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: McClatchy
Mar 18, 2009
Less than 5 miles from the futuristic Dallas Cowboys football stadium, University of Texas at Arlington students are digging up fossils of prehistoric turtles, sharks, giant crocodiles and duck-billed dinosaurs that were bigger than trucks.
The fossils are from about 100 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period.
Source: http://www.tampabay.com
Mar 18, 2009
They lived through the Great Depression, so they knew poverty firsthand: what it was like to sleep four to a bed, make your own noodles for supper or hang your used tea bag on the clothesline to dry so it could be steeped for another day's cup. They remember the long lines to the soup kitchens and how people finagled, bartered, took odd jobs or sold stuff on street corners: an apple for a nickel, a pencil for a penny. • Of course a penny was worth something back then. • And so, it turns out, are
Source: Politico.com
Mar 18, 2009
Former President George W. Bush has already written about 30,000 words of a memoir tentatively called “Decision Points” that will cover everything from how he found faith to how he quit drinking to how he chose Karl Rove and Dick Cheney for their jobs.
A contract with Crown, an imprint of Random House, is to be announced Thursday. The same publisher issued both of President Obama’s books.
The first chapter will be about the former president’s early life leading up to
Source: AP
Mar 18, 2009
CALGARY, Alberta — Former President George W. Bush, making his first public speech since leaving office in January, says he wants Barack Obama to succeed and that it's "essential" to support the new leader...
Bush also said he plans to write a book that will ask people to consider what they would do if they had to protect the United States as president. "It's going to be (about) the 12 toughest decisions I had to make," he said.
"I want people t
Source: Washington Post/House Divided (blog)
Mar 18, 2009
Battlefields in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, Texas, Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi are in the top 10 most endangered in the country, according to the Civil War Preservation Trust which released the names at a press conference this morning.
Although being named most endangered might be considered a negative, it actually is embraced by the various sites because the Trust has a proven ability to bring media attention to what are often little known sites or unrecognized threats
Source: AP
Mar 18, 2009
Even 20 years later, the shooting, chaos and death of the final assault on Tiananmen Square remain vivid in the mind of former soldier Zhang Shijun. Today, he has become one of the few to publicly voice regret.
In bearing witness about his role in the military crackdown on the 1989 student demonstrations in Beijing, Zhang says he hopes to add momentum to calls for an investigation and reassessment of the protest movement — and to further its ultimate goal of a democratic China.
Source: IHT
Mar 18, 2009
Tariq Ramadan, a respected Swiss academic and Muslim scholar, had a job all lined up at the University of Notre Dame in 2004, but the Bush administration prevented him from entering the country. Government officials said he had contributed to a charity believed to have connections to terrorism.
Now, in a move leading up to that hearing, a coalition of academic and civil liberties groups is calling on the Obama administration to break with the Bush administration’s policies on blocki
Source: AP
Mar 18, 2009
An Iraqi official says authorities believe they have found another mass grave from Saddam Hussein's regime in southern Iraq.
The director of the local human rights commission, Mahdi al-Timimi, says local villagers found two skulls, bones and old clothes in the oil-rich Nahran Omar area northeast of Basra.
He told reporters Wednesday that excavation for more remains will start the following day.
The victims are believed to have been killed in 1991, when Sadd
Source: Guardian (UK)
Mar 18, 2009
Tonight sees the unveiling of a belated 200th-birthday present to Charles Darwin in London's Natural History Museum - a sculpture consisting of a 5mm section of a 200-year-old oak tree, including trunk, roots and branches, installed on the ceiling. Sculptor Tania Kovats dreamed up her work in a camper-van in Patagonia (on a trip round South America, during which she used Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle "as a travel guide - and a surprisingly fresh one").
Source: Independent (UK)
Mar 18, 2009
The future of the New Zealand explorer Sir Edmund Hillary's Auckland home remains unclear after it was sold at auction today.
The house at 278A Remuera Road went to the bid of Auckland estate agent Graham Wall, who purchased it on behalf of clients he would not name.
The selling price of $1.9m was just below the house's government valuation of $1.93m. Planning restrictions allow only one unit to be built on the 1738sq m site.
