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: Inside Higher Ed
Jul 30, 2009
Google's ambitious book digitization project will democratize access to knowledge for members of minority and other underrepresented groups, said scholars and activists gathered at the Howard University School of Law on Wednesday.
Here at the historically black university, panel members applauded Google's plan to scan and index 10 million books for the Web. Among those who will benefit are African Americans and Latinos who attend inner-city schools and lack a quality education, said
Source: Time
Jul 30, 2009
It has been 44 years since an American President has succeeded at any new social policy nearly as ambitious as what Obama is trying to do. Yet Obama wondered whether there might be some lessons for him in that earlier President's achievement. So a couple of weeks ago, his health czar, Nancy-Ann DeParle, delivered to him a memo outlining how Lyndon B. Johnson got Medicare and Medicaid passed in 1965.
Obama was struck by the advantages LBJ had that he doesn't: Johnson was just coming
Source: Rasmussen Reports
Jul 30, 2009
In an effort to defuse a national controversy, President Obama is hosting a black Harvard professor and the policeman who arrested him at the White House today, but just 30% of U.S. voters give the president good or excellent marks for his handling of the situation over the past week.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 44% believe Obama has done a poor job dealing with the situation in recent days.
Despite the president’s damage control efforts
Source: BBC
Jul 30, 2009
A team of radiographers at a London university have been preoccupied with a patient somewhat older than most - 2,500-year old Egyptian mummy Tahemaa.
Specialists at City University in Islington, north London, used a CT scanner to learn more about how she died without damaging the corpse.
They discovered that, unusually, the brain had been left inside the mummy - suggesting an apprentice embalmed her.
Researchers discovered her thigh bone was broken after
Source: BBC
Jul 30, 2009
British World War I veteran Henry Allingham, until recently the world's oldest man, was buried on Thursday. The headlines about the day he was born, 113 years ago, give a fascinating insight into life in the late 19th Century.
On the day Henry Allingham's death was announced, swine flu, Moon landings and Michael Jackson were among the topics that ranked highly among readers of the BBC News website. They are subjects which could hardly have been imagined 113 years earlier, when Henry
Source: Press Release
Jul 30, 2009
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
announced today the update of its Google Earth initiative, Crisis in Darfur,
with U.S. Department of State data that shed new light on the extent of the
genocide in Darfur.
The new data show that more than 3300 villages have been damaged or
destroyed in the Darfur region of Sudan, primarily between 2003 – 2005. This
is more than twice the number that were identified in previous U.S.
government assessments, and strengthens the evidenc
Source: Independent (UK)
Jul 30, 2009
Vladimir Putin received a rare public rebuff from the widow of Alexander Solzhenitsyn for using the term "propaganda" in discussing the author's account of Soviet Gulag life, The Gulag Archipelago.
The Prime Minister, a scion of the Soviet intelligence world that suppressed Solzhenitsyn's works for most of his life, had meant only praise in proposing his account of the horrors of camp life for Russia's school curriculum.
Language, however, can be a sensitive m
Source: Independent (UK)
Jul 30, 2009
Germany's far-right National Democratic party (NPD) has triggered outrage with plans for a Third Reich-style "training centre" in a small village.
The mastermind of the scheme is Jürgen Rieger, a lawyer and deputy leader of the anti-immigrant, anti-EU party that is steeped in pride for Adolf Hitler and the "achievements" of the Nazi regime. The idea is for the old Hotel Gerhus at Fassberg, near Hanover, to become a place of pilgrimage for NPD devotees, where th
Source: AFP
Jul 30, 2009
A Nazi death camp may not seem a fit topic for comic books but a new series with real-life stories from Auschwitz has come out in Poland -- in Polish and English -- to teach youngsters about the Holocaust.
The drawings, at times as raw as the reality, are offset by the humanity of real, historically documented prisoners -- and jailers -- like the doomed, young lovers in the first adventure, "Love in the Shadow of Death".
The creators Beata Klos and Jacek Lech
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jul 30, 2009
More than 1.5 tonnes of silver coins, gold jewellery, crystal, Chinese porcelain, cannon, muskets and 400 bottles of wine were recovered by the treasure hunters from the Forbes, a ship that ran aground between Borneo and Sumatra in 1806.
