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: The Missoulian
April 3, 2010
Thousands of years before Euro-Americans “discovered” the bubbling mudpots and eruptive geysers of what is now Yellowstone National Park, early Americans were spending part of their summer camping in the Yellowstone Lake area.
The reasons are several.
Obsidian, a valued rock used to create razor-sharp points for weapons and tools, is located about 20 miles to the northwest at Obsidian Cliff. The lake area contains a variety of flora – everything from camas to wild onion
April 3, 2010
This is a day when a legend of the Old West began: The first Pony Express riders set out 150 years ago today from San Francisco and St. Joseph, Mo. The Pony Express, which brought the news and the mail from the east to the west in only 10 days, electrified the nation when it started April 3, 1860. It cut communication time between east and west in half. Only 18 months later it was obsolete, done in by the telegraph.
On its first day, Pony Express riders left San Francisco, heading e
Source: BBC
April 3, 2010
A fire has torn through buildings at a former World War II airfield in Suffolk.
More than 50 firefighters and about 12 fire engines were sent to Debach Airfield near Woodbridge on Friday night.
Industrial units, vehicles and a pile of tyres were all well-alight when crews arrived.
Source: BBC
April 3, 2010
Senegal has inaugurated a massive $27m (£18m) monument - higher than the Statue of Liberty - that has drawn huge criticism over its cost and symbolism.
The 49m (160ft) Monument of African Renaissance has been unveiled in Dakar as the highlight of the nation's 50th anniversary of independence.
Some scholars have labelled its scantily clad figures un-Islamic, while others said it was a waste of money.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 3, 2010
The prudish reputation of Victorian women has been challenged by a long-forgotten sex survey, which reveals intimate details of the bedroom habits of 19th Century wives.
Middle-class women of the era seemed quite willing to blame their husbands when their love lives failed to meet their own expectations, according to the candid accounts that lay unread for decades in a university archive.
While public morality frowned upon discussion of female sexuality, the records s
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 3, 2010
As Hungary prepares to vote in a crucial election, the far-Right Jobbik party expects great success - to the consternation of democrats and those old enough to remember the fascist past.
As the youthful leader of Hungary's far-right Jobbik party arrived for an election rally, his followers gave him a welcome that had disturbing echoes of Europe in the 1940s.
Two ranks of Hungarian Guards, in paramilitary-style uniforms, snapped to attention as Gabor Vona marched past t
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 3, 2010
A "missing link" between humans and their apelike ancestors has been discovered.
The new species of hominid, the evolutionary branch of primates that includes humans, is to be revealed when the two-million-year-old skeleton of a child is unveiled this week.
Scientists believe the almost-complete fossilised skeleton belonged to a previously-unknown type of early human ancestor that may have been a intermediate stage as ape-men evolved into the first species o
Source: AP
April 2, 2010
Eugene Allen, a White House butler who served presidents from Harry Truman through Ronald Reagan, has died. He was 90.
Allen died of renal failure Wednesday at a hospital in Takoma Park, Md., The Washington Post reported Friday.
Allen, who was black, started at the White House in 1952, when racial segregation prohibited him from using public restrooms in his native state of Virginia. When he left the White House in 1986 after 34 years, he had witnessed not only defining
Source: CNN
April 2, 2010
Turkey's prime minister announced Friday he will send his country's ambassador back to Washington next week.
The announcement comes nearly a month after Ankara recalled its diplomat to protest the passage of a non-binding resolution in the House Foreign Relations Committee, which calls the 1915 massacre of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Armenians in Ottoman Turkey "genocide."
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Ambassador Namik Tan would return to Washin
Source: AP
April 2, 2010
Pope Benedict XVI's personal preacher on Friday likened accusations against the pope and the Catholic church in the sex abuse scandal to “collective violence” suffered by the Jews.
The Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa said in a Good Friday homily with the pope listening in St. Peter's Basilica that a Jewish friend wrote to him to say the accusations remind him of the “more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism.”
The 82-year-old pontiff looked weary as he sat near the central alta
Source: Reuters
April 1, 2010
In the dusty streets behind the pasha's grand villa, bulldozers and forklifts are tearing into the city where Agatha Christie found inspiration and Howard Carter unearthed Tutankhamun.
