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This page features brief excerpts of news 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.
Highlights
Breaking News
This page features brief excerpts of news 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. Because most of our readers read the NYT we usually do not include the paper's stories in HIGHLIGHTS.
Name of source: BBC
SOURCE: BBC (1-1-10)
Robert Tannahill, also known as the Weaver Poet, was once viewed as being almost comparable to Burns.
The centenary of his death saw 15,000 people head to Paisley's Gleniffer Braes, one of his favourite spots, to listen to his songs. It is hoped that Paisley buddies and poetry lovers will again turn out in force to pay tribute to the poet.
New CDs of Tannahill's work are being released, concerts are being put on and a series of events will take place in May, including walks, talks and a play.
Tannahill was born in 1774 to a weaving family but showed a talent for writing poetry. His song Braes o' Balquhidder is thought to be the basis for the famous folk song Wild Mountain Thyme.
SOURCE: BBC (1-1-10)
Helen Lewis, who had a long association with the Lyric Theatre, settled in Northern Ireland after WWII.
Born in Czechoslovakia, she trained as a dancer and having made a new life in Belfast became involved in dance teaching and choreography.
In 1992 she published a widely acclaimed autobiography A Time To Speak which recounted her time in the camp.
SOURCE: BBC (1-1-10)
The original mosaic, the Great Orpheus Roman Pavement, was part of a floor of a Roman villa in Woodchester and is now buried in the village churchyard.
The real pavement, thought to date from AD 325, was last shown in 1973 and was seen by 140,000 people in 50 days.
It was decided not to unearth it again for its own protection.
The reconstruction took 10 years, using 1.6 million pieces of clay.
It was made by brothers Bob and John Woodward, who come from nearby Stroud, and was acclaimed by academics for its accuracy and beauty.
The replica is owned by entrepreneur Alex Lawless and was valued at £1m by the British Museum in 1988.
SOURCE: BBC (12-31-09)
Les Choristes (The Chorus) was missing when staff at the Catini Museum opened the premises on Thursday morning.
There were no signs of a break-in, said Jacques Dallest, the French city's public prosecutor.
The museum will now remain closed while the theft is being investigated, including the examination of CCTV footage from security cameras.
Mr Dallest also told Agence France Presse that police are looking into the possibility that the artwork was stolen by an intruder, a visitor or a museum insider.
Les Choristes, which dates from around 1876, is a colourful pastel work which depicts a male line of singers in the midst of performance.
Name of source: Telegraph (UK)
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (12-30-09)
Civil rights campaigners claimed that the real parents of Marcela and Felipe Noble Herrera, whose mother controlled the country’s biggest newspaper, were abducted and murdered by the last dictatorship during its “Dirty War” against Left-wing dissidents.
The pair were adopted in 1976 by Ernestina Herrera de Noble, the director of Grupo Clarín, Argentina’s dominant media group. Mrs Herrera de Noble – whose late husband, Roberto, set up Clarín, Latin America’s best-selling newspaper — claimed that the babies were left abandoned on her doorstep one night.
Her claim has been challenged by the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a civil rights group trying to locate 500 children of the thousands of dissidents who disappeared under the dictatorship between 1976 and 1983.
Mrs Herrera de Noble, 84, whose husband died in 1969, was childless and the Grandmothers group alleges that her two children were taken from political prisoners who gave birth while in custody in secret torture centres.
Children of the “disappeared” were often given to military or police families considered loyal to the government. Some have grown up not even knowing they were adopted until activists or judges announced efforts to obtain their DNA. On Tuesday, Marcela and Felipe Noble Herrera, both 33, complied with a judge’s order and gave samples at the Legal Medical Department, a federal forensics agency, according to their lawyer, Jorge Anzorreguy.
Name of source: CNN
SOURCE: CNN (12-30-09)
In its 2004 report on the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the commission warned that the Transportation Security Administration and Congress "must give priority attention to improving the ability of screening checkpoints to detect explosives on passengers."
But at most airports, travelers simply pass through magnetometers, which are unlikely to detect bomb materials on their body.
A Government Accounting Office report from October found that TSA has an array of "10 passenger-screening technologies." But the TSA, the report indicates, "has not deployed any of these technologies to airports nationwide."
Name of source: Guardian (UK)
SOURCE: Guardian (UK) (1-1-10)
There has been speculation that Obama's foreign policy approach – and his personal history of his grandfather being tortured by British colonial authorities during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya – might lead to a cooler relationship than was the case when his predecessor George Bush and Tony Blair went to war together in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Louis Susman insisted that Obama regards the UK as "our most important ally and our best friend" and dismissed the recent row over the liberation of the Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi as "a little spat" of the kind that occurs in any happy marriage.
