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: Guardian (UK)
October 2, 2009
Two key figures in the conviction of the Lockerbie bomber were secretly given rewards of up to $3m (£1.9m) in a deal discussed by Scottish detectives and the US government, according to legal papers released today.
The claims about the payments were revealed in a dossier of evidence that was intended to be used in an appeal by Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of murdering 270 people in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in 1988.
Megrahi abandoned his appeal las
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 2, 2009
Around 300 people were also wounded in the attack that leveled the seven-floor Argentine Jewish Mutual Association (AMIA) building in Buenos Aires. No one has ever been convicted for the bombing.
Federal Judge Ariel Lijo charged Menem, 79, with "instigating" several crimes, including concealing evidence and abuse of authority.
As part of his investigation of irregularities that took place during the first government inquiry into the bombing Judge Lijo also c
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 3, 2009
A photograph of the Iranian president holding up his identity card during elections in March 2008 clearly shows his family has Jewish roots.
A close-up of the document reveals he was previously known as Sabourjian – a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver.
The short note scrawled on the card suggests his family changed its name to Ahmadinejad when they converted to embrace Islam after his birth.
The Sabourjians traditionally hail from Aradan, Mr Ahmadinejad's
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 3, 2009
The witch bottle was discovered in a pit beneath a back room on the site of the Turk's Head Inn at Tipping Street car park in Stafford.
The vessel is a mid to late 17th-century Bellarmine jug which would have been filled with the likes of nail clippings, hair, bellybutton fluff, pins and iron nails.
The period was full of superstition and they were buried near or under buildings to ward off witches or evil spirits. Oxford Archaeology which is undertaking the dig will
Source: Spiegel Online
October 2, 2009
Helmut Preller is wearing the kind of white overalls typically worn by housepainters as he sits in room number 3 on the second floor of a former guesthouse that was once called Stadt Lübeck. His laptop lies open on the table, on the window sill stands a monitor connected to a video camera. He is keeping watch on the wall next to his house night and day.
Preller winds back the video recording on his laptop. "He must be on here," he hisses. Someone has been attacking his wa
Source: Deutsche Welle
October 2, 2009
The Freedom Train was the beginning of East Germany's peaceful revolution, paving the way for the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequently the fall of communism. On October 1, 1989, the train left Prague, then the capital of Czechoslovakia, and travelled to the town of Hof in what was then West Germany.
After the East German government closed the border to Hungary, the last chance for people to leave the country was via Czechoslovakia. The West German embassy was the most easily acc
Source: Deutsche Welle
October 3, 2009
Modern Germany is only 19 years old. It's hard to believe that Europe's leading economy and a key player on the international political stage, could have been at the center of the Cold War just two decades ago.
October 3, 1990, was the day on which the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) officially ceased to exist and the Federal Republic of Germany, previously the name for just the western part of the divided country, came to encompass both East and West. As the clock struck
Source: BBC
October 2, 2009
The uprising - triggered by the Nazis' decision to send residents to concentration camps - lasted three weeks before it was crushed.
Mr Edelman, then 23, was one of 200 young Jews who fought German troops.
His friend, Paula Sawicka, told the Associated Press that he died "at home, among friends".
Former Polish Foreign Minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski paid tribute to him.
Source: BBC
October 3, 2009
Defence of the Realm, the first authorised history of MI5, says there were worries about his relationships with Eastern European businessmen.
His contact with KGB officers also raised concerns.
However, the book, serialised in the Times, dismisses long-standing claims of bugging and plots against him.
Mr Wilson, who died in 1995 aged 79, was the only serving prime minister to have a permanent Secret Service file, according to the book's author Cambridge
Source: Fox News
October 2, 2009
Trial dates haven't yet been set for the ailing, retired Ohio autoworker, who was deported in May to Germany. At issue was whether he was medically fit to stand trial.
Demjanjuk, 89, is accused of serving as a guard at a death camp where approximately 29,000 Jews and others were killed. He is charged with being an accessory to their murders.
The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk says he was a Red Army soldier who was captured by the Nazis, spent the rest of the war as their pris
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 1, 2009
Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the last chief of the Reich Main Security Office, is said to have sunk the secret loot in the remote lake high in the Alps, 60 miles from Salzburg in western Austria, as Allied forces swept through Europe at the end of the Second World War.
