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: Politics Daily
August 6, 2009
On Oct. 27, 1993, a 32-year-old Chicago lawyer, Barack Obama, was interviewed by an aspiring filmmaker who wanted to make a documentary about African-American role models. That movie never got made, but the 12-minute interview is just now surfacing in a video, "Becoming Barack: Evolution of a Leader."
Video of Obama before his Illinois State Senate days is rare, but those dozen minutes weren't enough to carry a stand-alone film. Los Angeles-based executive producer Stuart
Source: BBC
August 7, 2009
"Egypt is the gift of the Nile," commented the Greek historian Herodotus back in the 5th Century BC.
The world's longest river, which runs through this desert country, produced its ancient civilisation and remains its main source of water.
But now Egypt is defending its historic rights to extract more from the Nile than any other country against calls for change to long-existing agreements.
Source: NYT
August 7, 2009
For the first time since the decade began, Americans are having fewer babies, and some experts are blaming the economy. In 2007, the number of births in the United States
broke a 50-year-old record high, set during the baby boom. But last year, births began to decline nationwide, by nearly 2 percent, according to provisional figures released last week. Those figures, from the National Center for Health Statistics, indicate that births declined in all but 10 states in 2008 (most of them in
Source: NYT
August 6, 2009
Somalia’s beleaguered transitional government received desperately needed support on Thursday as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton praised its president as “the best hope we’ve had for some time,” then strongly warned Eritrea to stop supporting insurgents in the country.
Mrs. Clinton met with Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, elected Somalia’s president in January, for more than an hour. She promised more aid, training and equipment, in addition to the millions of dollars’ worth of
Source: NYT
August 6, 2009
They marched through the streets of Beijing, Shanghai and countless small towns propelled by patriotic cheers and thumping drums. It was 1956, and Mao Zedong was calling on China’s youth to “open up the west,” the vast borderland known as Xinjiang that for centuries had defied subjugation.
After a monthlong journey by train and open-air truck, thousands arrived at this Gobi Desert army outpost to find that the factory jobs, hot baths and telephones in every house were nothing but em
Source: NYT
August 6, 2009
Wittingly or not, a just-completed 10-day visit to Ukraine by Kirill I, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, has exposed the dangers lurking in relations between Russia and Ukraine, the two most populous nations to emerge from the breakup of the Soviet Union.
It was Kirill’s first trip to Ukraine since he was elected patriarch in January. The visit opened on July 27 with an affirmation of Russian-Ukrainian brotherhood in Kiev, regarded as the cradle of Russian Orthodoxy. Princ
Source: Foxnews
August 7, 2009
Since Irwin Stovroff was profiled a week ago on FOXNews.com, the decorated WWII veteran has received thousands of positive letters for his non-profit organization, Vets Helping Heroes, which provides service and therapy dogs to wounded veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan.
As of December 31, 2008, over 45,000 troops have been wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan since the start of operations there. Many of them return with life-altering wounds, lost limbs, spinal cord injuri
Source: CNN
August 7, 2009
Life in the White House, however, came at a cost. Johnson and the first children before and after her will always have to "pay a big price in terms of personal time," she said. More than 45 years after she moved into the White House, she still receives requests for interviews about the time she spent there.
But the public's interest in first daughters is nothing new. Fanny Hayes, for example, who was about the same age as Malia when she moved into the White House in 1877,
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 7, 2009
A team hunting Noordin Mohammad Top surrounded a house in a village in Temanggung district of central Java and exchanged gunfire with a number of suspected militants.
Metro TV in Indonesia reported that police arrested two suspected militants in a nearby town earlier on Friday who gave them information that led them to the house.
A source at Indonesia's anti-terrorism unit Detachment 88 told Reuters the raid on the remote house in rice fields had started at about 5 pm
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 7, 2009
John Brennan, a former career CIA officer who worked closely with the Bush administration, lambasted the policies of President George W Bush and made the case for a broader approach to fighting Islamic extremism.
Mr Bush's policies, he said in a speech in Washington, had run counter to American values, undermined the security and resulted in a "global war" mindset that served to "validate al-Qaida's twisted world-view".
