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: Forbes Traveler
March 18, 2009
Attendance at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum rocketed to 7 million in 2008 — an increase of two million since our last report. The home of the Wright brothers’ 1903 Flyer, the Apollo 11 command module, and a fleet of other airborne wonders touched down in a tie for first place on the Forbes Traveler’s most-visited museum list.
In fact, the Smithsonian’s overall headcount was up two million compared with the 2006 numbers, for a grand total of 25.2 million visits. The vast and
Source: AP
March 23, 2009
On the outskirts of Jimmy Carter's ancestral home, miles from the nearest interstate, sits a state shrine to Georgia's native president.
The Plains Visitor Information Center pays tribute to the peanut farmer-turned-president, and it also stands as a reminder that even one of the most sacred names in Georgia politics can fall victim to a budget crisis.
Despite a campaign led by leaders of Carter's hometown — and the Democrats who represent his district — the center is o
Source: NYT
March 23, 2009
A former professor who has accused the University of Colorado of firing him because of a controversial essay he wrote about the Sept. 11 attacks took the stand Monday in his lawsuit against the university and offered a defense of those remarks.
Carrying a stack of books to the witness box, his long hair pulled back in a ponytail, the former professor, Ward L. Churchill, told a packed courtroom about the essay, in which he described office workers killed in the World Trade Center att
Source: Telegraph (UK)
March 24, 2009
"Mind your heads!" said the boiler-suited guide, grabbing a shiny horizontal bar and swinging expertly through a low porthole doorway, followed by our group of six. There was a resounding crack and an expletive as the biggest chap I've seen in a long time landed in a heap. I'm not claustrophobic, but it did occur to me that if he got stuck I really didn't want to spend the rest of my life in a 295ft-long, 26 and 1/2 ft-wide retired O-Class submarine from the Cold War.
We
Source: NYT
March 23, 2009
Mexico’s former president, Carlos Salinas, used to promise that free trade and foreign investment would jump-start this country’s development, empowering a richer and more prosperous Mexico “to export goods, not people.”
Fifteen years after the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect, only the first part of that promise has been realized.
Mexico’s exports have exploded under Nafta, quintupling to $292 billion last year, but Mexico is still exporting people too,
Source: NYT
March 23, 2009
In Chicago, a city that adores its architectural legacy, a
state appellate court found that the city's landmark
ordinance was "vague, ambitious and overly broad."
Source: Telegraph (UK)
March 24, 2009
A kind-hearted homeowner kept a baby elephant in her back yard for months during the Second World War because zookeepers feared the animal would be killed in a bombing raid, it has been revealed.
Sheila lived at Belfast Zoo until she was moved to her unusual home in 1941 as the city underwent the so-called Belfast Blitz.
She was one of the lucky ones at the zoo, in the north of the city.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
March 23, 2009
In the latest claim to emerge about the former US president's energetic love life, Lisa Lanett, an Austrian-born American, said she had a two-year affair with Kennedy after they met in Phoenix, Arizona, during the Second World War.
Now 87, she told the Austrian newspaper Kurier that Kennedy, then a young and single US navy officer and long before he earned his reputation as a notorious womaniser, had offered to marry her when she became pregnant with their son, Tony, but she had tur
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 24, 2009
A Bronze Age sauna and one of the oldest prehistoric roundhouses in the UK have been unearthed on a site earmarked for a park and ride scheme in Somerset.
Archaeologists have uncovered 3,000 years of history at the site near the junction of the A358 and the M5 at Cambria Farm, in Taunton, Somerset.
The Iron Age roundhouse with a diameter of 56ft (17m) is one of the largest prehistoric roundhouses ever found in Britain.
It is thought to date from around 700
Source: Foxnews
February 23, 2009
More than half a million young people from Maine to California are finalizing written reports, editing documentaries and polishing original performances - all in hopes of gaining a trip to the nation's capital and perhaps winning a scholarship as a finalist in National History Day's annual student competition.
Now in its 30th year, National History Day is a year-long program aimed at stimulating interest in history among middle and high school students and their teachers. Following
Source: Telegraph (UK)
March 20, 2009
The United States has deported to Austria a former Nazi concentration camp guard who admitted that he participated in the 1943 massacre of 8,000 Jews.
