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: http://www.lvrj.com
Feb 25, 2008
In putting the coal-power industry in the same sentence as Adolf Hitler, Harry Reid didn't mean to suggest the utilities are as bad as the Nazis -- just that they act like them.
"I never said they were as bad as Hitler," the senator said in an interview last week. "I said what they're doing is creating the big lie that coal is clean, and that's not true. That (tactic) goes back to the Nazi era, and I'm not saying they're following anything to do with the Nazis, but th
Source: http://www.lvrj.com
Feb 25, 2008
Gennifer Flowers is putting the tapes of her recorded conversations with Bill Clinton during their 12-year affair on the auction block, Vegas Confidential learned Monday.
Flowers, who came forward during Clinton's 1992 Presidential election campaign with details of the relationship, said she decided to part with the tapes after renewed interest surfaced. She was offered $5 million by a Japanese collector in the 1990s, she said.
Asked about the timing of her announcement
Source: International Herald Tribune
Feb 25, 2008
Last week, a senior French official flew to Istanbul to discuss Turkey's exclusion of Gaz de France from an $12 billion pipeline project - designed to bring Central Asian oil directly to European markets - because of recent French legislation making it a criminal offense to deny that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in 1915 constituted genocide.
The Turkish government clearly takes history seriously. Just last October, when the United States Congress considered a bil
Source: http://www.standard-freeholder.com
Feb 25, 2008
As a young girl, a Mohawk known as "She Who Bumps Into Things" probably wouldn't believe she would one day be hailed as a saint.
However, Kateri Tekakwitha, born in 1656 Auriesville, N.Y. to a Mohawk Chief and a Catholic Algonquin mother, has been put in just such a position.
Two hundred and sixty three years after her death, Tekakwitha was declared venerable by Pope Pius XII on Jan. 3, 1943. Beatification by Pope John Paul II followed on June 22, 1980.
Source: Reuters
Feb 25, 2008
A ceremonial plaza built 5,500 years ago has been discovered in Peru, and archeologists involved in the dig said on Monday carbon dating shows it is one of the oldest structures ever found in the Americas.
A team of Peruvian and German archeologists uncovered the circular plaza, which was hidden beneath another piece of architecture at the ruins known as Sechin Bajo, in Casma, 229 miles north of Lima, the capital. Friezes depicting a warrior with a knife and trophies were found near
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Feb 25, 2008
Despite the concerns of many of its faculty members and historians nationwide, Southern Methodist University agreed to terms Friday for becoming the home of President Bush’s library and of an institute that will promote the president’s views and that will not be controlled by the university.
Presidential libraries — which are managed by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration — have generally been considered a plum for a university to obtain. Scholars are attracted by
Source: CNN
Feb 25, 2008
Why are people drawn to sites of inexplicable horror or tragedy?
"People need to confront the reality of a disaster," says Dr. Grace Bellotti, a Bronx-based psychiatrist with the New York University Department of Psychiatry. "It's so unbelievable they need to go and look for themselves.'"
For some, the journey is intensely personal. "It was unbearable," Holocaust survivor Sol Rosenkranz, 90, of New York City, says of his trip five years ago
Source: AP
Feb 25, 2008
China has agreed to a long-standing U.S. request for access to sensitive military records that Pentagon officials believe might resolve the fate of thousands of U.S. servicemen missing from the Korean War and other Cold War-era conflicts, a Pentagon official said Monday.
The arrangement is scheduled to be publicly announced Friday in Shanghai after a final set of talks to work out certain details, according to Larry Greer, spokesman for the Pentagon's POW-MIA office.
Th
Source: International Herald Tribune
Feb 25, 2008
There is a hushed worry on the minds of many supporters of Senator Barack Obama, echoing in conversations from state to state, rally to rally: Will he be safe?
In Colorado, two sisters say they pray daily for his safety. In New Mexico, a daughter says she persuaded her mother to still vote for Obama, even though the mother feared that winning would put him in danger. And at a rally here, a woman expressed worries that a message of hope and change, in addition to his race, made him m
Source: CNN
Feb 25, 2008
Think Barack Hussein Obama has it rough campaigning for president with a name like that? The Illinois senator has nothing on Frankenstein Momin. Or Billy Kid Sangma. Or Adolf Lu Hitler Marak.
The three men are among dozens of others with equally colorful names who are competing for legislative seats in Meghalaya, a remote northeast Indian state, on March 3.
