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: Slate
Nov 21, 2008
Quite a bit. Every four years, Congress appropriates money to maintain and redecorate the 132-room executive mansion. (George W. and Laura Bush were allocated $100,000 for the president's second term.) For the living quarters, which are located on the top two floors, the first family has significant leeway. It usually falls to the president's wife to supervise paint jobs and to acquire new furniture, wall hangings, and bedding. If, however, the president's family wants to alter the appearance of
Source: http://www.wyff4.com
Nov 21, 2008
Bob Jones University issued a statement Thursday apologizing for the school's "failures" in policies toward race relations during its 81-year history.The Greenville, S.C., university did not admit black students until 1971. The school also maintained a prohibition on interracial dating between students until 2000. Bob Jones III, the grandson of the school's founder and namesake, announced the lifting of the interracial dating ban in an interview on CNN's Larry King program in March 20
Source: CNN
Nov 21, 2008
A U.S. soldier convicted of rape and murder two decades ago will be executed December 10 in the nation's first military execution since 1961, the Army said Thursday.
Pvt. Ronald Gray has been on the military's death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, since 1988. A court-martial panel sitting at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, unanimously convicted him of committing two murders and other crimes in the Fayetteville, North Carolina, area, and sentenced him to death.
Gray's exec
Source: Guardian (UK)
Nov 21, 2008
To the untrained eye the damage is barely visible. Yet within the handbound pages of books charting how Europeans travelled to Mesopotamia, Persia and the Mogul empire from the 16th century onwards, the damage caused by one Iranian academic to a priceless British Library collection is irreversible.
Leading scholars at the library are at a loss to explain why Farhad Hakimzadeh, a Harvard-educated businessman, publisher and intellectual, took a scalpel to the leaves of 150 books that
Source: BBC
Nov 21, 2008
The Europeana website was attracting more than 10 million hits an hour - more than double the number which had been anticipated.
The site includes paintings, photos, films, books, maps and manuscripts from 1,000 museums, national libraries and archives across Europe.
It is expected to reopen in December after technological improvements.
Source: AP
Nov 21, 2008
As Barack Obama considers whether to include former rival Hillary Clinton in his Cabinet, the president-elect is emulating his role model, Abraham Lincoln, who boldly put political adversaries in his Cabinet, hoping to forge a strong presidency through the heat of conflicting ideas.
But historians argue that Lincoln's model, described in the best-selling book "Team of Rivals," by Doris Kearns Goodwin, is a high-risk strategy for Obama, one that could alienate his allies an
Source: AP
Nov 21, 2008
SOFIA, Bulgaria – Archaeologists have unearthed an elaborately decorated 1,800-year-old chariot sheathed in bronze at an ancient Thracian tomb in southeastern Bulgaria, the head of the excavation said Friday. "The lavishly ornamented four-wheel chariot dates back to the end of the second century A.D.," Veselin Ignatov told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from the site, near the southeastern village of Karanovo...
The bronze-plated wooden chariot is decorated
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 21, 2008
More than 4,000 years after the settlement was eventually abandoned, researchers have unearthed the remains of houses built of wood and unbaked clay, together with pottery vases, ovens and stone tools, the Culture Ministry announced Thursday.
The Neolithic-era finds were discovered during work to lay a gas pipe near the village of Vassili in Thessaly, 170 miles north of Athens.
Thessaly's fertile plains attracted some of Greece's first farmers, and the ruins of more tha
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Nov 21, 2008
Soviet spymasters tried to force a top British scientist to defect at during the height of the Cold War, he revealed today.
Sir Bernard Lovell, the man behind the pioneering Jodrell Bank observatory, said he had acted as a secret adviser to the British military and was prevented from leaving the Soviet Union during a landmark visit in the 1960s.
And the 95-year-old revealed in an interview that he secretly modified the design of the iconic Lovell radio telescope at the
Source: BBC
Nov 21, 2008
Dr Gerald Toben was held last month at Heathrow Airport on a European arrest warrant.
The revisionist historian was accused of publishing anti-Semitic material on the internet.
The German authorities have now dropped an appeal to the High Court after Britain refused to hand him over.
The case against him is now closed and Mr Toben is waiting to get his passport back from the British authorities.
Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany and of
Source: BBC
Nov 21, 2008
In Washington, Kara Weipz of the Victims of Pan Am Flight 103 group told reporters Libya had "finally fulfilled 100% justice" by paying compensation.
