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: Salon
August 20, 2008
One of the presidential campaign's most pitched battles is already blazing away. But the action won't be coming to you live from Denver or St. Paul in the next two weeks, pollsters can barely track it and -- most important -- there aren't any rules.
For months, anonymous e-mail chain letters, blog posts and message board items attacking Barack Obama have been flying around the country. Obama's campaign is concerned enough about the rumor mill to devote an entire Web site to fightin
Source: DailyPress.com
August 21, 2008
Gov. Timothy M. Kaine on Tuesday approved a broad reuse plan that will allow Fort Monroe to become a combination tourist destination, park, and community of homes, offices and retail businesses.
An 18-member Fort Monroe Federal Area Development Authority has worked with consultants on the delicate act of preserving the post, which is a nationally registered landmark, while coming up with a plan to have it bring in enough revenue to pay for maintenance, restoration and improvements.
Source: AP
August 20, 2008
The White House is missing as many as 225 days of e-mail dating back to 2003 and there is little if any likelihood a recovery effort will be completed by the time the Bush administration leaves office, according to an internal White House draft document obtained by the Associated Press.
The nine-page outline of the White House's e-mail problems invites companies to bid on a project to recover the missing electronic messages.
The work would be carried out through April 1
Source: MSNBC.com
August 20, 2008
Jerry Beau is a national treasure, not only for his service to his country but also for his service to his fellow Marines and their families.
Beau, 89, served 24 years in the Marine Corps and has spent the last 52 years as the unpaid historian of the Marine Raiders Association, meticulously collecting service records and other information on 7,600 men who served with the elite Marine Raiders during World War II.
"We only have about 200 of the original Raiders left,
Source: MiamiHerald.com
August 20, 2008
Archaeology students from across the country have delved into the underwater mystery of a steamship that sank more than a century ago off Key Largo.
For two weeks, archaeology students pieced together an underwater puzzle of weathered artifacts -- the metal bands of a paddle wheel, a portion of a smokestack, remnants of boiler plates.
They mapped and measured these artifacts resting on the ocean's floor, trying to solve the mystery of the shipwrecked Menemon Sanford, a grand
Source: Independent
August 21, 2008
The merciless punishments Henry VIII meted out to his enemies have been well documented. Less is known about how, on the rarer occasions when the king was happy with the service of his courtiers or the country's most eminent noblemen, he liked to give them a golden livery collar or heavy chain as a token of his gratitude.
Henry VIII only awarded around 20 of the chains. They were all engraved with the characters SS, referring to the Latin religious creed, Spiritus Sanctus (Holy Spir
Source: International Herald Tribune
August 20, 2008
JERUSALEM: It began with a late-night call one Friday in July. A woman from New York was asking Gila Flam, who runs the music section of Israel's national library, about a century-old autographed manuscript by a Swiss composer. Was it in the library's collection?
When Flam checked, she discovered that the piece was in her inventory but not in the folder where it belonged. Other items were also missing from the folder. In fact, she said she began to recall, users of the library had b
Source: Independent
August 21, 2008
Images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of the Perseus cluster of stars have helped scientists to solve a 100 million-year-old mystery of how giant structures in deep space are prevented from disintegrating. The spectacular pictures show vast, thread-like "filaments" of gas which emerge from the centre of a galaxy known as NGC 1275, situated some 235 million light years away from Earth.
Astronomers have tried to explain how these beautiful structures can have survived f
Source: The Times
August 21, 2008
Captain Cook's boomerang has returned - and could bring its owner £60,000.
The explorer collected the strange, crooked stick in 1770 while surveying Australia, but he had no idea what it was for, or even what it was called. He thought that it was a wooden sword; his botanist, Sir Joseph Banks, believed it to be a short scimitar.
Captain James Cook returned to England with the boomerang in 1771, and was still ignorant of its secrets when he was killed eight years later.
Source: The Times
August 21, 2008
John Lennon's killer has provided new details of the murder of the former Beatle in his latest unsuccessful attempt for parole.
Mark David Chapman, 53, disputed media accounts that he called out to Lennon before shooting him in New York on December 8, 1980. “I don't recall saying, 'Mr. Lennon',” Chapman told the parole board. “I think that was something the press elaborated on. That didn't happen. He didn't turn. I shot him in the back,” he said.
