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: Media Matters (liberal watchdog group)
Sep 4, 2008
On the September 3 broadcast of San Francisco radio station KSFO's The Lee Rodgers Show, Rogers said of Takeru Kobayashi, six-time winner of the Nathan's Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest in Coney Island, New York, "Just eat, eat, eat, and you gain no weight. Oh, there is no justice. God needs to take a hand in this." Co-host Tom Benner, known as "Officer Vic," agreed and added: "Even things out. Wait, that's socialism, I'm sorry. Forget it."
Source: BBC
Sep 4, 2008
The Paralympics have come a long way from its humble beginnings as a
rehabilitation programme for British war veterans with spinal injuries.
Back in 1948, Sir Ludwig Guttman, a neurologist who was working with World
War II veterans with spinal injuries at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in
Aylesbury, began using sport as part of the rehabilitation programmes of
his patients.
He set up a competition with other hospitals to coincide with the London
Olympics in that year.
Over t
Source: BBC
Sep 4, 2008
Germany has introduced a new multiple-choice citizenship test that every
immigrant has to pass to gain a German passport.
Across the country, schools and adult education centres have already
started offering citizenship classes.
As well as taking the test - introduced on 1 September - migrants must
fulfil other conditions such as having sufficient command of the German
language, no criminal record and an income independent of social welfare
At a school in Berlin's Reinickend
Source: Telegraph
Sep 4, 2008
Polish prosecutors say they want access to classified British documents
after they launched an investigation into the death of Poland's wartime
leader General Wladsylaw Sikorski.
Investigators at Poland's Institute for National Remembrance, the body
charged with probing crimes committed during the war, want to determine
whether the general, who was also Polish prime minister, died in accident
or was assassinated.
General Sikorski died in July 1943 when his RAF Liberator bomb
Source: Robert Schlesinger at his US News blog
Sep 4, 2008
One sign of a historic figure's greatness is the quotations that are incorrectly attributed to him. Take Abraham Lincoln. Speaking to the Republican National Convention this evening, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee attributed to Lincoln the sentiment that a government big enough to give you anything you want is also big enough to take everything you have.
It's a great quote...but I'm pretty sure it's not Lincoln's.
This much I know as a certainty: Gerald Ford said it
Source: NYT
Sep 4, 2008
How do you vet a veep? Carefully, very carefully. Or so Senator John McCain may have learned. Disclosures about his hastily selected running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, seem to have caught his Republican campaign for the White House off-guard.
Whether or not Mr. McCain did his due diligence remains to be seen — is there a news organization or Democratic opposition researcher not rummaging through Ms. Palin’s life? — but the perils of a cursory background check for the White Ho
Source: NYT
Sep 4, 2008
Senator John McCain’s Republican primary campaign looked all but hopeless. He had risked the wrath of his party to push for an immigration overhaul and now, just months before the Iowa caucuses, his grand compromise was falling apart on the Senate floor as well.
“Lindsey, my boy, this may bring us down,” Mr. McCain said, turning to his friend Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina. “But wasn’t it fun?”
By this spring, when Mr. McCain had astounded politica
Source: Tehran Times
Sep 4, 2008
Archaeologists have recently resumed excavation at the 7000-year-old site at Shoghali Tepe in Pishva.
This is the third season the mound, located near the city of Varamin in southeastern Tehran Province, is being excavated by an archaeological team led by Moteza Hesari, the Persian service of CHN reported on Wednesday.
The team was scheduled to begin the season of excavation in early August, but it was postponed and Hesari declined to explain the reasons behind the del
Source: BBC
Sep 4, 2008
A team of Australian investigators is preparing an expedition to the arduous Kokoda Trail in Papua New Guinea, after a hiker spotted what is believed to be the body of a World War II airman hanging from a tree. The BBC's Becky Branford found out more.
History is alive on the densely forested slopes north of Port Moresby, the Papua New Guinea capital.
The hillsides around what is known as the Kokoda Trail are littered with rusting guns, grenades and mortars - reminders
Source: National Geographic News
Sep 3, 2008
Deep inside an underwater cave in Mexico, archaeologists may have
discovered the oldest human skeleton ever found in the Americas.
Dubbed Eva de Naharon, or Eve of Naharon, the female skeleton has been
dated at 13,600 years old. If that age is accurate, the skeleton—along
with three others found in underwater caves along the Caribbean coast of
the Yucatán Peninsula—could provide new clues to how the Americas were
first populated.
