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: NYT
August 22, 2008
When Senator John McCain is in Washington, he lives in a luxury high-rise condominium in Arlington, Va., owned by his wife, Cindy Hensley McCain. Mrs. McCain also owns their condos in Phoenix, San Diego and Coronado, Calif., and their vacation compound near Sedona, Ariz. And it is the beer business, Hensley & Company, she inherited from her father that is the source of the McCain family fortune.
That fortune makes Mr. McCain one of the richest members of the Senate. Yet barely a
Source: WaPo
August 22, 2008
On weekday mornings as a teenager, Barry Obama left his grandparents' apartment on the 10th floor of the 12-story high-rise at 1617 South Beretania, a mile and half above Waikiki Beach, and walked up Punahou Street in the shadows of capacious banyan trees and date palms. Before crossing the overpass above the H1 freeway, where traffic zoomed east to body-surfing beaches or west to the airport and Pearl Harbor, he passed Kapiolani Medical Center, walking below the hospital room where he was born
Source: Susan Eisenhower in the National Interest
August 21, 2008
Hijacked by a relatively small few, the GOP of today bears no resemblance to Lincoln, Roosevelt or Eisenhower’s party, or many of the other Republican administrations that came after. In my grandparents’ time, the thrust of the party was rooted in: a respect for the constitution; the defense of civil liberties; a commitment to fiscal responsibility; the pursuit and stewardship of America’s interests abroad; the use of multilateral international engagement and “soft power”; the advancement of civ
Source: Telegraph
August 22, 2008
Until two weeks ago, British holocaust survivor Eugene Black assumed his sisters had died in Auschwitz. "When we arrived at Auschwitz I was immediately separated from my mother and two sisters," he said yesterday, from his home near Leeds."Five minutes later I was separated from my father. I never saw any of them again." After accessing the files at Bad Arolsen in central Germany however, Mr Black, a Czech Jew deported to the Nazi's most notorious camp in May 1944, discovered that his sisters
Source: Independent
August 23, 2008
The Bletchley Park Trust plans to turn the historic site into an internationally-recognised visitor centre with restored buildings, an authentic 1940s atmosphere and gardens the public can enjoy free of charge.
But implementing the plan and saving the site, the dilapidated state of which was highlighted in The Independent this week, will cost 10m pounds. That money would bring new life to the decaying park near Milton Keynes, where some of Britain's finest minds hastened the defeat
Source: Independent
August 23, 2008
On the night of 22 October 1966, the deputy governor of Wormwood Scrubs telephoned Shepherd's Bush police station in west London. "I have just been informed by my chief that we have lost one of our chaps over the wall. We think it's Blake."
"Blake?" asked the duty constable. "Yes," came the reply. "The one doing 42 years. He went over the east wall. He's probably in prison grey. Look, I'm a bit tucked up at the moment, I'm in the middle of re
Source: Telegraph
August 22, 2008
A 140-year-old pavilion where cricketing legend W G Grace once strapped on his pads has avoided demolition after a birds' nest built there allowed a city council to save the landmark.
The pavilion at Cinderella Sports Ground, Worcestershire, hosted the batsman when he was 20-years-old, during one of his appearances for Worcestershire XI in 1870.
And when the famous Australian side of 1878 first came over to play in England they also used the quintessential English pavi
Source: Telegraph
August 22, 2008
Bill Tuttey, a naval aircrewman at the time, picked Mr Weston off the beach after he suffered severe burns in the bombing of the RFA troop carrier, the Sir Galahad, in the 1982 conflict.
He gave the Welsh Guardsman morphine to relieve the pain, issued words of comfort, and offered him a cigarette.
The two men did not meet again until this week when Mr Weston was signing copies of his latest book in Helston, Cornwall.
Source: New Zealand Herald
August 23, 2008
Federal investigators in the United States say they have solved a mystery of the September 11, 2001, attacks, the collapse of World Trade Centre building 7, long a source of conspiracy theories.
The 47-storey trapezoid-shaped building was north of the World Trade Centre towers, across Vesey St in lower Manhattan.
On September 11, it was set on fire by falling debris from the burning towers, but sceptics have long argued that fire and debris alone should not have brought
Source: AP
August 22, 2008
The U.S. government is bartering for Alexander Hamilton's boyhood home — offering land to build a public high school in return for control of the property owned by the U.S. Virgin Islands.
