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: BBC
July 31, 2009
Worshippers at a 13th Century rural church are preparing to gather outside it for its final service.
The small congregation at St Elidyrs in the parish of Crunwere in Pembrokeshire will say goodbye on Sunday to a building deemed unsafe two years ago.
The church has been surrounded by orange tape and signs warning people not to enter since it was declared structurally unsafe in the summer of 2007.
The graveyard and its grounds have and will remain open for
Source: foxnews
July 31, 2009
Police are investigating the suspicious death of an 89-year-old Holocaust survivor, who was found in his Manhattan luxury apartment with his arms tied behind his back.
Detectives say the building superintendent found the body of Guido Felix Brinkman Thursday night in bed in his Upper East Side building. He had suffered a head injury and was lying face-down under a sheet.
Someone called the superintendent because Brinkman had not been heard from in a while and he lived a
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 31, 2009
Today his descendants are rickshaw pullers and domestic servants in Calcutta, shunned by India's remaining royal families and humiliated by officials of a trust established to provide for their welfare.
But more than 200 years after Tipu Sultan was finally overpowered and killed by East India Company forces, mainly led by Scots officers, in the Fourth Mysore War at Seringapatam, his impoverished descendants are to have their royal status restored.
They are being rehabil
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 30, 2009
Sir John Chilcot warned that his team would "not shy away from making criticism" if they uncovered mistakes.
Launching the long-awaited inquiry on Thursday, Sir John said the former prime minister, who sent British forces into the conflict alongside the US, would be among witnesses called; and he also suggested the current premier, Gordon Brown, would be on the list.
He repeated his insistence that, "wherever possible", evidence would be heard in p
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 30, 2009
A full military service was held for Mr Allingham, who died in his sleep aged 113 on July 18 at St Dunstan's care home for blind ex-service personnel in Ovingdean, near Brighton, East Sussex.
Many of his relatives travelled from the United States to join royal, political and military dignitaries to honour Mr Allingham, the last founder member of the RAF and the final survivor of the Battle of Jutland.
Guests included Veterans' Minister Kevan Jones, incoming Chief of A
Source: Deutsche Welle
July 31, 2009
ETA, founded by nationalist students inspired by Marxist-Leninist teachings during the reign of right-wing dictator Francisco Franco, has campaigned for five decades for an independent Basque homeland encompassing parts of northern Spain and southwest France.
The militant group, which is listed as a terrorist organization by the European Union and the United States, has advocated armed struggle since its separatist campaign took a violent turn in 1968. Since then it has been blamed
Source: NYT blog: The Caucus
July 30, 2009
New York Times reporters Helene Cooper, Peter Baker and Jeff Zeleny are live-blogging the so-called beer summit of President Obama, Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and the officer who arrested him
Source: Inside Higher Ed
July 30, 2009
Google's ambitious book digitization project will democratize access to knowledge for members of minority and other underrepresented groups, said scholars and activists gathered at the Howard University School of Law on Wednesday.
Here at the historically black university, panel members applauded Google's plan to scan and index 10 million books for the Web. Among those who will benefit are African Americans and Latinos who attend inner-city schools and lack a quality education, said
Source: AP
July 29, 2009
President Dwight D. Eisenhower grappled with topics like relations with Iran and stability in Iraq during an era fraught with delicate policy challenges, newly declassified documents show.
"What's ironic is that the issues that Eisenhower was dealing with 50 or so years ago are the issues that the Obama administration is dealing with today," Eisenhower Presidential Library director Karl Weissenbach said Wednesday.
"The records show the U.S. has long been
Source: Time
July 30, 2009
It has been 44 years since an American President has succeeded at any new social policy nearly as ambitious as what Obama is trying to do. Yet Obama wondered whether there might be some lessons for him in that earlier President's achievement. So a couple of weeks ago, his health czar, Nancy-Ann DeParle, delivered to him a memo outlining how Lyndon B. Johnson got Medicare and Medicaid passed in 1965.
