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: CNN
December 28, 2008
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that despite President Bush's low
approval ratings, people will soon"start to thank this president for what
he's done."
"So we can sit here and talk about the long record, but what I would say
to you is that this president has faced tougher circumstances than perhaps
at any time since the end of World War II, and he has delivered policies
that are going to stand the test of time," Rice said in an interview that
aired on CBS'"Sunday Morning."
Source: AP
December 27, 2008
NEW YORK –- The publisher of a disputed Holocaust memoir has canceled the book, adding the name Herman Rosenblat to an increasingly long line of literary fakers and bringing down with a crash his story — embraced by Oprah Winfrey, among others — of meeting his future wife at a Nazi concentration camp.
Rosenblat's "Angel at the Fence" had been scheduled to come out in February, but Berkley Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA), withdrew the memoir Saturday following alle
Source: New Republic
December 26, 2008
We've just published a new article updating Gabriel Sherman's original reporting on the Holocaust memoir Angel at the Fence. Publisher Berkley Books, an imprint of Penguin Group, continues to defend the memoir, but auther Herman Rosenblat's sister-in-law and a fellow Holocaust survivor, both speaking publicly for the first time, say that Herman's story is fabricated. Sidney Finkel, a 77-year-old Holocaust survivor who was liberated with Herman, tells TNR that he ate with Herman and Roma Rosenbla
Source: NYT
December 27, 2008
IN bull markets, it’s wise to guard against thinking that “this time is different ” — that stocks will keep rising forever. Sooner or later, the laws of economics reassert themselves. And it’s wise to remember that major market declines follow some common patterns, too.
Right now, it’s tempting to think that this bear market is so unusual that history’s lessons are of little use, and that the types of investments that are weakest now will keep dropping indefinitely. No two market en
Source: Rasmussen Reports
December 27, 2008
It’s a showdown between the two most influential presidents of the 20th Century. Franklin D. Roosevelt versus Ronald W. Reagan.
Forty-five percent (45%) of U.S. voters say FDR, the Democratic father of the big government New Deal who led the country to victory in World War II, was the better president of the two.
But 40% say Reagan, the Republican champion of small-government conservatism and the winner of the Cold War, was a better president. Fifteen percent (15%) aren
Source: NYT
December 27, 2008
The National Archives has put into effect an emergency plan to handle electronic records from the Bush White House amid growing doubts about whether its new $144 million computer system can cope with the vast quantities of digital data it will receive when President Bush leaves office on Jan. 20.
The technical challenge was an inevitable result of the explosion in cybercommunications, which will make the electronic record of the Bush years about 50 times as large as that left by th
Source: Telegraph (UK)
December 26, 2008
Ban Ki-moon said he is hopeful that a United Nations inquiry into Benazir
Bhutto's assassination will be launched soon.
In a statement released on the eve of the anniversary of Bhutto's murder,
the UN Secretary General sought to assure the people and government of
Pakistan of"his commitment to contribute to their search for truth and
justice".
He said that he"is hopeful that ... the Commission [of inquiry] could be
established in the near future," a UN statement said.
H
Source: Telegraph (UK)
December 27, 2008
Thousands of heritage sites are in disrepair and decay after the
Government cut the budget for maintaining them, it has emerged.
Among the 37,000 sites of national importance that have been identified as
being at risk are Hadrian's Wall, Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire, the
ancestral home of Lord Byron, and Queen Victoria's final resting place at
Frogmore House, near Windsor Castle.
In the last year, just 57 threatened buildings were repaired and restored
to a state where th
Source: Forward
December 24, 2008
The audience was a receptive one at the Brookings Institution during a recent presentation on foreign policy recommendations for the incoming president. Experts explained in detail their view of the Bush administration’s blunders and how the Obama team should reverse almost every policy the outgoing administration has set in place over the past eight years.
Still, as the litany of criticism continued, one person in the back row of the Brookings briefing room seemed to draw attentio
Source: Deutsche Welle
December 26, 2008
The German government has announced that in honor of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, next November it will release the results of an architecture competition to design a memorial commemorating German unification.
Speaking with AP news agency, Minister of Culture Bernd Neumann said that construction on the memorial will start in 2010 and should be complete by 2012. Berlin has set aside 15 million euros ($21 million) for the project.
