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: Fox News
August 15, 2009
Prime Minister Taro Aso joined some 4,800 bereaved families to pay respect to 3.1 million Japanese war dead — 2.3 million soldiers and 800,000 civilians — at the Nihon Budokan hall in Tokyo. Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko also attended the ceremony, leading a one-minute silence at noon.
"Our country inflicted tremendous damage and suffering on many countries, particularly people in Asia. As a representative of the Japanese people, I humbly express my remorse for the victim
Source: Stone Pages Archaeo News
August 15, 2009
Archaeologists in Perthshire (Scotland) have unearthed a spectacular early Bronze Age grave containing a gold-banded dagger still wrapped in its 4,000-year-old sheath. The discovery was made by archaeologists from Glasgow and Aberdeen universities. In 2008 they found a large sandstone slab, weighing four tons, measuring 2m x 2m and 40cm thick, but had to wait a year for it to be lifted. Last week, a crane was brought in and the 4,000 year old grave was revealed.
Beneath the capstone
Source: Stone Pages Archaeo News
August 15, 2009
Archaeologists have unearthed eight neolithic sites in Derry (Northern Ireland), some more than 5,000 years old. The exciting discoveries were made during work on the new Maydown dual carriageway and include a pair of well-preserved 5,000 years-old Neolithic houses and 4,000 years-old Bronze Age burial places known as 'ring-ditches'. The discoveries also include Bronze age pottery, flint tools and human bones.
Archaeology firm John Cronin & Associates found the ancient remains i
Source: Deutsche Welle
August 15, 2009
Los Angeles may be the movie capital of the world today, but the very first cinema went into business far from the Hollywood hills in what is now Poland. The landmark theater turns 100 this year.
When the first moving picture was projected on the screen in the Kino Pionier cinema - then called Helios - tickets cost just two pennies and Germany was ruled by an emperor. What is now the Polish city of Szczecin on
the Baltic coast was then the German city of Stettin, just an hour
Source: telegraph.co.uk
August 14, 2009
King George VI privately wrote of his "relief" at the fact that war
had finally broken out between Britain and Germany, in a diary entry to go on public display for the first time.
On the evening of 3 September 1939 - the day that Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared war - the monarch wrote: "As 11 o'clock struck that fateful morning I had a certain feeling of relief that those 10 anxious days of intensive negotiations with Germany over Poland, which at moment
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 14, 2009
The prospect of mediated talks between the two sides has provoked fury in Baghdad, where the new government is dominated by parties that were ruthlessly repressed under Saddam's dictatorship.
Officials said an American military delegation that wrapped up a two-day visit to Damascus yesterday was given details of a Syrian-sponsored negotiation process that would end in the rehabilitation of most or all of the Ba'ath Party Iraqi regional command, which has remained loyal to Saddam's
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
August 15, 2009
The mother of the policewoman murdered by a Libyan gunman in London 25 years ago has condemned as 'sickening' the reported deal to send the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing back to Tripoli.
Queenie Fletcher branded the plan to let Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi leave a Scottish prison an 'insult' to the memory of her daughter Yvonne.
'What is going on is absolutely sickening,' the 76-year- old said from her home in Semley, Dorset.
She accused
Source: Deutsche Welle
August 14, 2009
The victims are believed to have been caught up in the Russian army's offensive in what was then the German province of East Prussia in the final stages of World War II; a province split between Poland and Russia after the war.
The ceremony was attended by a group of Germans who fled the area, as well as Polish officials who meant to make the event a symbol of reconciliation.
One of those survivors, a 74-year-old Hamburg resident named Sabina, lived in Germany's easte
Source: BBC
August 14, 2009
A spokesman said she "expressed strongly" the view to Kenny MacAskill that Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi should serve out his sentence in Scotland.
Earlier it was confirmed the Libyan had applied to abandon his appeal against his conviction.
Terminally-ill Megrahi is serving a life sentence at Greenock Prison.