The 198sq m house was built
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 18, 2009
For more than six decades scholars have believed the scrolls originated with a different, ascetic Jewish sect called the Essenes.
The Essenes are said to have lived in the 1st Century, in mountains in Palestine, where they recorded religious practices on parchments.
But Rachel Elior, a professor of Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, claims the 930 scrolls were written by the Sadducees, a group of Jewish priests living in Jerusalem, and that the E
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Mar 18, 2009
Their achievement stands as one of the greatest military triumphs in history.
It is, frankly, inconceivable to imagine anything as big or audacious as D-Day being attempted ever again: more than 300,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen in a bloody dawn attack which liberated France and Europe and changed the world.
These days, their average age is 84. But the people they liberated from Nazi rule will never forget them - which is why, to this day, the veterans of the D-Day
Source: http://c-ville.com
Mar 17, 2009
A six-member alliance of regional and national organizations, called the Wilderness Battlefield Coalition, is mounting a counter-offensive [to Wal-Mart's effort to build a box store near the Wilderness battlefield]. Not just against Wal-Mart but against what it sees as the inevitable repercussions: congestion, sprawl, and irreparable damage to an important piece of American history.
Source: NYT
Mar 17, 2009
PINGYAO, China It was a time of new wealth, a gilded age in which entire families came into fortunes overnight.
To move the money, businessmen here in this city in northern China opened banks, the first in the nation’s history. Soon branches sprang up across the country, and they began making loans. Money flowed this way and that.
Then, as quickly as it started, the entire system crumbled. The banks shut down and the city fell into ruin.
So went the histor
Source: SCNow (South Carolina)
Mar 17, 2009
Historical remnants from a Civil War-era gunboat will be pulled from the depths of the Pee Dee River by a team of underwater archaeologists looking to preserve and, in the future, display a part of the area’s early history.
The team is preparing to raise three Confederate cannons — each weighing more than 15 tons — from the watery resting places some 150 years after they were sunk by Confederate troops as Union Gen. William T. Sherman’s troops bared down on the Pee Dee, said state u
Source: The Times (UK)
Mar 17, 2009
Police officers in northern Scotland have been accused of vandalising a Bronze Age site through ignorance after they removed bones and textiles from the 4,000-year-old burial chamber, apparently because they thought they were investigating a crime scene.
The burial chamber, or cist, was discovered intact, in a field near Oykel Bridge in Sutherland. The area is rich in Bronze Age remains, but this find was of huge importance to archaeologists. Unlike the vast chambered cairns of the
Source: Ethiopian Review
Mar 17, 2009
So it was that New Jersey archaeologist David Braun tempered his excitement after he and other researchers, among them a Rutgers University professor and a group of Rutgers students, found what looked to be very unusual footprints in the ancient sediment of a riverbed in Kenya.
"We knew we might have something special, but we also kept thinking, 'OK, these could be from a baboon,'" Braun said.
Turns out all that caution was unnecessary. Over three summers, Bra
Source: New York Times
Mar 17, 2009
Shortly before President George W. Bush left office, his administration signed an agreement with China that imposed import restrictions on a sweeping range of Chinese art and antiquities in an effort to quash the growing illicit trade in looted artifacts, a volatile issue that has polarized the international art, museum and archaeological worlds and led to several high-profile restitution cases.
The agreement, signed on Jan. 14, covers all of China’s cultural heritage from the Paleo
Source: McClatchy
Mar 17, 2009
A top White House official threatened Tuesday to use a congressional rule to force some controversial proposals through the Senate by eliminating the Republicans' power to block legislation.
Peter Orszag, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, said the Obama administration would prefer not to use the budget "reconciliation" process that allows measures to pass the Senate on simple majority votes.
Orszag said he wouldn't rule it out, h
Source: BBC
Mar 17, 2009
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has cut seven years off the prison sentence of former Bosnian Serb leader Momcilo Krajisnik.
Appeals Chamber judges overturned Krajisnik's convictions for the murder, extermination and persecution of non-Serbs during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.
But he must still serve 20 years in jail for the deportation, forcible transfer and persecution of civilians.
Krajisnik was a close aide to ex-Bosnian Ser
