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: Slate
January 19, 2009
Bill Clinton is sworn in for his second term as president of the United StatesBarack Obama will be sworn in as president Tuesday with the same Bible that Abraham Lincoln used for his first inauguration. As his transition team noted in its press release, "President-elect Obama will be the first President sworn in using the Lincoln Bible since its initial use in 1861." Why haven't other presidents used the historic artifact?
Because the Library of Congress didn't offer it up
Source: Spiegel Online
January 20, 2009
The city of Berlin has long been trying to decide what to do with the monumental Tempelhof airport, built in the heart of the city by the Nazis. Some of the most recent proposals include a 1,000 meter mountain and a gigantic red-light district.
"The mother of all airports" is how star architect Sir Norman Foster once described Berlin's Tempelhof airport. Visitors to the site might agree. Built by the Nazis as the entry point to Hitler's never realized Third Reich capital G
Source: AP
January 19, 2009
WASHINGTON -- A federal judge ruled Monday that Vice President Dick Cheney has broad discretion in determining what records created during his eight-year tenure must be preserved.
Absent any evidence that Cheney's office is failing to safeguard records, it is up to the vice president to determine how he deals with material, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled.
"Congress drastically limited the scope of outside inquiries related to the vice president's
Source: BBC
January 19, 2009
China has declared a new annual holiday in Tibet called Serfs' Emancipation Day, to mark the end of what it says was a system of feudal oppression.
The local parliament in Tibet has passed a bill which declares 28 March as the new holiday.
The announcement comes in the run-up to the 50th anniversary of the escape into exile of the Dalai Lama.
It was on March 28th 1959 that the Communist Party announced the dissolution of the existing local government in
Source: History Today
January 20, 2009
In 1925, the American anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber (1876-1960) discovered a series of ‘trophy heads’ at six different sites in the region on the southern coast of Peru at the heart of the Nazca civilization, which flourished from approximately the first to the eighth centuries AD. The lips of the heads were sewn together with cactus spines and all the heads featured a hole in the centre of the forehead through which a carrying rope was inserted. Their meaning has remained a myth, however,
Source: AP
January 19, 2009
When Peter Sachs was only a year old in 1938, the Nazis seized his father's collection of 12,500 rare posters on the orders of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.
Sachs' father, Hans — a Jewish dentist — was then thrown into the Sachsenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin. After his wife managed to secure his release, the family fled to Boston — leaving the posters behind.
Today, some 4,000 of the posters, worth at least euro4.5 million ($5.9 million), are in the
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 20, 2009
Heavy rains have damaged part of Peru's famous Nazca lines, depositing desert clay and sand on top of three fingers of a geoglyph shaped like a pair of hands.
Culture Institute said that water from the unusually heavy rains washed off the nearby Pan-American highway had pushed sand and clay onto part of the site on Sunday.
The institute plans to clear the material and restore the glyph, Ms Olaechea said.
Fully visible only from the sky, they are one of P
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 20, 2009
Englishmen aboard the Titanic were less likely to survive than their American counterparts because of their good manners, a new study suggests.
They may have insisted that lifeboat places were given to "women and children first" and queued for a place while others made saving their own lives the priority, it is believed.
English people were seven per cent less likely to survive the 1912 disaster than others on board, according to the study. By contrast, Ameri
Source: Foxnews
January 19, 2009
To mark the 200th anniversary of writer Edgar Allan Poe's birth, a mysterious visitor again placed three red roses and a half-filled bottle of cognac at Poe's grave in Baltimore before quietly slipping away.
The curator of the Poe House and Museum, Jeff Jerome, said about 50 people waited outside the cemetery of Westminster Presbyterian Church, hoping to catch a glimpse Monday of the elusive man known as the "Poe toaster." The man returns each year in the early morning dar
Source: AP
January 19, 2009
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Salman Rushdie: Fatwa "The Albatross Around My Neck"
NEW YORK — Nearly 20 years after being driven underground by a religious decree, he is now Sir Salman Rushdie, properly famous and free, yet still burdened by his status as a symbol of persecution.
"This is the albatross around my neck," the novelist said Sunday night during a conversation with author-activist Irshad Manji at the 92nd S
Source: LiveScience
January 19, 2009
A choice few inaugural speeches are remembered in the annals of history, some for particularly stirring turns of phrase and others for striking just the right note for the nation at the time.
