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: Christian Science Monitor
April 23, 2008
GETTYSBURG, PA. - Even though he spends his time guiding tourists through the nooks and crannies of a Civil War-era house, retired librarian Harry Conay believes that nature can trump history.
He's watched in horror as the National Park Service has tried to make the Gettysburg National Military Park look more like it did on three July days in 1863. Officials are nearly a third of the way through cutting down 576 acres of trees that didn't exist back then.
Another 275 ac
Source: LAT
April 19, 2008
Survivors, relatives and officials gather in Lebanon to honor the 63 killed in the suicide bombing, which ushered in an era of similar attacks.
***
The explosion shook the earth. And it wouldn't be the last one.
Twenty-five years ago Friday, a suicide bomber drove a pickup truck full of explosives into the U.S. Embassy in downtown Beirut, killing 63 people. It heralded the rise in the Middle East of a soon-to-be common tool in the arsenal of radicals: the s
Source: Newsweek
April 28, 2008
Darnah's militants do have one other thing in common [beside desperate lives]: an almost obsessive devotion to their town's place in history. Greek and Roman ruins, the detritus of occupations in the ancient past, dot the wheat and barley fields along Libya's coastal plain. The United States left its own lasting mark on the town's collective memory during the Barbary Wars of the early 1800s. Darnah became a key battlefield in America's first overseas military expedition, when 500 American Marine
Source: NYT
April 22, 2008
According to the authors of “Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics,” change is indeed on its way, and the magnitude of that change will be monumental — a tectonic realignment of the sort that occurs about every four decades, leading to a fundamental shift in policy priorities and voter coalitions.
Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais also write in this fascinating but not always persuasive volume that the party capturing the White House in 2008 ha
Source: UPI
April 20, 2008
The Boston Tea Party has become more than a moment in history, now representing a template for protests across the nation, a historian says.
Tea Party historical consultant George Quintal Jr. said the event nearly 235 years ago has been mimicked countless times since by protesters in Boston and across the nation, The Boston Globe reported Sunday.
"That's the American way of protest," Quintal said. "We started out protesting with the tea party."
Source: LiveScience
April 22, 2008
Oil paintings have been found in caves behind the two ancient colossal Buddha statues destroyed in 2001 by the Taliban, suggesting that Asians — not Europeans — were the first to invent oil painting.
Many people worldwide were in shock when the Taliban destroyed the Buddha statues in the Afghan region of Bamiyan.
Behind those statues are caves decorated with paintings from the fifth to ninth centuries.
New experiments performed at the European Synchrotron R
Source: NYT
April 22, 2008
Imagine President Barack Obama is preparing his first State of the Union message. Would he want Vice President Hillary Rodham Clinton tut-tutting with edits or suggesting how she could write it better? Would he want to hear Second Spouse Bill Clinton wax on and on about favorite lines from his own speeches?
Alternatively, would the poll-obsessed Clintons want to wake up in the White House residence in 2009 and read about Vice President Obama’s sky-high popularity ratings, and how th
Source: USA Today
April 21, 2008
President Bush has set a record he'd presumably prefer to avoid: the highest disapproval rating of any president in the 70-year history of the Gallup Poll.
In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday, 28% of Americans approve of the job Bush is doing; 69% disapprove. The approval rating matches the low point of his presidency, and the disapproval sets a new high for any president since Franklin Roosevelt.
The previous record of 67% was reached by Harry Truman
Source: AP
April 15, 2008
Yale University is holding some 40,000 artifacts from the famed Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, a government official heading efforts to return the pieces told the state news agency Andina on Sunday.
Peru's government and Yale University reached an agreement last September to return 4,000 pieces — including mummies, ceramics and bones — that were taken a century ago from what has become one of the world's most famous archaeological sites.
The tally of 40,000 artifacts app
Source: AP
April 21, 2008
For a society accustomed to the likes of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, the images of the women from the polygamist compound in Texas are almost shocking in their understatement: Ankle-length dresses, makeup-less faces, hauntingly uniform hair.
And while no one would accuse the women of making a fashion statement, the pioneer-style outfits are a rare example of how in an age of overexposure, modesty, too, can give pause.
