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: Telegraph (UK)
October 14, 2009
A 2,000-year-old Roman vase has been hailed as the most important of its kind in existence with experts from auctioneer's Bonhams describing it as "virtually priceless".
It has been called "magnificent" by historians as it is the only complete cameo vase in existence and has distinct design properties that set it aside from any other vessel.
The vase dates from between late 1st century BC to early 1st Century AD and stands 13 inches high.
Source: Fox News
October 14, 2009
The Environmental Protection Agency document specifically cites global warming's effects on air quality, agriculture, forestry, water resources and coastal areas as endangering public welfare.
A controversial e-mail message buried by the Bush administration because of its conclusions on global warming surfaced Tuesday, nearly two years after it was first sent to the White House and never opened.
The e-mail and the 28-page document attached to it, released Tuesday by th
Source: CNN
October 14, 2009
An impassioned U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking to students at Moscow State University on Wednesday, admonished those in the U.S. and Russian governments who haven't moved beyond a Cold War mentality.
Clinton said such people are "living in the past" and aren't able to cooperate on issues such as missile defense because they "don't trust each other." She also called on the nations to find common ground, saying they "shouldn't end all coopera
Source: Spiegel Online
October 13, 2009
For many of the now-adult children of white German women and African-American GIs, adopted by families in the United States after World War II, the search for the truth has been difficult. Online communities are helping.
Rudi Richardson knew something about what it meant to be a black man in the United States. But after being deported to Germany, the country where he was born, shortly before his 47th birthday, he had to start figuring out what it meant to be black and German -- in a
Source: Truthout
October 13, 2009
The Obama administration indicated in court papers it may appeal a federal judge's ruling ordering the Justice Department to release portions of the transcribed interview between former Vice President Dick Cheney and Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor appointed to probe the roles Bush administration officials played in the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson six years ago.
Last week, Jeffrey M. Smith, an attorney in the Justice Department's civil division,
Source: NYT
October 12, 2009
The 1918 flu epidemic was probably the deadliest plague in human history, killing more than 50 million people worldwide. Now it appears that a small number of the deaths may have been caused not by the virus, but by a drug used to treat it: aspirin.
Dr. Karen M. Starko, author of one of the earliest papers connecting aspirin use with Reye’s syndrome, has published an article suggesting that overdoses of the relatively new “wonder drug” could have been deadly.
What raise
Source: Medieval News
October 13, 2009
In one of the most amazing recent examples of intuition, detective work, technical innovation and connoisseurship, a new addition to the very limited corpus of paintings by Leonardo da Vinci has now come to light.
The painting, actually a mixed-media of white, red and black chalks with additions of watercolour, and executed on vellum, was discovered in a private Swiss collection. Originally purchased in a New York auction ten years ago, the painting was catalogued as 'German early
Source: BBC
October 13, 2009
The small Canadian cattle-ranching city of Brooks, in south-eastern Alberta, is preparing to celebrate its 100th anniversary next year.
Painted murals depicting a proud western heritage of cattle farming, cowboys, ice hockey and the oil and gas industry have appeared throughout the city.
A century ago, immigrants cried when they reached Brooks because the landscape was so dry and inhospitable before irrigation helped it to become an oasis in the desert for cattle ranch
Source: Daily Mail
October 13, 2009
They were sleek, beautifully shaped, and earned something of a racy reputation.
And that was just the Spitfires they flew.
But even away from the cockpit, the plucky young gals of the World War Two Air Transport Auxiliary turned plenty of heads as well.
In their hastily adapted uniforms (one even had her jacket tailored in Savile Row) they became the darlings of the air – and the unsung heroines of the Battle of Britain.
This was the forgotten
Source: The Crescent News
October 12, 2009
A nationally recognized scholar and author on Abraham Lincoln tackled the difficult subject of civil liberties during wartime Sunday during the Town and Gown program at Schomburg Auditorium.
"There was torture under the administration of Abraham Lincoln," said Dr. Mark Neely Jr., professor of history at Penn State University. "At the time of the Civil War there was a loose idea of the laws and customs of war, so it's unclear if the torture was illegal."
