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: The American Task Force on Palestine
November 9, 2009
Marking the 20th anniversary since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Palestinians tore down a section of Israel's wall in the West Bank village of Ni'lin on Friday.
During a weekly protest against the barrier, which cuts through the Ramallah-area village's center and isolates residents from 60 percent of their farmland, some 300 demonstrators methodically dismantled a concrete section before Israeli forces opened fire...
... "Twenty years ago, no one imagined that the m
Source: AP
November 12, 2009
Police say they have evacuated 3,000 people in Wroclaw, a city in southwestern Poland, after discovering a World War II-era bomb.
Wroclaw police spokesman Pawel Petrykowski says workers found the 1,100-pound bomb Thursday during construction of a new music hall that will go up near the Wroclaw Opera House.
Petrykowski said the area was evacuated, residents were asked to avoid the area and a special crane was brought in to remove the bomb.
Source: BBC
November 12, 2009
Traditional African rulers should apologise for the role they played in the slave trade, a Nigerian rights group has said in a letter to chiefs.
The letter said some collaborated or actively sold off their subjects.
The group said it was time for African leaders to copy the US and the UK who have already said they were sorry.
It urged Nigeria's traditional rulers to apologise on behalf of their forefathers and "put a final seal to the history of slav
Source: NYT
November 11, 2009
PARIS — For the first time since the armistice that ended World War I with Germany’s defeat in 1918, a German leader joined French officials here to mark the moment the guns fell silent on the Western Front after a war that killed millions.
Source: Politico Playbook
November 11, 2009
TOMORROW IN DALLAS, 2 p.m. CT: “Former President George W. Bush will give a keynote address at Southern Methodist University on Thursday, November 12, 2009, outlining his vision for a unique public policy Institute that will link scholarly research with practical results. Former First Lady Laura Bush will also speak about her involvement with the Institute and its upcoming programs. The George W. Bush Institute will be part of the George W. Bush Presidential Center, which will also include the P
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 12, 2009
The Mona Lisa originally had eyebrows, according to a French art expert who has analysed Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece with a special camera.
Pascal Cotte said da Vinci built the painting up in layers, the last being a special glaze whose optical properties increased the illusion of a three-dimensional face. Above the glaze Da Vinci painted details such as the eyebrows.
He has uncovered a host of secrets about the Mona Lisa using a 240 megapixel camera. It can measu
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 10, 2009
Thousands of pupils are now getting only two years worth of teaching in the subject at secondary level, instead of the expected three, it was claimed.
Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, admitted that teachers should have the “flexibility” to cut the amount of time devoted to certain subjects.
But David Laws, the Liberal Democrat children’s spokesman, said the move was a "disgrace".
"Ed Balls is giving the green light to schools to allow pupils
Source: Guardian (UK)
November 12, 2009
A key adviser to Nato forces warned today that Barack Obama risks a Suez-style debacle in Afghanistan if he fails to deploy enough extra troops and opts instead for a messy compromise.
David Kilcullen, one of the world's leading authorities on counter-insurgency and an adviser to the British government as well as the US state department, said Obama's delay in reaching a decision over extra troops had been "messy". He said it not only worried US allies but created uncertain
Source: Taegan Goddard's Political Wire
November 12, 2009
CBS News reports President Obama's trip to Asia will bring his total to 8 foreign trips and 20 countries since becoming president.
"The only other president to come close to Mr. Obama's first-year-in-office globe-trotting numbers is President George H. W. Bush, who took 7 foreign trips to 14 countries."
In addition, as Politico notes, Obama is stopping in Alaska on his way to Asia. It's the only state he hasn't been to since he declared his run for president.
Source: BBC
November 9, 2009
Palestinians and foreign peace activists have broken apart a section of the West Bank barrier.
They used ropes and at least one truck to pull down some of the concrete blocks forming the Israeli-built wall.
The activists carried out the protest to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The barrier, which separates Israel from the West Bank, is a mixture of fences, barbed wire, ditches and concrete slabs up to 8m (26ft) high.
Source: BBC
November 12, 2009
The Australian government has approved the extradition of an 88-year-old alleged former Nazi to Hungary to face accusations of murder.
Charles Zentai is accused of killing Jewish teenager Peter Balazs in Budapest in 1944.
