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
Feb 23, 2011
The timeline, put together by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum and launched Wednesday, incorporates audio recordings from phone calls on that day, oral histories from survivors and eyewitnesses and graphic photographs and video snippets arranged in chronological order. Viewers can use social media including Facebook and Twitter as well as e-mail to share links to the site and to particular photos and videos.
The timeline starts at 5:45 a.m., with photographs of hijack
Source: CNN
Feb 23, 2011
Folks in Baltimore, Maryland, could be forgiven for doing a few double-takes at the tall stranger who rode into town Wednesday morning.
A man who looked an awful lot like the guy on the $5 bill arrived by carriage at Camden Station in a re-enactment of a secret transit by President-elect Abraham Lincoln exactly 150 years earlier.
Following his election in November 1860, Lincoln was making his way to Washington for his March 1861 inauguration when he learned of a possibl
Source: Fox News
Feb 23, 2011
Libya’s ex-justice minister claims the country’s leader, Muammar al-Qaddafi, ordered the Lockerbie bombing that killed 270 people, according to the Swedish tabloid Expressen.
Mustafa Abdel-Jalil was quoted Wednesday telling an Expressen correspondent in Libya that he has “proof that Qaddafi gave the order about Lockerbie."
Abdel-Jalil, who stepped down as justice minister to protest violence against anti-government demonstrations, did not describe the proof.
He told Exp
Source: Ekathimerini (Greece)
Feb 23, 2011
Renovation work on the aged Piraeus-Kifissia electric railway (ISAP) on the stretch between the central Athenian neighborhoods of Monastiraki and Thisseio have brought to light one of the most exciting archaeological discoveries of recent years.
Archaeologists believe that remnants found during construction in the area of the Ancient Agora, on the northwestern slope of the Acropolis, belong to the famed Altar of the Twelve Gods, one of Athens’s most ancient monuments and a landmark
Source: National Parks Service Press Release
Feb 22, 2011
DELANO, CA — Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, United Farm Workers President Arturo Rodriguez, and Paul Chávez, César Chávez’s son and president of the César Chávez Foundation, celebrated the life and legacy of the legendary farm labor and civil rights leader in a ceremony to officially dedicate the “Forty Acres” site as a National Historic Landmark. Forty Acres saw many historical events from the 1960s farm worker movement that Chavez championed and which dramatically improved the lives of
Source: Pew Research Center
Feb 22, 2011
The bitter fight over union rights in Wisconsin calls to mind a labor battle that helped define the first year of Ronald Reagan's presidency. Thirty years ago in August, Reagan fired more than 11,000 air traffic controllers after they staged a strike against the federal government.
Reagan's reaction to the PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization) strike was widely portrayed as harsh -- not only did Reagan fire the controllers, he banned the government from ever rehi
Source: Preservation Nation
Feb 22, 2011
As the nation celebrates the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth this month, the Chicago apartment building where Reagan lived for one year appears slated for demolition.
The University of Chicago, which bought the Hyde Park building in 2004 and moved tenants out last year, plans to use the site to expand its campus. No demolition-permit application has been filed, and it's unclear when the university will tear down the building. University spokesman Jeremy Manier had no comm
Source: Salon
Feb 22, 2011
The Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas recently released a video of John F. Kennedy filmed on Nov. 21, 1963 -- the night before he was assassinated. The images were recorded at the Rice Hotel in Houston, where the President appeared at an event with local Hispanic leaders. The sadly audio-free clip shows an animated Kennedy with his wife, Jacqueline, as he approaches a podium to deliver remarks....
Source: Time.com
Feb 22, 2011
Republicans and Democrats deny that they want to see a government shutdown, but both parties accuse each other of secretly rooting for one. With the federal government perilously close to shuttering on March 4 if an agreement on spending cuts cannot be reached in Congress, neither side appears prepared to make serious concessions. And while a shutdown looms, it has become increasingly apparent that conditions are very different from the last time the government shut down over a partisan budget f
Source: The Daily Caller
Feb 22, 2011
Fast fact: It is illegal to deliver the Gettysburg Address on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial without permission from the U.S. National Park Service.
On President’s Day — standing where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech” — Phillip Howell, 25, recited Lincoln’s famous address and was quickly stopped by a Park Police officer. He told Howell that he could not give speeches on the steps of the memorial without a permit.