Previous dives have dredged up hundreds of thousands of pounds of forged British currency and boxes of top secret SS documents. Hans Fricke, a German scientist, even discovered a new bacteria, called the "worm of Toplitz
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 2, 2009
Gandhi’s birthday, or Gandhi Jayanti, is celebrated every year as the International Day of Non-Violence. The Mahatma, who was born on 2 October 1869, would have turned 140 this year.
Mr Obama said: "Gandhi's teachings and ideals, shared with Martin Luther King Jr. on his 1959 pilgrimage to India, transformed American society through our civil rights movement.
"The America of today has its roots in the India of Mahatma Gandhi and the nonviolent social action mo
Source: The Atlantic
September 30, 2009
In Shira Engelhart's 4th grade class in Virginia, students asked why the pilots on the plane didn't just say "no" to the hijackers on 9/11. In his journal, an elementary school student offered a possible explanation that the attacks were perpetrated by German soldiers during the period when there were frequent wars between the U.S. and Germany. When Ms. Engelhart asked her class what happened on 9/11, eight out of 24 of her students knew that something bad occurred but were not sure wh
Source: Salon
October 1, 2009
It's become a truism that American attitudes on gay rights are changing at a rapid clip. Supporting civil unions -- now a compromise position -- almost endangered the career of then-Vermont Gov. Howard Dean as recently as 2000. And that was Vermont. Now, a mere nine years later, the Pentagon appears to be signaling that it's ready to give up on the "don't ask, don't tell" (DADT) policy regarding gays in the military.
The evidence is mainly in the form of an article denying
Source: NYT
October 2, 2009
Starting next month, the American Red Cross will auction off items squirreled away over many years in a warehouse in Lorton, Va., outside Washington.
Among more than 150 treasures going on the block, to help address a $50 million budget deficit, are a four-faced Cartier clock lamp; a Sèvres compote dish that was a gift from Albert Lebrun, president of France from 1932 to 1940; original Christmas Seals; international stamps; and archival materials.
One of the more unusua
Source: WSJ
October 3, 2009
QAPQAL, China -- Hasutai gingerly turns on the tape recorder and places it on a table. Out of it emanates something he thought he'd never hear: his native tongue, Manchu, spoken by a living person.
Hasutai is a Manchu, descendant of a nomadic warrior tribe that conquered China in the 17th century and ruled it for more than 250 years. Generations of persecution have all but eliminated the Manchus' language.
So Hasutai, who in the Manchu tradition goes by the one name, ha
Source: WSJ
October 3, 2009
Are humans hard-wired to be ruthlessly competitive or supportive of one another?
The behavior of our ape relatives, known as peaceful vegetarians, once bolstered the view that our actions could not be traced to an impulse to dominate. But in the late 1970s, when chimpanzees were discovered to hunt monkeys and kill each other, they became the poster boys for our violent origins and aggressive instinct.
I use the term "boys" on purpose because the theory was al
Source: Asian News International
October 1, 2009
An Armenian-American-Irish archeological expedition claims to have found the remains of the worlds oldest human brain, estimated to be over 5,000 years old.
The discovery was made recently in a cave in southeastern Armenia.
An analysis performed by the Keck Carbon Cycle Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Laboratory at the University of California, Irvine confirmed that one of three human skulls found at the site contains particles of a human brain dating to around the first
Source: WSJ
October 3, 2009
LONDON -- The recently freed Libyan agent convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, released documents containing what he calls fresh evidence that he hopes will bolster efforts to clear his name in the 1988 terrorist act that killed 270 people.
The 170-page legal brief published Friday includes some previously undisclosed evidence, including some uncovered by a Scottish review panel of his 1998 conviction. The documents say that a key witness, Malta shopkeeper Ton
Source: Inside Higher Ed
October 3, 2009
As Stanford University reported a couple of days ago and Inside Higher Ed noted, the estate of James Joyce, headed up by James Joyce’s grandson, Stephen James Joyce, has lost a lawsuit with English professor Carol Loeb Shloss and must pay her legal fees and costs of nearly a quarter-million dollars.
This finding appears to end the almost two-decade battle with the estate by Shloss, and to represent relief for other Joyce scholars who’ve felt the estate to be unfair and unreasonable