Source: The Daily Beast
October 13, 2009
9/11 “mastermind” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed may finally stand trial. The New York Daily News is reporting that Mohammed and four other detainees at Guantánamo Bay may soon face the death penalty in a courthouse near Ground Zero. Apparently, Attorney General Eric Holder is mulling the move and will decide by November 16 whether the men should stand trial in New York. Should the Gitmo tribunals be scrapped, which the Daily News says is “highly probable,” then the Justice Department will move to swift
Source: The Daily Beast
October 13, 2009
Bygones must be bygones on the presidential retirement circuit: Ex-presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are set to make their second joint appearance since Bush left office, as both men will speak at the TD Ameritrade Institutional 2010 National Conference in Orlando, Florida next year. The subject is the future of the financial-services industry, and the two will appear for an hour-long discussion. In their first joint appearance, Bush referred to Clinton as his “brother.”
Source: Inside Higher Ed
October 12, 2009
COLLEGE PARK, Md. – Undergraduates here announced on Friday the findings of their year-long study to uncover the University of Maryland’s slavery ties, discovering no evidence that slaves built or worked at the institution, even though many of its founders were themselves slaveholders.
Students from a two-semester history research course led by Ira Berlin, a prominent slavery scholar, presented the culmination of hours of library and archival research Friday, a 30-page report “Knowi
Source: True/Slant
October 12, 2009
Courtesy of the great Robert Garcia of the City Project we get this little gem on KCET’s blog:
Frederick Rindge bought the Topanga Malibu Sequit, a 13,316 acre rancho, for $300,000 in 1892. His widow May spent 25 years to keep the state from building what became the Pacific Coast Highway through the land. By the 1930s, May began selling beachfront lots to movie stars and others to pay her taxes. The parcels carried racial restrictions prohibiting people of color from using th
Source: NYT
October 12, 2009
Under rules to be proposed this week, the Department of Veterans Affairs plans to add Parkinson’s disease, ischemic heart disease and hairy-cell leukemia to the growing list of illnesses presumed to have been caused by Agent Orange, the toxic defoliant used widely in Vietnam.
The proposal will make it substantially easier for thousands of veterans to claim that those ailments were the direct result of their service in Vietnam, thereby smoothing the way for them to receive monthly di
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 13, 2009
Hundreds of people lined the banks of the Mississippi river near New Orleans as the USS New York sailed through the fog, local media reported.
Its bow stem contains 7.5 tonnes of steel salvaged from the rubble following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
"That steel means a whole lot more than just metal," Ronnie Harris, mayor of nearby Gretna, Louisiana told the local Fox News station amid a swell of patriot music.
"The entire coun
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 13, 2009
The ruling, by a Moscow court, is a rare victory for Russia's embattled liberal elite who believe the Kremlin is using Stalin's strongman image to boost patriotic fervour and legitimise its own tough tactics today.
In a case as surreal as it was absurd, Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, Stalin's grandson, had sued Novaya Gazeta, a liberal newspaper, for printing an article that referred to Stalin as a "bloodthirsty cannibal."
Mr Dzhugashvili, who lives in neighbouring G
Source: Times (UK)
October 14, 2009
He reimagined Elizabeth I as a flirtatious young princess and upset David Starkey with a hedonistic Henry VIII who looks more like a male model than Holbein’s florid monarch.
Now the creator of the hit television series The Tudors is training his gaze on another English ruler: Henry V.
Michael Hirst, who also wrote Elizabeth, the film that made a star of Cate Blanchett, has signed up to write the screenplay for Agincourt.
This €30 million (£28 million) Brit
Source: Guardian (UK)
October 13, 2009
History remembers Benito Mussolini as a founder member of the original Axis of Evil, the Italian dictator who ruled his country with fear and forged a disastrous alliance with Nazi Germany. But a previously unknown area of Il Duce's CV has come to light: his brief career as a British agent.
Archived documents have revealed that Mussolini got his start in politics in 1917 with the help of a £100 weekly wage from MI5.
For the British intelligence agency, it must have seem
Source: Taegan Goddard's Political Wire
October 12, 2009
Michael Smerconish says a source tells him Bill Clinton never told independent counsel Ken Starr about the secret tapes he recorded with the help of historian Taylor Branch.
"Sporadically in The Clinton Tapes, Branch addresses the conundrum posed by recording the sitting president and the need to avoid certain subjects because of investigations. Still, their conversation continued, and one suspects that the likes of Ken Starr would have salivated upon knowledge of their occurre
