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: Fox News
May 17, 2010
Former Vice President Dick Cheney endorsed California gubernatorial candidate and ex-eBay CEO Meg Whitman on Sunday, writing in an op-ed in the Orange County Register that she reminds him of another Golden State Republican hero – the late President Ronald Reagan.
Cheney added that he believes Whitman can bring the state back from the brink of collapse while upholding conservative principles.
Cheney, who took the Tea Party route in endorsing Kentucky Senate candidate Ran
Source: AP
May 17, 2010
Honduran strongman Oswaldo Lopez Arellano, who led two military coups and served as president for more than a decade, died on Sunday, his family said. He was 89.
His family released a statement saying the former general and twice-president died of prostate cancer at a private hospital in Tegucigalpa.
With armed forces backing, then-Col. Lopez Arellano ousted President Ramon Villeda Morales in 1963 and two years later held a constitutional assembly that formalized his po
Source: AP
May 17, 2010
An Indonesian filmmaker said Monday that his upcoming movie about the childhood of President Barack Obama will portray how the diversity of Jakarta influenced the future president.
Obama lived in the city with his mother and Indonesian stepfather from 1967 to 1971.
Director Damien Dematra is basing his movie on a fictionalized account of Obama's childhood that he published earlier this year, using interviews with neighbors and friends of Obama and his family. The movie
Source: AP
May 17, 2010
Walker "Bud" Mahurin, a fighter pilot who shot down two dozen planes in two wars and was regarded as one of America's top aces ever, has died, his wife said Sunday. He was 91.
Joan Mahurin said Bud Mahurin died of natural causes at his home in Newport Beach on Tuesday.
She said her husband kept flying small planes — and kept receiving fan mail — for most of his life.
"He would get letters from teenagers to old war veterans," Joan Mahurin
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 17, 2010
A 24-year-old Arab American has won the Miss USA title, despite nearly stumbling in her evening gown.
Rima Fakih of Dearborn, Michigan, won the pageant at the Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino on the Las Vegas Strip after strutting confidently in an orange and gold bikini, wearing a strapless white gown and saying health insurance should cover birth control pills.
While it is though Miss Fakih is the first Middle Eastern woman to take the title, pagent officials said
Source: CNN
May 17, 2010
The Vatican will embark on a sweeping new legal strategy Monday in responding to allegations of sex abuse in the United States, CNN has learned.
Responding to a Louisville, Kentucky, lawsuit that seeks to depose top Vatican officials -- including Pope Benedict XVI -- the Holy See plans to file a motion Monday denying that the church issued a document mandating secrecy in the face of abuse allegations, as many victims allege, according to a Vatican attorney.
The Vatican's moti
Source: Guardian (UK)
May 16, 2010
British scientists experimented with ways of spreading foot-and-mouth disease, and lethal infections such as dysentery, cholera and typhoid in secret biological warfare trials during the second world war.
An extensive list of the contagious agents and plagues that could be turned into weapons of mass destruction is revealed in files from a War Cabinet committee released to the National Archives.
The government was known to have produced 5m anthrax-filled cakes to infect
Source: AFP
May 16, 2010
Young Japanese infantryman Sawamura turned numb when he was ordered to bayonet a Chinese peasant as fellow soldiers looked on and taunted him.
"You captured him, so you get rid of him," his lieutenant barked, yanking the 21-year-old soldier toward his writhing victim, only days after Japanese troops had overrun the Chinese city of Nanking in December 1937.
"I stumbled forward and thrust the blade into his body until it came out on the other side," sa
Source: AP
May 16, 2010
Israeli antiquities authorities operating under heavy police guard began relocating ancient graves on Sunday to make way for construction of a hospital emergency room, setting off protests from ultra-Orthodox Jews who say Jewish remains are being disturbed.
Officers forcibly carried off dozens of demonstrators who had staged a sit-in to try to stop the work outside Barzilai Hospital in the southern city of Ashkelon. Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said 30 protesters were arrested.
Source: AP
May 16, 2010
The White House on Saturday asked Bill Clinton's presidential library to speed the release of more than 160,000 pages of paper, including e-mail, in its possession from Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan's tenure as a Clinton adviser in the 1990s.
In a letter to the U.S. archivist, White House counsel Bob Bauer said he was requesting the expedited release to aid the Senate's review of Kagan's nomination. Kagan currently is the U.S. solicitor general.
