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: Belfast Telegraph
October 25, 2008
Iraqi secret police believed that the notorious Palestinian assassin Abu Nidal was working for the Americans as well as Egypt and Kuwait when they interrogated him in Baghdad only months before the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.
Hitherto secret documents which are now in the hands of The Independent – written by Saddam Hussein's brutal security services for Saddam's eyes only – state that he had been "colluding" with the Americans and, with the help of the Egyptians and
Source: Barry Goldwater Jr. at Huffington Post
October 24, 2008
[As a guide and interpreter of the complexities of government and public affairs, Barry Goldwater is skilled and knowledgeable. As a former member of Congress from California, many of the current Congressional Committee Chairmen served with Goldwater. He has a first name relationship with most. His family name is familiar to many in Washington, California and Arizona.]
The Goldwater name carries with it the standard of modern conservatism and has shaped the Republican Party for deca
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 25, 2008
Alf Heywood, 88, picked the flower in Tunisia in 1942 while engaged in combat with German forces.
He preserved the poppy for 66 years, pressed between the pages of his Army pay book, under a note which read: "Poppy picked by Alf Heywood, while in action, with the 2nd Bln Lanc's Fus, 78th Div, 1st Army, North Africa 1942."
The great-grandfather, from Middleton, Greater Manchester, showed the poppy to visiting soldiers from the 207 Field Hospital, Greater Manche
Source: USA Today
October 23, 2008
The United States finally is making amends five years after two notorious stumbles in public relations during the early days of the Iraq war.
The U.S. announced this week a $14 million program to help refurbish the Iraqi National Museum. The museum wasn't guarded after the fall of Saddam Hussein, which allowed looters to steal precious antiquities.
And in August, two Bengal tigers were shipped to the Iraqi zoo in Baghdad to replace an endangered tiger that was shot and killed
Source: International Herald Tribune
October 24, 2008
Crammed into a dozen buses and escorted by the Israeli military, the Jewish pilgrims slid quietly along deserted streets throughout the early hours of a recent morning while the residents of this Palestinian city, a militant stronghold ruled until recently by armed gangs, slept in their beds.
The destination was the holy place known as Joseph's Tomb, a tiny half-derelict stone compound in the heart of a residential district that many Jews believe is the final burial place of the son
Source: Yahoo
October 23, 2008
When Philippine police confiscated 22 bags of broken pottery from antiquity smugglers near an area where Muslim rebels operated, little did they know that they may have uncovered the remnants of a long-lost tribe.
Now, experts at the National Museum in the capital
Manila are studying the burial urns from a tribe that lived in the Philippines over 2,000 years ago, in what could be a major archaeological discovery."The pottery has human faces that show emotions," Eusebio Dizon, head of the a
Source: The Observer (UK)
October 26, 2008
On a chilly October night in 1964, the shipping forecast warned of fog on the Thames. Just after midnight, an East German freighter, the MV Magdeburg, slipped out of her Dagenham dock and headed slowly down river. On deck were 42 Leyland buses bound for Cuba.
Coming the other way was the Yamashiro Maru, a Japanese ship, sailing empty. The ships met at 1:52am. The Magdeburg was making the tight turn around Broadness Point when the Yamashiro Maru ploughed into her starboard side at mo
Source: Times (UK)
October 24, 2008
Seventy years ago they marched out of Barcelona for the last time, proud heroes who had risked their lives to fight General Franco's Fascist-backed rebels.
Yesterday, a small band of veterans of the International Brigades returned to mark the anniversary in Sitges, near Barcelona.
Frail, some in wheelchairs, they joined in a chorus of La Bandera Roja, or The Red Flag, an Italian song popular with anti-Fascist forces during the war.
Now the eight British and
Source: NYT
October 23, 2008
Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. has worked with titans of the Senate and met countless heads of state. None of them have left as deep an impression on him as his father, Joseph Robinette Biden Sr., a prideful man.
Though life had dealt Joe Sr. a tough hand early in life in drunken, faithless bosses and a thieving partner, he never bemoaned his fate.
Joe Sr. had it all in his 20s, sailing yachts off the New England coast, riding to the hounds, driving fast cars, flying airpl
Source: AP
October 24, 2008
BUCHAREST, Romania — Vandals rampaged through a sprawling Jewish cemetery in Romania's capital, toppling tombstones and smashing markers for as many as 200 graves, authorities said Friday.
