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: AP
May 29, 2009
A small-town newspaper is apologizing for running a classified advertisement calling for the assassination of President Barack Obama.
Warren Times Observer Publisher John Elchert says the ad appeared Thursday. It read, "May Obama follow in the steps of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy!" The four presidents were all assassinated.
Elchert tells The Associated Press that the newspaper's advertising staff didn't make the historical connection.
Source: CNN
May 29, 2009
A chain link fence now stands between Tim Lambert's land and the impact site of United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed here on September 11, 2001. The property has been in Lambert's family for almost 80 years.
"My grandfather purchased about 200 acres in the 1930s, and he would cut timber and sell the timber off, and he would build cabins as well," Lambert says. "That's how he got the family through the Depression."
Lambert says he had no plans fo
Source: CNN
May 29, 2009
It was a journey that took more than a hundred years.
Missing for decades, the remains of Cpl. Isaiah Mays, a Buffalo Soldier and Medal of Honor recipient, were laid to rest Friday at Arlington National Cemetery.
Paying respects were African-American veterans, U.S. Army soldiers and those who rode for days as part of a motorcycle escort -- members of the Missing in America Project, who traveled from as far away as California and Arizona at their own expense to make sur
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 29, 2009
Barack Obama faced unprecedented public criticism from a member of his own family when his great uncle said he was only visiting a concentration camp next week for 'political reasons'.
Charles Payne, 84, was among the American infantrymen who liberated Ohrdruf, a subdivision of the Buchenwald camp, in April 1945.
Mr Obama will next week attend a memorial ceremony at the former camp with Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, before heading to Normandy to commemorate the
Source: LAT
May 23, 2009
Archaeologists preparing for the expansion of a Tucson wastewater treatment facility have discovered the remains of the earliest known irrigation system in the Southwest, a farming community that dates to at least 1200 BC.
That predates the well-known and much more sophisticated Hohokam tribe's canal system, which crisscrossed what is now Phoenix, by 1,200 years. The find suggests that the people who inhabited the region began with relatively simple irrigation systems and built up t
Source: AP
May 28, 2009
A mass extinction some 260 million years ago may have been caused by volcanic eruptions in what is now China, new research suggests.
The so-called Guadalupian Mass Extinction, devastating marine life around the world, was preceded by massive eruptions in the Emeishan geological province of Southwest China, researchers led by Paul Wignall of Britain's University of Leeds report in Friday's edition of the journal Science.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 29, 2009
Barack Obama has reassured Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president,
of Washington's support for Palestinian statehood during his first
visit to the White House.
Following their Oval Office talks, Mr Obama said he was" confident" of
moving the Middle East peace process forward and said freezing the
expansion of settlements was now a public priority for the US.
Mr Obama said that"time is of the essence" in securing Arab Israeli
peace and that it is"in US interests to do so quic
Source: CNN
May 29, 2009
Former President George W. Bush on Thursday repeated Dick Cheney's assertion that the administration's enhanced interrogation program, which included controversial techniques such as waterboarding, was legal and garnered valuable information that prevented terrorist attacks.
Bush told a southwestern Michigan audience of nearly 2,500 -- the largest he has addressed in the United States since leaving the White House in January -- that, after the September 11 attacks, "I vowed to
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 29, 2009
Matthew Boulton and James Watt, leading figures of the Industrial Revolution, are to be the new faces of the Bank of England's redesigned £50 banknotes.
Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, made the announcement on Friday evening when he opened a new exhibition at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery: "Matthew Boulton: Selling what all the world desires".
Boulton and Watt formed a successful partnership in the 18th century, eventually helping t
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 28, 2009
The heir to a Tsarist-era aristocrat has launched a legal fight to reclaim a Van Gogh masterpiece that could decide the future of artwork seized by the Bolsheviks after the 1917 revolution.
Pierre Konowaloff, a naturalised Frenchman, claims that Van Gogh's Night Cafe, which has hung on the walls of Yale University for nearly 50 years, was confiscated from his great-grandfather Ivan Morozov on the orders of Lenin.
