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: WaPo
Nov 6, 2008
Seventy-five days and counting -- to "game day," as the military planners call it. Inauguration Day to the rest of us.
It is not a lot of time until Jan. 20, the day Barack Obama will be inaugurated as the nation's first black president.
The congressional committee in charge of the swearing-in announced yesterday that the inaugural theme will come from stirring words spoken by Abraham Lincoln and be linked to the 200th anniversary of his birth next year.
Source: Huffington Post (Blog)
Nov 5, 2008
Now that the 2008 election is over, reporters are spilling all the juciest, and previously off the record, gossip from the campaign trail. Much of it is about the infighting between Palin and McCain's staff, as Newsweek's treasure trove of post-election gossip reveals.
However, perhaps one of the most astounding and previously unknown tidbits about Sarah Palin has to do with her already dubious grasp of geography. According to Fox News Chief Political Correspondent Carl Cameron, the
Source: http://www.birminghampost.net
Nov 5, 2008
The remains of a 19th century Birmingham Cardinal tipped for sainthood are unlikely to have been destroyed by soil acidity in a Worcestershire grave, an expert has said.
Professor John Hunter, from the University of Birmingham, cast doubt on the theory after testing soil from an area near to the Rednal cemetery from which Venerable John Henry Cardinal Newman was exhumed.
The ancient history and archaeology professor said it would be "unusual" to find a body buried i
Source: AP
Nov 5, 2008
The remains of a Marine who disappeared 40 years ago after his helicopter crashed during the Vietnam War have been identified and returned to his family in Southern California.
The Department of Defense said Wednesday that Lance Cpl. Luis Palacios will be buried Friday in Bellflower, about 10 miles south of Los Angeles, with full military honors.
Palacios was killed with 11 other military personnel in 1968 when their helicopter was hit by ground fire and crashed into mo
Source: AP
Nov 5, 2008
The black students who integrated Little Rock Central High School in a harrowing 1957 confrontation that riveted the nation's attention expressed their joy Wednesday in Barack Obama's election as the first black president.
During the campaign, Obama often said he was grateful to the so-called Little Rock Nine and other veterans of the civil rights movement. Wednesday, members of the group said the incoming president was more than welcome.
"I'm so happy today. You c
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Nov 5, 2008
Barack Obama, who won the overwhelming support of college students, faculty members, and higher-education officials during his campaign, will be the next president of the United States. His election on Tuesday breaks a racial barrier, making the U.S. senator from Illinois the first black man to ascend to the nation’s top job.
Mr. Obama, who taught constitutional law as a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago and was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, campaig
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Nov 5, 2008
The 2008 presidential election has broken so many political barriers that historians may overlook one unusual fact: When Barack Obama takes the oath of office next January alongside his running mate, Joe Biden, it will be the first time in history that the president, vice president, and both of their spouses have worked in higher education.
Taken together, the Obamas and the Bidens have amassed decades of experience at colleges and universities. Mr. Obama taught constitutional law a
Source: Times (UK)
Nov 5, 2008
Slave cabins still stand at the Friendfield Plantation in Georgetown, South Carolina. The whitewashed, wooden structures in Slave Street, a sandy track at the back of the plantation owner's house, were once crammed with captive African labourers. No more than sheds really, the cabins have no heating, no glass and no indoor plumbing, and are propped up on brick pillars to keep out flood water and visiting snakes.
The Withers family relied on more than 300 Africans to bring in the ric
Source: Times (UK)
Nov 5, 2008
She had dinner with Bobby Kennedy. Nat King Cole came to her parties. Martin Luther King sent her a telegram when her husband died and she has photographs of herself with his late wife Coretta on her sideboard.
In the early hours of yesterday morning, at the age of 106, she beat her personal best - Barack Obama singled out Ann Nixon Cooper for praise in his acceptance speech to hundreds of thousands of ecstatic supporters in Chicago.
The President-elect spoke of his adm
Source: CNN
Nov 5, 2008
The Rev. Martin Luther King is looking down on the United States, smiling, Otis Sutton said Wednesday.
"That's what he wanted. He'd been preaching that all along," Sutton, 78, said of the nation electing its first African-American president.
Sutton, who has worked on and off at the historic Busy Bee Cafe in Atlanta, Georgia, since it opened in 1947, was baptized by the civil rights icon's father, King Sr. He remembers playing pick-up football games in a
Source: Newsweek
Nov 5, 2008
The good news for President-elect Barack Obama: following George W. Bush is only slightly harder than following Jane Fonda at a Veterans of Foreign Wars rally. The bad news: compared with governing, campaigning is easy.
