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: Foxnews
Aug 31, 2009
White House Press Secretary Roberts Gibbs broadly dismisses former Vice President Dick Cheney's comments on "FOX News Sunday" as typical and unfounded.
Gibbs did not call out Cheney on specific misstatements, but suggested the former vice president's criticism about a newly formed unit responsible for interrogating high-value detainees was off base. After Cheney ridiculed the unit, Gibbs said it would have participants from several law enforcement agencies and dismissed
Source: CNN
Aug 31, 2009
Pennsylvania landowners around the September 11, 2001, crash site of Flight 93 have reached an agreement with the federal government allowing construction of a permanent memorial there, the government announced Monday.
U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said the National Park Service has "reached agreements with all the landowners needed" to establish the permanent memorial for the 40 people killed in the terrorist hijacking nearly eight years ago.
Salazar sa
Source: NYT
Aug 31, 2009
ISTANBUL — Turkey and Armenia, whose century of hostilities constitutes one of the world’s most enduring and acrimonious international rivalries, have agreed to establish diplomatic relations, the two countries announced Monday.
In a breakthrough that came after a year of tiny steps across a still-sealed border and furtive bilateral talks in Switzerland, the foreign ministries of the two countries said that they would begin talks aimed at producing a formal agreement.
T
Source: NYT
Aug 31, 2009
MOSCOW — Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin, published a lengthy article Monday characterizing the Nazi-Soviet pact to divide Poland at the outset of World War II in 1939 as immoral, but he stressed that it was just one of a series of such deals that countries struck with the Nazis at that time.
Mr. Putin called the nonaggression pact, which included secret amendments defining spheres of influence in Eastern Europe, “analogous” to the agreement by Britain and France a year e
Source: telegraph.co.uk
Aug 31, 2009
'We walked out into a wasteland, grey and desolate. The buildings had deteriorated, windows had been smashed. Trees and weeds had grown over everything: it was a ghost town." It reads like a passage from a post-apocalyptic novel, such as Cormac McCarthy's The Road; in fact, it's how Tim Mousseau describes his first visit to Chernobyl.
In 1999, this Professor of Biological Sciences from the University of South Carolina travelled to the site of the world's most horrific nuclear a
Source: LA Times
Aug 31, 2009
Mt. Wilson Observatory is a historic architectural site that has survived more than 100 years in the rugged wilds of the San Gabriel Mountains high above L.A.
This week, however, the observatory's very existence is in jeopardy as the Station fire continues to spread due to dry, hot weather conditions.
In a post today on the Chicago Tribune's Cityscapes blog, Blair Kamin writes that the observatory was designed by D.H. Burnham & Co., the firm of the notable Chicago a
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Aug 31, 2009
AUBURN, Calif. -- This town in the Sierra Nevada foothills accepted the gift of a 28-acre plot from the estate of Nobel laureate William B. Shockley in March. The mostly forested land was to become a community park named after the famous physicist -- co-inventor of the transistor -- and his late wife.
Then the local newspaper pointed out that Mr. Shockley, who died in 1989, was a proponent of eugenics, a widely discredited movement most prominent in the 1920s and '30s that held that
Source: Time
Aug 31, 2009
Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge does not want to "second-guess" the motivations of his former colleagues in the Bush Administration. But with a new memoir, The Test of Our Times, about to hit bookstores, he is ready to talk about all the second thoughts he has been having.
For instance, he thinks waterboarding "was and is torture," and he wishes the Bush Administration had not permitted it. He thinks President George W. Bush should have gone to Cong
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Aug 31, 2009
WASHINGTON -- U.S. officials, increasingly frustrated in recent years with what they saw as the paralyzed leadership of Japan's ruling party, are looking to the new regime to bring more-effective handling of shared goals.
The Democratic Party of Japan, victorious in Sunday's election, has vowed greater independence from Washington as a centerpiece of its foreign policy. But people involved in relations between the two countries play down the notion of a serious break, noting that co
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Aug 31, 2009
TOKYO -- Japanese voters overwhelmingly rejected the party that has largely ruled their nation for most of the past half a century, choosing instead an untested rival to grapple with an enfeebled economy and an aging society.
The historic change in government could usher in a new era for Japanese politics that replaces the staid consensus that guided Japan in its postwar boom years with a more fractious, competitive environment. The upstart Democratic Party of Japan and the establis
Source: Independent (UK)
Aug 31, 2009
Britain has refused to reveal who it will send to the biggest party in Libya's history, a celebration of the rise to power of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in a coup d'etat 40 years ago.
