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: WaPo
May 11, 2010
Just after Election Day the fall of her senior year at Princeton, Elena Kagan published an opinion piece in the campus newspaper recounting how she had wept and gotten drunk on vodka at a campaign gathering for a liberal Brooklyn congresswoman who had unexpectedly lost a race for the Senate.
Ronald Reagan was heading to the White House, and Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman -- a champion for women's causes for whom Kagan had toiled 14-hour days as a campaign press assistant -- was leaving Ca
Source: NYT
May 10, 2010
The ground began shifting on Supreme Court politics in President Ronald Reagan’s second term when conservatives pushed for candidates who would reverse what they saw as the excesses of the court under Chief Justices Earl Warren and Warren E. Burger.
In 1986, Mr. Reagan appointed Justice Scalia and elevated Justice William H. Rehnquist to replace Chief Justice Burger. But Mr. Reagan’s nomination of Robert H. Bork a year later was rejected by the Senate after an ideological clash. Onl
Source: LA Times
May 10, 2010
For almost four decades Edward Finch Cox has lived on the periphery of politics.
Actually, the last time most Americans even took notice of Cox was in 1971 during his storybook wedding to Richard Nixon's oldest daughter in the White House Rose Garden. In the years that followed, the tall, fair-haired Cox turned up often by the side of his shamed father-in-law with the 5 o'clock shadow. The Harvard-trained lawyer altogether served three presidents, legions of legal clients, boards of
Source: AP
May 7, 2010
A U.S.-funded program to restore the ruins of Iraq's ancient city of Babylon is threatened by a dispute among Iraqi officials over whether the priority should be preserving the site or making money off it.
Local officials want swift work done to restore the crumbling ruins and start building restaurants and gift shops to draw in tourists, while antiquities officials in Baghdad favor a more painstaking approach to avoid the gaudy restoration mistakes of the past.
The rui
Source: BBC
May 7, 2010
Two complete skeletons thought to date back to medieval times have been dug up by workmen in Gloucester.
The team was working on a £7m project to improve access between the city centre and the new Quays complex when the remains were unearthed on Tuesday.
The adult skeletons were uncovered, along with the remnants of a coffin, in the city's Kimbrose Triangle.
They will not be displayed and will instead be given a respectful reburial after they are examined
Source: BBC
May 10, 2010
Gordon Brown is to step down as Labour leader by September - as his party opens formal talks with the Lib Dems about forming a government.
His announcement came as he and the Conservatives woo the Lib Dems in a battle to run the country.
Mr Brown's presence was seen as harming Labour's chances of Lib Dem backing.
The Tories reacted by making a "final offer" to the Lib Dems of a referendum on changing the voting method to the Alternative Vote sys
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 10, 2010
An Argentine writer is trying to stop a memorabilia dealer from trying to sell what he says is one of few remaining copies of the document at the heart of the film Schindler's List.
The document – a roster of 801 Jewish workers whom the German businessman Oskar Schindler employed to spare them from Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War – is being offered for $2.2 million.
Rosenberg, Emilie Schindler's biographer, says she inherited the widow's interest i
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 10, 2010
Slabs of ancient plaster have fallen from the ceiling of the Colosseum, leading experts to call for a £20 million restoration of Italy's most famous Roman monument.
The three chunks of mortar plummeted to the ground around dawn on Sunday, a few hours before thousands of tourists tramped through the gladiatorial arena.
They crashed through a wire protection net which was supposed to have prevented such accidents, but which is more than 30 years old.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 10, 2010
An NHS health authority spent up to £10,000 of taxpayers' money on a staff survey asking questions including whether they thought Hitler was "cool".
The questionnaire also asked workers to compare the Nazi dictator to their own chief executive.
Workers were asked to rate the "coolness" of other leaders including Richard Branson, Gordon Brown, Winston Churchill and England manager Fabio Capello. The survey, entitled 'Makin
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 10, 2010
Europe's oldest person - who attributed her longevity to a fried egg sandwich every morning - has died weeks after her 114th birthday.
Florrie Baldwin died peacefully in he sleep at the care home where she lived.
She became the oldest woman in Britain in 2007 and last year became the oldest in Europe.
