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: http://www.wdsu.com
November 11, 2008
COVINGTON, La. -- Eight people were arrested Tuesday in connection with the killing of a woman who apparently tried to back out of a Ku Klux Klan initiation ritual, St. Tammany Parish Sheriff Jack Strain said Tuesday.The woman was slain Sunday morning, allegedly shot to death by a Klan leader from Bogalusa. Her body was found Monday in a ditch in the small St. Tammany community of Sun, about 60 miles north of New Orleans, the sheriff said.
Source: CNN
November 11, 2008
[Anthony Acevedo] was one of 350 U.S. soldiers held at Berga an der Elster, a satellite camp of the Nazis' notorious Buchenwald concentration camp. The soldiers, working 12-hour days, were used by the German army to dig tunnels and hide equipment in the final weeks of the war. Less than half of the soldiers survived their captivity and a subsequent death march, he says.
Acevedo shows few emotions as he scans the pages of his diary. But when he gets to one of his final entries, the d
Source: NYT
November 10, 2008
Fear of the politician with the unusual name and look did not end with last Tuesday’s vote in this rural red swatch where buck heads and rifles hang on the wall. This corner of the Deep South still resonates with negative feelings about the race of President-elect Barack Obama.
What may have ended on Election Day, though, is the centrality of the South to national politics. By voting so emphatically for Senator John McCain over Mr. Obama — supporting him in some areas in even greate
Source: AP
November 10, 2008
The chairman of an Indiana University committee says the panel will recommend adding a black basketball player’s name to a gymnasium named after a longtime trustee who advocated racial segregation in the 1940s.
The committee will recommend renaming the Ora Wildermuth Intramural Center the William L. Garrett/Ora L. Wildermuth Fieldhouse, IU vice president Terry Clapacs told the Indiana Daily Student.
Garrett, who died in 1974, was the first black basketball player at IU
Source: Irish Times
November 11, 2008
PEOPLE GUILTY of crimes linked to the Troubles will not be handed an automatic amnesty in any reconciliation process, the Eames-Bradley group - which is dealing with the legacy of violence - said yesterday.
Denis Bradley, who chairs the Consultative Group on the Past with Lord Eames, warned however that Northern Ireland society must face up to its history if it is to move on.
He said his group would publish its proposals on dealing with the legacy of the Troubles early
Source: Rasmussen Reports
November 10, 2008
Two days after Barack Obama became the first African-American to be voted into the White House, the percentage of black voters who view American society as fair and decent jumped 18 points to 42% (see crosstabs).
Just a month earlier, only 24% of black voters viewed American society as fair and decent.
Source: Yahoo
November 11, 2008
A new figure in humanity's history emerged last week when archaeologists announced the discovery of what could be one of the world's oldest known spiritual figures. After years of meticulous excavation just miles from Israel's Mediterranean coast, scientists from the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem unearthed a 12,000-year-old grave that held the remains of a diminutive "shaman" woman. Buried alongside the woman's small, huddled corpse were selected pieces
Source: WaPo
November 11, 2008
After trekking for five hours up steep Himalayan slopes, crossing numerous creeks and hacking a trail through bamboo forests, Clayton Kuhles and his guide reached the spot where a U.S. military plane had fallen more than six decades ago.
Out of breath and sweating, he rummaged through the forest-floor vegetation and excitedly pulled out rusted parts of an aircraft engine strewn atop a hill here in India's northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh. His eyes scanned for clues as he sift
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
November 3, 2008
Classics scholars have accused councils of 'ethnic cleansing' after they banned staff from using Latin words.
The local authorities claim the terms are elitist and discriminatory, and have ordered employees to use often-wordier alternatives in documents or when speaking to the public.
Bournemouth Council, which has the Latin motto Pulchritudo et Salubritas - beauty and health - has listed 19 terms it no longer considers acceptable for use.
They include ad h
Source: CNN
November 11, 2008
World War II didn't just divide the world. It also divided four brothers.
Not long after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Harry and Ken Akune were sent to live in an internment camp in Amache, Colorado. When the U.S. Army's Military Intelligence Service came to their camp to recruit Japanese-speaking volunteers as interpreters, they joined so they could prove their loyalty to their country.
