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 2, 2008
RAYMONDVILLE, Texas – A judge dismissed indictments against Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Monday and told the southern Texas prosecutor who brought the case to exercise caution as his term in office ends.
Willacy County District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra had accused Cheney and the other defendants of responsibility for prisoner abuse. The judge's order ended two weeks of sometimes-bizarre court proceedings.
Source: BBC
December 1, 2008
For the first time since 2003, Iran and Iraq have exchanged the remains of
soldiers killed in the war between the two countries.
The bodies of 241 soldiers, most of them Iraqis, were handed over at a
border crossing near Basra.
It is the first time remains were exchanged since the fall of Saddam
Hussein in 2003.
Source: CNN
December 1, 2008
Thousands of Cubans, including President Raul Castro and Communist Party
leaders, flocked to a Catholic ceremony on Saturday putting a 19th century
monk on the path to sainthood.
Saturday's Mass honored Friar Jose Olallo Valdes, known as the father of
the poor. It was the first beatification ceremony on the island."From here on, let him be called blessed," said the pope's representative,
Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints
at the Vatican.
Source: BBC
December 1, 2008
More than 500,000 people have died from Aids-related illnesses in the US
in the last 27 years - but has Aids really changed the country?
The actor Paul Michael Glaser, who presents a Radio 2 documentary on the
subject on Tuesday, has no doubt it has had a tremendous impact at a
personal level.
Best known as Starsky in the long-running television show"Starsky &
Hutch," Glaser said:"Aids had a huge impact on my life and on hundreds of
thousands of my fellow Americans."
Gl
Source: AP
December 2, 2008
WASHINGTON — Documents released Tuesday from Richard M. Nixon's White House years shed new light on just how much the government struggled with growing public unrest over the protracted war in Vietnam.
The National Archives opened nearly 200 hours of White House tape recordings and 90,000 pages of documents.
A newly declassified memo to Nixon from his secretary of defense at the time reflects just how much the administration felt and discussed public pressure — even as
Source: Philip Kennicott in the WaPo
December 2, 2008
Over time, the U.S. Capitol has taken on two very different faces. What was once deemed the back side of the building -- facing the Mall -- became a grand, ceremonial front, with the addition of dramatic stairs, terraces and landscaping that emphasized its prominence on a hill. To the east, the old "front" of the Capitol became, by contrast, more modest, accessible and pastoral. Before ground was broken for the new Capitol Visitor Center in 2000, you could stand on the east side and im
Source: Telegraph (UK)
December 2, 2008
But more betrayals were over petty family and neighbour disputes than accusations of being French Jews.
The findings were aired at the world's first international conference on French denunciation in the Second World War, in Caen.
They challenge some of the popular misconceptions about denunciation in wartime France.
Historians now say only a very small percentage related to Jews and a large proportion – around a quarter – of the letters were about French f
Source: http://www.theartnewspaper.com
December 1, 2008
The British Army is offering to help create a museum in Basra, which would be set up by the
Iraqi authorities in one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces. British military planners have codenamed the
project Operation Bell, after Gertrude Bell, the archaeologist who helped establish the Baghdad
Museum in 1926. Assistance is also being offered by the British Museum, but all parties stress that
this is an Iraqi venture.
Source: http://www.freemarketnews.com
November 29, 2008
Two tribunals at the centre of efforts to bring war criminals to justice are under threat because of insecurity among staff, the Guardian has learned. The international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR) face losing staff at a record rate, putting existing trials, including that of the former Bosnian Serb president, Radovan Karadzic, in jeopardy, sources inside the tribunals say.
Source: Time Magazine
November 26, 2008
Prosperity has its favorite hobbies, its gold-trimmed roadsters and superyachts and the million-dollar platinum fishing lure studded with 100 carats of diamonds. But in an age of austerity, when we seek satisfaction on the cheap, some pursuits are all about value, but not necessarily about money. This is the beauty of the collector's world. When you don't like the look of the economy, you get to make your own.
