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: Cafe 227 (blog)
September 3, 2006
Check out the new presidential action figure on sale at Target.com. In case they've already discovered and corrected their error, here's a screen shot from approximately 10pm EST...
Source: NYT
September 23, 2006
All the authors currently clamoring for a seat on Oprah Winfrey’s couch might do well to send copies of their books to the latest publishing tastemaker: Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez.
Ever since Mr. Chávez held up a copy of a 301-page book by Noam Chomsky, the linguist and left-wing political commentator, during a speech at the United Nations on Wednesday, sales of the book have climbed best-seller lists at Amazon.com and BN.com, the online site for the book retailer Barnes &am
Source: CNN
September 22, 2006
RICHMOND, Virginia (AP) -- Bill Cosby on Friday called on each American to contribute $8 to help build a national slavery museum amid the battlefields of the Civil War.
Cosby, who already has committed $1 million to the project, joined Richmond Mayor L. Douglas Wilder on Friday in launching a new campaign to raise $100 million toward the Fredericksburg museum's $200 million price tag.
"The incentive is that they would join in with the rest of the United States of A
Source: Haaretz
September 21, 2006
Prior to Jonathan Pollard's failed attempt to seek refuge in the Israeli Embassy in Washington on November 21, 1985, the Federal Bureau of Investigation did not suspect that he may have been spying for Israel.
In fact, even though he was a civilian analyst for U.S. Naval Intelligence, the FBI did not even know that Pollard was Jewish. This, according to a new book, "Capturing Jonathan Pollard" (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2006) by Ronald J. Olive, the retired office
Source: The Gazette (Montreal)
September 22, 2006
One of the country's leading war historians has amassed disturbing evidence that German troops trying to surrender during the First World War were "frequently executed" by Canadian soldiers gripped by fear or hungry for revenge.
In a lengthy article that appears in the latest Journal of Military History, the field's top scholarly publication, Canadian War Museum historian Tim Cook explores the complex and volatile "politics of surrender."
He found, i
Source: The Boston Globe
September 22, 2006
In the pantheon of Founding Fathers, John Adams is usually considered an also-ran. There is no memorial to him in Washington, no portrait of him on US currency, no singular achievement that is drilled into the heads of schoolchildren from Maine to California.
But opening today at the Boston Public Library is the first public exhibition of the second president's vast personal library, a priceless collection of 3,802 works whose breadth helps show why this Braintree farmer is gaining
Source: NYT
September 22, 2006
In his early 20’s, John R. Koza and fellow graduate students invented a brutally complicated board game based on the Electoral College that became a brief cult hit and recently fetched $100 for an antique version on eBay.
By his 30’s, Dr. Koza was a co-inventor of the scratch-off lottery ticket and found it one of the few sure ways to find fortune with the lottery.
Now, a 63-year-old eminence among computer scientists who teaches genetic programming at Stanford, Dr. Ko
Source: NYT
September 22, 2006
The Defense Department’s inspector general on Thursday dismissed claims by military officers and others who had insisted that a secret Pentagon program identified Mohamed Atta and other terrorists involved in the Sept. 11 attacks before the attacks occurred.
The inspector general’s office, which acts as the Defense Department’s internal watchdog, said in a report that its investigators found no evidence to suggest that the intelligence program, known as Able Danger, had identified M
Source: Guardian
September 20, 2006
A satirical cartoon about Hitler, where he sits on the toilet complaining about Churchill, is causing controversy in Germany.
Illustrator Walter Moers is famous for his comic books depicting the dictator as a frustrated little man who throws fits every time the Jews are mentioned. But with the release of the short film "Der Bonker", Germans seem to feel he has gone too far.
Despite thousands of Moers fans making the clip one of this week's top internet downloads, ma
Source: CNN
August 21, 2006
ANNAPOLIS, Maryland (AP) -- A national black Republican group is running a radio advertisement accusing Democrats of starting the Ku Klux Klan and saying the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican, a claim challenged by civil-rights researchers.
Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, the black Republican nominee for Maryland's open Senate seat, disavowed the ad Thursday as "insulting to Marylanders." He said his campaign asked the Washington-based National Black Republican Associa
Source: Reuters
September 21, 2006
BERLIN - An 83-year-old German woman deported from the United States for concealing her Nazi past as a concentration camp guard is a war criminal and should be prosecuted, the Simon Wiesenthal Center said on Thursday.
