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: Telegraph (UK)
November 23, 2009
Officers in London are targeting youth violence with the so-called Joint Enterprise law which allows them to charge any suspects present at an incident with the same offence as those directly involved.
It means a youth who encourages or watches another gang member kill someone could also be charged with murder.
Detective Superintendent Simon Morgan, of the Metropolitan Police, said: "Standing by is not a defence.
"Anybody and everybody that is inv
Source: Truthout
November 22, 2009
This weekend, thousands of people gathered at the gates of Ft. Benning to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the killings of 14-year-old Celia Ramos, her mother Elba Ramos and the six Jesuit priests with whom she worked at the Central American University in San Salvador.
Nearly 5,000 people are gathered in the pouring rain according to Larry White, a protester who spoke to Truthout. Earlier in the day, following a rally featuring a performance by the Indigo Girls, activists partici
Source: Ceske Noviny (Czeck Republic)
November 9, 2009
After examining 40 hectares on land, the experts gathered hundreds of thousands of finds. The most important ones include the four rondel enclosures.
The enclosures, of a circle or oval shape and usually of 50 to 200 metres in diameter, appeared in Europe in the Neolithic period. Their inner space was not inhabited. Experts believe they might have served for cult, military or trade purposes.
Over 100 rondel enclosures have been uncovered in Europe to date, including sev
Source: Cyprus Mail
November 11, 2009
POLICE ARE investigating what they believe to be the attempted theft of a giant 2,000-year-old standing stone (tripiti), which was been removed from the archaeological site in Pissouri.
Although police later found the stone in a nearby field, it is believed that thieves intended to return with proper equipment to transport the massive monument.
“This attempted theft is an act of mindless vandalism, of contempt for the people of Cyprus and the community this ancient monu
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 17, 2009
According to a new study of clay pots and ceramic tablets discovered almost 70 years ago in Harappa, now in Pakistan, the people of the Indus Valley had a detailed system of commodity value, weights and measures.
Dr Bryan Wells, a researcher based at India's Institute of Mathematical Sciences, told The Daily Telegraph he had begun work on his thesis ten years ago when he first saw photographs of the clay pots with markings which appeared to be in proportion to their relative size.
Source: Physorg.com
November 18, 2009
Archaeologist Eva Kaptijn has given up digging in favour of gathering. With her colleagues, she has been applying an intensive field exploration technique: 15 metres apart, the researchers would walk forward for 50 metres. On the outward leg, they’d pick up all the earthenware and, on the way back, all of the other material. This resulted in more than 100,000 finds, varying from about 13,000 years to just a few decades old. Based on further research on the finds and where they were located, Kapt
Source: Cornell Daily Sun
November 18, 2009
In a strange case of science imitating art, one hobbit has again become the center of a heated and ongoing conflict.
Since its 2003 discovery on the Indonesian island of Flores, the Homo floresiensis (nicknamed hobbit because it only grew to be about three feet tall) has caused scientists across the world to debate whether the find is a new species or simply a variation of the modern human. The difference could signal a major paradigm shift in the study of primitive humans.
Source: Hamilton Advertiser
November 19, 2009
SCOTLAND’S foremost amateur archaeologist, Tam Ward of Biggar Archaeology Group, was guest speaker at the November meeting of Lanark and District Archaeological Society.
The subject of Tam's talk was about the excavation work at Howburn Farm, near Elsrickle, which turned out to be the most important dig in Scotland this year.
Tam related how the site had been discovered through diligent field walking. Initially, Tam thought the site was early Neolithic but a talk with a
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 23, 2009
The Pope, who died five years ago, is being considered for sainthood by the Catholic Church.
As part of the Vatican's investigation thousands of documents have been collected and examined by officials from the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.
Among them is the testimony of Tobiana Sobodka, a Polish nun of the Sacred Heart of Jesus order, who worked for Pope John Paul in his private Vatican apartments and at his summer residence in Castel Gandolfo near Rome.
Source: Kompas
November 23, 2009
KOMPAS.com - Precise as a hole punch through a sheet of paper, craters surround a Nazi doodlebug factory in an extraordinary image showing the devastation wreaked by an Allied bombing raid.
The date is September 2, 1944 and the place Peenemunde, a village on the Baltic, where the terrifying weapons Adolf Hitler hoped would win the war for Germany were designed and tested. The image is astonishing enough, but how it was taken is even more startling.