A court ruling in his favour would trigger a flood of si
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 29, 2009
George W Bush, the former US president, has spoken for the first time about the things he misses the most after leaving office.
Flying on Air Force One, eating meals prepared by the White House kitchen staff and drawing inspiration from his encounters with US military personnel were among his favourite things, he said.
The often-tearful meetings with relatives of fallen soldiers were "in some ways... very hard and in some ways, it was very uplifting," the he
Source: Sky News
May 29, 2009
They looked at the lush green hills and rice paddies along the Korean border through very different eyes.
Searching for landmarks that could bring them back to a war that ended 56 years ago.
For 20 US Army and Marine veterans of the Korean War, their return to the demilitarised zone was a painful visit.
They had fought hard in the hills around Panmunjeom in 1952/53. They had lost many friends and their memories were undimmed.
Source: Times (UK)
May 30, 2009
Outside China he is known simply as Tank Man. Inside the country he is not known at all. No trace is to be found of the young man armed only with shopping bags who 20 years ago blocked a column of tanks rolling through Beijing. His defiance became the defining image of the student demonstrations crushed by the People’s Liberation Army.
It was on the morning of June 5 that he appeared from nowhere. A line of 18 tanks began to pull out of Tiananmen Square and drove east along the Ave
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 29, 2009
Charles Payne, 84, was among the American infantrymen who liberated Ohrdruf, a subdivision of the Buchenwald camp, in April 1945.
Mr Obama will next week attend a memorial ceremony at the former camp with Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, before heading to Normandy to commemorate the 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings.
Asked if his great nephew was following in his footsteps, which the White House has suggested as a reason for the trip, Mr Payne told the German
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 29, 2009
Gordon Newton, 84, who parachuted into Normandy on D-Day, wrote invitations to the royal but received letters from Buckingham Palace last month that said "with regret" both the brothers were involved in flight training with the RAF and Army. The Earl and Countess of Wessex were said to be on a pre-arranged trip to Canada.
"I said that on behalf of the veterans of the 9th Bn the Parachute Regiment we would love to see them at our memorial service on Friday June 5th,&q
Source: Deutsche Welle
May 30, 2009
The proposals put forward by Germany’s liberal Free Democrats suggested that everyone who had held a seat in parliament from 1949 onwards should be subjected to what it called a ‘Stasi check’.
But the motion met with resounding resistance from across the political spectrum, with the vast majority of Christian Democrats, Christian Social Union, Social Democrats and Left Party MPs voting against it. The Green Party abstained from the ballot altogether.
The FDP move was s
Source: BBC
May 30, 2009
After observing a two minutes' silence, he was taken on a tour of the site before meeting firefighters who were involved in the rescue attempt.
He will also visit a memorial to the 67 Britons who died in the 2001 attacks.
During his two-day trip, the prince will meet wounded Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans at a medical centre.
Source: BBC
May 29, 2009
Underneath the streets of Belfast lies a hidden history which archaeologists have been exploring for years.
However, until now, locals and visitors have not had the chance to actively explore the history that lies beneath them.
Since 1983, more than 50 excavations have taken place all over the city, in order to discover information about Belfast's 800 years of history.
Foundations of 17th Century red brick tenements were uncovered in a dig in front of Cot
Source: BBC
May 29, 2009
An unidentified corpse found in the basement of a Berlin hospital could be that of murdered revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, say German authorities.
A pathologist at Berlin's Charite hospital told Der Spiegel magazine the headless corpse bore "striking similarities" to the left-wing icon.
Ms Luxemburg was murdered by right-wing paramilitaries in 1919 at the age of 47 and thrown in an icy canal. Months later, a body thought to hav
Source: Foxnews
May 29, 2009
An Iraqi-born 16-year-old reportedly has cracked a math puzzle that has gone unsolved for over 300 years.
Mohamed Altoumaimi, who immigrated to Sweden six years ago, took only four months to find a formula that explains a sequence of calculations known as the Bernoulli numbers, a code that had stumped some of the best experts in the field, Agence France-Presse reported.
Altoumaimi said after his high school teachers were skeptical about his work he contacted professors
