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: The Washington Post
Sep 12, 2009
In marking his first Sept. 11 anniversary as commander in chief, President Obama told a solemn audience at the Pentagon on Friday, including relatives of those who died there eight years ago, that "no passage of time and no dark skies can ever dull the meaning of this moment."
It was not hollow rhetoric. The attacks and the steps that the Bush administration took to prevent another one have defined the way Obama views the world and have influenced, more than any other eve
Source: NYT
Sep 12, 2009
IN a corner of Bukvatoriya, a bookstore here in the capital of the Crimean Peninsula, are some stacks of literature that may be as provocative to the Kremlin as any battalion of NATO soldiers or wily oligarch.
The books are classics — by Oscar Wilde, Victor Hugo, Mark Twain, and Shakespeare — that have been translated into Ukrainian, in editions aimed at teenagers. A Harry Potter who casts spells in Ukrainian also inhabits the shelves.
Two decades ago, there would have
Source: BBC
Sep 12, 2009
As former comrades have passed away, history has closed in on Claude Choules, the 108-year-old who is now Britain's last witness to combat in World War I.
Claude resides on the other side of the world in a nursing home in the suburbs of Perth, Western Australia.
And though his body is failing - he is blind and partially deaf - he still possesses a lively mind.
Source: Breitbart
Sep 12, 2009
Latvian enthusiasts on Saturday unveiled a replica of a 1910 Farman 4 aircraft that they built from original, century-old plans.
Guntars Senkans, who led a team of vintage plane fans, said they had spent 15 years scouring archives in Latvia and neighbouring Russia for plans of the plane, which was designed by French aviator and aircraft designer Henri Farman.
They then spent three years building the 560-kilo (1,234-pound) plane, which has an original 1912 US-made Curtis
Source: Google News
Sep 12, 2009
FORT ROSS, Calif. — Nearly two centuries ago, Russian colonists selected a patch of sloping grassland along California's rugged North Coast for a new settlement. It was from this spot about 80 miles north of San Francisco that they hoped to harvest Redwoods, grow crops and hunt seals for the lucrative fur trade.
Today, Russian Americans throughout Northern California honor their past by visiting Fort Ross Historic State Park. Hundreds drive up a winding coastal highway to picnic at
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 12, 2009
A letter written by Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother at the height of the Blitz reveals how close she and her husband, George VI, came to being killed in a bombing raid.
Handwritten 69 years ago to the day by the then Queen Consort, it reveals how the Royal couple leapt for their lives after a bomb exploded in the grounds of Buckingham Palace. Three servants were injured in the attack.
The 14-page letter, on notepaper headed with the royal crest, is featured in the of
Source: Foxnews
Sep 12, 2009
The terminally ill Libyan man convicted of the Lockerbie jetliner bombing and recently released from prison has taken a sharp turn for the worse in the past day, his brother and doctors told Reuters.
Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, who has terminal prostate cancer, "has deteriorated rapidly since yesterday. He is unable to speak to anyone," his brother Abdenasser Megrahi told Reuters Saturday at the Tripoli Medical Centre.
Abdel al-Megrahi is being treated in a speci
Source: Slate
Sep 12, 2009
In the United States, the sudden bankruptcy of America's fourth-largest investment bank was the cathartic culmination of a process that had been building since subprime lenders began to go bust in 2007. Before Lehman was allowed to fail, we had witnessed the shocking demise of well-known firms such as Bear Stearns and of much larger institutions Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac (the two largest U.S. financial institutions as measured by the size of their balance sheets), and AIG. Throughout the summer of
Source: The Press and Journal
Sep 12, 2009
ARCHAEOLOGISTS have uncovered the floor and timber beams of a 2,000-year-old roundhouse in the heart of a Moray farm, it emerged yesterday.
Experts believe the structure unearthed at Dykeside Farm, Birnie, was once the multistorey-power centre of an Iron Age settlement.
Last night, the archaeologist leading the excavation said it was the best-preserved roundhouse discovered on the site.
National Museums of Scotland curator Fraser Hunter said the “huge, impr
Source: The Daily Beast
Sep 12, 2009
Seven years after he terrorized a city and a nation already reeling from the 9/11 and anthrax attacks, D.C. sniper John Allen Muhammad may die for his crimes. Virginia prosecutors are asking a state court to set an execution date of November 9. Muhammad, 48, embarked on a seemingly random spree of violence over a three-week span in October 2002 with his partner, Lee Boyd Malvo, using a high-powered rifle to shoot 13 people, 10 of whom died, in the Washington, D.C. area. Malvo, meanwhile, remains
Source: NYT (Digest)
Sep 12, 2009
NEW ORLEANS — The Orleans Parish district attorney said Friday that he was conducting an “evaluation” of the events surrounding patient deaths at Memorial Medical Center here in the days after Hurricane Katrina, though he said he had not formally reopened an investigation.
