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
Jun 17, 2008
The White House does not have to make public internal documents examining the potential disappearance of e-mails sent during some of the Bush administration's biggest controversies, a U.S. district judge ruled yesterday.
In a 39-page opinion, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said that the White House's Office of Administration is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), even though its top officials had complied with the public records law for more than two decades.
Source: Guardian
Jun 16, 2008
Last week a Spanish pressure group claimed its government was infringing civil rights by putting more security cameras in public areas, especially motorways. The Association for the Defence of Fundamental Rights demanded they should be suspended while the Orwellian horror of the surveillance society is debated.
Quite what George Orwell himself would have made of it we will never know. But the writer of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the satire featuring the all-seeing eye of Big Brother, mig
Source: military.com
Jun 16, 2008
Retired Navy Capt. Ward Boston, who in 2002 broke 35 years of silence to say the US Navy Board of Inquiry long cited to clear Israel of wrongdoing in attacking a US Navy ship during the Six Day War was a sham, died June 11 in California. He was 84.
Emma Boston, his wife of 60 years, told Military.com that Boston had been sick for about six weeks before his death and had been hospitalized. She said he ultimately died of pneumonia, which he contracted in the hospital.
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Source: AP
Jun 16, 2008
A federal appeals board has upheld a deportation order for a Wisconsin man who served as a Nazi concentration camp guard during World War II, the Justice Department announced Monday.
The federal Board of Immigration Appeals upheld a deportation order issued in January 2007 against 83-year-old Josias Kumpf of Racine, who had served as a guard at the Trawniki training camp in Nazi-occupied Poland and the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin. The Board of Immigration Appeals is
Source: Politico.com
Jun 16, 2008
Politico's Ben Smith reports that Stephen Mansfield, whose sympathetic 'The Faith of George W. Bush' spent 15 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list in 2004, will be out this summer with 'The Faith of Barack Obama.' Ben says the book could help 'lend credibility to Senator Obama's bid to win Evangelical Christian voters away from the Republican Party: 'Its tone ranges from gently critical to gushing, and the author defends Obama-and even his controversial former minister, the Rev. Jeremiah
Source: http://www.scoop.co.nz
Jun 16, 2008
A conference to plan the prosecution of President Bush and other high administration officials for war crimes will be held September 13-14 at the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover .
"This is not intended to be a mere discussion of violations of law that have occurred," said convener Lawrence Velvel, dean and cofounder of the school. "It is, rather, intended to be a planning conference at which plans will be laid and necessary organizational structures set up, to
Source: AP
Jun 16, 2008
Tony Schwartz, who helped create the infamous "daisy ad" that ran only once during the 1964 presidential race but changed political advertising forever, has died.
Schwartz, 84, died Sunday at his Manhattan home, said his daughter Kayla Schwartz-Burridge. He had been suffering from heart valve stenosis.
Schwartz, who started his career as a graphic designer, collaborated with a team from the Doyle Dean Bernbach ad agency to create the spot featuring a little
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jun 16, 2008
[First Minister] Alex Salmond dropped a cultural bombshell yesterday when he claimed that the Stone of Destiny, one of Scotland's most famous relics, was a medieval fake.
Scottish, English and British monarchs have been crowned on the ancient coronation stone since the ninth century.
It spent 700 years under the chair in Westminster Abbey after it was seized in 1296 by King Edward I, and was finally returned to Scotland 12 years ago.
It has since been viewe
Source: AP
Jun 15, 2008
Robert Stamps, one of nine Kent State students wounded in the Ohio National Guard shootings that killed four other students 38 years ago, died in Tallahassee, Fla., of complications from pneumonia, his wife said.
Stamps, an observer who was sympathetic to anti-war demonstrators, was struck in the lower back on May 4, 1970 while fleeing tear gas and gunfire during a protest against the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. He rode in the same ambulance as Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller, both
Source: Boston Globe
Jun 15, 2008
At Princeton, she came to terms with being a black achiever in a white world.
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As Catherine Donnelly climbed the stairs to her dorm room at Princeton University over a quarter-century ago, the Louisiana freshman felt ready for whatever lay ahead. But then she met Michelle.
Her full name was Michelle LaVaughn Robinson. She was so tall that her head seemed to brush the sloping ceiling of the cramped fourth-floor room. She was Donnelly's new roommate. And s
Source: NYT
Jun 15, 2008
... “The historical memory of the first oil shock is much stronger for Europeans than for Americans,” Daniel Yergin, the chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, said. “For Americans, the memory is of gas lines. For Europeans, it was the end of their postwar economic miracle.”