There are about 60 seats up for grabs, 331 candidates vying, and no shortage of unusual names.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 25, 2008
The Oxford laboratory that declared the Turin Shroud to be a medieval fake 20 years ago is investigating claims that its findings were wrong.
The head of the world-renowned laboratory has admitted that carbon dating tests it carried out on Christendom's most famous relic may be inaccurate.
Professor Christopher Ramsey, the director of the Oxford University Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, said he was treating seriously a new theory suggesting that contamination had skewed
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 25, 2008
A city philanthropist has called for the controversy over the fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square to be permanently resolved by offering to fund a statue in tribute to the man who played a key role in saving Britain from Nazi invasion.
For the past decade, millions of pounds of taxpayers' money has been spent on the displays after being subject to lengthy consultation committees at the order of Ken Livingstone, the London mayor.
But Terry Smith, the chief executive of Tul
Source: CNN
Feb 25, 2008
Pingpong helped thaw relations between China and the United States more than three decades ago. Now the catalyst of that thaw wonders whether music can do the same for the U.S. and North Korea.
Zhuang Zedong, a three-time world champion in table tennis, also known as pingpong, faced a quandary one April day 37 years ago.
He was sitting at the back of his Chinese team's bus, waiting to drive to the stadium during the 1971 world championship in Japan.
Perhap
Source: Newsweek
Feb 25, 2008
Michelle Obama was never much interested in calling attention to herself. As an undergrad at Princeton in the 1980s, she was interested in social change, but didn't run for student government. Instead, she spent her free time running a literacy program for kids from the local neighborhoods. At Harvard Law, she took part in demonstrations demanding more minority students and professors. Yet unlike another more prominent Harvard Law student who would later take up the cause, she was not one to hol
Source: Boston Globe
Feb 24, 2008
Ralph Nader announced he would run for the presidency Sunday as a third-party candidate. Nader is no stranger to presidential politics -- he ran in 1996 and 2000 for the Green Party, and in 2004 as an independent.
A longtime consumer activist, Nader says he runs to offer voters a third choice in a system he sees as dominated by corporate interests. Although he usually doesn't fare well at the polls, Nader has greatly impacted races in the past -- many Democrats still blame him for
Source: Guardian
Feb 24, 2008
On Friday 7 January 1944, Anne Frank confessed her love for a boy she had been smitten with for years. She had first set eyes upon him in school in 1940, and they had been 'inseparable' for a whole summer, walking hand in hand through their neighbourhood in Amsterdam, him in a white cotton suit, her in a short summer dress. He was 'tall, slim and good-looking, with a serious, quiet and intelligent face'. He had dark hair, brown eyes, a slightly pointed nose. Anne was 'crazy about his smile', whi
Source: News Obsersver
Feb 24, 2008
The Hump, American air crews called it. Or, when they were in a darker mood, the Aluminum Trail. The World War II supply route from India into China was dotted with their wreckage.
By whatever name, the route was critical, an aerial highway over some of the world's highest mountains, a path flown by hundreds of U.S. aircraft ferrying supplies to the Chinese Army so it could stay in the fight against Japan.
The cost in planes and lives was staggering. More than 400 U.S.
Source: AP
Feb 24, 2008
A longtime prosecutor agreed while he was in office to give filmmakers access to documents connected to President Kennedy's assassination and helped form a company to take part in the venture, a newspaper reported Sunday.
New details about District Attorney Henry Wade's involvement in the proposed project about the JFK assassination and the trial of Jack Ruby were contained in long-hidden files discovered in a courthouse safe, according to The Dallas Morning News.
Wade
Source: NYT
Feb 24, 2008
Larry Devlin is 85 now, suffering from emphysema and tethered to an oxygen tank, his Central Intelligence Agency career long behind him. But he recalls with sunlit clarity the day in Congo nearly half a century ago when he was handed a packet of poisons, including toxic toothpaste, and ordered to carry out a political assassination.
“I was totally taken aback,” said Mr. Devlin, sitting in his den, looking out on a small lake in the Virginia countryside. He uttered a mild profanity,
Source: NYT
Feb 24, 2008
She served as first lady through her husband’s two terms, suffered the indignities of his impeachment and then made history running for his office on her own.
No, not her. It was Miriam Amanda Wallace Ferguson, known as “Ma,” the first woman elected governor of Texas, back in 1924.
So you’ll pardon the women of Texas (and Ma Ferguson was known for her generous pardons) if they don’t go all wobbly over the idea of the first female president.
Texas is no stra