Josias Kumpf, 83, who was living in Racine, Wisconsin, served as a guard at the Nazi-run Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany and at the Trawniki labor camp in Poland, the US justice department said.
At Trawniki, he participated in a mass shooting in which about 8,000 Jewish men, women and children were killed in
Source: 2-22-09
December 31, 2069
Museum authorities at the former Nazi German Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland are struggling to save the enduring symbol of the Holocaust from the impact of time and the elements.
In the drive to stop the site falling into ruin and preserve the memory of the 1.1 million overwhelmingly Jewish victims who died here during World War II, they face tall odds.
"This is our last chance," warned Piotr Cywinski, director of the state-run museum.
The
Source: AP
February 24, 2009
Researchers may have discovered a mass grave for nearly five dozen 19th century Irish immigrants who died of cholera weeks after coming to Pennsylvania to build a railroad.
Historians at Immaculata University have known for years about the 57 immigrants who died in August 1832, but could not find the actual grave. Human bones discovered last week near the suburban Philadelphia university may at last reveal their final resting place -- and possibly allow researchers to identify the r
Source: AP
February 23, 2009
As former President George W. Bush works on his memoir, his detractors are doubting the candor of an unpopular leader famous for giving himself the highest of approval ratings.
Bush has signed with Crown Publishers for "Decision Points," a survey of fateful choices from running for president to invading Iraq. The book is scheduled for 2010, and while Bush said recently that "absolutely, yes," he would question some of his decisions, he added that he would make cl
Source: Chicago Tribune
February 22, 2009
The desperate times of the Great Depression called for desperate measures -- or at least measures that had never been tried before as means to boost the country from its economic malaise.
President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 pushed Congress to establish several "alphabet agencies" designed to put people to work as part of his New Deal. Some worked, some were derided, some failed and some were eliminated.
The legacy of the Civilian Conservation Corps, Works P
Source: AP
February 23, 2009
A Chicago-based Serb group said Monday it is offering a $100,000 reward for anyone who can locate the grave of a World War II guerrilla leader executed as a traitor by the Communists.
The burial site of Dragoljub Draza Mihailovic has been unknown since his execution in 1946 by the postwar Communist authorities. Mihailovic was convicted of collaboration with the Nazi occupiers in a hasty trial orchestrated by the new government.
The Serbian National Defense Council of Am
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 24, 2009
British veterans of the Second World War prison camp that featured in the film The Great Escape made an emotional return to the site of the getaway tunnel on the 65th anniversary of the breakout immortalised in the Hollywood film.
At a memorial at the mouth of Tunnel Harry, carved from the sandy soil under Stalag Luft III under the noses of the German guards, the men who helped those who fled only to be shot dead by the Gestapo toasted their absent comrades.
They bowe
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, is published by the Federation of American Scientists
March 24, 2009
The British foreign intelligence service MI-6 and the British domestic security service MI-5 will both mark their 100-year anniversary this year. Their exploits are the subject of the new book "Secret Wars: One Hundred Years of British Intelligence Inside MI5 and MI6" by Gordon Thomas, published this month by St. Martin's Press.
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
March 24, 2009
Tsutomu Yamaguchi must be the luckiest man in the world - or unluckiest, depending on your view.
The 93-year-old appears to be the only person in history to have survived not one, but two atomic bomb blasts.
Today he became the first person to be officially recognised for surviving both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks at the end of World War Two.
Yamaguchi had already been a certified 'hibakusha,' or radiation survivor, of the August 9, 1945, atomic bom
Source: Times (UK)
March 24, 2009
Austria has set free a former Nazi concentration camp guard who was extradited by the US for allegedly participating in the massacre of more 8,000 civilians, including 400 children.
Josias Kumpf, a former member of the SS, participated in the Nazi operation Harvest Festival in November 1943 when more than 42,000 Jews were murdered over two days.
According to the US Justice Department, Mr Kumpf, 83, who immigrated to America from Austria in 1956, helped to kill about 8
