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: MSNBC
Dec 16, 2008
“No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States,” reads Article I of the Constitution.
Yet with their fondness for political dynasties, American voters have created their own notion of modern nobility: families such as the Kennedys, the Rockefellers, the Bushes, and the Bidens who win political office generation after generation.
Eleven current members of the Senate are the children of former senators or governors, or the spouses of former senators, governo
Source: Reuters
Dec 16, 2008
ASHGABAT, Turkmenistan -– All references to Saparmurat Niyazov, the late autocratic leader of Turkmenistan, have been dropped from the Central Asian state's national anthem.
The parliament adopted a law changing the anthem Monday...
In the revised anthem, all three references to "Turkmenbashi" -- Niyazov's title meaning "the head of all Turkmens" -- have been replaced with "the people," according to a text of the revised anthem obtained by
Source: Washington Post
Dec 16, 2008
Barack Obama has evoked Abraham Lincoln ever since launching his campaign at the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Ill.
Now he plans to arrive in Washington the same way that Lincoln did in 1861, with a train trip that will include stops, speeches and crowds along the way.
On Jan. 17, Obama and his family will start the day with an appearance in Philadelphia, where they will board a chartered Amtrak train. The train will stop in Wilmington, Del., where the Obamas will b
Source: Politico.com
Dec 16, 2008
President-elect Obama has already broken White House records for the number of top Hispanic officials, and is expected to name two more in the next day or two, according to transition officials.
“Based on what I can cull from records, we have more Hispanics in senior positions in this White House than under either President Bush or President Clinton,” incoming White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said in an interview.
Source: LAT
Dec 16, 2008
Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that he was directly involved in approving severe interrogation methods used by the CIA, and that the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, should remain open indefinitely.
Cheney's remarks on Guantanamo appear to put him at odds with President Bush, who has expressed a desire to close the prison, although the decision is expected to be left to the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama.
Cheney's comments also mark the f
Source: NYT
Dec 16, 2008
In state capitals across the country, a select group of Americans who make up the Electoral College met on Monday to cement President-elect Barack Obama’s victory, in a year when new figures showed that voter turnout reached its highest level since 1968.
In a quadrennial ritual that has been criticized by some as an outdated part of the American political system, 538 electors, chosen for their party loyalty, cast their votes on Monday. Mr. Obama was expected to receive 365 votes to
Source: Deutsche Welle
Dec 16, 2008
Roman soldiers were famously defeated by Germanic tribesmen at the Battle of Teutoberg Forest in 9 A.D. However, a newly discovered battlefield near Kalefeld-Oldenrode is even farther north than the Teutoberg Forest and appears to date from between 180 and 260 A.D., according to a report by the Associated Press news agency.
Archaeologists held a press conference on Monday, Dec. 15, to announce that they had used coins and weapons excavated from the area to date the battlefield.
Source: BBC
Dec 16, 2008
A 105-year-old Dutch entertainer has lost his libel lawsuit over claims that he sang for Nazi guards at the Dachau concentration camp during World War II.
Johannes Heesters had been seeking a retraction from German author Volker Kuehn who made the claims.
But a German judge said that although this could no longer be proven, there was enough evidence to suggest that Mr Heesters appeared on stage at the camp.
Mr Heesters does admit visiting Dachau, and tha
Source: New Yorker
Dec 15, 2008
The single, blinding release of pure energy over Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945, marked a startling and permanent break with our prior understandings of the visible world. Yet for more than sixty years the technology behind the explosion has remained a state secret. The United States government has never divulged the engineering specifications of the first atomic bombs, not even after other countries have produced generations of ever more powerful nuclear weapons. In the decades since the S
Source: FoxNews.com
Dec 15, 2008
Newly declassified White House documents shed light on a unique crisis in
American history: when investigators working for President Richard Nixon
discovered that the Joint Chiefs of Staff used a stenographer to spy on
civilian command during the Vietnam War.
A Navy stenographer assigned to the National Security Council during the
Nixon administration"stole documents from just about every individual
that he came into contact with on the NSC," according to newly
declassified White Ho
Source: International Herald Tribune
Dec 15, 2008
Armed with a bottle of Egyptian brandy and a bowl of steaming chickpeas,
Hatem Fouad keeps watch each night over a historic slice of Cairo that is
in danger of dying: the bars that once flourished amid the sweeping
boulevards and graceful roundabouts of the city's European-style city
center.
