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: Dallas Morning News
Mar 31, 2008
While President Bush's advisers were taking offers on an ideal spot for his library and museum, they probably should have paid more attention to the virtual real-estate market.
Officials finally settled on Southern Methodist University in Dallas to house the $250 million complex.
But online, some of the very best addresses are gone — snapped up for a mere fistful of dollars by squatters who have no connection to the library yet hope to make fun of the president, protect
Source: BBC
Mar 31, 2008
A medieval game that is almost exclusively played in the South East has been recognised as a sport.
The Sports Council agreed that Stoolball, which is played by up to 4,000 people in Kent, Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire, met its criteria.
A round willow bat and wickets made of wooden boards on stakes are used to play the game which has links to the development of cricket.
The National Stoolball Association hopes its profile will now be raised.
Source: Globalist
Mar 31, 2008
Over the past twenty years, Ireland has undergone a massive transformation — both economically and socially. Llewellyn King explains in his essay how the only thing that stood between Ireland and its future was its bitter history and how that is slowly changing to give way to a new future.
Source: CNN
Mar 31, 2008
FBI wiretaps have "given us the most powerful and persuasive source of all for seeing how utterly selfless Martin Luther King was," as a civil rights leader, according to a leading civil rights scholar.
"You see him being intensely self-critical. King really and truly believed that he was there to be of service to others. This was not a man with any egomaniacal joy of being a famous person, or being a leader," said Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar David Garrow in a
Source: World Science
Mar 31, 2008
Does the human species have mammoth blood on its hands?
Source: http://www.6d.fi
Mar 31, 2008
Rock paintings created during the Stone Age can still be seen today in dozens of sites around Finland. These awe-inspiring artworks are like windows into the ancient past, revealing tantalising glimpses of long lost cultures.
FINLAND’S rock paintings mainly consist of brownish-red figures and markings painted onto steep granite walls, often overlooking waterways. Scenes feature people, boats, elk, fish and mysterious partly human figures that may be linked to shamanistic beliefs, as
Source: AFP
Mar 31, 2008
A major excavation at Britain's prehistoric Stonehenge standing stones started Monday as archaeologists try to work out exactly when and why the first boulders were placed at the site.
Experts are focusing on the Double Bluestone Circle, which is located inside the iconic giant pillars on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, southwest England.
The circle, thought to date from around 2,550 BC, consists of stones which came from the Preseli Hills in west Wales -- 250 kilometres
Source: AP
Mar 31, 2008
A famed conductor, a lowly laundress, singers, dancers, musicians. Jews, part Jews, or married to Jews, they were all a valued part of Vienna's opera family — until the Nazis came.
First to go was ballet teacher Risa Dirtl.
She was a 14-year veteran of the Vienna State Opera. But her husband was Jewish — and so she was purged just three days after Austrians thronged a huge central square in their capital 70 years ago to accord a delirious welcome to Adolf Hitler.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 31, 2008
British scientists have deciphered a mysterious ancient clay tablet and believe they have solved a riddle over a giant asteroid impact more than 5,000 years ago.
Geologists have long puzzled over the shape of the land close to the town of Köfels in the Austrian Alps, but were unable to prove it had been caused by an asteroid.
Now researchers say their translation of symbols on a star map from an ancient civilisation includes notes on a mile-wide asteroid that later hit
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 31, 2008
As a newly qualified doctor in September 1939, Nowell Peach was looking forward to a career in surgery. He was waiting to begin his anatomical studies and the course was set to start on September 4, 1939.
When war was declared the day before, the anatomy course was postponed. Young Dr Peach, then 26, enlisted as a medical officer with the RAF Volunteer Reserve.
Yet although he would spend the next six years in uniform, and three-and-a-half of those years in Japanese pri
Source: Chicago Tribune
Mar 31, 2008
Elmore Nickelberry has guided his grumbling garbage truck down Memphis' alleyways and avenues for 54 years, picking up not just trash, but a remarkable life story along the way.
