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: NYT
August 12, 2007
IT is now widely believed that the aggressive mortgage lending during the recent real estate boom was unprecedented. In the final counting, that assessment may well be accurate.
But some housing experts whose careers date back to the 1960s say they hear the distinct echo of a government program from 35 years ago in the current mortgage crisis....
There are obvious differences between the government program, which was run by the Federal Housing Administration and known a
Source: BBC
August 12, 2007
Border guards in East Germany during the Cold War were given clear orders to shoot at attempted defectors, including children, a senior official says.
A newly discovered order is the firmest evidence yet that the communist regime gave explicit shoot-to-kill orders, says Germany's director of Stasi files.
The Stasi was the security ministry of the East German government, which always denied there was such a policy.
The order "is a licence to kill", said
Source: NYT
August 11, 2007
A homeless man in London pleaded guilty yesterday to attacking a portrait of the 18th-century literary giant Samuel Johnson with a hammer, The Associated Press reported. Mark Paton, 44, was arrested on Wednesday after repeatedly hitting the $3.4 million portrait, by Joshua Reynolds, at the National Portrait Gallery. He admitted intent to cause criminal damage, though gave no explanation for the attack. “He has nothing against Sir Joshua Reynolds or Samuel Johnson,” said his defense lawyer, Euan
Source: NYT
August 12, 2007
BETHEL, N.Y., Aug. 9 — Inside an old wood-beamed farmhouse with picture windows on a hillside here, the chirp of the telephone pierced the air roughly every five minutes Thursday morning with another inquiry about the sale of “Yasgur’s Farm,” a house and a piece of land that the 1969 Woodstock music festival made famous, at least among members of the scattered tribe of a certain time.
“That’s right, that’s right, we’re moving, permanently, to Phoenix,” said Roy Howard, 73, speaking
Source: AP
August 12, 2007
MECCA, Saudi Arabia -- These days it's easier to find a Cinnabon in Mecca than the house where the Prophet Muhammad was born.
The ancient sites in Islam's holiest city are under attack from both money and extreme religion. Developers are building giant glass and marble towers that loom over the revered Kaaba which millions of Muslims face in their daily prayers. At the same time, religious zealots continue to work, as they have for decades, to destroy landmarks that they say encoura
Source: Houston Chronicle
August 9, 2007
President Bush tries to set an example for Americans
whenever he can, in terms of physical fitness, faith,
optimism and a certain overall moral rectitude. He
also sets an excellent example on taking vacation.
On Thursday, Bush left for a weekend in Kennebunkport,
Maine, and his family's summer compound, Walker's
Point. On Monday, he heads to his Crawford retreat,
where he has spent all or part of 418 days of his
presidency, according to Mark Knoller, a CBS News
White House correspo
Source: BBC
August 10, 2007
Memoirs of a British civil servant never published until now show how much the partition of India was decided by just two men, the BBC's Alastair Lawson reports.
In a quiet village in the northern English county of Yorkshire, Robert Beaumont rifles through his father's archives.
The various and somewhat tatty pieces of paper he unearths are no ordinary collection of paternal memoirs.
They are the thoughts and reflections of his father, Christopher Beaumont,
Source: NYT
August 12, 2007
THE Communist Party expends much effort trying to remove politics from daily life in China, and now it wants to remove politics from the Olympics, too. Beijing Olympic officials are taking the line that political protesters agitating about China are violating the spirit and charter of the Games....
Beijing knows politics cannot really be tabled. Even before China was selected in 2001, international opinion was sharply divided between those who thought the Games could help reform the
Source: http://inventorspot.com
August 11, 2007
The words "Mitsubishi fighter" still have the power to send a chill down the spines of American war history buffs. It was, after all, just 65 years ago that the Mitsubishi A6M "Zero" ruled the skies over the Pacific by outclassing the vast majority of Allied aircraft sent to oppose it.
Now it seems that a descendant of the legendary Zero may soon be stretching its wings across the skies of Japan - and perhaps further afield. ...
So it was that on Au
Source: NYT
August 12, 2007
[This is an excerpt from a new study guide for Russian teachers prepared by Aleksandr Filippov, a deputy director of a Kremlin-backed think tank.]
