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: AP
June 27, 2008
HAIPHONG, Vietnam - John McCain has an unusual endorsement — from the Vietnamese jailer who says he held him captive for about five years as a POW and now considers him a friend.
"If I were an American voter, I would vote for Mr. John McCain," Tran Trong Duyet said Friday, sitting in his living room in the northern city of Haiphong, surrounded by black-and-white photos of a much younger version of himself and former Vietnam War prisoners.
At the same time, he
Source: AP
June 28, 2008
Barack Obama's political success might claim an unintended victim: affirmative action, a much-debated policy that he supports.
Already weakened by several court rulings and state referendums, affirmative action now confronts a challenge to its very reason for existing. If Americans make a black person the leading contender for president, as nationwide polls suggest, how can racial prejudice be so prevalent and potent that it justifies special efforts to place minorities in coveted
Source: Times (UK)
June 28, 2008
It set off a massive explosion that flattened millions of trees in the Siberian wilderness and lit up the sky as far away as Britain.
A century later the Tunguska event still provokes intense debate over a blast 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.
This week advocates of rival theories have been holding conferences in Moscow to try to answer the question of what took place in the forests along the Tunguska River on June 30, 1908.
Most argue th
Source: Chicago Tribune
June 28, 2008
It's not what you heard in grade school history, of course, but it is somehow consoling to note how unbelievably vile politicians were early in the nation's history.
You probably don't remember "The Public Character and Conduct of John Adams," a letter written by Alexander Hamilton at the height of the 1800 presidential campaign.
There are "great and intrinsic defects in his character, which unfit him for the Office of Chief Magistrate," the Hamilton
Source: History Today
June 24, 2008
A gift of £3.3million to save the historic Cutty Sark was announced this week (June 24th). The donation from shipping magnate Sammy Ofer closes the funding gap for the Cutty Sark Trust, allowing the 19th-century sailing ship to be restored by 2010. Andy Burnham, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, stated: ‘The Heritage Lottery Fund has given more than £23 million towards the repair bill, and £8 million in donations have already been received. Mr Ofer's philanthropic contribution wil
Source: Seattle PI
June 24, 2008
Here in Seattle, Elly DeWolfe Hale was far removed from her early American ancestors, a wealthy, illustrious family whose legacy still colors life in Bristol, R.I.
Then came a letter that unmasked a shameful secret:
Hale's storied forebears, the DeWolfs, weren't just distillers and merchants, they were human traffickers who built their fortune on the slave trade. In fact, as Hale and other relatives were to discover, the DeWolfs were the largest slave-trading family in
Source: NYT
June 26, 2008
Divided Supreme Court Strikes Down D.C. Gun Ban.
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The 5-4 ruling was the first ever to directly address the meaning of the Second Amendment’s ambiguous text, but the decision left open the possibility that less restrictive state laws were permissible.
Source: National Security Archive
June 27, 2008
Washington, DC, June 26, 2008 - Responding to a petition filed in January by the National Security Archive and several leading U.S. historical associations for the release of grand jury records from the 1951 indictment of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, federal prosecutors in New York conceded that a substantial portion of the grand jury materials could be made public after more than 55 years.
In a court filing this week, the government said it would not oppose the release of transcript
Source: BBC
June 17, 2008
Flags from the battlefield at Waterloo have been found in a cupboard at the home of Sir Walter Scott.
The four banners, which date from 1815, were discovered by trustees sorting through Abbotsford, Scott's home near Melrose in Roxburghshire.
The novelist brought them from the scene of the battle, which he visited after hearing of Napoleon's defeat.
Source: AP
June 26, 2008
From prison brothels to slave labor camps, 15 scholars concluded a two-week probe Thursday of an untapped repository of millions of Nazi records, and hailed it as a rich vein of raw material that will deepen the study of the Holocaust.
It was the first concentrated academic sweep of the long-private archive administered by the International Tracing Service since it opened its doors last November to Holocaust survivors, victims relatives and historical researchers.
Germa
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 26, 2008
Mexicans are being encouraged to reclaim a piece of Texas, more than 150 years after they lost the Lone Star state to the United States.
Texan estate agents are heading south of the border to drum up the interest in buying cut-price land and property in the foreclosure-hit state.
Thanks to a rising Mexican peso and an economy which is growing faster than that of the US, a country that has previously been looked on by America as a source of cheap labour is now seen as a
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 27, 2008
The 2000 presidential election debacle was the fault of Al Gore, who should have followed Richard Nixon's 1960 example and conceded without legal action, according to the Supreme Court's leading conservative judge.