The architects
Source: BBC
December 27, 2008
The former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin may have killed millions of his own people but this weekend he could be chosen by Russians as their greatest-ever countryman.
Inspired by the British competition 100 Greatest Britons, one of Russia's biggest television stations Rossiya has been conducting a nationwide poll for much of this year.
From an original list of 500 candidates now there are just 12 names left from which viewers can select their all-time hero.
Source: BBC
December 27, 2008
Pakistan has marked a year since the assassination of Benazir Bhutto with a two-minute silence, while thousands of mourners visited her mausoleum.
President Asif Ali Zardari, her widower, used the occasion to call for peace and democracy in Pakistan and the resolution of problems through talks.
Analysts say the call was also aimed at India, which blames the recent attack on Mumbai on Pakistani militants.
Mrs Bhutto died in a suicide attack in Rawalpindi
Source: Guardian (UK)
December 27, 2008
It must have been an appalling moment when a Viking realised he had paid two cows for a fake designer sword; a clash of blade on blade in battle would have led to his sword, still sharp enough to slice through bone, shattering like glass.
"You really didn't want to have that happen," said Dr Alan Williams, an archaeometallurgist and consultant to the Wallace Collection, the London museum which has one of the best assemblies of ancient weapons in the world. He and Tony Fry,
Source: P.S. Ruckman, Jr. at PardonPower.com
December 25, 2008
"Experts said they knew of no other instance in which a presidential pardon had been revoked. They said it was not clear whether Bush was legally allowed to do so." - Chicago Tribune, December 25, 2008
One can hardly blame the Tribune for printing this statement. Lord knows countless other news agencies are doing the same thing today. There were deadlines to meet. There are plenty of people willing to talk about pardons, and even more willing to talk about the president! But there are ver
Source: CNN
December 26, 2008
A new national poll suggests that three out of four Americans feel
President Bush's departure from office is coming not a moment too soon.
Seventy-five percent of those questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp.
survey released Friday said they're glad Bush is going; 23 percent
indicated they'll miss him."Earlier this year, Bush scored some of the lowest presidential approval
ratings we've seen in half a century, so it's understandable that the
public is eager for a new president
Source: NYT
December 25, 2008
In the past decade, China has invested upward of $1 trillion, mostly earnings from manufacturing exports, into American government bonds and government-backed mortgage debt. That has lowered interest rates and helped fuel a historic consumption binge and housing bubble in the United States.
China, some economists say, lulled American consumers, and their leaders, into complacency about their spendthrift ways.
“This was a blinking red light,” said Kenneth S. Rogoff, a pr
Source: Time Magazine
December 24, 2008
Commander Frank Borman was very clear about the fact that no one aboard his spacecraft would be getting drunk on the way back from the moon. NASA had packed a couple of miniatures of brandy aboard Apollo 8 for the occasion - it wasn't enough for three grown men to get anything close to tipsy, but it was a couple of minis more than any crew had ever taken into space before, and when you're piloting a ship that is screaming to Earth at 25,000 miles per hour and you have to hit a narrow atmospheric
Source: USA Today
December 25, 2008
A month before his inauguration, Americans choose Barack Obama as the man they admire most in the world, according to a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll. It's the first time a president-elect has topped the annual survey in more than a half-century.
President Bush falls to a distant second after seven years as the most-admired man.
Hillary Rodham Clinton leads the list of most-admired woman, a spot she's held for 13 of the past 16 years — as first lady, then New York senator a
Source: San Francisco Examiner
December 24, 2008
Imagine San Francisco without the Bay Bridge. Or the airport. Or Treasure Island. Or Aquatic Park. Or the zoo.
That is just a partial list of local landmarks that exist as a result of the New Deal, President Franklin Roosevelt’s economic policy in the 1930s to help dig the nation out of the Great Depression.
Those investments, which continued until World War II, put millions of people to work and created much of the infrastructure we still rely upon today, historians say.
Source: AFP
December 26, 2008
For over 50 years, the inhabitants of this small east German town of Treuenbrietzen kept quiet about a World War II massacre. And many today still have no wish to revisit the past.
The long-forgotten slaughter of some 1,000 German civilians occurred after Russian Red Army soldiers occupied the town, some 40 kilometres (25 miles) southwest of Berlin, in April 1945, in the final days of the war.
Under East German communist rule, it would have been unwise to mention the m
