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
Nov 9, 2009
If there is a topic Justice Antonin Scalia does not relish discussing, it is how he would have voted in Brown v. Board of Education had he been on the Supreme Court when it was decided in 1954.
The question came up last month at the University of Arizona in what was billed as a conversation between Justice Scalia and Justice Stephen G. Breyer. The discussion, between the court’s two primary intellectual antagonists, bore the relationship to a conversation that a fistfight does to a
Source: NYT
Nov 9, 2009
On Nov. 9, 1938, a two-volume black-leather-clad Hebrew Bible vanished from a library in Vienna after that city’s Jewish community came under assault from soldiers during Kristallnacht, the start of the Nazi pogrom against Jews.
As is the case with much art looted during World War II, the Bible’s location during the following few decades was mostly unknown.
But last winter, the two volumes, printed 493 years ago, were smuggled into New York City, according to federal au
Source: BBC
Nov 9, 2009
Palestinians and foreign peace activists have broken apart a section of the West Bank barrier.
They used ropes and at least one truck to pull down some of the concrete blocks forming the Israeli-built wall.
The activists carried out the protest to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The barrier, which separates Israel from the West Bank, is a mixture of fences, barbed wire, ditches and concrete slabs up to 8m (26ft) high.
Source: Thaindian News
Nov 9, 2009
An archaeological excavation has uncovered the mummy of a young priestess, a member of the elite, with several precious items dating from the period of 300-450 AD in Cahuachi, Peru.
According to a report in Travel Culture History News, the mummy was found inside a series of rooms between the Great Pyramid and what is known as the Orange Pyramid.
The building would have formed a small temple that had 4 columns holding up its roof.
Giuseppe Orefici, director
Source: Guardian (UK)
Nov 9, 2009
It started out as a personal account by a world leader of where he was when the wall came down. The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, posted a photograph of himself taking a pickaxe to the Berlin Wall on his Facebook page, describing how he rushed to Berlin on 9 November 1989, and crossed through Checkpoint Charlie on the first day the gates opened.
But today, Sarkozy was accused of rewriting history by French journalists who had studied reports from the time and found no evidence
Source: NYT
Nov 9, 2009
MOSCOW — What’s powering your home appliances?
For about 10 percent of electricity in the United States, it’s fuel from dismantled nuclear bombs, including Russian ones.
“It’s a great, easy source” of fuel, said Marina V. Alekseyenkova, an analyst at Renaissance Capital and an expert in the Russian nuclear industry that has profited from the arrangement since the end of the cold war.
But if more diluted weapons-grade uranium isn’t secured soon, the pipeline
Source: Rasmussen Reports
Nov 9, 2009
Twenty-eight percent (28%) of adults nationwide believe that veterans of today’s conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan face more challenges when they return home than veterans of the Vietnam War.
However, the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that another 24% believe veterans of today’s conflicts face fewer challenges when they arrive home compared to those who served in Vietnam.
The plurality (42%) believes the challenges veterans from both eras have
Source: NYT
Nov 9, 2009
TARAKHEL, Afghanistan — The locals call the place “The Taliban Cemetery,” a weed-clotted memorial to the men who died for the movement during its fiercest campaigns in the years before 9/11.
The graveyard, next to this tiny village north of Kabul, sits a few miles from what was once the front line against the rebels who fought the Taliban after the group captured Kabul in 1996. Those rebels, then known as the Northern Alliance, finally overran the Taliban and captured Kabul — with A
Source: Fox News
Nov 9, 2009
President Obama, saying Nov. 9, 1989, was a day he will "never forget," expresses regrets for not being able to attend the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
President Obama on Monday marked the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in a video message broadcast before a huge crowd in Germany, calling the destruction of the wall a "rebuke of tyranny."
The video message was aired after Secretary of State Hill
Source: Multi-National Division Baghdad RSS/Iraqcrisis
Nov 9, 2009
BAGHDAD – What may look like large, weathered mounds of dirt in rural farmland near Mahmudiyah are actually artifact-filled ruins of an ancient civilization.
Soldiers of the North Carolina National Guard's 120th Combined Arms Battalion, 30th Heavy Brigade
Combat Team, surveyed the sites, here, recently, with officials from the Government of Iraq's
Ministry of Antiquities and Tourism to examine ways to preserve and protect two ancient Sumerian
sites from looters.
