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
August 17, 2009
Invergarry was burned down by Oliver Cromwell's forces in 1654. It was rebuilt, but ransacked by government soldiers after the Battle of Culloden.
The MyGlengarry.com Conservation Trust has "built" two versions of the castle, near Fort Augustus, on Second Life.
Virtual tours of the building in its ruinous state today and how it was in 1740 have been offered.
A computer expert who writes codes for Second Life was brought in by MyGlengarry to rec
Source: CNSNews.com
August 18, 2009
Less than a week after the Environmental Protection Agency restarted a controversial dredging project on the Hudson River, dredgers operated by the General Electric Company dislodged wooden beams that are the last remnants of one of the largest British forts in the American colonies.
The EPA now says that the beams are contaminated with potential carcinogens known as PCBs and therefore must be buried in a landfill.
The dredging operation is being conducted to remove se
Source: The Washington Times
August 18, 2009
A centuries-old way of doing business is taking center stage on Capitol Hill as a cutting-edge and potentially politically viable alternative to the government-run health insurance plan long preferred by President Obama.
Cooperatives, first organized in the 18th century, are being considered in the health care reform debate after the Obama administration signaled Sunday that it isn't wedded to the taxpayer-funded public plan, once considered by Democrats as essential to any substant
Source: Agence France-Presse
August 19, 2009
THE ornate pharaonic tombs in Egypt's Valley of the Kings are doomed to disappear within 150 to 500 years if they remain open to tourists, the head of antiquities has warned.
Zahi Hawass said humidity and fungus are eating into the walls of the royal tombs in the huge necropolis on the west bank of the Nile across from Luxor, which is swamped daily by several thousand tourists.
Poor ventilation and the breath of the hordes of visitors are causing damage to the carving
Source: telegraph.co.uk
August 18, 2009
Guy Burgess, one of the Cambridge Five traitors, lived a life of big bar bills and first class travel tickets on the BBC expenses system, according to documents made public by the corporation.
Burgess, who passed British secrets to the Soviet Union during the Cold War, worked for the BBC as a radio producer in two spells between 1936 and 1944 before joining the Foreign Office.
Entertainment expenses were frowned upon by his superiors, with one memo saying: "The ent
Source: The Kingston Whig Standard
August 18, 2009
Seventy-one years ago today, Kingston hosted U. S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Arthur Milnes, a fellow with the Centre for the Study of Democracy at Queen's University, wants you to know why it matters.
"It's probably the most significant speech ever given by a politician in Canada," Milnes said.
To commemorate it, Milnes says he would like to see the cities of Kingston and Watertown, N. Y., work together to celebrate it annually.
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Source: Times (UK)
August 19, 2009
A silver pocket watch that spent 130 years at the bottom of the sea will be reunited with the nearest living relative of its owner after the diver who found it turned amateur detective.
The watch was found by Rich Hughes near the spot off the Pembrokeshire coast where the Barbara went down in 1881. The square-rigged barque had sailed from Burma with a cargo of rice but was wrecked when she was steered on to rocks by her inexperienced captain.
Engraved on the back of the
Source: History Today
August 18, 2009
Almost exactly 200 years ago, on August 5th 1809, John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) set sail from Boston to St. Petersburg. President James Madison had appointed him minister plenipotentiary to Russia on June 27th and, sailing first to Denmark, Adams eventually arrived in Russia in October. From the day of his departure, he began to summarise each day of his three-month voyage in a line-a-day diary. 200 years on, since August 5th, the Massachusetts Historical Society has published John Quincy Adams’
Source: BBC
August 18, 2009
Plans to revamp a memorial to Jack Phillips, chief telegraphist on The Titanic, will go before a public meeting in Godalming on Thursday.
The organisers want to refurbish the memorial, built in 1914, in time for the 2012 centenary of the sinking of the ship on its maiden voyage.
The Grade II-listed Phillips Memorial Cloister is the largest of any built to remember a single Titanic victim.
Source: BBC
August 18, 2009
Poor farmers in the heart of Bolivia's Amazon are being encouraged to embrace the annual floods - by using a centuries-old irrigation system for their crops.
They are experimenting with a sustainable way of growing food crops that their ancestors used.