Chapman fired five sh
Source: The Times
August 21, 2008
For decades she has swum in the public memory as the irresistible Mata Hari of Korea — a dastardly seductress who played both sides, charming military secrets out of an American colonel and feeding them to her lover in the communist North.
In 1950, three days after conflict broke out on the Korean peninsula, Kim Soo Im was executed by the Seoul regime: a mysteriously hasty killing, the real motive of which was lost as the country descended into the bloody chaos of war.
Source: The Times
August 21, 2008
It has taken 110 years to cover 27 painstaking metres, but one of Britain's most recently discovered species has finally found a home.
Papillifera papillaris - a type of Italian snail - arrived in England near the end of the 19th century, having hitched a ride on a stone balustrade imported from Rome. It then disappeared.
A colony of the tiny snails, which have distinctive spindle-shaped shells 11mm long, has now been found on the “tortoise fountain” in the Italian-st
Source: progress-index.com
August 20, 2008
Dinwiddie County native Lucas L. Meredith Jr., 84, doesn’t look like a man who has a unique link to history.
He looks more like a wealthy retiree from Florida with a pink polo shirt, white sailor’s shorts and black loafers with full white hair neatly trimmed, and the soft and clean-shaven face that doesn’t reveal his 84 years.
But Meredith is the son of a Confederate soldier. Meredith is one of an estimated dozen people in the nation whose father fought in the Civil War
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 20, 2008
On 20 July 1944, a German colonel left a bomb in the Führer's office. It exploded, just missing its target, and the following day the officer was shot. With the daring plot now being made into a film - starring Tom Cruise - Berthold von Stauffenberg, son of the would-be assassin, tells Nigel Jones how his father's 'moral sacrifice' shattered his and his family's lives
Just before 1pm on a boiling hot day in 1944, a 10-year-old boy sat down to lunch at a grand country house in the h
Source: Washington Post
August 20, 2008
Hua Guofeng, who succeeded Mao Zedong as China's Communist Party leader for a short period before being brushed aside by economic reformers 30 years ago, died in the Chinese capital Wednesday afternoon, state media reported. He was 87.
Although analysts say Hua was not an overtly popular figure and has lived outside the spotlight for decades, funeral arrangements could create a sensitive issue for the party's current leadership, especially since the world's attention is focused her
Source: National Security Archive
August 20, 2008
Washington, DC, August 20, 2008 - On the tenth anniversary of U.S. cruise missile strikes against al-Qaeda in response to deadly terrorist attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, newly-declassified government documents posted today by the National Security Archive (www.nsarchive.org) suggest the strikes not only failed to hurt Osama bin Laden but ultimately may have brought al-Qaeda and the Taliban closer politically and ideologically.
Source: AP
August 20, 2008
It was an engineering marvel that brought tremendous
wealth to New York and opened up the North American interior, helping turn
the United States into an international commercial powerhouse in the 19th
century.
Today, managers of the storied Erie Canal are pouring tens of millions of
dollars of public money into it each year as they struggle to transform
the once vital freight route into a tourist destination.
The spending, and the state's decision to subsidize the canal with
Source: AP
August 20, 2008
The date is etched in blood in Utah and Mormon church history and,
on a more intimate level, the family trees of people like Karen Maxwell, a
mother of eight and choir teacher from Salt Lake City.
On Sept. 11, 1857, Mormon militiamen led the slaughter of 120 men, women
and children on a wagon train bound for California in an incident known as
the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
Chief among the instigators was Isaac Haight, a local militia and church
leader. Several generations late
Source: Independent Mail of South Carolina Online
August 17, 2008
A second canoe believed to date back hundreds of years to early
Native American residents of Oconee County has arrived at the Oconee
Heritage Center.
It will now join the canoe found in the Chattooga River in 2002 in a
preservation process and eventual exhibits at the museum, according to
Nick Gambrell, the center’s curator and director.
The latest canoe, found in the Keowee River, was discovered last month by
three young boys, Gambrell said.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 20, 2008
Charles Zentai, seventh on the list of most wanted Nazi war crimes suspects, faces trial after losing an extradition court battle in Australia.
Mr Zentai, 86, was deemed fit to be repatriated to his native Hungary, where he is accused of beating a Jewish youth to death in 1944.
The Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre has named Mr Zentai seventh on its list of 10 most wanted Nazi war crimes suspects who are potentially still alive.
The list is topped by Ari