At the moment, people have decided that anything related to Barack Obama-
Source: BBC
December 1, 2008
Rare artefacts from the late Stone Age have been uncovered in Russia.
The site at Zaraysk, 150km south-east of Moscow, has yielded figurines and carvings on mammoth tusks.
The finds also included a cone-shaped object whose function, the authors report in the journal Antiquity, "remains a puzzle".
Source: NYT
December 1, 2008
The National Bureau of Economic Research, a panel of academic
economists charged with the official designation of business
cycles, said that the United States economy has been in
recession since December 2007, when economic activity peaked.
Source: AP
December 1, 2008
Venice suffered its worst flooding in 22 years on Monday as water in the Renaissance city stood more than 1.5 metres (five feet) deep before beginning to recede.
A change in the direction of the wind helped the "acqua alta" (high water) water start backing down from a high of 1.56 metres (5 feet, 2 inches), the tide monitoring centre said.
Authorities had warned that the sea lapping at the lagoon city threatened to rise to 1.60 metres, a 30-year high mark, and
Source: LiveScience
November 28, 2008
A friend recently told me that he had finally, in middle age, found his soul mate. She was a woman he barely knew, but he was willing to give up everything to be in her sphere. With glassy eyes, he described how they were special, destined to find each other, and that in coming together they made each other whole.
It was hard to not laugh at my friend's pronouncement of wandering souls crashing together, because most adults are long past that ephemeral kind of love and way into the
Source: Breitbart
December 1, 2008
Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke said Monday the current economic situation bears "no comparison" to the much deeper crisis of the 1930s Great Depression.
"Well, you hear a lot of loose talk, but let me just ... say, as a scholar of the Great Depression -- and I've written books about the Depression and been very interested in this since I was in graduate school, there's no comparison," Bernanke said in a question period after an address in Austin, Texas.
Source: AP
December 1, 2008
Thanks to poor dental hygiene, researchers are getting a more detailed understanding of what people ate thousands of years ago in what is now Peru.
Dental plaque scraped from the teeth of people who lived as much as 9,200 years ago revealed traces of cultivated crops, including squash and beans, according to a report in Monday's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
These ancient people also ate peanuts and a local fruit known as pacay, acc
Source: National Parks Traveler Online
December 1, 2008
A lawsuit has been filed in a bid to halt a museum complex from being built on 78 acres surrounded on three sides by Valley Forge National Historical Park.
Bringing the lawsuit Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania was the National Parks Conservation Association, which was joined by residents from the town of Lower Providence Township, Pennsylvania. The filing argues that township planners approved an unlawful zoning ordinance to permit the Ameri
Source: Atlantic
November 1, 2008
Archaeologists believe Hasankeyf [a town on the banks of the Tigris in the heavily Kurdish region of far southeastern Turkey] may be one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in the world, dating back some 10,000 years. The cliffs lining the river are speckled with gaping black holes—homes carved out of the soft rock by cave dwellers thousands of years ago. What remains of a citadel built by the Byzantines in the fourth century A.D., and later expanded and reinforced by the Artukids a
Source: CNN
December 1, 2008
Paris, 1948. In the shadow of the Holocaust, the fledgling United Nations meets to adopt one of its first human rights treaties.
Applause shakes the room, cameras flash -- and at the center, a single, tired, unassuming man: Raphael Lemkin.
It was, at last, a victory for a tireless crusader who had fought for his entire life against genocide -- and coined the term that describes the world's most heinous crime.
"This new official world made a solemn pled
Source: International Herald Tribune
December 1, 2008
The peace of morning comes to the small village of famous isolation called
Kalaupapa. Breezes rustle the berry bushes.
Myna birds call from treetops to wild pigs below. Life stirs on this spit
of land between the soaring Molokai cliffs and the stretching Pacific
abyss.
The residents who call themselves patients move about in the hours before
the day's few tourists arrive. Here is Danny, who first came here in 1942,
lingering a moment in the peekaboo sun; Ivy, who arrived in 19
