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: McClatchy
August 3, 2009
The false allegation that President Barack Obama was born in another country is more than a fact-free smear.
Marked by accusations and backstabbing, it's the story of how a small but intense movement called"birthers" rose from a handful of people prone to seeing conspiracies, aided by the Internet, magnified without evidence by eager radio and cable TV hosts, and eventually ratified by a small group of Republican politicians working to keep the story alive on the floors of Congress and th
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 3, 2009
Almost 400 British servicemen killed by guerillas in Cyprus in the 1950s are finally to be honoured after Telegraph readers helped raise £80,000 to build a memorial to them.
A monument bearing the names of all 371 soldiers, sailors and airmen killed during four years of bloodshed will be unveiled on Remembrance Day in a military cemetery on the island.
The vast majority of those who died at the hands of Greek-Cypriot terrorists were young men carrying out National Ser
August 3, 2009
A Bronx woman has been charged with murder and robbery in the death of an 89-year-old Nazi concentration camp survivor, and police said a man is still being sought in connection with the death.
Angela Murray, 30, was arrested Saturday, according to the Manhattan district attorney's office, and is accused of strangling Guido Felix Brinkmann on Thursday in his Upper East Side apartment
Brinkmann, a native of Latvia, was a Holocaust survivor who escaped death for a year wh
Source: Independent (UK)
August 3, 2009
During the first fortnight of August as the Tokyo summer gets into its sticky stride, its citizens gear up for a string of painful Second World War anniversaries, climaxing on the 15th – the date the nation surrendered.
Fresh controversy invariably flares over how to remember the conflict: as a shameful stain, or a futile but honourable attempt to resist foreign aggressors.
The true spiritual home of revisionist debate is Yasukuni, a Shinto temple in the heart of Toky
Source: Observer (UK)
August 2, 2009
For a few weeks only, visitors to Westminster Abbey can gaze on the second-last resting place of Oliver Cromwell, the grave which the Lord Protector occupied for less than three years before being dug up, ritually executed, decapitated, and buried again in quicklime at the foot of the gallows.
The stone slabs engraved in the 19th century with the name of Cromwell and his relatives are usually covered by a blue carpet bearing the RAF crest. Recently moths were discovered in the build
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 3, 2009
A monument bearing the names of all 371 soldiers, sailors and airmen killed during four years of bloodshed will be unveiled on Remembrance Day in a military cemetery on the island.
The vast majority of those who died at the hands of Greek-Cypriot terrorists were young men carrying out National Service, some of the last British conscripts to lose their lives in service of their country, but their sacrifice had remained largely unrecognised for 50 years.
The campaign fo
Source: BBC
August 3, 2009
Karlheinz Schreiber, 75, is wanted for tax evasion, bribery and fraud in Germany, and has been fighting extradition for nearly 10 years.
He figured in a fund-raising scandal involving ex-Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
Mr Schreiber, who denies wrongdoing, arrived in Germany early on Monday after losing his extradition battle.
Source: The Times (UK)
August 2, 2009
On March 2, 1882, Roderick Maclean brandished a pistol outside Windsor railway station and attempted to shoot Queen Victoria.
Things did not go according to plan. The monarch lived and Maclean was charged with high treason, but “acquitted on the grounds of insanity”. Ordered “to be kept in strict custody and gaol until Her Majesty’s pleasure shall be known”, he spent the rest of his life in Broadmoor Hospital.
His case is one of 1.4 million criminal trials from the 18
Source: Foxnews
August 2, 2009
A well-preserved 4,500-year-old skeleton of a man was found on a beach south of Rome, Italian police told Reuters.
The man is believed to be a warrior killed by an arrow in the chest, Reuters reported.
Six small vases were also found buried near the man.
The skeleton was discovered during a routine air patrol of areas of archaeological interest.
Source: NYT
August 1, 2009
With bipartisan health care negotiations teetering, Democrats are talking reluctantly — and very, very quietly — about exploiting a procedural loophole they planted in this year’s budget to skirt Republican filibusters against a health care overhaul.