All this, he insisted, would c
Source: BBC
August 7, 2009
The meeting at his home in Johannesburg came on the second leg of her tour of Africa.
Mrs Clinton hailed Mr Mandela for the personal discipline he showed when he fought South Africa's apartheid system.
She was shown handwritten copies of Mr Mandela's letters from his time as a political prisoner.
Mrs Clinton was also shown his membership card of the Methodist Church, a denomination to which she also belongs.
Referring to these documents, sh
Source: BBC
August 7, 2009
Torquay Museum staff identified the arm bone as they documented animal remains discovered in Kents Cavern in Torquay.
The bone's marks are thought to have been made by stone tools and could indicate a ritual - or that the victim was devoured by other people.
The caves are the oldest Scheduled Ancient Monument in Britain.
The bone was first unearthed in 1866 by archaeologist William Pengelly, who spent 15 years excavating the cavern.
It was
Source: BBC
August 7, 2009
Midnight bonfires were lit in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, and other towns. A minute's silence was held and church bells rung to remember the dead.
A march and candlelight ceremony in South Ossetia are also planned.
Russia's president said the decision to go to war "was probably the hardest thing, but eventually we did it right".
Some 30,000 people remain displaced because of the conflict, according to Amnesty International.
Source: BBC
August 7, 2009
Fascinating stuff has just been released to my colleagues at the World Service, revealing the Treasury's assessments of what the war in Iraq might cost.
Documents prepared for Gordon Brown in the run-up to the 2003 Budget - and obtained by the BBC through freedom of information - say that the "best estimate" of the combat cost of the war is £3.1bn.
But that same document goes on to state clearly that the total "potential military costs" might be mu
Source: Salon.com
August 7, 2009
Ever since the first Europeans came to North America, only to discover the puzzling fact that other people were already living here, the question of how to understand the Native American past has been both difficult and politically charged. For many years, American Indian life was viewed through a scrim of interconnected bigotry and romance, which simultaneously served to idealize the pre-contact societies of the Americas and to justify their destruction. Pre-Columbian life might be understood a
Source: The Huffington Post
August 6, 2009
Sonia Sotomayor won confirmation Thursday as the nation's first Hispanic Supreme Court justice, a history-making Senate vote that capped a summer-long debate heavy with ethnic politics and hints of high court fights to come.
The third woman in court history, she'll be sworn in Saturday as the 111th justice and the first nominated by a Democrat in 15 years.
Source: MSNBC
August 6, 2009
Britain's notorious "Great Train Robber" was released from his prison sentence Thursday as the nearly 80-year-old lay close to death in a hospital bed.
Britain's Justice Secretary Jack Straw said he decided to release Ronnie Biggs on compassionate grounds, after he fell seriously ill this week in his cell at Norwich Prison, 118 miles northeast of London.
The prison officers watching him at the Norwich and Norfolk Hospital will remain overnight, and leave tomor
Source: The New Republic
August 5, 2009
Quiet sobs echo through the atrium of the Al-Rifai Mosque in Cairo, where rows of seated mourners are surrounded by wreathes of white flowers. Women dab their heavily made-up eyes, while men stare solemnly ahead.
As the streets of Tehran demand freedom, a different group of Iranians gathered in Cairo last week to commemorate the 29th anniversary of the death of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Iranian monarch deposed by the 1979 Islamic revolution. The Shah was granted refuge in Egyp
Source: NPR
August 4, 2009
Seeing former president Bill Clinton in North Korea today on a mission to win the release of two journalists and perhaps raise other issues of concern in U.S.-North Korean relations immediately brings to mind a question:
Has any former president taken on such a job, presumably with the blessing of the current administration?
I called presidential historian Stephen Hess at the Brookings Institution to talk about the historical precedent. Hess basically said nothing quite
Source: The Washington Times
August 6, 2009
The top U.S. uniformed military officer Wednesday offered a bleak assessment of the war in Afghanistan, saying that years of neglect before the Obama administration had starved the U.S.-led effort of funds and diplomatic heft - a condition he called "a culture of poverty."
Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told editors and reporters at The Washington Times that nearly eight years after the war began, the U.S. military is still digging its way "o
