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: NYT
May 25, 2009
Within an hour after the bodies arrive in their flag-draped coffins at Dover Air Force Base, they go through a process that has never been used on the dead from any other war.
Since 2004, every service man and woman killed in Iraq or Afghanistan has been given a CT scan, and since 2001, when the fighting began in Afghanistan, all have had autopsies, performed by pathologists in the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System. In previous wars, autopsies on people killed in combat were unco
Source: NYT
May 26, 2009
Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s judicial opinions are marked by diligence, depth and unflashy competence. If they are not always a pleasure to read, they are usually models of modern judicial craftsmanship, which prizes careful attention to the facts in the record and a methodical application of layers of legal principles.
Judge Sotomayor has issued no major decisions concerning abortion, the death penalty, gay rights or national security. In cases involving criminal defendants, employment
Source: Slate
May 26, 2009
North Korea conducted a nuclear test on Monday, the second such test in less than three years. In response to the incident, a senior administration official told the New York Times "that the United States would never grant full diplomatic recognition to North Korea, or sign a peace treaty formally ending the Korean War, unless its nuclear capability is dismantled." Wait, we're still at war with North Korea?
Sort of. The 1953 Korean War Armistice Agreement, signed by the Un
Source: National Security Archive
May 26, 2009
Today the National Security Archive publishes its fourth installment of the diary of Anatoly Chernyaev, the man who was behind some of the most momentous transformations in the Soviet foreign policy in the end of the 1980s in his role as Mikhail Gorbachev main foreign policy aide. In addition to his contributions to perestroika and new thinking, Anatoly Sergeevich was and remains a paragon of openness and transparency providing his diaries and notes to historians who are trying to understand t
Source: Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog, US News
May 26, 2009
It's been widely reported that Judge Sonia Sotomayor would be the first Hispanic on the Supreme Court, though a few people (including some TV commentators) have wondered whether Justice Benjamin Cardozo (on the court from 1932-1938) should not in fact be counted as such.The answer seems to be that Sotomayor would in fact be the first Hispanic, but it also points up the problem inherent in
Source: Time Magazine
May 26, 2009
GM stood atop the Fortune 500 nine years ago; it now stands on the brink of bankruptcy court as sales decline and cash becomes scarce. Moreover, GM bondholders are intensely unhappy with the terms they were offered as part of a plan to avoid bankruptcy, so even though the United Auto Workers struck a deal with management on Thursday, bankruptcy still looms as the probable course.
How did such a once great company become so desperate? Perhaps the better question is, how did GM's well
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
May 29, 2009
Many of the 1989 movement's most famous leaders fled, like Wu'er and Wang, to the West. Several enrolled at U.S. universities. A few continued to advocate for human rights from abroad. Others went into business. Wu'er now manages an investment fund in Taiwan. After earning an M.B.A. from Harvard University, Chai Ling, another student leader, started a Boston software company that provides free Web portals to universities in exchange for students' contact information, promoting its product with p
Source: NYT
May 26, 2009
President Obama announced on Tuesday that he will nominate the federal appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, choosing a daughter of Puerto Rican parents raised in a Bronx public housing project to become the nation’s first Hispanic justice.
Judge Sotomayor, who stood next to the president during the announcement, was described by Mr. Obama as “an inspiring woman who I am confident will make a great justice.”
The president said he had made his decision aft
Source: BBC
May 26, 2009
Divers say they have found the wreck of a vessel which may have been sent to relieve Bonnie Prince Charlie after his 1746 defeat at the battle of Culloden.
The team says artefacts recovered from the ship, found off the Anglesey coast, suggest it may have been bringing supplies from the King of France.
The Prince - Charles Edward Stuart - was at the time in hiding after the failure of the Jacobite Rebellion.
Source: CNN
May 25, 2009
Fifteen years after his death, and after his family fought a very long bureaucratic battle with the government, Enrique Valdez's name was added to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Valdez was a Marine gunnery sergeant wounded by shrapnel in August 1969, combat that left him a quadriplegic.