"Richard Nixon, when he lost to [John F.] Kennedy thought that the election had been stolen in Chicago, which was very likely true with the system at the time," Justice Antonin Scalia told The Telegraph.
"But he did not even think about bringin
Source: National Security Archive
June 26, 2008
American signals intelligence collectors tracked the activation of Soviet air defenses prior to the shootdown of a U.S. spy plane at the peak of the Cuban missile crisis, according to documents published on the Web today by the National Security Archive. A new book by Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs shows that the destruction of the U-2 piloted by Major Rudolf Anderson, Jr. on October 27, 1962, was closely connected to the deployment of Soviet nuclear cruise missiles in the vicinity of the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo. Soviet generals feared that the spy plane had uncovered the forward launch position of the cruise missiles, just 15 miles from Guantanamo. This is the fourth of five postings looking at the new material in One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War, which draws on the National Security Archive's long-standing documentary work on the Cuban missile crisis. The book provides new details about U.S. SIGINT (signals intelligence) activities in and around Cuba at the height of the missile crisis. Next week, in the final installment from One Minute to Midnight, the National Security Archive will publish key primary sources behind the "Eyeball to Eyeball" confrontation between U.S. and Soviet ships that never happened.
Source: http://www.mcclatchydc.com
June 26, 2008
A rare gold chalice from a Spanish fleet that sank in 1622 was unearthed Tuesday morning by a treasure diver who couldn't believe his find.
''Oh, my God,'' diver Michael DeMar said, describing his discovery of the chalice on the site where the Spanish galleon Santa Margarita is believed to have gone down during a vicious storm.
Dented on a few sides and encrusted with marine growth, the chalice weighs more than a pound is etched with scrollwork and boasts decorative han
Source: WJZ
June 23, 2008
Virginia has added 25 listings to its landmarks register, a catalog of historic sites and districts.
The latest listings include three former Confederate camp sites and two historic bridges. One includes the High Bridge, which spans the Appomattox River between Cumberland and Prince Edward counties.
Among the unusual listings is the Winchester Coca-Cola Bottling Works, a familiar sight along U.S. 11. The Art Deco plant was built in 1940 and operated for 36 years as a bo
Source: CNN
June 24, 2008
It's earth's most remote inhabited land, a South Pacific speck of volcanic rock so isolated the locals call it "Te Pito O Te Henua," or "The Navel of the World."
But Easter Island is a bellybutton experiencing a tourist boom -- and some are worried the onslaught of outsiders could take a toll on the very things they come to see, the gigantic stone heads known as Moais.
"More tourism, more deterioration. More visitors, more loss," said Susan
Source: Independent (UK)
June 26, 2008
Paris has long been known to be a very old city but its history as a settlement has just been extended by more than 3,000 years.
An archaeological dig, whose findings were revealed yesterday, moves back Paris's first known human occupation to about 7600BC, in the Mesolithic period between the two stone ages.
An area about the size of a football field on the south-western edge of the city, close to the banks of the river Seine, has yielded thousands of flint arrowheads a
Source: Cronaca
June 23, 2008
A cherished image of the Roman emperor Hadrian as a gentle, philosophical man wearing the robes of a Greek citizen has been shattered with one blow of a conservator's chisel at the British Museum.
The head, with its neatly trimmed beard and fringe of exquisitely crimped curls, is certainly Hadrian but it seems the body it has been attached to for almost 150 years belongs to somebody else. The statue, a unique piece that has been cited in many biographies of Hadrian as proof of his l
Source: NYT
June 26, 2008
T. Boone Pickens is not giving up his million dollars.
That’s how much he had offered to pay anyone who could disprove any of the accusations the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth made against Senator John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election – attacks Mr. Pickens, the billionaire Texas oilman, helped finance.
A group of Swift boat veterans sympathetic to Mr. Kerry sent Mr. Pickens a letter last week taking him up on the challenge. In 12 pages, plus a 42-page attachment
Source: Times (UK)
June 25, 2008
The first Japanese warship to visit China since the Second World War docked in a southern Chinese port yesterday in a symbolic breakthrough in relations between East Asia’s two biggest powers.
The 4,650-tonne destroyer Sazanami pulled into Zhanjiang, a Chinese naval port in the southern province of Guangdong, with a cargo of relief supplies for victims of last month’s Sichuan earthquake. The Sazanami and its 240 crew will stay in China for five days as part of a ground-breaking mili
