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
August 24, 2008
Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson, both 28, had spent this spring travelling across the United States correcting errors on government signposts.
The pair set up the Typo Eradication Advancement League and were interviewed by National Public Radio and the Chicago Tribune, which referred to them as "a pair of Kerouacs armed with Sharpies and erasers and righteous indignation".
Their brush with fame brought about their downfall, however, after investigators looked u
Source: WaPo
August 24, 2008
It's been four years since Bettye Kearse set out to prove a story that has been handed down through generations of her family: that she, an African American, is a direct descendant of founding father James Madison.
But after a prolonged attempt to arrange DNA testing with Madison family descendants in the United States, the two sides have been unable to agree on how to do it. And as Madison's sprawling Virginia estate, Montpelier, prepares to celebrate the completion of a $24 millio
Source: WaPo
August 24, 2008
As they watched Joseph R. Biden Jr. step on stage in Springfield, Ill., yesterday, a 65-year-old with white hair jogging to the lectern, many of his longtime friends and colleagues experienced a touch of deja vu: Once again, Biden had resurrected a career that appeared destined for decline.
Nearly eight months ago, Biden withdrew from the 2008 presidential race after winning less than 1 percent of the delegates in Iowa's Democratic caucuses. It was an ignoble failure for one of the
Source: Humberto Fontova (Click here to download his article.)
August 25, 2008
On Sept 20, 2001 the FBI arrested the enemy spy that had managed the deepest penetration of the U.S. Department of Defense in U.S. history. The spy's name is Ana Montes and during her fifteen years in the Defense Intelligence Agency she operated as an agent for Fidel Castro. At the time of her arrest she had moled her way to the head of the DIA's Latin America division. From here, she greatly influenced (if not actually directed) the Clinton administration's Cuba policy. Today she serves a 25 ye
Source: Newark Star-Ledger
August 24, 2008
When Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama makes his acceptance speech Thursday as the grand finale to his party's convention, he hopes to draw at least 76,000 supporters to Denver's Invesco Field to cheer him on.
As the late Frank Hague might have said: Is that all?
Hague, the famously powerful and infamously corrupt mayor of Jersey City from 1917 to 1947 and a Democratic political boss whose clout reached into the White House, probably would have been appalled
Source: National Geographic News
August 22, 2008
A labyrinth filled with stone temples and pyramids in 14 caves—some underwater—have been uncovered on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula, archaeologists announced last week.
The discovery has experts wondering whether Maya legend inspired the construction of the underground complex—or vice versa.
According to Maya myth, the souls of the dead had to follow a dog with night vision on a horrific and watery path and endure myriad challenges before they could rest in the afterlife.
Source: Salt Lake Tribune
August 20, 2008
KANAB - For a nearly 1,200-year-old home, it's held up pretty well. "Amazing" and"pristine" were the words archaeologists used to characterize the site of the ancient settlement just north of Kanab in southern Utah. It is believed that the single-family dwelling belonged to the Virgin Anasazi, who once flourished in the region, said Utah Department of Transportation spokesman Kevin Kitchen. The Virgin Anasazi was a prehistoric American Indian culture that lived along the Virgin River.
Source: AP
August 21, 2008
In a city where the mayor holds the same job his father once did,
politics can seem little different from the years of the legendary
Democratic Machine. But the faces of political privilege — long dominated
by white ethnic groups — have changed as powerful black politicians use
their clout to build new dynasties.
The next in a long line of successions has been set in motion by Illinois
Senate President Emil Jones, one of Barack Obama's first political
mentors, who in announcing his
Source: CNN
August 19, 2008
1. Anna Sage: Dillinger's deadly date
The Tale: Anna Sage was a Romanian immigrant who came to America in 1909
and found work in a brothel in East Chicago, Indiana.
Although she was successful in this venerable and established field (she
opened several of her own houses of ill repute in Indiana and Illinois),
the Department of Labor sought to deport her as an"alien of low moral
character."
But when famed bank robber John Dillinger -- whom she met through mutual
gal pal
Source: AP
August 24, 2008
The news footage has become grainy with age but is no less vivid:
Helmeted Chicago police in a haze of tear gas flailing with billy clubs at
demonstrators, while inside a hall politicians hold ugly shouting matches
over the bloody battles both on the streets outside and half a world away
in Vietnam.
The Democratic National Convention in Denver this week comes exactly 40
years after that jolting episode that became a milestone in American
politics.
