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: NYT
Jun 27, 2009
The history of repression to save regimes — or at least their leaders — is long. And every case is different: Some regimes are brittle in the face of popular pressure while others are supple in adapting to it; some can use nationalism as their trump card, while for others, it is an Achilles’ heel. And if some regimes are simple tyrannies, the structure of Iran’s political system is especially complex and opaque.
Still, a common thread is clear: It is the security services on which t
Source: NYT
Jun 27, 2009
True, David Letterman’s awkward joke about a daughter of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska prompted denunciations of the “media elite” (though it also boosted Mr. Letterman’s ratings).
But the admissions of extramarital adventures by two Republican stalwarts, Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina on Wednesday and Senator John Ensign of Nevada the week before, did not help their party’s cause and stood in dim contrast to President Obama’s recent success in co-opting parts of the conservatives
Source: NYT
Jun 27, 2009
As Democrats strained to win over crucial holdouts on the way to narrow, party-line approval of global warming legislation, they were dogged by a critical question: Has the political climate changed since 1993?
Veteran members of both parties vividly remember when many House Democrats, in the early months of the Clinton administration, reluctantly backed a proposed B.T.U. tax — a new levy on each unit of energy consumed — only to see it ignored by the Senate and seized as a campaign
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Jun 27, 2009
Bricks marked with swastikas on a crumbling building in Brazil have
helped historians trace an astonishing plan by Adolf Hitler for a Nazi
empire in South America.
They have also found some of the young men who were kept as slaves by
German settlers and local Nazi supporters.
They were known as ‘ Nummernmenschen’ – the number people – as the
dehumanisation practised in the concentration camps was exported.
It had long been known that fleeing Nazis moved into remote reg
Source: AP
Jun 27, 2009
Raymond Castro was a regular at The Stonewall Inn in 1969, finding it
a haven from a world where gay men and women could be arrested for
kissing or holding hands in public. Inside the bar, where plywood
covered the windows, warning lights served as a signal for couples to
stop dancing.
When police raided the bar in the past for selling liquor without a
license, patrons normally submitted to arrest or dispersed quietly.
But on June 28, Castro recalled, people fought back.
As o
Source: BBC
Jun 27, 2009
The Red Cross is marking the 150th anniversary of the battle which inspired Henri Dunant to found the world's best known humanitarian movement.
At the end of June 1859, the armies of France and Sardinia, led by Napoleon III, confronted the Austrians at Solferino in northern Italy.
The Red Cross is marking the 150th anniversary of the battle which inspired Henri Dunant to found the world's best known humanitarian movement.
At the end of June 1859, the armie
Source: BBC
Jun 27, 2009
At the end of the Bosnian Civil War, it was agreed that the country would remain a single nation.
However, the Serbs were granted their own officially-recognised region, known as the Republika Srpska.
The Republika Srpska parliament has issued a declaration, insisting that it has the right to make its own rules in certain key areas, like immigration and customs. That move was vetoed this week by Bosnia's High Representative, the intern
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jun 27, 2009
Meriwether Lewis, one half of the Lewis and Clark explorer duo who first reached the Pacific by land, may have been murdered, say descendants who want his body exhumed.
Now, as the 200th anniversary of his death approaches, his descendants have mounted a fresh push to have his body exhumed and the cold case reopened, believing that modern forensic procedures could settle the mystery.
An often melancholy character, his death was noted as a suicide and, despite his stat
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jun 27, 2009
From riderless horses disappearing through castle walls mischievous spirits apparently barging into visitors, English Heritage has compiled a new survey of "hauntings" and unexplained events recorded at its sites.
One medieval palace is even said to be haunted by a former member of staff.
Many of the events involve staff and visitors seeing mysterious figures, while others involve complaints that people were pinched or pushed, when there was nobody standing
Source: CNN
Jun 27, 2009
Former First Lady Laura Bush — who has kept a low profile since her husband's administration came to an end — is speaking out on a cause she championed while in the White House: the ongoing situation in Burma.
In a Washington Post op-ed set to be published in the paper's Sunday edition, Bush draws parallels between the events in Iran and Burma (Myanmar), and urges the United Nations to press the ruling regime there to end human rights abuses.
