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 News
April 27, 2009
A replica 15th Century junk has sunk off Taiwan, one day short of completing an epic voyage to the US and back.
The Ming dynasty-style Princess Taiping was trying to prove that China's greatest admiral, Zheng He, could have reached North America 600 years ago.
After surviving several storms during its 10-month voyage, the junk broke in two and sank after it was rammed by a freighter just off Taiwan's coast.
All 11 crew members were rescued after being found
Source: Politifact
April 27, 2009
Michele Bachmann, a Republican member of Congress from Minnesota, is known for her controversial remarks. During the fall of 2008, she nearly lost her re-election campaign because she said Barack Obama "may have anti-American views." In a 2009 radio interview, she said incorrectly that six Muslim clerics who were removed from a US Airways flight in 2006 were attending a "victory celebration" for Keith Ellison, a Muslim who was elected to Congress.
So we weren't e
Source: National Geographic
April 29, 2009
An ancient temple in Turkey has been found filled with broken metal, ivory carvings, and stone slabs engraved with a dead language.
The find is casting new light on the "dark age" that was thought to have engulfed the region from 1200 to 900 B.C.
Written sources from the era—including the Old Testament of the Bible, Greek Homeric epics, and texts from Egyptian pharaoh Ramses III—record the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age as a turbulent period o
Source: Poughkeepsie Journal
April 29, 2009
FISHKILL - Graves, very likely those of hundreds of Revolutionary War soldiers, have been found, at long last, on undeveloped land in the Town of Fishkill that was proposed to be a shopping center.
Archaeological digs and a survey using ground-penetrating radar confirmed existence of long-suspected remains in the historic site known as the Fishkill Supply Depot, according to letters from state historic officials.
Historians deem the depot to have been a major resource i
Source: Patricia Cohen in the NYT
April 30, 2009
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s legacy has been slid back under the microscope recently as his efforts to pull the country out of the Great Depression are scrutinized. Now a piece of his foreign policy is also being re-evaluated in a soon-to-be published book that upends a widely held view that he was indifferent to the fate of Europe’s Jews, and asserts that new evidence shows that the president pushed for an ambitious secret rescue plan before the war began.
The book, an edited collec
Source: Press Release--confederateheritagemonth.com
May 1, 2009
On Wednesday, April 29, 2009, Governor Sonny Perdue signed Georgia Senate Bill No. 27 designating ‘April’ permanently--Confederate History and Heritage Month by Georgia state law. Georgia is the first state in the Union to pass such legislation.
Supporters of the bill say that this would increase tourism at War Between the States battlefield sites.
This bill is timely as plans are underway throughout the nation to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the War Between the S
Source: NYT
April 30, 2009
The historic gap between blacks and whites in voter participation evaporated in last year’s presidential race, according to an analysis released today, with black, Hispanic and Asian voters comprising nearly a quarter of the electorate, setting a record.
The analysis, by the Pew Research Center, also found that for the first time, black women turned out at a higher rate than any other racial, ethnic and gender group.
The study attributed the findings to several factors
Source: AP
April 30, 2009
One of the Palestinians who hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise ship and killed an American passenger in 1985 has been released after more than 23 years in jail, officials said Thursday.
Youssef Magied al-Molqui left prison in Palermo, Sicily, on Wednesday and was transferred to a holding center for immigrants in nearby Trapani while officials work to expel him, police in the Sicilian capital said.
Al-Molqui, a member of the four-man team that hijacked the Achille Lauro
Source: San Jose Mercury News
April 30, 2009
When the news of the end of the World War reached Santa Cruz in the early morning hours of Nov. 11, 1918, the city erupted with the sounds of bells and whistles.
Awkwardly, the war ended in the midst of the largest epidemic in modern history.
The shooting and killing may have stopped, but the influenza continued to suffocate its victims, filling their lungs with fluid and strangling them in their bunks. Named the Spanish influenza though public health officials said i
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 20, 2009
Barack Obama has praised Winston Churchill's refusal to torture German spies during World War II as an example of why the United States was right to abandon waterboarding and other methods of torture.
The president said he recently read an article where he learned for the first time that the British wartime prime minister had stoutly refused to use violent interrogation of hundreds of detainees even as "London was being bombed to smithereens".
