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: AP
Oct 12, 2008
The announcement came in 1800 in the back of a Connecticut newspaper just above a farmer's reward for a stray cow. A man named Noah Webster was proposing the first comprehensive "dictionary of the American language."
Webster was mocked and scorned for challenging the King's English. About 60 percent of the country spoke English at the time, while others spoke German, Swedish and Dutch. Even among English speakers, regional dialects were strong.
A teacher afte
Source: International Herald Tribune
Oct 12, 2008
Survivors, relatives and tourists remembered victims of the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings on their sixth anniversary Sunday by lighting candles and laying wreaths in two small but emotional ceremonies on the resort island.
Many of the 100 people who participated in the 45-minute memorial at the site of the bombings, which killed 202 people, were moved to tears. Others were frustrated by delays in plans to execute three Islamic militants found guilty of planning and helping orchestrat
Source: Times (UK)
Oct 12, 2008
Tony Blair personally ordered an exemption for motor racing from a tobacco sponsorship ban after Labour received a secret £1m donation from Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula One boss.
New documents released under the Freedom of Information Act show he demanded a change of policy within hours of a meeting with Ecclestone on October 16, 1997, and his aides went on to blur the truth.
The affair was the first sleaze scandal of the new Labour era. At its height, Blair feared
Source: Observer (UK)
Oct 12, 2008
A lawyer running the Omagh civil case against several suspected Real IRA leaders has challenged the Northern Ireland Assembly to press Gordon Brown to give his legal team secret GCHQ surveillance transcripts of the bombers.
Jason McCue, whose firm H20 is behind the civil action, said the best thing the assembly could achieve for Omagh victims and their families would be to issue a united call for the Prime Minister to release the intercepts of conversations between the Real IRA plo
Source: Mail on Sunday (UK)
Oct 12, 2008
The Government body responsible for maintaining the nation's historic monuments has been forced to withdraw a children's guide to Stonehenge because it was littered with factual errors.
The book, called The Ghastly Book Of Stonehenge, has become a laughing stock among archaeologists because of its many blunders.
English Heritage, which receives £129million a year in Government funding, has recalled 4,500 copies of the £3 book and now plans to pulp them.
A s
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 12, 2008
The remote kiosk was put up in the 1960s when the Post Office gave permission for it to be painted black and white to blend in with its surroundings in the village of Achfary, on the duke's Reay Forest Estate in Sutherland.
The duke, who is godfather to Prince William and was named by Forbes magazine this year as the world's 46th richest man, is a regular visitor to the remote Highland sporting estate.
The phone box was converted to take cards only two years ago and i
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 12, 2008
"Azincourt" – the French name for Agincourt – has achieved something most serious historians can only dream of by selling 13,000 copies in five days.
The book has rocketed to the top of book charts with readers enjoying the story of the battle between the English and French in 1415 told with a bit of literary licence.
Its popularity echoes that of Shakespeare's version, which has kept the battle alive in the public imagination for centuries.
Azinc
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 12, 2008
The Nationalist MSP Christine Grahame has lodged a motion in parliament calling for the monarch's remains to be buried in Scotland.
The move to repatriate the Catholic monarch has the backing of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, historians and the composer James MacMillan.
Mary, who was born at Linlithgow Palace, fled to England after she was forced to abdicate in 1567. She was held prisoner by her cousin Elizabeth I, found guilty of treason and executed at Fotheri
Source: Terry Teachout in the WSJ (click on the link to listen to select audiotapes.)
Oct 11, 2008
Archeophone Records, a wonderfully adventurous Illinois-based label that specializes in exhuming long-forgotten but fascinating sound recordings of the past, has done historians of American politics an inestimable service by releasing "Debate '08: Taft and Bryan Campaign on the Edison Phonograph," which contains all 22 of the speeches recorded by the two men for Edison in 1908. (You can order it by going to www.archeophone.com.) If you have th
Source: NYT
Oct 11, 2008
THREE weeks to Election Day and polls project a victory, possibly a big one, for Barack Obama.
Yet everywhere, anxious Democrats wring their hands. They’ve seen this Lucy-and-the-football routine before, and they’re just waiting for their ball to be snatched away, the foiled Charlie Browns again. Remember how the exit polls in 2004 predicted President Kerry?