He and other experts caution against overstating the comparison between 2008 and 1973. Europe, they say, is better equipped to absorb these kinds of shocks than it was 35 years ago — with a sturdy, sh
Source: NYT
Jun 15, 2008
“The most important thing we do is not doing,” Justice Louis D. Brandeis once said of the Supreme Court’s abiding humility, its overwhelming preference to allow the people, through their elected representatives, to govern themselves.
And never is the court more reluctant to act than when faced with a challenge to the president during wartime. Consider the historical record.
The court has ruled against a president in a time of armed conflict no more than a handful of tim
Source: NYT
Jun 15, 2008
About a year after his release from a North Vietnamese prison camp, Cmdr. John S. McCain III sat down to address one of the most vexing questions confronting his fellow prisoners: Why did some choose to collaborate with the North Vietnamese?
Mr. McCain blamed American politics.
“The biggest factor in a man’s ability to perform credibly as a prisoner of war is a strong belief in the correctness of his nation’s foreign policy,” Mr. McCain wrote in a 1974 essay submitted t
Source: ABC
Jun 14, 2008
For the 2nd time this month, a massive confederate flag was raised near a well-traveled highway intersection, for all drivers to see.
The Sons of the Confederate Veterans, a local southern Heritage group, raised the 30 foot by 50 foot flag during a ceremony at 8 am this morning. They plan to fly the flag until around 3 pm, then will take it down again.
A group of onlookers traveled past the flag, located on the group's property off US 92, which could be seen by drivers
Source: Times (UK)
Jun 14, 2008
It has been a source of enduring fascination for archaeologists and amateur Egyptologists everywhere: what exactly happened to the sarcophagus of Menkaure, one of Egypt's greatest Pharaohs? Now, more than 170 years after it was found and lost, the mystery could be solved.
Built from polished blue basalt to transport the king's earthly remains to the next world, the elaborately decorated vessel lay hidden inside the third-largest of Giza's renowned Pyramids for more than 4,000 years.
Source: McClatchy
Jun 14, 2008
ROSARIO , Argentina - While Ernesto "Che" Guevara remains the most famous export of this sleepy city, his legacy here has long been a low-key one.
Except for a handful of businesses named in his honor, few markers alert visitors that the revolutionary leader was born here exactly 80 years ago before becoming one of the most mythic figures of the 20th century.
That changed Saturday when civic leaders inaugurated the first official monument honoring the revolut
Source: NYT
Jun 14, 2008
North Korea said Friday that it would reopen an investigation into abductions of Japanese citizens, reversing its longstanding position that the issue had been settled.
In return, Japan announced that it had agreed to lift some sanctions imposed on the North for its nuclear program, including the ban on travel between the countries, but that more serious sanctions would stay in place.
The Japanese announcement, which followed two days of bilateral talks in Beijing this
Source: WaPo
Jun 14, 2008
The rookie state senator from Chicago had driven 340 miles to explore southern Illinois, but Barb Brown could muster only 20 Democrats in this small town on the Mississippi River to have breakfast with him. She asked her niece and sister-in-law, who were helping in the kitchen, to come out to pad the audience.
"We tried to convince people that they needed to come out and meet with this senator from Chicago, who on top of everything else was African American," Brown, a circ
Source: WaPo
Jun 14, 2008
Hemant Singh Yadav, a lean and sprightly 15-year-old, was sent by his parents to a summer camp to learn to speak Sanskrit, or what he calls the language of the gods.
He had studied the 4,000-year-old classical Indian language at school for six years. He knew its grammar and could chant the ancient hymns. But he could not converse in it. During a two-week course at the camp, Sanskrit Samvad Shala, he had no choice: He was forbidden to speak any other language.
"At f
Source: LAT
Jun 14, 2008
On an infamous summer night in 1969, young followers of Charles Manson entered a Benedict Canyon mansion and murdered five people gathered on the compound.
Actress Sharon Tate, 8 1/2 months pregnant with the son of director Roman Polanski, begged one of the knife-wielding killers to spare her life. The attacker was Susan Atkins, and her response was cold and unequivocal.
"She asked me to let her baby live," Atkins told parole officials in 1993. "I told