U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne proposed the deal during a visit Thursday to the Virgin Islands to announce environmental preservation grants.
Hamilton's boyhood home is located on the island of St. Croix. The majority of land on St. John, where officials want to build the sch
Source: McClatchy
August 21, 2008
MANAGUA — Standing on the floor of the old national legislature where he and a group of Sandinista rebels sparked a national insurrection 30 years ago, legendary guerrilla leader Eden Pastora urges Nicaraguan youth to continue the revolution after he and his graying comrades have passed away.
''You need to be more revolutionary,'' Pastora, 71, told the packed audience of high-school students, as part of the government's weeklong commemoration of the assault on the National Palace. &
Source: http://www.turkishdailynews.com
August 21, 2008
History continues to be unearthed through excavations of the ancient city
of Pompeipolis, located in the western Black Sea city of Kastamonu.
Last year the excavations uncovered the Temple of Augustus, a Turkish
bath, a drainage system and the ruins of a villa from the late Roman
period. During the third-term excavations, which started a month ago,
archeologists have unearthed a mosaic and an iron furnace from the Roman
period, as well as a marketplace.
Professor Latife Summ
Source: BBC
August 21, 2008
August 1958 saw some of the worst rioting in British history in what is now one of London's most trendy and sought-after neighbourhoods. But 50 years ago the working-class area in west London, known as 'Notting Dale', was little more than a slum.
Newly arrived migrants from the Caribbean had settled in the Colville area alongside the white working-class, and it was an uncomfortable existence. 'Colour bars' saw black people turned away from pubs and consequently
Source: Independent
August 21, 2008
It is a detail of the already exotic life story of Barack Obama that his campaign was not intending to highlight to voters at the Democratic Convention in Denver next week: the circumstances
Source: National Security Archive
August 22, 2008
The U.S. intelligence community buckled sooner in 2002 than previously reported to Bush administration pressure for data justifying an invasion of Iraq, according to a documents posting on the Web today by National Security Archive senior fellow John Prados.
The documents suggest that the public relations push for war came before the intelligence analysis, which then conformed to public positions taken by Pentagon and White House officials. For example, a July 2002 draft of the &quo
Source: AP
August 22, 2008
Andre Steiner was the muscle behind one of the most daring — and overlooked — missions to save Jews during the Holocaust.
In his youth, before he became a renowned architect, he helped engineer a plan to stave off the deportation of Slovakia's Jews through a network of work camps and a series of bribes that likely helped save the lives of thousands.
The last living member of the underground network that devised the plan, Steiner marked his 100th birthday Friday in a ret
Source: AP
August 18, 2008
Archaeologists at America's first permanent English settlement are reporting the discovery of what they say are four significant finds.
The director of archaeology at Historic Jamestown, William Kelso, identifies the most significant find as an early 17th century copper pendant depicting a Powhatan Indian.
The "corn-flake" fragile copper relief is "tremendously significant" because there are so few renderings of Powhatan Indians, said Kelso.
Source: WaPo
August 15, 2008
Inside Ford's Theatre, there is nothing original: no hint of the fire that ruined the place in 1862, no trace of the actual box where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, no vestige of the forgotten catastrophe almost three decades later that killed 22 people and injured 60 others.
What's inside now dates from a 1960s renovation, theater officials say, and much of that is being transformed. The "cursed" old theater on 10th Street NW, twice wrecked by disaster and once
Source: AP
August 19, 2008
Maudie White Hopkins, who grew up during the Depression in the hardscrabble Ozarks and married a Confederate army veteran 67 years her senior, has died. She was 93.
Hopkins, the mother of three children from a second marriage who loved to make fried peach pies and applesauce cakes, died Sunday at a hospital in Helena-West Helena, said Rodger Hooker of the Roller-Citizens Funeral Home.
Other Confederate widows are still living, but they don't want any publicity, Martha B
Source: HNN Staff
August 21, 2008
A website drawing some attention has been established to build public opposition to Wal-Mart's plan to construct a new store adjacent to Civil War battlefields in Virginia.
Readers coming to the website, http://www.civilwar.org/walmart08, are told:
Walmart is planning on building a 141,000 sq. ft. Superstore next to the Wilderness and Chancellorsville Battlefields. Do you want to see the historical significance of both of these battlefields marred forever by more paveme
