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
Apr 1, 2009
AT a time when life in America is beginning to resemble a roller-coaster ride on the way down and everyone is trying to find ways to save money, it may be instructive — both in terms of offering helpful hints and putting things in perspective — to look at how people ran their households during the Great Depression.
Back then there was little money for food, let alone new curtains, but people found ways to cope. Backyard gardens were cultivated not because of a sudden itch to eat loc
Source: BBC
Apr 1, 2009
An international court in the Hague has asked Lebanon to hand over documents relating to the murder of the former Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafik Hariri.
The UN-backed tribunal also asked for a list of all suspects Lebanon is holding in connection with the 2005 killings.
The court has been set up to try those suspected of being behind the blast which killed Mr Hariri and 22 others.
The requests bring the tribunal closer to asking Lebanon to hand over four of
Source: NYT
Apr 1, 2009
... President Obama signed legislation establishing a national park in, of all places, Paterson, N.J., a faded industrial town that is one of the poorest in the nation.
This was no small triumph for Paterson; for its congressman and former mayor, Bill Pascrell Jr.; and for one Leonard Zax, a Paterson native and lawyer who a few years back took on the role of designated pain in the butt to push this thing forward.
Reporters deal with people like him all the time, many o
Source: WSFA 12 (Montgomery)
Apr 1, 2009
The discovery of numerous bodies Tuesday by construction workers at a city lot in downtown Montgomery is drawing national attention. In all, officials say they've recovered remains of 11 humans, including at least eight skulls.
Montgomery Police spokesman Major Huey Thornton said it's believed the bodies are from a mass grave of victims who died of a Yellow fever outbreak sometime in the early 1800's.
A structure built on the burial mound in the 1940's was recently torn
Source: AFP
Apr 1, 2009
Iraq will reopen ancient Ur, the Biblical birthplace of Abraham, to the public after the US military hands back the archaeological site next month, the government said on Wednesday.
The ancient site, which lies next to the US air base of Talila outside the southern city of Nasiriyah, has been closed to the public since the US-led invasion of 2003.
The ancient city, which dates back to 6000 BC, lies on a former course of the Euphrates, one of the two great rivers of Iraq
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Apr 1, 2009
US experts believe that Mr Obama, whose father was Kenyan, is descended through his Kansan mother's family to some of the earliest settlers in Massachusetts at the time of the Pilgrim Fathers.
Two clear links to England can be found, pointing to the possibility that direct ancestors of the 44th president may still be lying in the medieval churchyards of Stapleford, a village just outside Cambridge, or Sutton in Ashfield, Notts.
Researchers at the New England Historic
Source: NYT
Apr 1, 2009
Former President Alberto K. Fujimori of Peru defiantly defended himself in court on Wednesday against accusations of human rights abuses, saying that he was innocent of murder and kidnapping charges related to his government’s counterinsurgency tactics during a bloody period of guerrilla attacks in the early 1990s.
Mr. Fujimori took the stand in his own defense at his trial in Lima, Peru, now in its 15th month. He was seeking to convince a three-judge panel that he should not be hel
Source: WaPo
Apr 1, 2009
Members of a steamfitters union local said that in 2007, asbestos dust filled the air during renovation of the National Museum of American History because contractors repeatedly failed to take legally required precautions while removing insulation.
A Smithsonian spokeswoman said that as soon as institution safety workers found the problems, they immediately corrected procedures and turned off fans. The museum was closed to the public at the time during a two-year renovation, but Ame
Source: WaPo
Apr 1, 2009
Justice Department lawyers concluded in an unpublished opinion earlier this year that the historic D.C. voting rights bill pending in Congress is unconstitutional, according to sources briefed on the issue. But Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who supports the measure, ordered up a second opinion from other lawyers in his department and determined that the legislation would pass muster.
A finding that the voting rights bill runs afoul of the Constitution could complicate an upco
Source: McClatchy
Apr 1, 2009
Sen. John McCain and Rep. Peter King are hoping that they have a fighting chance of persuading the nation's first African-American president to pardon posthumously the world's first African-American heavyweight boxing champion.
McCain, R-Ariz., and King, R-N.Y., were to unveil a congressional resolution Wednesday afternoon calling on President Barack Obama to pardon Jack Johnson, who won the heavyweight title a century before Obama took the oath of office.
