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: Associated Press
January 11, 2010
In newly released papers from his presidency, Richard Nixon directs a purge of Kennedy-era modern art — "these little uglies" — orders hostile journalists to be frozen out and fusses over White House guest lists to make sure political opponents don't make it in.
As his lieutenants built an ambitious political espionage operation that tapped scribes as spies, Nixon is shown preoccupying himself with the finest details of dividing friend and foe.
The Nixon Libra
Source: LA Times
January 3, 2010
Robert Bohrn cannot forget the black Union soldier whose bones he and another Civil War relic hunter uncovered on Folly Island, S.C., more than 20 years ago.
"It's one thing to find a coin, a slave tag, a person's ring," Bohrn said. "It's way different to turn your shovel blade over and see a human being."
Feeling as though he is a caretaker for that soldier and the 18 others whose skeletons were found at the lonely outpost, Bohrn, 53, now is working
Source: Associated Press
January 11, 2010
North Korea proposed Monday that a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War be signed this year, saying a return to negotiations on its nuclear program depends on better relations with Washington and the lifting of sanctions.
The North has long demanded a peace treaty, but President Barack Obama's special envoy for human rights in North Korea said in Seoul on Monday that the communist regime must improve its "appalling" human rights record before any normalization of re
Source: Reuters
January 10, 2010
New tombs found in Giza support the view that the Great Pyramids were built by free workers and not slaves, as widely believed, Egypt's chief archaeologist said on Sunday.
Films and media have long depicted slaves toiling away in the desert to build the mammoth pyramids only to meet a miserable death at the end of their efforts.
"These tombs were built beside the king's pyramid, which indicates that these people were not by any means slaves," Zahi Hawass, the
Source: Deutsche Welle
January 10, 2010
During the Third Reich, Germany had a small black community, yet relatively little is known about their life in the Nazi era. Deutsche Welle takes a look at survival strategies under Hitler's oppressive regime.
Between 20,000 - 25,000 blacks lived in Nazi Germany under Hitler's rule.When asked about blacks in the Third Reich, Germans are most likely to talk about the Afrika Schau. In his book, "Hitler's Black Victims," American University researcher, Dr. Clarence Lusane wr
Source: Fox News
January 10, 2010
To the government's critics, it was a long and shocking act of official stonewalling: Agreements long hidden in Foreign Ministry files allowed nuclear-armed U.S. warships to enter Japanese ports, violating a hallowed principle of postwar Japan. Yet their very existence was officially denied.
Now, in a clear break from the past, a new prime minister has gone where none of his predecessors dared go: He has ordered a panel of ministry officials and academics to investigate the secret a
Source: BBC
January 9, 2010
Scientists claim to have the first persuasive evidence that Neanderthals wore "body paint" 50,000 years ago.
The team report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that shells containing pigment residues were Neanderthal make-up containers.
Scientists unearthed the shells at two archaeological sites in the Murcia province of southern Spain.
The team says its find buries "the view of Neanderthals as half-wits" and sho
Source: BBC
January 10, 2010
An Australian World War II hospital ship, the Centaur, has been seen for the first time since it sank more than 60 years ago with a loss of 268 lives.
Images of the wreck, more than 2km (1.3 miles) below the sea, were captured by a remote-controlled underwater camera.
The ship's location was discovered last month following a hi-tech search.
Australia says the ship, which went down in May 1943, was torpedoed by the Japanese. Japan says the circumstances su
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 10, 2010
One is an established American biographer who has written about the Kennedy clan, the Clintons and Diana, Princess of Wales. The other is a French writer who, by her own admission, is little known for her work which includes a book on the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall.
But the two women – Sally Bedell Smith and Isabelle Rivère – are going head to head in an attempt to write the definitive biography of the Queen to be published to coincide with her Diamond Jubilee in 2
Source: The Sunday Times (UK)
January 10, 2009
Outrage has greeted plans by Pope John Paul II’s would-be assassin to sign multi-million-dollar book and film deals after his release from prison this month.
But in a handwritten letter sent to The Sunday Times, the Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca insisted this weekend that there was "great interest from Japan to Canada" in film and television documentary projects.
