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: LAT
May 27, 2009
A public that wants to know everything about Barack Obama can thank Lisa Jack for a glimpse of what the future president was like when he was just another college freshman trying to cut a figure in this world -- with a partly unbuttoned Oxford shirt, a big Panama hat and puffs of cigarette smoke as his props of choice for projecting that coveted aura of post-adolescent confidence and cool.
Obama can thank Jack for keeping the roll of photographs she took of him in 1980 out of circul
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
May 27, 2009
President Obama's nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, has a relatively thin record on cases involving higher education. But in two decisions that could have implications for higher education, she has sided with members of minority groups—in one case supporting a government hiring policy that would benefit African-Americans, and in the other supporting an individual student who challenged a grading policy as discriminatory.
In a third case, Judge Sotomayor supported
Source: NY Daily News
May 27, 2009
George Bush has downsized - big time! Where once he enjoyed 34 bathrooms, he's now down to a mere 4 1/2. Where once he sauntered through a 132-room estate, he now roams this much smaller home.
Click through to look inside the Bush's new home in Dallas - it's certainly not the White House, that's for sure!
Source: Independent
May 23, 2009
At first glance, there may seem to be nothing unusual about this photograph, rescued from a rubbish skip in northern France.
Look, though, at the British soldier on the left. He is black: a very rare example of an image of a black"Tommy" from the First World War.
The photograph is one of almost 400 snaps of British soldiers on the eve of, and during, the Battle of the Somme in 1916. The trove has been rescued from oblivion by two French men. Many of the images are published in toda
Source: NYT
May 26, 2009
She was “a child with dreams,” as she once said, the little girl who learned at 8 that she had diabetes, who lost her father when she was 9, who devoured Nancy Drew books and spent Saturday nights playing bingo, marking the cards with chickpeas, in the squat red brick housing projects of the East Bronx.
She was the history major and Puerto Rican student activist at Princeton who spent her first year at that bastion of the Ivy League “too intimidated to ask questions.” She was the tough-minde
Source: NYT Magazine
May 31, 2009
So far, the former president has avoided causing trouble for the new one. Before Hillary Clinton was picked for secretary of state, some Obama advisers were wary of bringing a freelancing Bill Clinton inside the tent. But to their surprise, Clinton has done nothing to complicate Obama’s life so far. As of early May, Clinton had never been mentioned during the daily White House senior staff meetings as an issue to be dealt with, according to two officials who attend. By contrast, one of them said
Source: NYT
May 20, 2009
Barack Obama has been president only four months, but already his name is cropping up on schools, other buildings and avenues across the country. The most recent example is in St. Paul, where the school board voted Tuesday night to change the name of Webster Magnet Elementary, which had honored Daniel Webster, to Barack and Michelle Obama Service Learning Elementary....
“We have had buildings named after living individuals, but as a rule, they are no longer holding office,” said Ren
Source: Fox News
May 27, 2009
A flag fight is brewing in southern Florida.
Members of the Miami-Dade branch of the NAACP want the Confederate flag banned from the Homestead-Miami Motor Speedway, and they will meet Thursday to decide whether to boycott a NASCAR race slated there for November.
Debra Toomer, the branch's chairwoman of press and publicity, said a planning session has been scheduled to decide on a course of action regarding the display of the flag at the Nov. 20-22 event, as well as its
Source: AP
May 27, 2009
A French anti-racism group has filed a legal complaint against the Louvre Museum, claiming that a measure offering free admission to European young people is discriminatory.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced a measure earlier this year offering European Union citizens aged 26 and under free admission to national museums. The Louvre is among several museums that chose to apply the measure.
The group SOS Racisme filed a legal complaint viewed Wednesday by The Ass
Source: The Indianapolis Star
May 25, 2009
Bones found in the basement of an Albany barbershop belong to three prehistoric American Indians, Delaware County Coroner Jim Clevenger said.
While officials have identified whom the bones belonged to, it remains a mystery how the bones ended up in the basement of a building in downtown Albany, about 70 miles northeast of Indianapolis, where Gary Engelbrecht runs Fading Tradition barbershop.