For it comes from an
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 23, 2009
Munich prosecutors who built the case against former death camp guard Mr Demjanjuk, 89, put 23 witnesses on their list, some of them from Russia and Ukraine.
But all members of the list are dead. It means that Demjanjuk, charged with assisting in 27,900 murders during his time as an SS guard at the extermination camp of Sobibor in occupied Poland, will be judged on records such as his identity card and on the statements of the dead.
His lawyer Guenther Maull said the de
Source: Secrecy News
November 23, 2009
Development of a new executive order on classification of national security information is now proceeding at an accelerated pace in order to preempt a deadline that would require the declassification of millions of pages of historical records next month.A revised draft executive order was circulated to executive branch agencies by the Office of Management and Budget on November 16, with agency comments due back today, November 23. A final order is likely to be issued by the end o
Source: Salon
November 22, 2009
An engineering technician who works on burials at Arlington National Cemetery provided a startling sworn statement about misplaced remains at the cemetery to an Army investigating officer in late July.
The Army launched an internal investigation last summer after Salon began exposing burial errors at the cemetery, including a fiasco in May 2003 in which the cemetery went to bury a Navy captain in grave 449 of section 68 of the cemetery, only to find unknown, unmarked remains already
Source: NYT
November 22, 2009
President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to transfer the remains of the writer Albert Camus to one of the most hallowed burial places in France, but the plan has run into opposition from the Nobel laureate’s son, who does not think his father would have wanted the honor.
Camus’s son, Jean, says interring his father’s remains at the Panthéon, the Paris monument to some of the great men and women of France, would be contrary to his father’s wishes and does not want to have his legacy put to wo
Source: Chicago Tribune
November 22, 2009
ALBANY, Ind. - A former auto worker and history buff is keeping a Civil War soldier's memory alive by restoring the fallen soldier's marble gravestone.
Doug Cross of Albany came across Thomas Kent's grave last September while looking for a site where Civil War soldiers had used limestone slabs to cross the Mississinewa River.
He spotted Kent's gravestone in a clearing in the old Steubenville Cemetery and quickly suspected it belonged to a soldier.
"It
Source: LA Times
November 23, 2009
The challah was blessed, the Manischewitz wine was poured, the candles were lighted. It could have been any Shabbat dinner in Los Angeles, were it not for the fact that it took place midweek and the room was full of Catholic schoolteachers.
The 34 teachers were participants in Bearing Witness, a seminar designed for educators in Catholic schools learning to teach about anti-Semitism and the history of the relationship between Jews and Catholics. Created in 1996 by the Anti-Defamatio
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 21, 2009
Walter Myers, 72, a former State Department official with top-secret security clearance, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage and two counts of wire fraud, according to the department.
His wife, Gwendolyn Myers, 71, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to gather and transmit national defence information to Washington's Cold War enemy Havana, and will serve between six and 7.5 years behind bars.
The pair also agreed to forfeit $1,735,054 – the total salary Myers ear
Source: Politico
November 23, 2009
When former Indiana congressman Timothy Roemer arrived in New Delhi in July as President Barack Obama’s new ambassador to India, he inherited one of the few U.S. international relationships that had dramatically improved during the Bush administration.
Bush had reversed course from the sanctions and hectoring the Clinton administration employed toward India after its 1998 nuclear tests, and left it to India and Pakistan to resolve their dispute over Kashmir. Most of all, under Bush,
Source: Politico
November 23, 2009
If you’ve been hoping to see Sen. Joe Lieberman star in a sequel to “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” this holiday season, you can put away the microwave popcorn.
Fury over the Connecticut senator’s announcement that he might join Republicans to filibuster a vote on the Senate health care bill has Democrats clamoring for Majority Leader Harry Reid to grab his teddy bear and let ’em talk all night.
But the public isn’t likely to see Lieberman offer a dramatic reading of the
Source: Times (UK)
November 24, 2009
The destruction of a mosque by Hindu radicals that led to some of the bloodiest religious riots in India since Partition was “meticulously planned” by politicians including a former Prime Minister, according to a leaked report of the official investigation.
The razing of the 16th-century Babri mosque — in the northern town of Ayodhya, on December 6, 1992, by an estimated 150,000 Hindus — led to national violence in which about 2,000 people died, mostly Muslims.
The demo
