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: Rep. Jackie Speier in the San Francisco Chronicle
Nov 17, 2008
"I'm 28 years old, and I am about to die."
I was curled up behind the wheel of an airplane on a jungle airstrip in Guyana, South America. This isn't what I expected when I signed on to work for a United States congressman. Our fact-finding trip to investigate the Peoples Temple in Jonestown had gone horribly wrong. I lay as still as I could, pretending to be dead, as an unknown gunman pumped five bullets into me at close range. Pop-pop. Pop. Pop-pop.
When the
Source: National Parks Travel
Nov 17, 2008
When General Robert E. Lee's troops were battling the Union forces at Fredericksburg, Virginia, on December 13, 1862, his cannons atop Lee's Hill and nearby Howison Hill had clear lines of fire.
Those views were made possible by "pioneers," special troop detachments whose jobs entailed building breastworks and clearing trees to provide open lines of fire for the artillery. So good were they at their tasks, and so brutally effective was the cannonry, that the general was he
Source: Time Magazine
Nov 17, 2008
Sometimes those purported to be the best and the brightest are anything but. In the spirit of not making the same mistakes twice, TIME examines some of modern history's less-than-fabulous Cabinet appointments.
[The list includes:]
A. Mitchell Palmer - Attorney General, 1919-1921
Albert Fall - Secretary of the Interior, 1921-1923
Robert McNamara - Secretary of Defense, 1961-1968
Earl Butz - Secretary of Agriculture, 1971-76
Source: York Daily Record
Nov 17, 2008
As the country looks toward the inauguration of Barack Obama, some are wondering how he will fulfill his vow to bring people together, especially after such an angry, bitter campaign.
With race used as wedge issue in the election of 2008, perhaps it's not surprising to hear Obama so often quoting Abraham Lincoln -- another Illinois-lawyer-turned-politician whose presidency changed the way Americans talked about race.
"I think he's taking Lincoln's lead," said
Source: CNN
Nov 17, 2008
An extensive federal report released Monday concludes that roughly one in four of the 697,000 U.S. veterans of the 1990-91 Gulf War suffer from Gulf War illness.
That illness is a condition now identified as the likely consequence of exposure to toxic chemicals, including pesticides and a drug administered to protect troops against nerve gas.
The 452-page report states that "scientific evidence leaves no question that Gulf War illness is a real condition with real
Source: International Herald Tribune
Nov 17, 2008
Before there were call centers and Indian conglomerates, before the East India Co. or the British Raj, there were Armenians who made their way to India to trade and to escape religious persecution from the Turks and, later, Persians.
Entrepreneurial and devout Christians, but familiar with the Islamic ways of Mughal emperors, Armenians arrived in northeast India in the early 1600s, some 60 years before British adventurers became established traders here. They acquired gems, spices a
Source: International Herald Tribune
Nov 17, 2008
To conservative critics, a popular textbook's version of how U.S. and Soviet forces took control of Korea from Japanese colonialists in 1945 exemplifies all that's wrong with how South Korean history is taught to young people today.
The facts no one disputes are that, at the end of World War II, the Soviet military swept into northern Korea and installed a friendly Communist government while a U.S. military administration assumed control in the south.
But then the high
Source: International Herald Tribune
Nov 17, 2008
Of all the right angles that have been built at ground zero in the last three years, of all the places where steel meets steel at 90 degrees, there is no more meaningful angle right now than the one that defines a corner of the north pool of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.
It visibly defines part of the outline of 1 World Trade Center - a void left in the city fabric after the attack of Sept. 11, 2001.
"Sculptors talk about how the sculpture is alrea
Source: S.F. Chronicle
Nov 16, 2008
Thirty years ago, two unimaginable tragedies jolted San Francisco in less than a fortnight.
On Nov. 18, 1978, more than 900 men, women and children - many of them poor African Americans from San Francisco - died after drinking a cyanide-laced potion in Peoples Temple founder Jim Jones' compound in the jungles of Guyana.
Then, while San Francisco struggled to grasp the enormity of that tragedy, on Nov. 27 a fiercely conservative ex-supervisor named Dan White assassinated
Source: http://www.ledger-enquirer.com
Nov 16, 2008
The job is simple, repetitive, fascinating: Get in the car. Drive. Find a Civil War historical marker. Note its condition, location, etc.
Return to car. Repeat the process 900-plus times.