While another unpopular war,
Source: BBC
August 23, 2008
The tomb of an anti-slavery campaigner who wrote the hymn Amazing Grace is
among monuments given new protection because of their slave trade links.
John Newton's tomb at Olney, near Milton Keynes, is one of four to be
newly awarded Grade II listing.
Another 21 are having their listing changed or upgraded to mark the
International day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its
Abolition.
The government said they should be preserved for future generations.
Source: Deutsche Welle
August 24, 2008
Berlin's memorial to the Jews murdered during the Nazi era was vandalized Saturday, Aug. 23, only a week after a similar memorial to gays and lesbians persecuted by the Nazis was damaged, police reported.
In Germany's national memorial to European Jewish victims of the Holocaust, seven of the steles that make up the monument were desecrated with 11 Nazi swastikas in red and black paint.
Federal investigators have taken over the case.
On Saturday last week,
Source: BBC
August 24, 2008
A statue of late reggae legend Bob Marley has been unveiled in a small Serbian village during a rock festival as a token of peace in the Balkans.
Musicians from Croatia and Serbia were joined by rock fans for the midnight ceremony in Banatski Sokolac.
Organisers said Marley, who died in 1981, "promoted peace and tolerance in his music".
Serbia recently erected a statue of iconic film character Rocky, while Mostar in Bosnia has one of Bruce Lee.
Source: Times
August 24, 2008
The fortress-like 1960s concrete block housing America’s embassy in Britain could be listed by English Heritage.
The conservation quango is expected within the next few weeks to recommend to Andy Burnham, the culture secretary, that he should give the 600-room building a grade II listing.
The US ambassador, Robert Tuttle, is said to have been lobbying the conservation quango to head off the preservation order, which could halve the estimated £200m value of the embassy
Source: Telegraph
August 24, 2008
Thanks to drought and increasing Israeli security restrictions on where they can wander, their nomadic lifestyle, which predates the birth of Christ, is likely to die out within a generation.
Lack of rainfall over the past three years, thought by some to be due to climate change, is gradually rendering many already sparse grazing lands unusable for their flocks of goats and sheep. At the same time, the steady growth of Jewish towns and settlements in the Israeli Negev desert and th
Source: Telegraph
August 24, 2008
The Romantic poet made some 5,000 changes to a pre-publication script of the classic novel, according to Professor Charles Robinson of the University of Delaware in the US.
He changed key descriptions that helped paint a more vivid picture of scientist Victor Frankenstein's monster, the professor found.
They include his addition that the monster's hair be described as "lustrous black" and that Victor should refer to him as "beautiful" rather than &qu
Source: Observer
August 24, 2008
The young soldier stepped into the bedroom. It was the first time he had gone to a prostitute and he felt apprehensive and embarrassed. He also found himself unable to have sex. 'I was - what do you call it? - impotent,' he said.
This type of recollection from an unnamed veteran of the First World War, 90 years after the end of the conflict, is seldom reflected in the histories, poems or services of remembrance. It is among newly discovered accounts which bring to life a hidden hist
Source: CNN
August 22, 2008
Negative campaigning in America was sired by two lifelong friends, John
Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Back in 1776, the dynamic duo combined powers
to help claim America's independence, and they had nothing but love and
respect for one another. But by 1800, party politics had so distanced the
pair that, for the first and last time in U.S. history, a president found
himself running against his vice president.
Things got ugly fast. Jefferson's camp accused President Adams of having
a"hideou
Source: AP
August 22, 2008
An Aboriginal leader said Friday he wants a boomerang
to return to Australia more than 300 years after it was taken as a
souvenir by celebrated British explorer Capt. James Cook.
The boomerang will be auctioned in London on Sept. 25. Auctioneer
Christie's director Nick Lambourn expects the unmarked 22-inch
(56-centimeter) wooden artifact will fetch up to $113,000.
Cook, who led the first Europeans to discover Australia's fertile east
c
Source: HNN Staff based on a report by Humberto Fontova
August 23, 2008
A YouTube video has caught a Venezuelan TV sportscaster in the act of a flagrant example of historical ignorance.
The anchor, one of the replacement journalists the government of Hugo Chavez installed after nationalizing TV station RCTV, confuses Michael Phelps and Jesse Owens, and then goes on to claim that Hitler presided over the Munich games of 1972.
