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
Jul 24, 2006
Reathel Odum, a bank clerk who was chosen by Senator Harry S. Truman during the Depression to be one of his secretaries and later served in the White House as personal secretary to Bess Truman, died in her hometown, Benton, Ill., on June 6. She was 97.
Miss Odum’s nephew, Richard Odum Hart, said news of her death was not released for several weeks.
In 17 years with the Trumans — including two years chaperoning their daughter, Margaret, when she was making national tours
Source: The New York Times
Jul 24, 2006
Suddenly, after years of obscurity in his native land, attention is being paid to Arno Breker, the German sculptor whose monumental neo-Classical figures so vividly expressed Nazi racial ideology that he became known as ''Hitler's favorite sculptor.''
First there was a debate over two Breker statues that stand near the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, where the World Cup final was held earlier this month. A few critics argued, without success, that they should have been removed, or covere
Source: Wa Po
Jul 24, 2006
You could be forgiven for thinking the television images in the experiment were from 2006. They were really from 1982: Israeli forces were clashing with Arab militants in Lebanon. The world was watching, charges were flying, and the air was thick with grievance, hurt and outrage.
There was only one thing on which pro-Israeli and pro-Arab audiences agreed. Both were certain that media coverage in the United States was hopelessly biased in favor of the other side.
Source: Boston Globe
Jul 23, 2006
These are the last Shakers, living in the world's last active Shaker community, which has survived for 223 years in this idyllic and isolated hilltop village 35 miles northwest of Portland. Here, the four faithful live a life of ascetic simplicity and abide by the three C's: celibacy, confession of sin, and communalism. "The real misconception about the Shakers is that we're all dead," says one of the four, Brother Arnold Hadd, only half-jokingly.
The 49-year-old Hadd, a S
Source: NYT
Jul 23, 2006
OF all the powers of the presidency, the veto is among the most potent.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt rejected or failed to sign 635 bills during his 12 years in office, using his veto power to keep Congress — run by his fellow Democrats — subservient. Harry S. Truman vetoed 250 bills; Dwight D. Eisenhower, 181. Bill Clinton used one of 37 vetoes to reject a law banning a particular type of abortion.
But until last week, when President Bush vetoed a bill to expand federally
Source: NYT
Jul 23, 2006
It was just four minutes, after all, out of six years. Yes, the tape could conceivably fall into the bin of political history that includes the hours of recordings of Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon, which give deep looks into each man’s character and way of doing business. But it’s far more likely that it will fall into what can best be described as the blooper bin, which includes moments that draw a lot of attention in their day but give historians less to wo
Source: NYT
Jul 23, 2006
IT has stood for centuries, a slope of gleaming white houses climbing in steps from the sea like a construction of sugar cubes. It gave this Mediterranean port the nickname la Blanche, the white one. But despite the romance surrounding the old quarter, known as the Casbah and once home to pirates and freedom fighters, it is literally imploding from neglect.
Unesco has declared it a World Heritage site, and the Algerian government has designated it a protected landmark, to no avail.
Source: The Washington Post
Jul 23, 2006
If the shipwreck on the floor of Lake Michigan is indeed the Griffon, a French fur-trading ship that sank on its maiden voyage in 1679, it may contain archaeological treasures such as the skeleton of a "giant" sailor named Luc the Dane.
The wreck was discovered in 2001 by private explorer and Fairfax County resident Steve Libert. Libert says archaeological studies present good evidence that it is the Griffon, the oldest known shipwreck in the Great Lakes.
Source: Chicago Sun-Times
Jul 23, 2006
Like many of the other activists who converged Saturday on the South Side to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Chicago Freedom Movement, Aquil Charleton wasn't born when Martin Luther King marched in Chicago in 1966.
But Charleton, 26, who runs the Crib Collective, a youth activism organization in North Lawndale, still hears echoes.
"The civil rights movement wasn't just a period of time," said Charleton. "There are young people today who are very
Source: Guardian Unlimited (UK)
Jul 22, 2006
The secret police of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu recruited thousands of children to spy on schoolfriends, parents and teachers, according to communist-era archives. They show that the Securitate blackmailed children across Romania into becoming informers in the late 1980s, as the whiff of liberalisation in the Soviet bloc prompted Ceausescu to tighten his grip on the country.The files have shocked Romanians and prompted calls for an inquiry into why many of the agent
Source: CBS
Jul 22, 2006
President Bush ran for office as a "compassionate conservative." And he continues to nurture his conservative base — even issuing his first veto this week against embryonic stem cell research.
