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: BBC
October 5, 2009
A new UK project is digitising nearly 300 Royal Navy captains' logs from voyages dating back to the 1760s.
They include the voyages of Charles Darwin on HMS Beagle, Captain Cook's log from HMS Discovery and Captain Bligh's journal from The Bounty.
The logbooks will be available on the National Archives website next year.
But scientists are already transcribing the data as part of a project led by the University of Sunderland.
Source: AFP
October 5, 2009
BERLIN - THE bust of legendary Egyptian beauty Nefertiti, believed to be 3,400 years old, has been moved gingerly to its new home in Berlin before it is to go back on display this month, the city's museum authority said on Monday.
The bust was transferred on Sunday 'with extreme care' to its final resting place, the newly renovated Neues Museum, where it will take pride of place with its own display room, the authority said in a statement.
Nefertiti, renowned as one of
Source: Guardian (UK)
October 6, 2009
For almost four decades General Francisco Franco was someone Spaniards could not escape. He was there in school books, church prayers, statues, plaques, street names and thousands of other reminders of a violent insurrection that led to a vicious civil war.
Now his face and name are being erased from public view. Even the army, where nostalgia for the dictator survived long after his death in 1975, has pledged to remove all plaques, statues and monuments to the regime of a man it on
Source: BBC
October 6, 2009
A pilot held in Spain over his alleged role in Argentina's "Dirty War" will stay in detention pending a decision on extradition, a Spanish judge has ruled.
Julio Alberto Poch, an airline pilot, has been in custody in Madrid since his arrest last month.
He is wanted in Argentina for allegedly flying planes used to dump opponents of the military regime into the sea. He denies the allegations.
Some 30,000 people disappeared or died during the junta
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 6, 2009
German retailers have seen a huge spike in demand for products from the defunct Communist East as the country prepares to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall next month.
From gherkins to trainers and toothpaste to cola drinks, the consumer goods of a lost nation are now top of the shopping lists for millions of people - who are spending €100 million (£92 million) a year on former East German goods.
Zeha trainers are a case in point: once ridi
Source: AP
October 6, 2009
Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday the alleged terror plot disrupted in New York was "one of the most serious in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001" — but he gave no indication when more arrests might be made.
In a question-and-answer session with reporters, Holder said prosecutors will bring all those involved in the plot to justice.
So far, one suspect, Colorado shuttle bus driver Najibullah Zazi, has been charged with conspiring to detonate bombs
Source: BBC
October 6, 2009
The Munich state court has set aside 35 trial days for the process, beginning on 30 November and ending in May 2010.
The 89-year-old retired car worker, who was deported from the US in May, could face 15 years in prison if convicted.
Mr Demjanjuk has denied accusations that he was a guard at the Sobibor death camp and helped murder Jews.
He says he was captured by Germans in his native Ukraine while fighting for the Red Army and kept as a prisoner of war
Source: Guardian (UK)
October 6, 2009
It was a moment that went a long way to putting Afghanistan and its cultural heritage back on the map. In a small space in a once bombed-out building on the southern edge of Kabul, Afghan dignitaries and western diplomats squeezed past each other to see into the display cases: bronze age digging implements, pieces of carved marble and elaborate metal goods spanning Afghanistan's rich history.
It was only a two-room exhibit and much of the rest of Afghanistan's National Museum remain
Source: Guardian (UK)
October 6, 2009
Archaeologists have discovered evidence of what they believe was a second Stonehenge located a little more than a mile away from the world-famous prehistoric monument.
The new find on the west bank of the river Avon has been called "Bluestonehenge", after the colour of the 25 Welsh stones of which it was once made up.
Excavations at the site have suggested there was once a stone circle 10 metres in diameter and surrounded by a henge – a ditch with an external
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 6, 2009
From gherkins to trainers and toothpaste to cola drinks, the consumer goods of a lost nation are now top of the shopping lists for millions of people - who are spending €100 million (£92 million) a year on former East German goods.
Zeha trainers are a case in point: once ridiculed by the Nike and Adidas-wearing West, the athletic shoes of the masses in the German Democratic Republic are now sold from a specialty shop on Kurfurstendamm, Berlin's most expensive shopping mile.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 6, 2009
But the simple cross which has been in place for 75 years is at the heart of a bitter constitutional battle which will reach the US Supreme Court on Wednesday.
