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: Newsweek
November 24, 2008
It is the season to compare Barack Obama to Abraham Lincoln. Two thin men from rude beginnings, relatively new to Washington but wise to the world, bring the nation together to face a crisis. Both are superb rhetoricians, both geniuses at stagecraft and timing. Obama, like Lincoln and unlike most modern politicians, even writes his own speeches, or at least drafts the really important ones—by hand, on yellow legal paper—such as his remarkably honest speech on race during the Reverend Wright imbr
Source: WaPo
November 16, 2008
In the public imagination, the Depression was a galvanizing time, the crucible in which the Greatest Generation came of age and came together. That is, at best, only partly true. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam has found that, for many, the Depression was isolating: Kiwanis clubs, PTAs, and other social groups lost around half their members from 1930 to 1935. And other studies on economic hardship suggest that it tends to sap people's civic engagement, often permanently.
&
Source: WaPo
November 16, 2008
The 2008 presidential election ended less than two weeks ago, but the mythmaking machine has already begun to churn. President-elect Barack Obama transformed the face of the electorate! The Republican Party will be a miserable minority in Congress for the next century! Cats and dogs are now living together! Below we explode the five biggest myths that have already sprung up around the election that was.....
2. A wave of black voters and young people was the key to Obama's victory.
Source: AP
November 15, 2008
Threats against a new president historically spike right after an election, but from Maine to Idaho law enforcement officials are seeing more against Barack Obama than ever before. The Secret Service would not comment or provide the number of cases they are investigating. But since the Nov. 4 election, law enforcement officials have seen more potentially threatening writings, Internet postings and other activity directed at Obama than has been seen with any past president-elect, said officials a
Source: National Security Archive
November 14, 2008
Forty-six years ago, a month before the Cuban Missile crisis, Soviet leaders put their strategic forces on their "highest readiness stage since the beginning of the Cold War," according to a newly declassified internal history of the National Security Agency published today for the first time by the National Security Archive. Possibly responding to President Kennedy's call for reserves, perhaps worried that the White House had discovered Moscow's plans to deploy missiles on Cuba, the K
Source: AFP
November 14, 2008
An Indian probe landed on the moon on Friday, the Indian Space Research Organisation announced, in a milestone for the country's 45-year-old space programme.
The probe touched down on the moon at 8:34pm (1504 GMT), 25 minutes after it was ejected from an unmanned spacecraft orbiting the moon, spokesman S. Satish said.
"During its descent from Chandrayaan-1 an onboard video camera transmitted lunar pictures to the ISRO command centre," Satish said in the southern In
Source: AP
November 14, 2008
Zealous guardians of his words and his likeness, the family of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is demanding a share of the proceeds from the sudden wave of T-shirts, posters, and other merchandise depicting the civil rights leader alongside Barack Obama.
Isaac Newton Farris Jr., King's nephew and head of the nonprofit King Center in Atlanta, said the estate is entitled to hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing fees - maybe even millions.
"Some of this is pro
Source: Chicago Tribune
November 13, 2008
In a new afterword to his memoir, 1960s radical William Ayers describes himself as a "family friend" of President-elect Barack Obama and writes that the campaign controversy over their relationship was an effort by Obama's political enemies to "deepen a dishonest narrative" about the candidate.
Ayers describes phone threats and hate e-mail he received during the campaign, and he bemoans Obama's guilt by association.
During the campaign, Ayers' friend
Source: AP
November 13, 2008
The old moon has never looked this good. Mankind's first up-close photos of the lunar landscape have been rescued from four decades of dusty storage, and they've been restored to such a high quality that they rival anything taken by modern cameras.
NASA and some private space business leaders spent a quarter million dollars rescuing the historic photos from early NASA lunar robotic probes and restoring them in an abandoned McDonald's.
The first refurbished image was rel
Source: NYT
November 14, 2008
A criminal complaint filed in the Spanish High Court has
revived hopes that those behind the massacre of six Jesuit
priests in El Salvador's civil war could face trial.
Source: McClatchy
November 13, 2008
As the capital of a sprawling frontier region that was once in Mongol leader Genghis Khan's vast domain, Hohhot has many ethnic Mongol flourishes. Streets signs are in Mongolian, yurt-themed architecture graces the city and some park benches have a Mongol saddle motif. At least one television channel airs in the Mongolian language.
