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: BBC
Dec 1, 2008
Rare artefacts from the late Stone Age have been uncovered in Russia.
The site at Zaraysk, 150km south-east of Moscow, has yielded figurines and carvings on mammoth tusks.
The finds also included a cone-shaped object whose function, the authors report in the journal Antiquity, "remains a puzzle".
Source: NYT
Dec 1, 2008
The National Bureau of Economic Research, a panel of academic
economists charged with the official designation of business
cycles, said that the United States economy has been in
recession since December 2007, when economic activity peaked.
Source: AP
Dec 1, 2008
Venice suffered its worst flooding in 22 years on Monday as water in the Renaissance city stood more than 1.5 metres (five feet) deep before beginning to recede.
A change in the direction of the wind helped the "acqua alta" (high water) water start backing down from a high of 1.56 metres (5 feet, 2 inches), the tide monitoring centre said.
Authorities had warned that the sea lapping at the lagoon city threatened to rise to 1.60 metres, a 30-year high mark, and
Source: Breitbart
Dec 1, 2008
Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke said Monday the current economic situation bears "no comparison" to the much deeper crisis of the 1930s Great Depression.
"Well, you hear a lot of loose talk, but let me just ... say, as a scholar of the Great Depression -- and I've written books about the Depression and been very interested in this since I was in graduate school, there's no comparison," Bernanke said in a question period after an address in Austin, Texas.
Source: AP
Dec 1, 2008
Thanks to poor dental hygiene, researchers are getting a more detailed understanding of what people ate thousands of years ago in what is now Peru.
Dental plaque scraped from the teeth of people who lived as much as 9,200 years ago revealed traces of cultivated crops, including squash and beans, according to a report in Monday's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
These ancient people also ate peanuts and a local fruit known as pacay, acc
Source: National Parks Traveler Online
Dec 1, 2008
A lawsuit has been filed in a bid to halt a museum complex from being built on 78 acres surrounded on three sides by Valley Forge National Historical Park.
Bringing the lawsuit Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania was the National Parks Conservation Association, which was joined by residents from the town of Lower Providence Township, Pennsylvania. The filing argues that township planners approved an unlawful zoning ordinance to permit the Ameri
Source: CNN
Dec 1, 2008
Paris, 1948. In the shadow of the Holocaust, the fledgling United Nations meets to adopt one of its first human rights treaties.
Applause shakes the room, cameras flash -- and at the center, a single, tired, unassuming man: Raphael Lemkin.
It was, at last, a victory for a tireless crusader who had fought for his entire life against genocide -- and coined the term that describes the world's most heinous crime.
"This new official world made a solemn pled
Source: International Herald Tribune
Dec 1, 2008
The peace of morning comes to the small village of famous isolation called
Kalaupapa. Breezes rustle the berry bushes.
Myna birds call from treetops to wild pigs below. Life stirs on this spit
of land between the soaring Molokai cliffs and the stretching Pacific
abyss.
The residents who call themselves patients move about in the hours before
the day's few tourists arrive. Here is Danny, who first came here in 1942,
lingering a moment in the peekaboo sun; Ivy, who arrived in 19
Source: Tom Engelhardt at tomdispatch.com
Dec 1, 2008
If you want to catch something of the fears and hopes of Americans right now, go to News.Google.com and try searching for a few words. For instance, put in"FDR" -- the well-known initials of the man who was president four times and took America through the Great Depression and all but the last months of World War II -- and endless screens of references pop up.
The Nationand
Source: ABC News
Dec 1, 2008
Looking back on his eight years in the White House, President George W. Bush pinpointed incorrect intelligence that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction as "biggest regret of all the presidency."
President reflects on the camaraderie in his administration.
"I think I was unprepared for war," Bush told ABC News' Charlie Gibson in an interview airing today on "World News."
"In other words, I didn't campai
Source: AP
Dec 1, 2008
TOKYO — A Japanese general who was fired as head of the air force for suggesting Japan deserves credit, not blame, for its World War II actions stood by his claim Monday.