The puff-sleeved, pastel dresses worn by the wom
Source: International Herald Tribune
April 22, 2008
Elias Khoury can still remember the days when old people in this cliffside village spoke only Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Back then the village, linked to the capital, Damascus, only by a long and bumpy bus ride over the mountains, was almost entirely Christian, a vestige of an older and more diverse Middle East that existed before the arrival of Islam.
Now Khoury, 65, gray-haired and bedridden, admits ruefully that he has largely forgotten the language he spoke with his own mot
Source: Scotsman
April 22, 2008
AN EXHIBITION featuring photographs of Paris taken during the Nazi occupation has provoked so much public indignation that the Paris city council has ordered posters advertising the show to be taken down and has even called for the exhibition to be closed altogether.
Entitled Paris Sous l'Occupation (Paris Under the Occupation), the exhibition at the Paris History Library shows 270 colour photographs – part of the only collection of colour images of their kind – taken between 1941 a
Source: Tom Ferrick in the NYT
April 22, 2008
WHEN Philadelphia ward leaders realized the contest for the Democratic nomination for president would extend through the Pennsylvania primary, it set their salivary glands running. It meant they would have an opportunity to extract street money from the campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. And street money is the manna of Philadelphia ward politics.
Street money is the name for cash given to party committeemen and women who hand out literature and drum up the vote on prima
Source: AP
April 22, 2008
One of President Nixon's daughters, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, apparently supports a Democrat in this year's presidential contest _ Barack Obama.
Eisenhower has contributed the maximum amount allowed during the primary season to Obama's campaign: $2,300. Federal Election Commission records show she gave Obama's campaign $1,000 on Feb. 4, another $1,000 on Feb. 18 and $300 on March 5.
Source: LAT
April 18, 2008
Evidence linking him to the ex-leaders of the Weather Underground is thin. But a YouTube video is making noise.
Democrats have tried to heal their party's angry passions ever since violent protesters disrupted the Democratic National Convention here in 1968, a shock to America's collective psyche that helped Republican Richard Nixon capture the White House.
But some of the old fault lines were visible again Thursday as Sen. Barack Obama's suddenly defensive presidential
Source: WaPo's The Fix (blog)
April 21, 2008
Hours after Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) began airing an ad in Pennsylvania that subtly questions Sen. Barack Obama's readiness to handle a pending crisis, the Illinois Senator's campaign unveiled an ad of its own that starkly rebuts that charge.
Clinton's ad declares that the presidency is "the toughest job in the world" and asks "Who do you think has what it takes?" It is similar in message to the "3 a.m. telephone call" ad that Clinton's campai
Source: http://www.news.com.au
April 16, 2008
A GOLDMINE of Australian military history has been uncovered in Bendigo. The unique material includes hundreds of film negatives more than 90 years old that had been stored in an old biscuit tin in a garage since the end of World War I.
The photos were taken by twice-wounded Jack Grinton, of Bendigo, and include shots from the Somme and Villers-Bretonneux in France, where some of the deadliest fighting took place.
The collection includes the camera used by Sgt Grinton -
Source: http://www.pr.com
April 4, 2008
More than 9 million World War II army enlistment records are now searchable online at WorldVitalRecords.com through a shipment provided by National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), one of the largest archives in the US.
“The National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, DC, preserves and provides access to billions of genealogical and historical records, photographs, and computerized resources. I am pleased that WorldVitalRecords.com is including these NARA
Source: http://www.newsadvance.com
April 20, 2008
For more than a century, The Museum of the Confederacy’s home was in Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy during the Civil War.
Housed downtown in the White House of the Confederacy, President Jefferson Davis’ home during the war, the museum, the institution has become the repository of all things relating to the Civil War. But its location in Richmond was also a problem, too: the nearby Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center kept growing and growing, literally engulfing the
Source: Mercury News
April 20, 2008
SAN FRANCISCO—As Spain shrugs off the last cobwebs of Gen. Francisco Franco's fascist regime 70 years after it hatched amid civil war, Americans are also looking back, honoring their own who fought there and the ideals for which they stood.
The faces of some of the approximately 3,000 men and women who broke American isolationism to volunteer in the 1936-1939 Spanish war look out from the translucent onyx squares of a monument recently inaugurated on this city's touristed Embarcader
