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: Daily Mail (UK)
December 8, 2009
Actors in South Africa are campaigning to stop Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Hudson from playing the lead role in a new film about Winnie Mandela.
The Creative Workers Union of South Africa said using foreign actors to tell the country's stories undermined efforts to develop the national film industry.
'It can't happen that we want to develop our own Hollywood and yet bring in imports,' the union's president Mabutho Sithole said.
'This decision must be rev
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
December 7, 2009
In a jungle clearing on a small Pacific island, the descendants of a tribe of cannibals bow to a British pensioner and apologise for having his relative for dinner - literally.
The man they were apologising to was Charles Milner-Williams, 65, of Hampshire.
The meal they were apologising for was his great-great grandfather, the Reverend John Williams, who was killed on the island of Erromango, now part of Vanuatu, 170 years ago.
Williams, a prominent miss
Source: Spiegel Online
December 8, 2009
How do you carve up a cow? First you cut the meat off the bones. You start by severing the muscles from the joints with a sharp knife. The fibrous meat can then easily be scraped off, from top to bottom. After you've removed the flesh there's still a lot of goodness left. Deep in the long bones and vertebrae lies the marrow. To get at this delicacy you smash the bones and scrape out the marrow or simply boil it out in water. What's left is a pile of naked bones with traces of scratching and scra
Source: Deutsche Welle
December 8, 2009
Heinrich Boere announced in an Aachen state court on Tuesday that he killed three Dutch civilian resistance fighters at the end of World War II.
Boere said the three were a bicycle-shop owner, a pharmacist, and another civilian.
Murders "weren't a crime"
He told prosecutors, however, that he did not kill the men in cold blood.
"At no point did I feel like I was committing a crime. Now I see things from a different perspective,&qu
Source: Fox News
December 7, 2009
Researchers have discovered the remains of a Japanese mini-submarine they say was used to attack Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7 1941, the Los Angeles Times reports.
The discovery provides evidence that the submarine fired its torpedoes at Battleship Row and could therefore resolve a long-standing dispute among historians, the paper reports.
Five mini-submarines were intended to be used to launch a strike against Pearl Harbor, but four ended up not being used for various reasons
Source: Fox News
December 7, 2009
Secret Service report reveals dozens of security breaches since 1980 surrounding U.S. presidents.
A report compiled by the Secret Service reveals security surrounding the president has been breached at least 91 times since 1980, The Washington Post reported on Monday.
A summary of the secret 2003 report, along with descriptions of more recent breaches by federal homeland security officials, details scores of breaches, including a family who was mistakenly allowed onto W
Source: NYT
December 6, 2009
OTTAWA — Like public health care, Canada’s tight gun-control laws help distinguish the country from its powerful neighbor to the south. But as Canadians commemorated the 20th anniversary of one of the country’s most notorious shooting sprees on Sunday, their Parliament was on course to eliminate one of its most significant gun-control measures.
A long-gun registry, which requires the registration of rifles and shotguns, emerged largely from public revulsion over the massacre in 198
Source: Politico
December 7, 2009
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) upped the rhetorical ante this morning by comparing opponents of health care reform to conservatives who tried to block emancipation and equal rights -- prompting the Republican national chairman to question his sanity.
Speaking on the floor of the Senate, Reid blasted GOP leaders who have urged Democrats opt for a slower, incremental approach to reform instead of the mega-bill the majority hopes to push through the Senate by Christmas
Source: Telegraph (UK)
December 7, 2009
The former Christian Democratic party leader died during routine surgery and his relatives have long suspected that he was the victim of foul play at the hands of secret police operating under the 1973-1990 military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
The four doctors arrested include two who took part in the surgery and two others who had a role in an initial autopsy of Frei's body.
Two other suspects in the case are accused of having spied on Frei, who at the time was s
Source: The Christian Science Monitor
December 7, 2009
Washington - How did the Japanese do it? That question remains 68 years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a day that spawned some of the greatest unanswered questions of US military history.
The completeness of the surprise, as well as the enormity of the attack's destruction, have led conspiracy theorists to surmise that President Franklin D. Roosevelt must have known what was coming, and allowed it, to rouse the nation for World War II.
