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: Reuters
January 14, 2009
DALLAS -- President George W. Bush may be looking for a little peace and quiet when he moves out of the White House and into a suburban Dallas cul-de-sac, but the years ahead won't be entirely leisurely.
When Bush turns over responsibility for two wars and a foundering U.S. economy to President-elect Barack Obama on January 20, he will turn to the well-trodden post-presidential path of legacy-building.
He plans to open a presidential library and a policy centre at South
Source: Foxnews
January 13, 2009
In a motion filed Tuesday afternoon, lawyers representing atheists who want religious prayers stripped from next week's official inaugural activities submitted the 1952 Supreme Court brief filed by the United States in Brown v. Board of Education.
They point to language in that brief as evidence that the scheduled prayers including references to God demonstrate an unconstitutional preference of religion over non-religion.
The atheists highlight a section of the histor
Source: BBC
January 13, 2009
Former Liberian warlord Prince Johnson has warned against a witch hunt by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Prince Johnson, now an elected senator, said he had seen a confidential report recommending several war crime indictments, including one for him.
The man whose forces killed and mutilated the body of former President Samuel Doe vowed to resist any effort to arrest him.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia was set up following t
Source: CNN
December 24, 2008
While President-elect Barack Obama will certainly be making history when he takes the oath of office on January 20, he'll also be repeating it -- by placing his hand on the same Bible that Abraham Lincoln used during the inauguration of 1861.
The Constitution does not require presidents to be sworn in on a Bible, though almost every chief executive since George Washington has chosen to do so. Presidents have differed greatly, however, on the question of which passage the Bible shoul
Source: NPR
January 14, 2009
Every incoming president back to George Washington has spoken the 37 words in the oath of office:
"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
But where does the oath come from?
Marvin Pinkert, executive director of the National Archives Experience, says, "If I went up to 12 people
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 14, 2009
Petrol giant Esso has been forced to withdraw advertising posters after it emerged their slogan was the same as the that of Buchenwald concentration camp.
The oil firm and its partner coffee chain Tchibo had not realised the phrase "Jedem den Seinem" – which roughly translates as you get what you deserve – was virtually identical to the words on the gates of the camp
Salomon Korn, vice president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, branded the slogan e
Source: Deutsche Welle
January 14, 2009
The spokeswoman said the government was in contact with Polish authorities about what was required.
"We consider it a core duty of Germany to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive," she said.
Decaying site
An estimated 1.1 million European Jews died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz during World War II. The concentration camp, built in 1940, is badly in need of repair.
Without foreign assistance it faces falling into decay, according
Source: History Today
January 13, 2009
News today of the launch of two important but contrasting archive projects at Oxford and Essex universities.
A University of Essex led census project is set to create a massive historical research resource which focuses society in Britain for the period 1851-1911. The £1.06m project, is a collaboration between the university’s History Department and the UK Data Archive (UKDA), which is based on campus. It aims to bring together more than 200 million individual records from the censu
Source: Foxnews
January 13, 2009
Pope Bendict XVI is launching new guidelines for those who claim the Virgin Mary has appeared to them, in an attempt to end bogus sightings around the globe, the U.K.'s Daily Mail newspaper reported Tuesday.
In his own "holy war," the pontiff will publish criteria to help bishops determine which “visions” are true and which are false. In some cases, the Mail reported, exorcists will be used to determine the validity of a statement.
Between 1905 and 1995, there
Source: BBC
January 14, 2009
The former Czech President Vaclav Havel is in a serious but stable condition after undergoing surgery at a hospital in Prague.
The 72-year-old hero of the 1989 Velvet Revolution has had health problems for many years. He steered Czechs to democracy after the fall of communism.
He was elected Czechoslovakia's first post-communist president in 1989 and then became president of the Czech Republic formed in 1993.
Source: BBC
January 14, 2009
400-year-old "Moon maps" created by a little-known Englishman are to go on display to mark the launch of the International Year of Astronomy.