As much as Obama may want to turn the page and make good on his change mantra during the first hundred days, he might take a moment to read about the Hoover-Roosevelt transition of 1932-33. Or peruse tales of the clumsy Clinton start after the 1992 election. The peri
Source: Reuters
Nov 5, 2008
The Vatican returned a small fragment of the Parthenon Marbles to Greece on Wednesday on a one-year loan, fuelling calls for the British Museum to hand back its own priceless sculptures from the ancient temple.
The loan of the fragment, one of three in the Vatican Museum's vast collection of antiquities, follows a request for its return by Greece's late Orthodox Archbishop Christopoulos at a meeting with Pope Benedict in 2006.
In recent years Greece has stepped up its
Source: BBC
Nov 5, 2008
What should be done with objects from antiquity, when their provenance is uncertain?
From the debate over the British Museum's Elgin Marbles, to the conviction of art dealer Giacomo Medici in 2004 for selling millions of pounds worth of stolen Italian antiquities on the international market, curators face a minefield when acquiring new objects.
Now, the director of the Art Institute in Chicago, James Cuno, has argued that we should not waste time debating what to do wit
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 5, 2008
The grave, which also held 50 tortoise shells, a leopard pelvis and a human foot, is thought to be one of earliest burial sites of a shaman on archeological record and is the first of its kind found in the Middle East, said Leore Grosman, the archeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who led the excavation.
She said that the precise way the shaman, who was about 45 at the time of her death, was buried and the type of objects buried with her suggests her high standing in th
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 5, 2008
The previously unseen photographs were taken by a high ranking Nazi officer who attended the ceremony at Compiegne in Northern France.
Hitler is shown at the peak of his confidence. In one of the photos Goering is seen shaking Hitler's hand. In others he can be seen inspecting a group of high ranking German officers.
They are being auctioned in Ludlow, Shrops.
Richard Westwood-Brookes, Historical Documents Expert from Mullock's Auctioneers, said: "The
Source: Deutsche Welle
Nov 5, 2008
Nearly 70 years after the Nazis' infamous 1938 pogrom against the Jews, German lawmakers reaffirmed Germany's commitment to combating anti-Semitism. But the debate revealed deep party rifts.
Condemning anti-Semitism is something nearly all German politicians agree on, regardless of party ties. And on Tuesday, Nov. 4 -- five days prior to the anniversary of the Night of Broken Glass pogrom -- members from all parliamentary fractions signed a declaration emphasizing Germany's commitme
Source: St. Louis Today
Nov 4, 2008
With an outdated kitchen and living space that measures only about 900 square feet, the modest house at 4420 Ohio Street isn't your typical $400,000 listing. It's what lies beneath the home that excites lovers of St. Louis history, or, in this case, prehistory.
The house sits on Sugar Loaf Mound, the city's last remaining link with the native people who lived here centuries before 1764, when Auguste Chouteau and a band of Creoles landed at the river's edge.
There once
Source: NYT
Nov 4, 2008
No president since before Barack Obama was born has ascended to the Oval Office confronted by the accumulation of seismic challenges awaiting him. Historians grasping for parallels point to Abraham Lincoln taking office as the nation was collapsing into Civil War, or Franklin D. Roosevelt arriving in Washington in the throes of the Great Depression.
The task facing Mr. Obama does not rise to those levels, but that these are the comparisons most often cited sobers even Democrats rejo
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Nov 4, 2008
They rode 'into the jaws of Death, into the mouth of Hell', wrote Tennyson in his poem commemorating the suicidal Charge of the Light Brigade.
Now a remarkable account from one of the soldiers involved in the carnage has surfaced to provide a graphic insight into one of the most glorious failures in British military history.
Private James Olley, who was just 16 at the time of the Crimean War charge, described how he fought on despite being shot in the eye and having h
Source: International Herald Tribune
Nov 4, 2008
It ought to be a seminal moment: As a new president takes office in Washington, the Czech Republic assumes the rotating presidency of the European Union, the first former Soviet bloc country to lead the group of 470 million citizens, and during one of the worst economic conflagrations in a century.
But instead of welcoming the opportunity for this country of 10 million to shepherd the world's biggest trading bloc, the fiery Czech president, Vaclav Klaus, has evoked the Munich Agree