But lately his foreign policy has come under fire from some conservatives — including the father of modern conservatism, William F. Buckley.
CBS Evening News Saturday anchor Thalia Assuras sat down for an exclusive interview with Buckley about his disagreements with Pr
Source: Tulsa World
Jul 22, 2006
The Oklahoma Republican and chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee concedes that those on the other side of the global warming debate have dominated the air waves lately, but he remains confident that his side will be proved right in the end.
Indeed, Inhofe insists that he feels even stronger about taking on what he sees as the current hysteria about global warming than he did several years ago when he first uttered that now-famous hoax statement.
Source: AP
Jul 22, 2006
It seems a typical scene of urban decay: abandoned buildings, crumbling walls, trash and broken wine bottles.
Yet it's more than 1,500 years old. Engineers uncovered these ruins of an ancient Byzantine port during drilling for a huge underground rail tunnel.
Like Romans, Athenians and residents of other great historic cities, the people of Istanbul can hardly put a shovel in the ground without digging up something important.
Source: CNN
Jul 22, 2006
MONROE, Georgia The dirt road that led to Moore's Ford bridge is paved now, and the creaky wooden bridge has been replaced with a sleek concrete span. But the black letters "KKK" sprayed on the new bridge's face offer an eerie reminder of the terrible events that happened here 60 years ago.
Bobby Howard brushes back a leafy tree branch, revealing a half-dozen more racist scribblings. He sniffs his disgust, but he is not surprised. He has long forsaken his personal safety
Source: NYT
Jul 22, 2006
Ghosts are what people around here call the fading hex signs that the Pennsylvania Dutch began painting on their barns more than two centuries ago.
For years, the signs have been abandoned to weather and time. But though their brightly colored stars, framed with ornate rosettes and images of tulips, have paled, the ghosts have lingered as the shadows of a vanishing local tradition. The oldest are but stains on cracked wood panels. Others, just barely visible, stare quietly from behi
Source: NYT
Jul 22, 2006
Concerned about the effects of the hostilities in Israel and Lebanon, two American archaeological groups urged combatants there to honor the 1954 Hague Convention, which calls for parties in armed conflict to minimize damage to cultural sites. In a statement yesterday, the American Schools of Oriental Research and the Archaeological Institute of America identified World Heritage sites in both countries that are endangered by the fighting. Among them are the biblical sites of Megiddo and Hazor an
Source: NYT
Jul 22, 2006
The question has popped up all over Internet sites frequented by Islamic militants: Should your average God-fearing jihadist support Hezbollah in its battle against the Zionist aggressors and their American lap dogs?
The answer seems a foregone conclusion, given the hatred of Israel across much of the Muslim world.Suspicions among Sunnis over growing Shiite power — and a backlash by Shiites — have come to the fore during the Iraq war and fighting in
Source: NYT
Jul 22, 2006
Robert C. Mardian, a lawyer for President Richard M. Nixon’s re-election campaign whose conviction on charges of conspiring to cover up the administration’s involvement in the Watergate break-in was overturned, died Monday at his vacation home in San Clemente, Calif. He was 82 and lived in Phoenix.
The cause was complications of lung cancer, his son Robert told The Associated Press.
Mr. Mardian, who had resigned as assistant attorney general to work on Nixon’s campaign,
Source: The Daily Telegraph
Jul 22, 2006
THERE is some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England, but the locals would rather you did not go there. The land in question is a simple patch of wood-fringed shoreline lapped by the musical turquoise waves of Kealakekua Bay on Hawaii's Big Island.
It was here that Capt James Cook was killed by natives in 1779. It was in these waters that his dismembered remains were laid to rest by the sailors from Resolution. His death was regarded by Britons and foreigners as a cruel
Source: NYT
Jul 21, 2006
Researchers in Germany said Thursday that they planned to collaborate with an American company in an effort to reconstruct the genome of Neanderthals, the archaic human species that occupied Europe from 300,000 years ago to 30,000 years ago until being displaced by modern humans.
Long a forlorn hope, the sequencing, or decoding, of Neanderthal DNA suddenly seems possible because of a combination of analytic work on ancient DNA by Svante Paabo, of the Max Planck Institute for Evoluti
