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 Philadelphia Inquirer
August 20, 2009
As construction of the President's House memorial is poised to begin, sharp criticisms have been leveled at the architectural design, catching officials by surprise and focusing attention on purportedly historically inaccurate elements of the project.
The house's dimensions are incorrect, the arc of a bow window is distorted, and the building's now-infamous slave quarters are incorrectly located, the critics assert.
Some historians and members of a committee charged wit
Source: The Daily Beast
August 22, 2009
The International Committee of the Red Cross will now know the identities of prisoners kept in secret in Iraq and Afghanistan camps, in a reversal of the Pentagon's policy. The move will begin to dispel some of the secrecy surrounding the government's remaining overseas prisons. The Red Cross has been fighting for access to the information, but the military previously said disclosing prisoners' names would tip off other insurgents. The New York Times reported in 2006 that in one detention camp i
Source: Huffington Post
August 23, 2009
Even as the issue of torture appears likely to burst back onto the public agenda next week -- thanks to the much anticipated release of an internal CIA report -- one of the most progressive voices in Congress is arguing that the Obama White House has a legal obligation to investigate the Bush torture legacy.
New York Congressman Jerry Nadler, a senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, told the Huffington Post that he believed that President Obama would be breaking the law i
Source: BBC
August 23, 2009
A Norwegian team is set to embark on an expedition to find the submerged wreck of a plane which carried Norway's great polar explorer Roald Amundsen.
Amundsen was aboard a Latham 47 sea plane when the aircraft disappeared over the sea on its way to the Arctic island of Spitsbergen in 1928.
Two ships will set sail from the Norwegian city of Tromso on Monday to begin the two-week expedition.
The team will use an underwater robot to scan for the plane using so
Source: NYT
August 22, 2009
A Central Intelligence Agency inspector general’s report set to be released Monday provides new details about abuses that took place inside the agency’s secret prisons, including details of how C.I.A. officers carried out mock executions and threatened at least one prisoner with a gun and a power drill.
C.I.A. jailers at different times held the handgun and the drill close to the detainee, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, threatening to harm him if he did not cooperate with his interrogator
Source: The News (Portugal)
August 22, 2009
Located between Mafra and Torres Vedras, the fort is thought to have sheltered General Wellington’s troops serving the Torres Vedras line during the French invasions, between 1807 and 1814.
The General’s private quarters, a store room, a warehouse and a weapons locker were defined during the excavation. The division had been previously outlined in maps but this is the first time excavations were attempted to unearth them.
Of the weaponry storeroom, Archeologist Artur Ro
Source: The Sydney Morning Herald
August 19, 2009
The British Parliament will raise questions about the exhumation of 300 World War I soldiers buried in a mass grave in France for more than 90 years.
The all-party parliamentary war graves and battlefield heritage group, chaired by Lord Roper, is expected to reconvene in October and address the mounting controversy about the way the men's remains have been excavated as well as the tender process won by the private company, Oxford Archeology.
The anxiety has been fuelled
Source: Spiegel Online
August 20, 2009
The economic crisis is like a fairytale come true for Germany's romantic castles, baroque palaces and historic town squares because the government is spending millions of euros on sprucing them up, not just to protect the country's heritage but also to boost the construction sector.
Visitor numbers have also been increasing at many sites because Germans have been shunning foreign holidays in the recession.
Three separate programs totalling more than €320 million ($452
Source: Spiegel Online
August 21, 2009
Following reports on "black site" prisons in Poland, ABC News is now reporting that a third jail existed in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius. According to the report, as many as eight prisoners were held there for at least one year.
The United States is believed to have used the third black site prison in Europe to hold high-value al-Qaida suspects after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and to question them using "special interrogation techniques." These included t
Source: BBC
August 21, 2009
People who have not been to Belfast City Cemetery for years are being invited to come and visit the graves of friends and family this weekend.
The city council has organised a visitors' day this Sunday between 1000 BST and 1500 BST.
Staff will be on hand to do genealogical searches to help those who do not know where their family members are buried. Sinn Fein Councillor Tom Hartley who has helped organise the day said: "It is a wonderful
Source: BBC
August 23, 2009
Archaeologists have won a £48,000 Heritage Lottery grant to carry out an extensive dig at a Cumbrian abbey.