Others are totally forgotten, or at best remembered for how bad they were.
These worst inaugural addresses in U.S. presidential history represent a laundry list of what not to do on your big day, from boring the crowd with administrative details to droning on for two hours in the b
Source: AP
January 19, 2009
WASHINGTON –- Nature turned against one of America's early civilizations 3,600 years ago, when researchers say earthquakes and floods, followed by blowing sand, drove away residents of an area that is now in Peru. "This maritime farming community had been successful for over 2,000 years, they had no incentive to change, and then all of a sudden, boom, they just got the props knocked out from under them," anthropologist Mike Moseley of the University of Florida said in a statement.
Source: AP
January 19, 2009
WASHINGTON – Joe Biden's wife said Monday that he had his pick of being Barack Obama's running mate or the secretary of state nomination that eventually went to Hillary Rodham Clinton, a slip that the vice president-elect immediately tried to shush.
Jill Biden's comment came during an appearance with her husband on "The Oprah Winfrey Show," taped at Washington's Kennedy Center on the eve of the inauguration.
"Joe had the choice to be secretary of state or
Source: AFP
January 19, 2009
ROME -– Italian scientists are trying to get Galileo's DNA in order to figure out how the astronomer forged groundbreaking theories on the universe while gradually becoming blind, a historian said Monday.
Scientists at Florence's Institute and Museum of the History of Science want to exhume the body of 17th Century astronomer Galileo Galilei to find out exactly what he could see through his telescope.
The Italian astronomer -- who built on the work of predecessor Nicola
Source: Editor & Publisher
January 18, 2009
In a remarkable statement one day before the birthday holiday for Martin Luther King Jr. -- and two days before the inauguration of Barack Obama -- the Meridian (Miss.) Star has, in an editorial, offered an apology for its past coverage of civil rights issues.
It closed: "There was a time when this newspaper – and many others across the south -- acted with gross neglect by largely ignoring the unfairness of segregated schools, buses, restaurants, washrooms, theaters and other
Source: Newsweek
January 16, 2009
Imagine—just for a second—that it's 2020, and George W. Bush has restored his reputation. (I know, it's hard to imagine, but be creative.) Now try to answer this question: what would it take to actually make that happen?
The easy answer is that somehow between now and then, Iraq becomes a flourishing democracy, a source of cheap oil for the U.S., and a staunch ally in fending off the spread of terrorism in the region. Or that—by some sort of miracle—the American economy recovers, an
Source: BBC
January 14, 2009
The unexpected discovery of a grandfather's war diary inspired one Shropshire man to trace his entire journey across the Western Front.
For years the diary of World War I soldier Edgar Lucas lay forgotten in a cupboard.
It was only when his grandson Rob was sorting through possessions after the death of his father Dennis that he came across the book, which recorded Pte Lucas's journey across the Western Front.
The find inspired Mr Lucas, of Highley, Shro
Source: Spiegel Online
January 16, 2009
Over 400 years after the death of Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, scientists in Prague are preparing to exhume his body. Was Europe's most renowned scholar poisoned with mercury? A Danish scholar claims to have decoded the murderer's diary.
Walls of people formed to watch a funeral procession pass through the streets of Prague on Nov. 4, 1601. A herald carrying a billowing damask flag was followed by 12 imperial guards bearing a coffin covered with black satin. The man inside wore a
Source: BBC
January 19, 2009
Americans are marking the annual public holiday in memory of black civil rights leader Martin Luther King - on the eve of Barack Obama's inauguration.
The US president-elect will spend the day attending community projects in Washington in memory of Dr King, who was assassinated in 1968.
Mr Obama told hundreds of thousands at a rally on Sunday that "the dream of our founders will live on in our time".
Washington is braced for unprecedented crowd
Source: CNN
January 19, 2009
More than two-thirds of African-Americans believe Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision for race relations has been fulfilled, a CNN poll found -- a figure up sharply from a survey in early 2008.
The CNN-Opinion Research Corp. survey was released Monday, a federal holiday honoring the slain civil rights leader and a day before Barack Obama is to be sworn in as the first black U.S. president.
The poll found 69 percent of blacks said King's vision has been fulfilled in the more
