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: NYT
Oct 1, 2008
The French have always found American elections amusing, in a horror movie sort of way. They grumpily regard the American president as in some unfortunate sense also their own, but they see the campaign through their own cultural lens.
They value sophistication above almost anything, and so they regard their own hyperactive president, Nicolas Sarkozy, with his messy romantic life and model-singer wife, as "Sarko the American."
But this year has been difficult
Source: BBC
Oct 1, 2008
Dr Richard Beeching has become one of the villains of British history for dismantling the railway network in the 1960s. But, Ian Hislop asks, how much did he really change Britain?
In lists of the worst Britons, a physicist from the Isle of Sheppey commonly ranks alongside Richard III, Robert Maxwell and Fred West.
Dr Richard Beeching's crime was to cut 5,000 miles of railway as boss of British Railways, and his sentence is having his surname as a byword for the senseless axi
Source: Canada.com
Oct 1, 2008
Amnesty International appealed to Mexico's President Felipe Calderon Thursday to establish the truth behind a deadly clampdown on student protesters 40 years ago and punish the perpetrators.
The failure to confront the massacre on Oct. 2, 1968, when security forces opened fire on students gathered in the Tlatelolco square in the capital Mexico City, had left a "deep scar" in Mexican society, the rights group said.
The details of that day remain unclear, even t
Source: BBC
Oct 1, 2008
A £1m Treasury note has fetched £78,300, twice the expected price, at an auction in London.
The note, numbered 000008, was issued after World War II in connection with the Marshall Aid Plan.
The Marshall plan was a programme of funding given to Western Europe by the United States to help with recovery after the 1939-45 conflict.
Another £1,000,000 note numbered 000007 was sold for £8,000 in 1977, through a private sale.
Source: BBC
Oct 1, 2008
Newsnight asked you to help decide the UK's greatest and worst post-war prime minister.
We received more than 27,000 votes and below are the results:
1. Winston Churchill
2. Clement Attlee
3. Margaret Thatcher
4. Harold Macmillan
5. Harold Wilson
6. Tony Blair
7. Edward Heath
8. John Major
9. James Callaghan
10. Alec Douglas-Home
11. Anthony Eden
12. Gordon Brown
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Oct 1, 2008
Ink from these bronze wells and the blotter that accompanies them sealed the fate of peoples and nations during the Second World War.
Now the U.S. soldier who liberated them from Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler’s study as a souvenir of his military experiences has put them up for sale.
Bidding began online on Tuesday – an ominous day in history and one in which the bronze desk set played a significant role.
British prime minister Neville Chamberlain used it t
Source: BBC
Oct 1, 2008
Former Manchester United goalkeeper Harry Gregg has been honoured at a ceremony for Britain's unsung heroes.
The 76-year-old's actions in the Munich air crash in 1958 were marked with a Special Recognition award at the Daily Mirror's Pride Of Britain ceremony.
Gregg helped pull a pregnant woman and her daughter, and several team-mates, from the wreckage of the aircraft.
Others to receive awards included Richard Taylor, 59, father of murdered 10-year-old
Source: WaPo
Oct 1, 2008
When the first crowds surge through the doors of the lavish new Capitol Visitor Center this fall, they will be steeped in the saga of American Democracy and greeted with a statue of that pillar of the nation . . . Ephraim McDowell, the pioneering hernia surgeon.
Elsewhere in the glittering tribute to good government, pilgrims will find a bronze of the noted agriculturalist Julius Sterling Morton . . . the founder of Arbor Day!
And what temple to the political life of th
Source: AP
Sep 30, 2008
Taking off on Rosh Hashana and, a week later, the Jewish day of atonement, Yom Kippur, is a fairly recent practice.
The first Jews weren't elected to the House and Senate until the 1840s, and through most of the 19th century, Congress only met from December through the spring. Because lawmakers could not easily return home in those days, they often met on Christmas Day, according to Senate historian Donald Ritchie.
Even after the schedule changed in the 1930s, Congress genera
Source: Science News Daily
Sep 30, 2008
A new analysis of human remains buried at Machu Picchu reinforces the idea that royal retainers from all over the Inca empire were the permanent inhabitants of the famous Peruvian site.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 30, 2008
The band was temporarily disbanded earlier this year when its musicians, all serving marines, were sent off to fight in Afghanistan.
