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: Dallas Morning News
April 18, 2009
AUSTIN, Tex. – Gov. Rick Perry appears to have given new life to the state's two-decades-old tourism promotion – Texas: It's like a whole other country.
The empathy Perry has shown this week to those spitting-mad-at-Washington secessionists had newscaster Geraldo Rivera calling him "grossly irresponsible" and ripe for impeachment, while former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said that Perry was being a righteous governor "standing up for the sovereignty of his st
Source: CNN
April 18, 2009
The big winner out of this week's Summit of the Americas in Trinidad may be a decades-old book about the exploitation of Latin American people throughout history.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, whose anti-U.S. rhetoric has included calling former President George W. Bush the devil, approached Obama Friday and handed him a copy of "Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent."
In just hours, the book, by Uruguayan writer Eduard
Source: NYT
April 17, 2009
The contrition tour goes beyond Latin America. In China, Mrs. Clinton told audiences that the United States must accept its responsibility as a leading emitter of greenhouse gases. In Indonesia, she said the American-backed policy of sanctions against Myanmar had not been effective. And in the Middle East, she pointed out that ostracizing the Iranian government had not persuaded it to give up its nuclear weapons ambitions.
Like other leaders around the world, Mrs. Clinton’s host, th
Source: NYT
April 17, 2009
In the seven years since he was named general secretary of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, Dr. Hawass has been in perpetual motion. He personally announces every new discovery, was the force behind plans to construct 19 new museums, approved the restoration of nine synagogues in Cairo and has contributed to countless books, documentaries, magazine and newspaper articles all promoting Egyptian antiquities — and, of course, himself.
Naturally, this does not always win him friends,
Source: Times (UK)
April 17, 2009
The aftermath of the Abruzzo earthquake has witnessed the miraculous survival of people beneath collapsed buildings - and even of a small black dog which scampered out of the ruins of a house on Easter Sunday after nearly a week under the debris.
But residents of Rocca di Cambio, a village high in the Gran Sasso mountains of Abruzzo 25 kilometres from L’Aquila, are celebrating the emergence of a more longstanding survivor: a long-lost 11th Century fresco depicting the Virgin Mary a
Source: Times (UK)
April 18, 2009
Kenya is considering setting up a tribunal dedicated to prosecuting pirates to cope with the influx of Somalis detained at sea.
Officials said that it would improve efficiency and transparency as well as easing the burden on an already creaking legal system.
Prosecutors around the world are studying 17th-century piracy laws as navies wonder what to do with suspected pirates caught at sea.
Five Somalis are due to go on trial in the Netherlands next month
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 18, 2009
Lt Col Geoffrey Collingwood Sherman orchestrated the ceremony of Japanese capitulation in Singapore on September 12, 1945, which took place before 50 Allied generals.
Known as Lord Mountbatten's right-hand man, the father of three has died aged 93 at his home in Somerset after a short illness.
Last week around 150 people filled a church in the village of Long Sutton, near Langport, where the Union Flag flew on the tower for the first time since the Japanese ceased hos
Source: Deutsche Welle
April 18, 2009
The new US government disappointed human rights activists when it chose to adhere to the Bush administration's position that detainees imprisoned at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan have no right to challenge their confinement in US courts. Critics have now begun referring to Bagram as "Obama's Guantanamo."
An estimated 650 inmates are being held at the prison north of Kabul, but the public rarely receives any details about how they're being treated, says German Green P
Source: BBC
April 17, 2009
Now a journalism student at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), the 20-year-old believes her generation should know and care about the events of 1989.
"We found we were not familiar with what happened and many others did not know either, and we wanted to arouse their consciousness," she said.
As a vice chairperson of the university's Social Sciences Society, she helped organise an exhibition on campus featuring a series of panels explaining what led up to 4 J
Source: AP
April 18, 2009
PHILADELPHIA – John Sotos has a theory about why Abraham Lincoln was so tall, why he appeared to have lumps on his lips and even why he had gastrointestinal problems. The 16th president, he contends, had a rare genetic disorder — one that would likely have left him dead of cancer within a year had he not been assassinated. And his bid to prove his theory has posed an ethical and scientific dilemma for a small Philadelphia museum in the year that marks the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth.
