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: Foxnews
January 11, 2009
Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders says language next to president's portrait is misleading because it says the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks led to the war in Iraq.
Sanders, a strong opponent of the Iraq war, has asked the Smithsonian to rewrite the text that says Bush's two terms in office were "marked by a series of catastrophic event" including the "the attacks on September 11, 2001, that led to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq."
Sanders says
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 11, 2009
China's most prominent liberal philosopher is defying demands by the Communist Party to retract his signature from a ground-breaking call for reform, elections and freedom of speech that has infuriated the government.
Police and Party officials have threatened and harassed more than 100 of the 300 leading intellectuals, lawyers and activists who signed Charter 08, a call for a new politics consciously modeled on dissident movements in the former Soviet bloc.
The Charte
Source: CNN
January 10, 2009
President-elect Barack Obama, who in 10 days will be sworn in using the Bible of his political hero Abraham Lincoln, visited the Lincoln Memorial in Washington on Saturday night with his family.
Obama will be the first president to use the Lincoln Bible for his inauguration since Lincoln used it in 1861. Inauguration organizers have said Obama's inaugural theme, "A New Birth of Freedom," was inspired by Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
The president-elect also p
Source: HR Gov website
January 6, 2009
House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) today introduced six bills on the first day of the 111th Congress. Today’s legislation includes a proposal to create a War Powers Commission...
National Commission on Presidential War Powers and Civil Liberties will establish a Blue Ribbon Commission comprised of experts outside government service to investigate the broad range of policies of the Bush administration that were undertaken by the Bush administration under cla
Source: BBC
January 9, 2009
Drawings by Leonardo da Vinci on show at the National Library of Wales were previously stored there during World War II, researchers have found.
Among the other masterpieces stored in the library's secret cave were the Saxon Chronicles, the works of Wycliffe and Chaucer and a large collection of charters including the Magna Carta.
There was also a wealth of autographs and letters from the kings and queens of England, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Francis Drake, Francis Baco
Source: NYT
January 9, 2009
Over the years, several presidents have been forced to ponder the delicate (and sometimes unpleasant) question of whether to move the in-laws into the White House.
Ulysses S. Grant shared space with his father-in-law, who grumbled and squabbled with other relatives, historians say. Harry S. Truman lived with his mother-in-law, who declared that she knew “dozens of men better qualified” to preside over the Oval Office.
On Friday, the transition team of President-elect Ba
Source: AFP
January 9, 2009
NICKNAMED "the Beast", Barack Obama's new drive is a hulking, snazzed-up upgrade from previous presidential limousines, and will give him a better view of his inaugural parade than his predecessor.
Photos of the unfinished Cadillac leaked on the internet showed a hefty customised behemoth, reportedly tough enough to withstand a rocket-propelled grenade - and some joked, even an asteroid.
But Cadillac spokesman David Caldwell promised that the finished product
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 10, 2009
When Mohammed Becirovic returned to his village he found his home a charred ruin, his wife and two daughters gone - abducted by Serbian militiamen.
But 16 years later DNA testing of war orphans revealed that his infant daughter Senida had miraculously survived the conflict and was living with elderly foster parents in the Serbian capital Belgrade.
Plucked by a Serbian soldier from the ruins of their village, Caparde, on the very first day of the war in April 1992, Sen
Source: TheDailyBeast.com (summary of AP story)
January 9, 2009
Where does Cheney plan on spending his post-vice presidency? Fishing the Snake River, he told the Associated Press. Not, apparently, sitting in the dock at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. “I don't have any reason to believe that anybody in the agency did anything illegal," he said before mounting a spirited defense of waterboarding. "It's been used with great discrimination by people who know what they're doing and has produced a lot of valuable information and intelli
Source: Independent (UK)
January 9, 2009
The pope's minister for peace and justice was accused yesterday of speaking like a Holocaust denier after comparing Gaza to a "big concentration camp".
Cardinal Renato Martino, a veteran Vatican diplomat with years of experience as the Pope's delegate to the United Nations, told an interviewer for L'Avvenire, the daily paper of the Italian bishops, that "nobody" in the Israel-Hamas dispute "sees the interests of the other, but only their own". He contin
Source: CNN
January 9, 2009
The hemorrhaging of American jobs accelerated at a record pace at the end of 2008, bringing the year's total job losses to 2.6 million or the highest level in more than six decades.
