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
Aug 17, 2007
President Bush had been in office just a few months when Dallas oilman Ray Hunt came to Washington to talk about life after the White House.
Where would his legacy best be tended?
After a private dinner, in a conversation in the White House family quarters, Mr. Hunt, a major Bush campaign contributor, suggested his own alma mater – Southern Methodist University.
"I said to him, 'Mr. President, I would like to raise a new subject and that is that one of
Source: KansasCity.com
Aug 17, 2007
Silas Goodrich was not having a good day.
A catfish bit his hand and sweat from the 100-degree heat was dripping under his Army uniform.
Famed explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark waited anxiously nearby at the fork of the Kansas and Missouri rivers for him to catch a meal for their hungry crew.
He dunked his arms into the muddy water.
A semi truck whizzed past.
The 19th century fisherman disappeared.
Rolland Love wa
Source: MEMRI
Aug 17, 2007
U.S. filmmaker Oliver Stone has again proposed making a documentary about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iranian producer and filmmaker Alireza Sajjadpur said August 16.
Sajjadpur, who is also secretary of Iran's Islamic Society of Artists, said that Stone's publicist had emailed the request to Ahmadinejad's office, and added that in the email, the publicist "referred to the bad image that the U.S. media has given to Islam and Islamic countries and said that the documen
Source: Time
Aug 17, 2007
The military band's quick and terse rendition of India's national anthem was
greeted with a few hushed sighs and gentle nods, in keeping with the somber mood
of the Independence Day festivities at the governor's mansion. There was little
of the chest-thumping pride or fireworks on display for the few hundred guests.
European consuls fiddling with ties in the muggy heat; old freedom fighters
standing tall, their faces gaunt and expressionless. Sixty years after the
waning British Em
Source: HNN Staff
Aug 17, 2007
A 1994 interview with Dick Cheney featured on YouTube this week has drawn more than half a million hits. In the interview Cheney defends the first Bush administration's decision to allow Saddam Hussein to remain in power rather than remove him. Cheney says that going to Baghdad would have plunged the United States into a"quagmire" with parts of Iraq flying off.
The interview is circulating by email and was
Source: http://www.business-standard.com
Aug 17, 2007
It is not the first time in history that housing sector default on account of aggressive expansion of credit to realty sector has pressed the panic button in world equity markets. In 1837 a real estate boom, fuelled by an aggressive expansion of credit, ended in disaster.
The current subprime mortgage default has wiped out over $5 trillion market capitalisation world over. All major benchmark indices have declined by over 10 per cent from the peak levels sometime in February 2007.
Source: Miami Today
Aug 16, 2007
A temporary fix to the crumbling seawall adjacent to the famed Miami Circle in Brickell is just about complete, says State Archeologist Ryan Wheeler — but circle supporters will have to wait until at least next summer to see any further movement in securing the site.
Should the Legislature in March grant a $2.5 million request for funds to construct a permanent wall, the money could come in by July, Mr. Wheeler said, with construction to begin later in the year.
Source: Guardian
Aug 16, 2007
Former member of Germany's militant Red Army Faction, Eva Haule, is freed after 21 years in jail.
Source: NBC
Aug 16, 2007
Is a White House wedding in the works?
Jenna Bush, one of President Bush's twin daughters, is engaged to be married to her longtime boyfriend, Henry Hager, the White House announced Thursday.
Asked if the two were getting married in the Rose Garden, Sally McDonough, press secretary for first lady Laura Bush, replied: "They have not set any details, date or place."
[Click on SOURCE link to watch a video by Bob Faw that reviews past White House wed
Source: http://www.ynetnews.com
Aug 16, 2007
Usually a scene of discord and strife – the Knesset soon plans to lend its halls to far more joyous fanfare.
Essentially the event that will kick-off the celebrations commemorating Israel's 60's birthday, the Knesset plans to reenact the historic United Nations partition vote that led to the creation of a Jewish state.
On November 29th, exactly six decades since the event, Israel's parliament will host the 1947 vote on the partition of western British Mandate Palestine into t
Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Aug 16, 2007
The weekend began on Friday afternoon, after the mills closed. Women, their hair still fuzzed with chenille lint, crowded the doorways. Do you have any pretty dresses?
