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: Thinkprogress (liberal website)
Apr 20, 2009
Yesterday, President Obama shook hands and briefly chatted with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, explaining in a press conference afterwards that he was trying to move towards a “more constructive” relationship with the South American country.
The right wing has responded with outrage to Obama’s meeting with Chavez, claiming face-to-face talks with a dictator show that Obama is projecting weakness. On NBC this morning, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Obama “bows to the Saud
Source: AP
Apr 20, 2009
Tourists who want to put a hand or foot in each of four states at the Four Corners area are apparently off the mark — by about 2.5 miles. According to readings by the National Geodetic Survey, the Four Corners marker showing the intersection of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah is about 2.5 miles west of where it should be.
Source: Latin American Herlad Tribune
Apr 20, 2009
The first stages of building a Marriott hotel in the Peruvian city of Cuzco brought to light the unforeseen archaeological discovery of several ancient Inca walls, the daily El Comercio said on Saturday.
Though ancient chronicles written during the Spanish conquest say that the place where the construction is taking place, near the Plaza de Armas of what was once the capital of the Inca Empire, was an agricultural area, the discovery makes it necessary to reconsider the city map of
Source: Press Release
Apr 20, 2009
WASHINGTON, D.C. – From April 19 through April 26, the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum will lead the nation in remembering the six million
Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, as well as the millions of other
victims of Nazi persecution. Observances will be held in communities, state
houses, city halls, churches, and synagogues across the United States and
at military installations worldwide.
President Barack Obama will deliver the keynote address at the Museum's
Source: LA Times
Apr 20, 2009
A Malibu man's personal crusade to clean up a trash-strewn beach 5,000 miles away will gain national attention this week when it is the focus of a cable television documentary.
For more than three years, Leon Cooper has sought to pressure authorities into removing litter from Red Beach on the Pacific atoll called Tarawa -- site of one of the United States' bloodiest World War II battles.
The beach, which Cooper calls "hallowed ground," has become a dumping gro
Source: BBC
Apr 20, 2009
Men are needed for DNA tests to prove their distant ancestors moved from the Mediterranean to north west Wales as migrant workers 4,000 years ago.
Participants will be asked for a cheek swab sample for genetic analysis.
Researchers at the University of Sheffield hope to link the migration of men in the Bronze Age to the discovery of copper.
Source: BBC
Apr 20, 2009
A World War II Spitfire aeroplane which was found in a scrapyard has sold for £1.58m at an auction in north London.
The plane was sold at the RAF museum in Hendon after a five-year restoration in Hampshire made it airworthy.
The two-seater Vickers Supermarine Spitfire was built in 1944 and sold to the South African Air Force in 1948, where it served for an unknown period.
Source: AP
Apr 20, 2009
Austrian firefighters are battling a blaze inside Arenberg Castle, a 14th-century chateau in Salzburg.
Officials say about 100 firefighters are at the scene and three people were taken to a hospital for smoke inhalation. Austrian television showed thick smoke pouring from the castle's roof.
Arenberg Castle is one of Salzburg's most important historical buildings. Although it dates to the 1300s, the modern structure was rebuilt after a fire razed it in 1814, and it was r
Source: CNN
Apr 20, 2009
The last living survivor of the Titanic earned only a small fraction of what auctioneers hoped to raise when she sold her final remaining mementos of the doomed ship to pay nursing home bills.
The 17 items belonging to 97-year-old Millvina Dean sold for about $8,000 on Saturday, according to auctioneer Alan Aldridge -- not enough to pay for two months at her nursing home.
Aldridge had earlier speculated the sale could raise up to $50,000 for her.
Source: Times (UK)
Apr 20, 2009
The nuclear test grounds in the wastes of the Gobi desert have fallen silent but veterans of those lonely places are speaking out for the first time about the terrible price exacted by China’s zealous pursuit of the atomic bomb.
They talk of picking up radioactive debris with their bare hands, of sluicing down bombers that had flown through mushroom clouds, of soldiers dying before their time of strange and rare diseases, and children born with mysterious cancers.
