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: AP
December 14, 2008
A perplexing new chapter is unfolding in Barack Obama's racial saga: Many people insist that "the first black president" is actually not black.
Debate over whether to call this son of a white Kansan and a black Kenyan biracial, African-American, mixed-race, half-and-half, multiracial — or, in Obama's own words, a "mutt" — has reached a crescendo since Obama's election shattered assumptions about race.
Obama has said, "I identify as African-Ameri
Source: NYT Book Review
December 12, 2008
Villagers, acting as human minesweepers, walked ahead of troops in dangerous areas to keep Americans from being blown up. Prisoners were subjected to a variation on waterboarding and jolted with electricity. Teenage boys fishing on a lake, as well as children tending flocks of ducks, were killed. “There are hundreds of such reports in the war-crime archive, each one dutifully recorded, sometimes with no more than a passing sentence or two, as if the killing were as routine as the activity it int
Source: International Herald Tribune
December 14, 2008
It came to John Podesta during a jog through Rock Creek Park over the
Thanksgiving weekend. His boss was going to be impeached and there was no
way around it. It took Rahm Emanuel a little longer to reach that
conclusion. And it fell to Gregory Craig to pick up the pieces once it
happened.
Ten years ago this week, Bill Clinton became the first elected U.S.
president ever impeached by the House of Representatives, the culmination
of a sex-and-lies scandal that consumed the United Sta
Source: International Herald Tribune
December 11, 2008
It's not as if President-elect Barack Obama doesn't have enough on his
plate with a financial meltdown and a home-state scandal. But now he is
delving into the thorny question of who can send the country into war.
In between interviewing cabinet nominees and announcing health care plans,
Obama plans to meet Thursday with the leaders of a commission that has
proposed revamping the legal process for launching military action, to
require more consultation between a president and Congres
Source: International Herald Tribune
December 11, 2008
Thirteen years after the United States brokered the Dayton peace agreement
to end modern Europe's most ferocious ethnic war, fears are mounting that
Bosnia and Herzegovina, poor and divided, is again teetering toward
crisis.
On the surface, this haunted capital, its ancient mosques and Orthodox
churches still pocked with holes from mortar fire, appears to be enjoying
a renaissance. Young professionals throng to stylish cafés and gleaming
new shopping centers while the muezzin herald
Source: AP
December 13, 2008
ROCHESTER, N.Y. – Two explorers conducting underwater surveys of Lake Ontario have uncovered an aquatic mystery — a rare 19th-century schooner sitting upright 500 feet under the waves.
Jim Kennard and Dan Scoville located the 55-foot long dagger-board ship unexpectedly this fall using deep scan sonar equipment off the lake's southern shore, west of Rochester.
The ship is the only dagger-board known to have been found in the Great Lakes. Kennard said vessels of this type
Source: Miami Herald
December 12, 2008
In 1943, a German pilot decided not to shoot down Charlie Brown's damaged
plane. Brown died last month, but he lived to finally see his heroism
recognized.
When World War II bomber pilot Charlie Brown is laid to rest Saturday, his
burial will close a chapter on one of the most remarkable war stories in
modern history.
It's a tale of two pilots -- one American, the other German -- and of a
bloody, deadly battle in the sky that led to an extraordinary friendship.
Source: http://hitlernews.cloudworth.com
December 12, 2008
Australia, Hungary and Lithuania are failing to investigate and prosecute
suspected Nazi war criminals largely due to a lack of political will, the
Simon Wiesenthal Center said Thursday.
The Nazi-hunting group said the same holds true for Croatia, Estonia,
Latvia and Ukraine, adding all countries in question face no legal
obstacles in bringing suspects to justice.
The findings were published in the center's annual report, which graded
the investigation and prosecution efforts
Source: International Herald Tribune
December 12, 2008
As part of the wholesale effort to modernize its military, the Polish
government has officially brought a close to conscription, making last
week's class of drafted recruits the final one after 90 years of
compulsory military service on this soil, which felt the tremors of some
of the worst the last century's wars could offer.
The decision has come at a difficult time. Russia's incursion into
Georgian territory in August awakened real fears, catching policy makers
and citizens off g
Source: AP
December 12, 2008
Jimmy Carter said Friday he would have been "delighted" to meet with Hezbollah officials during his visit to Lebanon and regretted the militant group's leaders refuse to meet with current or former American presidents.