Libya paid $1.5bn (£1bn) in October into a fund for victims of the 1988 bombing, which killed 270 people.
It cleared the last hurdle to restoring full diplomatic relations with the US.
"Until today, Libyan officials claimed it had long fulfilled justice to the families," said Ms Weipz, w
Source: BBC
Nov 21, 2008
HMHS Britannic was completed at Belfast's Harland and Wolff shipyard two years after Titanic was lost in 1912. But she in turn went to the bottom, the victim of enemy action in the First World War.
BBC News correspondent Mike McKimm joined a Greek scientific expedition and dived to the Britannic to bring back dramatic footage of one of the world's biggest wrecks.
And the expedition also set out to try to discover what sank the vessel. Was it a torpedo or a mine?
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Nov 21, 2008
The Battle of Antietam left 23,100 soldiers wounded or killed in the bloodiest single-day conflict in American history. Rifles downed most of the soldiers, but a pair of geologists say they have found an unexpected accomplice: limestone.
A survey of the 25 bloodiest battles of the Civil War by Robert C. Whisonant and Judy Ehlen, both geologists at Radford University, has found a correlation between high casualties and the Civil War's terra firma.
"Military people h
Source: National Parks Traveler Online
Nov 20, 2008
The National Park Service, working directly with the Presidential Inauguration Committee, is making elaborate preparations to host what may very well be the biggest crowd ever to gather in Washington, D.C.
On January 20 as many as four million people are expected to descend on the National Mall & Memorial Parks to witness Barack Obama's inauguration as the 44th President of the United States. Hordes of spectators will cram the National Mall to witness the swearing-in ceremony th
Source: AP
Nov 20, 2008
No matter how careful he is, sooner or later President-elect Barack Obama is likely to make a bum nomination or two.
"It's unavoidable," says Paul Light, a New York University professor and expert on presidential transitions.
It may happen because a nominee has lied about his or her background to Obama's team, or because something that was dismissed as minor turns out to be a big deal.
Whatever the reason, "These things are likely to pop up a
Source: Brown Daily Herald (RI)
Nov 20, 2008
The shiny metal "torpedo" seemed out of place in the daylight of the Main Green. So too did the men and women gathered around it wearing ivy wreaths and carrying spice "offerings."
A standard-bearer marched to the beat of a snare drum as four young men carried the artifact on two support beams, as if carrying a ritual sacrifice to an altar.
The torpedo - in reality, a time capsule - was ceremoniously buried Wednesday morning beneath Rhode Island Ha
Source: NYT
Nov 20, 2008
Lawmakers may yet be back next month, but for now the meager results show why lame-duck sessions often do not work. And why some historians and scholars of Congress, not to mention some of the most prominent lawmakers over history, think that calling such sessions lame is overly generous....
“Lame-duck sessions are poor excuses for sloppy, secretive legislation,” John B. Oakes wrote in an Op-Ed in The New York Times after the 1982 session. “The latest was not only unnecessary but de
Source: Spiegel Online
Nov 20, 2008
Germany's national postal service has been forced to stop selling a coin commemorating former East Germany's Communist Party in the face of protests.
The silver disc, included in a new 36-piece collection called 60 German Years, attracted fierce criticism from politicians due to its celebration of the union of two political parties into the grouping that ruled East Germany with an iron grip.
The Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) was formed on April 22, 1946, from t
Source: AP
Nov 20, 2008
Retired Dallas police detective Jim Leavelle still gets letters from strangers because of that 1963 photo of him standing next to Lee Harvey Oswald.
You know — THAT photo.
"Most just want autographs," Leavelle said."One asked what affect the Kennedy assassination had on my life. The usual."
As the nation marks the 45th anniversary Saturday of the Kennedy assassination, the 88-year-old Leavelle remains one of the investigation's most famous figures.
Source: McClatchy Newspapers
Nov 20, 2008
WASHINGTON — The risks of a nuclear weapon being used and wars being fought over dwindling resources will grow during the next 20 years as diminishing U.S. power, a shift of wealth from West to East, the rise of India and China and climate change reshape the world, a new U.S. intelligence study warned Thursday.
"The international system — as constructed following the Second World War — will be almost unrecognizable by 2025 owing to the rise of emerging powers, a globalizing eco
