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: CNN
February 13, 2008
Britain's Prince Andrew on Wednesday defended comments he made suggesting the United States might have been better off had its leaders learned from the British experience with colonialism before invading Iraq.
"The fact is that we have learned, sometimes at our expense, in the years when we were a colonial power," he told CNN.
"So there may or may not have been things and ideas that were of valid use to what was going on at that particular time."
Source: AP
February 13, 2008
A group of Chicago investors are putting the 138 acres of mountaintop property just to the west of the "H" in the Hollywood sign on the market Wednesday.
The Fox River Co. said the property, once owned by Howard Hughes, offers a stunning 360-degree panorama of the Los Angeles Basin and the San Fernando Valley.
The asking price: $22 million.
Hughes once planned to build a love nest there for his then paramour Ginger Rogers. Though their relationshi
Source: LiveScience
February 12, 2008
The epic journey by which the Americas were first settled has been a great mystery for centuries. Did it happen by land or by sea? Did it happen one dozen or so millennia ago or three dozen?
The answer might be "yes."
New findings reveal the settling of the New World did not come in a single burst, as is suggested by most theories, but was, in a way, a play with three acts, each separated by thousands of generations.
The first stage of this voyage
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 13, 2008
An 88-year-old veteran of the Spanish Civil War has had a bullet removed from his shoulder almost seven decades after he was shot.
Faustino Olivera is recovering in hospital in Barbastro, in the northern Spanish region of Aragon, where doctors last week performed emergency surgery to remove a painful lump from his left shoulder.
They were astonished when they extracted a bullet fired from a Mauser 98.
Source: NYT
February 13, 2008
Making some of his most pointed remarks on race relations, President Bush on Tuesday denounced racially charged incidents involving nooses and called the era of lynchings from the 19th to the 20th centuries “a shameful chapter in American history.”
“The noose is not a symbol of prairie justice, but of gross injustice,” Mr. Bush said at a ceremony in the East Room of the White House. “Displaying one is not a harmless prank. And ‘lynching’ is not a word to be mentioned in jest.
Source: Newsweek
February 9, 2008
At the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Des Moines last November, an annual ritual of backslapping and speechifying that takes on added significance in the months before the Iowa caucuses, the candidates were trying out their slogans. Hillary Clinton went with "Turn Up the Heat" (meaning, she explained, let's attack the Republicans and not each other, a vow she inevitably could not keep). Barack Obama was looking for some way to sharpen the distinction with Clinton and the other candida
Source: Newsweek
February 12, 2008
With sorrow, the Abraham Lincoln industry chopped off a major commemoration Tuesday due to weather. First Lady Laura Bush was to be in Hodgenville, Ky., at the site of the 16th president's birth in 1809, to help lead the nation in a celebration worthy of his life. Perhaps it's just as well that the party did not come off. What, after all, would the country do to follow that act next year, on the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth?
That question may not be so easy to resolve. As it
Source: Ralph Luker at HNN blog, Cliopatria
February 9, 2008
What Richard Johnson,"Mystery of a JFK ‘Son'," NY Post's Page Six, 7 February, reports as Gossip is reported as News in Denise Ryan,"B.C. man said to be JFK's illegitimate son," Vancouver Sun, 8 February. They say that Vanity Fair was about to break the story of a forty-
Source: History Today
February 5, 2008
Scientists in Sweden hope to exhume the body of King Charles XII to determine if he was killed by one of his own soldiers in 1718. Researchers from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm applied in January to study the remains in the city’s Riddarholm Church to analyze the bullet-type. The King died while invading Norway but as his rule from 1697 presaged a decline in Sweden’s power, he could have been assassinated by one of his own men rather than a Norwegian weapon.
Source: BBC
February 12, 2008
With torment still in his voice, Frank Byrne recalls the day six decades ago when he was taken from his mother and their community in Christmas Creek, Western Australia.
He was just five at the time, and his mother, Maudie Yooringun, had long feared the day that the government would come to seize him - and he would be "stolen".
"The government came to Christmas Creek where we had a mud house and told me I was been taken away," he said.
