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: Evan Thomas in Newsweek
Sep 17, 2007
Bush and Clinton have this in common: they spend time worrying about their place in history. As president, Clinton spent hours fretting he could never be in the "top tier" because he'd never been a "war president." Bush initially suggested to [biographer Robert] Draper he'd be long dead before anyone knew his place in history. But he was thinking about it. Competing with political adviser Karl Rove to read the most books, Bush compared himself to Lincoln, winning the confiden
Source: Independent (UK)
Sep 17, 2007
The headline that the advertising (and political) world never thought it would see appeared in Campaign last week: "Labour turns to Saatchis". Saatchi & Saatchi, the advertising agency so integrally associated with the Conservative Party, in particular the three successive electoral victories of Margaret Thatcher, had been appointed to handle the Labour party's advertising account in the next election.
Thirty years ago, Saatchi & Saatchi made history with a politic
Source: BBC
Sep 17, 2007
An exploratory dive to assess the chances of recovering a sunken U-boat is to take place off the Donegal coast.
The vessel - which did not see any war action - sank while being towed from Scotland to Londonderry to be scrapped.
Derry City Council plans to raise the Nazi submarine - U-778 - which lies 16 miles north west of Malin Head in about 70 metres of water.
Source: AP
Sep 17, 2007
Constitution Day is here and many teenagers know little about commemorating the document's signing.
A study being released Monday by a foundation that focuses on journalism and the First Amendment found that 51 percent of high school students questioned had not heard of the day when they are required by law to learn about the Constitution.
The occasion is usually observed on or around Sept. 17, the day the document was adopted in 1787.
Just one in 10 studen
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 17, 2007
The rich history of Army uniforms will be celebrated in a new set of Royal Mail stamps to go on sale.
om the flamboyance of a 17th-century cavalryman to the familiar camouflage of the modern-day soldier, the set shows almost 350 years of Army history.
The stamps, which go on sale on Thursday, are the first in a series of three issues on a military theme. The Army set will be followed by RAF uniforms next year and Royal Navy uniforms in 2009.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
Sep 17, 2007
A decade ago, Republicans were vying to eliminate the Education Department, deriding it as a wasteful expansion of federal authority.
Today, they led a ceremony outside its headquarters here not only to celebrate the department, but to name the building after a trademark big-government Democrat: Lyndon Baines Johnson.
“Forty years ago,” Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said at the sun-splashed ceremony, describing her department’s humble beginnings, “Education was
Source: NYT
Sep 17, 2007
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — After white parents in this racially mixed city complained about school overcrowding, school authorities set out to draw up a sweeping rezoning plan. The results: all but a handful of the hundreds of students required to move this fall were black — and many were sent to virtually all-black, low-performing schools.
Black parents have been battling the rezoning for weeks, calling it resegregation. And in a new twist for an integration fight, they are wielding an unu
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 17, 2007
He was a young man, like so many others, who fell on the battlefield at Passchendaele. Aged just 29, Private Jack Hunter died in the arms of his younger brother, Jim, who buried him there, on the front line, in a shallow grave.
Once the guns had fallen silent, Jim returned to look for his brother's body, but the ground had been chewed up by artillery and he could find no trace. So the story remained, unfinished, when Jim himself died, aged 86 in 1977, calling to Jack with his final
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 17, 2007
The proposed sale of a rare bronze statue, looted from Beijing by British and French soldiers in 1860, has run into powerful opposition from China, where there is rising anger over the millions of Chinese antiquities held by foreign museums and collectors.
The beautifully preserved bronze horse head, which originally adorned the summer residence of China's ancient emperors, will be the centrepiece of Sotheby's autumn auction in Hong Kong next month. It is expected to fetch up to £5
Source: WaPo
Sep 16, 2007
Almost 40 years ago, a 21-year-old Mitt Romney watched as his father's presidential campaign stumbled to a halt. George Romney's 1968 bid for the White House failed for several reasons -- his notorious remark that U.S. generals had brainwashed him into supporting the Vietnam War, the surprise entry into the race of fellow liberal Republican Nelson Rockefeller, Richard M. Nixon's establishment appeal. But his Mormonism wasn't among them."I don't recall ever having been asked about his beliefs or about the Mormon church," says Charles Harmon, the elder Romney's press secretary at the time. Walter DeVries, Romney's chief strategist during the race, never considered his boss's religion a political liability. "I just don't remember it coming up," he notes.George Romney's candidacy did spark some news stories about the refusal of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to allow blacks to join the priesthood, a policy that was reversed in 1978. But his strong civil rights record as governor of Michigan inoculated him against charges of racism, and reporters otherwise paid virtually no attention to his religion.