It could provide them with better protection against the extremes of climate change, reduce deforestation, improve food security and even promise a better diet.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 18, 2009
The Arctic Sea, the cargo ship that disappeared before resurfacing off the coast fo the Cape Verde island of Sal, joins a list of unexplained shipping disasters.
Mary Celeste: A brigantine merchant ship discovered in early December 1872 in the Atlantic Ocean unmanned and apparently abandoned, in spite of the good weather. The ship had only been at sea a month and had six months of food and water on board. Cargo was virtually untouched and personal belongings were still in place. It
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 18, 2009
Liechtenstein's Prince Hans-Adam II has angered German Jews by invoking the Holocaust to defend his country's banking secrecy.
He took aim at Germany, which has been putting pressure on Liechtenstein to reform confidential banking practices that allow German depositors to evade taxes.
Germany's Jewish community - which last year condemned Hans-Adam II's description of modern Germany as a "Fourth Reich" - attacked his latest comments as another insensitive twi
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 18, 2009
Robert Novak, the conservative columnist who revealed the name of the CIA officer Valerie Plame, has died after a battle with brain cancer. He was 78.
The influential Right-wing pundit, who served as co-host of CNN's "Crossfire" and had been a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times for decades, became himself a central figure in one of the biggest and messiest stories in Washington in recent years.
In July 2003, Novak was the first to publish the name of Ms Pla
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 19, 2009
Scientists have found the largest dinosaur footprints ever to be discovered in Europe - half way up a Swiss mountain.
The 15-inch-long prints belonged to a carnivore from the Triassic period that would have been the biggest predator on the planet at the time.
A team of palaeontologists from the Natural History Museum in Basel found the prints at 3,300 metres on a mountain in Ela Nature Reserve, Switzerland's largest park.
Source: Times Online (UK)
August 14, 2009
A huge Neolithic cathedral, unlike anything else which can be seen in Britain, has been found in Orkney.
Archaeologists said that the building would have dwarfed the island’s landmarks from the Stone Age — the Ring of Brodgar and the Standing Stones of Stenness. Nick Card, who is leading the dig at the Ness of Brodgar, said that the cathedral, which would have served the whole of the north of Scotland, would have been constructed to “amaze” and “create a sense of awe” among those w
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 17, 2009
The Vatican's official newspaper has accused Britain and the United States of having detailed knowledge of Hitler's plans to exterminate the Jews but of failing to do anything to halt the Final Solution.
L'Osservatore Romano said the British and American governments ignored, downplayed or even suppressed intelligence reports about the Nazis' extermination plans.
They could have bombed Nazi concentration camps and the railways that supplied them but instead chose not to
Source: BBC
August 18, 2009
Kim Dae-jung, the former president of South Korea, has died at the age of 83, hospital sources say.
Mr Kim, who was being treated for pneumonia, was reported to have died after suffering heart failure.
The former leader had spent his life pursuing democracy and reunification with the North.
He survived several attempts on his life and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000 for his "Sunshine" policy efforts to improve ties with Pyongyang.
Source: NYT
August 17, 2009
Frederick Chiluba, the former president of Zambia whose government became internationally notorious for corruption during his years in office, was acquitted Monday on charges of stealing about $500,000 from the state.
A magistrate in the Zambian capital, Lusaka, ruled that the prosecution had failed to prove its case against Mr. Chiluba, a former trade unionist who governed Zambia for a decade, but it convicted two businessmen, Faustin Kabwe and Aaron Chungu, of theft. Mr. Chiluba’s
Source: The Washington Times
August 17, 2009
Tears filled the eyes of some Vietnam veterans who were warmly greeted with cheers from their family and friends Sunday -- unlike their original return from the war, when they were often met with angry demonstrators and harsh headlines.
The ceremony was a first for the 101st Airborne Division and the Army, said Maj. Patrick Seiber, an Army spokesman based at Fort Campbell in Kentucky.
"Our hope is that other units and other posts will follow our lead in having this
Source: Boston.com
August 17, 2009
...Nearly 123 years after his death, doubts about his US citizenship linger, thanks to lack of documentation and a political foe’s assertion that Arthur was really born in Canada - and was therefore ineligible for the White House, where he served from 1881 to 1885.
Long before “birthers’’ began questioning the citizenship of President Obama, similar questions were raised about the early years of Arthur, an accidental president who ascended to the job after President James Garfield w
