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: BBC
Oct 8, 2009
The Australian Federal Court has ruled that an 88-year-old man can be extradited to Hungary to face accusations of murder.
Hungary's government accuses Charles Zentai of killing Jewish teenager Peter Balazs in Budapest in 1944.
At the time, Mr Zentai was a warrant officer in the Hungarian army, then allied to Nazi Germany.
Mr Zentai says he was not in Budapest at the time. He can still appeal to Australia's High Court.
Source: BBC
Oct 8, 2009
A French tourism company has bought a house in South Africa where Indian independence hero Mahatma Gandhi lived.
Voyageurs du Monde is believed to have paid $377,029 for the house, outbidding many others including Indian bidders.
The Johannesburg house was put up for sale after the owner said she failed to find an institution interested in preserving the building's legacy.
Gandhi lived there for three years from 1907 when he began to formulate his philoso
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 8, 2009
A museum in a Chengdu sidestreet, stuffed to the rafters with Mao memorabilia, has a 75-year-old owner who is seeking to pass it on.
Tucked away on a side-street a few blocks north-west of Chengdu’s central Tianfu square you’ll find Wang Anting’s Little Exhibition. And little it certainly is, as the museum takes up the entirety of Mr Wang’s cluttered and dusty one-room house, with the exhibits piled high on top of each other.
Mr Wang, 75, has been running his exhibiti
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 8, 2009
Michelle Obama’s roots have been traced back to a six-year-old slave girl who was bequeathed to her owner’s heirs along with his household possessions and cattle.
The child, described in the will of David Patterson simply as “the negro girl Melvinia”, was uprooted from her plantation home in South Carolina and shipped to the US state of Georgia in 1852.
There, while still a teenager, she gave birth to the son of a white man – a union of dubious status that would have
Source: WSJ
Oct 8, 2009
Turkey has dropped a key condition to signing an agreement Saturday that would reopen its border with Armenia and establish diplomatic relations between the two nations, which have been divided for generations by a dispute over genocide.
"The agreement will be signed on Oct. 10," Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told The Wall Street Journal -- provided, he said, that Armenia doesn't ask for changes to the text.
Supporters of the pact -- which includ
Source: WSJ
Oct 8, 2009
A big question hangs over American politics: Could next year be 1994 all over again?
That was the year a bitter debate over health care led to a disastrous congressional election for Democrats, in which they lost 54 House and 10 Senate seats and ceded control of both chambers to the Republicans.
Things have started to look similar under Democratic President Barack Obama. His poll ratings slipped through the summer months, his party was damaged by a bruising health-care
Source: Time
Oct 8, 2009
... In May, the Pew Hispanic Center released a study of first-, second- and third-generation Hispanics in the U.S. — a look at how the Latin-American population has grown and assimilated over the past three decades. As recently as 1980, just 9% of U.S. kids under 18 were Hispanic, compared with 22% today. Only about a tenth of that population are first-generation Latin Americans — meaning they were born outside the U.S. More than half (52%) are second generation — born in the U.S. to at least on
Source: U.S News & World Report
Oct 7, 2009
Youth has always been a double-edged sword for America's presidents. It tends to inject the White House with fresh ideas and energy, but it can also lead to impetuousness and a disregard for the tried and true. So far, Barack Obama has demonstrated both the positive and the negative sides of the equation. As the nation's fifth-youngest chief executive—he turned 48 on August 4—he is both innovative and vigorous, but at the same time he is unseasoned and perhaps too willing to experiment and take
Source: SooToday
Oct 7, 2009
WASHINGTON - U.S. Senator Carl Levin, D-Michigan, [has] introduced a concurrent resolution calling for the issuance of a postage stamp commemorating the War of 1812.
Seven other senators have joined Levin in co-sponsoring the bill.
They are Senator Voinovich, R-Ohio; Senator Landrieu, La.; Senator Kaufman, D-Del.; Senator Brown, D-Ohio; Senator Stabenow, D-Mich.; Senator Snowe, R-Maine; and Senator Leahy, D-Vt.
“I am pleased to introduce this resolution com
Source: NYT
Oct 7, 2009
Read this rather breathless account of an admission wrested from William Ayers at Reagan National Airport, during an ambush moment by blogger Anne Leary, the “BackyardConservative.”
