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: AP
Feb 12, 2009
Pope Benedict XVI has acknowledged Vatican mistakes over a Holocaust-denying bishop and his efforts to reach out to ultraconservatives, saying in a highly unusual critical review that he was saddened that even Catholics attacked him with open hostility.
The pope made a personal analysis of the case in a letter to the world's Catholic bishops made public by the Vatican on Thursday, seeking to end one of the most serious crises of his nearly four-year papacy.
He said fail
Source: Discovery Channel News
Feb 12, 2009
The world's largest online collection of Civil War materials, including photographs, slave manifests and rare letters, has just been launched by Ancestry.com to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birthday.
The collection helps to document the lives of more than 12 million individuals affected by the Civil War. It reveals some harsh realities of the time, such as chronicling the movement of thousands of slaves to New Orleans to work in the booming cotton industry
Source: AP
Feb 12, 2009
Anne Frank called them the Helpers. They provided food, books and good cheer while she and her family hid for two years from the Nazis in a tiny attic apartment.
On Sunday, the last surviving helper, Miep Gies, celebrates her 100th birthday, saying she has won more accolades for helping the Frank family than she deserved — as if, she says, she tried to save all the Jews of occupied Holland.
"This is very unfair. So many others have done the same or even far more da
Source: Monsters and Critics
Feb 12, 2009
A Kurdish archaeological expedition announced on Thursday that it had found a small statue of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen in northern Iraq, a Kurdish news agency reported.
Hassan Ahmed, the director of the local antiquities authority, told the Kurdish news agency Akanews that archaeologists had found a 12-centimeter statue of the ancient Egyptian king in the valley of Dahuk, 470 kilometres north of Baghdad, near a site that locals have long called Pharaoh's Castle.
Source: Deutsche Welle
Feb 12, 2009
It's sobering news. While classical music lovers can still, in all likelihood, look forward to a concert with top conductor Kurt Masur, Rolling Stones fans will be devastated that a free concert featuring the rock band will now no longer take place. Other spectacular program events are also going to be axed.
The taxpayer rather than private sponsors will now pick up the bill for the new slimline version of the celebrations, which will be run by Germany's Federal Press Office. The
Source: NYT
Feb 12, 2009
Anyone who has failed to keep track of a winning lottery ticket for all of 12 months may want to consider the efforts of 39 bondholders who have been safekeeping valuable, tissue-thin, New York City securities since shortly after the Civil War.
Next month, one of the bonds, issued in 1868 and thought to be one of the oldest active municipal bonds in the country, will come due. And the city stands ready to retire the debt incurred when Winston Churchill’s grandfather came up with the
Source: NYT
Feb 12, 2009
Americans have grown accustomed to finding just about anything they want online fast, and free. But for those searching for federal court decisions, briefs and other legal papers, there is no Google.
Instead, there is Pacer, the government-run Public Access to Court Electronic Records system designed in the bygone days of screechy telephone modems. Cumbersome, arcane and not free, it is everything that Google is not.
Recently, however, a small group of dedicated open-go
Source: NYT
Feb 12, 2009
Some of the nation’s large banks, according to economists and other finance experts, are like dead men walking.
A sober assessment of the growing mountain of losses from bad bets, measured in today’s marketplace, would overwhelm the value of the banks’ assets, they say. The banks, in their view, are insolvent....
The Treasury program leans heavily on a sketchy public-private investment fund to buy up the troubled mortgage-backed securities held by the banks. Instead, th
Source: Time Magazine
Feb 12, 2009
The recent salmonella outbreak at the Peanut Corporation of America has led to the recall of more than 1,800 peanut-containing products, from off-brand dog biscuits to Trader Joe's vegan pad Thai, and sent sales of peanut butter plunging 25%, despite assurances that jars on supermarket shelves are not tainted. But the panic illustrates just how thoroughly the legume (Arachis hypogaea is, technically, not a nut), fashioned into a paste, has permeated the American diet. Spread on crackers, slather
Source: AP
Feb 12, 2009
Folksy, melancholy Abraham Lincoln would have been dumbfounded by the fuss over his birthday Thursday.
