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: Politico.com
Feb 4, 2009
Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a “high probability” that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration’s policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed.
In an interview Tuesday with Politico, Cheney unyieldingly defended the Bush administration’s support for the Guantanamo Bay prison and coercive interrogation of terrorism suspects. ...
The interview, l
Source: NYT
Feb 4, 2009
ROME — Responding to global outrage, especially in Pope Benedict XVI’s native Germany, the Vatican for the first time on Wednesday called on a recently rehabilitated bishop to take back his statements denying the Holocaust.
Late last month, the pope revoked the excommunication of four schismatic bishops, including British-born Richard Williamson, who in an interview broadcast last month denied the existence of the Nazi gas chambers.
A statement issued on Wednesday by th
Source: Tehran Times
Feb 4, 2009
About 700 Iranologists and Iranian cultural heritage lovers have recently signed a petition asking President Barack Obama to prevent confiscation of Iran’s 300 Achaemenid clay tablets loaned to the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute.
The petition has been organized by the European Iranologist Society (Societas Iranologica Europaea, SIE) in its website www.societasiranologicaeu.org.
The petition reads the artif
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Feb 3, 2009
He loathed vanity so much that he insisted his portraits depict him faithfully, 'warts and all'.
And even after his death, Oliver Cromwell's instructions were followed to the letter.
This death mask shows the puritanical Lord Protector of England in all his grizzled, lumpy glory.
There has been no attempt to conceal the growth on his lower lip or straighten his crooked nose.
All in all, the mask doesn't make an attractive artwork - though
Source: AP
Feb 3, 2009
A black state senator is pushing a bill that would require South Carolina cities and counties to give their workers a paid day off for Confederate Memorial Day or lose millions in state funds.
Democratic Sen. Robert Ford's bill won initial approval from a Senate subcommittee Tuesday. It would force county and municipal governments to follow the schedule of holidays used by the state, which gives workers 12 paid days off, including May 10 to honor Confederate war dead. Mississippi an
Source: AP
Feb 3, 2009
A Rwandan professor has been suspended with pay from teaching French at Goucher College while officials there investigate claims that he was involved in the 1994 genocide in his home country.
College President Sanford Ungar told faculty and students in an e-mail Saturday that Professor Leopold Munyakazi, 59, was removed from teaching after officials learned he had been indicted in 2006 on genocide charges in Rwanda.
More than a half-million Tutsis and moderate Hutus wer
Source: LAT
Feb 3, 2009
People in AD 1000 may have made drinks from cacao beans, which researchers had believed were brought from Mexico in the 15th century.
Cacao, the staple of Valentine's Day chocolates and hot drinks by a cozy winter fire, made it to the American Southwest by AD 1000, centuries earlier than researchers had believed.
Source: BBC
Feb 3, 2009
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said the Vatican's clarifications over the readmission of a bishop who queries the Holocaust do not go far enough.
"In my opinion these clarifications are not yet sufficient," Mrs Merkel said.
The Vatican says it was unaware of Bishop Williamson's views on the Holocaust when the decision was made to readmit the group.
Source: Telegraph(UK)
Feb 3, 2009
The Vatican has conceded for the first time that it may have made 'errors' in its rehabilitation of a British bishop who questioned the Holocaust.
A senior Vatican official acknowledged that the Holy See made "management errors" with its decision to lift the excommunication of Bishop Richard Williamson, who has said that the Nazis did not use gas chambers to kill and that a maximum of 300,000 Jews, not six million, lost their lives.
Pope Benedict XVI's decisi
Source: http://www.lafayette-online.com
Feb 3, 2009
The connections between presidents Barack Obama and Abraham Lincoln define Obama’s image today, but these associations also influence how Lincoln will continue to be remembered, says a Purdue University historian.
“Lincoln, who was born 200 years ago on Feb. 12, is known as a great speechwriter, thinker and consensus builder,” says Caroline E. Janney, an assistant professor of history who studies Civil War memorials and remembrance. “While people are watching how Obama is following Lincol
Source: The Cutting Edge
Feb 3, 2009
The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, housing millions of books, recordings, photographs, maps and manuscripts. Like many other great research libraries, the Library of Congress has been moving into the digital world.