The remains have been excavated over the past f
Source: Telegraph
Sep 3, 2008
A decade ago, two graduate students from Stanford University in California
sat in a Burger King, having breakfast. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were
celebrating, albeit frugally: their plan to turn a novel technique for
mapping the internet into a business had attracted its first $100,000 of
funding. The payee's name on the cheque - the name of the company they
would formally found on September 7, 1998 - had been agreed that morning:"Google, Inc".
Nowadays, if they wanted to treat them
Source: National Parks Traveler Online
Sep 3, 2008
Is the salvation of our natural souls tied to the preservation of
wilderness? And if it is, must we actually travel into the wilderness to
achieve its benefits, or is it simply enough to know wilderness exists? As
the Wilderness Act turns 44, how much has it done to protect nature?
An ancillary question, of course, is whether only officially designated
wilderness meets the bill, or whether de facto wilderness is just as
beneficial a salve?
Enacted September 3, 1964, the Wilder
Source: Spiegel Online
Sep 3, 2008
Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon has begun looking for information on Franco's victims in preparation for a possible court case. Victims groups are thrilled, but not everyone is happy about stirring up the country's fascist past.
It is a monument visited by hundreds of thousands of people each year. On Sundays, some travel from nearby Madrid to lay wreaths at the site. But just what the memorial, known as the Valley of the Fallen, stands for is not entirely clear.
Officia
Source: Catholic News Service
Sep 3, 2008
Israeli archaeologists uncovered the remains of two distinct southern walls of ancient Jerusalem on Mount Zion, establishing the size of the city during Jesus' time as well as during the Byzantine period.
At a Sept. 3 press conference archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority said locating the two city walls corroborates their theory about the southern expansion of the city during these two periods.
The two separate wall segments had been discovered and exca
Source: AFP
Sep 3, 2008
Russian archaeologists said Wednesday they had found the
long-lost capital of the Khazar kingdom in southern Russia, a breakthrough
for research on the ancient Jewish state.
"This is a hugely important discovery," expedition organiser Dmitry
Vasilyev told AFP by telephone from Astrakhan State University after
returning from excavations near the village of Samosdelka, just north of
the Caspian Sea.
"We can now shed light on one of the most intriguing mysteries of that
period -- how
Source: NYT
Sep 3, 2008
Perched on a wind-swept bluff above Lake Champlain, Fort Ticonderoga has a timeless presence. Its thick stone walls appear impenetrable, more than two centuries after being contested, variously, by French, British and American troops.
This summer, the national historic landmark — called Fort Ti for short — began its 100th season as an attraction open to the public with two causes for celebration: the unveiling of a splashy new education center, and an increase in visitors, reversin
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Sep 3, 2008
A novel canceled by Random House Inc. in May, after warnings from a University of Texas at Austin historian, has found a new publisher in Britain.
London-based Gibson Square Books announced today that it had agreed to publish The Jewel of Medina, which tells of A’isha, the child bride of the Prophet Muhammad.
Random House terminated its contract with the book’s author, Sherry Jones, after Denise Spellberg, an associate professor of history at Texas, warned that the book
Source: HNN Staff
Sep 3, 2008
Several days ago The Art Newspaper reported that"The leading archaeologist in Iraq says that sites are no longer being targeted by professional looters." The paper cited statements made in the course of an interview with Dr. Abbas al-Husseini, the successor to Donny George as the head of Iraq's state board of antiquities. Abbas later was fired.
This week Donny George used the IraqCrisis list to blast his successor:
Source: Telegraph
Sep 3, 2008
Researchers found that people who live in lands conquered by the Roman army have less protection against HIV than those in countries they never reached
They say a gene which helps make people less susceptible to HIV occurs in greater frequency in areas of Europe that the Roman Empire did not stretch to.
The gene lacks certain DNA elements, which means HIV cannot bind to it as easily and is less able to infect cells.
People with the mutation have some resistance to HIV
Source: Politico.com
Sep 3, 2008
Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) Said That Governor Palin Was A Supporter Of Pat Buchanan Who He Called A 'Nazi Sympathizer.' 'Here's Rep. Robert Wexler of Florida: John McCain's decision to select a vice presidential running mate that endorsed Pat Buchanan for President in 2000 is a direct affront to all Jewish Americans. Pat Buchanan is a Nazi sympathizer with a uniquely atrocious record on Israel, even going as far as to denounce bringing former Nazi soldiers to justice and praising Adolf Hilter f