The former police officer is part of a cadre of older Egyptian men who
frequent drinking holes and belly dancing cabarets chronicled by the Nobel
Prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz in the 1940s
Source: AP
Dec 15, 2008
ANKARA, Turkey — A group of about 200 Turkish intellectuals on Monday issued an apology on the Internet for the World War I-era massacres of Armenians in Turkey.
The group of prominent academics, journalists, writers and artists avoided using the contentious term "genocide" in the apology, using the less explosive "Great Catastrophe" instead.
"My conscience does not accept that (we) remain insensitive toward and deny the Great Catastrophe that t
Source: Reuters
Dec 15, 2008
U.S. military operations, including the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, have cost $904 billion since 2001 and could top $1.7 trillion by 2018, even with big cuts in overseas troop deployments, a report said on Monday.
A new study released by the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, or CSBA, said the Iraq conflict's $687 billion price tag alone now exceeds the cost of every past U.S. war except for World War II, when expenditures are adjusted for inflation.
Source: JTA
Dec 15, 2008
When the threat of a new boycott against Israeli academics emerged from the annual conference of the British University and College Union of lecturers’ conference in May, Israel supporters turned to London attorney Anthony Julius.
Well known for his hard line against anti-Semitism disguised as criticism of Israel, Julius went on the attack.
He promised free legal assistance to any academic affected by the threatened boycott, and wrote the union’s general secretary that
Source: Politico.com
Dec 15, 2008
Simply put, some scholars think the comparisons have gone a bit over the top hat.
Sean Wilentz, a scholar in American history at Princeton, said many presidents have sought to frame themselves in the historical legacies of illustrious predecessors, but he couldn't find any examples quite so brazen.
"Sure, they've looked back to Washington and even, at times, Jackson. Reagan echoed and at times swiped FDR's rhetoric," said Wilentz. "But there's never been
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Dec 15, 2008
From Elizabeth Taylor to Sophia Loren, there have been many faces of Cleopatra. But this might be the most realistic of them all.
Egyptologist Sally Ann Ashton believes the computer-generated 3D image is the best likeness of the legendary beauty famed for her ability to beguile.
Pieced together from images on ancient artefacts, including a ring dating from Cleopatra's reign 2,000 years ago, it is the culmination of more than a year of painstaking research.
Source: International Herald Tribune
Dec 15, 2008
Half a century ago, six men with no sailing experience climbed aboard an
aging Chinese junk in Taiwan and survived a typhoon that nearly wrecked
the little ship. But after sailing nearly 7,000 miles, or about 11,000
kilometers, across the Pacific, they were greeted by cheering crowds as
they sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge.
Now that turn-of-the-century junk, which experts say may be the last
salvageable vessel of its type, could be destroyed if it does not find a
permanent home
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Dec 15, 2008
Their orders in the spring of 1942 were to transport tons of weapons, ammunition and fuel across some of the wildest and highest terrain on the planet, quickly christened "the hump" by the pilots, to supply nationalist forces in China after invading Japanese had cut the Burma Road that had been their logistics lifeline.
Hundreds of aircrew perished when their planes crashed into mountains in bad weather or were shot down over thick jungles where their remains have lain fo
Source: BBC
Dec 15, 2008
An internet petition has been launched in Turkey, apologising for the"great catastrophe of 1915" when hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Armenians died. Armenians and many international historians describe as "genocide" the massacres and deaths during a forced deportation from eastern Turkey.
Turkey firmly denies that, saying those killed were just victims of war.
The petition - the first of its kind - was initiated by prominent Turkish academics and newspa
Source: WaPo
Dec 14, 2008
Two rural churches in upper Fauquier County, Emmanuel Episcopal and Cool Spring United Methodist, are celebrating their 150th anniversaries this year. Their beginnings go even further back, to 1769, when the Virginia legislature created the Anglican parish of Leeds, acknowledging the growth that had occurred in Fauquier's western sliver.
