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: BBC News
Mar 4, 2007
DAMASCUS, Syria -- The Sabian Mandaeans -- one of the oldest religious groups in the world -- are facing extinction, according to its leaders.
They claim that Islamic extremists in Iraq are trying to wipe them out through forced conversions, rape and murder.
The Mandaeans are pacifists, followers of Adam, Noah and John the Baptist. They have lived in what is now Iraq since before Islam and Christianity.
More than 80% have been forced to flee the country an
Source: CNN
Mar 4, 2007
SELMA, Ala. -- The top two Democratic presidential contenders fought Sunday for the support of African-American voters in a place infamous for a bloody clash between voting rights protesters and police.
Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama spoke on the 42nd anniversary of the 1965 Selma voting rights march, a turning point in the civil rights movement that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
On that day, police, enforcing Gov. George Wallace's ban on demonstr
Source: Los Angeles Times
Mar 4, 2007
SEATTLE —- Leif Erikson stood his ground in Seattle's Shilshole Bay Marina, just as he had since 1962 — despite his appointment with makeover artists in Kent, 15 miles to the south, and the efforts of a crew working full time to dislodge the 17-foot bronze Viking.
Workers tried concrete drills and jackhammers, and even tried to lever him out with a crane wielding 20,000 pounds of force. About 20 people attended his departure ceremony Tuesday — but Leif remained in place.
Source: AFP
Mar 4, 2007
SALMON, Idaho -- Ruby Bernal wasn't self-conscious about her American Indian heritage until her adolescence, when a band of teenage boys called her "squaw" during a drive-by heckling.
"It's like saying the 'N-word' to a black person," says Bernal, a member of the Shoshone-Bannock, one of five tribes with reservations in Idaho.
"To me, it's a slap in the face. It belittles me and it belittles all Indian women."
Bernal is among N
Source: AFP
Mar 4, 2007
BOKOR, Cambodia -- In the ruined ballroom of the Bokor Palace Hotel it is easy to imagine, amid the shattered floor tiles and mouldy walls, the clink of champagne flutes and lively chatter of a night out in this tiny colonial hill station.
A symbol of both the excesses of Cambodia's golden age and the apocalypse that followed, the long abandoned -- some say ghostly -- hotel and casino is now only haunted by curious tourists wandering among its dank rooms and tiny hallways.
Source: Reuters
Mar 4, 2007
WASHINGTON -- In a political landscape populated by Bushes, Kennedys and Clintons, the children and kinfolk of longtime U.S. politicians do indeed have a better shot at winning elective office, but not necessarily at holding on or moving up, experts say.
A study last year on political dynasties in the U.S. Congress found that politicians who held office for more than one term were 40 percent more likely to have a relative in Congress in the future than other members.
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Source: AP
Mar 4, 2007
OKLAHOMA CITY -- The Cherokee Nation vote this weekend to revoke the citizenship of the descendants of people the Cherokee once owned as slaves was a blow to people who have relied on tribal benefits...
In Saturday's special election, more than 76 percent of voters decided to amend the Cherokee Nation's constitution to remove the estimated 2,800 freedmen descendants from the tribal rolls, according to results posted Sunday on the tribe's Web site.
Marilyn Vann, presiden
Source: AP
Mar 4, 2007
NEW YORK -- Lee Drew had a chat with some cousins the other day.
He was sitting in his home office in Orem, Utah. Four of the cousins were in England. One was in Australia, another in South Africa. A few more joined in from other parts of North America.
Drew is one of a new breed of genealogists who are doing things that would have been impossible in the not-so-distant era of dusty archives and whirring microfilm readers. He has found so many of his relatives that he ne
Source: AP
Mar 4, 2007
LIBERTYVILLE, Ill. -- Yugoslavia's last monarch, exiled from his homeland during World War II, ended up in a tomb inside an ornately decorated church outside Chicago, a place that still attracts his loyal followers.
But while King Peter II [who died in Denver in 1970, age 43] personally chose St. Sava Serbian Orthodox Monastery as his final resting place, his son, Crown Prince Alexander, is upsetting some Serbian-Americans by planning to take his father's remains back to the land of
Source: NYT
Mar 4, 2007
LAST week, Alan Greenspan proved that a retired maestro can still seem to conduct the world’s financial orchestra, even if he no longer occupies the podium.
