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
Aug 24, 2008
It's been four years since Bettye Kearse set out to prove a story that has been handed down through generations of her family: that she, an African American, is a direct descendant of founding father James Madison.
But after a prolonged attempt to arrange DNA testing with Madison family descendants in the United States, the two sides have been unable to agree on how to do it. And as Madison's sprawling Virginia estate, Montpelier, prepares to celebrate the completion of a $24 millio
Source: WaPo
Aug 24, 2008
As they watched Joseph R. Biden Jr. step on stage in Springfield, Ill., yesterday, a 65-year-old with white hair jogging to the lectern, many of his longtime friends and colleagues experienced a touch of deja vu: Once again, Biden had resurrected a career that appeared destined for decline.
Nearly eight months ago, Biden withdrew from the 2008 presidential race after winning less than 1 percent of the delegates in Iowa's Democratic caucuses. It was an ignoble failure for one of the
Source: Newark Star-Ledger
Aug 24, 2008
When Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama makes his acceptance speech Thursday as the grand finale to his party's convention, he hopes to draw at least 76,000 supporters to Denver's Invesco Field to cheer him on.
As the late Frank Hague might have said: Is that all?
Hague, the famously powerful and infamously corrupt mayor of Jersey City from 1917 to 1947 and a Democratic political boss whose clout reached into the White House, probably would have been appalled
Source: AP
Aug 24, 2008
The news footage has become grainy with age but is no less vivid:
Helmeted Chicago police in a haze of tear gas flailing with billy clubs at
demonstrators, while inside a hall politicians hold ugly shouting matches
over the bloody battles both on the streets outside and half a world away
in Vietnam.
The Democratic National Convention in Denver this week comes exactly 40
years after that jolting episode that became a milestone in American
politics.
While another unpopular war,
Source: Deutsche Welle
Aug 24, 2008
Berlin's memorial to the Jews murdered during the Nazi era was vandalized Saturday, Aug. 23, only a week after a similar memorial to gays and lesbians persecuted by the Nazis was damaged, police reported.
In Germany's national memorial to European Jewish victims of the Holocaust, seven of the steles that make up the monument were desecrated with 11 Nazi swastikas in red and black paint.
Federal investigators have taken over the case.
On Saturday last week,
Source: BBC
Aug 24, 2008
A statue of late reggae legend Bob Marley has been unveiled in a small Serbian village during a rock festival as a token of peace in the Balkans.
Musicians from Croatia and Serbia were joined by rock fans for the midnight ceremony in Banatski Sokolac.
Organisers said Marley, who died in 1981, "promoted peace and tolerance in his music".
Serbia recently erected a statue of iconic film character Rocky, while Mostar in Bosnia has one of Bruce Lee.
Source: Times
Aug 24, 2008
The fortress-like 1960s concrete block housing America’s embassy in Britain could be listed by English Heritage.
The conservation quango is expected within the next few weeks to recommend to Andy Burnham, the culture secretary, that he should give the 600-room building a grade II listing.
The US ambassador, Robert Tuttle, is said to have been lobbying the conservation quango to head off the preservation order, which could halve the estimated £200m value of the embassy
Source: Telegraph
Aug 24, 2008
Thanks to drought and increasing Israeli security restrictions on where they can wander, their nomadic lifestyle, which predates the birth of Christ, is likely to die out within a generation.
Lack of rainfall over the past three years, thought by some to be due to climate change, is gradually rendering many already sparse grazing lands unusable for their flocks of goats and sheep. At the same time, the steady growth of Jewish towns and settlements in the Israeli Negev desert and th
Source: Telegraph
Aug 24, 2008
The Romantic poet made some 5,000 changes to a pre-publication script of the classic novel, according to Professor Charles Robinson of the University of Delaware in the US.
He changed key descriptions that helped paint a more vivid picture of scientist Victor Frankenstein's monster, the professor found.
They include his addition that the monster's hair be described as "lustrous black" and that Victor should refer to him as "beautiful" rather than &qu
Source: Observer
Aug 24, 2008
The young soldier stepped into the bedroom. It was the first time he had gone to a prostitute and he felt apprehensive and embarrassed. He also found himself unable to have sex. 'I was - what do you call it? - impotent,' he said.