A sobering U.S. Labor Department jobs report Friday showed the economy lost 524,000 jobs in December and 1.9 million in the year's final four months, after the credit crisis began in September.
The unemployment rate rose to 7.2% last month from 6.7% in November - its highest rate since Janu
Source: BBC
January 10, 2009
Digging through thick mud and an ancient swamp of black clay, archaeologists in Istanbul have discovered a grave that proves the city is 6,000 years older than they previously thought.
The skeletons of two adults and two children lie curled-up, perhaps to save space. Alongside them are pots: gifts placed in the grave to use in the afterlife.
The ancient family was unearthed at the site of a 21st Century rail project.
Historians had believed modern-day Is
Source: Reuters
January 9, 2009
LONDON -– The first official sequel to the original Winnie-the-Pooh books will appear in October, its publishers said on Saturday, more than 80 years after the honey-loving bear first appeared in print.
"Return to the Hundred Acre Wood" is the follow up to A.A. Milne's "Winnie-the-Pooh" and "The House At Pooh Corner," which were famously illustrated by E.H. Shepard.
The new book, published by Egmont Publishing in Britain and Penguin imprint
Source: AP
January 9, 2009
Gov. Rod Blagojevich was impeached Friday by Illinois lawmakers furious that he turned state government into a "freak show," setting the stage for an unprecedented trial in the state Senate that could get him thrown out of office.
The 114-1 vote in the Illinois House came exactly a month after Blagojevich's arrest on charges that included trying to sell President-elect Barack Obama's vacant Senate seat. The debate took less than 90 minutes, and not a single legislator rose
Source: BBC
January 9, 2009
A muddy river bank in the flat, watery landscape of southern Essex may seem an unlikely place to find one of the most important ships in scientific history.
But a combination of painstaking detective work and archaeology have convinced maritime historian Dr Robert Prescott that the banks of the River Roach near the village of Paglesham are the last resting place of HMS Beagle.
The historic ship will be forever associated with Charles Darwin who served as its naturalis
Source: Gettysburgtimes
January 9, 2009
The oldest building at the 6,000-acre Gettysburg Battlefield is getting a facelift following years of deterioration.
Gettysburg National Military Park crews began disassembling the historic Patterson House this week in preparation to restore the 146-year-old log home.
Historians believe that the building served as the headquarters of Union cavalry General Alfred Pleasonton during the latter stages of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863.
Source: Timesonline (UK)
January 9, 2009
Baltasar Garzón, a crusading champion of human rights, has claimed that Franco and 34 henchmen were guilty of the systematic killing or disappearance of at least 114,000 people during and after the civil war.
Among the victims were children of Republicans who were adopted by Franco sympathisers to prevent them coming under the influence of Marxism. Others, whose families fled abroad, were lured back to Spain under false pretences. “Child refugees were also kidnapped in France by th
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 9, 2009
Museums should be allowed to keep art looted by the Nazis according to Sir Norman Rosenthal, the former exhibitions secretary of the Royal Academy.
Despite being the child of Jewish refugees, Sir Norman said he thought "history is history" and descendants "distanced by two or more generations" from the works' original owners did not have an "inalienable right" to reclaim their forbearers' property.
In April 2000 a Spoliation Advisory Panel
Source: Spiegel Online
January 8, 2009
The first skeletons were unearthed by construction workers last October. A pit dug for the foundation of a new hotel in the Polish city of Malbork revealed the remains of dozens of corpses, all heaped together in what was apparently a World War II-era mass grave. But plenty of questions remained, and investigators began taking a closer look.
This week, Piotr Szwedowski, a Malbork city official, revealed what they found. "Since then, we have exhumed around 1,800 corpses,"
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 9, 2009
The ongoing debate over Japan's version of historical events in its school textbooks focuses on the 1945 Battle of Okinawa in which the military were believed to have coerced civilians into mass suicides faced with certain defeat.
The government controversially decided two years ago to delete or rewrite references to the mass suicides in its national curriculum history textbooks resulting in a string of protests across Japan.
However, although education officials agreed
