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: LAT
Jul 15, 2007
Thirty-five years ago, with the United States riven by an unpopular armed conflict in a faraway land, the Democratic Party responded by nominating for president its most vocal antiwar candidate: George McGovern.
Friday night, not far from the Capitol where debate over another war is an almost-daily occurrence, veterans of the McGovern campaign and others gathered at a reception to pay homage to him.
The parallels between the fight he led against the U.S. involvement in
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jul 15, 2007
On screen he portrayed British military heroes such as Henry V, Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington.
In real life Laurence Olivier performed some bravery of his own, risking imprisonment and even assassination as an agent for Britain.
The celebrated actor, mistakenly accused by some of his contemporaries of lacking patriotism for deciding to remain in Hollywood when war broke out rather than return home and sign up, worked secretly to help secure the hearts and minds
Source: Boston Globe
Jul 15, 2007
John Nelson Black was a three-year enlisted man in the Union infantry. History remembers his regiment for its hard luck, with its ranks decimated at Antietam, Maryland, and its men captured in the siege of Plymouth, North Carolina. But Black himself would have remained virtually anonymous, save for a quirky gent named McNutt and a discovery worthy of a Dan Brown novel.
In October 2004, C. Nelson McNutt passed away at the age of 105 on the very acreage where he was born in June 1899.
Source: Star-Ledger
Jul 15, 2007
This weekend marks the 40th anniversary of the riots that ripped through Plainfield's working-class West End, when black civil unrest erupted in violence from July 14 to 20, leaving one white police officer dead and businesses burned. More than 100 National Guardsmen were sent in to quiet the streets.
The riot's effect left a deep gash in Plainfield that some say has not completely healed....
More than an explosion of anger, the riots were a rebellion by a disenfranchis
Source: NYT
Jul 15, 2007
Only twice before over the last century has 5 percent of the national income gone to families in the upper one-one-hundredth of a percent of the income distribution — currently, the almost 15,000 families with incomes of $9.5 million or more a year, according to an analysis of tax returns by the economists Emmanuel Saez at the University of California, Berkeley and Thomas Piketty at the Paris School of Economics.
Such concentration at the very top occurred in 1915 and 1916, as the G
Source: AP
Jul 14, 2007
RICHMOND, Va. -- More than 140 years after Civil War cannons fell silent, two museums are offering very different views of the war between the states.
The century-old Museum of the Confederacy offers a more single-minded approach to the war. Red, white and blue battle flags from different Confederate troops wave from the ceiling. Three levels of exhibits feature bullet-riddled uniforms, blood-spattered letters from dying soldiers and maps generals once used to lead their men. Locat
Source: http://www.thanhniennews.com
Jul 14, 2007
Vietnam has announced it intends to seek UNESCO World Heritage status for the Hung Temple situated in its northern Phu Tho province.
Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has instructed the provincial administration and related agencies to do research and set up a data base on the temple and some other relics from the bronze and early iron ages.
Source: http://www.thestandard.com.hk
Jul 14, 2007
Japanese conservatives protested Friday against US congressional demands for a clear apology over wartime military brothels, saying the women were not sex slaves but camp followers.
Lawmakers and academics gave the US embassy in Tokyo a letter saying they were "surprised and shocked" by the pressure for a fresh apology to the "comfort women."
Shoichi Watanabe, history professor emeritus at Tokyo's Sophia University said: "If America keeps saying
Source: AP
Jul 14, 2007
Leaders of the city of Weimar, a cradle of German culture and democracy, vowed Saturday to fight racism and far-right extremism as part of ceremonies marking the 70th anniversary of the opening of the nearby Buchenwald concentration camp.
As part of ceremonies at the camp, where some 56,000 people perished behind its barbed wire fences or in incoming transports, Weimar city council members and survivors signed a statement pledging to honor victims' memories by fighting extremism.
Source: BBC
Jul 14, 2007
Prince Charles has paid a visit to one of Scotland's most important stately homes.
The prince, known as the Duke of Rothesay in Scotland, helped to save Dumfries House in Ayrshire.
He headed a consortium of charities and government bodies which raised £45m to buy the 250-year-old property.
