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)
January 22, 2009
Charles Darwin's tree of life, which shows how species are related, is " wrong" and "misleading", claim scientists.
They believe the concept misleads us because his theory limits and even obscures the study of organisms and their ancestries.
Evolution is far too complex to be explained by a few roots and branches, they claim.
In Darwin's The Origin of Species, published in 1859, the British naturalist drew a diagram of an oak to depict h
Source: BBC
January 21, 2009
A fresh attempt is to be made to reform a 308-year-old law which bars the monarch from marrying a Catholic.
Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris will present a bill to parliament in a bid to change the Act of Settlement.
He also wants to end the discrimination against female heirs to the throne, but his bill does not alter the requirement for the monarch to be a Protestant.
There have already been several bids to reform the law on the grounds it is outdated and discriminatory.
The 1701 Act of Set
Source: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/
January 21, 2009
In March 4, 1861, as President Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office, a woman now known as Grandma Foy stood in the crowd in Washington, D.C., wearing a black Chinese silk shawl, according to the McKain family story. More than 21/2 years later, on Nov. 19, 1863, she wore the shawl as she listened to Lincoln give his short but famous Gettysburg Address.
On Tuesday, Jan. 20, as President Obama took the oath of office, Bellingham [Washington] resident Debe McKain attended an inaugura
Source: Foxnews
January 22, 2009
A headline proclaiming "Huge Fire in the Reichstag" greeted Germans at newsstands Thursday — and although the story is more than 70 years old, customers are snapping it up.
Dieter Grosse, who runs a newsstand at Berlin's busy Friedrichstrasse station, said he has sold about 600 copies of Zeitungszeugen — a new publication that reprints Nazi-era newspapers — since it first edition went on sale Jan. 8.
But the project has drawn criticism from Jewish organization
Source: CNN
January 22, 2009
George Bush should have pardoned I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Dick Cheney said after stepping down as vice president this week.
"He was the victim of a serious miscarriage of justice, and I strongly believe that he deserved a presidential pardon. Obviously, I disagree with President Bush's decision," Cheney told Stephen F. Hayes of the Weekly Standard, a leading conservative Washington magazine.
Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff, was convicted of ob
Source: David Leonhardt in the NYT
January 21, 2009
The recession of the early 1980s doesn’t have a catchy name, and almost half of Americans are too young to have any real memory of it. But it was terrible — qualitatively different from the mild recessions of 1990-91 and 2001.
The first big blow to the economy was the 1979 revolution in Iran, which sent oil prices skyrocketing. The bigger blow was a series of sharp interest-rate increases by the Federal Reserve, meant to snap inflation. Home sales plummeted. At their worst, they wer
Source: AP
January 22, 2009
WASHINGTON — Government watchdogs are cheering President Barack Obama's move to change how open records laws are interpreted as a sign of greater disclosure of agency information than during the Bush administration.
Obama's instruction to federal agencies Wednesday to be more responsive to requests made under the Freedom of Information Act is not the first time a president has pushed for wider release of information. The Carter and Clinton administrations had similar policies that c
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, is published by the Federation of American Scientists
January 22, 2009
In a breathtaking series of statements and executive actions, President Barack Obama yesterday announced “the beginning of a new era of openness in our country.”“For a long time now there’s been too much secrecy in this city,” he told reporters at a January 21 swearing-in ceremony.“The old rules said that if
Source: WaPo
January 21, 2009
[HNN: In its special inaugural edition the WaPo tells the story of the Caldwell family, tracing this local family's history through slavery and freedom. ]
As the great and sometimes heartbreaking flow of events swept around
the contours of this city, the Caldwells set themselves into the
portrait album of America. Figures pressed between the pages of
history.
One black American family: A mother and a father. Four daughters and a
son. Forebears who reach back to slavery, and gr
Source: NYT
January 21, 2009
Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address on Tuesday was a stark repudiation of the era of George W. Bush and the ideological certainties that surrounded it, wrapped in his pledge to drive the United States into “a new age” by reclaiming the values of an older one.
It was a delicate task, with Mr. Bush and Dick Cheney sitting feet from him as Mr. Obama, only minutes into his term as president, described the false turns and the roads not taken.