Obama was struck by the advantages LBJ had that he doesn't: Johnson was just coming
Source: Rasmussen Reports
July 30, 2009
In an effort to defuse a national controversy, President Obama is hosting a black Harvard professor and the policeman who arrested him at the White House today, but just 30% of U.S. voters give the president good or excellent marks for his handling of the situation over the past week.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 44% believe Obama has done a poor job dealing with the situation in recent days.
Despite the president’s damage control efforts
Source: http://worldmeets.us
July 17, 2009
Over the past three decades, U.S. authorities have deported 107 former
Nazi war criminals. The latest is Ivan [John] Demjanjuk. The Nazi
collaborator has been charged with being an accomplice in 27,900 cases
of murder. Too bad for him that he landed in Munich rather than Vienna.
The scandal began on April 3 with a phone call to the office of social
assistance in the Austrian province of Vorarlberg. Someone inquired
about welfare for a man by the name of Josias Kumpf who had just
re
Source: ABC
July 27, 2009
It has been 72 years since famed aviator Amelia Earhart and navigator
Fred Noonan disappeared while attempting to fly around the world. But
the mystery remains unsolved: Nobody knows exactly what happened to
Earhart or her plane.
Now researchers at the International Group for Historic Aircraft
Recovery, or Tighar, say they are on the verge of recovering DNA
evidence that would demonstrate Earhart had been stranded on
Nikumaroro Island (formerly known as Gardner Island) before finall
Source: The Times (UK)
July 29, 2009
One of the great political mysteries — what was said by President Nixon during a suspicious 18-minute gap on the Watergate tapes — could soon be solved thanks to a keen-eyed amateur sleuth and modern crime-fighting technology.
The missing section of a 79-minute conversation between Nixon and his Chief of Staff, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, was erased. It had been recorded during a meeting on June 20, 1972, three days after operatives connected to the White House broke into the headquarters
Source: BBC
July 30, 2009
A team of radiographers at a London university have been preoccupied with a patient somewhat older than most - 2,500-year old Egyptian mummy Tahemaa.
Specialists at City University in Islington, north London, used a CT scanner to learn more about how she died without damaging the corpse.
They discovered that, unusually, the brain had been left inside the mummy - suggesting an apprentice embalmed her.
Researchers discovered her thigh bone was broken after
Source: BBC
July 30, 2009
British World War I veteran Henry Allingham, until recently the world's oldest man, was buried on Thursday. The headlines about the day he was born, 113 years ago, give a fascinating insight into life in the late 19th Century.
On the day Henry Allingham's death was announced, swine flu, Moon landings and Michael Jackson were among the topics that ranked highly among readers of the BBC News website. They are subjects which could hardly have been imagined 113 years earlier, when Henry
Source: Independent (UK)
July 30, 2009
Germany's far-right National Democratic party (NPD) has triggered outrage with plans for a Third Reich-style "training centre" in a small village.
The mastermind of the scheme is Jürgen Rieger, a lawyer and deputy leader of the anti-immigrant, anti-EU party that is steeped in pride for Adolf Hitler and the "achievements" of the Nazi regime. The idea is for the old Hotel Gerhus at Fassberg, near Hanover, to become a place of pilgrimage for NPD devotees, where th
Source: Press Release
July 30, 2009
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
announced today the update of its Google Earth initiative, Crisis in Darfur,
with U.S. Department of State data that shed new light on the extent of the
genocide in Darfur.
The new data show that more than 3300 villages have been damaged or
destroyed in the Darfur region of Sudan, primarily between 2003 – 2005. This
is more than twice the number that were identified in previous U.S.
government assessments, and strengthens the evidenc
Source: Newsweek
July 29, 2009
History largely records the 1930s as a bleak chapter in American life. But some famous survivors fondly recall a time of resourcefulness, altruism, and even joy.
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Early in Studs Terkel's Hard Times, before the tales of Depression-era woe get rolling, we hear from a startling young man. Jerome Zerbe, a celebrity photographer for Parade magazine, not only remained stylish during the downturn, he remembered it fondly. "The Thirties," he told Terkel, "was