Bells tolled, wreaths were laid, speeches intoned and banjos picked to mark the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth in a Kentucky log cabin. At the Lincoln presidential museum in Springfield, hundreds of excited schoolchildren joined in reciting the 16th president's Gettysburg Address — an attempt to break the record for the biggest worldwide crowd reading it aloud together."I got up a
Source: NYT
Feb 12, 2009
Pope Benedict XVI, meeting with Jews in an effort to mend fences after lifting the excommunication of a schismatic bishop who has publicly denied the scale of the Holocaust, said Thursday that the Roman Catholic Church was “profoundly and irrevocably committed” to rejecting anti-Semitism.
He also condemned Holocaust denial as “intolerable and altogether unacceptable,” and said it should “be clear to everyone,” especially to clergy members, that the Holocaust was “a crime against Go
Source: WaPo
Feb 12, 2009
Underlying the partisan division over President Obama's stimulus bill is a dispute over history -- a decades-old debate between liberals and conservatives over the impact the New Deal had in bringing the country out of the Great Depression.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said flatly last week that "the big-spending programs of the New Deal did not work." Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) said, "If we look back, even to the New Deal, it's not going to help e
Source: Yahoo (Click here to watch slideshow)
Feb 12, 2009
The humble US one-cent coin got a facelift Thursday as the Mint unveiled the first redesign of the Abraham Lincoln penny in 50 years....
The themes for the reverse designs represent the four major aspects of Abraham Lincoln's life include his birth and early childhood in Kentucky; his formative years in Indiana, shown; his professional life in Illinois; and his presidency in Washington, D.C. The obverse (heads side) will continue to bear the likeness of President Lincoln currently on the
Source: AP
Feb 12, 2009
A handwritten manuscript of an 1864 Abraham Lincoln speech sold for $3.44 million on the bicentennial of his birthday Thursday, setting a new auction record for any American historical document.
The manuscript was sold to an anonymous phone bidder after spirited bidding in a crowded Christie's auction house room. Proceeds from the sale will go toward a new wing for a library in New York's Finger Lake region, where the document has been since 1926.
Thursday's price wa
Source: Independent (UK)
Feb 12, 2009
Cigars, fine rum and communist revolution are not the only things that make Fidel Castro tick. In an eccentric newspaper article, the Cuban leader has admitted to a curious fascination with Barack Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.
Mr Castro, who has not been seen in public since he handed the presidency to his brother, Raul, in 2006, propped himself up on his sick-bed this week to write a lengthy editorial about the origins of the US politico's surname.
"What a
Source: Muscatine Journal
Feb 12, 2009
What’s left of a ring-shaped American Indian village discovered in Oakville has been labeled as a rare site in pristine condition by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The Oak Village site, located off County Road H22, was discovered because the Two Rivers Levee was scheduled to be realigned after it was topped in the June 2008 flood. The flooding destroyed portions of the levee.
During a study required by the National Historic Preservation Act and National Environmental
Source: IHT
Feb 12, 2009
Divided for 60 years by war and political turbulence, the imperial art collection of China is now the focus of negotiations that could lead to at least a few of the works being exhibited together again in a historic moment.
The director of the National Palace Museum in Taipei, the repository of the cream of the 1,000-year-old collection, plans to travel on Saturday to Beijing.
Chou Kung-shin will hold talks at the Palace Museum in Beijing. Chou said in an interview that
Source: IHT
Feb 12, 2009
PASSAU, Germany: The stabbing of the police chief here in December provoked a nationwide furor because the victim, Alois Mannichl, was known as a staunch opponent of neo-Nazis, who were immediately blamed for the attack.
What had become an instant symbol of out-of-control right-wing violence quickly turned into an investigation under the microscope. Here in this ancient city, which traces its history back to Roman times and earlier, the case and its aftermath have dredged up a reput
Source: IHT
Feb 12, 2009
Barack Obama is not the first president to feel a kinship with Abraham Lincoln. Nixon made at least one midnight visit to the Lincoln Memorial for a talk with the great man's statue. Teddy Roosevelt wore a ring that was made from a lock of Lincoln's hair. Franklin Roosevelt hired Robert Sherwood, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his play, "Abe Lincoln in Illinois," as his speechwriter.
But Obama has taken the identification with the 16th president to a new level. He began his
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 12, 2009
The International Criminal Court will issue an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir over alleged genocide in Darfur, the first time the tribunal has sought the detention of a sitting head of state in its seven years of operating.
According to a report in the New York Times, citing court lawyers and diplomats, judges in the Hague will formally announce the decision over the next few days.
It said precise charges cited by the judges against Bashir had no