Carter spent five days talking to top Lebanese leaders and members of parliamentary blocs but didn't sit down with lawmakers from the Iranian-backed Hezbollah, which is on the State Department list of terrorist groups.
Carter offered to have his
Source: Guardian (UK)
December 12, 2008
It had seemed an appropriate memorial. In August, Russia's president, Dmitry Medvedev decided to name a street in Moscow after Alexander Solzhenitsyn, shortly after the writer's death aged 89.
But the residents of Alexander Solzhenitsyn Street - as it is now known - appear to have other ideas. Together with Russia's communists, locals have waged a furious campaign against the change of name - and have demanded that the street get its old name of Big Communist Street back
Source: NYT
December 13, 2008
An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.
The history, the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft form here and in Washington among
Source: Times (UK)
December 13, 2008
Russia’s Constitutional Court, which recently transferred from Moscow at Vladimir Putin’s command, is lit more brightly than any other building on St Petersburg’s beautiful English Embankment at night.
At the offices of the leading human rights group Memorial, however, a daylight raid by masked men speaks of a darker Soviet tradition of state power. Police confiscated computer hard drives containing 20 years’ work documenting victims of Stalin’s Terror and political persecution in
Source: Telegraph (UK)
December 12, 2008
Ukrainian-born Ivan Demjanjuk, 88, is alleged to have been involved in the murder of over 29,000 Jews when he served as a guard in several Nazi prisons including the death camp Sobibor in Poland during World War II.
Demjanjuk moved to America in 1952 and changed his first name to John, and now lives as a retired car worker in Ohio.
Last month, a court in Munich ruled that Demjanjuk, who was dubbed Ivan the Terrible for his role in the mass murder, could not be charged
Source: Telegraph (UK)
December 12, 2008
"People need to look past the fact that Buckingham Palace is a royal residence and treat it like a national treasure," the television historian told Mandrake at a Waterstone's book signing for his latest tome, Henry: Virtuous Prince.
"As it is, the palace is a national disgrace. I have filmed there extensively and it has got to the point now that they are just slapping Dulux magnolia paint on the grubby bits. It needs some serious money spent on it. All the palaces a
Source: BBC
December 13, 2008
Files released this autumn at the National Archives in Kew include one dossier showing how the Special Operations Executive - Churchill's "secret army" - was not disbanded at the end of the Second World War, as is commonly thought.
Instead, nearly 300 agents were brought into the Secret Intelligence Service - later MI6.
Officially SOE, the organisation set up to run resistance in occupied countries, was "liquidated" in January 1946.
S
Source: Times (of London)
December 12, 2008
The construction of an exact copy of the Taj Mahal has sparked a diplomatic fracas between India and Bangladesh - raising the vexing issue of whether or not it is possible to claim copyright on a building.
The row began after Ahsanullah Moni, a wealthy Bangladeshi film director, gave the first glimpse of his copy of the Taj Mahal this week.
The project has cost about £40 million and is being built about 20 miles northeast of Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital. But the India
Source: FoxNews.com
December 12, 2008
He is the man who tracked down the Ace of Spades: Saddam Hussein, the top card in the U.S. military's deck of cards, found crouching like a mole in a darkened spider hole under a trap door at the back of a farm in Tikrit.
For the first time since the Army's 4th Infantry Division captured Saddam in a dramatic raid on Dec. 13, 2003, the U.S. intelligence officer who hunted him down has come forward with his story.
Speaking to FOX News, Staff Sgt. Eric Maddox, who still se
Source: BBC
December 12, 2008
The top floors of several high-rises in the Chinese city of Hangzhou are
to be lopped off to help the city's bid for world heritage status,
officials say.
Two exclusive hotels, a TV tower and a number of other buildings around
the beautiful West Lake area will all be made shorter, the developer said.
The 40m yuan ($5.8m) project is to help the city become a Unesco World
Heritage site, Chinese media reports.
But one of the hotels named said it was unaware of the plans.
Source: CNN
December 11, 2008
[David] Plouffe served as Obama’s campaign manager and is often referred to as the"unsung hero" of the president-elect's White House bid. He was largely
responsible for designing the strategy that ultimately dashed Clinton's
own ambitions for the Oval office.
Now, the camera-shy Plouffe is revealing what surprised him the most about
Clinton’s campaign: the New York senator's strategists willingness to
concede a string of caucus states to the Obama camp. In the process Obama
won a vas