With London desperate to avoid further embarrassment in the wake of allegations that it supported the release of the Lockerbie bomber in return for trade deals, no decision had been made about who would represent the UK at the lavish and potentially controversial carnival in Tripoli.
Official
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 31, 2009
The Polish leadership wants an acknowledgement from Mr Putin that the Soviet Union's pact with Adolf Hitler, forged the month before the war broke out on September 1 1939, was illegal, and a major contributing factor to the conflict which would go on to claim 55 million lives.
Mr Putin will join Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, David Milliband, the foreign secretary, and his French counterpart in Gdansk for commemorations marking the anniversary. His inner circle are adamant th
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Aug 31, 2009
Ireland plotted to send special forces to attack BBC studios in Belfast as part of plans to invade Northern Ireland, it emerged yesterday.
Codenamed 'Exercise Armageddon', the operations against British targets in 1969 would have stunned the world.
Tensions were running high as the Troubles began in earnest.
In August that year, Irish prime minister Jack Lynch said he would not stand by as the innocent suffered, fearing a huge onslaught by loyalists on R
Source: Sky News
Aug 31, 2009
The visit comes amid rising tension between Warsaw and Moscow over their shared history - particularly over the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact which resulted in Poland being carved up by Hitler and Stalin.
Mr Putin described the pact as "immoral" and expressed sorrow over a Soviet massacre of Poles, ahead of his visit to Gdansk in Poland.
Mr Putin told Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza: "Our duty is to remove the burden of distrust and prejudice left from the past
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 31, 2009
The hidden image of a butchered pig has been discovered by a restorer in a 17th century Dutch painting 350 years after it was painted.
Barn Interior, one of 16 paintings given to Calvin College in Michigan by alumnus Cornelius Van Nuis two years ago, shows a woman and two children inside a barn. It was painted by Egbert van der Poel, who lived from 1621 to 1664.
Last summer, Joel Zwart, the director of exhibitions at the college, sent the picture to Barry Bauman, a Chi
Source: Connecticut Post
Aug 30, 2009
A 1907 catalog of the New Haven County Historical Society listed several rare and odd items, including a necklace from an Egyptian mummy, slave chains, a small block of wood from the Old South Bridge in Concord, Mass., which the British guarded at the start of the Revolutionary War.
But lot 23 in the inventory -- "a skull of an American soldier, one of 42 who died of the 200 in a destitute and sickly condition that were brought from a British prison ship ... and suddenly cast
Source: Rapid City Journal
Aug 30, 2009
Four men accused of trafficking in archaeological resources will forfeit more than 12,500 archaeological items as part of their federal penalties.
Three of the men were recently sentenced, and a fourth is awaiting sentencing.A fifth man, Scott Matteson, 60, of Fort Pierre, has pleaded not guilty and will be tried in January 2010. Matteson faces up to five years in prison and a $100,000 fine.
John Sheild, 77, of Monona, Wis., was fined $10,000 and ordered to forfeit his
Source: Yahoo News
Aug 30, 2009
BOSTON – Sen. Edward Kennedy's family fortune not only fueled his brothers' presidential campaigns and his eight terms in the U.S. Senate, it also helped drive the family's liberal legacy and forge Kennedy's lifelong crusade for universal health care...
... The main source of Kennedy's wealth was his father and family patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy who amassed a fortune in banking, real estate, liquor, films and Wall Street holdings that eventually grew to an estimated $500 million by
Source: ynetnews.com
Aug 30, 2009
Hamas condemned the United Nations on Sunday, saying it planned to teach Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip about the Holocaust – but the UN agency which runs schools in the enclave would not confirm any change.
Branding the Nazi genocide of the Jews "a lie invented by the Zionists", the Islamist movement which runs the Gaza Strip wrote in an open letter to a senior UN official that he should withdraw plans for a new history book in UN schools.
A spokesman
Source: The Washington Post
Aug 30, 2009
The Washington Post digs up a master's thesis written by Virginia gubernatorial candidate Robert McDonnell (R) in which he described working women and feminists as "detrimental" to the family.
McDonnell also said government policy should favor married couples over "cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators." And he described as "illogical" a 1972 Supreme Court decision legalizing the use of contraception by unmarried couples.
"The 93-