At the time, Mr Zentai was a warrant officer in the Hungarian army, then allied to Nazi Germany.
Hungary has two months to complete the extradition. Mr Zentai's family say they will try to overturn the decision.
Source: BBC
November 12, 2009
Andy Warhol artwork 200 One Dollar Bills has sold in New York for $43.8m (£26.5m) - the second highest auction price for a work by the pop artist.
The 1962 silk screen print, which shows 200 life-sized images of dollar bills, had a pre-sale estimate of $8m to $12m (£4.8m to £7.3m) at Sotheby's.
The contemporary sale fetched $134.4m (£81.3m) with 52 out of 54 lots sold.
Warhol's 1963 painting Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I) sold for a record $71.7m (
Source: Fox News
November 12, 2009
The former president, outlining his vision for a policy institute to bear his name at Southern Methodist University, calls the decision to back the $700 billion bank bailout one of the "most difficult" of his presidency. But he warns that policymakers may be taking government intervention too far in the wake of the rescue package.
Former President George W. Bush on Thursday warned that Washington is in danger of taking the country away from free-market principles in the wa
Source: Fox News
November 12, 2009
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg welcomed to City Hall an "unindicted co-conspirator" in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, later claiming he didn't know the radical Muslim cleric had been invited, the New York Post reported.
Siraj Wahhaj has called the FBI and CIA the "real terrorists," defended the convicted World Trade Center attack plotters and said his hope is that all Americans will become Muslim.
In 1995, Wahhaj was identified as one of
Source: Yahoo News
November 11, 2009
ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. – Sister Catherine Bitzer slowly opened a file box and carefully removed a brittle page, scarred by years of neglectful storage, mold and insects. At 415 years old, the marriage record written by a Roman Catholic priest is still readable and is one of the oldest known European records from the United States.
It's among thousands of artifacts detailing the lives of the Spanish soldiers, missionaries and merchants who settled St. Augustine, the nation's oldest perm
Source: Yahoo News
November 11, 2009
VATICAN CITY – Pope Benedict XVI has urged Europeans to defend their continent's religious and cultural heritage.
The pope told pilgrims Wednesday that all those who hold the future of Europe dear to their hearts should "rediscover, appreciate and defend the rich cultural and religious heritage" of past centuries.
Benedict has been urging Europeans to keep alive their Christian roots, saying that Christian values are fundamental for the survival of societies.
Source: The American Task Force on Palestine
November 10, 2009
“I can offer you a discount on the headbands,” said Tareq Abu Dayyeh, souvenir-store owner. “They’re just like the kind used by suicide bombers.”
He was making a sales pitch at his Chairman Arafat Shop, one of Gaza’s oddest commercial outlets. A battery-powered, dancing Osama bin Laden doll occupies a shelf above Barack Obama coffee mugs emblazoned with a misspelling of the U.S. president’s middle name: “Abu Hussain Palestine Loves You.” A plastic Virgin Mary and Jordan River holy w
Source: The American Task Force on Palestine
November 11, 2009
More than 13,000 Palestinians gathered in Ramallah on Wednesday to mark the fifth anniversary of the death of former Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.
Large crowds packed into the Presidential Compound to hear a memorial from President Mahmoud Abbas, who donned a white ball cap emblazoned with the flag of Palestine and a black and white kuffeyeh as he addressed the crowd for what many anticipated to be a historic speech. Rumors spread before the event that Abbas would announce hi
Source: The American Task Force on Palestine
November 11, 2009
Fifty-five years after the notorious failure of an Israeli sabotage operation in Egypt, Military Intelligence has finally gotten around to figuring out what went wrong. The answer? Pretty much everything.
An educational presentation about the 1954 Lavon affair prepared by the MI history and heritage division found that MI had not sufficiently trained the members of the sabotage unit, who were mostly amateurs and included several Egyptian Jews, and had failed to give them cover stor
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 11, 2009
The building covering nearly 300 square metres was located close to the city of Sakurai and the former Japanese capital of Nara, 300 miles south-west of Tokyo.
Built on stilts, the structure was found beside three other aligned buildings, leading archaeologists to believe it is the site of Himiko's Yamatai palace.
"A building cluster that is placed in such a well-planned manner is unprecedented in Japan at that period in time," Hironobu Ishino, director of the
