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
February 20, 2011
Is it really different this time?
That’s what Republican political strategists are asking as party leaders and presidential prospects keep raising the bar in their quest to curb government deficits. As thrilling as that process feels for Tea Party members and conservative intellectuals, its merit as an electoral formula remains unproven at best.
Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Budget Committee, set the tone when he warned of fiscal catastrop
Source: NYT
February 21, 2011
NAIROBI, Kenya — President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan, who has been in power for more than 20 years and faces international charges of genocide, will not run for office again after his current term ends in four years, a Sudanese government spokesman said Monday.
Mr. Bashir seized power in 1989 in a military coup and has ruled with an iron fist ever since, crushing or trying to crush numerous rebellions across Sudan. But now, Mr. Bashir “has no will to be a president again,” said
Source: NYT
February 21, 2011
In 1950, nearly half of the more than 10,000 New Yorkers living in the heart of Little Italy identified as Italian-American. The narrow streets teemed with children and resonated with melodic exchanges in Italian among the one in five residents born in Italy and their second- and third-generation neighbors.
By 2000, the census found that the Italian-American population had dwindled to 6 percent. Only 44 were Italian-born, compared with 2,149 a half-century earlier.
A ce
Source: NYT
February 21, 2011
On Monday, Radio Shack offered special prices for Presidents’ Day. Office Depot had discounts, too, in honor of President’s Day. Not to be left out, Macy’s advertised sales of its own to celebrate Presidents Day.
Never mind that the federal holiday observed on Monday didn’t go by any of those names — not officially, anyway. It was Washington’s Birthday, observed on the third Monday of February, as dictated by a 1968 law. But that statement of fact is a lost cause by now. So let us t
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 21, 2011
Four angels stand on grassy hummocks, their sandalled feet on tip-toe as they stretch up against a golden sky to support between them a wide disc of blue on which is displayed the Chi-Rho, the monogram of Christ, shining in tesserae of gold. The angels wear long tunics with palliums draped over their shoulders, for the mosaic that depicts them, on the vaulted ceiling of a chapel in the archbishop's palace in Ravenna, was made in the sixth century, nearly 1,500 years ago.
Two things
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 21, 2011
When Francis Pryor first started scraping building sites in Peterborough new town in the Seventies, he was met with incredulous looks from passers-by who imagined that archaeological remains only existed in Egypt and Greece. Now, nobody who has watched Francis and his colleagues on Channel Four’s Time Team can dispute that Britain is positively bursting with evidence of our predecessors’ lives. But are our back gardens really as interesting as he insists?
I have invited him to my ho
Source: Spokesman Review (ID)
February 20, 2011
Lying in a hospital bed, his heart failing, Allan Wood met a priest.
The two were sharing a room at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center when Wood discerned the priest’s Dutch accent. They struck up a conversation, and soon these two men, ages 89 and 88, uncovered a shared experience from decades ago that molded their lives.
They had never met until their chance encounter in the hospital last Nov. 11 – Veterans Day. But they spoke intimately of Sept. 17, 1944, in Nij
Source: NYT
February 21, 2011
WASHINGTON — Ron Reagan’s new memoir, “My Father at 100,” has touched off sensational headlines with its suggestion that President Ronald Reagan might have begun showing hints of Alzheimer’s disease while still in the White House.
But in two interviews this month, the younger Mr. Reagan said he never meant to suggest that his father had dementia before leaving office in 1989. And he graciously took the blame for not being more explicit in a passage that described a few personal obs
Source: NYT
February 21, 2011
Egypt has reopened many of its museums and historical sites, which were hit by sporadic looting during the uprising that led to President Hosni Mubarak’s ouster, Reuters reported.
On Sunday, the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, which is just off Tahrir Square and which served as an embattled backdrop during the protests, opened its doors again, and museum workers handed roses to the few visitors who came to see its treasures. The galleries of the museum, which are usually bustling, were ne
Source: NYT
February 21, 2011
Her memory is creaky, Dwania Kyles insisted, and most of the photographs that help unlock it are stored in her computer. But recently, sitting in a warren of rooms in Harlem as the light outside faded, she had a rush of recollections about her family and the night that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did not come to dinner.
