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: CBS News
Mar 17, 2008
Bill Clinton’s reentry into the political arena appears to have come at some cost to his legacy. New polling now suggests that Clinton’s involvement in the Democratic nomination battle between his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Barack Obama, has significantly tarnished the former president’s image.
A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released Thursday found that more Americans view Bill Clinton negatively than positively, 45 to 42 percent. It marked the first time since January
Source: Scotsman
Mar 17, 2008
A RARE piece of Neolithic art has been discovered on a beach in Orkney. The 6,000-year-old relic, thought to be a fragment from a larger piece, was left exposed by storms which swept across the country last week.
Local plumber David Barnes, who found the stone on the beach in Sandwick Bay, South Ronaldsay, said circular markings had shown up in the late-afternoon winter sun, drawing his attention to the piece.
Source: BBC
Mar 17, 2008
France has given full military honours to its last World War I veteran, Lazare Ponticelli, who died on Wednesday at the age of 110.
President Nicolas Sarkozy led a ceremony in Paris to commemorate him, and eight million other Frenchmen who fought in the conflict.
Mr Sarkozy said it was a national duty to keep their memory alive.
Source: AP
Mar 17, 2008
YREKA, Calif. - In extreme Northern California, far from the bright lights of Hollywood and the foggy charms of San Francisco, is a place unknown to most people: a handful of counties that once sought to make themselves into a separate state called Jefferson.
The idea lasted only a few days in 1941 before it was quashed by the attack on Pearl Harbor. But for a few who remember its history, the movement embodies the mindset of this sparsely populated country that still longs for more
Source: Fox News
Mar 17, 2008
The great-granddaughter of a Civil War-era storekeeper in Tampa, Fla. is suing the city for a 147-year-old unpaid promissory note. With interest, the note is now worth over $22 million.
The financially-strapped city of Tampa, in need of ammunition during the Civil War, issued the note to Thomas Pugh Kennedy on June 21, 1861, the St. Petersburg Times reported Sunday. Kennedy's great-granddaughter, Joan Kennedy Biddle and her family are suing to collect the payment, plus 8 percent ann
Source: AP
Mar 17, 2008
Israel and Germany strengthened their ties on Monday in one of the highlights of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's three-day visit to mark the 60th anniversary of Israel's creation.
Merkel and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert chaired a joint session of members of the two countries' Cabinets, at which both governments signed off on a range of projects, including in education, the environment and defense.
The two sides agreed to hold such meetings once a year, alternat
Source: Independent (UK)
Mar 17, 2008
Gordon Brown has promised that the Government will hold a full-scale inquiry into the mistakes made in Iraq before and since the invasion five years ago.
His concession marks a significant break from his predecessor, Tony Blair, who steadfastly refused to hold a wide-ranging inquiry into the war.
Mr Brown, however, insists it is not the right time for an immediate investigation as the situation in Iraq remains "fragile" and British troops are still trying to b
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 17, 2008
A treasure-hunter could be in line for a small fortune after unearthing two rare coins that shed light on a little-known rebel Roman emperor.
Derrick Fretwell's finds, which date back to AD286 and the reign of Carausius, have been hailed "priceless" by experts at the British Museum.
Source: http://www.charlestonscrealestate.us (Click here to watch live video.)
Mar 17, 2008
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Source: Michael Gordon in the NYT
Mar 17, 2008
When President Bush convened a meeting of his National Security Council on May 22, 2003, his special envoy in Iraq made a statement that caught many of the participants by surprise. In a video presentation from Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III informed the president and his aides that he was about to issue an order formally dissolving Iraq’s Army.
The decree was issued the next day.
The broad outlines of the decision are now widely known, defended by proponents as necessary
Source: Jewish Federation of Deleware
Mar 17, 2008
Hundreds of people joined some two dozen Holocaust survivors, including several saved by German industrialist Oskar Schindler, in a march Sunday marking the 65th anniversary of the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto by the Nazis.Family members, historians and Krakow residents and officials gathered with the survivors in a square in the heart of the former ghetto to say the Jewish prayer for the dead, the Kaddish.