Most historians don't believe t
Source: The Chronicle Herald (Canada)
December 7, 2009
WITH BLOWING SNOW and frigid temperatures Sunday, it wasn’t hard to evoke the memory of the Halifax Explosion.
As those familiar with the story know, Mother Nature twisted the knife the day after the Dec. 6, 1917, catastrophe by whipping up a snowstorm that crippled a city already laid bare by the disaster.
Sunday’s nor’easter was a reminder of conditions 92 years ago was not lost on those attending the annual outdoor service at the bell tower in Fort Needham Memorial P
Source: Examiner
December 7, 2009
Former United States Vice-President Al Gore met with President Barack Obama on Monday ahead of the climate summit in Copenhagen, Denmark to discuss climate change and the goals of the United Nations.
The climate summit of 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark began on Monday and in the opening talks, the Saudi Arabian climate negotiator called for an independent international investigation into Climategate, reports Digital Journal...
... NPR reports that the White House issued an
Source: The American Task Force on Palestine
December 7, 2009
Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas's visit to Beirut on Monday casts the spotlight on the plight of nearly 300,000 Palestinians in Lebanon who fear they are doomed to be refugees for life.
His brief trip comes amid renewed efforts to revive the Middle East peace process and concern in Lebanon's political circles that any deal struck on the refugee issue would be at the expense of the Lebanese...
... The majority of the refugees arrived in Lebanon following the creation
Source: BBC
December 7, 2009
Researchers at an Isle of Wight museum have begun the painstaking process of assembling an almost complete 30ft (9m) dinosaur skeleton, the BBC can reveal.
Visitors to the Dinosaur Isle Museum will be able watch experts build the vertebra of an Iguanodon, which roamed the earth 130 million years ago.
It was uncovered over several years by fossil hunter Nick Chase, who then donated it to the Sandown museum.
Work on the skeleton, known as "Big Iggy&quo
Source: BBC
December 7, 2009
A man whose great-great grandfather was killed and eaten by cannibals has taken part in a unique reconciliation event in the South Pacific.
In the 1830s, the Reverend John Williams was the most famous missionary of the age.
Now, 170 years after his murder the descendants of those responsible invited his family to Erromango, part of the island nation of Vanuatu.
Charles Milner-Williams, of Hampshire, was among those who made the journey.
Source: BBC
December 7, 2009
A Gwynedd-based artist is developing his passion for Victorian era black and white photography.
After initial experiments with more up-to-date technology, Richard Cynan Jones, is using technology developed by photographers in the 1850s.
Based at Mynydd Llandygai, near Bangor, the artist is concentrating on character portraits, lugging his large box camera, and on-site developing equipment with him.
Source: BBC
December 5, 2009
Thousands of people have attended the funeral of Chilean singer Victor Jara, who has been reburied 36 years after his death in a military coup.
Well-wishers scattered flowers as his cortege made its way to a cemetery.
Jara was one of the most prominent victims of the 1973 coup that brought Gen Augusto Pinochet to power.
His body was exhumed in June so that a court could clarify the circumstances of his death. It was established that he had been shot more
Source: BBC
December 7, 2009
A Chilean judge has charged six people over the death in 1982 of the country's ex-President, Eduardo Frei Montalva.
The judge said there was now evidence that Mr Frei, a vocal critic of military leader Augusto Pinochet, had been poisoned in hospital.
The arrests come less than a week before Chile's presidential election, in which Mr Frei's son, Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, is a leading candidate.
The former president's family have long argued he was murdered.
Source: BBC
December 7, 2009
A distant US relative of Dr Hawley Crippen, executed in London in 1910 for murdering his wife, has failed in a bid to secure a posthumous pardon for him.
The Criminal Cases Review Commission refused to send the case back to the Court of Appeal, saying the applicant was not a "properly interested person".
James Patrick Crippen, 73, of Ohio, a second cousin three times removed, said he was "disappointed" by the decision.
Source: Fox News
December 7, 2009
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid took his GOP-blasting rhetoric to a new level Monday, comparing Republicans who oppose health care reform to lawmakers who clung to the institution of slavery more than a century ago.
The Nevada Democrat, in a sweeping set of accusations on the Senate floor, also compared health care foes to those who opposed women's suffrage and the civil rights movement -- even though it was Sen. Strom Thurmond, then a Democrat, who unsuccessfully tried to filibus
