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This page features brief excerpts of news 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.
Highlights
Breaking News
This page features brief excerpts of news 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. Because most of our readers read the NYT we usually do not include the paper's stories in HIGHLIGHTS.
Name of source: AP
SOURCE: AP (5-28-09)
Thousands of atom bomb survivors still seek official recognition after the government earlier rejected their eligibility for compensation. Last year, the government eased the requirements for recognition following criticism that the rules were too strict and had neglected many who developed illnesses doctors have linked to radiation.
But less than 1 percent of survivors have been officially recognized as suffers of "atomic bomb illness" under the government's criteria, originally established in 1959, public broadcaster NHK said.
SOURCE: AP (5-27-09)
French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced a measure earlier this year offering European Union citizens aged 26 and under free admission to national museums. The Louvre is among several museums that chose to apply the measure.
The group SOS Racisme filed a legal complaint viewed Wednesday by The Associated Press. The group's vice president Samuel Thomas says the "European preference" is "the translation of an ideology of the extreme right."
SOURCE: AP (5-27-09)
The plant, the size of a small town, was built with a U.S. contribution of more than $1 billion and is seen as a milestone in cooperation on disarmament between Washington and Moscow.
Russia, as a signatory of the international Chemical Weapons Convention, is obliged to eliminate its vast stores of Class I weapons -- chemicals that have no use other than in arms. Moscow already has destroyed about 30 percent of its stockpile, according to the Russian Munitions Agency.
SOURCE: AP (5-27-09)
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, U.S. President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown are among leaders who will attend.
But Sarkozy's office said on Wednesday that the queen was welcome. A French government spokesman says it is up to Britain to decide who attends.
Name of source: CNN
SOURCE: CNN (5-28-09)
Federal officials, who have not ruled out its possible theft from a government collection, discovered it two years ago during routine monitoring of online auctions.
They have been negotiating for its return ever since.
In the short note, torn from the center of a bound volume, Lincoln tells Chase to do a small favor on behalf of someone recently fired from his job with the federal government.
Larry Cutler, a former prosecutor who collects artifacts ranging from Greek antiquities to presidential documents, said he had owned the document for several years and considers it a "cornerstone" example of Lincoln's compassion.
SOURCE: CNN (5-28-09)
Clinton reportedly has yet to make his peace with Sen. Ted Kennedy and the Massachusetts senator's niece, Caroline, over their high-profile endorsements of Barack Obama during the primaries.
The Times, also citing unnamed sources, says Clinton harbors hard feelings toward New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who held several posts in the Clinton administration but who chose to endorse Obama instead of Hillary Clinton.
The former president has adjusted to his wife's new role on the international stage. "She used to look forward to me coming home from wherever I've been," Clinton says in the magazine article. "Now I'm afraid I'll be second fiddle to whatever world leader she's just met.
SOURCE: CNN (5-25-09)
Valdez was a Marine gunnery sergeant wounded by shrapnel in August 1969, combat that left him a quadriplegic.
Since his death in 1994, his family has been waiting for the Defense Department to answer their requests that Valdez be included on "The Wall."
On Memorial Day, his family finally got their wish, as they watched his name officially added to "The Wall."
SOURCE: CNN (5-25-09)
Critics had called for an end to the longtime presidential practice of laying a wreath at the Confederate memorial. Last week, in a letter to Obama over the issue, roughly five dozen professors called the tradition offensive to African-Americans. In recent days, some observers had suggested the addition of the African-American memorial as a possible compromise.
SOURCE: CNN (5-25-09)
In the days after the outbreak of the war, Jacqueline Cochran, one of the country's leading female pilots at the time, went to a key general to argue that women would be just as capable pilots as men if they were given the same training.
She won the argument, and the program was launched.
Some 65 years after their service, the WASPs are being honored with the Congressional Gold Medal -- one of the national's highest civilian honors.
Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, and Barbara Mikulski, D-Maryland, shepherded a bill through the Senate, and it now awaits a vote by the House of Representatives.
