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: White House letter to NBC News
May 19, 2008
Steve Capus
President, NBC News
30 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, N.Y. 10112
Mr. Capus:
This e-mail is to formally request that NBC Nightly News and The Today Show air for their viewers President Bush's actual answer to correspondent Richard Engel's question about Iran policy and "appeasement," rather than the deceptively edited version of the President's answer that was aired last night on the Nightly News and this morning on The Today Show.
Source: Tampa Tribune
May 19, 2008
At low tide, the Hillsborough River recedes enough to reveal wood beams poking through the water.
To the untrained eye, the barnacle-encrusted wood appears to be nothing more than a neglected boat mooring.
"It looks like an old dock," said Tom Wagner, spokesman for the Florida Aquarium in downtown Tampa.
The beams could be part of something far more interesting.
The planks are the remains of a ship between 80 and 100 feet long, Wagner said. A tea
Source: AP
May 19, 2008
The U.S. Embassy in Berlin moves back this week to its historic location in the center of the German capital, which it abandoned after Nazi Germany declared war on the United States in 1941.
Ambassador William Timken told reporters Monday that the embassy's return to Pariser Platz will be officially marked on the Fourth of July with speeches by Chancellor Angela Merkel and former President George H.W. Bush, followed by traditional Independence Day fireworks over the Brandenburg Gat
Source: AP
May 19, 2008
New York City, San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge and South Dakota's Badlands were named to a list of seven U.S. wonders featured on ABC's "Good Morning America."
Also on the list were the Grand Canyon, Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Preserve, Washington D.C.'s National Mall, and the Saturn V moon rocket at the Davidson Center for Space Exploration in Huntsville, Ala. Huntsville is nicknamed Rocket City because the U.S. space exploration program began there in the late
Source: AP
May 19, 2008
Experts found a tiny gold combined toothpick and earwax spoon, believed to be more than 385 years old, during the search for a shipwrecked Spanish galleon off the Florida Keys.
The late 16th or early 17th century grooming tool, which weighs only about an ounce, was located Sunday by Blue Water Ventures diver Chris Rackley as he searched the area about 22 feet below the surface and 40 miles west of Key West. He says its value could exceed $100,000.
The divers, who are se
Source: WaPo
May 19, 2008
The furrows in Martin Luther King Jr.'s brow already are gone, and his face looks less troubled.
The pen in his left hand is gone, too, replaced by a scroll. His hands seemed etched in more detail, down to the creases in his knuckles and the bones under the skin. There are buttons on his coat sleeves.
The sculpture of the civil rights leader, destined for a memorial on Washington's Tidal Basin, began undergoing these subtle yet noticeable changes even before a federal a
Source: WaPo
May 19, 2008
Sometime in the next few years, if a memorandum signed by President Bush this month ever goes into effect, one government official talking to another about information on terrorists will have to begin by saying: "What I am about to tell you is controlled unclassified information enhanced with specified dissemination."
That would mean, according to the memo, that the information requires safeguarding because "the inadvertent or unauthorized disclosure would create risk
Source: NYT
May 19, 2008
It has been more than two years since two college professors first made their claim that the winning design chosen for the Flight 93 National Memorial had evolved to contain elements of their proposal to honor those who died fighting the terrorists who hijacked the plane on Sept. 11, 2001.
And after an investigation by the Department of the Interior a year later found no merit to the claim by the professors, Lisa Austin and Madis Pihlak, that the winning design by Paul Murdoch, an a
Source: BBC
May 19, 2008
A man accused of being a guard at a Nazi death camp during World War II has finally lost his legal fight to stay in the United States.
John Demjanjuk, 88, migrated to the US in the 1950s. He was extradited to Israel and sentenced to death for war crimes, but the ruling was overturned.
He returned to the US but was accused of lying on his immigration application about working for the Nazis.
The US Supreme Court has now rejected his appeal against deportation.
Source: Matt Bai in the NYT Magazine
May 18, 2008
Among his fellow combat veterans in the Senate, past and present, [John McCain] is the only one who has continued to champion the war in Iraq; by contrast, Kerry, Webb and Hagel have emerged in the years since the invasion as unsparing critics of American involvement there. (In a new book, Hagel, who voiced deep concerns about Iraq even as he voted for the war resolution in 2002, predicts that the war will turn out to be “the most dangerous and costly foreign-policy debacle in our nation’s hist
Source: http://www.charlotte.com
May 18, 2008
SPENCER --It's a clash between two Southern staples -- the Civil War and racing.