This type of recollection from an unnamed veteran of the First World War, 90 years after the end of the conflict, is seldom reflected in the histories, poems or services of remembrance. It is among newly discovered accounts which bring to life a hidden hist
Source: AP
Aug 23, 2008
Frail and zealously shielded from a prying media, the 85-year-old woman Obama affectionately calls "Toot" won't be in Denver when he takes the stage at the Democratic National Convention. But as the Illinois senator becomes the first black man to accept a major party's presidential nomination, friends and family will be looking for glimpses of the white woman who had as much to do with shaping his character as anyone.
Madelyn Lee Payne was born in October 1922 in the tiny
Source: BBC
Aug 23, 2008
For the people of Georgia, any optimism about the future has been suddenly displaced by uncertainty and worries from the past, as its conflict with Russia ends in swift defeat and humiliation.
Grand buildings of the Soviet era do not decay with dignity; the cheap materials mean they just moulder.
The concrete walls of the former presidential palace which is Eduard Shevardnadze's Tbilisi home are streaked with water stains, the formal gardens as scruffy as the gaggle of
Source: BBC
Aug 23, 2008
The tomb of an anti-slavery campaigner who wrote the hymn Amazing Grace is
among monuments given new protection because of their slave trade links.
John Newton's tomb at Olney, near Milton Keynes, is one of four to be
newly awarded Grade II listing.
Another 21 are having their listing changed or upgraded to mark the
International day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its
Abolition.
The government said they should be preserved for future generations.
Source: HNN Staff based on a report by Humberto Fontova
Aug 23, 2008
A YouTube video has caught a Venezuelan TV sportscaster in the act of a flagrant example of historical ignorance.
The anchor, one of the replacement journalists the government of Hugo Chavez installed after nationalizing TV station RCTV, confuses Michael Phelps and Jesse Owens, and then goes on to claim that Hitler presided over the Munich games of 1972.
Source: Independent
Aug 23, 2008
The Bletchley Park Trust plans to turn the historic site into an internationally-recognised visitor centre with restored buildings, an authentic 1940s atmosphere and gardens the public can enjoy free of charge.
But implementing the plan and saving the site, the dilapidated state of which was highlighted in The Independent this week, will cost 10m pounds. That money would bring new life to the decaying park near Milton Keynes, where some of Britain's finest minds hastened the defeat
Source: Independent
Aug 23, 2008
On the night of 22 October 1966, the deputy governor of Wormwood Scrubs telephoned Shepherd's Bush police station in west London. "I have just been informed by my chief that we have lost one of our chaps over the wall. We think it's Blake."
"Blake?" asked the duty constable. "Yes," came the reply. "The one doing 42 years. He went over the east wall. He's probably in prison grey. Look, I'm a bit tucked up at the moment, I'm in the middle of re
Source: New Zealand Herald
Aug 23, 2008
Federal investigators in the United States say they have solved a mystery of the September 11, 2001, attacks, the collapse of World Trade Centre building 7, long a source of conspiracy theories.
The 47-storey trapezoid-shaped building was north of the World Trade Centre towers, across Vesey St in lower Manhattan.
On September 11, it was set on fire by falling debris from the burning towers, but sceptics have long argued that fire and debris alone should not have brought
Source: LiveScience
Aug 22, 2008
Medieval stained-glass windows colored in gold nanoparticles help purify air when lit by the sun, a new study finds.
"For centuries people appreciated only the beautiful works of art, and long life of the colors, but little did they realize that these works of art are also, in modern language, photocatalytic air purifier with nanostructured gold catalyst," said Zhu Huai Yong, a material scientist at the Queensland University of Technology.
When energized by th
Source: BBC
Aug 22, 2008
Bronze Age structure thought to have been used as a sauna has been
saved from destruction by the sea after a team of archaeologists moved
the entire find to a safer location. The building, which dates from
between 1500 BCE and 1200 BCE, was unearthed on the Shetland island of
Bressay (Scotland) eight years ago. It was found in the heart of the
Burnt Mound at Cruester, a Bronze Age site on the coast of Bressay
facing Lerwick. But earlier this summer, because of the increased threat
of coa
Source: Canwest News Service
Aug 22, 2008
It's the oldest whodunit in Canadian history, and new research has
conclusively ruled out one of the suspect aboriginal groups behind the
retreat of Viking would-be colonists from the New World.
A scientific redating of the eastward migration of the Thule -- ancestors
of modern-day Inuit -- has pegged their push across Canada's polar
frontier to no earlier than AD 1200. That's at least 150 years after Norse
voyagers from Greenland are believed to have abandoned their short-lived,
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