With fewer than 300 living former WASPs, all in their late 80s or older, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Florida, a sponsor of the bill, told CNN it's important for the House to act quickly.
Name of source: http://www.thereaganfiles.com/
SOURCE: http://www.thereaganfiles.com/ (5-28-09)
Until now, only a few of these NSC/NSPG meeting minutes have ever been published.
Here is some of what President Reagan told his advisers during his NSC and NSPG meetings:
“My own feeling – and one which I have talked at length – is that we are way behind, perhaps decades, in establishing good relations with the two Americas.
“We must change the attitude of our diplomatic corps so that we don’t bring down governments in the name of human rights. None of them is as guilty of human rights violations as are Cuba and the USSR. We don’t throw out our friends just because they can’t pass the ‘saliva test’ on human rights. I want to see that stopped. We need people who recognize that philosophy.
Name of source: NYT
SOURCE: NYT (5-27-09)
A thousand years ago, the northern and southern branches of the Silk Road converged at this oasis town near the western edge of the Taklamakan Desert. Traders from Delhi and Samarkand, wearied by frigid treks through the world’s most daunting mountain ranges, unloaded their pack horses here and sold saffron and lutes along the city’s cramped streets. Chinese traders, their camels laden with silk and porcelain, did the same.
The traders are now joined by tourists exploring the donkey-cart alleys and mud-and-straw buildings once window-shopped, then sacked, by Tamerlane and Genghis Khan.
Now, Kashgar is about to be sacked again.
Nine hundred families already have been moved from Kashgar’s Old City, “the best-preserved example of a traditional Islamic city to be found anywhere in central Asia,” as the architect and historian George Michell wrote in the 2008 book “Kashgar: Oasis City on China’s Old Silk Road.”
Over the next few years, city officials say, they will demolish at least 85 percent of this warren of picturesque, if run-down homes and shops. Many of its 13,000 families, Muslims from a Turkic ethnic group called the Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurs), will be moved.
In its place will rise a new Old City, a mix of midrise apartments, plazas, alleys widened into avenues and reproductions of ancient Islamic architecture “to preserve the Uighur culture,” Kashgar’s vice mayor, Xu Jianrong, said in a phone interview.
SOURCE: NYT (5-27-09)
The selection process for Mr. Obama’s first Supreme Court nomination brought together a group that had been thinking about this moment for a long time, from a president who taught constitutional law to a vice president who voted on the confirmation of every member of the current court. Sitting in the room were advisers like Ronald A. Klain and Cynthia Hogan, who have been involved in nomination fights going back to Clarence Thomas.
Even before Justice David H. Souter publicly announced nearly four weeks ago that he was retiring, Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff who lived through two nominations during Bill Clinton’s presidency, commissioned a strategy memorandum from Mr. Klain intended to dictate the process. Secrecy was paramount. As the decision neared, aides disguised meetings on the subject even on the president’s internal schedule by blocking out time under the label “Chief of Staff Strategy.”
SOURCE: NYT (5-26-09)
She was the history major and Puerto Rican student activist at Princeton who spent her first year at that bastion of the Ivy League “too intimidated to ask questions.” She was the tough-minded New York City prosecutor, and later the corporate lawyer with the dazzling international clients. She was the federal judge who “saved baseball” by siding with the players’ union during a strike.
SOURCE: NYT (5-20-09)
“We have had buildings named after living individuals, but as a rule, they are no longer holding office,” said Renee Miscione, a spokeswoman for the General Services Administration. “With federal judges, who are appointed for life, we don’t name buildings after them until they are deceased.”
The National Register of Historic Places has no such qualms about living presidents, even those still in office. Bestowing a different yet similar kind of honor, the register listed George W. Bush’s childhood home in Midland, Tex., in 2004, while he was president. Bill Clinton’s birthplace, in Hope, Ark., was listed in 1994, during his first term, and his boyhood home in Hot Springs, Ark., was listed in 1995.