The
Source: Times (UK)
Apr 20, 2009
The night before Shifa Alqudsi was going to blow herself up in a bomb attack on the Israeli town of Netanya she stayed up explaining it all to her seven-year-old daughter Diana, telling her to look for a star in the sky when she wanted to speak to her.
Last week she told the story again, this time to the people she had wanted to kill, among them a soldier with a tale of how he once took part in an operation to murder Palestinians.
The encounter took place in an Irish
Source: Times (UK)
Apr 20, 2009
Hundreds of documents relating to the Hillsborough disaster are to be made public for the first time after the Home Secretary asked for the 30-year secrecy rule to be waived.
Medical files, police reports and transcripts of high-level operational meetings could be among the documents released, finally allowing the families of the 96 Liverpool fans who died to discover how events unfolded on April 15, 1989.
The families of fans crushed to death in Britain’s worst footb
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Apr 20, 2009
Booksellers told The Daily Telegraph that while it is regarded in most countries as a 'Nazi Bible', in India it is considered a management guide in the mould of Spencer Johnson's "Who Moved My Cheese".
Sales of the book over the last six months topped 10,000 in New Delhi alone, according to leading stores, who said it appeared to be becoming more popular with every year.
Several said the surge in sales was due to demand from students who see it as a self-impro
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Apr 20, 2009
Citing a 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum, the New York Times said the agency used the simulated drowning technique on the two al-Qaeda operatives far more than had been previously reported.
The report recalls that in 2007, former CIA officer John Kiriakou told media organizations that Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew.
Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the Sept 11 terrorist attacks
Source: Sky News
Apr 20, 2009
The ancient Great Wall of China is almost 200 miles longer than previously thought, according to a new study.
An extra 180 miles of the world-renowned ancient Chinese monument were uncovered after a two-year government mapping study, according to an official report.
The study used mapping technologies such as infrared range finders and GPS devices to show extra portions of the wall - hidden by hills, trenches and rivers - that stretch from Hu Mountain in northern Liaoni
Source: NYT
Apr 20, 2009
JERUSALEM — In the Ukrainian town of Berdichev, Jewish women were forced to swim across a wide river until they drowned. In Telsiai, Lithuania, children were thrown alive into pits filled with their murdered parents. In Liozno, Belarus, Jews were herded into a locked barn where many froze to death.
Holocaust deniers aside, the world is not ignorant of the systematic Nazi slaughter of some six million Jews in World War II. People know of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen; many have heard o
Source: Newsweek
Apr 20, 2009
[T]here is a dirty secret about unemployment. We may feel united by a common anxiety about losing our jobs, but we are not all in this together. Unemployment is not a scythe that cuts equally through different sectors of society, felling white collar and blue collar, African-American and Hispanic, male and female, in equal measure. Young, minority men working in jobs that didn't pay much to begin with are suffering more than their white-collar counterparts. The unemployment rate for those over 2
Source: BBC
Apr 19, 2009
The memoirs of China's former communist leader who was sacked after the Tiananmen protests have been published.
Zhao Ziyang's book lifts the lid on discussions within the party that led to the brutal crushing of the protest movement.
The publication of the book comes just weeks before the 20th anniversary of the killings.
The book is believed to have been based on secret tapes recorded while Mr Zhao, the party's former general secretary, was under house a
Source: Stone Pages Archaeo News
Apr 19, 2009
The discovery of a remarkably well-preserved monumental temple in Turkey - thought to be constructed during the time of King Solomon in the 10th/9th-centuries BCE - sheds light on the so-called Dark Age. Uncovered by the University of Toronto's Tayinat Archaeological Project (TAP) in the summer of 2008, the discovery casts doubt upon the traditional view that the transition from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age was violent, sudden and culturally disruptive.
Source: Stone Pages Archaeo News
Apr 19, 2009
Last week's powerful earthquake in the central Italian Abruzzo regional capital L'Aquila has unearthed prehistoric dwellings there. Some of the vaulted caves measure up to five metres in height, according to Italian geologist Gianluca Ferretti. "We are exploring them," said Ferretti, who teaches geology at L'Aquila's university.
