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: New York Times
December 31, 2069
Paul A. Samuelson, the first American Nobel laureate in economics and the foremost academic economist of the 20th century, died Sunday at his home in Belmont, Mass. He was 94.
His death was announced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which Mr. Samuelson helped build into one of the world’s great centers of graduate education in economics.
In receiving the Nobel Prize in 1970, Mr. Samuelson was credited with transforming his discipline from one that ruminate
Source: New York Times
December 31, 2069
David R. Obey has served in Congress since Barack Obama was in grade school. He does not waste time with pleasantries, and he does not mince words. So when President Obama called Representative Obey recently to talk about Afghanistan, the congressman raised a topic sure to make the young commander in chief uncomfortable: Vietnam.
“I came here in ’69, and I determined that I would give Nixon a year to see what he could do, because he had inherited the war, so I bit my tongue for a ye
Source: NPR
December 13, 2009
The Orient Express — the very name carries an aura of glamour and mystery. Van Helsing rode it to his battle with Dracula. James Bond romanced a beautiful Russian aboard it. And Agatha Christie set one of the best-known murders in literary history aboard that train.
Now the original Orient Express is itself about to become part of history. On Monday, the route will disappear from European railway timetables, a victim of high-speed trains and cut-rate airlines.
Source: CNN
December 12, 2009
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair says he would have taken the decision to remove Saddam Hussein even without evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
In an excerpt from a BBC interview to be aired Sunday, Blair said: "I would still have thought it right to remove him. I mean obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments, about the nature of the threat."
Blair, who left office in 2007 and now serves as a special envoy to the
Source: BBC
December 11, 2009
Five former Khmer Rouge leaders have been charged with crimes against humanity.
A first trial ended with accusations the special courts had shown little interest in the victims' testimony.
This conference is a chance for victims to air their concerns to officials before a second case goes to trial.
As many as two million Cambodians died in the late 1970s because of Khmer Rouge policies.
Source: BBC
December 11, 2009
It reported that the raids revealed a greater level of involvement between the spy agency and Blackwater than previously acknowledged by either.
Blackwater said it was "never under contract to participate in covert raids with CIA or Special Operations".
It was employed to provide security at bases for CIA staff.
In response to the New York Times article, a spokesman for Blackwater - now called Xe Services - said: "Blackwater USA was never
Source: BBC
December 12, 2009
The former prime minister said it was the "notion of him as a threat to the region" which had tilted him in favour of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Without WMD claims it would have been necessary to "use and deploy different arguments," he told the BBC.
Mr Blair is expected to face the Iraq war inquiry early next year.
In September 2002 the UK government published a dossier which contained the now discredited claim that Iraq could use
Source: Jewish Telegraph Agency
December 10, 2009
Some 2,200 years after the Maccabees' revolt, historians and archaeologists are uncovering new information about their era.This year's biggest discovery is a correspondence between Seleukes IV, whose brother and heir was Antiochus IV Epiphanes of the Chanukah story, and one of Seleukes' chiefs in Judea found on parts of an ancient stele.Professor Dov Gera of Ben-Gurion University, who studied the stone's inscription, said it confirms the account by the Jewish historian Josephus
Source: Honolulu Advertiser
July 12, 2009
Sixty-eight years ago today, the United States entered one of the bloodiest struggles of its history, the war in the Pacific.
About 200 people gathered yesterday at a cracked, potholed, weedy strip of concrete at 'Ewa Field, where part of the opening salvo in that long, brutal fight was fired.
'Ewa Field has a history that time has obscured. When the carrier-launched warplanes of the Japanese Empire roared in to attack Pearl Harbor, they also hit the Marine Corps Air St
Source: CNN
November 12, 2009
The remains of Adolf Hitler were burned in 1970 by Soviet KGB agents and thrown into a river in Germany on direct orders from the spy agency's chief, a top Russian security official said this week.
The head archivist of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) -- the successor to the former Soviet Union's KGB -- confirmed for the first time the chain of events that led to the disposal of Hitler's body, and who ordered the operation, in an exclusive interview with Russia's Interfax ne
Source: Science Daily
September 12, 2009
Recent studies show that one in three people suffer from stress and the number is on the rise. But stress isn't a new problem.