Source: BBC
Jul 14, 2007
A Devon farming family has unveiled a maze in a 10-acre field of maize to mark the 100th anniversary of the scouting movement.
Nick Lees and his family have created an image of the movement's founder Robert Baden-Powell in the corn.
The maze, which is open to the public, has been created in a field at Bickleigh, near Tiverton.
Source: Seattle Times
Jul 14, 2007
Starbucks closed its store in Beijing's Forbidden City on Friday after months of controversy over the U.S. coffee-shop chain doing business there.
The decision followed the Forbidden City's announcement that it wants to operate all stores inside the former imperial palace, which is now a museum.
"[W]e have respectfully decided to end our lease agreement," the Seattle coffee chain said.
Source: NYT
Jul 14, 2007
OSSINING, N.Y. It started with an ever-expanding sinkhole at the entrance of the Mystic Pointe condominiums here and led to an excavation this spring that revealed an underground complex of brick chambers with vaulted ceilings.
Now the subterranean structure, believed to date to the mid-19th century, is a mystery just begging to be solved. Is it as pedestrian as a root cellar? Or as storied as a stop on the Underground Railroad? Does it stretch beyond the cluster of at least nine kn
Source: AP
Jul 14, 2007
It was the summer of Reggie, the summer of Sam, the summer when the lights went dark and the Bronx burned bright.
Thirty years ago, as the temperatures soared and its morale plunged, New York City endured a scathing summer custom-made for tabloid headlines: A crippling July blackout, complete with arson and looting (''24 HOURS OF TERROR''); a media-savvy serial killer dubbed the Son of Sam (''NO ONE IS SAFE''); and a dysfunctional, sensational New York Yankees team (''THE BRONX ZOO'
Source: NYT
Jul 14, 2007
The year was 1973, and Karl Rove was looking for help — from the Nixon White House.
Tucked away inside 78,000 pages of documents from the Nixon administration, released by the National Archives earlier this week, is a little gem: a strategy memorandum from the man who would go on to become the architect of President Bush’s rise to political power.
Source: NYT
Jul 14, 2007
AUSTIN, Tex., July 14 — Past the images of escalating chaos in Vietnam, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the triumph of mankind’s entry into space, at the top of a marble staircase at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum here, thousands of mourners filed past the coffin of Lady Bird Johnson.
Mrs. Johnson died Wednesday at 94, and at her funeral Saturday afternoon at the Riverbend Centre church, representatives of first families stretching back half a century t
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jul 14, 2007
A painting by Sir Winston Churchill of his Chartwell estate near Westerham in Kent fetched 1 million pounds at Sotheby's in London yesterday, a world record auction price for a work by Britain's wartime prime minister.
The 76in x 63.5in (193cm x 161cm) landscape was painted in the war years of the early 1940s, about 20 years after Churchill moved into the much-modified Elizabethan manor house. The picture was bought by a private collector.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jul 14, 2007
It is one of the greatest mysteries of the 20th century. But today an expedition is heading for a remote South Pacific island that they believe holds the key to finally solving the 70-year-old puzzle of the missing aviator Amelia Earhart.
Fifteen members of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (Tighar) will hunt for evidence that the American pilot and her navigator, Fred Noonan, may have crash-landed on a reef and died as castaways on the long-uninhabited atoll of
Source: NYT
Jul 14, 2007
Trying to build popularity, many public libraries across the country have been looking more like big chain bookstores, offering comfortable easy chairs, coffee bars and displays of the latest best sellers.
But the new library in this growing Phoenix suburb has gone a step further. It is one of the first in the nation to have abandoned the Dewey Decimal System of classifying books, in favor of an approach similar to that at Barnes & Noble, say, where books are shelved in “neighb
Source: New York
Jul 13, 2007
Thirty years ago tonight, the lights went out in New York City. Unlike the
placid blackout of 2003, the 1977 blackout plunged a weary, wary city into
inky mayhem. Fires burned in Bushwick. Looters tore into Crown Heights. A
significant chunk of Broadway was ablaze. Damages went into the hundreds
of millions. And no one got shot. In a special issue on the blackout
published on August 1, 1977, New York's Thomas Plate wrote about what the
cops did and didn't do that dark night.