The building housed a bank until 1965 and has been an insurance office, a consi
Source: Cuba Headlines
May 26, 2009
A bronze cannon, the first of its type discovered in the oceans surrounding Cuba, was found by fishermen off the coast of Trinidad, Sancti Spiritus
According to the local Radio Trinidad station, a group of lobster fishermen working in waters close to the Zaza Afuera Cay found the cannon. The same fishermen discovered the remains of a colonial ship a year earlier in the same location.
Leonel Delgado Ceballos said that the cannon comes from a ship that was part of the Re
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 26, 2009
The world might never have heard of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the reporters who broke the story of Watergate, if a couple of rival journalists had followed up their tip.
Robert Smith and Robert Phelps, who were both working for the New York Times in 1972, have belatedly admitted that they were steered towards the political scandal first but never did anything about it.
Instead, Woodward and Bernstein of the Washington Post famously broke the story with help from
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 27, 2009
Church leaders turned the Virgin Mary from being a "serious, official, imperial" figure into a normal "mum" to widen Christianity's appeal, according to a leading medieval historian.
Speaking at the Hay Festival in Wales, Mary Rubin, the author of Mother of God – A History of the Virgin Mary, said the transformation took place in the 11th and 12th century, with images of her knitting and cooking.
By comparison she was portrayed in the early church a
Source: BBC
May 26, 2009
Forensic experts investigating a newly-discovered mass grave in Bosnia say they have found 12 bodies thought to be of victims of the Srebrenica massacre.
They say more bodies are expected to be found in the grave near the eastern town of Vlasenica in the coming days.
About 70 mass graves around Srebrenica have been found since the Bosnian war, and more than 5,000 victims identified.
Last week, a team from the Institute for Missing People exhumed 10 bodie
Source: AP
May 27, 2009
Since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union left Russia's military underfunded and disorganized, the arsenal in Shchuchye, about 1,000 miles east of Moscow, has been a top security concern. After years of delays and disputes, a vast facility to destroy the weapons is to formally open there on Friday.
The plant, the size of a small town, was built with a U.S. contribution of more than $1 billion and is seen as a milestone in cooperation on disarmament between Washington and Moscow.
Source: AP
May 27, 2009
Buckingham Palace says Queen Elizabeth II did not receive an invitation to attend ceremonies next week marking the 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, U.S. President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown are among leaders who will attend.
But Sarkozy's office said on Wednesday that the queen was welcome. A French government spokesman says it is up to Britain to decide who attends.
Source: NYT
May 26, 2009
The oldest known skeleton showing signs of leprosy has been found inIndia and may help solve the puzzle of where the disease originated.
The skeleton, about 4,000 years old, was found at the site of Balathal, near Udaipur in northwestern India. Historians have long considered the Indian subcontinent to be the source of the leprosy that was first reported in Europe in the fourth century B.C., shortly after the armies of Alexander the Great returned from India.
The skelet
Source: NYT
May 26, 2009
On a sweltering day two summers ago, a University of Chicago scholar, Jacqueline Goldsby, began to dig through a maze of cardboard boxes crammed to the ceiling in a loft on Ogden Avenue. As she peeked inside the boxes, bulging with hidden remnants from The Chicago Defender, the famed black newspaper, she gasped.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ There were photos of Booker T. Washington playing with his grandchildren, there were letters from Harry Truman,” said Dr. Goldsby, 47. “Every time
Source: NYT
May 26, 2009
It was called “the shot that changed the republic.”
The killing in 1967 of an unarmed demonstrator by a police officer in West Berlin set off a left-wing protest movement and put conservative West Germany on course to evolve into the progressive country it has become today.
Now a discovery in the archives of the East German secret police, known as the Stasi, has upended Germany’s perception of its postwar history. The killer, Karl-Heinz Kurras, though working for the W
Source: New York Times
May 27, 2009
CHICAGO — On a sweltering day two summers ago, a University of Chicago scholar, Jacqueline Goldsby, began to dig through a maze of cardboard boxes crammed to the ceiling in a loft on Ogden Avenue. As she peeked inside the boxes, bulging with hidden remnants from The Chicago Defender, the famed black newspaper, she gasped.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ There were photos of Booker T. Washington playing with his grandchildren, there were letters from Harry Truman,” said Dr. Goldsby, 47. “E