SOURCE: NYT (5-26-09)
The skeleton, about 4,000 years old, was found at the site of Balathal, near Udaipur in northwestern India. Historians have long considered the Indian subcontinent to be the source of the leprosy that was first reported in Europe in the fourth century B.C., shortly after the armies of Alexander the Great returned from India.
The skeleton is described in the journal PLoS One by Gwen Robbins, an anthropologist at Appalachian State University, and colleagues in India. The authors say the skull shows signs of erosion typical of leprosy.
SOURCE: NYT (5-26-09)
“I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ There were photos of Booker T. Washington playing with his grandchildren, there were letters from Harry Truman,” said Dr. Goldsby, 47. “Every time I opened a box, I found something of historical significance.”
The artifacts were the last vestiges of The Defender still in the hands of Robert Sengstacke, heir to the newspaper’s founding family. Mr. Sengstacke estimated that the collection could fetch “a few million bucks,” although it has not been formally appraised.
SOURCE: NYT (5-26-09)
The killing in 1967 of an unarmed demonstrator by a police officer in West Berlin set off a left-wing protest movement and put conservative West Germany on course to evolve into the progressive country it has become today.
Now a discovery in the archives of the East German secret police, known as the Stasi, has upended Germany’s perception of its postwar history. The killer, Karl-Heinz Kurras, though working for the West Berlin police, was at the time also acting as a Stasi spy for East Germany.
It is as if the shooting deaths of four students at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guard had been committed by an undercover K.G.B. officer, though the reverberations in Germany seemed to have run deeper.
SOURCE: NYT (5-25-09)
Since 2004, every service man and woman killed in Iraq or Afghanistan has been given a CT scan, and since 2001, when the fighting began in Afghanistan, all have had autopsies, performed by pathologists in the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System. In previous wars, autopsies on people killed in combat were uncommon, and scans were never done.
The combined procedures have yielded a wealth of details about injuries from bullets, blasts, shrapnel and burns — information that has revealed deficiencies in body armor and vehicle shielding and led to improvements in helmets and medical equipment used on the battlefield.
SOURCE: NYT (5-26-09)
Judge Sotomayor has issued no major decisions concerning abortion, the death penalty, gay rights or national security. In cases involving criminal defendants, employment discrimination and free speech, her rulings are more liberal than not.
But they reveal no larger vision, seldom appeal to history and consistently avoid quotable language. Judge Sotomayor’s decisions are, instead, almost always technical, incremental and exhaustive, considering all of the relevant precedents and supporting even completely uncontroversial propositions with elaborate footnotes.
All of which makes her remarkably cursory treatment last year of an employment discrimination case brought by firefighters in New Haven so baffling. The unsigned decision by Judge Sotomayor and two other judges, which affirmed the dismissal of the claims from 18 white firefighters, one of them Hispanic, contained a single paragraph of reasoning.
SOURCE: NYT (5-26-09)
Judge Sotomayor, who stood next to the president during the announcement, was described by Mr. Obama as “an inspiring woman who I am confident will make a great justice.”
The president said he had made his decision after “deep reflection and careful deliberation,” and he made it clear that the judge’s inspiring personal story was crucial in his decision. Mr. Obama praised his choice as someone possessing “a rigorous intellect, a mastery of the law.”
SOURCE: NYT (5-23-09)
In 2005, Congress passed an energy law requiring that the standard incandescent light bulb be 25 to 30 percent more efficient, beginning in 2012. But engineers are still working on a way to meet that goal.
More than half the states have mandated “renewable portfolio standards” requiring that some percentage of their electricity come from nonfossil fuel sources. But would-be developers of these energy alternatives have had trouble lining up money, equipment and production sites fast enough to meet the goals in some states.
SOURCE: NYT (5-25-09)
Presidents since Warren G. Harding have marked Memorial Day by visiting Arlington National Cemetery, where white rows of tombstones mark more than seven generations of America’s war dead. But with the nation’s first African-American president in office, a race-related controversy erupted over Mr. Obama’s appearance this year.
