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: ROGERS CADENHEAD at the website watchingthewatchers.org
Jan 17, 2008
On Jan. 17, 1998, Matt Drudge reported that Newsweek had spiked Michael Isikoff's story about President Clinton's sexual affair with Monica Lewinsky, the first shot in the war between the corporate and cautious culture of mainstream journalism and the completely batshit blogosphere.
Six weeks later, I registered Drudge.Com. It's hard to believe that Matt Drudge remains one of the most important journalists in the U.S., 10 years after he nabbed somebody else's scoop. I wish someone h
Source: Guardian
Jan 17, 2008
The Ministry of Defence is to offer compensation and an apology to the Porton Down victims of secret chemical testing, it was reported today.
It is understood £3m will be made available between the 360 veterans who claim they were tricked into becoming "human guinea pigs" for nerve gas experiments.
The ex-servicemen say they were duped into thinking the trials only involved cold remedy tests at the military research centre in Salisbury, Wiltshire.
But r
Source: Reuters
Jan 17, 2008
An official Chinese obituary praised a late Communist Party city boss on Thursday for "maintaining stability" during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in a rare mention of a subject that remains taboo to this day.
Publication of the obituary of Zhang Lichang, the former party boss of the port city of Tianjin, in The People's Daily, the party's official paper, coincided with the third death anniversary of Zhao Ziyang.
Zhao was toppled as national party chief i
Source: Washington Times
Jan 17, 2008
Jerusalem-based Nazi hunters, engaged in a race against time to find and prosecute World War II criminals before they die of old age, say they are frustrated that some European governments have not shown the same sense of urgency.
German authorities appear to have given up trying to bring the former Nazis to justice, while Austria has become "a paradise for war criminals," said Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel-based Simon Wiesenthal Center.
"In Germa
Source: NYT
Jan 17, 2008
Volunteers making telephone calls for Senator John McCain in South Carolina last weekend noticed something odd: Four people contacted said in remarkably similar language that they opposed Mr. McCain for president because of his 1980 divorce from his first wife, Carol, who raised the couple’s three children while Mr. McCain was a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
By Tuesday afternoon, a group calling itself Vietnam Veterans Against McCain had sent out a crude flier accusing the candidate o
Source: NYT
Jan 16, 2008
Looking dapper in a bow tie and a crisp suit, the founder of the Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, stared fiercely into a dark room. He was made of wax and standing in a museum, but for some visitors last week, he might as well have been alive and breathing.
“If they let me I would kiss his hand,” exclaimed a middle-aged man with a bushy black mustache. “My heart is burning.”
Almost 85 years after Ataturk formed the modern state of Turkey from the remains of the
Source: Newsletter of the New York American Revolution Round Table
Jan 16, 2008
For decades, Anna Plumstead of Wiscasset, Me had a treasure in her attic: a 1776 copy of the Declaration of Independence. It had been sent to the town in that decisive year as part of a campaign to spread its message throughout the 13 rebelling colonies. At that time, Wiscasset was part of Massachusetts. When Ms Plumstead died, her heirs cleaned out the attic and found the copy. It was sold at an estate auction and has since changed hands several times. Most recently it was bought by a private c
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Jan 16, 2008
Pope Benedict XVI, who got a firsthand look at sometimes-violent student activism as a German university professor in the late 1960s, evidently has no wish to repeat the experience.
After some 50 students at the University of Rome La Sapienza briefly occupied the rector’s office today to protest the pope’s scheduled appearance at the university, the Vatican announced that Benedict would not be coming after all.
“Following the widely noted vicissitudes of recent days … i
Source: Scott McLemee at the website of Inside Higher Ed
Jan 16, 2008
One of the really puzzling phenomena [of the 2008 campaign] has been the habitual reference to Clinton’s run as “the first serious campaign for president by a woman.” That is how I heard it described on a cable news program half an hour ago. Chances are, a similar formulation is being used by someone in media-land right this very second. It is hopelessly ahistorical, yet now practically inescapable.
In her examination of press coverage between 1872 and 2004, [Erika Falk, author of t
Source: China Daily
Jan 16, 2008
Chinese archaeologists have discovered an elaborately-made sword, which they believe is 2,500 to 2,600 years old, in an ancient tomb in the eastern province of Jiangxi.