There's only one thing in short supply: ethnic Mongolians.
Fewer than 10 percent of the greater metropolitan area's 2.6 million inhabitants
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 14, 2008
The Archbishop of Canterbury called Auschwitz-Birkenau an "image of hell" as he made his first visit to the Nazi death camp.
Dr Rowan Williams said it was vital that people saw the site where more than 1 million were killed during the Second World War in order to understand how the atrocity had come about.
He and Britain's Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, placed candles on the railway tracks that lead under a watchtower into the vast Birkenau camp. It was from
Source: International Herald Tribune
November 14, 2008
On Jan. 20, Barack Obama will inherit a world very different from the one his predecessor found in January 2001. Over the past eight years, the Bush administration has faced great challenges and nurtured grand ambitions; it has tried hard to remake the world. Condoleezza Rice has been a central player in that effort since becoming the chief foreign policy adviser in 2000 to Bush, then a candidate, so we arranged to interview her at the State Department late last month. The interview turned into
Source: AP
November 14, 2008
President-elect Barack Obama won one of Nebraska's electoral votes, the first time in history that the state has split its votes and the first time in 44 years that it had given a vote to a Democrat.
After remaining ballots were counted Friday, Obama had a 3,325-vote lead over Republican John McCain in unofficial results for the 2nd Congressional District. Nebraska and Maine are the two states that divide their electoral votes by congressional districts.
Obama, who won the White Hou
Source: http://www.newbernsj.com
November 13, 2008
HAVELOCK - The forest has largely swallowed up Camp Patterson.
The camp was in what was once a small triangle of woods near the entrance to the MacDonald Downs development in Havelock. The camp was operated by the Civilian Conservation Corps as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.
It was started in the Great Depression to provide educational, recreational and job-training opportunities for young men ages 17 to 23.
Company number 5420-C at Camp Patterso
Source: 24dash.com
November 13, 2008
A Roman settlement has been unearthed by a water company laying pipelines.
The civilian settlement in Cumbria is believed to date to the first century AD and includes the remains of timber buildings and cobbled streets.
The discovery was made by United Utilities engineers during excavations for a sewage pipeline near Penrith in October.
Archaeologists believe the settlement was attached to a fort and used to house soldiers' families and local market traders
Source: AP
November 13, 2008
A hobbyist with a metal detector struck both gold and silver when he uncovered an important cache of ancient Celtic coins in a cornfield in the southern Dutch city of Maastricht.
"It's exciting, like a little boy's dream," Paul Curfs, 47, said Thursday after the spectacular find was made public.
Archaeologists say the trove of 39 gold and 70 silver coins was minted in the middle of the first century B.C. as the future Roman ruler Julius Caesar led a campaign
Source: BBC
November 11, 2008
Three of the four surviving British veterans of World War I have helped mark the 90th anniversary of the end of the conflict.
Henry Allingham, 112, Harry Patch, 110, and Bill Stone, 108, represented the RAF, Army and Royal Navy respectively at a ceremony at London's Cenotaph.
They led the country in observing two minutes' silence from 1100 GMT.
Among other Armistice Day events across Europe, Prince Charles laid a wreath at a battle site in France.
Source: International Herald Tribune
November 14, 2008
Scottish judges on Friday rejected a request by the only man convicted in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, Britain's bloodiest terror attack, to be released early from jail to spend time with his family while he is treated for prostate cancer.
Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, 56, a former Libyan intelligence officer, was jailed in 2001 after a trial under Scottish law at a special court in the Netherlands. He has always proclaimed his innocence in the explosion on board Pan Am Flight 103 on
Source: International Herald Tribune
November 13, 2008
Nearly 20 years after the Salvadoran Army murdered six Jesuit priests in one of the most notorious incidents of the country's civil war, a criminal complaint filed in the Spanish High Court has revived hopes that those behind the slaughter could face trial.
Human rights lawyers filed a complaint with Spain's High Court on Thursday alleging that former President Alfredo Cristiani Burkard of El Salvador and 14 former members of the military played a role in the deaths of the priests a