To read his words literally, Mr. Obama blamed
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 21, 2009
The Nazi doctor Josef Mengele is responsible for the astonishing number of twins in a small Brazilian town, an Argentine historian has claimed.
The steely hearted "Angel of Death", whose mission was to create a master race fit for the Third Reich, was the resident medic at Auschwitz from May 1943 until his flight in the face of the Red Army advance in January 1945.
His task was to carry out experiments to discover by what method of genetic quirk twins were p
Source: New Scientist
January 21, 2009
An old glass jar inside a beaten up old safe at the bottom of a waste pit may seem an unlikely place to find a pivotal piece of 20th century history. But that's just where the first batch of weapons-grade plutonium ever made has been found - abandoned at the world's oldest nuclear processing site.
The potentially dangerous find was made at Hanford, Washington, the site of a nuclear reservation, established in 1943 to support the US's pioneering nuclear weapons program.
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
January 21, 2009
In a parting shot, the Bush administration's Justice Department shrugged off a San Francisco federal judge's order to make a classified document available to lawyers for an Islamic group challenging the legality of the outgoing president's secret wiretapping program.
National security officials, not judges, must decide whether private citizens - even those with security clearances - are entitled to see classified material, Justice Department lawyers said in a filing Monday night.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 22, 2009
Hailed as a genius and the father of astronomy, researchers believe Galileo Galilei could have been even more accurate in his work had he not been suffering from a genetic disease which eventually left him blind.
They want to extract DNA samples from his remains, which are kept in a tomb in Florence's Santa Croce Basilica.
"If we succeed, thanks to DNA, in understanding how this disease distorted his sight, it could bring about important discoveries for the history
Source: Independent (UK)
January 22, 2009
Both will be remembered as vertically challenged men in a vertiginous hurry. Both were helped into power by beautiful wives, with whom they quarrelled. Both believed that they had a destiny to rebuild France and, above all, to change the way the French think of themselves. Both are known for a weakness for kitsch and anything that glitters.
Both came from non-French, minor aristocratic backgrounds and despised the Parisian elite. Both had, from the start of their career, an o
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 21, 2009
A dissident Vietnamese novelist has published an explosive novel with lurid claims about Ho Chi Minh's private life.
According to Duong Thu Huong, 61, whose works are banned but widely admired in her native country, the man the Vietnamese worship as "Uncle Ho" kept a mistress 40 years his junior who was murdered by Communist Party bosses.
"His companions were terrified it would damage his saint-like image," the author claims.
She also cl
Source: IHT
January 22, 2009
When he vowed in his inaugural address to "restore science to its rightful place," President Barack Obama signaled an end to eight years of stark tension between science and government.
But many of the Bush administration's restrictions on science, like those governing stem cell research, will take time to be removed. And whether the Obama administration entirely reverses strict controls over the government's main scientific agencies remains to be seen.
On iss
Source: Foxnews
January 21, 2009
President Obama's executive order will still allow former presidents to have certain documents kept private, but they no longer may compel the National Archives to do so.
The executive order also makes clear that neither former vice presidents nor relatives of former presidents who have died have authority to keep records private.
Obama's action on Wednesday -- his first full day in office -- overturned an earlier order issued by George W. Bush that prompted a federal
Source: CNN
January 21, 2009
Alfred Bouey, an 84-year-old African-American, still remembers the stories from his grandfather about the scars on his body from the beatings he took as a slave in the South.
Bouey, of Oak Park, Illinois, attended Tuesday's inauguration of President Obama. Words can't express his excitement and happiness about witnessing history.
A World War II veteran, he never thought he would live to see a black president in America.
Bouey grew up in Arkansas and saw rac
Source: Politico
January 21, 2009
President Barack Obama got off to a quick start in his first full day in office, mixing ceremonial duties with his first official forays into domestic and foreign policy..
Perhaps most significantly, Obama underscored that a new administration had taken over the capital with a series of executive orders aimed at creating the open government he promised on the campaign trail.
Obama said the moves were aimed at helping to “restore that faith in government without which we
