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: Times (UK)
August 22, 2009
It is one of the mysteries of Whitehall: why did Harold Wilson resign as Prime Minister only two years into his second reign?
Conspiracy theories have abounded about the events preceding March 16, 1976, when Wilson stunned the country and his Cabinet colleagues. Was he the victim of a plot by the security services, who thought that he had communist sympathies and was a KGB asset, or had the onset of Alzheimer’s already claimed his faculties?
At the time Wilson, later
Source: Lee P. Ruddin
August 21, 2009
Civil Rights activist Diane Nash launched Liverpool’s Slavery Remembrance Day Festival (21-23 August) with a free memorial lecture on Friday evening at the Town Hall.
Nash’s hour-long talk, Reflections on the American Civil Rights Movement, focused on her “agaphic energy” during the struggle and was greatly received by a packed council chamber.
This was Nash’s first visit to the UK, and the 71-year-old is set to depart immediately on what is a whistle-blowing tour.
Source: NYT
August 20, 2009
IT’S Madison Avenue’s version of “It’s a Small World”: A brewer founded in South Africa and based in London is about to sell a beer in Vietnam with a campaign from a Baltimore agency that celebrates the American way of life.
The brewer is SABMiller, which is introducing to the Vietnamese the Miller High Life brand sold by its Miller Brewing Company unit. A campaign scheduled to begin on Friday carries the theme “It’s American time, it’s Miller time.”
Source: NYT
August 20, 2009
The rich have been getting richer for so long that the trend has come to seem almost permanent.
They began to pull away from everyone else in the 1970s. By 2006, income was more concentrated at the top than it had been since the late 1920s. The recent news about resurgent Wall Street pay has seemed to suggest that not even the Great Recession could reverse the rise in income inequality.
But economists say — and data is beginning to show — that a significant change may in fact
Source: NYT (Digest)
August 21, 2009
The idea that primitive hunter-gatherers lived in harmony with the landscape has long been challenged by researchers, who say
Stone Age humans in fact wiped out many animal species in places as varied as the mountains of New Zealand and the plains of
North America. Now scientists are proposing a new arena of ancient depredation: the coast.
In an article in Friday’s issue of
the journal Science, anthropologists at the Smithsonian Institution and the University o
Source: NYT
August 20, 2009
Its name means the Mountain of Horror, which seems an apt description for this sacred Buddhist site inside the crater of a dormant volcano. The weather-beaten temple here is surrounded by a lifeless lake and a wasteland of naked rock reeking of sulfur that conjures images of Buddhist hell.
But during the mountain’s twice annual religious festivals, visitors come by the busload to line up before a row of small tents in a corner of the temple. Within are the “itako” — elderly, often b
Source: Independent (UK)
August 22, 2009
He is accused of stealing a priceless first edition work of Shakespeare – and arrived at court in a horse-drawn carriage, wearing Highland tartan and swigging from a bottle of Drambuie.
Raymond Scott, who claims to be distantly related to Bonnie Prince Charlie, faced a judge at Durham Crown Court dressed in a kilt of Royal Stewart tartan, a Harris Tweed jacket, cravat and a pair of limited edition £1,000 Fendi sunglasses.
The eccentric antique book dealer, who faces cha
Source: Guardian (UK)
August 21, 2009
Russia has declassified top-secret surveillance documents in an attempt to justify its occupation of Eastern Europe under the Nazi-Soviet pact, signed 70 years ago on Sunday.
The hidden protocols of the pact, in which Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler agreed to carve up Poland and other sovereign states, were denounced by the Soviet parliament in 1989, shortly after they were revealed for the first time.
But the pact, which lasted until Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Unio
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 21, 2009
Sergeant Paul McAleese, the son of John McAleese, became the 205th soldier to be killed in the conflict after his patrol went to recover the body of another British soldier who died in a bombing attack hours earlier.
The 29-year-old, described as "one of the best of his generation", became a father just a week before he deployed to Afghanistan,following the birth of his son, Charley, The MoD said on Friday night.
Sgt McAleese, who was serving with the 2nd Ba
Source: Times (UK)
August 22, 2009
The face of Chairman Mao is possibly the most reproduced in the world, printed, as it is, on every banknote in China and on countless mementoes around the land.
