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
January 28, 2011
Former President George W. Bush is landing a stinging jab at his former longtime aide and press secretary, Scott McClellan, saying the man who served as the public face of his administration for three years was irrelevant.
In an interview with CSPAN scheduled to air this weekend, Bush says he deliberately didn't include McClellan – who held the high profile post longer than anyone else during the administration – in his memoir, "Decision Points."
McClellan had
Source: CNN
January 28, 2011
Anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela was discharged from a South African hospital Friday after treatment for an acute respiratory infection, the nation's surgeon general said.
The 92-year-old former president left the hospital in a motorcade that included an ambulance in the middle.
Doctors are happy with his recovery and he will continue to receive treatment at home, said V.J. Ramlakan, the surgeon general....
Source: CNN
January 28, 2011
Twenty-five years ago today, Concord, New Hampshire, was abuzz with excitement as teacher Christa McAuliffe was about to make history.
Thousands of educators had applied to be the first teacher in space, but NASA chose McAuliffe, a 10th-grade social studies teacher at Concord High School.
Micaela Pond, who was 17 and McAuliffe's neighbor at the time, remembers getting a ride home one day from the teacher turned astronaut.
On January 28, 1986, the day of
Source: CS Monitor
January 28, 2011
It was shortly before noon on January 28, 1986. President Ronald Reagan was in the Oval Office, preparing for a traditional pre-State of the Union luncheon with television news anchors. Then, as Reagan remembered it, Vice President Bush and National Security Advisor John Poindexter strode into the room with terrible news.
“All they could say at the time was that they had received a flash that the space shuttle had exploded,” Reagan said later.
In that flash, US history
Source: CS Monitor
January 27, 2011
Will the unnamed author of "O," the new novel about a quasi-realistic 2012 presidential campaign, take his or her identity to the grave? Considering the horrific critical reaction to the book – "trite, implausible and decidedly unfunny," grumbled Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times – it might not be a bad idea. And there just so happens to be some precedent.
he anonymous author of a sensational and female-friendly 19th-century bestseller about the dangers of a
Source: Jewish Daily Forward
January 26, 2011
In the 20th century, Jews created bombs. Weapons of mass destruction.
Most famously, there was J. Robert Oppenheimer who ran the Manhattan Project, which gave the world the atom bomb. After him came Edward Teller, the Hungarian Jew who engineered an incredibly destructive upgrade: the hydrogen bomb.
And then there was Samuel T. Cohen, the lesser-known Jewish physicist who rounds off this troika but whose invention, the neutron bomb, has been relegated to ignominy. Like
Source: AP
January 27, 2011
The ancient gods and fantastical creatures going on show in Berlin this week have made an unlikely comeback from near-destruction.
Unearthed in present-day Syria a century ago, the 3,000-year-old basalt statues and stone reliefs in the exhibition, "The Tell Halaf Adventure," shattered into thousands of pieces when their Berlin home was destroyed by bombing in 1943.
The rubble was rescued, then slumbered in the vaults of the capital's Pergamon Museum, then in E
Source: Boston.com
January 27, 2011
For years it has been buried, swallowed up by layers of earth, muck, and water, a once-prominent landmark concealed by time.
And the late-1700s wharf might have remained that way — embedded for the ages — had it not been for a recent accidental find.
Last June, as workers excavated portions of Newburyport’s Water Street for the city’s new waste-water operations building, they unearthed large, centuries-old slabs of granite. Based on maps and archaeological research, the
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 27, 2011
Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov has been posthumously proved right over his roundly criticised evolution theory that a type of butterfly migrated from Asia to the New World over a period of millions of years.
The man known primarily for being one of the 20th Century's most famous novelists was dismissed by some as an amateur in the field of insect evolution.
But now a decade long genetic study has proved that, against the odds, Nabokov was right and showed "extraord
Source: Der Spiegel (Germany)
January 28, 2011
For years, the site was left to crumble and decay. But now, following extensive renovation, the factory where the Auschwitz ovens were designed and built has reopened as a memorial. It shows the intimate involvement of German industry in the mass murder of the Holocaust.
For years, the site was little more than a typical industrial ruin -- the kind of modernist decay that became synonymous with Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism. The crumbling buildings just outside the
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 28, 2011
Christie's has announced record sales for 2010 after the auction house enjoyed the best 12 months in its 245-year history.
