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: Houston Chronicle
Jul 16, 2007
''My only adversity is age," Senate President Pro Tem Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., the longest-serving senator in American history, told his junior colleagues last month. Then he cast the 18,000th vote of his 48-year career in that august body, triumphantly passing the previous record set by the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., another legend in his own time. The 89-year-old Byrd observed this historic event with an eloquent, moving but largely overlooked speech on the Senate floor publicly confr
Source: http://www.egyptologyblog.co.uk
Jul 16, 2007
A settlement dating back to the time of the pyramid builders was discovered in Egypt's western desert, the first find of its kind there, Egypt's Supreme Council for Antiquities (SCA) said Monday.
"A joint Egypt-Czech archaeological mission found a city dating to the Old Kingdom [2687 to 2191 BC] in the Garat Al Abyad region in Bahariya," SCA chief Zahi Hawass said, referring to an isolated oasis 400 kilometres (250 miles) southwest of Cairo...
The latest find
Source: AP
Jul 16, 2007
... 10th Mountain Division troops are in the front lines fighting
against al-Qaida insurgents in Iraq. ...
But few can detail the division’s exploits during World War II, and fewer
still how the division was born as an alpine fighting force in the
mountains of Colorado or why it now calls upstate New York its home.
Fort Drum’s new Heritage Center is now providing those answers.
Source: Daily India
Jul 16, 2007
World War II Gurkha hero Tul Bahadur Pun is now trying to get his Victoria Cross back from the British authorities, who took it away from him 30 years ago on the pretext that it required "safekeeping."
Eighty-four-year-old Pun, who came to Britain last week from his home in Nepal for medical treatment, recently went to see his medal on display in a case at the Gurkha Museum in Winchester.
Museum chiefs use a picture of Pun on their leaflet - but when asked if
Source: Middle East Times
Jul 16, 2007
A Bulgarian archaeologist announced Sunday that his team had found a gold mask that belonged to a Thracian king in the fourth century BC, near the eastern town of Sliven.
"The discovery of this mask proves that the Valley of the Thracian Kings stretches from the center of Bulgaria to the east of the country," archaeologist Georgi Kitov said.
The Thracians lived in southeastern Europe, the Carpathians and the Caucasus from about 4,000 BC to the 3rd century AD
Source: LiveScience
Jul 16, 2007
The world’s first atomic bomb test might have exposed unaware civilians in New Mexico to thousands of times the recommended level of public radiation exposure, according to reconstructed data in a new study.
The research, led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), found that ingestion of radioactive materials—primarily from irradiated rainwater and goat’s milk—might have been a substantial contributor to public radiation exposure that was largely not accounted for.
Source: NYT
Jul 16, 2007
There has been a lot of criticism of Senator John McCain and his campaign advisers for the touchstone strategic assumption they made in planning his presidential campaign. With Vice President Cheney having long ago ruled out running, Mr. McCain built his approach on the belief that he would be viewed as the Republican heir apparent. That meant rustling up big name consultants and then awaiting the deluge of campaign contributions needed to finance a Rolls Royce campaign.
As has beco
Source: BBC
Jul 16, 2007
The gap between rich and poor in the UK is as wide as it has been for forty years, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) has said in a report.
The JRF found that households in already wealthy areas had become "disproportionately" richer compared to society as a whole.
But the number of "poor" households has risen over the past 15 years.
Source: BBC
Jul 16, 2007
South African national prosecutors have charged two of the most senior public security officials of the apartheid era with attempted murder.
Former Police Minister Adriaan Vlok and ex-police chief Johan van der Merwe are accused of plotting to kill a prominent opponent of apartheid in 1989.
Prosecutors said they and three others attempted to kill Rev Frank Chikane by lining his clothes with a nerve toxin.
Source: Haaretz
Jul 16, 2007
A German historian has called for Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler's anti-Semitic hate book Mein Kampf to be reprinted and put back on sale in German bookshops with notes on its errors, saying this would be preferable to a flood of unrefuted editions.
Horst Moeller, director of the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich, said Monday this would be better than waiting until 2015 when anybody could publish it after copyright in Germany lapses on the book.
The newspaper Fran
Source: Time
Jul 16, 2007
The U.S. commanders in Iraq seem to sense some new horror for the country is
near. On July 7, Gen. David Petraeus predicted that insurgents would lash out
with spectacular attacks in the coming weeks, as the clock runs down on time
ahead of the September progress report due in Washington. And yesterday Maj.
