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: Telegraph (UK)
June 2, 2010
The Indian government has demanded the return of the "cursed" Koh i Noor diamond, a symbol of imperial power and the inspiration for the Victorian author Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone.
The diamond has been in British possession since East India Company forces in India defeated the Maharaja of Punjab in 1849 and forced him to hand it over to Queen Victoria as a tribute following the Treaty of Lahore.
It was last worn in public by the late Queen Mother and last
Source: AP
June 2, 2010
A potentially record-breaking number of congressional challengers are running this election year.
Discontent with incumbents and anti-Washington anger are boosting the numbers. More than 2,300 people are running for the House and Senate in the midterms, the highest number in at least 35 years. That's according to data provided to The Associated Press from the Federal Election Commission, which began tracking candidates in 1975.
Source: CNN
June 2, 2010
He was succeeded in the White House by the most web savvy administration in U.S. history, but that has not stopped former President George W. Bush from joining Facebook.
The office of the 43rd President recently established an official presence on the popular social networking site, CNN has confirmed.
The former president has nearly 30,000 Facebook fans connected to his Facebook page which is located at www.facebook.com/geor
Source: CHE
June 2, 2010
Higher-education groups praised a set of a national standards for elementary and secondary education that governors and state education officials announced on Wednesday, saying the guidelines would help improve college preparedness and accessibility.
The National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers collaborated with educators, researchers, and other experts to write the Common Core State Standards, which outline specific exp
Source: Boston Herald
June 1, 2010
What happened to Col. Robert Gould Shaw’s sword? The mystery of the war hero’s missing blade “sticks like a fishbone in the city’s throat,” to steal a line from Robert Lowell’s poem about the monument to Shaw and the black soldiers of the storied 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment that he led.
“I hope they replace it soon,” said Lt. Benny White, a re-enactor with the 54th Regiment, who added that it has gone missing several times before, but seeing the scar on the statue
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 28, 2010
Almost 100 tombs belonging to German soldiers killed in the two world wars were desecrated overnight at a cemetery in eastern France, according to police.
Crosses were broken and tombstones overturned in the Guebwiller Franco-German cemetery in the Alsace region. The vandalism affected 95 tombs.
An offensive message was written on at least one of the tombs, the Haut-Rhin departmental police authority said, without giving further details....
Source: AP
June 2, 2010
The man was in his 80s and dying. The woman was 73 and held his hand. They each lost a son in the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and fought for decades to get China to acknowledge the deaths.
But Duan Hongbing wouldn't live to see that day.
"I held his hand and told him that I won't give up," the woman, Zhang Xianling, said she told Duan on a visit to his Beijing hospital bed. She said he squeezed her hand and closed his eyes in response, no longer able to sp
Source: David Firestone in the NYT
May 31, 2010
[David Firestone writes for the NYT.]
Few members of the Tea Party have endorsed Rand Paul’s misgivings about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but a surprising number are calling for the repeal of an older piece of transformative legislation: the 17th Amendment. If you don’t have the Constitution on your smartphone, that’s the one adopted in 1913 that provides for direct popular election of United States senators.
Allowing Americans to choose their own senators seems so ob
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 2, 2010
The Savoy Hotel billed it as the Monet Suite Experience.
For £720 per person, art lovers could stay in the room from which the artist famously spent six months painting his landscapes of the River Thames in London.
However, a new study has now shown that those prepared to pay for the Monet Suite are not actually experiencing the painter's time at the hotel, but that of his next door neighbour.
Scientists have analysed the French Impressionist's paintings and disc
Source: BBC News
June 2, 2010
The Volkswagen camper van celebrates 60 years of production this year - and for its generations of fans, the love affair is far from over.
They lie on their backs in oil, get pulled from side to side by their brakes and greet steep hills with a nervous sigh but when you are truly in love nothing really matters.
The owners of vintage VW camper vans are a dedicated bunch, lavishing care, attention and money on their beloved wheels.
They are the first to admit
Source: BBC News
June 2, 2010
One of the largest collections of Sir Winston Churchill memorabilia, including an unsmoked cigar, is expected to fetch £1m at auction later.