Holm Cultram Abbey in Abbeytown was the largest monastic house in Cumbria and founded by Cistercian monks in 1150.
Members of West Cumbria Archaeological Society will use the cash to search for abbey foundations in a nearby field.
The investigation of the size and layout of the site is hoped to result in the production of a plan of the entire monast
Source: Deutsche Welle
August 21, 2009
The Federal Prosecutor's Office in Karlsruhe revealed that genetic material unmistakably belonging to Becker had been found on several envelopes of letters claiming responsibility for the attack on April 7, 1977.
The assassination of Siegfried Buback, a strong opponent of the left-wing extremist terrorist group, marked the beginning of a wave of terrorist acts by the RAF in their radical opposition to the West German government. It remained one of the highest-profile political kill
Source: BBC
August 21, 2009
The descendants of the former princely rulers of Tonk in the Indian state of Rajasthan have won a legal battle to raise their monthly allowances.
Each of the 570 descendants will now get a minimum of 100 rupees ($2). The earlier minimum was set at 50 paise (less than a cent).
The allowance was started in 1944 and the maximum amount was fixed at 500 rupees ($10).
Tonk was the only Muslim princely state in Rajasthan before India gained independence in 1947.
Source: Chron (Houston Chronicle)
August 20, 2009
Texas high school students would learn about such significant individuals and milestones of conservative politics as Newt Gingrich and the rise of the Moral Majority — but nothing about liberals — under the first draft of new standards for public school history textbooks.
And the side that got left out is very unhappy.
As it stands, students would get “one-sided, right wing ideology,” said Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, D-San Antonio, chairman of the House Mexican America
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 23, 2009
Baltic states have marked the 20th anniversary of the day two million people joined hands against Soviet rule.
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania held a 375-miles relay race to remember the Baltic Way human chain.
The Baltic human chain was organised on August 23, 1989 amid a drive to restore independence from Moscow.
It saw two million people from a total population of seven million in the three states hold hands in an act of solidarity and defiance.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 23, 2009
A new photograph of Fidel Castro has been published in Cuba's state-run Communist Youth newspaper, apparently showing the ailing former leader in improved health.
The photograph in Juventud Rebelde, showed Mr Castro talking to Rafael Correa, the visiting Left-wing Ecuadorean president.
Mr Castro, 83, was dressed in a white shirt instead of the tracksuit he has worn in recent photos. The meeting with Rafael Correa occurred on Friday.
Source: Google News
August 22, 2009
Chancellor Angela Merkel reiterated her support Saturday for a memorial to Germans forced to relocate from eastern Europe after World War II, but said it did not mean Germany was seeking to diminish responsibility for starting the war.
After the Third Reich collapsed in 1945 and borders were moved westward, millions of ethnic Germans in Poland, then-Czechoslovakia and elsewhere were viewed as traitors and were expelled or fled.
Backed by the German government, a group c
Source: The Huffington Post
August 23, 2009
They go by such nicknames as "Fat Cat" and "Tomboy." Their simmering power struggles once drove them into the streets, guns blazing. They rule their crime families with steely determination, and also raise the kids and stir the pasta.
Move over, Don Corleone. Godmothers are rising in the ranks of the Camorra, the Naples' area crime syndicate.
Women have long played a strong role in Camorra crime families, muscling, sometimes murdering, their way to t
Source: The Times (UK)
August 21, 2009
Is he the evil perpetrator of the deadliest terrorist attack in British history, or a sick old man, a loving father and grandfather, who has suffered a terrible miscarriage of justice? Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi put on a virtuoso performance when The Times came calling yesterday.
He did not come across as bitter or angry but continued to insist on his innocence, as he has done from the day of his conviction. He abandoned his appeal, he said, not because he was guilty but to give him
Source: CNN
August 23, 2009
South Korea bade farewell to former President Kim Dae-jung Sunday in a ceremony attended by thousands of citizens, dignitaries and politicians.
The solemn Sunday afternoon ceremony was held outside parliament, with a large portrait of Kim placed on a shrine surrounded by flowers.
The funeral followed six days of mourning for Kim, who died Tuesday of a heart failure.