Across the world in Japan, their father Ichiro was raising the rest of his l
Source: AP
November 11, 2008
Leaders of a united Europe on Tuesday marked the 90th anniversary of the end of World War I, which tore the continent apart and cost millions of lives.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Britain's Prince Charles attended the solemn ceremony near one of the conflict's bloodiest battlefields. It was held in the northeastern French town of Douaumont, near the site of the Battle of Verdun.
There, an estimated 300,000 soldiers lost their lives in 300 days of ferocious figh
Source: WaPo
November 11, 2008
A former Japanese air force chief, removed from his post last month for writing an essay that says Japan was not an aggressor in World War II, is refusing to quietly fade away.
Pugnaciously defending his version of Japan's role in a war that killed millions across Asia, Toshio Tamogami, 60, told parliament Tuesday that he does not see "anything wrong with what I wrote."
The ousted general's revisionism, together with revelations that 94 air force staff members
Source: AP
November 11, 2008
With just 70 days left as president, Bush is pretty much out of time to alter public perception of his performance. He cannot get a Middle East peace deal, or turn around a failing economy, or rekindle broad support for the war in Iraq. But leaving on good terms? Now that he can control.
So on Monday at the White House, Bush warmly welcomed Obama, whose dominant win last week was largely seen as a referendum on the Bush years.
The two leaders spent more than an hour dis
Source: Esquire
November 7, 2008
Fifty years ago, a Republican senator from New York [Jacob Javits] predicted that by the year 2000, America would elect its first black president. Close enough. Read this extraordinary essay from December 1958 to see where we were as a nation -- and how far we’ve come.
[The Essay]
... Fantasy? To be sure, a speculation into the future as we look ahead from 1958. But a speculation based on realistic appraisal of fact for the march of progress and world events make it qui
Source: AP
November 11, 2008
A 4,300-year-old pyramid has been discovered in Saqqara, Egypt, the sprawling necropolis and burial site of the rulers of ancient Memphis, Egypt's chief archaeologist said Tuesday.
The pyramid is said to belong to Queen Sesheshet, the mother of King Teti who was the founder of the 6th Dynasty of Egypt's Old Kingdom. Click here for photos.
Egypt's antiquities chief Zahi Hawass made the announcement Tuesday a
Source: Time
November 10, 2008
Americans like to think they perfected the peaceful transfer of power from old regime to new: no crimes, no coups, no blood in the streets. But that doesn't mean the future Former Leader of the Free World has an easy time handing over the keys to the White House. It's not just ego that has a way of fouling up this transition; both parties have one eye on the history books, as the outgoing President airbrushes the epilogue and the arriving one prepares the prologue.
This election, g
Source: Times (UK)
November 11, 2008
Emperor Akihito of Japan should follow the example of Germany in making a genuine gesture of contrition for his country’s wartime aggression in Asia, Lee Myung Bak, the South Korean President, has said.
In an interview with The Times and two Asian newspapers, Mr Lee made a comparison with the late German Chancellor, Willy Brandt, whose genuflection before a monument to murdered Polish Jews became a symbol of postwar German contrition for the horrors of the Holocaust and the Second
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 11, 2008
Kurt Schrimm, head of the special German prosecutors' office that has hunted Nazis since 1958, said he believes transport lists of prisoners that arrived at Sobibor during John Demjanjuk's seven-month tenure at the camp can be used as evidence of his alleged involvement in their deaths.
"We believe that it's enough," Mr Schrimm said. "We believe that we will get a trial."
Munich prosecutors were asked to file the extradition request because Mr Demjan
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 11, 2008
In the age of Oliver Cromwell, Francis Osborne's literary mix of pragmatism and cynicism went down well and was considered sound common sense by many of his educated male readers.
Osborne's views are contained in the publication 'Advice to a Son; or Directions For your Better Conduct Through the various and most important Encounters of this Life', which was printed in Oxford and published in 1656, four years before the restoration of the monarchy.
The chapter headings o
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
November 11, 2008
A U.S. nuclear warhead was abandoned under the ice in northern Greenland after a B52 bomber crashed in 1968, an investigation has found.
The Pentagon believed the former Soviet Union would destroy the base as a prelude to a nuclear strike against the U.S. and began flying nuclear-armed B52s continuously over Thule in 1960 in order to retaliate.
Thule Air Base has been a major strategic asset to the U.S. since it was built in the early 1950s, as it allowed a radar to sca