Last week, a group of university professors [on HNN] petitioned the White House to end a longstanding practice of sending a wreath to a monument to Confederate soldiers on the cemetery grounds. Mr. Obama continued that tradition but started another, the White House said, by sending a second wreath across the Potomac River to the historically black neighborhood in Washington where the African-American Civil War Memorial commemorates more than 200,000 blacks who fought for the North in the Civil War.
SOURCE: NYT (5-24-09)
British courts have always been friendlier to libel claimants than their American counterparts. Until recently that did not matter much to American authors or publishers. But now the Internet makes anything published in the United States almost immediately available in Britain, too.
Some free-speech advocates in the United States say that so-called libel tourists — people with little connection to Britain — are using the global-distribution argument to justify suing for libel there.
London has gained a reputation as the libel capital of the world. Saudi businessmen have sued there to complain about American reports that they engaged in terrorist financing; Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs have sued in Britain over accusations of unsavory business activities; and Hollywood celebrities have gone to London to seek redress over reports of wayward kisses.
To try to insulate American authors and publishers, groups like the A.C.L.U. and the Center for Democracy have persuaded lawmakers in New York and Illinois to pass state laws that block enforcement of British libel decisions in the United States. Similar bills are advancing in other state legislatures, and stronger measures, allowing American defendants to fight back against adverse foreign libel rulings, have been proposed in the United States Congress.
SOURCE: NYT (5-22-09)
It was inevitable, too, that as his trial unfolded and he was sentenced earlier this month to eight months in prison on manslaughter charges — in addition to the three years he had already served awaiting trial — the contrast between the gravity of the crime and the seeming leniency of the punishment would ignite protests that white privilege had survived far beyond the moment in 1963 when Kenya first raised aloft its banner of independence.
And most of all, the outcome seemed to hold up to blacks and whites alike the fractured mirror through which each perceives the other — literally as “the other,” uneasy partners thrust together by history and still struggling to lay to rest the troubled ghosts of their uneven tryst.
Name of source: Time Magazine
SOURCE: Time Magazine (5-27-09)
By the '90s, the frustrations turned violent. In 1991 blacks rioted for days in Cuban-dominated Miami after the conviction of a Hispanic police officer for killing two African Americans was overturned. That same year, Hispanics in black-controlled Washington, D.C., did the same after a Latino was wounded by a black cop.
Through it all, blacks tended to retain their political leverage because Hispanic voter turnout was abysmal by comparison. That began to change at the turn of this century, when Latinos not only overtook African Americans as the largest U.S. minority (now about 15% of the U.S. population) but also started building ballot-box muscle. By 2004 they seemed to be splitting with the Democratic Party as well, giving George W. Bush a surprising 44% of their vote in that year's presidential election.
SOURCE: Time Magazine (5-26-09)
How did such a once great company become so desperate? Perhaps the better question is, how did GM's well-paid management fritter away a treasure chest of brand loyalty and corporate wealth? There's not a single bad decision or one misguided executive that we can point to and say, "but for that GM would still rein supreme." GM's is a long-term management failure with a litany of losing moves over the decades, from the Chevy Corvair to the acquisition of Hummer — a rolling insult to the environment — that have collectively destroyed GM's balance sheet and sent its customers wandering.
Name of source: World Net Daily
SOURCE: World Net Daily (5-26-09)
Less than a week after the billboard campaign began, media have already begun showing interest – even though, so far, only one billboard, an electronic one, is up and running as a result of the more than $50,000 raised so far.
Over the weekend, the London Times found it an interesting business
story, reporting, "A right-wing website has collected more than $10,000 so far to help to fund a series of billboards to be erected around America questioning Barack Obama's credentials for holding office. 'Where's The Birth Certificate?' the posters will demand."
Name of source: Center for Public Integrity
SOURCE: Center for Public Integrity (5-6-09)
These are among the findings that emerged from the Center for Public Integrity’s analysis of government data on nearly 7.2 million “high-interest” or subprime loans made from 2005 through 2007, a period that marks the peak and collapse of the subprime boom. The computer-assisted analysis also revealed The Subprime 25 — the top 25 originators of the high-interest loans, accounting for nearly $1 trillion and about 72 percent of industry-reported subprime loans during that period.