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Toshio Tamogami was dismissed a month ago for writing an essay that said Asia benefited from imperial Japan's activities before and during the war.
Tamogami defended that position Monday, saying Japan has been unjustly subjected to what he called "the history
Source: LAT
Nov 30, 2008
Everybody knows how President-elect Barack Obama's amazing campaign money machine was dominated by several million regular folks sending in hard-earned amounts under $200, a real sign of his broadbased grassroots support.
Except, it turns out, that's not really true.
In fact, Obama's base of small donors was almost exactly the same percent as George W. Bush's in 2004 -- Obama had 26% and the great Republican satan 25%. Obviously, this is unacceptable to current popular
Source: http://www.freemarketnews.com
Nov 29, 2008
Two tribunals at the centre of efforts to bring war criminals to justice are under threat because of insecurity among staff, the Guardian has learned. The international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR) face losing staff at a record rate, putting existing trials, including that of the former Bosnian Serb president, Radovan Karadzic, in jeopardy, sources inside the tribunals say.
Source: AP
Nov 29, 2008
Among the many challenges Michelle Obama will face as first lady, the biggest may be defining the job.
And therein lies the problem: Her newest high-profile job isn't a job, per se.
America's Founding Fathers made no provision for the first lady in the Constitution, and no formal or official description exists. The first lady is neither elected nor appointed, but comes along with the president, for better or worse.
Nor is she paid for all that's required of
Source: AP
Nov 29, 2008
In the years after World War II, Americans packed up their young families and Army surplus camping gear and headed into the national forests to hunt, fish, and hike. Going to the woods was part of what it meant to be an American.
Today, however, visits to the national forests are off 13 percent.
Top officials at the U.S. Forest Service blame it on circumstances outside their control — rising gas prices, the popularity of video games and the Internet, and an increasingl
Source: AP
Nov 29, 2008
Anne Frank's status as a symbol of the Holocaust has overshadowed the reality of a girl eager to discover the world around her, a close childhood friend said.
Jacqueline van Maarsen said that while the use of Frank's name to fight anti-Semitism had been very effective, it inadvertently made her larger-than-life.
"Anne as a little girl was lost," Van Maarsen said during an interview in Budapest where she was presenting the Hungarian version of her book "My
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 29, 2008
The items are being offered by a British seller via a controversial US-based website, in an enterprise which has been described by the family of one victim as "against common decency".
Adam Walsh, a shop assistant from Beckenham, south-east London, is asking £500 for a poem handwritten and illustrated by Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, which dates from 1981, the year of his arrest. He is serving life for murdering 13 women between 1975 and 1980.
Another item
Source: CNN
Nov 28, 2008
Modern-day pilgrims to Plimoth Plantation have much curiosity about life in the re-creation of an English village from the 1600s and a Native American homesite. But some of the thousands of people who visit daily to get a glimpse of how the first colonials existed and created the Thanksgiving tradition bring with them misconceptions about the Native people.
Paula Peters, of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, said one of the first things she learned when she started working at Plimoth in M
Source: LiveScience
Nov 28, 2008
A friend recently told me that he had finally, in middle age, found his soul mate. She was a woman he barely knew, but he was willing to give up everything to be in her sphere. With glassy eyes, he described how they were special, destined to find each other, and that in coming together they made each other whole.
It was hard to not laugh at my friend's pronouncement of wandering souls crashing together, because most adults are long past that ephemeral kind of love and way into the
Source: BBC
Nov 28, 2008
Around a dozen people are crammed onto the bridge by the River Spree, pointing their cameras through the fence, determined to catch a glimpse of the huge building site where the Palace of the Republic once stood.
"It's a disgrace that they're tearing down the Palace of the Republic, it's an expression of political superiority after the reunification of Germany," one old man said.
"They're destroying a powerful symbol of Berlin's history," he added.
