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: NYT
Dec 9, 2006
A Fox News commentator accused former President Jimmy Carter of copying material from one of his books without proper attribution. The commentator, Dennis Ross, a former envoy to the Middle East who is now a foreign affairs analyst for Fox News, said Mr. Carter used maps he created without giving proper credit for the material, which was included in the former president’s controversial new book, “Palestine Peace Not Apartheid.” “I think there should be a correction and an attribution,” Mr. Ross
Source: NYT
Dec 9, 2006
... In the past several weeks China Central Television has broadcast a 12-part series describing the reasons nine nations rose to become great powers. The series was based on research by a team of elite Chinese historians, who also briefed the ruling Politburo about their findings....
The documentary, on China’s main national network, uses the word rise constantly, including its title, “Rise of the Great Powers.” It endorses the idea that China should study the experiences of nation
Source: NYT
Dec 9, 2006
Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, the Reagan administration’s first United Nations ambassador and a beacon of neoconservative thought who helped guide American military, diplomatic and covert action from 1981 to 1985, died Thursday at her home in Bethesda, Md. She was 80.
Her death was announced yesterday by the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, where she was a senior fellow. The cause was congestive heart failure, said her personal assistant, Tammy Jagyur.
Ms. Kirkpatri
Source: International Herald Tribune
Dec 8, 2006
Scotland's first contemporary feature film in Gaelic is in post-production. The BBC has begun broadcasting live sports coverage in Gaelic. A Gaelic-only high school has opened in Glasgow. A leading Scottish politician is seeking, via Brussels, to ensure Gaelic's place as a European language.
Currently spoken by fewer than 2 percent in Scotland, Gaelic is enjoying a revival here that has blossomed since the country held elections in 1999 to create a Scottish Parliament for the first
Source: International Herald Tribune
Dec 8, 2006
The kindest thing one can say about Gerhard Schröder's return to private life last year is that it was not as unseemly as that of his predecessor as German chancellor, Helmut Kohl.
Kohl admitted to taking illegal cash payments, which shredded his reputation. Schröder, 62, took a job as chairman of a Russian-German pipeline venture and was roundly condemned by critics who said he had championed the pipeline while in office and was improperly cashing inon his friendship with Vladimir
Source: AP
Dec 8, 2006
An effort to clean up some of the city's seedier neighborhoods and rid the streets of junkies, hookers and runaways has run headlong into San Francisco's free-to-be-who-you-are ethos.
Nearly four decades after the Summer of Love, residents and merchants frustrated with what they regard as blight are turning to the city for help or taking revitalization into their own hands.
But other residents of the Tenderloin district and Haight-Ashbury contend a crackdown would rob
Source: AP
Dec 8, 2006
Poetry Tulip has vanished. So have Due West and Po Biddy Crossroads. Cloudland and Roosterville are gone, too.
A total of 488 communities have been erased from the latest version of Georgia's official map, victims of too few people and too many letters of type.
Georgia's Department of Transportation, which drew the new map, said that the goal was to make it clearer and less cluttered and that many of the dropped communities were mere "placeholders," generall
Source: IHT
Dec 8, 2006
JACKSON, Mississippi -- Moses Hardy, believed to be the second-oldest man in the world and the last black U.S. veteran of World War I, has died at age 113, family members said Friday.
Evelyn Davis, 68, one of Hardy's eight children, said her father died Thursday at a nursing home in Aberdeen. He would have been 114 on Jan. 6.
"He had been doing great. He didn't suffer and he wasn't sick — he died of old age," said Davis, of Aberdeen. "He knew everybody an
Source: AP
Dec 8, 2006
With 10 days left in office, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld bade a sometimes emotional farewell to Pentagon employees Friday and predicted that the period since he took office nearly six years ago would eventually be seen as one of "enormous challenge and historic consequence."
Asked how he wants history to remember him, he said simply, "Better than the local press."
With a couple of dozen troops from each military service and a few civilian Pentagon emp
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Dec 8, 2006
Drawings by the renowned architect Robert Adam, who designed some of the most impressive buildings of the Georgian era, have been uncovered for the first time in 170 years.
Adam's family glued around 9,000 of his drawings into 57 albums and in the process hid hundreds of sketches, plans and letters on the back of the paper which he used for his designs.
Some of the hidden material has now been revealed for the first time since the early 19th century with the aid of a t
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Dec 8, 2006
The heart-rending diary of a British soldier was sold at auction yesterday, 90 years after it was written in the mud of Flanders.