On Wednesday BBC News revealed that Kenny MacAskill was likely to announce next week that Megrahi, who is gravely ill with prostate cancer,
Source: Scoop (Independent News)
July 28, 2009
Among the high profile clients of British antiquities dealer Robin Symes was Maurice Tempelsman -- one of the pillars of the Eastern Establishment (Council on Foreign Relations, Africa-America Institute, long-time beau of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and "friend" of former Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright); Leon Levy & Shelby White and the Metropolitan Museum of Art were customers too. Symes bought his pieces primarily from now-convicted antiquities smuggler Giacomo Medi
Source: CNN
August 14, 2009
Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme was released from federal custody Friday, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons said.
Fromme was convicted in 1975 of pointing a gun at then-President Gerald Ford in Sacramento, California.
She was released Friday morning from Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, said Felicia Ponce, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons in Washington.
Fromme, a follower of Charles Manson, pointed a gun at For
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 14, 2009
British prisoners of war condemned the Japanese government after it offered US veterans a full apology and invited them to visit the country while ignoring the plight of those from the UK.
Ichiro Fujisaki, Japan's ambassador to Washington, apologised for the "tragic experiences" of the American survivors of the Bataan Death March, in which 20,000 US servicemen died after Imperial forces overran their defensive positions in the Philippines in April 1942.
Speak
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 14, 2009
The former general who ran a base that was the backdrop for multiple abuses during Argentina's 1976-83 dictatorship was sentenced to life in prison on Wednesday for human rights violations.
Santiago Omar Riveros, 86, who commanded the Campo de Mayo barracks near Buenos Aires, was found guilty of torturing and beating to death 15-year-old Floréal Avellaneda, and abducting his mother, Iris
Some 5,000 prisoners were held at the Campo de Mayo barracks during Argentina's di
Source: AP
August 14, 2009
When a small plane collided with a sightseeing helicopter over the Hudson River last week, it was only the second time in decades that crowded skies near Manhattan led to a midair crash.
But an Associated Press review of pilots' safety reports found many more near-misses in the same airspace in recent years, including several between small planes and helicopters flying the busy river corridor near the Statue of Liberty.
Almost all the incidents involved small aircraft f
Source: The Huffington Post
August 14, 2009
Income inequality in the United States is at an all-time high, surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression, according to a recently updated paper by University of California, Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez. The paper, which covers data through 2007, points to a staggering, unprecedented disparity in American incomes. On his blog, Nobel prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman called the numbers "truly amazing."
Though income inequalit
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 14, 2009
The contents of a briefcase belonging to a German who lived for years under an alias in an Egyptian hotel prove he was a fugitive Nazi war criminal known as "Dr Death", police say.
A German police statement said handwriting found on documents in the case was that of Dr Aribert Heim, accused of killing and performing experiments on inmates of concentration camps during the Second World War.
Analysis of dust showed the briefcase had been in North Africa for a n
Source: AP
August 14, 2009
Five private security guards have climbed to the top of the Colosseum in Rome to protest planned layoffs at their company.
Ambulances and a fire brigade crane arrived at the scene Friday evening. Police cordoned off the area. Below the ancient arena, some 50 other security guards backed the protest with cheers.
The protesters unfurled a banner that read "no to job insecurity" and received a megaphone and supplies attached to a rope by their colleagues.
Source: AP
August 14, 2009
Navy pilot Scott Speicher, the long-missing first casualty of the first Gulf War, was finally laid to rest Friday in his adopted hometown as thousands of people lined the streets to watch a funeral procession pass his school, church and former military base.
Speicher was shot down in 1991 on the first night of the Gulf War. For more than 18 years, no one knew if he was killed or being held prisoner in Iraq until his remains were discovered in the desert, west of Baghdad, earlier thi
Source: CNN
August 13, 2009
Pan Am Flight 103 was 31,000 feet in the air, heading for New York City, when it exploded over Scotland on the longest night of the year, December 21, 1988, killing 259 people on board and 11 people on the ground below.
It was the world's deadliest act of air terrorism until the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, according to the FBI.
American and British investigators painstakingly pieced together the aircraft's wreckage and found it had been dest
Source: Telegraph.co.uk
August 14, 2009
Just as raising temperature can change the properties of iron and other metals, early humans heated stone to make it easier to flake.
The process transformed a stone called silcrete into an outstanding raw material for tool manufacture.
Doctoral student Kyle Brown, who led the research at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, said: "Our illumination of the heat treatment process shows that these early modern humans commanded fire in a nuanced and sophistica