That's OK with Will Hanley. With rental car, computer and maps, the 28-year-old Savannah resident is compiling an inventory of Civil War markers across Georgia. Working for the Georgia Historical Society, Hanley is finding signs on roadsides and in state parks, in the blanket-flat reaches of
Source: NYT
Nov 16, 2008
Deep below the Egyptian desert, archaeologists have found evidence of yet another pyramid, this one constructed 4,300 years ago to store the remains of a pharaoh’s mother. That makes 138 pyramids discovered here so far, and officials say they expect to find more.
Tourists will, no doubt, care.
Egyptians probably will not, unless they work in tourism.
But for citizens and foreigners alike, there is no escaping the truth that Egypt is inextricably linked in t
Source: AP
Nov 16, 2008
DALLAS — A Texas museum hopes a document found in its archives turns out to be an authentic government copy of Abraham Lincoln's eloquent letter consoling a mother thought to have lost five sons in the Civil War.
The famed Bixby Letter, which the Dallas Historical Society is getting appraised as it prays for a potential windfall, has a fascinating history.
The original has never been found. Historians debate whether Lincoln wrote it. Its recipient, Lydia Bixby, was no f
Source: Rasmussen Reports
Nov 16, 2008
The Rasmussen Consumer Index, which measures the economic confidence of consumers on a daily basis, fell a point to match its all-time low on Sunday. At 62.3, the Consumer Index is down five points from a week ago and down nine points from a month ago. The record low was set last Wednesday, November 12, surpassing a previous record set in mid-October.
Source: Chicago Tribune
Nov 16, 2008
Betty Shoemaker has seen all this before: a stock market crash, banks going bust, families cast out of their homes.
She was only 5 years old in 1929, when the nation fell into the long economic cataclysm that came to be known as the Great Depression. But she remembers clearly her father's despair at losing his accounting job, the misery of Logan Square neighbors evicted onto the street, her own shame at receiving food from public aid.Experts say safeguards developed since the 1930s
Source: AP
Nov 16, 2008
The men bound the thumbs of dozens of suspected communists behind their backs with banana leaves and drove them to a torch-lit jungle clearing. As villagers jeered, the prisoners were killed, one by one.
"There was no resistance," remembers Sulchan, then the 21-year-old deputy commander of an Islamic youth militia. "All of them had their throats cut with a long sword."
Sulchan was a killer in one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century, where up
Source: AP
Nov 16, 2008
When Gunnar Bergstrom was a guest of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge regime in August 1978, the young Swede enjoyed a dinner of oysters and fish hosted by dictator Pol Pot.
The meal followed a rare interview he and three of his countrymen were given by the secretive communist leader who labeled talk about genocide under his rule a Western lie.
The young European leftists, members of an unofficial friendship delegation, shared Pol Pot's view, seeing the Khmer Rouge takeover as a
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 16, 2008
Cynthia Roberts, 72, who stood as a Labour Parliamentary candidate, allegedly spied for the Czech Government when the country was controlled by the Soviet Union.
Documents obrained by the Mail on Sunday purport to show that she worked for the Communists under the codename Agent Hammer.
The files, held by the Czech security service, claim that she wrote secret dossiers for the communist regime on Tory politicians including Margaret Thatcher and ex-Cabinet Minister Davi
Source: WaPo
Nov 16, 2008
In the public imagination, the Depression was a galvanizing time, the crucible in which the Greatest Generation came of age and came together. That is, at best, only partly true. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam has found that, for many, the Depression was isolating: Kiwanis clubs, PTAs, and other social groups lost around half their members from 1930 to 1935. And other studies on economic hardship suggest that it tends to sap people's civic engagement, often permanently.
&
Source: WaPo
Nov 16, 2008
The 2008 presidential election ended less than two weeks ago, but the mythmaking machine has already begun to churn. President-elect Barack Obama transformed the face of the electorate! The Republican Party will be a miserable minority in Congress for the next century! Cats and dogs are now living together! Below we explode the five biggest myths that have already sprung up around the election that was.....
2. A wave of black voters and young people was the key to Obama's victory.
Source: AFP
Nov 15, 2008
Too poor and too few, Poland's several thousand Jews lack the resources to preserve their heritage, still in jeopardy after the destruction wrought by the Nazis and decades of communism.
"It's urgent. If we don't react now, in 10 years there will be even more ruins," laments Monika Krawczyk, head of the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland (FODZ).
Prior to World War II some 10,000 synagogues and houses of worship served Poland's communi