Indeed, stopped by a relative stranger after attending an education conference in Arlington, Va., Mr. Ayers revealed for the very first time that he did write — page-for-page — “Dreams From My Father,” the best-sellin
Source: South Cartolina News
Oct 7, 2009
American doll-maker Mike Fosella has sparked controversy by unveiling a line of Nazi Action figurines. So far Adolf Hitler and Joseph Mengele, the concentration camp doctor dolls have been produced. Fosella plans further figures of Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler and propagandist Joseph Goebbels.
Ken Jacobson, director of the American Anti-Defamation League, told the New York Daily News: “The people who are most interested in these things are probably the ones with sinister intention
Source: Newark Advocate
Oct 7, 2009
NEWARK — Following nearly the same route that might have been taken thousands of years ago by American Indians, about 30 people intend to set out Saturday to trek nearly 70 miles from Chillicothe to Newark.
Their journey will take about a week and echo a journey thought to have been repeatedly made by the Hopewell Indians nearly 2,000 years ago.
"The basic idea is pilgrimage," said Richard Shiels, director of the Newark Earthworks Center. "The idea that p
Source: Pew Research Center Publications
Oct 7, 2009
Young Latino adults in the United States are more likely to be in school or the work force now than their counterparts were in previous generations. In 1970, 77% of Hispanics ages 16 to 251 were either working, going to school or serving in the military; by 2007, 86% of Latinos in this coming-of-age group were taking part in these skill-building endeavors, according to a comprehensive analysis of four decades of Census Bureau data by the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center.
Source: BBC
Oct 7, 2009
The three-month exhibition at Taiwan's National Palace Museum features 37 items borrowed from Beijing - the first time any artwork from the centuries-old Chinese emperors' collection has been loaned to Taiwan.
These items - including paintings, lacquer boxes and porcelain which belonged to the 18th Century Qing Dynasty Emperor Yongzheng - are being displayed with some 200 exhibits from Taiwan's collection.
The exhibition is particularly significant because of the hist
Source: NYT
Oct 7, 2009
PARIS — The Hôtel Lambert, in a corner of the Île Saint-Louis overlooking the Seine, was once one of Paris’s best-kept secrets. But when a high-rolling Qatari prince bought the crumbling 17th-century palace in 2007 for $88 million, the Lambert became the center of attention, not all of it so attractive.
The Lambert was built as a private residence (a “hôtel particulier”) for the Lambert family and was finished in 1644, when it bordered Parisian fields and cows. But it has been throu
Source: NYT
Oct 7, 2009
Related Links
NBC News: video story
WASHINGTON — In 1850, the elderly master of a South Carolina estate took pen in hand and painstakingly divided up his possessions. Among the spinning wheels, scythes, tablecloths and cattle that he bequeathed to his far-flung heirs was a 6-year-old slave girl valued soon afterward at $475.
In his will, she is described simply
Source: USA Today
Oct 7, 2009
When German Chancellor Angela Merkel earlier this week accepted an invitation to address a joint session of the Senate and U.S. House on Nov. 3. Her spokesman, Thomas Steg, called it a "rare honor for foreign guests of state to be able to speak before the Senate and the House of Representatives.”
He added, "Of Germany's chancellors only Konrad Adenauer, who spoke to both houses in May 1957, has had this privilege."
That got us thinking: how many heads of
Source: Salon
Oct 7, 2009
For the first time in a generation, Arlington National Cemetery has marked the burial of an unknown on its storied grounds. Only this time, 25 years since the last interment at the Tomb of the Unknowns, the identity of the body remains a mystery not because the ravages of war made identification impossible, but because in a bureaucratic error the cemetery lost the paperwork showing the identity of the remains...
... This is the first time the cemetery has marked an unknown since 198
Source: WSJ
Oct 7, 2009
WASHINGTON -- The struggle to set the future course of the Afghan war is becoming a battle of two books -- both suddenly popular among White House and Pentagon brain trusts.
video
Washington bureau chief John Bussey discusses two new books with competing Afghanistan narrative on the News Hub.
The two draw decidedly different lessons from the Vietnam War. The first book describes a White House in 1965 being marched into an escalating war by a military viewing the
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Oct 7, 2009
An anti-evolution group is getting ready to unveil a new tactic -- with college students as the target.
Living Waters, an evangelical group that argues for the literal truth of the Bible, is planning to distribute 175,000 copies of The Origin of Species on university campuses next month, just in time for the 150th anniversary of its publication. But these won't be ordinary copies. They will feature a "special introduction" to Darwin's classic.
Materials being