Source: The Herald
Nov 9, 2009
THE heroic image of wartime Plymouth has been dealt a blow by new research.
During the Second World War Blitz, 50 Plymothians were caught and convicted of looting, the research by an historian reveals.
The looters moved in as German bombs rained down on the city.
Shockingly, many were men and women in positions of trust, according to a new book by Exeter University historian Dr Todd Gray.
Plymouth's heaviest bombing took place from March to Apr
Source: NYT
Nov 9, 2009
DA NANG, Vietnam — Cmdr. H. B. Le, the first Vietnamese-American to command a United States Navy destroyer, had just stepped ashore on a formal port call, making an emotional return to Vietnam for the first time since he fled as a young boy on a fishing boat at the end of the war in 1975.
A youthful and smiling man of 39, he bore on his shoulders the weight of the symbolism of cautiously warming military ties between Vietnam and the United States in the visit over the weekend.
Source: CNSNews.com
Nov 9, 2009
Berlin (AP) - U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton congratulated Germans on the 20-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall at a meeting Monday with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
"I am delighted to be here in Berlin, the city that meant so much, not only to the German people, but to the European and the American people and the world," Clinton said at the Chancellory.
"I congratulate the chancellor, not only on the very well deserved oc
Source: The American Task Force on Palestine
Nov 9, 2009
Marking the 20th anniversary since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Palestinians tore down a section of Israel's wall in the West Bank village of Ni'lin on Friday.
During a weekly protest against the barrier, which cuts through the Ramallah-area village's center and isolates residents from 60 percent of their farmland, some 300 demonstrators methodically dismantled a concrete section before Israeli forces opened fire...
... "Twenty years ago, no one imagined that the m
Source: Rasmussen Reports
Nov 9, 2009
Seventy percent (70%) of U.S. voters rate the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism as Very Important in terms of world history.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows another 23% see the events as somewhat important. Just four percent (4%) of voters say the fall of the wall around Berlin and the collapse of communism were not very or not at all important.
The Berlin Wall was built by the communist East Germans to surround the free city
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 9, 2009
Heinz Kessler has no regrets over the deaths to those who tried to cross the Berlin Wall.
Almost alone among the ex-Communist titans who ran the east bloc, he remains a stalwart defender of the system he served as minister of defence in the Honecker politburo.
Now 89 and living in Lichtenberg, Berlin, he regards the united Germany as a "callous and unjust" government, and wishes that the wall and the wire was still standing.
For his beliefs, Herr
Source: BBC
Nov 9, 2009
German Chancellor Angela Merkel was joined at the Brandenburg Gate by Russia's Dmitry Medvedev, France's Nicolas Sarkozy and UK PM Gordon Brown.
In a special video address, US President Barack Obama said Berliners had rebuked tyranny on 9 November 1989.
The event two decades ago led Germany to reunify, caused the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Cold War's end.
Communist East Germany erected the 155-km (96-mile) concrete barrier in 1961 to encircle West
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Nov 9, 2009
Many students at Northwestern University are upset over the blackface Halloween costumes of some white students, NBC Chicago reported. Morton O. Schapiro, Northwestern's president, sent an e-mail to students saying: “While I fully support the principles of free expression, at the same time I am deeply disappointed to see any example of insensitivity that demeans
Source: WSJ
Nov 9, 2009
When President Barack Obama meets Japan's new prime minister in Tokyo on Friday, he will face a government that appears uncertain about how to resolve the major issue complicating ties between the two allies.
Members of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's administration have sent mixed signals in recent weeks over the Japanese government's stance on a plan to realign U.S. forces on the remote southern island of Okinawa. Mr. Hatoyama campaigned in part on reviewing the plan, which is unp
Source: BBC
Nov 9, 2009
The future of records dating back more than 700 years has been secured - with the help of the taxman.
Estate ledgers, royal edicts and personal correspondence are to stay at Bangor University after a deal with Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC).
The deal agreed with executors of the Penrhyn Castle estate will see the archives accepted for the British people in lieu of inheritance tax.
They reveal the history and politics of the families of the castl
