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: http://www.eveningsun.com
May 17, 2008
Map in hand, park ranger Karlton Smith lays an index finger on one rectangular shape he trusts to orient visitors with their historic surroundings.
"This building's actually McDonald's," he says. "That's a good marker."
Seconds later, an outstretched arm points toward the modern-day structure as it stands in real life on Emmitsburg Road - across the street from where Smith stands on Cemetery Ridge, a chunk of land on which hundreds were killed and wo
Source: http://www.charlotte.com
May 18, 2008
SPENCER --It's a clash between two Southern staples -- the Civil War and racing.
The dispute centers on a former textile mill and 130 acres of forest just north of this Rowan County railroad town near the Yadkin River.
Here, former Boston investment banker Dave Risdon, now of Huntersville, is clearing land to build a 2.15-mile "country club" raceway for amateur drivers of souped-up sports cars and motorcycles. The raceway would include a clubhouse and 120 townhomes
Source: NYT
May 19, 2008
It has been more than two years since two college professors first made their claim that the winning design chosen for the Flight 93 National Memorial had evolved to contain elements of their proposal to honor those who died fighting the terrorists who hijacked the plane on Sept. 11, 2001.
And after an investigation by the Department of the Interior a year later found no merit to the claim by the professors, Lisa Austin and Madis Pihlak, that the winning design by Paul Murdoch, an a
Source: AP
May 17, 2008
POKHARA, Nepal - Two centuries later, young men are still being drawn from their poverty-stricken Himalayan hills by the thousands to fight — and die — with legendary valor for another man's country far away.
In an era when the world's armies are hard pressed to fill their ranks, the Gurkhas are a recruiter's dream: Last year 17,349 applied to join the British military, and after grueling physical, medical and mental tests 230 were accepted — just one in 75.
These warri
Source: AP
May 18, 2008
A fire official says more than 16,000 people were evacuated from a Tokyo suburb while an unexploded 1-ton bomb believed was defused.
The bomb was believed to have been dropped by the U.S. military during World War II.
The rusty bomb was defused by a team from Japan's Self-Defense Force in Chofu, on the outskirts of Tokyo, said Tokyo Fire Department official Shigeru Ishikawa.
Source: Chicago Tribune
May 18, 2008
Rightly famous for more than a century of archeological excavations in the Middle East, Europe, Asia and Latin America, the University of Chicago lately has been working just around the corner and down the street on a dig in Jackson Park.
Among the treasures unearthed by archeologist Rebecca Graff and some of her students are rusty nails, broken crockery, pieces of glass bottles, clumps of gravel and metallic slag, now all neatly labeled in kitchen storage bags.
Graff
Source: BBC
May 19, 2008
A man accused of being a guard at a Nazi death camp during World War II has finally lost his legal fight to stay in the United States.
John Demjanjuk, 88, migrated to the US in the 1950s. He was extradited to Israel and sentenced to death for war crimes, but the ruling was overturned.
He returned to the US but was accused of lying on his immigration application about working for the Nazis.
The US Supreme Court has now rejected his appeal against deportation.
Source: Economist
May 8, 2008
DOUG MCFADDEN, an archaeologist, walks through the site of a future suburb picking up shards of pottery more than a thousand years old. The 280-acre field in south-west Utah is littered with Indian artefacts. Last year a trench was dug through part of the site that was not expected to contain many remains. It revealed a grave, pit houses and part of a building.
Southern Utah is one of the archaeologically richest parts of America. The Anasazi Indians who lived there until the 14th c
Source: Spiegel Online
May 15, 2008
Though most Muslims reject Islamism and its propaganda, anti-Semitic messages from satellite channels like the Hamas-run Al-Aqsa are helping to bring a message of hate and intolerance to Europe. The effects of such hate preaching can already be felt in Germany.
Source: Daily Star (Lebanon)
May 16, 2008
Five years later, robber gangs still loot Iraq's cultural heritage at the estimated 11,000 archaeological sites across the country, with dealers buying the protection of the clans who control large tracts of the country. A 1,400-strong Mobile Archaeological Site Protection Force was mustered in 2006 but it proved to totally ineffective - usually outgunned by the gangs, its men poorly paid and motivated. Security officials estimate that it would take a force of 50,000-75,000 to protect the sites
Source: NYT
May 17, 2008
The walls of the historic Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village will be preserved under a plan released by New York University on Friday, a move that Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, hailed as “tremendous progress” in the talks between the university and community leaders about the site. Plans had included a proposal to demolish the building.
