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: Belfast Telegraph (UK)
February 5, 2010
The Democratic Unionist Party members last night voted to back a deal with Sinn Fein to save Northern Ireland's power-sharing government.
DUP leader Peter Robinson said his party's elected representatives at the Stormont Assembly had backed a deal with Sinn Fein and can now move forward on devolution of policing and justice.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown and taoiseach Brian Cowen are expected to travel to Belfast this morning to put their seal on the deal.
Th
Source: AP
February 5, 2010
Henio Zytomirski's Facebook profile picture stands out from most. The grinning 6-year-old is captured in black and white and poses in an old-fashioned buttoned-up shirt and shorts.
The photograph, shot in 1939, is probably the last taken of him before he was murdered in the Holocaust.
A group in the boy's hometown of Lublin is using the social networking site to breathe virtual life into Henio's stolen childhood and give people around the world the chance to get to know
Source: BBC News
February 4, 2010
Two art galleries have staked the loan of a painting on the outcome of the US Super Bowl between the New Orleans Saints and the Indianapolis Colts.
John Bullard and Maxwell Anderson, directors of museums in New Orleans and Indianapolis, waged the online betting match on Twitter.
The pair agreed to loan paintings - by JMW Turner and Claude Lorrain - to the other, if their team loses on Sunday.
The Super Bowl painting exchange will last for three months.
Source: BBC News
February 5, 2010
A 14-year-old boy has been confirmed as the UK's youngest known service member to have been killed in WWII.
Reginald Earnshaw was aged 14 years and 152 days when he died under enemy fire on the SS North Devon on 6 July 1941.
The merchant navy cabin boy had lied about his age, claiming he was 15, so he could join the war effort.
His sister Pauline Harvey, 77, will mark his birthday on Friday by laying flowers at his grave in Comely Bank Cemetery, Edinburgh
Source: BBC News
February 5, 2010
The death of the last speaker of an ancient language in India's Andaman Islands highlights the fact that half of the world's 7,000 languages are in danger of disappearing. Linguist K David Harrison argues that we still have much to learn from vanishing languages.
My journey as a scientist exploring the world's vanishing languages has taken me from the Siberian forests to the Bolivian Altiplano, from a McDonald's in Michigan to a trailer park in Utah. In all these places I've listene
Source: BBC News
February 5, 2010
Five crates of Scotch whisky and brandy belonging to the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton have been recovered after more than 100 years in the ice.
They were buried beneath Shackleton's Antarctic hut, built in 1908 for a failed expedition to the South Pole.
Some of the crates have cracked and ice has formed inside, which means experts will face a delicate task in trying to extract the contents.
The ice-bound crates were first discovered three years ago.
The master blender at whisky c
Source: Guardian (UK)
February 4, 2010
Survey of landscape suggests prehistoric monument was surrounded by two circular hedges.
The Monty Python knights who craved a shrubbery were not so far off the historical mark: archaeologists have uncovered startling evidence of The Great Stonehenge Hedge.
Inevitably dubbed Stonehedge, the evidence from a new survey of the Stonehenge landscape suggests that 4,000 years ago the world's most famous prehistoric monument was surrounded by two circular hedges, planted on lo
Source: BBC
February 3, 2010
An iPhone application that allows users to download speeches by the former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini has been withdrawn.
Its developer says he is removing it after legal threats.
But the application has also faced protests from Jewish groups and Holocaust survivors who described it as offensive.
IMussolini, as the application is known, has become the most popular iPhone download in Italy.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 2, 2010
Tony Blair 'lied' to his Cabinet and misled Parliament over the war in Iraq, Clare Short, the former international development secretary has said.
Giving evidence before the Chilcot Committee into the war, she repeatedly accused the former prime minister of personally “misleading” and “conning” her, and of being “deceitful” with Cabinet, Parliament, and the public.
Miss Short claimed that Mr Blair broke the ministerial code by misleading Parliament, and accused Lord G
Source: AP
February 2, 2010
Candidates for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize include a Russian human rights group, a Chinese dissident and an inanimate object: the Internet, people who made the nominations said Tuesday....
