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: CNN
Aug 28, 2009
Sen. Ted Kennedy would have had a "very, very difficult" time politically surviving the drowning death of a young woman if it happened in the era of blogs, talk radio and 24-hour news cycles, experts said.
Today, Baughman said, Kennedy could still survive a Chappaquiddick -- largely because of the Kennedys' clout and because Massachusetts is so enamored with the family -- but it would be tougher with the Slate.coms and Drudge Reports of the world hounding him.
Source: CNN
Aug 28, 2009
On Friday, the Tea Party Express group sets off on a bus tour starting in Sacramento, California, and winding down in Washington on September 12.
At that point, the group notes, a three-day march on the nation's Capitol will take place to protest health care reform and what they see as big government.
The tea party movement gained momentum this year; several parties were held across the country this summer to protest President Obama and the Democrats' economic stimulus
Source: CNN
Aug 28, 2009
Friends, family and colleagues gathered to pay tribute to Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy on Friday evening after tens of thousands had filed past the Democratic legend's casket throughout the day.
The wake was held at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in suburban Boston, where an estimated 45,000 people had filed past the senator's flag-draped casket by Friday evening.
The senator's funeral is scheduled for Saturday at Boston's Our Lady of Perpetual Help Basil
Source: Brisbane Times
Aug 28, 2009
The Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, called for the end to the history and culture wars yesterday, but wound up starting a new fight with his predecessor, John Howard.
Launching the first volume of Tom Keneally's 'Australians: Origins to Eureka,' Mr Rudd called for a reappraisal of the way the nation viewed its past.
In a pointed reference to Mr Howard's time in office, he said it was time ''to move beyond the arid intellectual debates of the history wars and the culture war
Source: Telegraph.co.uk
Aug 28, 2009
Staff feared that the Germans would easily spot the central London building, which was made of gleaming white Portland stone.
The plan was contained in a memo released on Thursday by the BBC from its wartime archives. Other documents detail the corporation’s intention to hand over editorial control to the Government.
In a memo dated September 28, 1939 and headed ‘Broadcasting House: Protection’, house superintendent HL Chilman wrote to his superiors: “If we are going t
Source: AP
Aug 28, 2009
President Richard Nixon considered Ted Kennedy such a threat that he tried to catch Kennedy cheating on his wife, even ordering aides to recruit Secret Service agents to spill secrets on the senator's behavior.
''Do you have anybody in the Secret Service that you can get to?'' Nixon asked his aide John Ehrlichman in a stark series of Oval Office conversations about Kennedy before the 1972 election. ''Yeah, yeah,'' Ehrlichman replied.
''Plant one,'' Nixon said. ''Plant t
Source: Reuters
Aug 27, 2009
An important Viking hoard of jewels and coins unearthed in England by a father-and-son team of treasure hunters in 2007 has been acquired by two museums and will go on display next month.
The Vale of York hoard, valued at 1.1 million pounds ($1.8 million) and dated at 1,000 years old, includes objects from Afghanistan, Ireland, Russia and Scandinavia, underlining the global spread of cultural contacts during medieval times.
The York Museums Trust in York, northern Engla
Source: The Local (Germany)
Aug 27, 2009
Hessian Science Minister Eva Kühne-Hörmann on Thursday presented fragments of a 2,000-year-old bronze equestrian statue of Roman Emperor Augustus found recently in a stream near Giessen.
On August 12, archaeologists pulled the gold-gilded, life-sized head of a horse and a shoe of the emperor – who ruled the Roman Empire between 23 BC and 14 AD – from a stream in what was once the Roman outpost Germania Magna. Experts there have uncovered several bits – including a horse hoof and a d
Source: The Local (Sweden)
Aug 27, 2009
Swedish archaeologists have announced the find of a 7th century burial ship, the oldest of its kind to be discovered in Scandinavia.
The ship, thought to be from the Vendel era (550-793) of Swedish prehistory, was found in Sunnerby on the island of Kållandsö in Lake Vänern in central Sweden and, according to Lake Vänern Museum, is the only known ship burial to be uncovered in Sweden.
Archaeologists from Lake Vänern Museum and Gothenburg University are busy excavating th
Source: Truthout
Aug 27, 2009
Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts - After spending weeks dogging George W. Bush's presidential vacations, anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan is now trying to make life uncomfortable for President Barack Obama.
Sheehan used to pitch a peace camp near Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, becoming a symbol of the anti-war movement after her son Casey died in action in Iraq.