Officials fear, however, that a huge number of Mao knick-knacks on the market fail to show proper respect for the man revered as the founding father of modern China. That is why the Quality and Technology Supervision Bureau in Mao Zedong’s native Hunan Province is planning to put new standards in place before next year. Any
Source: Times (UK)
August 22, 2009
The release of the Lockerbie bomber is casting a long shadow over relations between Britain and the United States, where senior figures in the Obama Administration have expressed dismay over the Government’s failure to take a stand.
The controversy over the decision to let Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi go home to Libya was further stirred after Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the son of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, said in a Libyan television interview yesterday that his release was linked to nego
Source: TheDailyBeast.com
July 29, 2009
It’s no contest: Teddy Roosevelt’s post-presidential vacation puts other presidential vacations to shame. Three weeks after he left the White House in 1909, Roosevelt embarked on an African safari that lasted nearly a year. He’d always wanted to hunt the continent’s big game, but he also wanted the trip to be a scientific one—so he invited the Smithsonian Institute to come along, and donated animal trophies to the institute, providing dozens of new species for its collections. As if the safari w
Source: The Washington Times
August 20, 2009
The Pakistani government has lifted a ban on political activities in its tribal areas along the Afghan border, including a ban on membership in political parties that dates to colonial times.
President Asif Ali Zardari announced the changes last week in hope that tribesmen would begin a political opposition to Taliban and al Qaeda sympathizers, who hold sway in mosques.
Previously, about 4 million residents of seven Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) could not b
Source: The National Security Archive
August 20, 2009
As Mexicans debate last week’s Supreme Court ruling vacating the conviction of 20 men for the Acteal massacre, newly declassified documents from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency describe the Army’s role in backing paramilitary groups in Chiapas at the time of the killings. The secret cables confirm reporting about military support for indigenous armed groups carrying out attacks on pro-Zapatista communities in the region and add important new details. They also revive a question that has lin
Source: AFP
August 20, 2009
Former US homeland security chief Tom Ridge charges in a new book that top aides to then-president George W. Bush pressured him to raise the "terror alert" level to sway the November 2004 US election.
Then defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and attorney general John Ashcroft pushed him to elevate the color-coded threat level, but Ridge refused, according to a summary from his publisher, Thomas Dunne Books.
"After that episode, I knew I had to follow throug
Source: NYT
August 20, 2009
It’s the Internet video of the moment. It happened at a town hall meeting in Dartmouth, Mass., Tuesday evening. The famously colicky Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, lays into a questioner who is waving a picture of President Obama altered to look like Hitler and asks Mr. Frank why he was supporting a “Nazi” health policy.
“On what planet do you spend most of your time?” Mr. Frank responds.
He did not stop there. Roll, please:
Source: Public Policy Polling blog
August 19, 2009
After we conducted polls over the last couple of weeks finding significant numbers of 'birthers' in North Carolina and Virginia, we decided to take the question national but also drum down more specifically on where exactly the people who think Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States do think he's from.
The answer is that 62% of Americans think Obama was born here, while 24% think he was not and 14% are unsure.
10% of the country thinks that he was born in Indones
Source: NYT
August 20, 2009
North Korea said Wednesday that it would send a delegation to the funeral of the former South Korean president Kim Dae-jung, according to a lawmaker quoted by the Yonhap news agency in Seoul. Such an official visit would signal a drastic change in policy regarding diplomatic exchanges.
Park Jie-won, an opposition member of Parliament who was once an aide to Mr. Kim, said Wednesday that he received the news of the visit in a letter faxed from the North Korean government agency in cha
Source: NECN.com (New England Cable News)
August 19, 2009
It's a funny thing about Boston: A city rich with nearly 400 years of history doesn't have a museum of Boston history.
But developer Frank Keefe and a high-powered team of civic leaders hope to change that. They're working to get rights from the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority to build a Boston Museum on a vacant parcel between the Rose Kennedy Greenway and Haymarket outdoor fruit and vegetable market. It's officially called Parcel 9 on plans for post-Big-Dig redevelopment of Bosto
Source: NYT
August 19, 2009
The Central Intelligence Agency in 2004 hired outside contractors from the private security contractor Blackwater USA as part of a secret program to locate and assassinate top operatives of Al Qaeda, according to current and former government officials.
Executives from Blackwater, which has generated controversy because of its aggressive tactics in Iraq, helped the spy agency with planning, training and surveillance. The C.I.A. spent several million dollars on the program, which di
