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: Newsweek
March 3, 2008
Hillary Clinton has always been the woman who doesn't quit. Her supporters testify to her stamina—how at an endless upstate meeting on agriculture subsidies, she asked penetrating questions when everyone else was asleep; how after umpteen drafts of an important policy address, she wrote the thing herself. Then there's her marriage, how after Bill embarrassed her in front of the world, she stuck by him. She thrives by outlasting everyone. The no-good husband and the cloying press corps, the borin
Source: Newsweek
March 3, 2008
[Barack] Obama himself does not believe that America is "post racial," a phrase he rejects as naive. To the contrary, reports NEWSWEEK's Richard Wolffe, who reports from the Obama campaign, the senator recognizes that the country's legacy of racism is too deep to be eradicated overnight, or even over the course of his campaign. Nevertheless, Obama has said, voters are judging candidates on their ability to fix health care, foreign policy, the economy and education, not on a candidate's
Source: WaPo
February 27, 2008
After promising last year to search its computers for tens of thousands of e-mails sent by White House officials, the Republican National Committee has informed a House committee that it no longer plans to retrieve the communications by restoring computer backup tapes, the panel's chairman said yesterday.
The move increases the likelihood that an untold number of RNC e-mails dealing with official White House business during the first term of the Bush administration -- including many
Source: Time Magazine
February 26, 2008
When last we saw the lost Ark of the Covenant in action, it had been dug up by Indiana Jones in Egypt and ark-napped by Nazis, whom the Ark proceeded to incinerate amidst a tempest of terrifying apparitions. But according to Tudor Parfitt, a real-life scholar-adventurer, Raiders of the Lost Ark had it wrong, and the Ark is actually nowhere near Egypt. In fact, Parfitt claims he has traced it (or a replacement container for the original Ark), to a dusty bottom shelf in a museum in Harare, Zimbabw
Source: National Security Archive
February 26, 2008
Washington D.C., February 26, 2008 - At a hearing today before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, it was disclosed that the White House has received repeated warnings from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and from information technology experts within the White House about the risk of lost e-mails. Records obtained by the Committee showed that NARA's warnings began as early as January 2004 and that the White House was aware of the danger that e-mails m
Source: http://www.lvrj.com
February 25, 2008
In putting the coal-power industry in the same sentence as Adolf Hitler, Harry Reid didn't mean to suggest the utilities are as bad as the Nazis -- just that they act like them.
"I never said they were as bad as Hitler," the senator said in an interview last week. "I said what they're doing is creating the big lie that coal is clean, and that's not true. That (tactic) goes back to the Nazi era, and I'm not saying they're following anything to do with the Nazis, but th
Source: WaPo
February 26, 2008
The 2008 presidential campaign has witnessed the rise of a whole arsenal of new political weapons, including Internet fundraising and sophisticated microtargeting of voters. For Sen. Barack Obama, however, the most powerful weapon has been one of the oldest.
Not since the days of the whistle-stop tour and the radio addresses that Franklin D. Roosevelt used to hone his message while governor of New York has a presidential candidate been propelled so much by the force of words, accord
Source: NYT
February 26, 2008
Fewer than half of American teenagers who were asked basic questions about history and literature during a recent telephone survey knew when the Civil War was fought, and one-quarter thought that Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World sometime after 1750, not in 1492.
The results of the survey, released Tuesday, demonstrate that a significant proportion of American teenagers live in “stunning ignorance” of history and literature, according to the group that commissioned it. Kn
Source: Reuters
February 26, 2008
The chief torturer under the Khmer Rouge "Killing Fields" regime wept and prayed on Tuesday as he led the judges who will try him for crimes against humanity around the mass graves for some of its victims.
Duch, also known as Kaing Guek Eav, accompanied 80 judges, lawyers and other officials of a U.N.-backed tribunal to the 129 graves, uncovered after a Vietnamese invasion sent the Khmer Rouge back to the jungles in 1979.
"I saw Duch kneel in front of th
Source: AP
February 26, 2008
The storms that have lashed Oregon's scenic coast this winter have dredged up an unusual array of once-buried secrets: old shipwrecks, historic cannons, ghost forests — even strangely shaped iron deposits.
One of the first ships to emerge from the sands was recently identified as the George L. Olson, which ran aground at Coos Bay's North Jetty on June 23, 1944.
The shipwreck has become a tourist attraction on the southern Oregon coast. Interest became so great that auth
Source: AP
February 26, 2008
- German treasure hunters began digging Tuesday for what they say may be plunder buried by the Nazis in a man-made cavern near the Czech border.
