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: HNN Staff
July 23, 2009
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Draft Content Standards Elicit Mixed Reviews
Core standards proposed for American schools are under attack by critics for once again divorcing content from form.
“At first glance, these language standards are, despite the brave descriptors, very similar to the dysfunctional state standards already in place,”
Source: Time
July 24, 2009
With the U.S. trillions of dollars in the hole, 70 cents an hour sounds like chump change. But it's a big boost for the millions of workers who earn that much extra as of July 24. The increase is the third and final uptick in a hike that has since 2007 boosted the federal minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25. In total, the extra $2 and change translates into a yearly raise of some $4,400 for a full-time minimum-wage worker, nosing his or her family of four above the poverty line.
The m
Source: LAT
July 24, 2009
U.S. military officials in Afghanistan have halted the practice of releasing the number of militants killed in fighting with American-led forces as part of an overall strategy shift that emphasizes concern for the local civilian population's well-being rather than hunting insurgent groups.
The decision has triggered a quiet but fierce debate among military officers comparing the current situation with the U.S. experience in Vietnam, when military officials exaggerated body counts an
Source: BBC
July 23, 2009
The Jewish Community Security Trust, which monitors anti-Semitism, says it recorded 609 incidents between January and June - up from 276 last year.
Most incidents were abusive behaviour, but there were also 77 violent acts.
The trust said the rise had been driven by anger over Israel's military campaign against Hamas in Gaza.
That conflict, between December 2008 and January 2009, was followed by an almost immediate rise in anti-Semitic incidents in the U
Source: AP
July 20, 2009
A U.N. war crimes court convicted two Bosnian Serb cousins Monday for a 1992 killing spree that included locking scores of Muslims in two houses and burning them alive.
Yugoslav war crimes tribunal judge Patrick Robinson said burning at least 119 Muslims to death in the eastern Bosnian town of Visegrad "exemplified the worst acts of inhumanity that one person may inflict on others."
Source: Huffington Post
July 23, 2009
Oliver Stone at the Huffington Post:
The murder of President Kennedy was a seminal event for me and for millions of Americans. It changed the course of history. It was a crushing blow to our country and to millions of people around the world. It put an abrupt end to a period of a misunderstood idealism, akin to the spirit of 1989 when the Soviet bloc to began to thaw and 2008, when our new American President was fairly elected.
Today, more than 45 years lat
Source: Guardian blog
July 23, 2009
HNN Hot Topics: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Barack Obama last night showed a deft touch, but also reached a trenchant conclusion when he was asked about the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, a black Harvard professor, at his own home over the weekend.
First Obama joked about what would happen if he was found breaking into the White House.
"Here, I'd get shot," Obama quipped before calling
Source: NYT
July 23, 2009
HNN Hot Topics: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Ralph Medley, a retired professor of philosophy and English who is black, remembers the day he was arrested on his own property, a rental building here in Hyde Park where he was doing some repair work for tenants.
A concerned neighbor had called the police to report a suspicious character. And that was not the first time Mr. Medley said he had been wrongly appreh
Source: Times (UK)
July 24, 2009
Fragments of human bone believed to be the remains of victims of the London Blitz have been discovered by children near a playground in Regent’s Park.
The discovery, almost 70 years after German Luftwaffe bombs destroyed large tracts of the capital, suggests that victims’ remains may still lie beneath London’s open spaces, buried along with the rubble from their devastated homes.
Police were called to Regent’s Park when children digging in the soil near the Gloucester
Source: BBC
July 24, 2009
Soviet bullets were found with the remains at Glubokoye, a village which had been in Poland but fell into Soviet hands in 1939.
A youth group discovered the remains earlier this week, reports say.
Local historians said the victims had most probably been shot by the NKVD secret police between 1939 and 1941.
Source: Daily Tar Heel
July 23, 2009
The Preservation Society of Chapel Hill and other town groups are starting a project to identify grave sites in the black section of the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery.
The research will include two different studies that can show where grave sites are in the black section of the cemetery, in hopes of later discovering the exact identities of people who are buried there.
Once the tests have been completed, it is possible that up to 100 black people who worked at the Universit
Source: Reuters
July 22, 2009
US treasure hunting firm Odyssey filed a challenge Wednesday to a court ruling ordering that it surrender to Spain treasure recovered from a 19th century Spanish shipwreck.
The discovery of the sunken treasure, from a ship code-named "Black Swan," was announced in 2007.
Source: http://www.icelandreview.com
July 23, 2009
Archeological research undertaken earlier this summer in Keldudalur in Skagafjördur has brought to light an unusually well-preserved cowshed from the 10th century; the first one to be unearthed in Northern Iceland, archeologist Ragnheidur Traustadóttir told mbl.is.
Remains from man-made structures from the 11th and the 12th century were also discovered.
Source: BBC
July 22, 2009
The US town of Hanford, in Washington state, is opening up its nuclear secrets to tourists.
"I'm in love with B reactor," says historian Michelle Gerber to a bus-load of American tourists.
It is 8am on a Saturday morning and they are the lucky ones.
Around 20,000 people applied for this exclusive tour run by the US Department of Energy.
Source: Deutsche Welle
July 22, 2009
The fresh preliminary hearings were ordered after Russia's supreme court annulled a Moscow district military court acquittal handed to three men who had been put on trial over Politkovskaya's murder.
Rights groups and the slain journalist's family have condemned the retrial, instead calling for an entirely new investigation into the journalist's murder.
The Politkovskaya family lawyer, Anna Stavitskaya, has said she would demand in the upcoming preliminary hearings that
Source: Independent (UK)
July 23, 2009
Moscow's skyline and architectural heritage are on the verge of being destroyed forever because of low-quality renovations and thoughtless demolition, according to a report released yesterday by a group of Russian and international activists.
"There is no other capital city in peacetime Europe that is being subjected to such devastation for the sake of earning a fast megabuck," the Moscow Architecture Preservation Society stated in its report. The authors said that hundr
Source: History Today (UK)
July 21, 2009
A searchable database containing 250,000 service records of soldiers who saw active duty in the latter phases of the Hundred Years War was published online yesterday, July 20th. The database is part of a research project about soldiers in English royal armies between 1369 and 1453 led by Dr Adrian Bell at the ICMA (International Capital Market Association), Henley Business School, University of Reading, and Professor Anne Curry from the University of Southampton. The project is funded by the Art
Source: Independent (UK)
July 23, 2009
Avery sad, isolated old man set down to write an account of his life, 25 years ago, hoping that he might explain the terrible mistake that had hung over the whole of his adult life.
Yesterday the public got its first view of the last testimony of Anthony Blunt, art historian and Soviet spy, which had been kept under a lock and key in the British Library since he died, subject to a 25-year rule banning anyone from reading them. The quarter century is now up and anyone curious enough
Source: Independent (UK)
July 23, 2009
The man who planted the Brighton hotel bomb has been invited back to the seaside town to attend a commemoration marking the upcoming 25th anniversary of the IRA's most deadly attack on mainland Britain, The Independent has learnt.
Patrick Magee's 30lb bomb killed five people during the Conservative Party conference in October 1984 and nearly succeeded in assassinating the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
An official commemoration marking the bombing is being plan
Source: Time
July 23, 2009
Hours before they were to leave office after eight troubled years, George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney had one final and painful piece of business to conclude. For over a month Cheney had been pleading, cajoling, even pestering Bush to pardon the Vice President's former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby. Libby had been convicted nearly two years earlier of obstructing an investigation into the leak of a covert CIA officer's identity by senior White House officials. The Libby pardon, aide
