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: AP
Jul 17, 2009
Smithsonian Institution space curator Roger Launius, a former NASA chief historian, said the loss of the original video "doesn't surprise me that much."
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jul 17, 2009
Eleven of the 1009 people surveyed thought Buzz Lightyear was the first person on the Moon.
The Toy Story film character was named alongside Louis Armstrong. Eight of those taking part thought the late jazz musician made the first moon walk.
Not quite three quarters correctly answered that Neil Armstrong took the first step onto the Moon.
Eleven per cent of people polled thought the Apollo programme was a recent as the 1980s, with just 68 per cent knowing that the firs
Source: CNN
Jul 17, 2009
President Obama slowly walked across the grounds of Cape Coast Castle, a slave outpost in Ghana where hundreds of thousands of Africans were shipped as human cargo to a life of bondage in the United States, South Africa and the Caribbean.
Obama's recent trip to Ghana and the slave-shipping outpost comes on the heels of last month's apology by the U.S. Senate about slavery. The Senate passed a nonbinding resolution that "acknowledges the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality
Source: BBC
Jul 16, 2009
The Cheddar Gorge in Somerset was one of the first sites inhabited by humans when they returned to Britain towards the end of the last Ice Age.
New radiocarbon dates on bones from Gough's Cave show people were living there some 14,700 years ago.
The results confirm the site's great antiquity and suggest human hunters re-colonised Britain at a time of rapid climate warming.
Interest in the site was stimulated by the discovery in 1903 of "Cheddar Man&q
Source: AP
Jul 16, 2009
A Virginia newspaper expressed regret Thursday for supporting a systematic campaign by the state's white political leaders to maintain separate public schools for blacks and whites in the 1950s.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch acknowledged in an editorial that it and its now-defunct sister newspaper, The News Leader, played a central role in the "dreadful doctrine" of Massive Resistance. "The record fills us with regret," the newspaper said.
The newspape
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jul 16, 2009
German prosecutors have launched an inquiry into whether a garden gnome with its right arm raised in a Hitler salute in a Nuremberg art gallery breaks the law.
Salutes and Nazi symbols have been illegal in Germany since the Second World War but investigators may decide the figure is in fact ridiculing the Third Reich.
The gnome was produced by German-born Ottmar Hoerl, the president of the Academy for Fine Arts in Nuremberg.
Source: AP
Jul 16, 2009
A collection of slavery records newly available over the Internet may help thousands of people trace their families back to Africa through St. Croix, a former slave-trading hub in the Caribbean.
The records, which went online Thursday at ancestry.com, already have helped Susan Samuel of Houston discover the story of an ancestor who was freed after persuading officials that she had been illegally sold into slavery.
"Even though she came from a very horrible situati
Source: NYT
Jul 16, 2009
For half a century, a dark tunnel of crumbling concrete encased more
than three miles of a placid stream bisecting this bustling city.
The waterway had been a centerpiece of Seoul since a king of the
Choson Dynasty selected the new capital 600 years ago, enticed by the
graceful meandering of the stream and its 23 tributaries. But in the
industrial era after the Korean War, the stream, by then a rank open
sewer, was entombed by pavement and forgotten beneath a lacework of
elevated ex
Source: BBC
Jul 16, 2009
Members of a United Nations inquiry into the assassination of former Pakistani PM Benazir Bhutto have arrived in Pakistan.
Led by Chile's ambassador to the UN, Heraldo Munoz, the team includes a former Indonesian attorney general and a former senior Irish police officer.
During the visit, the commissioners are scheduled to meet Ms Bhutto's widower, Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari, and other senior officials.
The commission is scheduled to submit its
Source: AP
Jul 16, 2009
A navigational chart used by Apollo 11 astronauts has become the unexpected star of an auction in New York City marking the 40th anniversary of man's first lunar landing.
Bonhams New York said that the lunar surface star chart sold Thursday for an astronomical $218,000. The tool, with a 9-inch (23-centimeter) diameter, had been expected to bring in $70,000 to $90,000.