One way they're doing it is through a scanning project that has so far put 25,000 books online for anyone to read or download.
Doron Weber of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which is funding the $2 million project, stresses the impor
Source: BBC
Feb 3, 2009
It is an iconic images of the Troubles.
The hunched figure of Father - now Bishop - Edward Daly waves a white handkerchief as he attempts to escort marchers carrying the fatally injured Jackie Duddy away from the gunfire during Bloody Sunday.
The 17-year-old became the fourth person to die that day, and the handkerchief - which had been used to staunch his bleeding - was later returned to Jackie's family along with his clothes.
Kept safe by his family fo
Source: NYT
Feb 2, 2009
Stephen I. Zetterberg, a California Democrat whose loss to Richard M. Nixon in a primary race for Congress in 1948 helped propel Nixon’s early career, died on Jan. 30 in Claremont, Calif. He was 92.
The cause was heart failure, his son Charles said.
Nixon, an incumbent in the House of Representatives who had no Republican primary opponent, ran against Mr. Zetterberg in the Democratic primary, as California law then permitted. By defeating him, Nixon effectively won re-e
Source: Slate
Feb 2, 2009
Last week, Slate published an analysis of Elizabeth Cheney's senior thesis from Colorado College, which author Zac Frank discovered in a bin of discarded books at the college's library. Frank found Cheney's 125-page treatise on presidential war powers to be eerily similar to the philosophy of the unitary executive that her father would expound years later as vice president.
At the time this thesis was written, Dick Cheney was Wyoming's lone member in the House of Representatives. Af
Source: USA Today
Feb 2, 2009
The setting was a hidden island filled with pint-size men who feasted on pygmy elephants and battled dragons. The story of paleontology's "Hobbits," the extinct human species called Homo floresiensis, packs plenty of drama.
But the 2003 discovery by an Australian-Indonesian of the undersize bones inside Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores has long also suffered from a modern-day human rivalry. Add in the scientific back-story — a five-year feud over the whether the
Source: Chicago Tribune
Feb 2, 2009
U.S. Rep. John Dingell has received a recount, and it means he'll set a longevity record three days earlier than thought.
The U.S. House historian's office says the 82-year-old Dearborn Democrat will become the longest serving member Feb. 11, 2009. That will be his 19,420th day in office.
The current record-holder is ex-Rep. Jamie Whitten, D-Miss., who died in 1995.
The Congressional Research Service earlier said Dingell would break the record Feb. 14.
Source: USA Today
Feb 2, 2009
Frederick Barron, 17, a senior at North Atlanta High School in Atlanta, says the election of Barack Obama as the first African-American president is making Black History Month come to life.
"Barack Obama is opening our hearts and minds to the true meaning of Black History Month," Barron said. "African Americans won't be viewed as just a minority but as people who make a difference."
Obama's election, and this year's 100th anniversary of the NAACP, me
Source: NPR
Feb 2, 2009
President Obama hopes the proposed $800 billion-plus stimulus package can jump-start the economy and lay the groundwork for long-term prosperity. If it doesn't show immediate results, New York Times columnist David Leonhardt says the state of the economy could end up dominating Obama's term.
Some of the current economic trouble is rooted in what Leonhardt calls "investment deficit disorder."
"I think our economy has been far too dependent on consumption o
Source: History Today
Feb 2, 2009
Two months ago, the body of Wladyslaw Sikorski, the Prime Minister of the Polish government in exile in London during the Second World War, was exhumed in order to find the cause of his mysterious death. Prosecutors were specifically investigating a communist sponsored crime in the belief that he was murdered by the government of the Soviet Union at a time of increasingly tense diplomatic relations between Poland and the Soviet Union. Prior to his death, Sikorski had notably called for an invest
Source: Newsday
Feb 2, 2009
One of three known letters written by Gen. George Washington about his Long Island spy network in the American Revolution is scheduled to be auctioned in Manhattan next week.
Stony Brook University, which already owns one of the historically important letters about the Setauket Spy Ring, is hoping to add a second to its colonial document collection at the Feb. 12 sale by Christie's.
The 1780 letter, owned by an unnamed private collector, was written by the commander of
