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: AP
Jan 3, 2007
The Navy will name its next aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford in honor of the president who was laid to rest Wednesday in his home town of Grand Rapids, Mich., officials said.
The Navy had not planned to make the announcement yet, but Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary who served in the Ford administration, divulged the news during his eulogy at the funeral.
"How fitting it would be that the name Gerald R. Ford will patrol the high seas for decade
Source: AFP at Yahoo News
Jan 3, 2007
A German archaeologist says he has found relics of "humanity's first war" in the northeast of Syria in the form of clay balls used as ammunition almost 6,000 years ago, Die Zeit weekly said in its edition due for publication on Thursday.
"We have there the oldest example of an offensive war," said Clemens Reichel, who is leading an archaeological dig in the ancient city of Hamoukar, on the border with Iraq, for the University of Chicago.
Reichel said
Source: Seattle Times
Jan 3, 2007
.. Never realizing all the time that you were cutting, you were defining how you saw yourself, taking in the images of what the mass producers of toys told you was the standard of beauty.
Arabella Grayson knows what it was like for children to take in those images. And it is what led her to begin collecting paper dolls, black ones, and trying to understand their place in history. Her efforts are on display at the Smithsonian's Anacostia Community Museum in "Two Hundred Years of
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 3, 2007
The cavalier attitude of the polar explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes meant his earliest adventures were opposed by the Government and the most famous names in the field.
A Foreign Office file released by the National Archives after 30 years reveals the animosity he aroused as he planned the Transglobe expedition that made his name.
Sir Ranulph Fiennes’ tenacity led him to take on the elements but won him few friends at the outset
Sir Wally Herbert, the first
Source: icCoventry
Jan 3, 2007
THE STRATFORD church where William Shakespeare worshipped and is buried urgently needs up to a million pounds worth of repairs.
The Holy Trinity Church attracts thousands of visitors annually but needs the cash to stop the oldest church in the town from crumbling.
It dates back to the 13th century and was where Shakespeare was baptised, where he worshipped with his family and where he lies buried in the chancel.
Source: BBC
Jan 3, 2007
Documents and papers shown to the BBC by a relation of the commander of British troops during the 1897 siege of Malakand - in what is now Pakistan's North West Frontier Province - provide a fascinating new insight into the struggle for South Asia.
The papers belong to Ben Tottenham, a relation by marriage of William Hope Meiklejohn, who commanded British and Indian troops at the Malakand garrison, which was besieged by thousands of tribesmen for 10 days before it was successfully
Source: Independent (UK)
Jan 3, 2007
Three weeks after two of Britain's most notorious spies defected to Soviet Russia, the Prime Minister and his cabinet were more concerned about the moral fibre of the Foreign Office than any threat posed to national security.
Top-secret papers released on New Year's Day reveal the true extent of the ignorance and incompetence at the heart of the then government and the intelligence services during one of the most serious breaches of security in British history. The classified notes
Source: BBC
Jan 3, 2007
It's not an epitaph one would wish for - to become the physical embodiment of a swear word. But how else do you explain "Gordon Bennett!", the expression of surprise that, in lewder company, would take four-letter form?
But who was the original Gordon Bennett, and how did he come to be immortalised in the English language?
No one knows for sure, which is why the country's leading language experts are consulting the public on the origins of this and dozens of
Source: WaPo
Jan 3, 2007
Rep.-elect Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, found himself under attack last month when he announced he'd take his oath of office on the Koran -- especially from Virginia Rep. Virgil Goode, who called it a threat to American values.
Yet the holy book at tomorrow's ceremony has an unassailably all-American provenance. We've learned that the new congressman -- in a savvy bit of political symbolism -- will hold the personal copy once owned by Thomas Jefferson.
Source: WaPo
Jan 3, 2007
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich., Jan. 2 -- The line just kept growing.
Dozens of mourners became hundreds and then thousands. An hour's wait became two, then four, then six. Soon, the numbers and the time grew beyond counting as citizens young and old turned out Tuesday night to honor a president who had once lived among them.
Source: NYT
Jan 3, 2007
In a moment of presidential empathy, former President George Bush recalled a skill he had learned from Gerald R. Ford: how to handle being ridiculed on “Saturday Night Live.”