"It is reckoned as the oldest ever excavated in the country," said Xu Changqing, chief of the excavation team.
Source: CNN
Jan 16, 2008
The Library of Congress recently discovered three glass negatives of the crowd gathered at the U.S. Capitol in Washington for Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural address on March 4, 1865.
[Click on the SOURCE link to view pics.]
Source: WaPo
Jan 16, 2008
Every year the nation celebrates one man's birthday like no other's -- with song and poetry, breakfasts and rallies, parades that quicken the heart and films that well the eyes with tears.
Yesterday, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would have been 79.
If he could peer across the national landscape, he would see some 125 schools named after him, at least 770 streets, the vast majority of them concentrated in the South, where he fought the hardest -- and resistance was gr
Source: LAT
Jan 16, 2008
Between 1934 and 1936, more than 300,000 men and women, divided into several armies, trudged inland through a brutal terrain of frigid mountain passes, freezing rivers and marshes in search of a sanctuary to continue their nascent Communist revolution. Only one in 10 survived. Now, seven decades later, fewer than 500 are still alive.
For generations, their sacrifices have been considered legend, a Chinese version of America's Valley Forge, where sheer grit and dedication drove a you
Source: NYT
Jan 16, 2008
Card-catalog classifications hardly seem the subject of trans-Atlantic imbroglios, but the Library of Congress recently settled one when it agreed to reinstate a past policy of classifying works by Scottish authors under the heading “Scottish literature.” Early last year the library started classifying about 600 titles by Scottish writers as “English literature,” with subheadings like “Scottish authors” or “Scottish poets.” That offended the National Library of Scotland, which complained, enlist
Source: AP
Jan 16, 2008
The White House has acknowledged recycling its backup computer tapes of e-mail before October 2003, raising the possibility that many electronic messages - including those pertaining to the CIA leak case - have been taped over and are gone forever.
The disclosure came minutes before midnight Tuesday under a court-ordered deadline that forced the White House to reveal information it has previously refused to provide.
Among the e-mails that could be lost are messages swap
Source: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/24816.html
Jan 16, 2008
Workers rolled out sod amid snow flurries Tuesday, determined that the summer home where President Lincoln and his family spent more than a quarter of his Washington life will look fully restored by Presidents Day.The sprawling Gothic Revival cottage, likely to be Washington's next niche tourist attraction, lies only three miles north of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. But it's 300 feet higher than the swamp-level White House, hence is breezier and as much as 7 degrees co
Source: AP
Jan 15, 2008
A time capsule was found atop a bell tower at Mexico City's Metropolitan Cathedral, where it was placed in 1791 to protect the building from harm, researchers said Tuesday.
The lead box — filled with religious artifacts, coins and parchments — was hidden in a hollow stone ball to mark the moment on May 14, 1791, when the building's topmost stone was laid, 218 years after construction had begun.
Workers restoring the church found the box in October, inside the stone ball
Source: Jerusalem Post
Jan 15, 2008
US President George W. Bush is"very
conscious" that Jewish refugees fled to Israel from
Arab lands after the 1947-49 war, and this came up in his discussions on the Palestinian
refugee issue last week in Jerusalem, a senior Western diplomatic source said Tuesday.
Jewish organizations have been trying for years to underline the similarities between the
plight of Jewish and Arab refugees, and this was a clear indication that the narrative has
begun to seep into US administration thinking.
Source: NYT
Jan 15, 2008
Americans routinely used to wear their political hearts on their sleeves — or at least on their lapels. George Washington proudly displayed his own on his chest when he was inaugurated as the nation’s first president, where Federal Hall now stands in Lower Manhattan.
Nearly two centuries later, in 1968, a 10-year-old Manhattan student named Jordan M. Wright glommed a handful of Bobby Kennedy for President buttons from a Midtown campaign headquarters. Since then, Mr. Wright, a New Yo
Source: Reuters
Jan 15, 2008
Guatemala will create a tourist park at the ruins of an ancient Maya city that is home to one of the world's largest pyramids, the country's president said on Monday.
The Maya built soaring temples and elaborate palaces in Central America and southern Mexico before mysteriously abandoning their cities around 900 A.D.
Recently elected Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom said the park would give tourists access to the Mirador archeological site, which contains hundreds of b