Efraim Zuroff, head of the agency that tracks Nazis, said that U.S. authorities deserved praise for their diligence in finding Elfriede Lina Rinkel, who reportedly never told her late husband, a concentration camp survivor, of her past.
The U.S. Justice De
Source: Philip Graitcer in the Voice of America News
September 21, 2006
September 22nd marks the 100th anniversary of an infamous 1906 race riot in the southern U.S. city of Atlanta, Georgia. Mobs of white men killed dozens of African-Americans during the 4-day rampage. The violence received worldwide newspaper attention at the time, but has now been largely forgotten. Still, many believe the legacy of the 1906 Atlanta riots continues to influence race relations in the city. A group of Atlantans is preparing to mark the centennial and use the occasion to open a new
Source: NYT
September 21, 2006
The New-York Historical Society announced that it would mount a $3.5 million exhibition, “New York Divided: Slavery and the Civil War,” to open on Nov. 17. The show will present about 300 artifacts, documents, drawings, maps and other images in a sequel to last year’s exhibition “Slavery in New York,” which drew 175,000 visitors. The time frame of the first show ended in 1827, when black New Yorkers celebrated emancipation in New York State. Dr. Louise Mirrer, the society’s president, said the n
Source: AP
September 21, 2006
The U.N. address by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has had an unexpected impact -- on the best seller lists of Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com.
At the start of his talk Wednesday, during which Chavez referred to President Bush as ''the devil,'' Chavez held up a book by Noam Chomsky, ''Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance,'' and recommended it to everyone in the General Assembly, as well as to the American people.
''The people of the United
Source: Jewish News Weekly
September 21, 2006
A 1938 diary written near the end of Pope Pius XI’s papacy confirms his opposition to fascism was hardening as the outbreak of World War II grew closer, a historian said Tuesday, Sept. 19, after examining documents in the Vatican’s just-opened secret archives.The diary quoted Pius as saying, “I won’t be afraid. I prefer to beg for alms” than to give into pressures from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime, said French historian Philippe Chenaux.
Th
Source: LAT
September 21, 2006
It took more than half a century to fulfill Theodor Herzl's dream of a Jewish state. But it would take Israel even longer to meet Herzl's more intimate last wishes: to have his children buried next to him.
On Wednesday, more than seven decades after their deaths, the bodies of two of Herzl's children were laid to rest here near the grave of the famed Zionist leader, whose public legend left little room for the unhappy saga of his troubled children.
The solemn ceremony f
Source: Wa Po
September 21, 2006
Henrietta "Etty" Allen said Wednesday that she concealed her upbringing as a Jew in North Africa from her children, including Sen. George Allen (R-Va.), until a conversation across the dining room table in late August.
She said Allen asked her directly about his Jewish heritage when he was in Los Angeles for a fundraiser. "We sat across the table and he said, 'Mom, there's a rumor that Pop-pop and Mom-mom were Jewish and so were you,' " she recalled, a day after
Source: Wa Po
September 18, 2006
BAGHDAD -- A silence has fallen upon Mutanabi Street.
In the buttery sunlight, faded billboards hang from old buildings. Iron gates seal entrances to bookstores and stationery shops. On this Friday, like the past 13 Fridays, the violence has taken its toll. There is not a customer around, only ghosts.
Perched on a red chair outside a closet-sized bookshop, the only one open, Naim al-Shatri is nearly in tears. Short, with thin gray hair and dark, brooding eyes, his voice
Source: David Remnick in the course of an interview posted at the New Yorker following his 23 page profile of Clinton
September 17, 2006
Clinton's concern with his reputation came up again last week, when his aides reportedly helped persuade ABC to re-edit a miniseries about the run-up to 9/11. How concerned is he with shaping how he's remembered?
He told me that he liked a biography by John Harris, "The Survivor," that is not entirely complimentary, but he thought it was quite good and accurate and fair. So he's not interested in only his own hagiographies, although no one resists his hagiographers. But h
Source: NYT
September 21, 2006
Muslims angry about Pope Benedict XVI’s remarks on Islam are not the only ones talking about an apology.
“What should he apologize for?” asked Daniele Corbetta, 43, a psychologist in Rome. “There is freedom of speech, and what he said is objectively true.”
There was, without doubt, a low-grade seething where Mr. Corbetta stood, with thousands of pilgrims and tourists — probably few of them Muslims — in St. Peter’s Square on Wednesday, as the pope again addressed a speec
