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: WaPo
Mar 26, 2010
Happy Friday! With roughly one week until census forms are due, a group of Confederate rights activists is urging southerners with Confederate ancestors to declare themselves "Confederate Southern Americans" on census forms in order to qualify for national origin protection under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Federal law makes it illegal to discriminate because of a person's birthplace, ancestry, culture or language. The South Carolina-based Southern Legal Resource Center bel
Source: AP
Mar 26, 2010
Hundreds of prime acres are up for grabs in this waterfront city and its neighboring towns, valuable commodity on an island known for prized beaches, lavish homes and natural beauty.
The 260 acres on Aquidneck Island were for decades owned by the U.S. Navy, which says it no longer needs the land and is moving to unload it. The island communities envision the property as untapped economic potential for sweeping new development.
But another suitor — the Narragansett India
Source: AFP
Mar 26, 2010
A painting of the famed bank robber and bushranger Ned Kelly has sold for 5.4 million dollars (4.9 million US), smashing the previous record for an Australian artwork sold at auction.
Sidney Nolan's "First Class Marksman", which shows the outlaw in his iconic homemade armour and pointing a rifle, was known as the "missing Nolan" because it is the only one in a series of 27 not at the National Gallery of Australia.
The 1946 canvas was bought by an ano
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Mar 26, 2010
A coffin placed on a Missouri congressman's lawn. Bricks thrown through the windows of numerous Democratic Party offices. Death threats via phone, e-mail and fax flooding congressional offices....
"It all makes me ill," said Leonard Zeskind, president of the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, which has tracked the tea party movement. "It is a level of mendacity, social mendacity that has gripped
us."...
Violence has reare
Source: BBC
Mar 26, 2010
Army divers have recovered an old mortar bomb from a Cumbrian lake.
The device was found in about 9ft (3m) of water in the Bowness Bay area of Windermere by local divers on a night exercise on Thursday.
They confirmed that the shell, which is believed to date back to World War II, was harmless.
Source: BBC
Mar 26, 2010
A dog which sailed aboard the Mary Rose ship 465 years ago has taken up residence in the Mary Rose Museum at the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard.
The animal's skeleton, which has been reconstructed by staff at the Mary Rose Trust, went on display on Friday.
The dog was discovered trapped in the sliding door of the carpenter's cabin of the Mary Rose, which sank in 1545.
The dog, named Hatch by museum staff, was probably used as a ratter and was about two year
Source: BBC
Mar 26, 2010
A Rwandan court has sentenced an opposition politician to 17 years in jail for his part in the 1994 genocide.
Joseph Ntawangundi initially denied participating in the genocide but later pleaded guilty to the charges.
Ntawangundi was convicted for his involvement in the deaths of eight people who were killed at a school he ran in eastern Rwanda.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 26, 2010
Shanghai's Bund, once known as the "Wall Street of Asia", will reopen on Sunday after a painstaking £280 million two-year restoration to bring back a touch of its 1930's glamour.
The stately waterfront, alongside the muddy Huangpu river, was built by the British and was the hub of colonial life in Shanghai until the Japanese invaded the city in 1941.
Now, however, as Shanghai attempts to relaunch itself as one of the world's great financial centres, the Bund
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 26, 2010
An original lunar flight plan which settles the debate about what astronaut Neil Armstrong meant to say when he first walked on the moon is expected to fetch as much as £55,000 at auction.
The document carries an inscription by Armstrong that he had intended to say "one small step for A man, one giant leap for mankind".
But the indefinate article was accidentally omitted and the erroneous phrase "one small step for man ..." has gone down in history
Source: CNN
Mar 26, 2010
Loggers in coastal Oregon have found the wreckage of a World War II-era Navy aircraft that investigators believe may have human remains inside.
Investigators reported seeing a wing, tail section, landing gear and other mangled debris spread out over 200 yards in a heavily wooded area in Tillamook County in northwestern Oregon.
Oregon State Police bomb technicians checked the site Wednesday afternoon and found no obvious signs of unexploded ordnance.