Erna Solberg, the head of Norway's Conservative Party, put forth Russian human rights activist Svetlana Gannushkina and Memorial, a prominent rights group she works with.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, president of the PEN American Center and a Princeton philosophy professor, said in a statemen
Source: Der Spiegel
February 1, 2010
Controversial Bishop Richard Williamson continues in his denial of the Holocaust, embarrassing both the Society of St. Pius to which he belongs and the Vatican. But the SSPX is becoming increasingly powerful despite the controversy and is attracting more and more supporters....
The world has become a smaller place for the notorious bishop. Since he denied the existence of the Holocaust on television more than a year ago, causing serious problems for Pope Benedict XVI and almost trig
Source: CNS News
February 2, 2010
Pope Pius XII wanted to speak out against Nazi atrocities, but was advised not to for fear of worsening the wartime situation, said the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano.
"If the pope was silent, it was not out of fright or self-interest, but concern for worsening the situation of those oppressed" by the Nazi regime, it said.
With continuing criticism of Pope Pius' wartime activities, especially given the advancement of his sainthood cause, the newspaper
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 4, 2010
As the last of the Mitford sisters, Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire has known her fair share of tragedy and upheaval.
Yet the redoubtable duchess has hit out at the "sloppy-sentimental" culture of "self-pity and self-esteem" which has overtaken modern society, and lamented the demise of Britain's traditional stiff upper lip.
The duchess, who will celebrate her 90th birthday in March, said she did not see the point of dwelling on misfortune. The wartim
Source: CNN.com
February 2, 2010
...[O]pposition to smoking has been around almost as long as smoking itself, and some of the historical measures to curb lighting up might surprise you.
1. The Pope cracks down on smoke
Pope Urban VII's papacy began on September 15, 1590. It ended with his death from malaria less than two weeks later.
Although he didn't spend much time as the head of the Catholic Church, Urban VII was around long enough to make his feelings on tobacco known. He banned all t
Source: Politico
February 3, 2010
President George W. Bush and his senior aides considered — and rejected — a military response to Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia, according to a new history of the conflict and interviews with former officials in the Bush administration.
With desperate Georgians begging for American help in closing down the key route through which Russian soldiers were pouring into the country, Bush’s national security aides outlined possible responses, including “the bombardment and sealing of th
Source: Copenhagen Post (Denmark)
February 4, 2010
Body of Denmark’s most famous astronomer will be dug up in Prague to determine true cause of death
The riddle of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe's death in 1601 may now have a good chance of being solved
Prague's cultural department has finally given researchers permission to open the tomb of Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, which lies in the city’s Tyn Cathedral.
A group of Danish and Czech experts will therefore soon be able to carry out detailed analyses
Source: Scientific American
February 4, 2010
In a report in the Journal of Roman Archaeology, researchers announce the discovery of a body of an east Asian man, buried in Italy two millennia ago. Christopher Intagliata reports
Researchers found his body on an imperial Roman estate and took dental samples. Why examine teeth? Well, the water you drink at birth leaves a distinct signature in your teeth. That water signature is in the form of oxygen isotopes, atoms of oxygen with different numbers of neutrons. Isotopes say someth
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 4, 2010
Adolf Hitler's autobiography "Mein Kampf" is to be republished in Germany in 2015 for the first time since being banned under the country's constitution at the end of the Second World War.
Under the post-1945 German constitution, the dissemination of Nazi philosophy has been a crime punishable by fines and imprisonment.
But the copyright, held by the state of Bavaria where the Nazi movement began life in the 1920s, expires in 2015, 70 years after the death of
Source: Discovery News
February 3, 2010
The remains of a 2,000-year-old skeleton found in eastern Mongolia reveal a man of multi-ethnic heritage.
Consider an older gentleman whose skeleton lay in one of more than 200 tombs recently excavated at a 2,000-year-old cemetery in eastern Mongolia, near China's northern border. DNA extracted from this man's bones pegs him as a descendant of Europeans or western Asians. Yet he still assumed a prominent position in ancient Mongolia's Xiongnu Empire, say geneticist Kyung-Yong Kim of
Source: CBS News
February 4, 2010
Egypt's antiquities chief on Thursday unveiled the completion of an 8-year, $14.5 million restoration of the world's oldest Christian monastery, touting it as a sign of Christian-Muslim coexistence.
The announcement at the 1,600-year-old St. Anthony's Monastery came a month after Egypt's worst incident of sectarian violence in over a decade, when a shooting on a church on Orthodox Christmas Eve killed seven people.
The attack raised heavy criticism of the Egyptian gover