Johnson's 19
Source: The Jakarta Post (Indonesia)
Apr 1, 2009
The Mpu Purwa Historical Object Preservation Center in Malang, East Java, has recovered a 12th-century stone statue of Ganesha, believed to be the only one of its kind in Indonesia. It features a special trait not found on other Ganesha statues in Indonesia - the elephant-headed deity is seen riding atop a mouse.
"The mouse is apparently included as an animal used by Ganesha as a vehicle, but this type of statue has never been found in Indonesia before. Ganesha is usually seen
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Apr 1, 2009
A Kremlin academic has predicted that the global economic crisis will pave the way for Vladimir Putin to rule over a reconstituted Soviet empire stretching from central Europe to the Canadian border within four years.
Igor Panarin, the dean of the Russian foreign ministry's diplomatic academy, gave fellow patriots the opportunity to indulge their wildest imperial fantasies with a startling projection of how geopolitics will change over the next decade.
In an interview
Source: BBC
Apr 1, 2009
One of Russia's most famous statues of Vladimir Lenin has been bombed, leaving the Bolshevik revolutionary with a gaping hole in his rear.
The bronze statue, in the city of St Petersburg, was badly damaged before dawn on Wednesday, when the blast blew a hole in Lenin's coat.
No-one was hurt in the attack, the motive for which was unknown.
The statue, outside the Finland Station, marks the Bolshevik leader's return from exile in April 1917.
Source: AP
Apr 1, 2009
The rusting wreck of the first American vessel sunk during World War II has been found off Australia's southeastern coast, ocean researchers said Thursday.
The MV City of Rayville, a freighter carrying a cargo of lead, wool and copper from Australia to New York, sank in the Bass Strait after striking a German mine on Nov. 8, 1940, a year before the United States entered the war.
One seaman drowned while trying to recover personal items from the sinking vessel but the 37
Source: Independent (UK)
Apr 1, 2009
Aristotle once suggested that the sex of a child was determined by the ardour of the man at the time of insemination, whereas other ancient Greek philosophers thought that it had something to do with the left and right sides of the body.
Two millennia later, an 18th-century French surgeon writing under the pseudonym of Procope Couteau took up the idea and advised men wishing to have baby boys to cut off their left testicle – a procedure no more painful than extracting a tooth, he sa
Source: Times (UK)
Apr 1, 2009
Cristina Fernández Sánchez is more concerned with boyfriends and forging a career as a journalist than with dwelling on the past. At 22, she is part of the generation that grew up as Spain embraced democracy and threw off the shackles of nearly 40 years of dictatorship.
She was born after General Franco died in 1975, and to her the Spanish Civil War was just something she learnt about at school.
“We were taught Franco was a bad man and were only told the basics about
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Apr 1, 2009
The event is to be held at the Argentine president's ambassador's official residence tomorrow evening - the anniversary of the date the war began.
Dr Cristina Kirchner, the president of Argentina, is also expected to make yet another demand for Britain to give up the island, according to The Sun.
It is officially described as a ceremony "to honour the veterans and fallen of the South Atlantic conflict", the newspaper reported.
President Kirchner
Source: BBC
Apr 1, 2009
He had suffered from pneumonia and lung cancer and last appeared in public in October, when the current president unveiled a bust in his honour.
A medical team had been tending to him at his home in Buenos Aires.
Mr Alfonsin was elected president in 1983, after the fall of the military regime which had held power since 1976.
Critics point out that he failed to stave off a deep economic crisis but his political achievement was summed up by current Preside
Source: Civil War News
Apr 1, 2009
The entrance to the harbor in Charleston – the scene of much naval activity during the Civil War – will be mapped to produce the nautical equivalent of a detailed map of a large battlefield on land.
The Maritime Research Division (MRD) of the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology (SCIAA) at the University of South Carolina is running the project, supported by a $28,348 grant from the National Park Service’s American Battlefield Protection Program.
Th
Source: NYT
Mar 31, 2009
In the summer of 1933, just as they will do on Thursday, heads of government and their finance ministers met in London to talk about a global economic crisis. They accomplished little and went home to battle the crisis in their own ways.
More than any other country, Germany — Nazi Germany — then set out on a serious stimulus program. The government built up the military, expanded the autobahn, put up stadiums for the 1936 Berlin Olympics and built monuments to the Nazi Party across