James Beatson described life on the Western Front after finding the tattered journal of a German officer that had somehow found its way into the British trenches in 1915.
In the months before his own death on the Somme, he conducted an imaginary conversation with the author, and penned his own descriptions of the horrors of the First World Wa
Source: Breitbart
Dec 8, 2006
The 15th anniversary of the end of the Soviet Union passed practically
without notice in Russia, even though the collapse of the communist
regime is still a traumatic event for many Russians.
The date of December 8, 1991, marks the day of a meeting between Soviet
bloc leaders in a Belarussian hunting lodge where they signed the death
warrant of the USSR.
Now 15 years later, no celebration or demonstration was held in Moscow."What's there to celebrate on this anniversary?" asked Nat
Source: NYT
Dec 8, 2006
HAVANA, Dec. 7 — Anatomy is a part of medical education everywhere. Biochemistry, too. But a course in Cuban history?
The Latin American School of Medical Sciences, on a sprawling former naval base on the outskirts of this capital, teaches its students medicine Cuban style. That means poking at cadavers, peering into aging microscopes and discussing the revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power 48 years ago.
Cuban-trained doctors must be able not only to diagnose an
Source: Livescience.com
Dec 7, 2006
Infants may have been considered equal members of prehistoric society, according to an analysis of burial pits found in Austria.
Two separate pits, one containing the remains of two infants and the other of a single baby, were discovered at the same Stone Age camp of Krems-Wachtberg in Lower Austria. Both graves were decorated with beads and covered in red ochre, a pigment commonly used by prehistoric peoples as a grave offering when they buried adults.
Using radiocarb
Source: Reuters
Dec 7, 2006
VANKOR FIELD, Russia (Reuters) - Half a century ago, Josef Stalin banished
his foes to labor camps in East Siberia. Now volunteers are lining up to
drill the frozen wastelands for their vast reserves of oil.
A 130-strong team of drillers, hardened frontiersmen who live in barracks
set in sparse fir forests, have so far drilled 12 exploration wells.
They are helping fulfill President Vladimir Putin's strategy to wean
Russia of its dependence European markets. Vankor's oil will go
Source: NBC News
Dec 7, 2006
For 65 years, Jim Levealle has treated his role in the attack on Pearl Harbor much like many of his fellow survivors — with grace and humility. In fact, until a few years ago, only a few friends and family even knew he had been at Pearl Harbor.
That's because Levealle was too busy talking and giving interviews about another infamous event in American history.
For Pearl Harbor survivors, the 65th anniversary of the attack represents a chance to reflect on the defining m
Source: WaPo
Dec 7, 2006
For 65 years, the wreck of the USS Arizona has been leaking oil from its grave at the bottom of Pearl Harbor, staining the water, visitors often say, as if it were the ship's blood.
The leaks come from about 500,000 gallons of thick, bunker C fuel oil that remain trapped in the deteriorating hulk -- oil whose "catastrophic" release experts now think is inevitable.
Today, on the anniversary of the attack that plunged the United States into World War II, scienti
Source: Yahoo
Dec 7, 2006
A key fossil found at South Africa's Sterkfontein Cave, a site dubbed "the Cradle of Humankind" for its trove of hominid relics, is far younger than initially thought, a new study says.
"Little Foot," a fossil with both ape-like and human features, was found in the 1990s thanks to remarkable luck and diligent work.
It was first dated to between 3.0 and 3.5 million years old, and later to more than 4.1 million years.
Those dates generated
Source: http://starbulletin.com
Dec 7, 2006
Pearl Harbor survivor Lonnie Cook remembers completing his morning shower in the forward section of the battleship USS Arizona and returning to his locker just before the Japanese began their attack.
"I was standing in front of my locker changing clothes," the 86-year-old said, "when the bombs started falling."
Had Cook taken a bit longer in the shower, he would have been killed along with 1,177 of his Arizona shipmates. The 1,760-pound armor piercin
Source: Salt Lake Tribune
Dec 7, 2006
Lennox Tierney, who was on Gen. Douglas MacArthur's staff during the Japanese occupation, says cultural errors by the U.S. can't be hidden in Iraq.
Toward the end of the occupation of his nation, Japanese Emperor Hirohito announced he would formally apologize to U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur for Japan's actions during World War II - including the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor.
Lennox Tierney was there, on the fifth floor of the Dai-Ichi Insurance Building in Tokyo,