Name of source: Telegraph (UK)
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (5-28-09)
At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.
Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (5-26-09)
Robert Smith and Robert Phelps, who were both working for the New York Times in 1972, have belatedly admitted that they were steered towards the political scandal first but never did anything about it.
Instead, Woodward and Bernstein of the Washington Post famously broke the story with help from their secret source, Deep Throat.
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (5-27-09)
Speaking at the Hay Festival in Wales, Mary Rubin, the author of Mother of God – A History of the Virgin Mary, said the transformation took place in the 11th and 12th century, with images of her knitting and cooking.
By comparison she was portrayed in the early church as "a figure of enormous solemnity and enormous majesty", as befitting the mother of God in human form.
But the church became so worried about people worshipping Mary rather than Christ that rosaries were introduced in the late middle ages to "create a way of praying to Mary that is more monitored," she added.
Name of source: LAT
SOURCE: LAT (5-27-09)
Obama can thank Jack for keeping the roll of photographs she took of him in 1980 out of circulation until he was elected. Nine were first published in Time magazine's December "Person of the Year" spread on Obama; now 21 of the 36 photos, plus a blow-up of her original contact sheet, make up "Barack Obama: The Freshman," an exhibition opening Thursday at M+B Gallery in West Hollywood.
Jack rummaged for the long-ignored negatives in her Minneapolis basement early in 2008, after it became clear Obama was a serious contender for the presidency. The callow kid kicking back on a couch in a living room near L.A.'s Occidental College, where he and Jack were students, may not have been the image the Obama campaign wanted to project.
Name of source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Ed (5-27-09)
In a third case, Judge Sotomayor supported an individual's right to file complaints against a university regardless of the merits of the suit....
In a case with more-direct applications to higher education, Judge Sotomayor was on another three-judge panel of the Second Circuit court that in 2001 unanimously upheld a trial-court jury's verdict against Queens College, which is part of the City University of New York, and the $50,000 in damages it awarded to the plaintiff.
In that case, Tolbert v. Queens College, the trial-court jury had found that the college had discriminated against a black graduate student on the basis of race by failing him on his final examinations, while giving Chinese students who spoke English as a second language more "slack" in completing their exams. The trial-court judge reversed the jury's verdict, but the Second Circuit appellate panel ruled that there was strong-enough evidence to sustain the original verdict. Judge Sotomayor did not write the opinion in that case.
SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Ed (5-29-09)
But outside of labor camps and Western democratic havens, the memory of what happened dulled. For a few years following 1989, videos about June Fourth — known in Mandarin simply as liu si, or "6/4" — circulated on the black market. Then the government began a campaign of forgetting, first spinning the event and then erasing it. The popular Chinese search engine Baidu now blocks at least 19 derivations of "six four," including Chinese character homophones, the abbreviation "sf," and "63+1."
Such controls are far from total, but they can be very effective. On June 4, 2007, a newspaper in Chengdu published a small advertisement recognizing the mothers of the 1989 victims. Online, chat-room users speculated about how such a message could have gotten past the paper's editors — until it was revealed that the young clerk who took the ad didn't recognize the event. What might have been a quiet act of resistance was instead a measure of a nation's forgetting.
Name of source: NY Daily News
SOURCE: NY Daily News (5-27-09)
Click through to look inside the Bush's new home in Dallas - it's certainly not the White House, that's for sure!
Name of source: Independent
SOURCE: Independent (5-23-09)
Look, though, at the British soldier on the left. He is black: a very rare example of an image of a black"Tommy" from the First World War.
The photograph is one of almost 400 snaps of British soldiers on the eve of, and during, the Battle of the Somme in 1916. The trove has been rescued from oblivion by two French men. Many of the images are published in today's Independent magazine for the first time. The photographs, all of which are preserved on glass plates, lay undisturbed in the attic of a ramshackle barn 10 miles behind the Somme battlefields for more than 90 years.