The anxiety is more acute this year, because Senator Obama is the first African-American major-party presidential
Source: National Parks traveler Online
Oct 11, 2008
First Ladies National Historic Site, which was established on October 11, 1980, has a prime location in Canton, Ohio, yet attracts scarcely more than 10,000 visitors a year. Why is that, and does it really matter?
There are lots of national parks, including not a few historic sites, whose annual attendance is low enough to raise eyebrows. These units are in the National Park System despite visitor appeal factors, not because of them. We justify their existence as national parks beca
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Oct 11, 2008
For years, Quinten Massys' portrait of 'An Old Woman' in the National Gallery [in London] has captivated audiences with her unattractive looks.
Looking at her upturned nose, wrinkled cleavage and beady eyes, one would wonder why the Flemish artist would choose to paint such an ugly woman.
After much investigation and debate, art experts believe they have found out why the woman looked like she did and have authenticated the masterpiece.
Medical research on
Source: AP
Oct 11, 2008
Baruch Milch was hiding from the Nazis in occupied Poland in the summer of 1943. His wife and 3-year-old son had been killed in Hitler's Holocaust.
All the Jewish doctor had was his diary — a chronicle he hoped would help "take this huge weight off my heart and off my soul." Over 1,600 pages of thin copybooks and slips of paper, he scrupulously recorded his feelings.
Now, his Israeli-born daughter wants Warsaw's Jewish History Institute to hand over the journa
Source: Independent (UK)
Oct 11, 2008
The last remaining treasures of the French royal family – including a silk purse embroidered by Queen Marie Antoinette in her prison cell – will be auctioned in Paris next week. The objects, including jewellery, paintings, miniatures and furniture, are the remnants of one of the greatest royal fortunes in Europe, diminished first by revolution and, more recently, by scandal. The auction is also the latest chapter in a dispute that broke in 1999 upon the death of the pretender to the French thron
Source: Deutsche Welle
Oct 11, 2008
A German Waffen-SS batallion stationed in neighbouring Chatellerault was responsible for the attack during World War II, Le Figaro reported, quoting prosecutor Ulrich Maass on Saturday, Oct. 11.
"I received the translation of the testimonies in the archives, and they are very interesting," he told the paper. "I am practically sure that the SS battalion based at Chatellerault, as has already been suspected, was responsible for the massacre."
Maass has
Source: Times (UK)
Oct 11, 2008
Schoolchildren are celebrating, commentators are astonished and purists are fuming over what they describe as a scandalous attack on 500 years of French history.
In the most sweeping linguistic reform in France for centuries, Le Petit Robert, the nation's premier dictionary, has cast aside tradition to allow alternative spellings for thousands of words. Accents have become optional, consonants can be doubled on a whim and hyphens will float in and out of literary texts under the ch
Source: Guardian (UK)
Oct 11, 2008
Seventy years have passed since they marched out of Barcelona amid crowds of weeping, cheering Spaniards, but it is only now that the last few British volunteers who fought in Spain against General Franco's fascist-backed rebels are finally to be rewarded by the Spanish state.
The handful of British survivors from the 2,300 men and women in the International Brigades during the civil war are now in their 90s or have passed 100, and most are physically frail.
They still
Source: Deutsche Welle
Oct 11, 2008
The move to change the spelling of the name, which reads as “Kopernik” in Polish and “Kopernikus” in German, reportedly came at the insistence of European Commission Vice President Guenter Verheugen, a German.
Poles have consequently accused the commission of Germanizing the name of the father of astronomy, Nicolas Copernicus.
But there is more to the matter than simply a few letters. Copernicus' nationality has since long been a source of argument between Germans and
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 11, 2008
Mr Haider, 58, who earned worldwide notoriety for making statements sympathetic to Hitler's Nazi regime, suffered fatal head and chest injuries after the car he was driving plunged down an embankment near his home town of Klagenfurt.
Detectives are still investigating the cause of the crash, but said he was driving alone at the time in a government-owned vehicle.
The death of Mr Haider, who was governor of Carinthia province in southern Austria, comes less than a fort
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 11, 2008
He also dismisses the notion that his theories were difficult to understand as "twaddle".
Einstein's correspondent, the psychoanalyst Walter Marseille, had suggested an idea of a world government in a paper entitled "A Method to Enforce World Peace".
Einstein wrote in correspondence in 1948: "Better to let Russia see that there is nothing to be achieved by aggression, but there are advantages in joining [a world government]: Then the Russian r
