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: International Herald Tribune
November 6, 2008
All the ominous predictions, all the fretting about hidden votes and closeted racists frustrating a victory for the nation's first African-American president came down to this: the so-called Bradley effect did not exist.
People did not lie — to pollsters or to themselves — about whether they would vote for a black man. The polls, national and statewide, generally predicted the results with accuracy.
"The unambiguous answer is that there was no Bradley effect,"
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 7, 2008
Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a coalition of lawyers, academics and activists from round the country, has grown in the shadows of state suppression in the last two years.
Its survival is a token of the courage of its members, who have been harassed, imprisoned and beaten as they taken up difficult cases and attempt to promote legal reform.
"Twenty years after China ratified the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishme
Source: Deutsche Welle
November 8, 2008
Officials from the Simferopol Art Museum in south Ukraine told Germany's Foreign Ministry the museum "had no plans to give up" the 87 paintings thought originally to have belonged to the Suermondt- Ludwig Art Museum in the German city Aachen, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said.
A pair of Bavarian tourists photographed the paintings during a 2007 visit to Ukraine's Crimea province and sent copies of the shots to the Aachen museum after finding the paintings listed as "
Source: Deutsche Welle
November 8, 2008
Ceremonies were to be held Sunday to recall Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, when Nazis smashed up Jewish-owned shops, burned or ransacked synagogues and killed 91 people throughout Germany, according to the official toll.
The late November 9, 1938 pogrom, a precursor to the Holocaust, ultimately led to more than 1,300 deaths from injuries, by suicide or in concentration camps, official historians add.
Merkel, in a weekly video podcast, said Sunday would be
Source: History Today
November 7, 2008
Two recent archaeological stories show that humanity has been using drugs on opposite ends of the earth for thousands of years.
In Chile, new tests on members of an ancient pre-Hispanic civilisation are showing clear signs of drug use. Graves of the Tiwanaku are often found to contain equipment for using hallucinogens, such as pipes. Recent experiments by the University of Tarapaca on the remains of an adult male buried with an elaborate snuffing kit have shown that his body contain
Source: NYT
November 6, 2008
One of the many ways the election of Barack Obama differed from recent presidential elections was that in the end, it did not all come down to one state....
So how does Mr. Obama’s 364, which could go as high as 376, measure up?
“It’s a normal win,” said John C. Fortier, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who edited “After the People Vote: A Guide to the Electoral College.” Mr. Fortier called it a respectable, solid mandate.
“It was not
Source: NYT blog
November 7, 2008
President-elect Barack Obama called Nancy Reagan tonight, reports our colleague Jeff Zeleny, who passed along this statement from the transition team:
“President-elect Barack Obama called Nancy Reagan today to apologize for the careless and off-handed remark he made during today’s press conference. The President-elect expressed his admiration and affection for Mrs. Reagan that so many Americans share and they had a warm conversation,” said Stephanie Cutter, transition team spokeswom
Source: NYT
November 6, 2008
Forty years ago — before Richard Nixon was president, before the Chicago Seven were tried, before the shootings at Kent State — a 19-year-old Brooklyn man was shipped to Vietnam.
His name was Jose Ramon Sanchez and he was a private first class with the First Battalion, Fourth Regiment of the Third Marine Division, Headquarters and Support Company. On June 6 — D-Day — of 1968, his CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter was sent to extract a team of fellow grunts who were pinned down by the enem
Source: Huffington Post (Blog)
November 5, 2008
Now that the 2008 election is over, reporters are spilling all the juciest, and previously off the record, gossip from the campaign trail. Much of it is about the infighting between Palin and McCain's staff, as Newsweek's treasure trove of post-election gossip reveals.
However, perhaps one of the most astounding and previously unknown tidbits about Sarah Palin has to do with her already dubious grasp of geography. According to Fox News Chief Political Correspondent Carl Cameron, the
Source: NYT
November 7, 2008
After a career of deception, Isaiah Oggins died in an executioner’s dirty trick.
An aspiring American professor turned spy for the N.K.V.D., Stalin’s intelligence service, Mr. Oggins had been convicted of treason and espionage by the Soviet Union and completed an eight-year sentence in the gulag.
