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: Telegraph (UK)
October 29, 2008
A new book has revealed the lengths to which East Germany's Stasi secret police went to quell dissent in the Communist nation.
For the 40 years of the Cold War the Stasi – 'The Sword and Shield of the Party' – kept a lid on dissent in East Germany through a unique method of surveillance.
They did not need torture chambers and rubber truncheons to keep people in line, but instead exploited the insecurities of members of the public, according to author Christhard Laepple.
Source: NYT
October 28, 2008
Senate Democrats are coming around to the view that Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, the longest-serving senator in American history, needs to be replaced as chairman of the Appropriations Committee in the next Congress, because he is not up to the immense challenges he would face in that job, Democratic aides said Tuesday.
Democratic senators hope Mr. Byrd will step aside voluntarily, the aides said. But, they added, a growing number of Democratic senators would, reluctantl
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 29, 2008
The inhabitants of the French town of Vichy say they are sick of being treated as outcasts over their Second World War Nazi links.
Local officials have called for an end to the 'ostracism' and constant digs over collaboration.
The local mayor hit out after left-wing groups said it was inappropriate for the town to stage its first international summit for 60 years.
After being shunned for decades by conference organisers keen to avoid any links with the form
Source: AP
October 29, 2008
Serbian officials denounced Albania on Wednesday for refusing to investigate claims that Kosovo Albanians killed Serb prisoners for their organs during the 1998-99 Kosovo war.
Albania's top prosecutor said Monday she would not help a visiting Serbian war crimes prosecutor who is investigating claims of organ-trafficking that surfaced in a book earlier this year by the former chief U.N. war crimes prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte.
In "The Hunt: War Criminals and Me,"
Source: AP
October 28, 2008
Back in 1780, while the Revolutionary War still raged, a village in eastern Georgia had a notion. The hero of that uncertain hour was Gen. George Washington, and the community of Heard's Fort became the first of nearly 30 towns and cities across the U.S. to take his surname as its own.
Today, barring traffic, it takes nine hours and 31 minutes to drive south from the White House in THAT Washington to the town square of this one, where you'll find, among other attractions, a taxiderm
Source: BBC
October 29, 2008
Earthquakes have claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in the last 100 years and improvements in technology have only slightly reduced the death toll.
29 October 2008
At least 160 people are killed in the Pakistani province of Balochistan after an earthquake of 6.4 magnitude struck 70km (45 miles) north of Quetta.
12 May 2008:
Up to 87,000 people are killed or missing and as many as 370,000 injured by an earthquake in just one county in China's south-west
Source: Guardian (UK)
October 29, 2008
Nearly 92 years have elapsed since Captain Charles Bartlett, standing in his pyjamas on the bridge of the biggest vessel in the world, the HMHS Britannic, gave the call to abandon ship.
It was 8.35am on November 21 1916. The four-funnel ocean liner, built to be even larger and safer than the "unsinkable" Titanic, her ill-fated sister, was listing fast. Bartlett knew the ship was doomed, but on this eerily calm morning as it sailed to collect troops wounded in the first wor
Source: Times (UK)
October 29, 2008
With Nixon and Bush Jr. out of the running nice and early, we can continue our comprehensive countdown to the greatest ever Commander-in-Chief in The Times US presidential rankings.
Eight of our US and foreign policy experts have considered, compared, debated and finally ranked all 42 presidents in order of greatness to give us a complete list of the best and worst.
Yesterday we published the ten worst and today it is time for numbers 32 to 22:
32. Jimmy Ca
Source: NYT
October 25, 2008
JOE SITT received a degree in business at New York University in the 1980s, which helped him become a real estate powerhouse. But he also took courses in history, and that subject, he said, has had an influence on how he sees his work as a developer.
“One of my philosophies is that what ‘once was’ can be again,” he said.
In New York, where Mr. Sitt owns 11 waterfront acres of Coney Island, he is having a hard time proving the point. (His plans for hotels and condominium
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
October 28, 2008
Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers announced today that they had settled their longstanding legal battle over Google’s mass scanning of books. Under the terms of the deal, Google will pay $125-million to establish a Book Rights Registry, to compensate authors and publishers whose copyrighted books have already been scanned, and to cover legal costs.
The settlement, which still needs court approval to go into effect, would resolve a class-action law
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 28, 2008
Adolf Hitler's favourite dish of trout in butter sauce is off the menu for a popular Belgian television cooking show after an outcry from Belgium's Jewish community and victims of Nazi concentration camps.
