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 4, 2008
Mildred Loving, a black woman whose
challenge to Virginia's ban on interracial marriage
led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down
such laws nationwide, has died, her daughter said
Monday.
Peggy Fortune said Loving, 68, died Friday at her home
in rural Milford. She did not disclose the cause of
death.
Loving and her white husband, Richard, changed history
in 1967 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their right
to marry. The ruling struck down laws banning racially
Source: BBC
May 4, 2008
The threat of a nuclear attack on the UK in the 1950s caused concern over the supply of tea, top-secret documents which have now been released reveal.
Government officials planning food supplies said the tea situation would be "very serious" after a nuclear war.
"It would be wrong to consider that even 1oz per head per week could be ensured," they stated.
The papers were released under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Archives at
Source: WaPo
May 4, 2008
Almost eight years after al-Qaeda nearly sank the USS Cole with an explosives-stuffed motorboat, killing 17 sailors, all the defendants convicted in the attack have escaped from prison or been freed by Yemeni officials.
Source: AP
May 2, 2008
- Like many boys in the South, Sam White got hooked on the Civil War early, digging up rusting bullets and military buttons in the battle-scarred earth of his hometown.
As an adult, he crisscrossed the Virginia countryside in search of wartime relics -- weapons, battle flags, even artillery shells buried in the red clay. He sometimes put on diving gear to feel for treasures hidden in the black muck of river bottoms.
But in February, White's hobby cost him his life: A ca
Source: NYT
May 4, 2008
Sometimes, as Senator Barack Obama seemed to argue earlier this year, a flag pin is just a flag pin.
But it can never be that simple for anyone with direct experience of the 1988 presidential campaign. That year, the Republicans used the symbols of nationhood (notably, whether schoolchildren should be required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance) to bludgeon the Democrats, challenge their patriotism and utterly redefine their nominee, Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts.
Source: Robert Fisk in the New Statesman
May 1, 2008
No wonder Seven Pillars of Wisdom - indeed, all of T E Lawrence's work - now tops the reading list of almost every senior US officer in Iraq. Long after his legend was established in Arabia and Damascus and at the Versailles Treaty negotiations - almost 90 years after he realised that his promises to his Arab allies were to be broken by Britain's adherence to the Balfour Declaration - Lawrence's wisdom is now serving to guide (and no doubt misguide) the Americans, who have walked into the hell-d
Source: NYT
May 2, 2008
A book published on Thursday asserts that a black radio journalist convicted of murdering a white Philadelphia police officer more than 26 years ago is not guilty of the crime and that it was actually committed by another man who is now deceased.
The book, “The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal,” by J. Patrick O’Connor, asserts that Officer Daniel Faulkner died on Dec. 9, 1981, from shots fired by Kenneth Freeman, a business partner of the brother of the convicted man, Mr. Abu-Jamal, who h
Source: NYT
May 4, 2008
SAPELO ISLAND, Ga. — When Wevonneda Minis first came to this marshy barrier island where her ancestors had been rice-cultivating slaves, she learned of the dream her great-great-grandfather, Liberty Handy, had the night before he died. In the dream, people told her, a black cat scratched him.
The handing down of stories like that through the generations lies at the very marrow of life here among the rutted dirt roads and palmetto fronds of Hog Hammock, a community of about 400 acres
Source: WaPo
May 2, 2008
The Senate has unanimously declared John McCain a natural-born citizen, eligible to be president of the United States.
That is the good news for the presumptive Republican nominee, who was born nearly 72 years ago in a military hospital in the Panama Canal Zone, then under U.S. jurisdiction. The bad news is that the nonbinding Senate resolution passed Wednesday night is simply an opinion that has little bearing on an arcane constitutional debate that has preoccupied legal scholars f
Source: AP
May 1, 2008
After three decades of keeping mum, Barbara Walters is disclosing a past affair with married U.S. Senator Edward Brooke, whom she remembers as “exciting” and “brilliant.”
Appearing on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” scheduled to air Tuesday, Walters shares details of her relationship with Brooke that lasted several years in the 1970s, according to a transcript of the show provided to The Associated Press.