Things gained momentum on Saturday, as farmers who'd looked at the rear ends of mules all week raised their eyes to the treasures inside. You got overalls?...
For Irwin Koplan, those 60-year-old memories remain as vivid as a bolt of dress fabric. His father, Leo Koplan, was one of those merchants who open
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 16, 2007
A tribe in Papua New Guinea has apologised for killing and eating four 19th century missionaries under the command of a doughty British clergyman.
The four Fijian missionaries were on a proselytising mission on the island of New Britain when they were massacred by Tolai tribesmen in 1878.
They were murdered on the orders of a local warrior chief, Taleli, and were then cooked and eaten.
The Fijians - a minister and three teachers - were under the leadershi
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Aug 16, 2007
Yale University Press on Wednesday announced that a libel suit against it and one of its authors has been dropped, without any changes being made in the book or any payments to the plaintiffs. The book in question is about Hamas and comes just weeks after Cambridge University Press settled a libel case against it over a book about Islamic terrorism by promising to destroy remaining copies of the book.
The cases are notably different in that Cambridge was sued in Britain (where libel
Source: NYT
Aug 16, 2007
Precisely 80 years on, the Sacco-Vanzetti case still resonates like a mournful chord. Almost instantly elevated to the status of myth, the trial and execution of the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti remains one of the blackest pages in the American national story, a cautionary tale of lethal passions fueled by political fear and ethnic prejudice....
“Sacco and Vanzetti,” Bruce Watson’s spirited history of the affair, does a great service in rescuing fact from the haze
Source: Reuters
Aug 16, 2007
An 800-year-old, gold-plated
crucifix that went missing after being seized by the
Nazis has been found in a rubbish skip in Austria,
police said.
The crucifix, made of copper and enamel, was crafted
in Limoges, France, and was part of a Polish art
collection brought to Austria during Nazi rule, Josef
Holzberger, police spokesman in Salzburg, said on
Thursday.
Source: BBC
Aug 15, 2007
An online tool that claims to reveal the identity of organisations that edit Wikipedia pages has revealed that the CIA was involved in editing entries.
Wikipedia Scanner allegedly shows that workers on the agency's computers made edits to the page of Iran's president.
It also purportedly shows that the Vatican has edited entries about Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams.
The tool, developed by US researchers, trawls a list of 5.3m edits and matches them to the net
Source: History Today
Aug 15, 2007
A treatment used by Stalin’s Red Army to treat bacterial infections could offer modern patients the solution to hospital super-bug, MRSA. Bacteriophages, viruses which feed on bacteria, have been used in Eastern European medicine for more than 60 years as an alternative to antibiotics. During the 1930s, as cures were sought for bacterial diseases, bacteriophages lost out to antibiotics in western European countries since they were harder to patent and thus offered less potential profit for drug
Source: Reuters
Aug 15, 2007
India marks 60 years of independence on August 15, celebrating the end of British colonial rule in 1947.
Following is a chronology of major events during the last six decades.
August 15, 1947 - India wins independence from Britain after being divided into two separate nations, India and Pakistan. Jawaharlal Nehru is appointed the first prime minister....
Source: AP
Aug 15, 2007
Certain images will be indelibly linked to the interstate bridge collapse: Mangled green steel beams, giant concrete slabs that seem to float on the Mississippi River, a school bus frozen on a downward slant. Even as the search for victims continues, historians are thinking about how to document the carnage.
Those who have chronicled other disasters say it's important to quickly secure artifacts, photographs and witness accounts that will convey the magnitude years from now. Key items wou
Source: http://www.jpost.com
Aug 15, 2007
The most poorly compensated half of the estimated 250,000 Holocaust survivors living in Israel who are entitled to monthly pensions, 52%, receive payments of NIS 1,200 to NIS 1,600.
Under the first compensation agreement between Israel and Germany, signed in 1953, Germany gave Israel $750 million in goods and services for the absorption of Holocaust survivors and to help the young state.
Germany conditioned the agreement on the renunciation of any future claims by Israe