The banned footage shows Jeroen Meus, a 30-year-old Flemish TV chef, catching trout before cooking up the "favourite meal of an atrocious man" at Hitler's Kehlsteinhaus, Eagle's Nest, hideaway in the Bavarian Alps.
Belgium's VRT broadcaster has cancelled the
Source: International Herald Tribune
October 28, 2008
Henry David Thoreau endorsed civil disobedience, opposed slavery and lived for two years in a hut in the woods here, an experience he described in "Walden." Now he turns out to have another line in his résumé: climate researcher.
He did not realize it, of course. Thoreau died in 1862, when the industrial revolution was just beginning to pump climate-changing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. In 1851, when he started recording when and where plants flowered in Concord,
Source: FoxNews.com
October 28, 2008
A Vienna streetcar driver says it was all a joke, but his "Sieg Heil" to passengers has cost him his job — and could potentially land him before a judge.
Officials at Wiener Linien, which operates the Austrian capital's subway, bus and tram system, said Tuesday the man has been fired after uttering the Nazi greeting over the tram's public address system over the weekend.
State-run ORF radio and television said on its Web site that the unidentified 35-year-old
Source: National Geographic News
October 27, 2008
Inca nobility at Machu Picchu relied on special, permanent servants from the far corners of the empire to manage the royal estate, according to a new study of human skeletons found buried at the site. Machu Picchu sits high in the Peruvian Andes about 50 miles (80 kilometers) northwest of the former Inca capital of Cusco (see map).
Royal retainers, known as yanacona, may have been brought to the site from as far away as South America's Pacific Coast, the northern highlands, and the area a
Source: http://en.rian.ru/russia
October 28, 2008
YEKATERINBURG, October 27 (RIA Novosti) - Additional excavations could be carried out in the Urals area where the remains of the family of Russia's last tsar Nicholas II were found, a local archeologist said on Monday.
The remains were discovered near Yekaterinburg in 1991.
"We plan to begin the excavations in June next year. We earlier thought we could start this fall, but the work was postponed due to lack of funding," Sergei Pogorelov told RIA Novosti
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, is published by the Federation of American Scientists
October 28, 2008
The Director of National Intelligence today disclosed the 2008 budget for the National Intelligence Program: $47.5 billion. That figure does not include spending for the Military Intelligence Program, which is at least another $10 billion.
The disclosure marks only the fourth time that the intelligence budget has been officially disclosed. The aggregate intelligence budget figure (including national, joint military and tactical intelligence spending) was first released in 1997 ($2
Source: Media Matters (liberal watchdog group)
October 28, 2008
Summary: Rush Limbaugh distorted comments by Sen. Barack Obama in a 2001 radio interview and falsely characterized Obama as"an anti-constitutional professor" who has"flatly rejected" the U.S. Constitution. Obama made the comments in a panel discussion of how the Founders addressed the issue of slavery in the Constitution; he did not reject it, as Limbaugh falsely claimed, but called it"a remarkable political document."Distorting comments by Sen. Barack Obama from a 2001 radio
interview, n
Source: Boston Globe
October 28, 2008
LEXINGTON - John Quinlan was never in a hurry to leave Fenway Park after a Red Sox game. During the Great Depression, pure joy was precious.
Quinlan and his childhood friends from Lexington learned at an early age to be frugal. That's why they liked double-headers - two games for the price of one, about $1.
"We had to get our money's worth," he said. "We'd go and see batting practice and 18 innings of baseball, and hang around and look for autographs afte
Source: AP/US Senate Historical Office
October 27, 2008
The conviction of Sen. Ted Stevens on Monday is the fifth time a U.S. senator has been found guilty on felony charges. Another had his conviction overturned on appeal. Five other senators have been indicted, then acquitted, according to the Senate Historical Office. A look at their cases:
___
Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska: On Monday Stevens was found guilty on seven counts of making false statements on Senate financial documents. He was indicted on July 29 for lying about free home re
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 28, 2008
Four US presidents have been assassinated, while Ronald Reagan was extremely lucky to survive being shot in 1980. That unfortunate past, combined with lingering presence of white supremacist groups has created a nagging fear that at some time someone will make a move against the politician now on the verge of becoming the country's first black president.
Mr Obama received protection from the Secret Service in early 2007, the earliest ever stage of an election for a presidential cand