The group then set out to retrace the steps of Jews
Source: BBC
Mar 17, 2008
A letter penned by a passenger of the doomed Titanic which sank in 1912, killing 1,522 people on board, is expected to raise £9,000 at auction.Charles Jones, who worked for the Colgate firm in New York, was returning to the US after a UK trip to buy sheep from Dorset farmer James Foot.
Mr Foot received Mr Jones' last letter on 15 April, the actual day the Titanic sank after hitting an iceberg.
According to Dukes, the note, on headed White Star pape
Source: Tocqueville Connection
Mar 17, 2008
President Nicolas Sarkozy led a national ceremony in Paris on Monday in honour of the last French veteran of World War I, Lazare Ponticelli, who died last week aged 110.Italian-born Ponticelli, the last of more than eight million men who fought under French colours in the 1914-18 war that tore Europe apart, died on Wednesday at his home in a Paris suburb.
State officials across France held a minute of silence, and flags flew at half mast on public buildings for
Source: AP
Mar 17, 2008
Forty years after rampaging American soldiers slaughtered her family, Do Thi Tuyet returned to the place where her childhood was shattered. “Everyone in my family was killed in the My Lai massacre — my mother, my father, my brother and three sisters,” said Tuyet, who was 8 years old at the time. “They threw me into a ditch full of dead bodies. I was covered with blood and brains.”More than 1,000 people turned out Sunday to remember the victims of one of the most notorious ch
Source: Newsweek
Mar 17, 2008
Margaret Thatcher was the kind of woman who made men's toes curl. Her savage intelligence, command of policy and what François Mitterrand called "the mouth of Marilyn Monroe and the eyes of Caligula" both terrified and intrigued them. And she loved it. The woman who was prime minister of Britain from 1979 to 1990 declared she owed nothing to "women's lib" and surrounded herself with men—appointing only one woman to her cabinet.
Today she is remembered as a resolu
Source: Newsweek
Mar 17, 2008
In a five-part original video series, we follow a group of Japanese-Americans returning to the bleak internment center where they were forcibly relocated with their families during World War II. And we learn how the U.S. government secretly used the internees to build the infrastructure for an American Indian reservation.
Source: New Yorker
Mar 17, 2008
This week in the magazine, Alec Wilkinson writes about a rare album of photographs from the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz, in southern Poland. The album, which was delivered to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2007, belonged to Karl Hoecker, adjutant to the commandant of Auschwitz from May, 1944, to January, 1945. Wilkinson writes:
“If the album consisted only of photographs of people who hadn’t been seen at Auschwitz, and of areas of Auschwitz that hadn’t been por
Source: National Security Archive
Mar 16, 2008
Washington, D.C., March 16, 2008 - President Bush's executive order for a "citizen-centered" and "results-oriented" Freedom of Information system did improve customer service at federal agencies, but has failed to make consistent progress on backlogs and has not significantly improved compliance with electronic FOIA requirements, according to the Knight Open Government Survey released today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
"M
Source: Times (UK)
Mar 16, 2008
It is one of the enduring mysteries of the second world war. More than 800 Jews based in this hospital in the middle of Nazi Berlin survived the war, seemingly — and bizarrely — protected by Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution. So who were they and why were they saved?
Source: AP
Mar 16, 2008
RIGA, Latvia: Thousands of people marched through this capital Sunday under heavy police protection to honor countrymen who fought in a German combat unit during World War II.
Protesters jeered as the procession of about 3,000 people - a few surviving members of the Waffen SS unit, known as the Latvian Legion, among them - arrived at the Freedom Monument in central Riga.
Participants in the march sang patriotic songs and waved Latvian flags before laying roses at the ba
