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
November 9, 2009
President Obama, saying Nov. 9, 1989, was a day he will "never forget," expresses regrets for not being able to attend the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
President Obama on Monday marked the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in a video message broadcast before a huge crowd in Germany, calling the destruction of the wall a "rebuke of tyranny."
The video message was aired after Secretary of State Hill
Source: Live Science
November 6, 2009
We are currently the only human species alive, but as recently as 24,000 years ago another one walked the earth — the Neanderthals.
These extinct humans were the closest relatives we had, and tantalizing new hints from researchers suggest that we might have been intimately close indeed. The mystery of whether Neanderthals and us had sex might be solved if the entire Neanderthal genome is reported soon as expected. The matter of why they died and we succeeded, however, remains an ope
Source: Fox News
November 9, 2009
Germans from both sides of the former Berlin Wall celebrated on Monday, 20 years after the Iron Curtain fell, sending East Germans flooding west and setting in motion events that soon led to the country's reunification.
Chancellor Angela Merkel — reunited Germany's first leader to grow up in the communist east — started the day with President Horst Koehler and other leaders at a prayer service at a former East Berlin church that was a rallying point for opposition activists in 1989.
Source: Fox News
November 9, 2009
The president does not plan to travel to Germany to attend the 20th anniversary celebration Monday of the fall of the Berlin Wall, drawing heated criticism from those who say he's ignoring a shining triumph of American-inspired democracy.
"A tragedy," is how former House Speaker Newt Gingrich described Obama's absence.
For its part, the administration is citing a scheduling conflict. The White House says the president simply does not have the time to go, with
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 9, 2009
Relatives of passengers on United flight 93, the hijacked 9/11 plane which crashed in a field after an on-board fight for the controls, have broken ground on a permanent memorial park in their honour.
At a ceremony at the weekend that was led by Ken Salazar, the US Interior Secretary, 39 relatives of the 40 passengers and crew who died turned shovels of soil in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
The government intends to have the first phase of a national monument
Source: BBC
November 9, 2009
The 70th anniversary of World War II is being commemorated around the world, but the contribution of one group of soldiers is almost universally ignored. How many now recall the role of more than one million African troops?
Yet they fought in the deserts of North Africa, the jungles of Burma and over the skies of Germany. A shrinking band of veterans, many now living in poverty, bitterly resent being written out of history.
For Africa, World War II began not in 1939, b
Source: Talking Points Memo
November 6, 2009
At yesterday's tea party rally on Capitol Hill, at least one protester brandished a large graphic photograph of the victims of the Dachau Nazi concentration camp, comparing health care reform to Nazi policies. Today, Rep. Eric Cantor's (R-VA) spokesman called the photograph "inappropriate."
Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY) has also condemned the poster.
Cantor, in an interview today with Bloomberg, also offered some criticism of radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh's co
Source: Multi-National Division Baghdad RSS/Iraqcrisis
November 9, 2009
BAGHDAD – What may look like large, weathered mounds of dirt in rural farmland near Mahmudiyah are actually artifact-filled ruins of an ancient civilization.
Soldiers of the North Carolina National Guard's 120th Combined Arms Battalion, 30th Heavy Brigade
Combat Team, surveyed the sites, here, recently, with officials from the Government of Iraq's
Ministry of Antiquities and Tourism to examine ways to preserve and protect two ancient Sumerian
sites from looters.
Source: The News-Press
November 5, 2009
In the cool, buggy shade of a huge royal poinciana, archaeologist Michael Wylde dragged his trowel 1,200 years into the past.
Wylde, manager of the Randell Research Center at Pineland, was renewing an excavation begun last winter of a Calusa Indian site known as Mound 5 of Brown's Mound Complex...
... "Brown's Mound Complex is a site we know about extensively but not intensively," said Bill Marquardt, curator in archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural His
Source: Google News
November 5, 2009
ATLANTA — An archaeologist says excavations in southern Georgia have turned up beads, metal tools and other artifacts that may pinpoint part of the elusive trail of the 16th-century Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto.
Dennis Blanton of the Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta was scheduled to present his findings Thursday to the Southeastern Archaeological Conference in Mobile, Ala.