In her op-ed, Bush also say
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jun 27, 2009
Nine former members of the Nazi SS were sentenced to life in prison for a series of massacres during the Second World War by an Italian court, according to news reports.
The court also ordered Germany to pay damages to some of the families of the hundreds of victims, the ANSA news agency reported.
The nine suspects, aged between 84 and 90 were tried in absentia and found guilty of the murders of more than 350 civilians in the summer of 1944.
Source: CBS News blog
Jun 26, 2009
Despite the president's claim at a joint appearance this afternoon that "I like Chancellor Merkel a lot," President Barack Obama and Germany's Angela Merkel are widely believed to have a somewhat frosty relationship. The biggest perceived rift between the two? How best to respond to the global financial crisis.
Mr. Obama, of course, has pushed through a massive stimulus package and pressed for greater government spending worldwide to end the recession. Merkel, who helms t
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jun 26, 2009
A 620-year-old skeleton discovered under the floor of Stirling Castle has shed new light on the violent life of a medieval knight.
Archaeologists believe that bones found in an ancient chapel on the site are those of an English knight named Robert Morley who died in a tournament there in 1388.
Radio carbon dating has confirmed that the skeleton is from that period, and detailed analysis suggests that he was in his mid-20s, was heavily muscled and had suffered several s
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jun 26, 2009
An ancient settlement dating back to before the time when Alexander the Great's armies swept across Afghanistan could be bulldozed and dynamited for a new road.
French archaeologists said they had been forced to stand in front of earthmovers to prevent Korean contractors building a road through a historic gorge.
Excavations show people have lived at Cheshm-e-Shafa since at least the fourth century BC, when the area was ruled by a Persian dynasty eventually swept away
Source: Reuters
Jun 26, 2009
Germany's highest court has upheld a ban on three words appearing in sequence because of their link to a former anthem of the Nazi party.
The Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe rejected on Thursday an appeal by a member of a far-right party who was fined 1,750 euros ($2,400) for wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words "die Fahnen hoch."
This literally translates as "the flags on high." The court said the words, which appeared as the final
Source: AP
Jun 26, 2009
Russia told a U.S. court on Friday that judges have no authority to tell the country how to handle sacred Jewish documents held in its state library that were seized by the Nazi and Soviet armies.
The documents are at the center of a lawsuit brought by members of Chabad-Lubavitch, which follows the teachings of Eastern European rabbis and emphasizes the study of the Torah. The group is suing Russia in U.S. court to recover thousands of manuscripts, prayers, lectures and philosophic
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jun 26, 2009
Special Forces made a series of night jumps on the outskirts of Baghdad in a campaign against insurgent leaders and bomb-making factories, The Daily Telegraph has learnt.
The operations - which can only now be disclosed - played a significant role in removing "high value targets'' and reducing the ability of insurgents to make roadside bombs.
On at least a dozen occasions, SAS soldiers using highly-manoeuvrable parachutes jumped from the back of a Hercules aircra
Source: NYT
Jun 26, 2009
The speculation over the future of the marriage of Mark Sanford, the South Carolina governor, after his recently disclosed affair is likely to die off well before the family’s pain. So, too, will the unsolicited lectures — about his hypocrisy, about her obligations, about the dire state of marriage in general.
Yet if recent research is any guide, the marriage itself has a chance to outlast all of it, the public leer and the private sting, by many years....
A comparison
Source: Chicago Tribune
Jun 26, 2009
Duffers and history buffs alike will get to follow in the footsteps of Bobby Jones and Bob Hope this weekend as they retrace a vanished golf course considered one of the best in the country in its day.
The beautifully manicured fairways of Mill Road Farm, built in the 1920s, were replaced by subdivisions after World War II. Last winter 30 Lake Forest College students used original plats and satellite images to flag about 10 holes.
"What we found more than greens an
Source: http://www.hometownannapolis.com
Jun 26, 2009
Who would think a series of dark spots in the ground and a tiny clay pot could generate such excitement?
The dark smudges in the earth, deemed to be posts supporting Native American wigwams, found by county archaeologists this spring could be the oldest structures yet discovered in Maryland.
Carbon dating has determined the settlement along the Patuxent River near Jug Bay dates from A.D. 1290 and 1300.
