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: Press Release
November 20, 2009
A new study by The Socionomics Institute shows a link between bear markets and the rising popularity of eugenics movements over a span of 225 years.
"Although most people think that society has dumped eugenics on the trash heap of bad ideas," says analyst Alan Hall, "its core ideology of top-down reproductive control is likely to regain popularity in the upcoming bear market. There are already signs of resurgence."
For example, during the long bear
Source: The New York Observer
November 17, 2009
New York Times Washington correspondent Jodi Kantor has secured a stunning seven-figure book deal this week with Little, Brown to write a volume on the Obamas.
The deal was the result of a heated citywide auction, and was brokered by independent lit agent Elyse Cheney. It comes on the heels of the 34-year-old reporter’s New York Times Magazine cover story on the Obamas’ marriage, which argued that “the Obamas mix politics and romance in a way that no first couple quite have before.”
Source: BBC
November 19, 2009
A US judge has ruled that negligence by the US Army Corps of Engineers led to massive floods in parts of New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005.
The court upheld complaints by six residents and a business against the Corps over its maintenance of a navigational channel.
They were awarded damages totalling $720,000 (£431,000), and the ruling could lead to thousands more claims.
About 80% of New Orleans was flooded by Hurricane Katrina.
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education
November 19, 2009
The University of Chicago Law School is displaying a collection of letters recovered from a time capsule that was sealed in a cornerstone in 1958, reports the Chicago Tribune.
The capsule was supposed to have been unsealed on May 28, 2008 — the 50th anniversary of the school's opening — and would have been forgotten altogether but for a discovery by an alumni-magazine reporter. The loss would have been a tremendous one; the capsule contained letters from Supreme Court justices and t
Source: Time
November 19, 2009
Uncertainty is one of the most corrosive elements in politics, and as days melt into weeks with no firm decision from President Barack Obama on whether the U.S. will increase troop levels in Afghanistan, the remaining British consensus on the issue is threatening to dissolve. Public support for Britain's contribution to the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan has curdled as the body count of British troops has spiraled, reaching 98 this year alone. An opinion poll taken earlier this month after an A
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education
November 17, 2009
Time traveling is coming to an Internet browser near you.
A new Web site called Memento Web will allow anyone curious about what the Internet used to look like to plug in a date and then browse the World Wide Web as it was on that day.
The site is already live with limited use. Users can enter a URL and the date on which they wish to see a version of the page the URL once called up.
That doesn't mean they'll get exactly what they were looking for. For examp
Source: AP
November 17, 2009
A letter President Abraham Lincoln wrote to a boy whose friends didn't believe he had met the commander in chief is being sold in Philadelphia.
Lincoln sent the letter from the White House to 8-year-old George Patten two weeks after his March 1861 inauguration.
The youngster had been mocked by classmates for saying he'd met the 16th president with his father, a journalist. His teacher wrote Lincoln to uncover the truth.
Source: LA Times
November 16, 2009
Two decades after his party was banned from running for seats in the parliament, Rabbi Meir Kahane and his ideas are once more on its agenda.
Recently, right-wing legislator Michael Ben-Ari asked to hold a discussion in parliament in memory of Kahane, an American-born rabbi who had founded the Jewish Defense League before moving to Israel and founding the militantly nationalist Kach movement that advocated removal of Arabs from biblical Israel. In 1988, Israeli law was amended to ba
Source: Reuters
November 18, 2009
BADALING, China (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama took a walk alone on the Great Wall on Wednesday, wrapping up a visit to China with a visit to the ancient fortifications that symbolize the country's history and separateness.
"It's magical. It reminds you of the sweep of history," Obama said, after breaking away from his tour guides to walk alone along the snowy parapets, hands jammed into his pockets against the cold and wind.
"It gives you a good
Source: BBC
November 18, 2009
Officials from two museums in Sweden have handed over the remains of five indigenous Maori people to their New Zealand counterparts.
The remains include one almost complete skeleton, a skull, and three other skeleton parts.
The ceremony was held at the Natural History Museum in Gothenburg.
Museums across Europe have been repatriating human remains taken from indigenous burial grounds during colonial times.