In a case with ramifications for war memorials across the United States, judges will consider whether, as an overtly religious symbol, the Mojave Memorial Cross violates the First Amendment which provides for a separation of church and state.
The 8ft Latin cross sits in the government-owned Mojave National Pres
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 6, 2009
Ugandan police working with Interpol said they had arrested the suspect, who they described as one of the "top four" men accused of directing Rwanda's 1994 genocide.
Nizeyimana, nicknamed the Butcher of Butare, is accused of ordering the execution of the revered Queen of Rwanda, Rosalie Gicanda, the symbolic head of the Tutsi tribe.
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) indicted him in 2000 on five counts of genocide, complicity in and incitem
Source: NYT
October 4, 2009
PUERTO AYORA, Galápagos Islands — The mounds of reeking garbage on the edge of this settlement 600 miles off Ecuador’s Pacific coast are proof that one species is thriving on the fragile archipelago whose unique wildlife inspired Darwin’s theory of evolution: man.
Tiny gray finches, descendants of birds that were crucial to his thesis, flutter around the dump, which serves a growing town of Ecuadoreans who have moved here to work in the islands’ thriving tourism industry.
Source: Google News
October 4, 2009
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama will focus "at the right time" on how to overturn the "don't ask, don't tell" ban on gays serving openly in the military, his national security adviser said Sunday.
"I don't think it's going to be — it's not years, but I think it will be teed up appropriately," James Jones said.
The Democratic-led Congress is considering repealing the 1993 law. Action isn't expected on the issue until early next year.
Source: The Christian Science Monitor
October 2, 2009
Washington - For all the recent uproar over Iran's nuclear program, little attention has been paid to the fact that the country which first provided Tehran with nuclear equipment was the United States.
In 1967, under the "Atoms for Peace" program launched by President Eisenhower, the US sold the Shah of Iran's government a 5-megawatt, light-water type research reactor. This small dome-shaped structure, located in the Tehran suburbs, was the foundation of Iran's nuclear pro
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 5, 2009
The United Nations is to include the Holocaust in a new curriculum for schools attended by children in Gaza despite protests by the Palestinian territory's Hamas rulers.
A UN agency is producing a human rights curriculum which is to be proposed for inclusion in the studies of secondary school pupils. It is to be discussed with the local community within weeks.
At least one senior UN official in Gaza has said he is confident the Holocaust will become part of the curric
Source: SF Gate
October 5, 2009
Scientists have reproduced the Shroud of Turin — revered as the cloth that covered Jesus in the tomb — and say the experiment proves the relic was man-made, a group of Italian debunkers claimed Monday.
The shroud bears the figure of a crucified man, complete with blood seeping out of nailed hands and feet, and believers say Christ's image was recorded on the linen fibers at the time of his resurrection.
Scientists have reproduced the shroud using materials and methods t
Source: Live Science
October 5, 2009
The first century B.C. was one of the most culturally rich in the history of the Roman Empire — the age of Cicero, Caesar and Virgil. But as much as historians know about the great figures of this period of Ancient Rome, they know very little about some basic facts, such as the population size of the late Roman Empire.
Now, a group of historians has used caches of buried coins to provide an answer to this question.
During the Republican period of Rome (about the fifth t
Source: Truthout
October 5, 2009
Buenos Aires, Argentina - Prosecutors here in Argentina have framed former Gen. Jorge Olivera Rovere as Argentina's Adolf Eichmann: a mid-level official who dutifully helped execute orders to exterminate opponents of Argentina's last military dictatorship. Yesterday, Rovere's attorneys defended the aging military man, 83, saying that the trial of the former general threatened to disrupt the "social peace" generated by amnesty laws and pardons passed in the 1980's.
Rove
Source: CNSNews.com
October 2, 2009
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus has asked the Obama administration to “immediately terminate” a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) program that has identified more than 120,000 illegal aliens over the past three years..
“On behalf of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC), we write to ask that you immediately terminate all Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) under the 287(g) program and cease to establish such agreements,” reads t