They are talking reluctantly because using the tactic, officially known as reconciliation, would present a variety of serious procedural and substantive obstacles that could result in a piecemeal health bill. And they are whispering bec
Source: NYT
August 2, 2009
The girls have toured the Eiffel Tower and ogled the stone majesties of the Pantheon. They have swooned over the Jonas Brothers, giggled over wax likenesses of their parents and romped with friends at Camp David, all in the span of two blissfully school-free months.
Welcome to Sasha and Malia Obama's fabulous summer vacation, a hodgepodge of foreign travel, concerts, birthday parties and just plain fun carefully organized by the president and first lady. (The first lady has dubbed i
Source: Media Matters (liberal watchdog website)
July 27, 2009
From the July 27 edition of Fox News' The Live Desk (hat tip to Twitter user StefanoScalia):
[HNN: Wikipedia map of the Middle East]
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 29, 2009
St Andrew's Church in South Warnborough in Hampshire, whose youngest member is eight months and whose oldest is 92, has won Country Life magazine Village Church for Village Life Award.
The church suffered poor lighting, cramped pews, cluttered space and had no facilities to enable the building to be used for more than regular Sunday worship. But after a call for help from the parochial church council it was transformed by the South Warnborough Gentlemen's Working Club which was set
Source: NYT
August 1, 2009
Seventy years have passed since members of the Thorsch family fled
German-occupied Czech lands in 1939. They left behind a lucrative oil
refinery business that was seized by the Nazis, nationalized after
World War II and then taken over by the Communist government.
Marie and Alfons Thorsch in the mid-1930s before fleeing to Canada.
Their granddaughter says Czech laws have stymied her attempts to get
compensation for an oil refinery the Nazis seized.
Marie Warburg — granddaught
Source: AP
August 2, 2009
Navy pilot Capt. Michael "Scott" Speicher was shot down over the Iraq desert on the first night of the Gulf War in 1991 and it was there he apparently was buried by Bedouins, hidden in the sand from the world's mightiest military all these years.
In a sorrowful resolution to the nearly two-decade old question about his fate, the Pentagon disclosed Sunday it had received new information last month from an Iraqi citizen that led Marines to recover bones and skeletal fragmen
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 2, 2009
At the height of the Blitz in 1940, thousands were huddled in the dimly lit tunnels of the London Underground, sheltering from the German bombs raining on the capital.
Exhausted, afraid and not knowing whether their houses would still be standing when they emerged from their refuge, the civilians' spirits were in need of a lift.
It came in the form of Sgt Walter Huntley, a soldier and ventriloquist, and his life-size dummy, Gunner Jimmy Turner, who ventured into the t
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 2, 2009
The Cuban president Raul Castro has warned the US and Europe he will not 'restore capitalism' and will never renounce the revolution.
Mr Castro said the Caribbean country's socialist political system was non-negotiable.
In a speech marking the end of the annual parliamentary session, which has been dominated by Cuba's grave economic crisis, he said he would be willing to "discuss everything" with foreign leaders except the island's political and social syste
Source: Foxnews
August 1, 2009
F.D.R. threw keggers and J.F.K. was a Heineken man, while Theodore Roosevelt didn't touch the stuff.
The most pressing question of the week was what brands of brew would be quaffed at the White House "beer summit," the presidential peer-mediation between the Harvard prof and the Cambridge cop. Some foodie followers were dismayed to hear that President Obama chose to drink Bud Light, which some dismiss as the very symbol of corporate, mass-produced, flavorless beer-like pro
Source: BBC
August 2, 2009
Two newly discovered pieces of piano music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart are to be performed in the Austrian city of his birth, Salzburg.
The pieces had long been in the archive of the International Mozarteum Foundation but only recently were they identified as compositions by Mozart.
The foundation has released very few details about the music.
It is to be played at a house where the composer lived from 1773-1780, which is now the Mozart's Residence museum.
Source: BBC
August 1, 2009
Rare Buddhist treasures, not seen for more than 70 years, have been unearthed in the Gobi Desert.
The historic artefacts were buried in the 1930s during Mongolia's Communist purge, when hundreds of monasteries were looted and destroyed.
The relics include statues, art work, manuscripts and personal belongings of a famous 19th Century Buddhist master.
A total of 64 crates of treasures were buried in the desert by a monk named Tudev, in an attempt to save t