Source: NYT (accompanying short article by historian Ted Widmer)
April 16, 2009
An anonymous diarist sketched New York City's storefront
shrines to honor the assassinated president in August 1865.
The drawing are seen here for the first time.
Source: NYT
April 17, 2009
For at least 3,000 years, a drumbeat of potent droughts, far longer and more severe than any experienced recently, have seared a belt of sub-Saharan Africa that is now home to tens of millions of the world’s poorest people, climate researchers report in a new study.
The last such drought, persisting more than three centuries, ended around 1750, the research team writes in the April 17 issue of the journal Science.
The scientists warned that more such mega-droughts are i
Source: AP
April 17, 2009
The family of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. has charged the foundation building a monument to the civil rights leader on the National Mall about $800,000 for the use of his words and image — an arrangement one leading scholar says King would have found offensive.
The memorial — including a 28-foot sculpture depicting King emerging from a chunk of granite — is being paid for almost entirely with private money in a fundraising campaign led by the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memo
Source: Press Release
April 14, 2009
The constitutionality of the War in Iraq will be the subject of a hearing in Newark’s Federal District Court on Tuesday, April 21, at 11 am. The suit brought by the Constitutional Litigation Clinic at Rutgers School of Law–Newark challenges the legality of the invasion of Iraq without a Congressional Declaration of War. The plaintiffs are New Jersey Peace Action, a non-profit anti-war group; an Iraq war veteran; and two New Jersey mothers, members of Military Families Speak Out, whose sons were
Source: Politico (Mike Allen)
April 17, 2009
April 29 is Day 100 of the Obama administration. Look for lots of attention from the press, but none from the White House, where they don't want to shorten the president's landing strip or accept a three-month scorecard at a time of unprecedented challenges. If you buy the storied hundred-days construct, it means you're less special or fresh on Day 101. Two different top Obama staffers derided the marker yesterday as 'A HALLMARK HOLIDAY.'
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 17, 2009
The year 1536 changed Henry VIII from a handsome, popular and athletic king to a corpulent tyrant who thought little of dispatching his many wives, a historian has claimed.
A new look at the life of one of England's most famous monarchs argues that a series of calamitous events within the space of 12 months had an irreversible effect on his life.
Suzannah Lipscomb, a research curator at Hampton Court Palace and Oxford scholar, said the apparent betrayal by his wife, a d
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 17, 2009
Mussolini's hometown has finally banned the sale of daggers, cudgels and other fascist souvenirs relating to the late dictator after years of cashing in on trade from fervent admirers and tourists.
Crowds who flock to Predappio – many of them skinheads and black-shirted supporters of Italy's far-right – visit Mussolini's stone mausoleum, which is presided over by a stern-looking marble bust of Il Duce.
They then converge on shops offering a large and imaginative select
Source: AP
April 16, 2009
Archaeologists believe they've found the spot where hundreds of Mexican soldiers surrendered to the Texas army after a battle that sealed Texas' independence from Mexico 173 years ago.
Unfired musket balls, bayonets and cavalry ornaments were found in rows in an area about 20 yards wide and 200 yards long near an NRG Energy power plant about 20 miles east of Houston.
The Dallas Morning News reported Thursday that the heavily wooded area was long suspected to be a gold m
Source: AP
April 17, 2009
A South Carolina archaeologist says he'll begin exploring the wreckage of a Civil War-era ship submerged in the Charleston Harbor.
James Spirek will led a team Friday in search for the remains of the U.S.S. Patasco, a Union ironclad that was torpedoed and sank in 1865.
Friday's search is part of Spirek's efforts to create the first comprehensive historical map of the Charleston harbor bottom. The University of South Carolina archaeologist hopes to record everything from
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 17, 2009
An illicit love affair between the daughter of Benito Mussolini, the former fascist dictator, and a prominent communist partisan has been revealed after 36 love letters chronicling the affair were made public.
The secret correspondence, discovered on the Italian island of Lipari, has inspired Marcello Sorgi’s new book: “Edda Ciano and the Communist. The unspeakable passion of the Duce’s Daughter”.
The letters, dated from September 1945 to April 1947, chart the affair b
