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 20, 2011
So there is Abraham Lincoln -- Henry Fonda, actually, in a stovepipe hat -- walking toward the horizon as the gorgeous strains of an orchestra swell up behind him. Soon the orchestra is joined by a choir, the strings and the voices blending into a beautiful, almost ethereal, rendition of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Thunder crackles in the cinematic sky.
Monday is Presidents Day, and in anticipation I treated myself to a viewing of "Young Mr. Lincoln," the
Source: CNN
February 21, 2011
An upcoming tell-all on Sarah Palin authored by a former top aide alleges the Republican firebrand despised her job as governor and broke campaign election laws in 2006.
According to the Anchorage Daily News, a 500-page manuscript authored by Frank Bailey was leaked to several Alaska media organizations over the weekend.
The book reportedly describes a Palin deeply exasperated with her political opponents and the heightened attacks she faced after being tapped to be the
Source: Newsweek
February 20, 2011
Amid horrific Nazi madness, Wiera Gran sang love songs in the Warsaw Ghetto. Within the walls of that grim urban cage, the 25-year-old petite Jewish beauty drew crowds to the ghetto’s Café Sztuka, crooning standards from happier times in a deep, velvety lilt. She died, many decades later, in 2007, in a Paris at peace, caged in her own filthy, darkened hovel, consumed with hatred, sick with fear. She had scrawled words on every surface in her oppressive 16th-arrondissement flat, crippled by paran
Source: WaPo
February 20, 2011
The daunting tower of national, state and local debt in the United States will reach a level this year unmatched just after World War II and already exceeds the size of the entire economy, according to government estimates.
But any similarity between 1946 and now ends there. The U.S. debt levels tumbled in the years after World War II, but today they are still climbing and even deep cuts in spending won't completely change that for several years.
As President Obama and
Source: NYT
February 21, 2011
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — One hundred and fifty years and one day later, the South did it again.
Before a cheering crowd of several hundred men and women, some in period costume and others in crisp suits, an amateur actor playing Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of the Confederacy on the steps of the Alabama Capitol on Saturday, an event framed by the firing of artillery, the delivery of defiant speeches and the singing of “Dixie.”
The participants far outnumbered the
Source: BBC
February 18, 2011
On Saturday, a group will gather in Alabama to mark the 150th anniversary of the inauguration of the first president of the Confederacy, 11 Southern slave states that left the US in 1860 and 1861. They say they are honouring their ancestors and their heritage but, as the BBC's Daniel Nasaw reports, critics view the group as celebrating slavery.
Under a bright Southern sky on Saturday, the Sons of Confederate Veterans will dress in period costume, including replica grey uniforms of t
Source: NYT
February 21, 2011
CHICAGO — Locked in a climate-controlled vault at the Newberry Library here, a volume titled “The Pen and the Book” can be studied only under the watch of security cameras.
The book, about making a profit in publishing, scarcely qualifies as a literary masterpiece. It is highly valuable, instead, because a reader has scribbled in the margins of its pages.
The scribbler was Mark Twain, who had penciled, among other observations, a one-way argument with the author, Walter
Source: NYT
February 12, 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 m
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 20, 2011
An alleged war criminal is working in a care home in a seaside resort.
Celestin Ugirashebuja is wanted for war crimes in Rwanda, where he accused of organising attacks during the genocide in 1994.
Mr Ugirashebuja, who passed a Criminal Records Bureau check, works at the Anna Victoria Nursing Home in Frinton-on-Sea, Essex.
Nearly half a million Rwandans died in the genocide, and Mr Ugirashebuja, 60, is accused of organising roadblocks and urging Hutus to
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 20, 2011
A “macabre” short story written by Daphne du Maurier and lost for more than 70 years has been unearthed by an enthusiast.
The Doll, billed as “a dark story of obsession and jealousy”, is the peculiar tale of a man who becomes infatuated with a woman he meets at a party. He visits her home only to discover the real object of her affection: a life-size, mechanical male doll.
The story was written around 1928 and the female character was called Rebecca, a name du Maurier
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 20, 2011
History will become the preserve of the rich if the coalition continues to cut arts and humanities in favour of sciences, Simon Schama the historian has warned.