But the Navy has announced the band will not be returning to Dartmouth, and the musicians will be relocated.
Cdre Jake Moores, of the college, said: "It is the end of an era for BRNC to say farewell to our RM band."
Earlier this year it was announced that band members would be deployed to Afghanistan as part of 3 Com
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 30, 2008
The previously unseen letters sent to Mary Clarke went for a total of £24,265 – more than double the pre-sale estimate.
They reveal intimate thoughts of the Princess from her experience of married and Palace life to her feelings about pregnancy.
A letter, in which she wrote of being pregnant with Prince William, fetched £9,200.
In it, she said: "I am still feeling and being ill, well into my fourth month and am at total despair".
Source: NYT
Sep 30, 2008
With his signature mustache, medal-encrusted Soviet marshal’s uniform and determination to be addressed as “Comrade,” the Stalin impersonator Jamil Ziyadaliev should perhaps be out of work in Georgia, a country still reeling from a war with Russia.
But Mr. Ziyadaliev, 64, an avuncular father of two who dresses as Stalin even on days off, insists that business has seldom been better. He is a frequent hired guest at weddings, where he dances to Soviet Katyusha music from World War II.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 30, 2008
Lady Thatcher, who served as prime minister between 1979 and 1990, beat Britain's wartime leader Sir Winston Churchill by 97 votes to 53 in a debate at the party conference in Birmingham.
The two beat Benjamin Disraeli, who was twice prime minister in the 19th century, and Edmund Burke, the 18th century philosopher.
The case for Lady Thatcher was made by John Whittingdale, a current Conservative MP who worked with her in Downing Street.
"She will alway
Source: http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk
Sep 30, 2008
WHEN Matthew McClelland decided to do a spot of gardening at his new house, little did he realise the 2,000 year old mystery which was about to unravel.
Matthew, 28, had just moved into the Chorlton terrace last summer, when he started clearing up the front garden only to find buried deep in the soil ...a skull.
A major police investigation swung into action and when forensic scientists discovered a second jawless cranium the university manager started to worry the fi
Source: http://chronicle.com
Sep 30, 2008
One of the big news stories in Philadelphia this week has to do with the
fallout from a series of controversial exchanges between a city
councilman’s aide and a local broadcast journalist.
The controversy pivots on the fact that the aide, a black woman, held up a
handwritten sign during a council meeting accusing the journalist and his
station, Fox29, of racism. One of the makeshift signs read “Jeff Cole
KKK.” Cole is the journalist in question, and he’d been targeting the
aide, Lat
Source: Canada.com
Sep 30, 2008
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and billionaire Alexander Lebedev plan to set up a new opposition party in Russia as the Kremlin's monopoly on political life strengthens.
The two men say they want the new party to field candidates in the next parliamentary elections in 2011, Mikhail Kuznetsov, the deputy chairman of Gorbachev's Union of Social Democrats, said in a phone interview on Monday in Moscow.
Gorbachev, 77, whose 1980s policy of glasnost or openness helpe
Source: International Herald Tribune
Sep 30, 2008
Joshua B. Jeyaretnam, the opposition politician whose outspokenness and persistence made him Singapore's leading dissident, died Tuesday of a heart attack, family members said.
At the age of 82, recently freed from bankruptcy, Jeyaretnam was preparing another run for Parliament, where he had broken the governing party's monopoly by winning the first opposition seat in 1981.
"We were trying to surmount the last hurdle," said a close friend and political partner
Source: BBC
Sep 30, 2008
A group of retired Gurkhas fighting for the right to settle in Britain have won their immigration test case, their lawyers have said.
Five ex-Gurkhas and the widow of another Gurkha veteran took their case to the High Court in London.
They were challenging immigration rules which said that those who retired from the British Army before 1997 did not have an automatic right to stay.
The judgment could mean some 2,000 Gurkhas being allowed to settle here.
Source: Independent (UK)
Sep 30, 2008
The outgoing Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, has publicly acknowledged for the first time that "almost all" of the territory seized during the Six-Day War in 1967 will have to be given back in return for peace with the Palestinians.
In an interview with Israel's biggest-selling newspaper, Yedhiot Ahronot, in which he underlined the urgent need for an agreement to be reached while the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas remains in office, Mr Olmert warned that the al