It was the summer of 1947. He was past due for release. A few months before in New York, his wife and young son had pleaded with George C. Marshall, then the secretary of state
Source: Times (of London)
November 8, 2008
The Ministry of Defence has issued the last medal for service in the First World War. It had been requested by the family of a soldier who had kept his war service secret from them.
The Silver War Badge was issued posthumously to Alfred Gibbins, who was seriously injured during the battle of Passchendaele in 1917. Mr Gibbins denied even to his own family that he had fought in the war, claiming that his injuries were sustained in childhood and had kept him out of the Army.
Source: AP
November 7, 2008
It ought to be a proud milestone in the Dutch seafaring heritage — the construction of a new ship its owner claims will be the world's largest. But there's one problem: its name.
Edwin Heerema, founder of the company that has commissioned the $1.7 billion vessel, wants to name it the Pieter Schelte after his late father, Pieter Schelte Heerema, who was renowned as a maritime engineer but was condemned for his service in the murderous Nazi Waffen SS.
The choice of name h
Source: USA Today
November 7, 2008
Barack Obama's election has inspired a wave of optimism about the future of race relations in the United States, according to a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken the day after the first African American won the White House.
Confidence that the nation will resolve its racial problems rose to a historic level. Two-thirds of Americans predict that relations between blacks and whites "will eventually be worked out" in the United States, by far the highest number since Gallup first a
Source: Wil Haygood in the WaPo
November 6, 2008
For more than three decades Eugene Allen worked in the White House, a black man unknown to the headlines. During some of those years, harsh segregation laws lay upon the land. He trekked home every night, his wife, Helene, keeping him out of her kitchen.
At the White House, he worked closer to the dirty dishes than the large desk in the Oval Office. Helene didn't care; she just beamed with pride.
President Truman called him Gene. President Ford liked to talk golf with him.
Source: http://www.birminghampost.net
November 5, 2008
The remains of a 19th century Birmingham Cardinal tipped for sainthood are unlikely to have been destroyed by soil acidity in a Worcestershire grave, an expert has said.
Professor John Hunter, from the University of Birmingham, cast doubt on the theory after testing soil from an area near to the Rednal cemetery from which Venerable John Henry Cardinal Newman was exhumed.
The ancient history and archaeology professor said it would be "unusual" to find a body buried i
Source: AP
November 7, 2008
he Kentucky attorney general, Jack Conway, has proposed a
settlement aimed at ending a squabble with an Ohio city
over a rock. The historic rock bears numerous carvings of
initials, names and a crude face and was once an attraction
for locals. It had been submerged since about the 1920s
until last September, when a local historian led a team to
extract it. The boulder now sits in a city garage in
Portsmouth, Ohio. Mr. Conway sent a letter to the city
solicitor in Portsmouth proposing tha
Source: CNN
November 6, 2008
With record low approval ratings and intense criticism for his handling of the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina and the economy, the word most used to label George W. Bush's presidency will be "incompetent," historians say.
"Right now there is not a lot of good will among historians. Most see him as a combination of many negative factors," said Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School.
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Source: http://nycitynewsservice.com
November 6, 2008
The FBI amassed a dossier on the late journalist David Halberstam for more than two decades – keeping tabs on his reporting, tracking his marriage to a Polish actress and preparing background reports on the Pulitzer Prize winner for other federal agencies, documents show.
The feds appear to have paid particular attention to Halberstam in the mid 1960s when he was a New York Times correspondent in Poland during the Cold War – when that nation was closely aligned with the Soviet Union
Source: Times (UK)
November 7, 2008
The Lockerbie bomber should be freed on bail pending appeal because he has prostate cancer and does not have long to live, judges heard yesterday.
Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi’s lawyers told the Court of Criminal Appeal in Edinburgh that there was a “compelling case” for letting the former Libyan agent, 56, live with his family in Scotland. Prosecutors say the gravity of the offence means that he should stay in Greenock prison, where he is serving at least 27 years for blowing up Pan
Source: Times (UK)
November 7, 2008
The fate of the Wittelsbach diamond, worn by at least three of Europe's royal families, has been shrouded in mystery for almost a century.
Now the 35.56 carat stone, the second largest blue diamond in the world, has turned up again, offered for sale at Christie's by an anonymous seller. The guide price of £9 million is modest, given that a 13.39 carat blue diamond fetched $8.9 million (£5.6 million) at auction in May.
Collectors, convinced that diamonds are a recessio