Gen. Rick Lynch, the commander of U.S. forces in southern Iraq, echoed the fear
when talking to reporters in the Green Zone."We're concerned about some kind of
Tet offensive that'
Source: Azzaman
Jul 16, 2007
The Antiquities Department has included an ancient synagogue where Biblical prophet Nahum is
purportedly buried in its 2008 renovation plans.
“The Antiquities Department has added the tomb of Prophet Nahum, peace be on him, to its 2008
preservation plan,” said department’s chief, Abbas al-Hussaini.
The synagogue and the tomb are situated in the northern Christian Iraqi town of al-Qoush, 40
kilometers north of Mosul.
Al-Qoush, a major Christian center in northern Iraq, had a large Jewish
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
Jul 16, 2007
This year marks a computing milestone, but it’s not one that will have IT officials popping any corks: The computer virus has turned 25, according to Scientific American.
And boy, has it matured. The first computer virus to spread in the wild, Scientific American says, was “Elk Cloner,” a relatively simple piece of software created by a high-school student in Pittsburgh. Cloner didn’t attempt to destroy the data of Apple II users; it merely serenaded them with a poem:
I
Source: http://www.independent.ie
Jul 15, 2007
AN HISTORIC Irish dolmen has been wrapped in tin foil and silver plastic - so that it now looks more like a Flash Gordon spaceship than a prehistoric monument.
Labby Rock, near Castlebaldwin, Co Sligo, and overlooking Lough Arrow, looked more like a "baked potato" according to one expert who visited it recently.
The famous 70-ton dolmen was said to have been used as a bed by Diarmaid and Grainne when fleeing Fionn MacCumhaill.
But Mary Quinlan, wh
Source: Charlotte Observer
Jul 15, 2007
The S.C. state flag is a tourism bureau's dream -- a palmetto tree that appears to be rustling in a nighttime breeze, illuminated by a perfect crescent moon.
But the flag, one of the most recognizable and best-selling state banners in the nation, has nothing to do with condos or beaches, smiling faces or beautiful places.
Because that's not necessarily the moon.
Nearly 150 years after it was adopted as the state flag, historians and scholars still can't agr
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
Jul 15, 2007
Residents of Lower Providence Township who live next to Valley Forge are feeling like George Washington at the Battle of the Brandywine - completely outflanked.
"It's disturbing how secretive this has been," said Craig Crawford, whose home is next door to the park. "Why wasn't this in a township newsletter? The public is not aware of what's going on, and it seems like it's a done deal."
This anger, verging on rage, is directed at what many neighbors regard
Source: NYT
Jul 15, 2007
DURING her years in the White House, Lady Bird Johnson, who died last week, kept a voluminous journal of the downhill trajectory of her husband’s presidency.
Mrs. Johnson documents, perhaps too copiously, the glamour and banalities of White House life — the state dinners, her highway beautification program, her wardrobe. But the diary also documents the pressures of an ambitious administration cracking under the pressures of an increasingly unpopular war.
[The article i
Source: NYT
Jul 15, 2007
AFTER John McCain discovered that his campaign was nearly broke — at a time when he was already hemorrhaging in public opinion polls — he did what presidential candidates in trouble always seem to do: he forced out his top consultants....
Nelson Warfield, a media consultant advising Fred Thompson, a likely Republican presidential candidate, said: “How are important are they? I think in a presidential race there are larger dynamics at work than some guy can fix by telling you how to
Source: Chicago Tribune
Jul 15, 2007
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton on Sunday labeled President Bush's tenure in the White House "the most radical presidency" in U.S. history, as she and four other Democratic presidential contenders courted the support of the nation's influential trial lawyers at a meeting in Chicago....
"We need to continue America's forward motion toward progress, toward that more perfect union," Clinton told a large, crowded convention room at the Hyatt Regency Chicago, addressing t
Source: PRNewswire
Jul 15, 2007
Today on NBC's Meet the Press, columnist Robert Novak revealed one of his most secret sources: Sen. Tom Eagleton (D-MO) gave him the quote that labeled 1972 Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern as the candidate of "Amnesty, Abortion and Acid." This is reported for the first time in his new memoir: The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington (Crown Forum).
Following McGovern's stunning victory in the '72 Massachusetts primary, Novak began calling Dem