The team believes the value of the find to be at least 7 million euros (£6m).
Martin Wenzel, one of the hunters, told The Daily Telegraph that the discovery had come like "a shot of adrenalin in the blood".
"
Source: BBC
Jul 30, 2009
The last surviving British veteran is Claude Choules, 108, who lives in Australia. The former seaman is also the last veteran to have served in both world wars.
Jack Babcock, 109, is Canada's only surviving veteran of WWI, but he never saw action.
In an interview with the Canadian Army website he said: "I don't consider myself to be a veteran, because I never got to fight." Frank Buckles, 108, is the last remaining member of
Source: BBC
Jul 30, 2009
Henry Allingham, who was in the Royal Naval Air Service in the war and later with the RAF, was the world's oldest man when he died 12 days ago aged 113.
Since his death, the last WWI veteran in Britain, Harry Patch, has also died.
Hundreds of people are expected to attend Mr Allingham's funeral in Brighton, which will be followed by a flypast of five replica WWI aircraft.
Among the guests will be the Duchess of Gloucester, the Veterans Minister Kevan Jon
Source: BBC
Jul 30, 2009
Chairman Sir John Chilcot will outline some details of the inquiry, although its exact terms of remit are not expected to be spelled out.
There have already been four inquiries into aspects of the war but critics say there are still questions to answer.
Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth said hearings would be in public unless there were national security concerns.
The inquiry is expected to take about a year and report back after the next general election.
Source: TheDailyBeast.com
Jul 29, 2009
It’s no contest: Teddy Roosevelt’s post-presidential vacation puts other presidential vacations to shame. Three weeks after he left the White House in 1909, Roosevelt embarked on an African safari that lasted nearly a year. He’d always wanted to hunt the continent’s big game, but he also wanted the trip to be a scientific one—so he invited the Smithsonian Institute to come along, and donated animal trophies to the institute, providing dozens of new species for its collections. As if the safari w
Source: http://www.cathnews.com
Jul 29, 2009
A recent study by French scientist Thierry Castex has revealed that on the shroud are traces of words in Aramaic spelled with Hebrew letters.
A Vatican researcher, Barbara Frale, told Vatican Radio on July 26 that her own studies suggest the letters on the shroud were written more than 1,800 years ago.
She said that in 1978 a Latin professor in Milan noticed Aramaic writing on the shroud and in 1989 scholars discovered Hebrew characters that probably were portions of th
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jul 29, 2009
St Andrew's Church in South Warnborough in Hampshire, whose youngest member is eight months and whose oldest is 92, has won Country Life magazine Village Church for Village Life Award.
The church suffered poor lighting, cramped pews, cluttered space and had no facilities to enable the building to be used for more than regular Sunday worship. But after a call for help from the parochial church council it was transformed by the South Warnborough Gentlemen's Working Club which was set
Source: Newsweek
Jul 29, 2009
History largely records the 1930s as a bleak chapter in American life. But some famous survivors fondly recall a time of resourcefulness, altruism, and even joy.
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Early in Studs Terkel's Hard Times, before the tales of Depression-era woe get rolling, we hear from a startling young man. Jerome Zerbe, a celebrity photographer for Parade magazine, not only remained stylish during the downturn, he remembered it fondly. "The Thirties," he told Terkel, "was
Source: The Times (UK)
Jul 29, 2009
One of the great political mysteries — what was said by President Nixon during a suspicious 18-minute gap on the Watergate tapes — could soon be solved thanks to a keen-eyed amateur sleuth and modern crime-fighting technology.
The missing section of a 79-minute conversation between Nixon and his Chief of Staff, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, was erased. It had been recorded during a meeting on June 20, 1972, three days after operatives connected to the White House broke into the headquarters
Source: AP
Jul 29, 2009
President Dwight D. Eisenhower grappled with topics like relations with Iran and stability in Iraq during an era fraught with delicate policy challenges, newly declassified documents show.
"What's ironic is that the issues that Eisenhower was dealing with 50 or so years ago are the issues that the Obama administration is dealing with today," Eisenhower Presidential Library director Karl Weissenbach said Wednesday.
"The records show the U.S. has long been
Source: NBC Nightly News
Jul 29, 2009
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