&
Source: BBC
February 12, 2008
With torment still in his voice, Frank Byrne recalls the day six decades ago when he was taken from his mother and their community in Christmas Creek, Western Australia.
He was just five at the time, and his mother, Maudie Yooringun, had long feared the day that the government would come to seize him - and he would be "stolen".
"The government came to Christmas Creek where we had a mud house and told me I was been taken away," he said.
&
Source: AP
February 12, 2008
President Bush honored Georgia Congressman
John Lewis and others Tuesday at an event marking Black History Month at the White House.
In his remarks, Bush took aim at a resurgence in the display of
nooses as misguided and disturbing type of prank. The President
said it indicates that some Americans may be losing sight of the
suffering that blacks have endured across the nation.
Bush said"The era of rampant lynching is a shameful chapter in
American history.'' He said the that a noose"is
Source: Boston Herald
February 11, 2008
A restoration effort at the historic African Meeting House in Boston is getting a big boost courtesy of Wal-Mart.
The retail giant is donating $250,000 to the effort to restore the meeting house to its original 19th century glory.
The donation was accepted at a ceremony Monday at the Museum of African American History.
Source: Courier-Journal
February 11, 2008
One floor below what was once Abraham Lincoln's office, President and Mrs. Bush last night hosted a White House celebration of the 16th president's legacy.
Two days before Lincoln's 199th birthday and the Kentucky kickoff of the bicentennial of his birth, Bush paid tribute to a man who "remains a presence here in the house."
"Of all the successors to George Washington, none had a greater impact on the presidency or on the country," Bush said.
Source: NPR
February 11, 2008
Along the coast of Peru, a mysterious civilization sprang up about 5,000 years ago. This was many centuries before the Incan Empire. Yet these people were sophisticated. They cultivated crops and orchards. And they built huge monuments of earth and rock.
Archaeologists are trying to prove that an abrupt change of climate created this new culture.
The culture has no official name yet. It flourished in a series of dry coastal valleys called Norte Chico. The place is a moo
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 12, 2008
A century of Westminster-style pageantry and pomp took a backseat in Australia’s capital Canberra today when Aborigines smeared with white body paint and playing didgeridoos opened parliament for the first time.
The colourful ceremony came as prime minister Kevin Rudd prepares to deliver an historic apology to the Stolen Generations — Aboriginal children who were removed from their families in an attempt to integrate them into white society.
British parliamentary tradi
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 11, 2008
It was lampooned by Monty Python and spurned by British shoppers, but Spam is fuelling a "raging epidemic" of diabetes, strokes and heart disease among the previously lithe inhabitants of the South Pacific.
Another of Britain's colonial culinary legacies - corned beef - is also being blamed for a rise in obesity-related illnesses in countries once known for muscled warriors and slim-hipped maidens.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 11, 2008
Definitive evidence that Napoleon did not die of arsenic poisoning is published today.
After nearly 200 years of debate about what killed the French emperor, researchers at Italy's National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) have examined his hair to shed light on the suggestion that he was poisoned by guards during his exile in Saint Helena, an island in the South Atlantic, following the Battle of Waterloo.
In 1961, an elevated level of arsenic was found in Napoleon's
Source: Reuters
February 11, 2008
Ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro took on front-running U.S. Republican presidential candidate John McCain on Monday, accusing him of lying about Cubans torturing American prisoners of war in Vietnam.
At a campaign stop in Miami last month, the Arizona senator told anti-Castro exiles that American POWs held with him in Hanoi were tortured by "a couple of Cubans."
"His accusation against the Cuban revolutionaries ... are completely unethical," Castro w
Source: Baltimore Sun news story
February 11, 2008
In campaign literature and speeches, each of the three leading presidential candidates has trumpeted the experience that makes him or her best suited for the job.
A biography on Sen. John McCain's campaign Web site proclaims his "remarkable record of leadership and service." Sen. Barack Obama's Web site describes the "rich and varied experiences" of his life. Sen. Hillary Clinton has spoken of her "35 years of change" and told supporters, "We need