On Thursday, she and a band of anti-war protesters turned up outside the media center used by journalists
Source: NYT
Aug 27, 2009
BILIN, West Bank — Every Friday for the past four and a half years, several hundred demonstrators — Palestinian villagers, foreign volunteers and Israeli activists — have walked in unison to the Israeli barrier separating this tiny village from the burgeoning settlement of Modiin Illit, part of which is built on the village’s land. One hundred feet away, Israeli soldiers watch and wait.
The protesters chant and shout and, inevitably, a few throw stones. Then just as inevitably, the
Source: Fox News
Aug 27, 2009
The Kennedy compound in Hyannis, Mass. will be converted into an educational center and museum as a tribute to the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, FOX News learned Thursday.
The compound is also known as the Hyannis Port Historic District, which covers six acres of waterfront property along Nantucket Sound. The property includes the homes of family patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy and two of his sons, Robert and John.
Source: BBC
Aug 27, 2009
Australian palaeontologists say they have discovered a new species of dinosaur on a sheep farm in the northern state of Queensland.
The fossil remains of the large plant-eating sauropod, nicknamed Zac, are about 97 million years old.
They were found near the town of Eromanga, in a fossil-rich area that was once covered by a vast inland sea.
Palaeontologists say the find confirms Australia's importance as a centre for dinosaur discovery.
Source: Politico
Aug 27, 2009
President Barack Obama’s health care reform plan is facing even more public skepticism than President Bill Clinton’s health care proposals did in 1994, according to a poll released this week.
The telephone survey, conducted by Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican polling firm, found that 37 percent of Americans are opposed to the Obama plan compared with 25 percent who favor it.
In June of 1994 — just a few months before a White House-led health care reform push effe
Source: NYT
Aug 27, 2009
A central Moscow subway station reopened this week after a painstaking, yearlong restoration of its initial Stalin-era luster, complete with gilt-trimmed words of praise to the Soviet dictator spelled out around the vestibule’s rotunda that add new fuel to debate about his role in Russian history.
That debate has simmered this summer, among politicians, historians, human rights activists and religious leaders, at dinner tables and in blogs, after a resolution passed in July by the p
Source: NYT
Aug 27, 2009
In the spring of 2003, the United States Senate was heading for a meltdown. Democrats were blocking confirmation of federal judges. Republicans were set to retaliate with a “nuclear option”: a new rule stripping senators of their right to filibuster judicial nominations.
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, fearing for the future of the institution, turned to a historian for help. He invited Robert A. Caro, author of the epic Lyndon B. Johnson biography, “Master of the Senate,” to speak to la
Source: CNSNews.com
Aug 27, 2009
Federal Communications Commission Chief Diversity Officer Mark Lloyd called on fellow liberals to follow the model of former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and challenge conservative media moguls and station owners, particularly figures such as Rush Limbaugh, Rupert Murdoch, and “a pro-big business Supreme Court aligned” with them.
Lloyd made the call in a 2007 article for the liberal Center for American Progress while he was a senior fellow there.
Entitled “Media
Source: Yahoo News
Aug 27, 2009
Sketched on yellowing parchment, the 29 blueprints presented to Israel's prime minister Thursday lay out the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz in chilling detail, with gas chambers, crematoria, delousing facilities and watch towers drawn to scale.
"There are those who deny that the Holocaust happened," Benjamin Netanyahu said as he accepted the documents as a gift to Israel's Holocaust memorial, where they will go on display next year.
"Let them come to Jerusa
Source: Digital Daily
Aug 27, 2009
The Open Book Alliance–or “Sour Grapes Alliance,” as Google likes to call it–formally launched Wednesday afternoon, debuting a new Web site, as well as the manifesto with which it is challenging Google’s settlement with authors and publishers.
“The mass digitization of books promises to bring tremendous value to consumers, libraries, scholars, and students,” the Alliance says in its mission statement. “The Open Book Alliance will work to advance and protect this promise. And, by pro
Source: Yahoo News
Aug 27, 2009
It's not green cheese, but it might as well be.
The Dutch national museum said Thursday that one of its prized possessions, a rock supposedly brought back from the moon by U.S. astronauts, is just a piece of petrified wood.
Rijksmuseum spokeswoman Xandra van Gelder, who oversaw the investigation that proved the piece was a fake, said the museum will keep it anyway as a curiosity.
"It's a good story, with some questions that are still unanswered,"