Name of source: NYT Magazine
SOURCE: NYT Magazine (5-31-09)
“He left the country in a stronger position, and I think he’s pretty much at peace with what he accomplished,” Mack McLarty, a Clinton friend since kindergarten and his first White House chief of staff, told me. “That doesn’t mean that from time to time, President Clinton wouldn’t like to be engaged and be in the action. That’s an understandable human feeling. But it’s not burning him up or eating him up.”...
if Clinton has a powerful memory for slights, he also has a remarkable capacity for reconciliation. He is likelier to find peace with people who hate him the most than with friends who betray him. He focuses his considerable charms on seducing the person in the room he finds most resistant. Among those he has been friendly with lately is Christopher Ruddy, a conservative journalist who was a chief proponent of cover-up theories involving the Clintons during the 1990s. In his book, “The Strange Death of Vincent Foster,” Ruddy rejected official findings that Foster, a deputy White House counsel, killed himself in a Virginia park and suggested the possibility of “a cover-up conducted by people who have, with the help of the press, placed themselves above the law.” Ruddy also advanced the notion that Ron Brown, the Clinton commerce secretary who died in an airplane crash in Croatia in 1996, was actually shot in the head.
Ruddy today is the founder and chief executive of Newsmax, a conservative news-magazine. He told me he came around on Clinton after Ed Koch, the former New York mayor, introduced them. That led to lunches and more contacts, and now Ruddy says he was wrong about Clinton. “I do consider Bill Clinton a friend, and I think he would consider me a friend,” Ruddy said. “And to think of all the wars we went through in the ’90s, it seems almost surreal.”
With the passage of time, Ruddy said he came to believe that Clinton was much less liberal than his enemies thought. After all, Clinton overhauled welfare, tamed the deficit and promoted free trade. While still a proud “Reagan conservative,” Ruddy said he now thinks the attacks on Clinton in the 1990s went too far. “Did we like and enjoy all the salacious reporting and all the stuff going on in the ’90s?” he asked. “I guess we thought, This is just politics. But looking back at my role, I was probably over the top. And if I knew then what I know today, I wouldn’t have pursued some of that stuff as aggressively as I did. I did an honest reporter’s job. But I have a different take on it now.”
Ruddy also attributes his change of heart to Clinton’s foundation, which has impressed him and other onetime foes. Richard Mellon Scaife, the billionaire publisher who financed Ruddy’s investigations and other anti-Clinton activities, is now a contributor to the foundation. So is Rupert Murdoch, the News Corporation chairman whose Fox News was a regular thorn in Clinton’s side. Clinton over the years has also made peace with other former adversaries, like Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich. The elder George Bush told me he now considers Clinton “a real friend.” When I asked what changed his view, he wrote in an e-mail message: “I didn’t know him personally back then. I knew him, but not up close and personal. Now I do.”...
When the subject [of the economy] came up during our conversation in Chappaqua, Clinton calmly dissected the case against him and acknowledged that in at least some particulars his critics have a point. In almost clinical form, as if back at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, he broke down the case against him into three allegations: first, that he used the Community Reinvestment Act to force small banks into making loans to low-income depositors who were too risky. Second, that he signed the deregulatory Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999, repealing part of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act that prohibited commercial banks from engaging in the investment business. And third, that he failed to regulate the complex financial instruments known as derivatives.
The first complaint Clinton rejects as “just a totally off-the-wall crazy argument” made by the “right wing,” noting that community banks have not had major problems. The second he gives some credence to, although he blames Bush for, in his view, neutering the Securities and Exchange Commission. “Letting banks take investment positions I don’t think had much to do with this meltdown,” he said. “And the more diversified institutions in general were better able to handle what happened. And again, if I had known that the S.E.C. would have taken a rain check, would I have done it? Probably not. But I wouldn’t have done anything. In other words, I would have tried to reverse everything if I had known we were going to have eight years where we would not have an S.E.C. for most of the time.”