Since his death in 1994, his family has been waiting for the Defense Department to answer their requests that Valdez be included on "The Wall."
On Memorial Day,
Source: NBC
May 25, 2009
Visit msnbc.com for
Source: NYT
May 23, 2009
Consider the trajectories of some past energy initiatives announced with similar enthusiasm as the president’s new fuel economy plan, which calls for new cars to average 35.5 miles a gallon by 2016. In 2007, for example, Congress set quotas for ethanol made from plant matter to displace gasoline. Next year, refiners are required to use 100 million gallons. The problem is, no one has figured out yet how to produce it in commercial quantities. “The soup’s not quite cooked yet,” said Mitch Mandich,
Source: NYT
May 25, 2009
President Obama observed Memorial Day on Monday just as his predecessors have: by placing a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns here. But Mr. Obama added a new twist: he sent a second wreath to a memorial honoring African-Americans who fought in the Civil War.
Presidents since Warren G. Harding have marked Memorial Day by visiting Arlington National Cemetery, where white rows of tombstones mark more than seven generations of America’s war dead. But with the nation’s first African-Ame
Source: The Boston Globe
May 25, 2009
Brisk trade in WWII planes thwarts efforts to recover missing fliers.
To the US military, Carter Lutes, a pilot who vanished in Papua New Guinea in April 1944, is one of the lost heroes of World War II. The Pentagon still hopes to recover him. Until then, it considers his jungle crash site a sacred place - and the last known clue to finding him.
Yet while the military was making plans to search for Lutes's remains, other visitors arrived on the site seeking different re
Source: BBC
May 25, 2009
The Italian art world is in a messy "is it or isn't it" debate over a wooden sculpture that may or may not have been made by Michelangelo.
Standing just 40cm (16 inches) high, it depicts Christ on the Cross, but leading art experts simply cannot agree who made it.
This is not a tale about fakery or imitation - everyone says the statue is a Renaissance piece of art from around 1495, when Michelangelo would have been 20.
But who actually crafted i
Source: BBC
May 25, 2009
Lawyers for the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic have filed papers arguing all charges against him should be dropped.
They say US diplomat Richard Holbrooke promised him immunity from prosecution on condition he gave up politics - something Mr Holbrooke strongly denies.
Mr Karadzic is on trial at the UN tribunal in The Hague, facing 11 charges including genocide.
The tribunal has said that any immunity deal would not be binding.
Source: CNN
May 25, 2009
Following controversy over President Obama's decision to continue a presidential tradition of honoring Confederate war dead on Memorial Day, the White House confirmed Monday that a wreath will now also be placed at a monument to African-American Civil War dead.
Critics had called for an end to the longtime presidential practice of laying a wreath at the Confederate memorial. Last week, in a letter to Obama over the issue, roughly five dozen professors called the tradition offensive
Source: CNN
May 25, 2009
The Women Airforce Service Pilots was born in 1942 to create a corps of female pilots able to fill all types of flying jobs at home to free male military pilots to travel to the front.
In the days after the outbreak of the war, Jacqueline Cochran, one of the country's leading female pilots at the time, went to a key general to argue that women would be just as capable pilots as men if they were given the same training.
She won the argument, and the program was launched.
Source: NYT
May 24, 2009
The American Civil Liberties Union may not often see eye to eye with the American Center for Democracy, a research group with neoconservative credentials. But the two organizations are united on at least one thing: their distaste for British libel laws, which they say are being exploited to suppress free speech in Britain and beyond.
British courts have always been friendlier to libel claimants than their American counterparts. Until recently that did not matter much to American au
Source: NYT
May 22, 2009
When Thomas Cholmondeley — son of the fifth Baron Delamere, scion of Kenya’s residual white aristocracy — appeared in court in Nairobi charged with murdering a black poacher, it was inevitable that this juxtaposition of bloodshed and privilege across the racial divide would provoke comparison with other misbehavior by his forebears stretching back decades.
It was inevitable, too, that as his trial unfolded and he was sentenced earlier this month to eight months in prison on manslaug