The evaluation was prompted by an Aug. 30 article in The New York Times Magazine, in a collaboration with ProPublica, an independent nonprofit investigative organization. The article raised questions about the dea
Source: NYT (Digest)
Sep 12, 2009
SEOUL — South Korea has long felt under-recognized for its many achievements; it
built an economic powerhouse from the ruins
of a vicious war in just decades and, after
years of authoritarian rule, has created one
of Asia’s most vibrant democracies.
Now, one South Korean woman, Lee Kinam, is determined to wring more recognition from the world with an unusual export: the Korean alphabet. Lee is using a fortune she made in real estate to try to bring the alphabet to places where n
Source: Times (UK)
Sep 12, 2009
Special forces have been training Libyan soldiers under a Government deal with Colonel Gaddafi, despite his regime having funded many of the IRA’s worst attacks.
SAS soldiers said there was a “weary rolling of the eyes” when they learnt that they would be passing on some of their skills to members of the Libyan infantry.
In the 1980s and 1990s Libya supplied the IRA with Semtex used in at least ten attacks, including the bombings of Harrods in 1983 and Warrington and
Source: WaPo
Sep 11, 2009
VINCENNES, Ind. The students filed into their social studies class just after lunch and slumped into desks where they had learned about the Civil War, Lewis and Clark, and the bombing of Pearl Harbor. On this day, teacher Michael Hutchison said, the class would feature "another of those huge moments in our history." He reminded the high school juniors and seniors that he would be grading their notes. Then he dimmed the lights and played a video on the classroom TV....
Eigh
Sep 11, 2009
JERUSALEM – Israeli archaeologists have uncovered one of the earliest depictions of a menorah, the seven-branched candelabra that has come to symbolize Judaism, the Israel Antiquities Authority said Friday. The menorah was engraved in stone around 2,000 years ago and found in a synagogue recently discovered by the Sea of Galilee.
Pottery, coins and tools found at the site indicate the synagogue dates to the period of the second Jewish temple in Jerusalem, where the actual menorah wa
Source: Fox News
Sep 11, 2009
Google is well known for the clever logos it often drapes over its home page on holidays and some anniversaries, such as the Internet behemoth's own birthday.
But on the solemn eighth anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks, while rivals including Ask.com and Microsoft's Bing.com offered prominent commemoration displays, it was just another day for the biggest search engine of them all.
Whereas Google made special note when Luciano Pavarotti died, the anniversary
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 11, 2009
A British film about Charles Darwin has failed to find a US distributor because his theory of evolution is too controversial for American audiences, according to its producer.
Creation, starring Paul Bettany, details Darwin's "struggle between faith and reason" as he wrote On The Origin of Species. It depicts him as a man who loses faith in God following the death of his beloved 10-year-old daughter, Annie.
The film was chosen to open the Toronto Film Festiv
Source: Ronald Brownstein (Atlantic blog)
Sep 11, 2009
Thursday's annual Census Bureau report on income, poverty and access to health care-the Bureau's principal report card on the well-being of average Americans-closes the books on the economic record of George W. Bush.
It's not a record many Republicans are likely to point to with pride.
On every major measurement, the Census Bureau report shows that the country lost ground during Bush's two terms. While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty i
Source: Slate
Sep 11, 2009
When no second terrorist attack occurred in 2001, experts adjusted their time horizons. "If we get through the summer without some sort of attack, we'll be pretty fortunate," said George Vinson, a security adviser to then-California Gov. Gray Davis, in June 2002. In February 2003, Tom Ridge, the nation's first secretary of homeland defense, publicly estimated an 80 percent likelihood that terrorists would attack the United States within the next few days. In August 2003, the World Mark
Source: Times Online
Sep 11, 2009
Cave art seems always to have been thought of, for no especially good reason, as the work of men. Perhaps it is because much of the art lies in deep, dark caverns, or because many of the paintings and engravings are of large food animals such as mammoth and bison, which men might be supposed to have hunted.
Cartoons have often suggested that women played a part, however, with the animals shown as a shopping list, or as home décor.
An American archaeologist has now propo