Jewish leaders condemned the vandalism
and said the scale of the destruction suggested the activity was organized — rather than random acts by wayward youths. Other graves have been vandalized in Jewish cemeteries in recent years, but those attacks occurred in the provinces, and wer
Source: http://www.sfltimes.com
October 20, 2008
In the rural Teoc community of Carroll County, Miss., where the ancestors of Sen. John McCain owned enslaved Africans on a plantation, black, white and mixed-race family members unite every two years for their Coming Home Reunion, on the land where the plantation operated.
Some of McCain’s black family members say they are not sure exactly where they fall on the family tree, but they do know this: They are either descendants of the McCain family slaves, or of children the McCains fa
Source: Times (of London)
October 25, 2008
On one bank of the Truc Bach lake a small electricity sub-station is plastered with flyers touting a local plumber. Along the road is an aerobics studio where youngsters lazily sip coffee and browse the papers. Thirty yards out across the water – rancid and bobbing with dead fish – is moored a handful of pedal boats shaped like swans.
It was within this unlikely triangle of landmarks – exactly 41 years ago this Sunday – that John McCain crash-landed and, say his captors, began his r
Source: Discovery Channel News
October 23, 2008
Two Egyptian mummies who died more than 3,500 years ago have provided clear evidence for the earliest known cases of malaria, according to a study presented this week in Naples at an international conference on ancient DNA.
Pathologist Andreas Nerlich and colleagues at the Academic Teaching Hospital München-Bogenhausen in Munich, Germany, studied 91 bone tissue samples from ancient Egyptian mummies and skeletons dating from 3500 to 500 B.C.
Using special techniques from
Source: International Herald Tribune
October 22, 2008
The prison inmates had to think for a moment when Missy Shea of the Vermont Secretary of State's office asked them to name the only crime that would prevent an incarcerated person from voting in the state.
"Murder," answered one of the men gathered in the library of the Marble Valley Regional Correctional Facility. Others guessed treason or domestic assault.
"You're all going to have really good answers, but you're not going to get it," Shea said dur
Source: BBC
October 22, 2008
Relatives of a sea captain from Sunderland have heard their long dead ancestor singing sea shanties recorded in the 1920s.
The songs, which were in a collection recorded on wax cylinders by American academic James Madison Carpenter, were restored for a BBC documentary.
Mark Page, born in 1836, ran away to sea as a boy and contributed to the scholar's work when he retired.
The recordings then lay untouched in an attic for decades.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 23, 2008
Barack Obama and John McCain are nearing the finishing line in the 2008 US presidential campaign. As US voters prepare to elect their 44th president on November 4, the Telegraph's US correspondents compile a list of the 25 highlights of the race so far. On Thursday we publish 13 to 25. On Friday we will conclude with the top 12 turning points in the race to the White House. These are our lists. We know that you will not agree with all our choices and we encourage you to submit your own lists bel
Source: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,443789,00.html
October 23, 2008
The two teenage history buffs dressed up in military gear like so many times before for the seaside summer festival. One sported the green fatigues of the Red Army. The other donned the grayish uniform of the German Wehrmacht.
Only this time, they ended up in jail, charged with violating a new law banning public displays of communist and Nazi symbols.
Verdicts are expected Friday in a legal test for the disputed legislation pushed through Lithuania's Parliament in June
Source: Times (UK)
October 23, 2008
Sixteen crates locked in a dark store room in Madrid for more than 70 years hold the secret to how General Franco might have won the Spanish Civil War.
Inside the crates are Enigma code-making machines that Franco had bought from Nazi Germany and used to co-ordinate his troops who fought on fronts hundreds of miles apart.
The 26 machines were discovered this week by the Spanish daily newspaper El País, hidden in army headquarters since the Civil War ended in 1939, most
Source: Newsweek
October 23, 2008
John McCain recently accused Barack Obama of advocating socialist policies. It turns out he was channeling one of his illustrious home-state predecessors—Barry Goldwater.
In newly unearthed correspondence, Goldwater, the famed GOP senator from Arizona and a conservative icon, wrote a stinging letter to Lyndon Johnson just after he heard the news that the then Senate majority leader had agreed to be John F. Kennedy's running mate in the 1960 election.
Goldwater's complai
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
October 19, 2008
Political parties rise and fall, legislative theories emerge, evolve, expire. But certain debates enjoy immortality in America, persisting in the Facebook era in a form that would be familiar to the founding fathers.
One of those evergreens is the battle over who holds the reins of power in these United States - the wealthy and the educated, or the common working citizen. On one side are the elitists; on the other, populists.
Both words have been used in caustic ways in