Clinton argued that the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act set up a framework for overseeing the industry. “So I don’t think that’s such a good criticism,” he said. “I think, actually, if you want to make a criticism on that, it would be an indirect one — you could say that the signing of that legislation sped up what was happening anyway and maybe led some of these institutions to be bigger than they otherwise would have been and the very bigness of some of these groups caused some of this problem because the bigger something is and the newer it is, the harder it is to manage. And I do think there were some serious management problems which might not have occurred.”
Then there are the derivatives. There, Clinton pleads guilty.
Name of source: Fox News
SOURCE: Fox News (5-27-09)
Members of the Miami-Dade branch of the NAACP want the Confederate flag banned from the Homestead-Miami Motor Speedway, and they will meet Thursday to decide whether to boycott a NASCAR race slated there for November.
Debra Toomer, the branch's chairwoman of press and publicity, said a planning session has been scheduled to decide on a course of action regarding the display of the flag at the Nov. 20-22 event, as well as its presence at city-sponsored events like last year's Veterans Day parade.
Name of source: The Indianapolis Star
SOURCE: The Indianapolis Star (5-25-09)
While officials have identified whom the bones belonged to, it remains a mystery how the bones ended up in the basement of a building in downtown Albany, about 70 miles northeast of Indianapolis, where Gary Engelbrecht runs Fading Tradition barbershop.
The building housed a bank until 1965 and has been an insurance office, a consignment shop and an apartment in later years.
The group of three skeletons included at least one male and one female, Clevenger said. The three American Indians were believed to have died sometime after the age of 45 and showed no signs of traumatic injury at the time of death.
Clevenger will work with the state archaeologist and American Indian authorities to determine what should happen to the bone fragments. Until that time, the bones will remain secured at the University of Indianapolis.
Name of source: Cuba Headlines
SOURCE: Cuba Headlines (5-26-09)
According to the local Radio Trinidad station, a group of lobster fishermen working in waters close to the Zaza Afuera Cay found the cannon. The same fishermen discovered the remains of a colonial ship a year earlier in the same location.
Leonel Delgado Ceballos said that the cannon comes from a ship that was part of the Real Armada fleet of King Carlos III as confirmed by a crown engraved on the surface of the cannon with a capital R encircled with a C and the number "three" in Roman numerals.
The cannon, along with 20 small pieces of ammunition and an 8-pound cannonball, will be exhibited in one the museums in Trinidad, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Name of source: BBC
SOURCE: BBC (5-26-09)
They say more bodies are expected to be found in the grave near the eastern town of Vlasenica in the coming days.
About 70 mass graves around Srebrenica have been found since the Bosnian war, and more than 5,000 victims identified.
Last week, a team from the Institute for Missing People exhumed 10 bodies of Bosniak civilians in the town of Rudo, near Vlasenica.
SOURCE: BBC (5-26-09)
The team says artefacts recovered from the ship, found off the Anglesey coast, suggest it may have been bringing supplies from the King of France.
The Prince - Charles Edward Stuart - was at the time in hiding after the failure of the Jacobite Rebellion.
SOURCE: BBC (5-25-09)
Standing just 40cm (16 inches) high, it depicts Christ on the Cross, but leading art experts simply cannot agree who made it.
This is not a tale about fakery or imitation - everyone says the statue is a Renaissance piece of art from around 1495, when Michelangelo would have been 20.
But who actually crafted it? That is the question.
The controversy has been rekindled because of a new exhibition in Naples to display the cross, which incidentally has itself disappeared somewhere in antiquity, leaving the figure of Christ these days hanging mid-air connected to a sheet of transparent plastic.
SOURCE: BBC (5-25-09)
They say US diplomat Richard Holbrooke promised him immunity from prosecution on condition he gave up politics - something Mr Holbrooke strongly denies.
Mr Karadzic is on trial at the UN tribunal in The Hague, facing 11 charges including genocide.
The tribunal has said that any immunity deal would not be binding.
Name of source: New York Times
SOURCE: New York Times (5-27-09)
“I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ There were photos of Booker T. Washington playing with his grandchildren, there were letters from Harry Truman,” said Dr. Goldsby, 47. “Every time I opened a box, I found something of historical significance.”