Excavations since 2006 in rural Telfair County uncovered remains of an Indian se
Source: The Star
October 16, 2009
For years, Fort York has been separated from the harbour it once protected and the city it defended, hemmed in by the Gardiner Expressway and a rail corridor.
But construction of a new pedestrian-cyclist bridge over the railway tracks, which begins next year as part of a $35 million revitalization of the national historic site, will once again connect the fort with city neighbourhoods to the north and waterfront trails to the south.
"One of our biggest challenges o
Source: SooToday
October 7, 2009
WASHINGTON - U.S. Senator Carl Levin, D-Michigan, [has] introduced a concurrent resolution calling for the issuance of a postage stamp commemorating the War of 1812.
Seven other senators have joined Levin in co-sponsoring the bill.
They are Senator Voinovich, R-Ohio; Senator Landrieu, La.; Senator Kaufman, D-Del.; Senator Brown, D-Ohio; Senator Stabenow, D-Mich.; Senator Snowe, R-Maine; and Senator Leahy, D-Vt.
“I am pleased to introduce this resolution com
Source: NYT
November 4, 2009
EDINBURGH — Come April a small team of experts from the Glasgow School of Art and the government heritage entity Historic Scotland will fly to South Dakota at the behest of an organization called CyArk and the United States National Park Service. They will make laser scans and computer models of Mount Rushmore.
Aside from the wee bit of Scottish blood in three of the four enshrined presidents (Lincoln’s the odd man out, in case you’re wondering), there is of course nothing whatsoev
Source: The Herald
November 9, 2009
THE heroic image of wartime Plymouth has been dealt a blow by new research.
During the Second World War Blitz, 50 Plymothians were caught and convicted of looting, the research by an historian reveals.
The looters moved in as German bombs rained down on the city.
Shockingly, many were men and women in positions of trust, according to a new book by Exeter University historian Dr Todd Gray.
Plymouth's heaviest bombing took place from March to Apr
Source: NYT
November 9, 2009
DA NANG, Vietnam — Cmdr. H. B. Le, the first Vietnamese-American to command a United States Navy destroyer, had just stepped ashore on a formal port call, making an emotional return to Vietnam for the first time since he fled as a young boy on a fishing boat at the end of the war in 1975.
A youthful and smiling man of 39, he bore on his shoulders the weight of the symbolism of cautiously warming military ties between Vietnam and the United States in the visit over the weekend.
Source: CNSNews.com
November 9, 2009
Berlin (AP) - U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton congratulated Germans on the 20-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall at a meeting Monday with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
"I am delighted to be here in Berlin, the city that meant so much, not only to the German people, but to the European and the American people and the world," Clinton said at the Chancellory.
"I congratulate the chancellor, not only on the very well deserved oc
Source: Rasmussen Reports
November 9, 2009
Seventy percent (70%) of U.S. voters rate the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism as Very Important in terms of world history.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows another 23% see the events as somewhat important. Just four percent (4%) of voters say the fall of the wall around Berlin and the collapse of communism were not very or not at all important.
The Berlin Wall was built by the communist East Germans to surround the free city
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 9, 2009
Heinz Kessler has no regrets over the deaths to those who tried to cross the Berlin Wall.
Almost alone among the ex-Communist titans who ran the east bloc, he remains a stalwart defender of the system he served as minister of defence in the Honecker politburo.
Now 89 and living in Lichtenberg, Berlin, he regards the united Germany as a "callous and unjust" government, and wishes that the wall and the wire was still standing.
For his beliefs, Herr
Source: BBC
November 9, 2009
German Chancellor Angela Merkel was joined at the Brandenburg Gate by Russia's Dmitry Medvedev, France's Nicolas Sarkozy and UK PM Gordon Brown.
In a special video address, US President Barack Obama said Berliners had rebuked tyranny on 9 November 1989.
The event two decades ago led Germany to reunify, caused the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Cold War's end.
Communist East Germany erected the 155-km (96-mile) concrete barrier in 1961 to encircle West
Source: Inside Higher Ed
November 9, 2009
Many students at Northwestern University are upset over the blackface Halloween costumes of some white students, NBC Chicago reported. Morton O. Schapiro, Northwestern's president, sent an e-mail to students saying: “While I fully support the principles of free expression, at the same time I am deeply disappointed to see any example of insensitivity that demeans
