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: Fox News
November 15, 2009
ORLANDO, Fla. — The Army Corps of Engineers will be returning to an Orlando middle school to search for World War II explosives that might be buried there.
The federal agency will inspect part of the Odyssey Middle School campus where 15 portable classrooms are being removed because of declining enrollment. Corps officials hadn't been able to search that area with metal detectors and other bomb finding technology before.
More than 400 pounds of World War II-era bombs
Source: Fox News
November 14, 2009
STOCKHOLM — With a solemn ceremony in Stockholm's antiquities museum, Sweden on Saturday marked the return of 22 skulls looted from a native Hawaiian community mainly in the 17th century.
The symbolic ceremony — attended by guests from Hawaii and the Nordic countries' own indigenous Sami population — was part of Sweden's increased efforts to return indigenous remains collected by scientists across the world in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The Swedish government in 2005
Source: The Daily Beast
November 15, 2009
The CIA has given hundreds of millions of dollars to support Pakistan's spy network since the September 11 attacks, contributing as much as a third of the foreign agency's annual budget, the Los Angeles Times reported Sunday. Additionally, a secret State Department program pays Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency tens of millions of dollars for capturing or killing wanted militants, officials tell the newspaper. All of this money has some in the U.S. government concerned because of fea
Source: NYT
November 14, 2009
MARASHONI, Kenya — With the stroke of a pen, the last of Kenya’s honey hunters may soon be homeless.
Since time immemorial, the Ogiek have been Kenya’s traditional forest dwellers. They have stalked antelope with homemade bows, made medicine from leaves and trapped bees to produce honey, the golden elixir of the woods. They have struggled to survive the press of modernity, and many times they have been persecuted, driven from their forests and belittled as “dorobo,” a word meaning r
Source: NYT
November 14, 2009
JERUSALEM — At the heart of this contested city, the holy site known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary, has become, for many, the epicenter of the conflict between Israel, the Palestinians and the wider Muslim world.
The mere mention of the place stirs passions and memories of centuries of bloodshed. Its alternative names evoke the depth of religious devotion and the competing claims.
Many of those contradictions are encap
Source: NYT
November 14, 2009
WASHINGTON — Not long after he was rousted from bed and seized in a predawn raid in Pakistan in March 2003, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed gave his captors two demands: He wanted a lawyer, and he wanted to be taken to New York.
After a nearly seven-year odyssey that took him to secret Central Intelligence Agency jails in Europe and an American military prison in Cuba, Mr. Mohammed is finally likely to get his wish.
He will be the most senior leader of Al Qaeda to date held to
Source: Fox News
November 14, 2009
The Ziggurat of Ur has stood for 4,000 years in the desert near Nasiriyah in southeastern Iraq, but this unique historical site had been almost completely off limits to visitors under Saddam Hussein.
All that has changed since the old regime was overthrown in 2003, and now, U.S. soldiers are some of the site's most receptive visitors.
The temple-pyramid is part of the ruins of an ancient Sumerian city.
Dhair Muhsen, an Iraqi tour guide, said Hussein made i
Source: NYT
November 14, 2009
THIS past week the Supreme Court heard arguments about whether children should ever be sentenced to life without parole for crimes that don’t involve murder.
At the heart of the argument lies a vexing question: When should a person be treated as an adult?
The answer, generally, is 18 — the age when the United States, and the rest of the world, considers young people capable of accepting responsibility for their actions. But there are countless deviations from this benc
Source: The Border Mail (AU)
November 14, 2009
BEECHWORTH’S noted Ned Kelly historian Ian Jones says the skull handed to Victorian authorities for DNA authentication this week is not likely the famous bushranger’s.
Mr Jones said the skull was likely Ernest Knox’s, who was executed at Old Melbourne Gaol 14 years after Kelly.
“His initials are EK (the same as Edward Kelly) and it appears the grave that was dug up in 1929 as Ned Kelly’s grave was Ernest Knox’s,” Mr Jones said.
Mr Jones first saw the skull
Source: NYT
November 13, 2009
WASHINGTON — How do you defend one of the most notorious terrorist figures in history?
One step, legal analysts say, may be to ask for a change of venue.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s lawyers, whoever they are, will no doubt question whether he can get a fair trial from a jury sitting, as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. noted, in a Manhattan courthouse “just blocks away from where the Twin Towers once stood.”