The artifacts were the last vestiges of The Defender still in the hands of Robert Sengstacke, heir to the newspaper’s founding family. Mr. Sengstacke estimated that the collection could fetch “a few million bucks,” although it has not been formally appraised.
But after some spirited discussions with Dr. Goldsby, Mr. Sengstacke said, he decided some things were worth more than money. City officials are to announce Wednesday that the collection will be donated to the Chicago Public Library and housed in a South Side branch.
Name of source: Slate
SOURCE: Slate (5-26-09)
Sort of. The 1953 Korean War Armistice Agreement, signed by the United Nations Command, North Korea, and China, ended the conflict in a practical sense. It set up a system for exchanging prisoners of war, created a north-south boundary within a demilitarized zone, and marked the suspension of all open hostilities. It was not, however, intended as the final say on the matter. In fact, Article IV of the Armistice recommends that "the governments concerned on both sides" convene a conference within three months of signing to organize the withdrawal of foreign forces from the peninsula and settle the "Korea question"—roughly, who would rule over a reunited Korea. Talks did take place in Geneva in 1954, but they broke down over how, exactly, to hold fair elections for a unified government.
Name of source: National Security Archive
SOURCE: National Security Archive (5-26-09)
Name of source: Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog, US News
SOURCE: Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog, US News (5-26-09)
The answer seems to be that Sotomayor would in fact be the first Hispanic, but it also points up the problem inherent in the term Hispanic.
Cardozo, Josh Marshall reports, was of Portuguese ancestry (Cardozo biographer Andrew Kaufman says that Cardozo"family legend" has them coming from Portugal, but without"firm documentation about the particulars"). Which brings us to the critical question: What sort of ancestry qualifies as Hispanic? There are three strikes against the Cardozo-as-Hispanic thesis, all having to do with the fact that Portuguese natives speak ... Portuguese (rather than Spanish).
- A TPM reader notes that the Associated Press defines Hispanic as coming from a Spanish-speaking country, and distinguishes Hispanic from those of Brazilian and Portuguese descent.
- Webster's dictionary defines Hispanic thusly:"Of or relating to the language, people, or culture of Spain or Spanish-speaking Latin America."
- The U.S. Census uses the Office of Management and Budget's definition of Hispanic:"The term 'Hispanic' refers to persons who trace their origin or descent to Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Central and South America, and other Spanish cultures."
Portugal is on the Iberian peninsula, but is most certainly not Spanish. So Cardozo is not Hispanic. Or, presumably, Latino (the Census asks people whether they are Hispanic or Latino, since the words have different meanings in different parts of the country). Which brings up my larger problem here: The obsession with Sotomayor potentially being the first"Hispanic justice," like discussion in politics of the"Hispanic vote," assumes Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and so on to be a monolithic group who all care about the same set of issues. It's just not so (I have some firsthand knowledge here, having married a Puerto Rican)—the different groups have different perspectives and different issues that motivate them. They react differently to, say, normalizing trade relations with Cuba, how to handle illegal immigration, etc.
But of course U.S. politics rarely acknowledges this fact.
Related Links
Shelomo Alfassa: Sonia Sotomayor NOT the first Hispanic for US Supreme Court NPR story
Name of source: NBC
SOURCE: NBC (5-25-09)
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Name of source: The Boston Globe
SOURCE: The Boston Globe (5-25-09)
To the US military, Carter Lutes, a pilot who vanished in Papua New Guinea in April 1944, is one of the lost heroes of World War II. The Pentagon still hopes to recover him. Until then, it considers his jungle crash site a sacred place - and the last known clue to finding him.
Yet while the military was making plans to search for Lutes's remains, other visitors arrived on the site seeking different remains: Lutes's aircraft - a P-47D Thunderbolt, a highly sought-after model in the booming market for authentic World War II planes.
Driven largely by wealthy American collectors, interest in such "warbirds" has grown into a multimillion-dollar frenzy that rivals the most feverish art trend or real estate boom, according to interviews with dozens of collectors, aircraft restorers, museum curators, and government officials.