The formal handing over involved a tra
Source: Times Online
November 19, 2009
The Ancient Greeks deliberately built their temples to face the rising Sun, according to research that promises to shed light on their religious practices and to resolve a longstanding archaeological controversy.
An investigation into temples built by Greek colonists in Sicily has found strong evidence that they were aligned to the East.
The findings, by Alun Salt, of the University of Leicester, suggest that Ancient Greek religion may have included ritual elements insp
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 17, 2009
Bill Millin, now 86, tried to raise the morale of incoming troops with his tunes, as shells exploded overhead and machinegun fire raked Sword Beach.
The picture of the 21-year-old commando became one of the enduring images of the landings which paved the way to Hitler's defeat in the Second World War.
Now he is to be immortalised in a life-sized statue by the people of Colleville Montgomery, which he helped to liberate in 1944.
On Thursday a group of French
Source: Dominican Today
November 18, 2009
SANTO DOMINGO.- “That’s the mystery of the past, we’ve found doors as small as 20 by 20 centimeters which lead to great chambers,” revealed the Secretary General of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, regarding the search for Cleopatra’s tomb by a Dominican-Egyptian team.
Zahi Hawas is in the country to receive a decoration in the National Palace and a Doctorate degree from the Catholic University of Santo Domingo in the company of Dominican archaeologist Kathleen Martinez, who
Source: Stroud News and Journal
November 18, 2009
HIDDEN Victorian railway lines have been found beside the Thames and Severn Canal at Thrupp.
The rails, unearthed during work to repair a leak in the watercourse, were probably used to transport coal to a nearby mill.
Dr Ray Wilson, honorary secretary of the Gloucestershire Society for Industrial Archaeology, said: "It is really exciting.
"We are seeing the physical remains of something which we imagined existed elsewhere but never knew existed a
Source: Huffington Post
November 17, 2009
Orders to prevent sales of T-shirts showing Obama dressed like communist revolutionary Mao Zedong are in force during the president's visit -- and Chinese officials mean it, as a CNN reporter found out.
Correspondent Emily Chang reported that she went searching for Oba-Mao souvenirs at Shanghai's Yatai Xinyang market. Finding none, she pulled out a T-shirt she bought before the ban was imposed to record a report in the market.
Security guards pounced, telling her she di
Source: Inside Higher Ed
November 17, 2009
Many advocates for free speech were outraged when Yale University Press, in publishing a book about the controversy over the Danish cartoons of Muhammad, refused to publish the cartoons themselves. Gary Hull, a Duke University professor, decided the best response would be to publish a book that included the controversial images, and through his new Voltaire Press, he has now done so. The book, Muhammad: The "Banned" Images, includes an introduction by Hull on "the basic choice bet
Source: AP
November 18, 2009
The U.S. attended a meeting of the International Criminal Court's management board for the first time Wednesday in a sign it has stopped shunning the world's only permanent war crimes tribunal.
The U.S. has not ratified the court's founding treaty, the Rome Statute, partly because of fears the court could become a forum for politically motivated prosecutions of U.S. troops.
He told The Associated Press his presence is a sign the Obama administration wants to "re-en
Source: BBC
November 18, 2009
Hardening of the arteries has been found in Egyptian mummies - suggesting that the risk factors for heart disease may be ancient, researchers say.
A team of US and Egyptian scientists carried out medical scans on 22 mummies from Cairo's Museum of Antiquities.
They found evidence of hardened arteries in three of them and possible heart disease in three more.
All the mummies were of high socio-economic status and would have had a rich diet.
Source: BBC
November 18, 2009
All the most senior ministers were at the Afghan strategy meeting.
They knew things were not going well, but from their leader there was a whiff of panic."We just need to be sure that the final result does not look like a humiliating defeat: to have lost so many men and now abandoned it all... in short, we have to get out of there."
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev - the speaker of those words - was understandably alarmed.
It was June 1986, almos
Source: Project Q Atlanta
November 16, 2009
With a simple three-sentence notice taped to the door, the publishers of Southern Voice and David magazine ended two decades of gay media in Atlanta on Monday.
The publications, owned along with several others by Window Media and Unite Media, abruptly closed their doors overnight Sunday, ending a months-long battle with federal receivership that imperiled the gay media company.
Laura Douglas-Brown, the paper’s editor since 2006 and an employee for nearly 13 years, says