Total sales rose more than 50pc to hit £3.3bn last year, as the company retained its position as the world’s largest auction house.
Christie's was involved in two-thirds of global artwork sales worth more than $50m (£32m).
Works sold over the course of 2010 included Pablo Picasso’s Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, which sold for an auction
Source: Fox News
January 28, 2011
A key member of a Miami-based marijuana-smuggling ring was reportedly arrested by the U.S. Marshals Service on Thursday, more than 31 years after skipping out of a federal trial.
Mark Steven Phillips, 62, was arrested in his apartment at Century Village, a seniors community where he had been living in recent months, the Miami Herald reports.
Along with 13 others, Phillips was charged in May 1979 in what was then the country's largest marijuana importation prosecution in
Source: NYT
January 27, 2011
ISTANBUL — Turkey’s first officially sanctioned commemoration of the Holocaust was held in a synagogue here on Thursday, reflecting government efforts to assuage the Jewish minority in the face of increasingly strained ties with Israel. But the event was overshadowed by the scheduled premiere on Friday of the latest installment in a series of popular Turkish-made adventure films that depict Israelis as evil.
“Gathering in love, brotherhood and humanity should be our common language
Source: NYT
January 27, 2011
SANTIAGO, Chile — A Chilean judge has opened the first official investigation into the death of former President Salvador Allende, the democratically elected Socialist who died during the 1973 military coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
Mr. Allende, 65, was found dead by the military forces that stormed the presidential palace after hours of a gun battle and bombings. At the time, an autopsy suggested that Mr. Allende had killed himself. But many of his supporters have contended for
Source: NYT
January 28, 2011
A cache of stone tools found on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula has reopened the critical question of when and how modern humans escaped from their ancestral homeland in eastern Africa.
The present view, based on both archaeological and genetic evidence, holds that modern humans, although they first emerged in Africa some 200,000 years ago, were hemmed in by deserts and other human species like Neanderthals and did not escape to the rest of the world until some 50,000 years
Source: Fox News
January 28, 2011
It's been 25 years since teacher Christa McAuliffe died aboard the Challenger space shuttle, and people in her hometown of Concord, New Hampshire, still don't like to talk about it.
"It hurts every time the anniversary comes around. Especially for those that knew her," said New Hampshire Executive Council member Daniel St. Hilaire, 43. "My son is 18 and a freshman in college, and I've never sat down with him to talk about it."
A long-time resident o
Source: CNN
January 27, 2011
The Manhattan district attorney announced Thursday new indictments against Rodney Alcala, the so-called "Dating Game Killer," in connection with the deaths of two women in New York during the 1970s.
Alcala, 67, is currently on death row in California for killing four women and a 12-year-old girl there. He was convicted of those crimes in February 2010 and sentenced the following month.
The California murders took place between November 1977 and June 1979 and c
Source: CNN
January 27, 2011
A Pennsylvania high school says some students are separated by race, gender and language for a few minutes each day in an effort to boost academic scores, raising controversy over the historically contentious issue of segregation in schools.
The initiative is a pilot program intended to capitalize on "enriching students' experiences through mentoring" and is derived from school research "that shows grouping black students by gender with a strong role model can help bo
Source: BBC News
January 28, 2011
A 450-year-old Madonna and Child work by Titian has sold for $16.9m (£10.7m) in New York, setting a new auction record for the Renaissance master.
A Sacra Conversazione: The Madonna and Child with Saints Luke and Catherine of Alexandria was sold at Sotheby's to a European telephone bidder.
It beat the previous Titian auction record of £7.5m ($11.9m) paid at Christie's in London in December 1991.
That was the price achieved for the artist's Venus and Adonis
Source: Voice of America
January 26, 2011
Israeli archeologists have discovered ancient artifacts in a cave outside of Tel Aviv that could shed new light on the theory of human origins. Tel Aviv University archeologist Ran Barkai says what his team has excavated at Qesem Cave show a much more advanced people than the accepted image of our Stone Age ancestors in the Middle Paleolithic period.
These early hominids hunted for food, cooked meat over fires and crafted a sophisticated array of flint tools.
"We k
