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: NY Daily News
May 27, 2009
George Bush has downsized - big time! Where once he enjoyed 34 bathrooms, he's now down to a mere 4 1/2. Where once he sauntered through a 132-room estate, he now roams this much smaller home.
Click through to look inside the Bush's new home in Dallas - it's certainly not the White House, that's for sure!
Source: Fox News
May 27, 2009
A flag fight is brewing in southern Florida.
Members of the Miami-Dade branch of the NAACP want the Confederate flag banned from the Homestead-Miami Motor Speedway, and they will meet Thursday to decide whether to boycott a NASCAR race slated there for November.
Debra Toomer, the branch's chairwoman of press and publicity, said a planning session has been scheduled to decide on a course of action regarding the display of the flag at the Nov. 20-22 event, as well as its
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 27, 2009
Church leaders turned the Virgin Mary from being a "serious, official, imperial" figure into a normal "mum" to widen Christianity's appeal, according to a leading medieval historian.
Speaking at the Hay Festival in Wales, Mary Rubin, the author of Mother of God – A History of the Virgin Mary, said the transformation took place in the 11th and 12th century, with images of her knitting and cooking.
By comparison she was portrayed in the early church a
Source: AP
May 27, 2009
A French anti-racism group has filed a legal complaint against the Louvre Museum, claiming that a measure offering free admission to European young people is discriminatory.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced a measure earlier this year offering European Union citizens aged 26 and under free admission to national museums. The Louvre is among several museums that chose to apply the measure.
The group SOS Racisme filed a legal complaint viewed Wednesday by The Ass
Source: AP
May 27, 2009
Since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union left Russia's military underfunded and disorganized, the arsenal in Shchuchye, about 1,000 miles east of Moscow, has been a top security concern. After years of delays and disputes, a vast facility to destroy the weapons is to formally open there on Friday.
The plant, the size of a small town, was built with a U.S. contribution of more than $1 billion and is seen as a milestone in cooperation on disarmament between Washington and Moscow.
Source: AP
May 27, 2009
Buckingham Palace says Queen Elizabeth II did not receive an invitation to attend ceremonies next week marking the 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, U.S. President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown are among leaders who will attend.
But Sarkozy's office said on Wednesday that the queen was welcome. A French government spokesman says it is up to Britain to decide who attends.
Source: New York Times
May 27, 2009
CHICAGO — On a sweltering day two summers ago, a University of Chicago scholar, Jacqueline Goldsby, began to dig through a maze of cardboard boxes crammed to the ceiling in a loft on Ogden Avenue. As she peeked inside the boxes, bulging with hidden remnants from The Chicago Defender, the famed black newspaper, she gasped.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ There were photos of Booker T. Washington playing with his grandchildren, there were letters from Harry Truman,” said Dr. Goldsby, 47. “E
Source: World Net Daily
May 26, 2009
When WND Editor and Chief Executive Officer Joseph Farah launched his billboard campaign focusing attention on Barack Obama's constitutional eligibility for office, he predicted the effort would attract media curiosity – perhaps even more than the central issue of whether the president is truly a "natural born citizen."
Less than a week after the billboard campaign began, media have already begun showing interest – even though, so far, only one billboard, an electronic one
Source: NYT
May 26, 2009
She was “a child with dreams,” as she once said, the little girl who learned at 8 that she had diabetes, who lost her father when she was 9, who devoured Nancy Drew books and spent Saturday nights playing bingo, marking the cards with chickpeas, in the squat red brick housing projects of the East Bronx.
She was the history major and Puerto Rican student activist at Princeton who spent her first year at that bastion of the Ivy League “too intimidated to ask questions.” She was the tough-minde
Source: Cuba Headlines
May 26, 2009
A bronze cannon, the first of its type discovered in the oceans surrounding Cuba, was found by fishermen off the coast of Trinidad, Sancti Spiritus
According to the local Radio Trinidad station, a group of lobster fishermen working in waters close to the Zaza Afuera Cay found the cannon. The same fishermen discovered the remains of a colonial ship a year earlier in the same location.
Leonel Delgado Ceballos said that the cannon comes from a ship that was part of the Re
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 26, 2009
The world might never have heard of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the reporters who broke the story of Watergate, if a couple of rival journalists had followed up their tip.