The dispute centers on a former textile mill and 130 acres of forest just north of this Rowan County railroad town near the Yadkin River.
Here, former Boston investment banker Dave Risdon, now of Huntersville, is clearing land to build a 2.15-mile "country club" raceway for amateur drivers of souped-up sports cars and motorcycles. The raceway would include a clubhouse and 120 townhomes
Source: AP
May 18, 2008
A fire official says more than 16,000 people were evacuated from a Tokyo suburb while an unexploded 1-ton bomb believed was defused.
The bomb was believed to have been dropped by the U.S. military during World War II.
The rusty bomb was defused by a team from Japan's Self-Defense Force in Chofu, on the outskirts of Tokyo, said Tokyo Fire Department official Shigeru Ishikawa.
Source: Chicago Tribune
May 18, 2008
Rightly famous for more than a century of archeological excavations in the Middle East, Europe, Asia and Latin America, the University of Chicago lately has been working just around the corner and down the street on a dig in Jackson Park.
Among the treasures unearthed by archeologist Rebecca Graff and some of her students are rusty nails, broken crockery, pieces of glass bottles, clumps of gravel and metallic slag, now all neatly labeled in kitchen storage bags.
Graff
Source: NYT
May 18, 2008
Twenty-eight feet tall and carved from Chinese granite, the statue of Martin Luther King Jr. planned for the National Mall in Washington could resist almost any attack but the one that came recently from the panel whose approval it needs to proceed.
The United States Commission of Fine Arts, which must sign off on every inch of the $100 million memorial, from typeface to tree variety to color scheme, said in a letter that “the colossal scale and Social Realist style of the proposed
Source: NYT
May 18, 2008
The story of Mr. Obama’s life as an author tells as much about him as some of the stories he has recounted in his books. It possesses at times the same charmed quality sometimes ascribed to his political ascent — an impression of ease, if not exactly effortlessness, that obscures a more complex amalgam of drive, ambition, timing and the ability to recognize an opportunity and to do what it takes to seize it.
Source: WaPo
May 18, 2008
Helga Johnson, 73, remembers fleeing her Berlin home in 1944 with the Russian army hot on her trail. She remembers coming back to Berlin a year later and nearly starving in the aftermath of World War II.
And she remembers the American airplanes, part of the Berlin Airlift, that flew over once every three minutes in 1948 to bring food and other supplies to the city enduring a Russian army blockade.
"The war was only over three years and we were hungry," Johnson
Source: AP
May 18, 2008
DAEJEON, South Korea - Grave by mass grave, South Korea is unearthing the skeletons and buried truths of a cold-blooded slaughter from early in the Korean War, when this nation's U.S.-backed regime killed untold thousands of leftists and hapless peasants in a summer of terror in 1950.
With U.S. military officers sometimes present, and as North Korean invaders pushed down the peninsula, the southern army and police emptied South Korean prisons, lined up detainees and shot them in the
Source: Huffington Post (Blog)
May 18, 2008
One journalist's bid to report mass murder in South Korea in 1950 was blocked by his British publisher. Another correspondent was denounced as a possibly treasonous fabricator when he did report it. In South Korea, down the generations, fear silenced those who knew.
Fifty-eight years ago, at the outbreak of the Korean War, South Korean authorities secretively executed, usually without legal process, tens of thousands of southern leftists and others rightly or wrongly identified as s
Source: http://www.eveningsun.com
May 17, 2008
Map in hand, park ranger Karlton Smith lays an index finger on one rectangular shape he trusts to orient visitors with their historic surroundings.
"This building's actually McDonald's," he says. "That's a good marker."
Seconds later, an outstretched arm points toward the modern-day structure as it stands in real life on Emmitsburg Road - across the street from where Smith stands on Cemetery Ridge, a chunk of land on which hundreds were killed and wo
Source: AP
May 17, 2008
POKHARA, Nepal - Two centuries later, young men are still being drawn from their poverty-stricken Himalayan hills by the thousands to fight — and die — with legendary valor for another man's country far away.
In an era when the world's armies are hard pressed to fill their ranks, the Gurkhas are a recruiter's dream: Last year 17,349 applied to join the British military, and after grueling physical, medical and mental tests 230 were accepted — just one in 75.
These warri