Egypt has already cleared out Luxor's old bazaar, demolished thousands of homes and dozens of Belle Epoque buildings in a push to transform the site of the ancient capital Thebes into a huge open-air museum.
Officials say the project will preserve temples and draw more tourists, but the w
Source: USA Today
March 31, 2010
Andean mummies reveal arsenic poisoning afflicted people in northern Chile for thousands of years, a hair analysis shows.
In the current Journal of Archaeological Science, a team led by Bernardo Arriaza of Chile's Universidad de Tarapaca analyzed hair from 45 Andean mummies taken from ten sites some 7,000 to 600 years old. The mummies dried in Chile's Atacama desert region, one of the most parched regions on Earth. They were deliberately mummified with sticks, reeds and clay, give
Source: USA Today
April 2, 2010
As his fifth anniversary approached, Pope Benedict XVI had been building on a legacy of a scholarly man who tenderly urged people to look to the moral teachings of Jesus Christ to answer the dilemmas of modern life, be they political or personal.
Although his predecessor John Paul II traveled the globe often to meet millions of adoring Catholics, Benedict has been content to remain close to home and out of the limelight.
But today, five years to the day of the death of
Source: BBC
April 2, 2010
A Serbian court has issued an international arrest warrant for a US man accused of involvement in mass murder during World War II.
Peter Egner, 88, is suspected of war crimes against Jews and other citizens during the Nazi occupation of Serbia, court officials said.
Mr Egner is an ethnic German who was born in the former Yugoslavia.
He has denied the accusations and has been opposing US attempts to strip him of his citizenship.
Source: BBC
April 2, 2010
The "father of the personal computer" who kick-started the careers of Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen has died at the age of 68.
Dr Henry Edward Roberts was the inventor of the Altair 8800, a machine that sparked the home computer era.
Gates and Allen contacted Dr Roberts after seeing the machine on the front cover of a magazine and offered to write software for it.
The program was known as Altair-Basic, the foundation of Microsoft'
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 2, 2010
Jesus was the son of a middle-class, highly educated architect, according to a new book, which claims the previous belief that Joseph worked as a carpenter has distorted the Bible's meaning.
The book- The Jesus Discovery- claims that Jesus rose to become the most senior Rabbi of his time, thus explaining how he was able to exert such influence and why his teachings became such a concern to the authorities.
Author Dr Adam Bradford, who works as a GP, drew his conclusio
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 2, 2010
The remarkable tale of a working class boy from Bolton who won a place to study alongside the future King Edward VIII at Oxford, only to die on a Flanders battlefield, has been told for the first time.
Fred Walker's extraordinary life story would have gone unremembered if not for a military historian who came into possession of his First World War medals.
Fred's old school – Canon Slade school in Bolton, Greater Manchester – is now planning a permanent memorial to its
Source: CNN
April 2, 2010
done by Adolf Hitler when he was a struggling student trying desperately to get into art school.
The 12 charcoal and crayon sketches cover "typical student subjects" and don't display a great deal of promise, Mullock's Auctioneers said. They include two drawings of an elderly woman thought to be Hitler's mother, as well as studies of objects, landscapes, models, and even a Roman senator.
All are signed and some even have Hitler's Vienna address, Mullock's said
Source: Minneapolis Star Tribune
April 2, 2010
Sometimes the hardest thing to find is the person you want to thank.
What began as a casual hallway conversation between two Minneapolis lawyers has turned into a small-scale international search for Danish fishermen who helped rescue Jews during World War II. The obstacles include the passage of time -- 67 years to be exact -- and a well-deserved cultural reputation for stoicism and modesty.
In October 1943, in German-occupied Denmark, Danish Jews were about to be roun
Source: Salon.com
April 2, 2010
As with a restrictive corset worn for far too long, it's time to free yourself of the notion of Victorian women as the epitome of sexual prudishness. An article in Stanford Magazine (via Boing Boing) details the findings of a little known sex survey started in 1892 by Dr. Clelia Duel Mosher that is believed to be the oldest of its kind. Long before the famous Alfred Kinsey was even a glimmer in his parents' eyes, the Stanford professor daringly sat down to ask women about the most intimate aspec