Then will come the inevitable challenges to inter
Source: Salon
November 13, 2009
In the wake of a Salon investigation, the Army Friday announced a broad investigation into “lost accountability” at some graves at Arlington National Cemetery, along with shoddy record keeping and other issues at the cemetery.
Army Secretary John McHugh ordered the inquiry after a series of articles in Salon showed the cemetery found an unknown casket in a grave in 2003, covered it up with dirt and quietly walked away, and also buried another service member in the wrong plot in 2008
Source: WSJ
November 14, 2009
Google Inc. and two author and publisher groups submitted a narrower version of a legal settlement that would allow Google to distribute millions of digital books online, hoping to mollify the Justice Department and other critics who blasted the original settlement as overly broad and anticompetitive.
The revised settlement will only cover books that were either registered with the U.S. Copyright Office or published in the U.K., Australia, or Canada.
The new agreement a
Source: Newsweek
November 16, 2009
Stanley Karnow is the author of Vietnam: A History, generally regarded as the standard popular account of the Vietnam War. This past summer, Karnow, 84, picked up the phone to hear the voice of an old friend, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. The two men had first met when Holbrooke was a young Foreign Service officer in Vietnam in the mid-1960s and Karnow was a reporter covering the war. Holbrooke, who is now the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, was calling from Kabul. The
Source: NYT
November 13, 2009
CAIRO
He was a small man, with a very neatly trimmed black mustache, seated in a corner, leaning forward on his walking stick, smiling, sipping Scotch from a glass that seemed too large for his frail hands. His face brightened with a smile as he reminisced about the dictator’s wife who once locked herself in the bathroom of his private jet and the star-studded, five-day extravaganza he threw for his 50th birthday.
Oh, the memories of a fallen billionaire arms trader.
Source: NYT
November 13, 2009
TOKYO — The United States is not threatened by a rising China, President Obama said Saturday, but will seek to strengthen its ties with Beijing even as it maintains close ties with traditional allies like Japan.
In a wide-ranging speech on his first trip to Asia as president, Mr. Obama drew on his own background to reassure the people of the fast-growing continent that even as the United States seemed preoccupied with conflicts in the Middle East and other regions, it was increasing
Source: NYT
November 13, 2009
BEIJING — The Chinese government had a special message for President Obama on Thursday: He is black, he admires Abraham Lincoln, so he, of all people, should sympathize with Beijing’s effort to prevent Tibet from seceding and sliding back into what it was before its liberation by Chinese troops: a feudalistic, slaveholding society headed by the Dalai Lama.
“He is a black president, and he understands the slavery abolition movement and Lincoln’s major significance for that movement,
Source: WSJ
November 14, 2009
ANKARA -- Turkey's government laid out long-awaited plans Friday to reconcile with the country's large Kurdish minority and end a separatist war that has cost tens of thousands of lives, prompting the main opposition party to storm out of parliament in protest.
The heated debate was symbolic of the sensitivities of the Kurdish issue in Turkey, which has only recently begun to be debated openly and impartially.
Opponents accused the government of pandering to terrorists.
Source: BBC
November 14, 2009
The discovery of a rare 15th Century gold coin in Powys has triggered a legal row.
The coin, from the reign of Henry IV, was unearthed by contractor Shaun Bufton on 28 April while he was working on a new water pipeline in Newtown.
But archaeologists failed to return it to him.
Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust said it had made a mistake in not returning the coin and it regretted not having told him what was happening.
When it was minted in ab
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 13, 2009
With thousands of followers on Twitter, the social networking website, Stephen Fry has come to be regarded as a modern oracle.
The actor and comedian has, however, upset friends of the late Princess Margaret by accusing her of anti-Semitism.
At the HarperCollins History Lecture at the Royal Institute of British Architects, Fry claimed that the Queen's sister had been shocked when he told her at a dinner party that he had Jewish ancestors. Fry, who is a great chum of t
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 13, 2009
Ned Kelly, the infamous Australian bush ranger, may finally be able to rest in peace after a skull believed to belong to the outlaw was handed to authorities for forensic testing.
Kelly's skull has been missing ever since it was stolen from a display cabinet at the Old Melbourne Gaol in 1978, just yards from where Kelly was hanged in 1880 for killing a policeman. The crime went unsolved and the whereabouts of the skull became one of Australia's greatest mysteries.
Then