Kagan has never been
Source: NYT
May 16, 2010
When Eva Mutoni’s boyfriend of three years broke up with her, she realized she should have seen it coming.
Ms. Mutoni, 25, whose mother is ethnic Tutsi and whose father is Hutu, and her boyfriend, a full-blooded Tutsi, were college sweethearts at the National University of Rwanda in Butare.
“A year into the relationship, we had a big talk about me being mixed,” she said. They weathered that discussion, aided by the fact that Ms. Mutoni identifies herself as Tutsi. But a
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 16, 2010
A memorial has been unveiled dedicated to the first RAF pilot to shoot down an enemy bomber in British airspace during the Second World War.
Squadron Leader Patrick Gifford spotted the German plane near Dalkeith, Midlothian, while flying a Spitfire during a patrol on October 16, 1939.
The bomber had been part of a group of 12 planes attacking Royal Navy ships in the Firth of Forth....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 16, 2010
The Royal Navy may hold records about possible sea monsters but it does not collect them centrally, it has revealed.
Sailors can note unusual sightings on the ocean waves in their ship's logs, the Navy said.
But they are not required to do so and none of the information is assembled in a central archive devoted to sea monsters.
Any sightings of strange marine animals reported to the Navy by the public are passed on to the UK Hydrographic Office, which provi
Source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch
May 16, 2010
The Civil War Sesquicentennial, which begins next year, is expected to heighten interest about what happened on and off the battlefields 150 years ago.
That means archivists are scrambling to post information online to feed that curiosity.
Missouri State Archivist John Dougan detailed the effort to those at the St. Louis Genealogical Society's 40th annual family history conference, the largest such gathering in the Midwest, on Saturday.
Organizers said abou
Source: Great Falls Tribune (MT)
May 16, 2010
Gardeners planting tomatoes or tulips here occasionally stumble upon a piece of century-old pottery and — until the Fort Benton City Council passed an ordinance forbidding it — people scoured the riverbanks with metal detectors, hunting for a piece of Montana history.
Boasting it's the "Birthplace of Montana," Fort Benton is one of two dozen places in the entire state to earn National Historic Landmark status.
As the westernmost steamboat stop on the Missouri
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 15, 2010
A British granddad has been credited with killing dreaded German tank ace the 'Black Baron', a claim which could end a mystery which has lasted for more than half a century.
New evidence has emerged which allegedly shows Joe Ekins, 86, fired the fatal blast which ended the reign of terror of Nazi Germany's most feared tank gunner Michael Wittmann.
Historians argued for decades over who killed the Black Baron after the Canadian army, Polish forces and the RAF each claim
Source: AP
May 15, 2010
Bitter Palestinian rivals marched together Saturday in a rare show of unity as they marked 62 years of displacement in the war surrounding Israel's creation.
Loyalists of rival groups Hamas and Fatah held Palestinian flags and a giant key symbolic of their hoped-for return as part of annual commemorations of what they call the "catastrophe," or "nakba" in Arabic. The names of the villages and towns emptied during the war were written across the key, alongside the
Source: Reuters
May 15, 2010
Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson is to star in a biopic of former South African President Nelson Mandela's ex-wife Winnie, whose lawyers have already contacted the film makers threatening to block it.
"Winnie," which also features Terrence Howard as Nelson Mandela and is based on a book by Anne Marie du Preez Bezdrob, starts shooting in South Africa on May 31 and could be ready for theatres by spring next year.
Producer Andre Pieterse said Winnie Madikizela-Mandel
Source: Kitsap Sun (WA)
May 15, 2010
On a thickly wooded hillside, blue and white porcelain shards glint under layers of ivy.
What was once a bowl depicting an ornate pattern of cherry blossoms and soaring cranes is now scattered across the forest floor. Nearby, embedded in the surface of the soil, is a brush handle made of bone, a rusted tea kettle and a black leather shoe for very small foot.
This forest overlooking Blakely Harbor is littered with artifacts from Yama, a vanished village that was once hom
Source: Post Star (NY)
May 15, 2010
Just as the Champlain Bridge was being recognized for its unique historic value, its trusses and arches were packed with dynamite and blown into legend.
Listed in February 2009 on the National Register of Historic Places, the bridge was being pushed for an even more exalted designation - as a National Historic Engineering Landmark - when in the fall of last year state inspectors found cracks in the concrete piers that led them to declare the bridge unsafe and on Oct. 16 shut it down