Source: WaPo
Mar 26, 2010
There are 35 statues of very important people in Statuary Hall of the Capitol. Thirty-four of them are of men. Frances Willard, suffragist and orator for Prohibition, is the lone woman. She looks somewhat forbidding, but then again, so does everybody else frozen in granite and marble.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton surely will rank for placement there someday. For now, they are making history, and on Thursday, at a reception in that hall, th
Source: BBC
Mar 25, 2010
The Bangladeshi government has set up a tribunal to prosecute those accused of committing war crimes during the country's war of independence in 1971.
The government says it will put on trial those Bangladeshis who at the time collaborated with Pakistan.
Forces from Pakistan are accused of killing many civilians.
In its doomed bid to suppress independence 39 years ago, Pakistan's army unleashed terror against those suspected of supporting secession.
Source: The Post and Courier (SC)
Mar 25, 2010
The 'Big Red' flag linked to Citadel cadets firing on a Union ship before the Civil War could be preserved with the help of a new state license tag.
State Rep. Chip Limehouse on Wednesday introduced a bill that issues a special tag that would bear the image of the red banner with white Palmetto tree and crescent....
Source: BBC
Mar 25, 2010
Six renowned Scots are to become a daily inspiration to MSPs as they carry out their work at Holyrood.
The Scottish Parliament has announced it will name its committee rooms after historical figures who made a significant contribution to the nation.
The six rooms are currently known only by number.
Poet Robert Burns and explorer David Livingstone are among those to be picked from a list of 170 nominations proposed by 45 MSPs.
Source: BBC
Mar 25, 2010
Scientists have identified a previously unknown type of ancient human through analysis of DNA from a finger bone unearthed in a Siberian cave.
The extinct "hominin" (human-like creature) lived in Central Asia between 48,000 and 30,000 years ago.
An international team has sequenced genetic material from the fossil showing that it is distinct from that of Neanderthals and modern humans.
Details of the find, dubbed "X-woman", have been pu
Source: BBC
Mar 25, 2010
Scientists have found the first evidence that tyrannosaur dinosaurs - relatives of the famous T. rex - existed in the southern hemisphere.
Previously, tyrannosaurs had only been known from fossil finds in northern continents, the team of researchers write in Science journal.
Now, a hip bone found in Australia has been identified as belonging to a southern relative of T. rex.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 25, 2010
For three decades Abu Nayef has been digging for treasure from Lebanon's rich archaeological past, but instead of museums his finds end up in the hands of unscrupulous traders around the globe.
In the eastern town of Baalbeck, home to some of the world's most beautiful Roman temples, scavengers like Abu Nayef have made careers of unearthing ancient treasure for sale to the highest bidder.
The artifacts often wind up in the homes and gardens of Lebanese politicians and
Source: Fox News
Mar 25, 2010
Bin Laden threatens to harm Americans if self-confessed Sept. 11 attacker Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is put to death.
Al Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden threatened in a new audio recording released Thursday to kill any captured Americans if the U.S. executes the accused mastermind of the Sept.11 attacks or any other Al Qaeda suspects.
The U.S. is still considering whether to put Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four of his fellow plotters on military tribunal for their role in the Se
Source: CNN
Mar 25, 2010
Thurgood Marshall, Hattie McDaniel, the Tuskegee Airmen and Walter Morris -- all African-Americans who made history breaking the color barrier. But while America's first black Supreme Court justice, the first African-American Oscar winner and the U.S. military's first African-American pilots are well known, you may never have heard of Walter Morris or his role in American history.
The War Department, as the Defense Department used to be called, wanted it that way. On Thursday, a cer
Source: NYT
Mar 25, 2010
If nationalists in Slovakia have their way, schoolchildren will soon be forced, each Monday at 8 a.m., to listen to the national anthem blaring out from loudspeakers across this small Central European nation.
At a rally to commemorate the Slovak wartime state (1939-1945), people demonstrated in support of the patriotism bill in Bratislava, with portraits of the codificator of the Slovak language, Ludovit Stur, left, and the president of the Nazi-backed wartime Slovak state, Josef T