Source: NYT
May 18, 2008
Twenty-eight feet tall and carved from Chinese granite, the statue of Martin Luther King Jr. planned for the National Mall in Washington could resist almost any attack but the one that came recently from the panel whose approval it needs to proceed.
The United States Commission of Fine Arts, which must sign off on every inch of the $100 million memorial, from typeface to tree variety to color scheme, said in a letter that “the colossal scale and Social Realist style of the proposed
Source: NYT
May 17, 2008
WITH his trial over, Kenzaburo Oe, the 1994 Nobel laureate in literature, was free again to write. He had already completed the preface and first chapter of a new novel, and found a title, “Death by Water,” in T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”
Mr. Oe’s eyes lit up behind his trademark round glasses as he spoke of striking a new approach in what he declared would be his final novel. If Mr. Oe (pronounced OH-ay), 73, kept his pace of writing two hours every morning, it would take two ye
Source: NYT
May 18, 2008
The story of Mr. Obama’s life as an author tells as much about him as some of the stories he has recounted in his books. It possesses at times the same charmed quality sometimes ascribed to his political ascent — an impression of ease, if not exactly effortlessness, that obscures a more complex amalgam of drive, ambition, timing and the ability to recognize an opportunity and to do what it takes to seize it.
Source: WaPo
May 18, 2008
Helga Johnson, 73, remembers fleeing her Berlin home in 1944 with the Russian army hot on her trail. She remembers coming back to Berlin a year later and nearly starving in the aftermath of World War II.
And she remembers the American airplanes, part of the Berlin Airlift, that flew over once every three minutes in 1948 to bring food and other supplies to the city enduring a Russian army blockade.
"The war was only over three years and we were hungry," Johnson
Source: AP
May 18, 2008
DAEJEON, South Korea - Grave by mass grave, South Korea is unearthing the skeletons and buried truths of a cold-blooded slaughter from early in the Korean War, when this nation's U.S.-backed regime killed untold thousands of leftists and hapless peasants in a summer of terror in 1950.
With U.S. military officers sometimes present, and as North Korean invaders pushed down the peninsula, the southern army and police emptied South Korean prisons, lined up detainees and shot them in the
Source: Huffington Post (Blog)
May 18, 2008
One journalist's bid to report mass murder in South Korea in 1950 was blocked by his British publisher. Another correspondent was denounced as a possibly treasonous fabricator when he did report it. In South Korea, down the generations, fear silenced those who knew.
Fifty-eight years ago, at the outbreak of the Korean War, South Korean authorities secretively executed, usually without legal process, tens of thousands of southern leftists and others rightly or wrongly identified as s
Source: NYT
May 17, 2008
From the grave, Albert Einstein poured gasoline on the culture wars between science and religion this week.
A letter the physicist wrote in 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, in which he described the Bible as “pretty childish” and scoffed at the notion that the Jews could be a “chosen people,” sold for $404,000 at an auction in London. That was 25 times the presale estimate.
The Associated Press quoted Rupert Powell, the managing director of Bloomsbury Auctions, as
Source: Yahoo News
May 17, 2008
After four decades carrying
millions of New Yorkers, 44 of the city's subway cars
are now home to millions of fish.
The worn-out cars were dumped on Friday into the
Atlantic Ocean, 21 miles off the Maryland coast, to
create an artificial reef, designed to attract fish
for the state's lucrative sport-fishing industry.
"These reefs provide quality habitat for marine life
off our coast which benefits not only the environment
Source: AP
May 17, 2008
TICONDEROGA, N.Y. (AP) — Before the Civil War and Antietam, the bloodiest battle fought on American soil was here, on a narrow but strategically vital strip of land between Lake Champlain and Lake George.
A 15,000-strong British army sailed up Lake George 250 years ago this summer, intent on taking Fort Ticonderoga, France's southernmost outpost in the region. The French, outnumbered nearly five to one but well fortified, hastily built 8-foot-high log barriers as the enemy approache