While the physiological state wasn't properly named until the 1930s, new research from The University of Western Ontario proves stress has plagued humans for hundreds, and perhaps thousands of years.
The first study of its kind, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, detected the stress hormone cortisol in the hair of ancient Peruvi
Source: Scotsman.com
November 12, 2009
HEART specialists have saved the life of an Israeli man who had refused to visit a doctor for 64 years – and learned the terrible secret of his mistrust of the medical profession.
When Yitzhak Ganon, 85, came around from the anaesthetic at the hospital near Tel Aviv, he was informed that he had only one kidney.
"I know," he replied. "The last time I saw the other one it was pulsating in the hand of Josef Mengele. He was a doctor too."
Mr
Source: BBC News
November 12, 2009
Many in Albania - which has Europe's fastest-growing economy and aspirations to join the EU - feel the former dictatorship has come a long way fast, reports the BBC's Paul Henley from Tirana.
Lufti Dervishi is old enough to compare living in Albania today with how life used to be.
Whenever he thinks the road towards European integration is not a fast enough one, he stops to remind himself how far his country has come since it threw off what was the contine
Source: BBC News
October 12, 2009
Researchers have unveiled a new species of dinosaur from the late Triassic period - a small, early relative of T.rex and Velociraptor .
The 2m-long dinosaur, named Tawa hallae , was found in a "bone bed" on the Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, US.
The discovery of this early theropod, reported in the journal Science, sheds light on early dinosaur evolution.
The team says the find also highlights how dinosaurs dispersed across what was then the &qu
Source: BBC News
November 12, 2009
Thieves have stolen the corpse of Tassos Papadopoulos, the former president of the Republic of Cyprus, police say.
Mr Papadopoulos' body was removed after his grave in Nicosia was broken into overnight, officials said.
Mr Papadopoulos died of lung cancer in Nicosia in 2008, aged 74.
The theft from the Deftera village cemetery in Nicosia was discovered a day before the first anniversary of his death.
The desecration was discovered by one of Mr P
Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH)
December 9, 2009
On December 8, the White House issued an Open Government Directive requiring federal agencies to take immediate, specific steps to open their operations up to the public. In addition to the directive, the Administration released the Open Government Progress Report to the American People – an analysis of the s
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
December 6, 2009
In 1991, Donald W. Livingston threw a party—well, a conference—and nobody showed up.
It was during the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and Mr. Livingston, a professor of philosophy at Emory University and raised in South Carolina, decided there should be more thoughtful discourse on the topic of secession.
A political philosopher who specializes in David Hume, he searched philosophy papers published since 1940 and turned up only seven on the matter of secession from fe
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 12, 2009
The death certificate of Baron Manfred von Richthofen, the legendary First World War German flying ace better known as 'Red Baron', has been discovered in Poland.
Ninety-one years after Von Richthofen died after being shot down near the River Somme in France Maciej Kowalczyk, a genealogist, found the document in archives belonging to the western Polish town of Ostrow Wielkopolski.
Mr Kowalczyk explained that the town, which in 1918 was part of Germany, issued the death
Source: Times (UK)
December 8, 2009
An Iraqi taxi driver who overheard two military commanders talking about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was allegedly the “intelligence sub-source” quoted in the Government’s dossier to prove that chemical missiles could be fired in 45 minutes, according to a report by a Tory MP.
Adam Holloway, a former army officer and Conservative MP for Gravesham, told The Times last night that he had been given information that the taxi driver’s recollections of the conversation in the back
Source: Yahoo News
December 7, 2009
Potsdam, Germany – Handsome villas on Karl Marx street here look out on the bending Griebnitzsee River. In one villa, occupied by Harry Truman in July 1945, history itself would fatefully bend.
President Truman called it "the little White House" – and it was here, while he was in Berlin for the Potsdam Conference, that word arrived of the first atom bomb test in New Mexico July 14. With strong urging from Winston Churchill, the Americans sent a letter to Japan, asking for