“He called me Abe
Source: Medievalists.net
Feb 22, 2011
Several medieval churches in England have received funding the Heritage Lottery Fund and English Heritage as part of their joint Repair Grants for Places of Worship program. In an announcement made earlier this month, over 153 Grade I and II listed places of worship across England were granted £15.7 million to support urgent repair work.
The churches include St Peter’s, Wilburton, in the Diocese of Ely, which has a tower dating from the 13th century. It has been offered at grant of
Source: Guardian (UK)
Feb 22, 2011
Bunhill Fields, the London cemetery where some of the most radical figures in history lie quietly side by side in unhallowed ground, will today be declared a Grade I park by the government, with separate listings for scores of its monuments.
The cemetery, founded in the 1660s as a burial ground for nonconformists, radicals and dissenters, holds the remains of John Bunyan, author of The Pilgrim's Progress, Daniel Defoe, who wrote Robinson Crusoe, and the poet and artist William Blake
Source: CBS News
Feb 22, 2011
MUNICH - John Demjanjuk says he will go on hunger strike if a German court does not pursue more evidence that he says could exonerate him of charges he served as a Nazi death camp guard.
A former Soviet soldier during World War II, the 90-year-old Demjanjuk is standing trial on 28,060 counts of accessory to murder on allegations that he agreed to serve as a guard in the Sobibor death camp after being captured. The retired Ohio autoworker denies having ever served as a guard....
Source: WaPo
Feb 22, 2011
FRANKLIN, TENN. - Among the Civil War buffs wandering through the tables of muskets and faded daguerreotypes of Union soldiers for sale here are four federal agents.
One raids houses and carries a gun. But right now he's handing out innocuous-looking brochures to the relic hunters walking by, as the sweet smell of glazed nuts wafts from a concession stand. "Does that document belong in the National Archives?" the brochure asks.
The agents have flown to a fair
Source: NYT
Feb 22, 2011
A set of important murals depicting events in African-American history will be restored and sent on tour for the first time through a collaboration of Talladega College in Alabama, which owns the murals, and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. In 1938 Talladega, one of the country’s oldest all-black colleges, commissioned Hale Aspacio Woodruff, an African-American artist who had studied with Diego Rivera, to create the murals for the lobby of its new library....
Source: Fandomania
Feb 22, 2011
After too many movie myths and promotional episodes over the last few months, the MythBusters finally managed to pull themselves together and go out with a bang in their last episode of the year, both figuratively and literally. Adam and Jamie address an interesting historical “what if” — what if the location for Hitler’s briefing on July 20, 1944 hadn’t been changed from the underground bunker to an above-ground, windowed conference room?
Would we still be remembering the martyrs b
Source: Der Spiegel (Germany)
Feb 22, 2011
John Demjanjuk, the 90-year-old former auto worker accused of helping to murder 27,900 Jews in the Holocaust, has threatened to go on hunger strike to to force the court to admit KGB documents he claims will exonerate him. In a statement, he has protested against what he calls his "political show trial."
John Demjanjuk, accused of helping to kill 27,900 Jews in the Holocaust, will go on a hunger strike unless the Munich court allows him to present documents that could exon
Source: BBC News
Feb 22, 2011
A parliamentary commission in Georgia says the country's first post-Soviet president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, may have been murdered in 1993.
Gamsakhurdia died from a gunshot to the head after being ousted from power and pursued by an enemy militia.
The authorities previously concluded that he had killed himself.
The commission wants a new official inquiry. But there are some doubts about its research, as it is run by Mr Gamsakhurdia's son and his associates.
Source: BBC News
Feb 22, 2011
There is a dawning in Europe. A growing awareness that events have thrown up one of history's moments.
The German Foreign Minister, Guido Westerwelle, said the awakening in the Arab world was a "historic watershed". "Nothing," in his view, "will be as it was before".
The UK Foreign Secretary, William Hague, said it was "a historic test for the EU". If democracy and stability could take root in North Africa then it would be "t
Source: BBC News
Feb 22, 2011
Scientists have named a new dinosaur species "thunder-thighs" because of the huge thigh muscles it would have had.
Fossil remains recovered from a quarry in Utah, US, are fragmentary but enough to tell researchers the creature must have possessed extremely powerful legs.
The new species, described in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, is a sauropod - the family of dinosaurs famous for their long necks and tails.
It could have given other a
