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: AP
December 1, 2009
Remains believed to be those of four American servicemen killed during the Vietnam War were loaded on a plane Tuesday and flown back to the United States for identification.
U.S. honor guards carried the four American flag-draped aluminum cases holding the remains onto the U.S. military transport plane at Noi Bai International Airport in Hanoi. The remains were headed to a lab in Hawaii for forensic testing.
One set of remains was recovered by joint excavation teams in
Source: Yahoo News
November 27, 2009
NEW YORK – Members of one of America's oldest Protestant churches officially apologized Friday — for the first time — for massacring and displacing Native Americans 400 years ago.
"We consumed your resources, dehumanized your people and disregarded your culture, along with your dreams, hopes and great love for this land," the Rev. Robert Chase told descendants from both sides. "With pain, we the Collegiate Church, remember our part in these events."
Source: BBC
December 1, 2009
The Lockerbie bomber wore a white shellsuit to hide the fact he was wearing body armour when he was released from a Scottish prison.
Abdelbaset al-Megrahi wore the casual clothing as he boarded a flight from Glasgow to Libya in August.
He later swapped his shellsuit and baseball cap for a formal grey suit before landing in Tripoli. Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill revealed the security measure to a committee of MSPs.
T
Source: BBC
December 1, 2009
The Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at former US President George W Bush has found himself on the receiving end of a shoe-throwing attack.
Muntadar al-Zaidi was speaking about Iraqi war victims at a news conference in Paris, but managed to duck in time.
Media reports said the attacker was an exiled Iraqi journalist who defended US policy and accused Zaidi of "working for dictatorship in Iraq".
The AP news agency said Zaidi's brother, Maitha
Source: The Neew York Times
December 1, 2009
An 1852 contract — a delicate sheet of paper, with tinges of yellow — outlined plans for the Cooper Union foundation building. On it are the signatures of the college’s founder, Peter Cooper, and the architects Frederick A. Petersen and F. H. Knevitt.
Nearby, a letter and invoice show a lab director’s request for equipment totaling $7,407, which included steam engine thermometers and sewing machine motors.
There is also a 1901 letter from an alumnus, John F. O’Rourke,
Source: BBC
December 1, 2009
Singer Pete Doherty has apologised after being asked to leave a stage in Germany for performing a verse of the national anthem with Nazi connotations.
Doherty, 30, was booed after singing "Deutschland, Deutschland ueber alles" at a concert in Munich on Saturday that was broadcast live on Bavarian radio.
A spokesperson for the singer said he was "unaware of the controversy" about the anthem's rarely used first verse.
Source: BBC
December 1, 2009
Alleged Nazi guard John Demjanjuk was a willing participant in the Holocaust, and herded thousands of Jews to their deaths, a German court has heard.
Prosecutors said Mr Demjanjuk, 89, volunteered to join the Nazis and shared their racist ideology.
He maintains that he was a Soviet soldier who was captured by the Germans, and therefore spent most of the war in prison camps.
Source: AP
December 1, 2009
Prosecutors accused John Demjanjuk of playing an active role in the Nazis' machinery of destruction, saying Tuesday that he was a willing follower of Hitler's racist ideology as they read the indictment against the retired Ohio autoworker.
The 89-year-old, who was deported from the United States in May to stand trial in Germany, rejects the charges of being an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews in the Sobibor death camp, saying he has been mistaken for someone else.
Source: Fox News
December 1, 2009
An African-American newspaper in Cleveland published an editorial cartoon that portrayed a black lawmaker as Aunt Jemima, angering her supporters.
Some blacks find the food company advertising character offensive because of its use as a racist stereotype.
The weekly Call & Post cartoon cast state Sen. Nina Turner as Aunt Jemima. The cartoon accompanied an editorial criticizing the Cleveland Democrat for supporting last month's successful ballot issue to overhaul cou
Source: CNN
December 1, 2009
Dick Cheney's throwing cold water on a new group's effort to try and convince the former vice president to seek the Republican presidential nomination in the next race for the White House.
"Draft Dick Cheney 2012" officially launched on Friday and unveiled a new Web site. The group hopes to follow up the on-line launch with a more formal structure, which they say will include building a database and reaching out through social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
Source: The Local (Germany)
January 12, 2009
Just after the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, pieces of the Bornholmer Straße border crossing between East and West Berlin go up for sale Tuesday on internet auction site eBay.