Ms. Kyles and Thomas Allen Harris, a documentary filmmaker, had donned white gloves to thumb through photographs of her parents in high school. “My parents l
Source: NYT
February 21, 2011
One of Malcolm X’s daughters is being held in North Carolina on an arrest warrant from Queens, stemming from an accusation that she stole from the widow of one of her father’s bodyguards, the authorities said Monday.
The daughter, Malikah Shabazz, was arrested Friday night in Mars Hill, N.C., and faces an extradition hearing on Tuesday....
Source: NYT
February 20, 2011
WASHINGTON — There comes a moment in the life of almost every repressive regime when leaders — and the military forces that have long kept them in power — must make a choice from which there is usually no turning back: Change or start shooting.
Egypt’s military, calculating that it was no longer worth defending an 82-year-old, out-of-touch pharaoh with no palatable successor and no convincing plan for Egypt’s future, ultimately sided with the protesters on the street, at least for A
Source: NYT
February 19, 2011
ATLANTA — Over the years, the public radio show “This American Life” has done some ambitious work. It was the first media outlet in the country to broadcast lengthy interviews with Guantánamo Bay prisoners. It sent reporters to Iraq for a month. And it exposed the misdeeds of a hedge fund.
So what other topic could be so weighty, so captivating that it would cause the radio show’s Web site to crash under a stampede of visitors?
A soft-drink recipe.
The host
Source: Baltimore Sun
February 21, 2011
Del. Sandy Rosenberg reports that the House hearing on the bill he has proposed to require extensive disclosures about the French national railway's World War II activities while under Nazi control if one of its subsidiaries wants to bid for a MARC contract has been postponed from Wednesday until March 3....
Source: Ynet News
February 21, 2011
The family of Jewish physicist Albert Einstein is offering a €5,000 ($6,850) reward for information about the murder of three members of Einstein’s family by Nazi soldiers in 1944. The wife and two daughters of Eisntein's cousin Robert were murdered in August 3, 1944 near Florence, Italy.
Authorities have been investigating the murder since 2007 when new evidence surfaced, and have largely managed to reconstruct the events of the day of the murder....
Source: BBC
February 21, 2011
The Nottinghamshire public are being offered a rare opportunity to handle a 75,000-year-old axe and other ancient artefacts at a local museum.
The University of Nottingham Museum of Archaeology is putting on a Prehistory Day on 23 February 2011, in conjunction with the BBC's Hands On History.
The attraction is the only specialised archaeological museum in the region.
The museum opened in 1933 with artefacts donated by Felix Oswald, including his collection
Source: NYT
February 20, 2011
In the Cemetery of the Evergreens on the border of Brooklyn and Queens, there is a haunting stone monument to the garment workers who died in the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire of 1911 but were never identified. It contains the bas-relief figure of a kneeling woman, her head bowed, seemingly mourning not only the deaths, but also the fact that those buried below were so badly charred that relatives could not recognize them.
Almost a century after the fire, the five women and one
Source: BBC
February 21, 2011
Egypt has re-opened many of its museums and historical sites which had been closed since the civil uprising started in January.
Tourists visiting Cairo's Egyptian Museum, which houses Tutankhamun's golden death mask, were welcomed by staff with roses.
The museum stands on Tahrir Square, the focus of the unrest, and some artefacts were stolen or damaged.
The upheaval is said to have cost the tourism industry $800m (£500m).
The usually busy ga
Source: BBC
February 21, 2011
Excavation work on the site of a Roman fort near a school has revealed what archaeologists believe are structures never previously seen in the UK.
The dig in the playing fields of Dwr-y-Felin Comprehensive Upper School in Neath has uncovered sections of the defences of the 1st Century building.
These include a defence tower partially set outside its ramparts allowing soldiers to shoot at gate attackers.
A fort was in occupation on the site until at least th
Source: AP
February 21, 2011
A New York man whose wallet disappeared from his jacket pocket has gotten it back -- 40 years later.
Rudolph Resta was working for The New York Times as an art director in 1970 when he left his jacket in a closet at the old Times building in Manhattan just off Times Square. When he went to fetch the jacket, the wallet was gone.
Fast-forward to last fall, when a security guard checking a gap by an unused window came across the wallet -- apparently stashed there by a thi