The Government's new history tsar who was called in by Education Secretary Michael Gove to advise the Government on the history curriculum in schools, also berated academic snobbery among some fellow historians who have worked solely in higher education.
Broadcaster Schama, 66, who is Professor of Art History
Source: AP
February 20, 2011
Japan is starting to excavate the site of a former medical school that may reveal grisly secrets from World War II.
The investigation begins Monday at the former school linked to Unit 731, a germ and biological warfare outfit during the war. Shadowy experiments conducted by the unit on war prisoners have never been officially acknowledged by the government but have been documented by historians and participants.
It is the first government probe of the Tokyo site, and fo
Source: CNN
February 19, 2011
Helena Hicks remembers it vividly. It was a cold January day back in 1955. The 20-year-old Morgan State College student was at a bus stop with her friends at Lexington and Howard streets on the west side of Baltimore. Hicks said she and her friends were cold, hungry, tired -- fed up.
With that mindset, Hicks and her friends went into Read's drug store and took a seat at the lunch counter. The problem: the retail chain had a policy of not serving African-Americans.
So th
Source: CNN
February 18, 2011
The hard-won fight for civil rights could go down as one of the most thoroughly archived periods in American history, largely because participants kept photos and objects that would later tell their stories.
The revolution demanded it, even if the keepers of history at the time didn't.
At the height of the movement, there was no market for historic African-American artifacts. Mainstream museums weren't interested in documenting it, and "if you look at how museums a
Source: Art Info
February 17, 2011
Much international concern has focused on acts of looting of cultural artifacts during the current revolutionary unrest in Egypt. However, in Tunisia, a far more spectacular cultural crime is making news, this one carried out by the agents of the state themselves. Recently ousted dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and his family stand accused of illegal appropriation and plundering of the site of the ancient city of Carthage. A pair of activists are publicizing the crimes in a petition they have l
Source: National Geographic
February 18, 2011
Explorers have discovered what might be the oldest evidence of humans in the Americas.
Alex Alvarez, Franco Attolini, and Alberto (Beto) Nava are members of PET (Projecto Espeleológico de Tulum), an organization that specializes in the exploration and survey of underwater caves on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.
Alex, Franco and Beto have surveyed tens of thousands of feet of mazelike cave passages in the state of Quintana Roo. The team's relatively recent explorations
Source: Physorg
February 18, 2011
One of Europe’s best preserved medieval fishing structures located on the Fergus Estuary in County Clare, Ireland, will be washed away by tidal flows before archaeologists can reveal its secrets.
A team of University College Dublin archaeologists who have been visiting the remote 700 year old fishing site will no longer be able to conduct their scientific recording and analysis, due to recent budget cuts experienced by the Irish Heritage Council.
Located about 1.5km fro
Source: BBC
February 18, 2011
Four hundred years after his death, Caravaggio is a 21st Century superstar among old master painters. His stark, dramatically lit, super-realistic paintings strike a modern chord - but his police record is more shocking than any modern bad boy rock star's.
An exhibition of documents at Rome's State Archives throws vivid light on his tumultuous life here at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries.
Caravaggio's friendships, daily life and frequent braw
Source: AP
February 19, 2011
A prosecutor says a court has told Pakistani authorities to trace the address of former military ruler Pervez Musharraf to arrest him in connection with the Benazir Bhutto assassination.
Musharraf left Pakistan for London after quitting the presidency in 2008.
Bhutto, a former prime minister, died in a gun and suicide bomb attack in late 2007. Prosecutors allege Musharraf was part of the conspiracy to kill her because he did not do enough to protect her....
Source: AP
February 19, 2011
A steady stream of people gathered to mourn the apparent imminent demise of the poisoned oak trees at Toomer's Corner, where Auburn fans traditionally celebrate wins.
The crowd of old and young alike, many clad in orange and blue, began arriving early Saturday morning for the rally dubbed "Toomer's Tree Hug" and carried on well into the afternoon.
A fan of rival Alabama -- Harvey Updyke Jr., 62 -- has been charged with first-degree criminal mischief for allege