As of December 1, anyone who wants a real piece of Germany’s communist past can place their bid, property management company Marienburg Grundstücksverwaltung announced on Monday.
The original Bornholmer Straße border crossing between Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg and Wedding district
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 12, 2009
A sale of lost treasures that belonged to the Russian royal family has broken auction records at Sotheby's in London.
The trove, which belonged to the Romanov family, sold for £7 million, more than seven times the pre-sale estimate.
The sale included a 25th Wedding Anniversary Fabergé Imperial jewelled cigarette case, made as a present for Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, the sister-in-law of Emperor Alexander III.
It sold for £612,250 – 12 times the pre-sale
Source: Culture 24
December 31, 2069
Tests on the Midlands mansion where William Shakespeare lived out his final years will begin tomorrow after experts revealed plans to dig up the 14th century site next year.
Experts from The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and Birmingham Archaeology will carry out a feasibility study on New Place, the picturesque Stratford-upon-Avon house and gardens where Shakespeare died in 1616, ahead of a major archaeological excavation in 2010.
"Our purpose would be to create a m
Source: Mary Elise Sarotte, a professor of international relations at the University of Southern California, in an NYT op ed
November 29, 2009
TWENTY years ago, dictatorships across Central and Eastern Europe toppled. During this season of remembering, the focus has rightly been on celebration of the new freedoms gained by the inhabitants of those countries: to speak freely, to travel, to vote and to choose their own national futures and alliances. Yet the legacy of 1989 has difficult aspects as well, mostly centering on the origins and legitimacy of later NATO expansion to former East German and Warsaw Pact territory; acknowledgment o
Source: Times (UK)
December 1, 2009
A medieval book is to become the first item from a British national museum to be returned to its rightful owners under a new law governing looted artefacts.
The Benevento Missal, which was stolen from a cathedral in southern Italy soon after the Allies bombed the city during the Second World War, has been in the collection of the British Library (formerly the British Museum Library) since 1947. After a change in the law, it could be back in Italy within months, according to The Art
Source: Times (UK)
November 30, 2009
Tony Blair ordered military chiefs secretly to prepare plans for an invasion of Iraq nine months before the start of the war, an inquiry into the conflict was told today.
Sir David Manning, the Prime Minister’s foreign policy adviser, said that Mr Blair asked the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to draw up options in June 2002 when he discovered that the United States was planning for war. The following month Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, offered three alternatives. The first “in-pla
Source: LA Times
November 30, 2009
Reporting from Washington - After Zacarias Moussaoui -- the accused "20th hijacker" in the Sept. 11 attacks -- was sentenced to life in prison in 2006 because one juror in Virginia refused to agree to the death penalty, Moussaoui clapped his hands and called out, "America, you lost and I won." Now the Obama administration plans to seek a death sentence for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind.
Some legal experts say President Obama was
Source: WGN 9 News
December 31, 2069
A World War II Fighter Plane has been recovered from the bottom of Lake Michigan.
A crane pulled the plane out Monday at Waukegan Harbor, but the process has been going on for months.
It was back in 1945, when the F6F-3 Hellcat sank, during a training flight.
The pilot, Walter B. Elcock, now 89, barely survived the crash. While he couldn't make it to the recovery, his grandson, Hunter Brawley did.
Brawley recalls his grandfather telling him al
Source: New York Times
November 29, 2009
Dredged up from the murky depths of the Rhône River, beneath a heap of wrecked cars, rotting tires and more than 20 centuries of silt, the statue’s white marble visage was plain as day.
“My God, it’s Caesar!” Luc Long remembers shouting after his team of archaeologists and divers discovered the statue in 2007.
The Roman appears with little hair, a wrinkled forehead, a prominent Adam’s apple and features that, for Mr. Long, “seem carved in human flesh.” But Mr. Long did
Source: Bloomberg
November 30, 2009
The trial of John Demjanjuk, Germany’s most prominent Holocaust case in decades, may demonstrate the justice system’s limits in helping the nation come to terms with its troubled past, lawyers said.
Demjanjuk, 89, appeared in a Munich court today to face charges of being a Nazi guard who aided in the murder of 27,900 people in 1943 at the Sobibor death camp in then German-occupied Poland. About 35 relatives of the camps’ victims registered as co-plaintiffs. The first day of trial op