The area's mayor, Hans-Peter Haustein, and a man who believes he found the coordinates for the buried booty in a notebook among his deceased father's belongings, maintain that a scan of the spot has revealed that a large quantity of metal is about 20 meters below the surface.
They believe it to be either gold or silver, based o
Source: http://www.lvrj.com
February 25, 2008
Gennifer Flowers is putting the tapes of her recorded conversations with Bill Clinton during their 12-year affair on the auction block, Vegas Confidential learned Monday.
Flowers, who came forward during Clinton's 1992 Presidential election campaign with details of the relationship, said she decided to part with the tapes after renewed interest surfaced. She was offered $5 million by a Japanese collector in the 1990s, she said.
Asked about the timing of her announcement
Source: Guardian
February 24, 2008
On Friday 7 January 1944, Anne Frank confessed her love for a boy she had been smitten with for years. She had first set eyes upon him in school in 1940, and they had been 'inseparable' for a whole summer, walking hand in hand through their neighbourhood in Amsterdam, him in a white cotton suit, her in a short summer dress. He was 'tall, slim and good-looking, with a serious, quiet and intelligent face'. He had dark hair, brown eyes, a slightly pointed nose. Anne was 'crazy about his smile', whi
Source: Reuters
February 26, 2008
An Australian professional soccer player who attended a club celebration dressed as Adolf Hitler will be disciplined after Jewish groups complained, officials said on Tuesday.
German-born Andre Gumprecht, 33, attended a post-Grand Final ceremony on Monday for his Central Coast Mariners team dressed in a khaki military uniform and moustache to resemble the former German dictator.
"Hitler was such a monster and for a lot of people, it's a very sensitive thing to be confron
Source: International Herald Tribune
February 25, 2008
Last week, a senior French official flew to Istanbul to discuss Turkey's exclusion of Gaz de France from an $12 billion pipeline project - designed to bring Central Asian oil directly to European markets - because of recent French legislation making it a criminal offense to deny that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in 1915 constituted genocide.
The Turkish government clearly takes history seriously. Just last October, when the United States Congress considered a bil
Source: http://www.standard-freeholder.com
February 25, 2008
As a young girl, a Mohawk known as "She Who Bumps Into Things" probably wouldn't believe she would one day be hailed as a saint.
However, Kateri Tekakwitha, born in 1656 Auriesville, N.Y. to a Mohawk Chief and a Catholic Algonquin mother, has been put in just such a position.
Two hundred and sixty three years after her death, Tekakwitha was declared venerable by Pope Pius XII on Jan. 3, 1943. Beatification by Pope John Paul II followed on June 22, 1980.
Source: Reuters
February 25, 2008
A ceremonial plaza built 5,500 years ago has been discovered in Peru, and archeologists involved in the dig said on Monday carbon dating shows it is one of the oldest structures ever found in the Americas.
A team of Peruvian and German archeologists uncovered the circular plaza, which was hidden beneath another piece of architecture at the ruins known as Sechin Bajo, in Casma, 229 miles north of Lima, the capital. Friezes depicting a warrior with a knife and trophies were found near
Source: NYT
February 26, 2008
You couldn’t miss the 100th anniversary of the New York City subway in 2004. There were speeches, banners, slogans, displays, events and a shelf full of books to mark the milestone for posterity: “Subways,” “A Century of Subways,” “Subwayland,” “Subway Memoirs,” “The Subway Pictures,” “Subway Style,” “The Subway and the City.”
But you might easily have missed the centenary of New York’s other subway on Monday.
PATH? One hundred years old?
Source: NYT
February 26, 2008
If this city is known for both intellectual heft and political blood sport, the Boston Public Library, one of its proudest institutions, aligns itself strictly with the former. But in recent months, the august library has been at the center of some nasty political tussles.
Its trustees, appointed by Mayor Thomas M. Menino, voted last fall to oust the library’s president, who then complained publicly that Mr. Menino was “anti-intellectual” and had ordered him to hire certain people.
Source: Seattle PI
February 21, 2008
Hundreds of Japanese-Americans who were held in internment camps during World War II will receive honorary baccalaureate degrees from the University of Washington -- a move some say has been too long in the coming.
Of the thousands of Japanese-Americans incarcerated in the early 1940s, 440 were students at the UW. Regents at the university voted Thursday to acknowledge the suffering of those students by awarding them honorary degrees.
The honorary degrees were lauded as