The items are being sold by US publishing magnate, Steve Forbes, who amassed them over three decades.
The collection also features the wartime leader's official engagements diary and candid letters to colleagues.
Auctioneer Christie's says the items, being sold in three parts, provide an exceptional insight into the ma
Source: CNN
June 2, 2010
The mayor of Gary, Indiana, and Michael Jackson's father, Joe, on Wednesday will announce "a major move forward" to bring a museum and performance arts center bearing the singer's name to the city.
Mayor Rudy Clay has said the project has the potential to bring 500,000 to 750,000 visitors to Gary and an annual income of $100 million to $150 million dollars to the community.
In addition, the Jackson Family Museum and a Michael Jackson Performing Arts Center wil
Source: Essence
June 1, 2010
After 59 years in an unmarked grave, Henrietta Lacks was honored with a headstone for her resting place, reports the Virginia Pilot. Friends and family gathered for a small ceremony in Clover, Virginia where Lacks has been buried on a family plot since 1951....
Source: The Root
May 28, 2010
When Adele Logan Alexander was doing research for her doctorate at Howard University, she stumbled on a remarkable and largely forgotten power couple who were born nearly 150 years ago: William Henry Hunt and Ida Alexander Gibbs. Hunt was the first African American to enjoy a full-fledged career in the U.S. State Department; he served as consul in Madagascar, in eastern France and Guadeloupe. His wife was one of the early black female internationalists, helping W.E.B. Du Bois organize the Pan-Af
Source: WaPo
June 2, 2010
LOUISVILLE -- The push to integrate Kentucky's private social clubs, whose members clung to old notions of Southern white privilege for decades after the end of Jim Crow, began in the early 1990s with a lone, quiet protest: At lunchtime on days when the weather was nice, a black preacher and civil rights activist named Louis Coleman would put up a folding card table in front of one of the many unofficially restricted clubs here; set it with a tablecloth, china and candles; and dine on buns and l
Source: WaPo
June 2, 2010
A Minnesota law professor jailed in Rwanda and charged with genocide denial has long been a sharp critic of the central African nation's president and even helped file a lawsuit accusing the one-time rebel leader of sparking the slaughter that erupted there in 1994.
Peter Erlinder, 62, a professor at the William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul with a history of taking on unpopular causes, was arrested Friday, about a week after going to Rwanda to help with the legal defense of
Source: NYT
June 2, 2010
North Korea’s soccer team arrived Tuesday at the World Cup, where it will be supported by cheerleaders recruited from China, led by a forward born in Japan and prohibited at home from receiving free television coverage provided by fellow competitor and political rival South Korea.
There is much intrigue surrounding the mostly unknown team from North Korea. One of the world’s most closed nations will open slightly to participate in the world’s biggest sporting event, even as it is be
Source: WaPo
June 2, 2010
The brown goo oozed from the drill hole like a primordial porridge -- from 60 feet beneath the Jefferson Memorial, it was some of the muck that's under the Mall and part of the stuff that has been slowly swallowing the memorial's sea wall for years.
Centuries of Potomac River sediment and layers of dredged fill, it is the material engineers are drilling through to reach bedrock and anchor the famed memorial's sea wall, for the first time, on a solid foundation.
On Tues
Source: Science News
May 31, 2010
Oyster shells excavated from a well in Jamestown, Va., the first permanent British settlement in North America, bolster the notion that the first colonists suffered an unusually deep and long-lasting drought.
The shells reveal that water in the James River near the colony, where many of those oysters were harvested, was much saltier then than along that stretch of the estuary today, says Howard Spero, a geochemist at the University of California, Davis. For the water to have been so
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 1, 2010
Meet "Phoenix," a new pterosaur that once flew over what is now the Sahara desert.
The giant flying reptile, also known as a pterodactyl, lived 95 million years ago and is described in the latest issue of the journal PLoS ONE. Its scientific name is Alanqa saharica, which basically means "Phoenix of the Sahara" in Arabic. The Phoenix was a mythological flying creature that died in a fire and was reborn from the ashes of that fire.
This pterosaur Phoe