“I remember that lesson well, since being able to laugh at yourself is essential in public life,” Mr. Bush said in his eulogy for Mr. Ford on Tuesday. “I’d tell you more about that, but as Dana Carvey would say: ‘Not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent.’ ”
As the 82-year-old former president imitated
Source: AP
Jan 2, 2007
A portrait of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee not publicly seen since 1868 is being displayed as part of the Museum of the Confederacy's commemoration of the iconic Civil War leader's 200th birthday.
The gilt-framed oil painting, about 26 inches high and 21 inches wide, will be the showcase piece of the museum's exhibit marking Lee's birthday on Jan. 19. American artist Thomas B. Welch painted Lee during the general's lifetime, but museum officials said the portrait wasn't based on a
Source: UPI
Jan 2, 2007
TEL AVIV, Israel -- The Rev. Angelo Roncalli, who later became Pope John XXIII, helped save thousands of Jews from the Holocaust, newly discovered records show in Israel.
The documents, which include memoirs and letters, describe multiple meetings at the Vatican compound in Istanbul between Roncalli, who at the time was a diplomat for the Vatican, and Chaim Barlas, a Jewish man sent to Istanbul on behalf of the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee, an organization dedicated to saving Je
Source: WaPo
Jan 2, 2007
You can't find "Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings" at the Pohick Regional Library anymore. Or "The Education of Henry Adams" at Sherwood Regional. Want Emily Dickinson's "Final Harvest"? Don't look to the Kingstowne branch.
It's not that the books are checked out. They're just gone. No one was reading them, so librarians took them off the shelves and dumped them.
Along with those classics, thousands of novels and nonfiction works h
Source: USA Today
Jan 2, 2007
The war in Iraq has fractured even the fraternity of presidents.
After they exit the Oval Office, presidents generally limit criticism of their successors, at least in public. When President Bush and predecessors Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton gathered Tuesday at the National Cathedral for President Gerald Ford's funeral, it was a show of solidarity and affection for one of the few who knew firsthand how difficult the job can be.
The three former presidents s
Source: NYT
Jan 2, 2007
Of all the aging Washington power brokers who have re-emerged in the shadow of the death of former President Gerald R. Ford, there is one, Henry A. Kissinger, for whom the return to the spotlight may be as much curse as blessing.
At 83, Mr. Kissinger, former secretary of state to Presidents Ford and Richard M. Nixon and sometime adviser to the current occupant of the White House, remains a towering figure in international relations. He is expected to be among a select few, including
Source: NYT
Jan 2, 2007
The Theater Museum in London, Britain’s national museum of the performing arts, is scheduled to close to the public on Sunday after almost 20 years at its Russell Street location in Covent Garden.
The museum, which is a branch of the Victoria and Albert and houses one of the world’s largest collections of documents and artifacts related to theater, dance, opera and other performances, has been unable to secure financing for redevelopment. Though the collection itself is not in dang
Source: AFP at Yahoo News
Jan 2, 2007
ANACOPIA, Georgia (AFP) - In an ancient land on the lush shores of the Black Sea, archaeology has become a battleground for those who claim this territory as their own.
The history of Abkhazia, which broke away from Georgia in a 1992-1993 war, is no fusty academic debate. For the Abkhaz it is about the province's bid to be recognised as an independent state.
"We have to show people, the whole world, that Abkhazia has been a state for a long time," said Vadim B
Source: Times Online (UK)
Jan 2, 2007
To the untutored eye, it looks like a lump of mud, but experts say that an 8th-century psalter found in an Irish peat bog is exceptionally significant.
Even though the vellum pages of the early Book of Psalms are a crumpled mass, they are likening it to the Book of Kells, one of the world’s most beautiful illuminated manuscripts.
As the find is thought to date from the late 8th century, the illuminators of both books would have been contemporaries, within ten or twent
Source: NYT
Jan 2, 2007
Gerald R. Ford was eulogized today as a president and a man who embodied the best of small-town American values and whose decency made him a player on the world stage.
“To know Jerry Ford was to know a Norman Rockwell painting come to life,” former President George H. W. Bush told a gathering at the National Cathedral. Mr. Ford was a man of uncommon toughness when necessary, but possessed of a heart “as big and open as the Midwest plains on which he was born,” Mr. Bush said.