Source: Business Week
Jul 16, 2009
In late January of 2001, in the depths of the dot-com crash, a San Francisco startup called Pyra Labs ran out of money. Its staff departed. The co-founder of the company, a young Nebraskan named Evan Williams, decided to make a go of it alone. He scraped together $40,000 in new funding and moved Pyra's servers into his apartment. This permitted the company's 100,000 registered customers (and counting) to keep using Pyra's service, Blogger, to publish their online journals, or blogs.
Source: AFP
Jul 16, 2009
US President Barack Obama paid passionate tribute to black civil rights trailblazers on the centennial of the NAACP, but said a "new mindset" was necessary to achieve a post-racial America.
The first black president in US history received a thunderous welcome at a dinner Thursday marking the 100th anniversary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded after the abolition of slavery but when segregation "was a way of life (and) when lync
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jul 16, 2009
Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the Moon, is reportedly going to skip a celebration of his achievement to mark the Apollo 11 mission's 40th anniversary.
The notoriously publicity-shy Armstrong will appear briefly at an event on Sunday, but will not appear in public on Monday, 40 years to the day since he set foot on the Moon.
The event at Nasa's headquarters in Washington will be attended by his fellow Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin and one of the last men t
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jul 16, 2009
Marking the 40th anniversary of man's first lunar landing, more than 50 items related to the Apollo 11 mission are to go up for auction on Thursday.
Bonhams New York said many of the articles were acquired directly from the astronauts or were originally in their collections.
Among the highlights from the historic July 20, 1969, mission of Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin is a lunar module landing sequence – three sheets that list "entry commands to
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jul 16, 2009
Oscar Wilde, whose flamboyant homosexuality shocked Britain in the 19th century, won an unlikely endorsement from the Vatican on Thursday.
In a surprise act of reconciliation with the playwright, the Holy See's official newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, praised the poet as a "lucid analyst of the modern world".
Wilde, who was sent to prison for acts of gross indecency with Lord Alfred Douglas and later converted to Catholicism, has been regarded by the Roman
Source: CNN
Jul 16, 2009
One hundred years after the birth of the NAACP, the civil rights group welcomes a major address by the first African-American president.
President Obama speaks before the annual convention Thursday night in New York, the city where the organization was founded a century ago.
The excitement over Obama is in stark contrast to the reception of former President Bush, who had a strained relationship with the NAACP and declined the group's invitations for five years.
Source: CNN
Jul 16, 2009
In many places across the South you can walk in the footsteps of slaves, and if you understand the history, it is not a happy journey. The same is true at Friendfield Plantation outside Georgetown, South Carolina.
It's not exactly "Gone With the Wind," but what makes this overgrown 3,300 acres of marsh and pine trees stand out is this: The family of first lady Michelle Obama believes her great-great grandfather was held as a slave here and labored in the mosquito-infested
Source: AP
Jul 16, 2009
Museums are seeing an increase in donations and oral histories from the swell of former U.S. prisoners of war eager to leave their legacies. But museum officials still worry that too many POWs approaching their late 80s and 90s will go to their graves without publicly telling their stories.
The National Prisoner of War Museum, in Andersonville, Ga., said it expects to have a 40 percent increase in artifacts, journals and other donations from former POWs this year compared to last y
Source: AP
Jul 16, 2009
When Enid Pinkney was a girl in the 1940s, her grandmother would tell her stories about a black cemetery nestled in the northwest corner of Miami in an area once called Lemon City.
Pinkney never saw any headstones or tombs on the former farm land, which gradually became surrounded by small homes, car lots and industrial warehouses starting in the 1950s and 1960s. Interstate 95 rumbles past a few blocks away.
But Pinkney's grandmother was apparently right. The bones of a
Source: Telegraph
Jul 16, 2009
Saddam Hussein spent billions building dozens of vast, gaudy palaces all over Iraq, many of which are still occupied by US troops. But the Iraqi government is divided - as usual - on what to do with them once the soldiers have gone.
There is, as yet, no instructed estate agent, but should one come along, their marketing pitch will for once need no over-egging. ‘For sale/rent: 80 presidential palaces, average unit living space half-a-million square feet. Attached gardens featuring di