Source: Boston Globe
May 1, 2008
Long before NASA was established in 1958, before JFK's impassioned speech about the space race, and before any of the Apollo missions or space shuttle successes and disasters, Percival Lowell devoted much of his career and considerable fortune to trying to prove that Mars hosted intelligent life. Viewed through his telescopes, the ancient, baleful Red Planet was about the size of a dime. Lowell believed he was seeing a network of canals on its surface. Therefore, he declared, Mars holds intellig
Source: Guardian
May 2, 2008
The images of voters celebrating the recent election results in Italy were as eloquent as they were alarming: amid the sea of tricolour flags were hundreds of people raising their right arms to the skies, their fingers tense and straight. Everywhere you could see the old fascist salute. It is back in fashion and many are now wondering if the boot-boys themselves are back in power.
t is never easy to understand what is happening in Italian politics, but the past fortnight has been un
Source: http://www.bellinghamherald.com
May 1, 2008
One of the Pacific Northwest's most astonishing archaeological finds in a generation has languished for more than a year, lingering on metal shelves in a Seattle warehouse, unseen by the public and unexamined by scientists.
No one questions the discoveries - artifacts from a 2,700-year-old Native American village excavated from the Port Angeles waterfront amid great public interest - should be exhibited, analyzed and celebrated.
But the 900 boxes of artifacts - such thi
Source: AP
May 2, 2008
Akhenaten wasn't the most manly pharaoh, even though he fathered at least a half-dozen children. In fact, his form was quite feminine. And he was a bit of an egghead.
So concludes a Yale University physician who analyzed images of Akhenaten for an annual conference Friday at the University of Maryland School of Medicine on the deaths of historic figures.
The female form was due to a genetic mutation that caused the pharaoh's body to convert more male hormones to female
Source: AP
May 1, 2008
A bill to find ways to preserve the Newtonia Civil War battlefields is headed to President Bush after securing final congressional approval Wednesday.
The bill was sponsored by U.S. Rep. Roy Blunt. It authorizes the National Park Service to conduct a study to determine if the Newtonia sites could be made a separate unit of the park service or brought under the management of Wilson's Creek National Battlefield near Springfield.
Source: AP
May 1, 2008
Thousands of young Jews, Poles and World War II survivors took part Thursday in the March of the Living, an annual event at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi death camp.
This year’s march, the 17th, started with the blowing of the shofar, a ram’s horn, at the iron gate — crowned with the words “Arbeit Macht Frei,” or “Work Sets You Free” — that leads into the former camp of Auschwitz.
The Israeli army chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, led the marchers, accompanied by
Source: http://www.bitsofnews.com
March 26, 2008
Professor Benny Shanon of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem has written a paper arguing that Moses, the Jewish prophet, was on drugs. Shanon argues that Moses was on Ayahuasca, a mixture of the Acacia tree and harmal plant in conjunction. He argues this based on some very easily obtainable facts. In South America, shamans take a mixture of chemicals as Ayahuasca, a different mix than available in the Middle East, to generate mystical experience. The writer, Professor Shanon, a professor of psyc
Source: http://www.news4jax.com
May 1, 2008
One man's pride in and loyalty to his Confederate flag has landed him in a free-speech fight with his employer, who doesn't want it displayed on company property.
The flag is attached to Bobby Tillett's pickup truck, which he drives to work every day. Because his employer has banned the flag from his parking lot, Tillett is forced to park far from his job.
"If I take it down, that means you know the politically correct people would have won, and that's wrong," Bobb
Source: http://mag.awn.com
May 2, 2008
One of the strangest animation-related stories of this year to date has to be the discovery, in Norway, of a set of four watercolor paintings stashed behind the frame of a fifth. This artwork depicted three of Disney's Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio, and would be of no great import unless one knew the identity of the purported painter: Adolf Hitler, supreme leader of the Third Reich.
Source: The Age (Australia)
May 2, 2008
Philipp von Boeselager, the last survivor of a failed 1944 plot to assassinate Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, has died at the age of 90.
A German army officer, Boeselager said he obtained for the other plotters the explosive that was detonated under a table at Hitler's Wolf's Lair headquarters in present-day Poland on July 20, 1944.
A feature film about the plot, starring Tom Cruise as Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, who planted the bomb, is set for release next year.