Almost three decades after he shot the Polish Pope in St Peter’s Square, Rome, in 1981, it remain
Source: Discovery News
January 8, 2010
Wear patterns on one of the most celebrated mosaics of antiquity have allowed researchers to reconstruct exactly how ancient Romans viewed the artwork.
Found during the 1831 excavations in the lava-buried town of Pompeii, the Alexander mosaic (now on display at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples) is the most famous example of an early tessellated mosaic.
Measuring 19 feet by 10 feet, the piece was made around 100 B.C. out of roughly 4 million tesserae (small m
Source: NPR
January 9, 2010
The students in front of Paula Holmes-Eber wear camouflage and have close-cropped hair. Most of them are Marine officers, and many of them have already been to war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They're here to learn the consequences of their actions.
"Should we change another culture?" she asks the class. "The reality is, the second you land on the ground with 100,000 troops eating and using the materials of the area, you've changed the economy; you've changed
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
January 10, 2010
Bill Clinton was at the centre of a race storm last night after he was accused of denigrating Barack Obama.
The former president allegedly claimed during the hard-fought Democratic primary race: ‘A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.’
He is said to have made the racist remark in a phone call entreating Senator Teddy Kennedy, the party’s vastly influential elder statesman, to endorse his wife, Hillary, in the delicately balanced 2008 nomination bat
Source: New York Times
December 31, 2009
Love him or hate him, Antonin Scalia has had a greater influence on the way Americans debate the law today than any other modern Supreme Court justice. Conservatives hail Scalia as the founding prophet of their true faith — the Jurisprudence of Original Understanding — and the leader of the opposition to moral relativism and judicial imperialism in the age of Obama. Liberals scorn Scalia as a show-off and intellectual bully who is quick to betray his constitutional principles when they clash wit
Source: New York Times
January 4, 2010
The soaring steeple, airy flying buttresses and steep slate roof of the 19th-century parish church that dominates this town in western France is — like many other village churches in France — scheduled for demolition, a victim of its size, its condition and, ultimately, municipal budget concerns.
Although the church, dedicated to St. Peter, is arguably the sole architectural jewel in this town of 2,400 people, the town has decided to tear it down and replace it with a new one that w
Source: New York Times
January 9, 2010
The Obama administration is lowering the volume in a long-running argument between Congress and the executive branch over when, if ever, a president has the power to bypass federal statutes he has signed into law.
Legal scholars said the administration’s new approach, which avoids repeating claims of executive power that the White House has previously voiced, could avoid setting off fights with lawmakers. But the approach will make it harder to keep track of which statutes the White
Source: New York Times
January 10, 2010
“He put the question to me explicitly — ‘The time is coming when something must be done,’ ” Freya von Moltke said. “ ‘I would like to have a hand in it, but I can only do so if you join in too,’ and I said, ‘Yes, it’s worth it.’ ”
So, with a wife’s assent, began a famous challenge to Hitler. At the height of the Nazi victories, Count Helmuth James von Moltke invited about two dozen foes of Nazism, many of them aristocrats like himself, to imagine a new, better postwar Germany.
Source: Discovery News
January 8, 2010
Pigment-stained seashells, likely worn as necklaces by Neanderthals, suggest these early Europeans were not only stylish, but that they were also just as smart and crafty as humans in Africa were, according to a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The colorful mollusk shells, which date to 50,000 years ago, were recently found in Murcia Province, Spain. Since the shells were painted 10,000 years before modern humans are believed to have settled in Europe, t
Source: AP
January 9, 2010
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani set off a tempest about terrorism Friday with his claim that this nation "had no domestic attacks" under President George W. Bush.
Giuliani somehow neglected to mention the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as he was contrasting President Barack Obama's handling of terrorism with that of Bush in light of the failed Christmas Day attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound flight. The Sept. 11 attacks toppled New York's World Trade Center, killed
Source: BBC
January 9, 2010
Osama Bin Laden died eight years ago during the battle for Tora Bora in Afghanistan, either from a US bomb or from a serious kidney disease.
Or so the conspiracy theory goes.
The theory that has developed on the web since 9/11 is that US intelligence services are manufacturing the Bin Laden statements to create an evil bogeyman, to justify the so-called war on terror in Afghanistan, Iraq and back at home. Bruce Riedel, who chaired Presi