Experts say they prove their creator - Thomas Harriot - beat Galileo to become the first man to view the Moon through a telescope.
British astronomers hope that, 400 years on, Harriot will finally get some of the wider recognition that he deserves.
Source: BBC
January 14, 2009
Developers say they have discovered the remains of at least 50 anti-French resistance fighters and war victims at a site in central Hanoi.
Workmen found bones and skull fragments while clearing the site of a market.
They also found handcuffs and leg irons, which suggested that some of the dead were prisoners.
The grave dates from 1946-1947, when fighting between Vietnamese resistance and French troops reoccupying the country after World War II broke out.
Source: King 5 news
January 9, 2009
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer was published first as “The Gazette” in 1863, serving a Seattle population of about 250.
For 145 years, it has chronicled the lives of Seattleites and of Seattle itself.
“It just seems like a violation of common sense that the P-I should stop,” said Seattle historian Paul Dorpat. He calls the P-I the single most important source for local history.
Source: Associated Baptist Press
January 9, 2009
Baptists’ signal contribution to American and world history and political thought, historians almost unanimously agree, is their uncompromising emphasis on religious liberty.
But, they hasten to add, the doctrine of soul freedom that grounds Baptists’ belief in religious liberty is the very reason Baptists of varying stripes have been found on both sides of subsequent political and social controversies.
“Baptists were among the first—if not the first—to say in English certainly by
Source: NYT
January 8, 2009
They are warm, they have food and rest rooms, and they are full of highlights of American history. And now, for the early birds to the National Mall, they will be open a bit longer on Inauguration Day because of an agreement between the Presidential Inaugural Committee and the Smithsonian Institution.
The National Museum of American History and the Castle, the first Smithsonian building and home to the Smithsonian Information Center, will open at 8 a.m. on Jan. 20, two hours earlier
Source: AP
January 13, 2009
ATLANTA -- Thousands of documents in the Martin Luther King Jr. Collection at Morehouse College will now be available online for public research, school officials announced on Tuesday.
The collection was acquired in 2006 in an 11th-hour coup led by Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin to buy the papers in a $32 million private sale that thwarted a public auction to be held at Sotheby’s in New York. Morehouse College, where King graduated in 1948, is custodian of the collection of more tha
Source: Times (UK)
January 13, 2009
A mass protest by women campaigning to be allowed to vote has finally come to public attention, almost a century too late to make a difference. Hundreds of suffragettes risked prosecution in 1911 by spoiling their census forms in a coordinated revolt.
But the full impact of their boycott has not emerged until today because of secrecy rules. Census information is usually kept secret for 100 years, but the 1911 documents have been released three years early because the rule was not e
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 13, 2009
The saying goes that the past is a foreign country - and newly-released details from the 1911 census of British life shows how true that expression is.
Personal information from the census, which has been put online for the first time, paints a picture of a society that is in many ways, unrecognisable from modern Britain.
People did different jobs, lived considerably shorter lives and existed in a society that was vastly less equitable, according to 1911 Census - the ol
Source: NYT
January 12, 2009
President Bush held what he called “the ultimate exit interview” on Monday, using the final news conference of his presidency to dispute the idea that the nation’s “moral standing has been damaged” by his actions and to warn President-elect Barack Obama that, despite the turbulence in the economy, his most urgent priority must be fighting “an enemy that would like to attack America and Americans again.”
Looking back over the long arc of his turbulent presidency, Mr. Bush was by turn
Source: National Security Archive
January 13, 2009
During the 1970s the Shah of Iran argued, like current Iranian leaders today, for a nuclear energy capability on the basis of national "rights," while the Ford and Carter administrations worried about nuclear weapons possibilities, according to newly declassified documents published today by the National Security Archive for the first time. Uranium enrichment capability is now the major point of controversy between Tehran and the world community, while during the 1970s Washington's gre