Speaking when she became Britain's oldest woman, Florrie, of Leeds, West Yorks., who was born in 1896 during the reign of Queen Victoria, attributed her li
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
May 10, 2010
President Obama on Monday nominated Elena Kagan, the U.S. solicitor general and a former dean of Harvard Law School, to serve on the Supreme Court, ending weeks of speculation about who would replace Justice John Paul Stevens, who is retiring. Her confirmation rests with the U.S. Senate, where Republican critics are expected to home in on a position she took on military recruiting on college campuses five years ago.
In 2005, Ms. Kagan, along with several dozen other Harvard law prof
Source: Newsweek
May 10, 2010
It's a pretty safe bet that the Democratic-ruled Senate will confirm Solicitor General Elena Kagan, President Obama's Supreme Court nominee, by about Aug. 6, with over 60 votes. But that's not to deny that many conservatives—and some liberals—will raise passionate complaints that the 50-year-old Kagan is unfit to be a justice. Indeed, they've been attacking her for as long as she has been the consensus front-runner for the nomination....
The New York-born Kagan would increase the Co
Source: Irish Times
May 10, 2010
THE LOSS of two million Irish people through starvation and emigration is to be remembered in Mayo this week when the second National Famine Commemoration’s programme opens today.
Writing the Famine in Fiction and Song is the theme for the first in a series of lectures organised by Mayo County Council and the Murrisk Development Association. Writer and songwriter Brendan Graham, vocalist Cathy Jordan and pianist Feargal Murray will participate in the literary and musical evening at
Source: BBC
May 10, 2010
The Spanish grave of a British World War I hero has been saved after an appeal to trace his relatives.
Authorities were threatening to exhume the body of Sir Gilbert Mackereth, who is buried in a San Sebastian cemetery, because of unpaid taxes on the plot.
The Sun newspaper has paid the 330 euro (£287) tax owed on the plot.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 10, 2010
Evidence of flying dinosaurs with a 9ft wingspan and more than 100 razor-sharp teeth that dominated the skies 95 million years ago has been discovered on a building site.
A 14 inch long lower jaw belonging to one of the reptiles was found by an amateur fossil hunter.
Two of its teeth were still present and experts were able to analyse it and produce an artists impression of what the beast looked like.
They have named it Aetodactylus halli after it was un
Source: WaPo
May 10, 2010
The woman President Obama has chosen to be the 112th justice of the Supreme Court has never been a judge -- not that it was of her own choosing.
Elena Kagan was 39 when President Bill Clinton nominated her for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, sometimes referred to as the second most important court in the land. The Republican-controlled Senate never brought her nomination for a vote before Clinton's presidency expired.
Kagan, now 50, went on to
Source: NYT
May 10, 2010
Barring extraordinary circumstances, Solicitor General Elena Kagan should win confirmation to the Supreme Court on the strength of Democrats' numerical advantage in the Senate.
To stop her from becoming the nation's 112th justice, Democrats would have to abandon President Barack Obama and his second high court pick or almost all of the GOP senators would have to agree to filibuster the nomination -- more than a year after seven of them voted for Kagan to become the solicitor general
Source: NYT
May 10, 2010
WASHINGTON — She was a creature of Manhattan’s liberal, intellectual Upper West Side — a smart, witty girl who was bold enough at 13 to challenge her family’s rabbi over her bat mitzvah, cocky (or perhaps prescient) enough at 17 to pose for her high school yearbook in a judge’s robe with a gavel and a quotation from Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court justice, underneath.
She was the razor-sharp newspaper editor and history major at Princeton who examined American socialism, and th
Source: BBC News
May 10, 2010
A new mass grave thought to hold the bodies of about 250 Kosovo Albanians has been found in Serbia, the country's war crimes prosecutor has told the BBC.
It said the information had come from Eulex, the EU police mission in Kosovo, and Serbia was sending investigators.
The victims are believed to have been killed during the 1998-99 conflict, when Serbian forces fought ethnic Albanian rebels in Kosovo.
The grave is near the town of Raska, close to the bord
Source: AP
May 10, 2010
Solicitor General Elena Kagan will be nominated Monday to the Supreme Court by President Barack Obama, a person familiar with the president's thinking says, positioning the high court to have three women justices for the first time.
Obama plans to announce his choice at 10 a.m. in the East Room of the White House. The source spoke on condition of anonymity because the decision, which came after a monthlong search, had not been made public. Shortly before 8 a.m., Kagan emerged from h