March marks 40 years since Memphis and its sanitation workers took center stage in the nation's civil rights struggles. While time has tempered this city's downtown district — gone are the protests, curfews and bloodshed of '68 — the memories of that period live on within Nickelberry.
"This
Source: PRnewswire
Mar 30, 2008
From a meeting at the storied bar of the Willard Hotel, through speeches from presidents and other world leaders, to battles over the admission of women and blacks, the National Press Club has been a Washington institution since its founding in 1908.
Beginning March 31, the Club will celebrate its 100 years of history with events that culminate with a gala on April 5.
The NPC compiled an array of historic moments in the Club's life to assist reporters and editors workin
Source: AP
Mar 30, 2008
Islam has surpassed Roman Catholicism as the world's largest religion, the Vatican newspaper said Sunday.
"For the first time in history, we are no longer at the top: Muslims have overtaken us," Monsignor Vittorio Formenti said in an interview with the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano. Formenti compiles the Vatican's yearbook.
He said that Catholics accounted for 17.4 percent of the world population -- a stable percentage -- while Muslims were at 19.2 pe
Source: WaPo
Mar 30, 2008
Addressing civil rights activists in Selma, Ala., a year ago, Sen. Barack Obama traced his "very existence" to the generosity of the Kennedy family, which he said paid for his Kenyan father to travel to America on a student scholarship and thus meet his Kansan mother.
The Camelot connection has become part of the mythology surrounding Obama's bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. After Caroline Kennedy endorsed his candidacy in January, Newsweek commentator Jonat
Source: AP
Mar 30, 2008
Their faces seem to float from Todd Matthews' computer -- morgue photographs, artist sketches, forensic reconstructions -- thousands of dead eyes staring from endless Web sites as though crying out for recognition. John and Jane and Baby "Does" whose nameless bodies have never been identified.
His wife, Lori, complains that Matthews, a 37-year-old auto parts supplier, spends more time with the dead than he does with the living, including his two sons, Dillan, 16, and Devin
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 30, 2008
The Northwest Passage is one of the most fabled, and treacherous, sea routes in the world. Many sailors have perished in its freezing Arctic waters after their ships became encased in ice.
Now, as climate change takes hold, British explorers are trying to become the first to sail through the Northwest Passage from east to west, relying solely on wind and oars.
The expedition will demonstrate the advance of climate change, which scientists say is thawing out the Northwes
Source: Dan Barry in the NYT
Mar 30, 2008
The members of the 2:20 tour follow their guide up the front steps of Monticello, past those iconic white pillars and into the domed building’s aura of wonder. The wooden floor creaks like the knees of an aged host rising from his seat to explain a few things.
The guide speaks in present tense of the home’s most famous occupant — Mr. Jefferson, as he is often referred to around here — while leading the tour into the family sitting room, where his daughter Martha supervised the slave
Source: NYT
Mar 30, 2008
Invention may be mothered by necessity. But determining the father can require a paternity test.
Take the sound recording. Researchers said last week that they had discovered a recording of a human voice, made by a little-known Frenchman two decades before Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph.
An unusual case of innovation misconception? Hardly.
The reality is that the “Aha” moments of industrial creation are preceded by critical moments far less he
Source: http://www.inrich.com
Mar 29, 2008
The Civil War ended more than 140 years ago, but there is still ordnance to be unearthed, said Bob Wilcox an amateur historian from Powhatan County.
And the thought, he said, is chilling, especially in light of the February explosion that killed Sam White, who ran a business in which he cleaned and disarmed Civil War-era military ordnance at his Chesterfield County home.
The explosion scattered Civil War shell shrapnel throughout the neighborhood.
The incid
Source: Australian
Mar 29, 2008
TWO or three times a month, Martin Pash relives the horror of the worst atrocity in Australian waters during World War II.
The 85-year-old retired truck driver tosses and turns in bed at his home in the Melbourne suburb of Ivanhoe and endures frightful nightmares recalling the sinking of the Australian hospital ship Centaur, which was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine off the southern Queensland coast on May 14, 1943.
Mr Pash, who was a 20-year-old steward on the Centau