"Churchill
Source: Guardian.Co.UK
April 30, 2009
The Iraqi prime minister arrives in Britain today seeking UK investment. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad reports on how a leader once seen as weak is now being compared to his infamous predecessor.
The charges voiced by the INSI officers are heard, in hushed tones, more and more around Baghdad these days. Critics say Maliki is concentrating power in his office (the office of the prime minister) and his advisers are running "a government inside a government", bypassing ministers and parl
Source: Guardian.Co.UK
April 30, 2009
Schools are producing illiterate and uncommunicative children, he tells conference of private school heads.
The TV historian David Starkey today called for schools to bring back memorising dates, elocution and grammar lessons, and public-speaking competitions.
The 64-year-old expert on the Tudor period said education had been "taken over by bean counters" and schools were producing illiterate and uncommunicative children.
He said that in the early
Source: CNN
April 30, 2009
If there's a blessing in the current swine flu epidemic, it's how benign the illness seems to be outside the central disease cluster in Mexico. But history offers a dark warning to anyone ready to write off the 2009 H1N1 virus.
In each of the four major pandemics since 1889, a spring wave of relatively mild illness was followed by a second wave, a few months later, of a much more virulent disease. This was true in 1889, 1957, 1968 and in the catastrophic flu outbreak of 1918, which
Source: Deutsche Welle
April 29, 2009
Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon on Wednesday announced a new investigation of those allegedly responsible for torture at the US prison camp in Guantanamo, Cuba.
"It seems that the documents declassified by the US administration mentioned by the media have revealed what was previously a suspicion," Garzon said in a court document.
They showed the existence of "an authorized and systematic program of torture" of prisoners who had not been charged with
Source: CNN blog
April 28, 2009
When was the last time there was a filibuster-proof majority in the U.S. Senate?
It was during the 95th Congress in 1977-1979, when Democrats controlled 62 seats.
The Senate's filibuster rule had just changed two years earlier in 1975, when the threshold was lowered from a two-thirds majority of senators present and voting to a flat 60 votes. At the time of the rule change, the Democratic caucus had 61 votes.
With the switch by Sen. Arlen Specter, Democrats
Source: Oregonian
April 29, 2009
Portland's cost to change the name of 39th Avenue to Cesar Chavez Boulevard would be $86,000, according to the city's road maintenance bureau.
The figure is contained in a memo to the planning commission, which is holding a public hearing on the renaming proposal at 7 Tuesday night in City Hall, 1221 S.W. Fourth Ave.
The memo states that the 7.22 miles of 39th Avenue have 172 intersections, and would require 242 Chavez signs.
Source: CNN
April 29, 2009
As World War I rages in Europe, fresh U.S. Army soldiers pass the time on a train ride to to Camp Forrest, Georgia. "The boys are just starting to sing," Martin Aloysius Culhane wrote on September 6, 1918, to his friend back home. "They've gotten back to 'Old Black Joe' so far."
Stephen Foster's classic song from the Civil War is about the death of slaves who had become his friends. But Culhane, known as "Al," and the soldiers who sang along could not k
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 30, 2009
A new museum dedicated to the history of Chinese espionage is so top-secret that foreigners are banned.
The director of the Jiangsu National Security Education museum in Nanjing, who would only give her name as Ms Qian, said the collection of tiny pistols, miniature cameras, and concealed wiretaps may be timeworn, but is still too sensitive for foreign eyes.
No photography is allowed inside the museum either, she said.
However, the museum did reveal that i
Source: BBC
April 30, 2009
A stack of Victorian letters hidden in the attic of a derelict building has proved a valuable find after a rare Penny Black stamp was found.
It is among 27 Penny Blacks, first issued in the UK in 1840, and found on letters impaled on spikes in the loft.
It has a catalogue value of £15,000 but its condition means auctioneers in Denbighshire value it at £5-6,000.
The letters were encrusted with bird droppings which may have helped preserve the stamp collec
Source: BBC
April 30, 2009
A first edition, first issue of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection has been sold at auction in Norfolk for £35,000.
Just 1,250 copies of the work were produced in its first print run in 1859 and sold out immediately.
All existing copies are highly valued, according to Keys of Aylsham, the firm which auctioned the book which was bought by a local book dealer.
A signed photograph of Darwin sold at the auction for £22,00