Source: Guardian
Sep 16, 2007
In the vast, agonising mosaic of the Holocaust, Mahjub bin Adam Mohamed was simply one more piece, one of millions of the Nazis' victims lost to obscurity without a funeral or a grave.
Now bin Adam is to make history in Germany by becoming the first black person to be given a memorial in his adopted country as an individual victim of the genocide of the Third Reich. A Stolperstein - a bronze 'stumbling block' - will be erected on the ground outside the house in Berlin where he lived
Source: NYT
Sep 16, 2007
Wolfram Pobanz, a 68-year-old retired cartographer, is positive that it’s not the one in the Deutsches Historisches Museum, with the Russian bullet hole through Germany, and he can prove it.
Neither is it the one in the Märkisches Museum, the Berlin history museum nearby, nor the one in a geographical institute across town, which first caught Mr. Pobanz’s eye 40-odd years ago when he was a student.
“We called it the Führer globe,” he remembered. It planted the seed of h
Source: Independent (UK)
Sep 16, 2007
Almost a century after it steamed to the rescue of the stricken Titanic,
saving the lives of more than 700 stranded passengers, and 89 years after it
was sunk, the wreckage of the RMS Carpathia has finally been explored,
yielding precious artefacts.
An amateur dive team performed a record-breaking feat of underwater
archaeology to salvage objects such as the telegraph machine used on the
liner to communicate between the bridge and the engine room. They also
brought up crockery
Source: http://www.news.com.au
Sep 16, 2007
A SCHOOL in northern France was evacuated yesterday after a nine-year-old girl took a World War II handgrenade to show to the class.
Her teacher had asked students to bring an unusual object to school, according to deputy police chief Vincent Roberti.
The girl obliged, pulling a grenade her brother had found out of her bag.
The teacher "immediately reacted, putting the weapon in a plastic bag, taking it to the courtyard and warning the school principal
Source: AP
Sep 16, 2007
Deep in Shari Klages' memory is an image of herself as a girl in New Jersey, going into her parents' bedroom, pulling a thick leather-bound album from the top shelf of a closet and sitting down on the bed to leaf through it.
What she saw was page after page of ink-and-watercolor drawings that convey, with simple lines yet telling detail, the brutality of Dachau, the Nazi concentration camp where her father spent the last weeks of World War II. ...
Now, she finally want
Source: AFP
Sep 16, 2007
Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, for years an inscrutable seer on the economy, is causing a stir by alleging in his new memoir that "the Iraq war is largely about oil."
Greenspan, who as head of the US central bank was famous for his tight-lipped reserve, is uncharacteristically direct in "The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World," also accusing President George W. Bush of abandoning Republican principles on the economy.
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Source: NYT
Sep 16, 2007
Oration and recitation, once staples of the American school system, have largely been phased out. Rhetoric programs at universities have narrowed, merged with communications departments, or been eliminated altogether.
“We don’t have that kind of oral culture anymore,” said Prof. James Engell, author of “The Committed Word: Literature and Public Values,” who teaches a rhetoric course at Harvard. “We are in a culture that devalues our sense of memory.” Back when John Quincy Adams was
Source: NYT
Sep 16, 2007
Rarely does a politician, a party or a political system get a chance at a do-over.
Yet when Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton rolls out her comprehensive health plan in Iowa on Monday, it will be just that: Mrs. Clinton, or whoever the next president might be, has a second chance to fix a system that has, in many ways, deteriorated in the 14 years since the Clintons’ last attempt at an overhaul....
It was almost inconceivable, in the spring of 1993, when nearly three-fourt
Source: AP
Sep 16, 2007
Douglas Eugene "Gene" Savoy, an explorer who discovered more than 40 lost cities in Peru and led long-distance sailing adventures to learn more about ancient cultures, has died. He was 80.
Savoy died of natural causes Tuesday at his Reno home, his family said Saturday.
Dubbed the "real Indiana Jones" by People magazine, Savoy was credited with finding four of Peru's most important archaeological sites, including Vilcabamba, the last refuge of the In
Source: AP
Sep 16, 2007
LIMA, Peru - Yale University has agreed to return thousands of Inca artifacts taken from Peru's famed Machu Picchu citadel almost a century ago, the government said Saturday.
"Finally it has been established that Peru is the owner of each one of the pieces," Housing Minister Hernan Garrido Lecca, who led negotiations with Yale, told Lima's Radioprogramas radio.
The New Haven, Connecticut-based university said in a statement on its Web site that some of the pie