As a result of the “Big Purge” of late 1930s, practically all members and candidates to become Politburo members elected after the 17th Party Congress suffered from reprisals to a certain degree....Postwar reprisals were quite similarly addressed... The number of victims of the Leningrad case reached about two thousand people. Many of the
Source: NYT
July 12, 2007
For centuries, there was only one bridge across the Grand Canal, perhaps the world’s most magical stretch of water. The third and last one went up 73 years ago. Those facts alone would have been enough to draw a crowd as the center span of a new bridge, a sleek red steel spine nearly 190 feet long, was carefully fitted into place on Saturday.
But this crucial moment in the construction of the new bridge drew a vocal little pack of Venetians for other reasons: It cost a lot. It was d
Source: NYT
August 11, 2007
IT has not been the best few weeks ever for stock market investors, but it has been the best 25 years.
As stock markets gyrated this week, the United States stock market was approaching the 25th anniversary of the beginning of the great bull market. The Dow Jones industrial average hit bottom on Aug. 12, 1982, at 776.92, during a recession and with interest rates very high.
Source: ABC News
August 10, 2007
He's preached to every president since Harry Truman. It is one of the most unique series of friendships in modern politics, counseling these leaders under the tremendous stresses of war, politics and personal scandals. But evangelist Billy Graham simply refers to the last 11 presidents as his "friends."
"Each one I've known long before they ever became president, been in their homes many times, always called them by their first names, until they became president,"
Source: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Little Rock)
August 8, 2007
Gov. Mike Beebe said Wednesday that he won't delay the implementation of new social studies standards that historians have said will de-emphasize the teaching of Arkansas history.
He stressed that state history will continue to be taught in a separate class for one semester between seventh and 12th grades, as required by law.
"We're not backing up one iota, and it's going to be mandatorily taught and taken," Beebe said in an interview.
Beebe said
Source: National Security Archive
August 10, 2007
The Central Intelligence Agency has lost documents concerning its investigation of the mysterious 1948 murder of CBS reporter George Polk, and destroyed its file on FOIA requests for Polk documents, according to a letter from Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein. In June 2006, the Archive asked the CIA and the National Archives to investigate the possibility that the CIA had lost or destroyed records on the Polk case.Polk, a CBS reporter based in Greece at t
Source: History Today
August 10, 2007
A giant statue of the Emperor Hadrian has been discovered in southern Turkey. A colossal head, foot and part of the statue's leg have been unearthed at the site of the ancient mountain town of Sagalassos.
Source: AHA Blog
August 9, 2007
The reliability of the information contained in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia is a contentious topic in academia, as well as on this blog (see Wikipedia Banned by Middlebury College for History Students and Wikipedia: Valuable Resource or Abyss of Misinformation? for example). But recently, computer engineers at the University of California at Santa Cruz came up with a new method which may help separate fact from fiction at Wikipedia: measuring the reliability of those wielding the digital r
Source: LiveScience
August 9, 2007
New discoveries at dig sites in Middle Asia are rocking the archeological world and redefining the origins of modern civilization.
Numerous sites in modern-day Iran and the surrounding region suggest that a vast network of societies together constituted the first cities, whose residents traded goods across hundreds of miles and forged parallel but strikingly independent cultures.
Archaeologists have thought that modern civilization began in Mesopotamia, where the large
Source: LiveScience
August 10, 2007
Erosion on the floor of the English Channel is
revealing the remains of a busy Stone Age settlement,
from a time when Europe and Britain were still linked
by land, a team of archaeologists says.
The site, just off the Isle of Wight, dates back 8,000
years, not long before melting glaciers filled in the
Channel and likely drove the settlement's last
occupants north to higher ground.
Source: WaPo
August 9, 2007
Battlefield historians say it will bring a clearer understanding and vision of the Battle of Second Manassas. Environmentalists say it will reduce an already diminished amount of hickory-oak forest in Northern Virginia and further degrade the surrounding environment.
Nevertheless, the National Parks Service plans to cut down approximately 140 acres of timber in the western end of the Manassas National Battlefield Park beginning this month.
"The National Park Servic