Robert Smith and Robert Phelps, who were both working for the New York Times in 1972, have belatedly admitted that they were steered towards the political scandal first but never did anything about it.
Instead, Woodward and Bernstein of the Washington Post famously broke the story with help from
Source: BBC
May 26, 2009
Forensic experts investigating a newly-discovered mass grave in Bosnia say they have found 12 bodies thought to be of victims of the Srebrenica massacre.
They say more bodies are expected to be found in the grave near the eastern town of Vlasenica in the coming days.
About 70 mass graves around Srebrenica have been found since the Bosnian war, and more than 5,000 victims identified.
Last week, a team from the Institute for Missing People exhumed 10 bodie
Source: NYT
May 26, 2009
The oldest known skeleton showing signs of leprosy has been found inIndia and may help solve the puzzle of where the disease originated.
The skeleton, about 4,000 years old, was found at the site of Balathal, near Udaipur in northwestern India. Historians have long considered the Indian subcontinent to be the source of the leprosy that was first reported in Europe in the fourth century B.C., shortly after the armies of Alexander the Great returned from India.
The skelet
Source: NYT
May 26, 2009
On a sweltering day two summers ago, a University of Chicago scholar, Jacqueline Goldsby, began to dig through a maze of cardboard boxes crammed to the ceiling in a loft on Ogden Avenue. As she peeked inside the boxes, bulging with hidden remnants from The Chicago Defender, the famed black newspaper, she gasped.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ There were photos of Booker T. Washington playing with his grandchildren, there were letters from Harry Truman,” said Dr. Goldsby, 47. “Every time
Source: NYT
May 26, 2009
It was called “the shot that changed the republic.”
The killing in 1967 of an unarmed demonstrator by a police officer in West Berlin set off a left-wing protest movement and put conservative West Germany on course to evolve into the progressive country it has become today.
Now a discovery in the archives of the East German secret police, known as the Stasi, has upended Germany’s perception of its postwar history. The killer, Karl-Heinz Kurras, though working for the W
Source: NYT
May 26, 2009
Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s judicial opinions are marked by diligence, depth and unflashy competence. If they are not always a pleasure to read, they are usually models of modern judicial craftsmanship, which prizes careful attention to the facts in the record and a methodical application of layers of legal principles.
Judge Sotomayor has issued no major decisions concerning abortion, the death penalty, gay rights or national security. In cases involving criminal defendants, employment
Source: Slate
May 26, 2009
North Korea conducted a nuclear test on Monday, the second such test in less than three years. In response to the incident, a senior administration official told the New York Times "that the United States would never grant full diplomatic recognition to North Korea, or sign a peace treaty formally ending the Korean War, unless its nuclear capability is dismantled." Wait, we're still at war with North Korea?
Sort of. The 1953 Korean War Armistice Agreement, signed by the Un
Source: National Security Archive
May 26, 2009
Today the National Security Archive publishes its fourth installment of the diary of Anatoly Chernyaev, the man who was behind some of the most momentous transformations in the Soviet foreign policy in the end of the 1980s in his role as Mikhail Gorbachev main foreign policy aide. In addition to his contributions to perestroika and new thinking, Anatoly Sergeevich was and remains a paragon of openness and transparency providing his diaries and notes to historians who are trying to understand t
Source: Time Magazine
May 26, 2009
GM stood atop the Fortune 500 nine years ago; it now stands on the brink of bankruptcy court as sales decline and cash becomes scarce. Moreover, GM bondholders are intensely unhappy with the terms they were offered as part of a plan to avoid bankruptcy, so even though the United Auto Workers struck a deal with management on Thursday, bankruptcy still looms as the probable course.
How did such a once great company become so desperate? Perhaps the better question is, how did GM's well
Source: NYT
May 26, 2009
President Obama announced on Tuesday that he will nominate the federal appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, choosing a daughter of Puerto Rican parents raised in a Bronx public housing project to become the nation’s first Hispanic justice.
Judge Sotomayor, who stood next to the president during the announcement, was described by Mr. Obama as “an inspiring woman who I am confident will make a great justice.”
The president said he had made his decision aft