On Monday, Mr. Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, said that “it is possible we can get a recession in the latter months of 2007.” His musings, to a group of executives in Hong Kong, were followed over the next 48 hours by a break in the frothy Chinese market and poor numbers on United States home sales and durable-g
Source: Washington Post
Mar 4, 2007
Forty-two years after a 25-year-old activist named John Lewis led voting-rights marchers onto the Edmund Pettus Bridge outside Selma, Ala., only to be beaten and tear-gassed by state troopers on what became known as Bloody Sunday, the bridge is the scene of another kind of showdown. Today, Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are joining Lewis, now a Democratic congressman from Georgia, and thousands of participants in the annual commemoration of the march from Selma to Montgomery, which was f
Source: Times (of London)
Mar 4, 2007
Winston Churchill banned an electronics expert from Downing Street after an MI5 warning that Soviet spies might use him to bug the prime ministerial hearing aid.
Churchill, then nearing his eighties, had an elaborate desktop loudspeaker system installed at No 10 during his second premiership in the early 1950s.
Files released at the National Archives in Kew show that Roger Hollis, then deputy director-general of MI5, warned Downing Street about the risk of continuing to
Source: Telegraph
Mar 4, 2007
The scene was described by Monet as "dazzling" and "beautiful" and inspired the Impressionist master to paint some of his best loved works.
Now the Palace of Westminster has joined a list of heritage sites that ministers are accused of failing to protect.
A United Nations body overseeing "world heritage sites" is threatening to put several British areas on its Heritage in Danger List, a register of 31 historic places whose futures are in je
Source: AP
Mar 3, 2007
BELGRADE, Serbia -- Serbia's president on Saturday urged the arrest of war crimes fugitive Gen. Ratko Mladic to comply with a World Court demand.
The U.N.'s highest court ruled Monday that Serbia did not carry out genocide against Muslims in Bosnia's war. But it ordered Belgrade to hand over Mladic, the Bosnian Serb wartime commander and the alleged architect of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre that left over 7,000 Bosnian Muslims killed.
Mladic and the others who are hiding"are working agains
Source: Xinhua/ChinaView
Mar 3, 2007
GUIYANG, China -- Legislators in southwest China's Guizhou Province are mulling a regulation aimed at protecting property rights for traditional knowledge, especially knowledge relating to biological resources, said sources with the provincial bureau of intellectual property right.
For centuries the Miao ethnic group in southwestern China extracted herbal remedies to combat cold, cough and pneumonia from a type of grass called "guanyin cao".
But their failure
Source: AP
Mar 3, 2007
GROZNY, Russia -- The body of a former Georgian president who was overthrown in 1992 and died the following year under mysterious circumstances was unearthed Saturday in the Chechen capital, his son said.
Zviad Gamsakhurdia was elected as Georgia's first president in 1991 but was overthrown in a popular uprising in January 1992. He fled to
Chechnya, where he was friends with local leaders, then returned to Georgia where he led an unsuccessful rebellion aimed at returning to p
Source: AP
Mar 3, 2007
OKLAHOMA CITY -- Cherokee Nation members voted Saturday to revoke the tribal citizenship of an estimated 2,800 descendants of the people the Cherokee once owned as slaves.
With all 32 precincts reporting, 76.6 percent had voted in favor of an amendment to the tribal constitution that would limit citizenship to descendants of "by blood" tribe members as listed on the federal Dawes Commission's rolls from more than 100 years ago.
The commission, set up by a Cong
Source: Guardian
Mar 3, 2007
Balthazar Napoleon de Bourbon, a jovial Indian lawyer and part-time farmer, has always been fascinated by France. Framed pictures of the Eiffel Tower and the palace of Versailles implausibly decorate his house in a dusty, bustling suburb of the central Indian city of Bhopal. He gave his children French names even though he has never set foot in France.
But he may soon make his first trip to Paris, after he was visited by a relative of Prince Philip, who told him that he is the first
Source: Live Science
Mar 3, 2007
Vikings navigated the oceans with sundials aboard their Norse ships. But on an overcast day, sundials would have been useless. Many researchers have suggested that the on foggy days, Vikings looked toward the sky through rock crystals called sunstones to give them direction.
No one had tested the theory until recently.
A team sailed the Arctic Ocean aboard the Swedish icebreaker Oden and found that sunstones could indeed light the way in foggy and cloudy conditions.
Source: AP
Mar 3, 2007
Even as the U.S. Department of Justice was announcing a fresh look at unsolved civil rights-era killings around the South, a Mississippi Delta prosecutor was closing the books on perhaps the most notorious of those cold cases —- the brutal 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till.
To some, the Leflore County grand jury's decision not to return an indictment in the case following an exhaustive three-year federal investigation was a sign that not much has changed in Mississippi in the l
