to the Israeli Knesset, Bush
mentioned the president of Iran, and said:"Some seem
to believe that we should negotiate with the
terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument
will persuade them they have been wrong all along.
Source: http://www.dispatch.co.za
May 15, 2008
IFP NATIONAL Organiser Albert Mncwango said the party was prepared to go to court if Education Minister Naledi Pandor and her KwaZulu-Natal counterpart did not withdraw a grade 12 book, titled In Search of History.
He was speaking at a march at Port Shepstone .
About 2000 party supporters took to the streets to call for the immediate withdrawal of the book.
Mncwango said it was untrue that the IFP and its leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi were perpetrating violence in the province
Source: White House letter to NBC News
May 19, 2008
Steve Capus
President, NBC News
30 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, N.Y. 10112
Mr. Capus:
This e-mail is to formally request that NBC Nightly News and The Today Show air for their viewers President Bush's actual answer to correspondent Richard Engel's question about Iran policy and "appeasement," rather than the deceptively edited version of the President's answer that was aired last night on the Nightly News and this morning on The Today Show.
Source: Scotsman
May 7, 2008
BLUE and white flags with the star of David brighten Jaffa's streets for Israel's sixtieth anniversary and the roar of practice aerobatics in the sky adds to the sense of anticipation.
But Sami Abu Shehadi, a member of Israel's Arab minority, is in no mood for tomorrow's festivities across Israel. As he likes to remind visitors, until 1948 this was a thriving Arab city, a cultural capital known for its writers and newspapers and a commercial centre with an ancient port. As part of w
Source: http://www.civilwarinteractive.com
May 20, 2008
A plan to build an expanded visitor center at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in Montana has sparked heated opposition from historians, two former park superintendents and conservation groups. This week, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) and the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees (CNPSR) have asked NPS Director Mary Bomar to halt the plan and review its appropriateness, legality and impact on the historic battlefield.
Under the plan,
Source: Tampa Tribune
May 19, 2008
At low tide, the Hillsborough River recedes enough to reveal wood beams poking through the water.
To the untrained eye, the barnacle-encrusted wood appears to be nothing more than a neglected boat mooring.
"It looks like an old dock," said Tom Wagner, spokesman for the Florida Aquarium in downtown Tampa.
The beams could be part of something far more interesting.
The planks are the remains of a ship between 80 and 100 feet long, Wagner said. A tea
Source: AP
May 14, 2008
JERUSALEM: Israeli opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu and his family thanked Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni Wednesday for memorializing Netanyahu's brother, who was killed in the 1976 Israeli raid at Uganda's Entebbe Airport.
But the Ugandan president, who is in Jerusalem to attend Israel's 60th anniversary celebrations, wanted to know about the more distant past.
He grilled Israeli opposition-leader Benjamin Netanyahu and his historian father on Israel's history —
Source: AP
May 19, 2008
The U.S. Embassy in Berlin moves back this week to its historic location in the center of the German capital, which it abandoned after Nazi Germany declared war on the United States in 1941.
Ambassador William Timken told reporters Monday that the embassy's return to Pariser Platz will be officially marked on the Fourth of July with speeches by Chancellor Angela Merkel and former President George H.W. Bush, followed by traditional Independence Day fireworks over the Brandenburg Gat
Source: NYT
May 20, 2008
Sometimes you can read a city though a cultural landmark. Tempelhof Airport is Berlin’s open book.
On the eve of the 60th anniversary of the historic, American-led airlift to supply the besieged capital, the mayor is going ahead with plans to close the airport by year’s end. How sad. A last-minute campaign by his political opponents to save it through a citywide referendum late last month won a majority, but not enough Berliners turned out to make the vote official.
No
Source: NYT
May 20, 2008
When it opened in 1956, the Statler Hilton Hotel in Dallas was a marvel of modern architecture, its size a tribute to imagination and a booming economy. Now it stands empty, another white elephant on the American landscape.
On Tuesday, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a private nonprofit organization, will announce that the Statler Hilton and 10 other sites have made its 2008 list of the country’s most endangered historic places.
“Historic buildings in citi
Source: AP
May 19, 2008
New York City, San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge and South Dakota's Badlands were named to a list of seven U.S. wonders featured on ABC's "Good Morning America."
Also on the list were the Grand Canyon, Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Preserve, Washington D.C.'s National Mall, and the Saturn V moon rocket at the Davidson Center for Space Exploration in Huntsville, Ala. Huntsville is nicknamed Rocket City because the U.S. space exploration program began there in the late
Source: AP
May 19, 2008
Experts found a tiny gold combined toothpick and earwax spoon, believed to be more than 385 years old, during the search for a shipwrecked Spanish galleon off the Florida Keys.
The late 16th or early 17th century grooming tool, which weighs only about an ounce, was located Sunday by Blue Water Ventures diver Chris Rackley as he searched the area about 22 feet below the surface and 40 miles west of Key West. He says its value could exceed $100,000.
The divers, who are se
Source: WaPo
May 19, 2008
The furrows in Martin Luther King Jr.'s brow already are gone, and his face looks less troubled.
The pen in his left hand is gone, too, replaced by a scroll. His hands seemed etched in more detail, down to the creases in his knuckles and the bones under the skin. There are buttons on his coat sleeves.
The sculpture of the civil rights leader, destined for a memorial on Washington's Tidal Basin, began undergoing these subtle yet noticeable changes even before a federal a
Source: WaPo
May 19, 2008
Sometime in the next few years, if a memorandum signed by President Bush this month ever goes into effect, one government official talking to another about information on terrorists will have to begin by saying: "What I am about to tell you is controlled unclassified information enhanced with specified dissemination."
That would mean, according to the memo, that the information requires safeguarding because "the inadvertent or unauthorized disclosure would create risk
