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 12, 2009
Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, who is suffering from terminal prostate cancer, has been serving his jail sentence at Greenock Prison.
Scottish ministers described the development as "complete speculation".
The Libyan had launched an appeal against his conviction for the murder of 270 people when Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie in 1988.
Source: BBC
August 12, 2009
A man accused of planning the massacre of Rwandans during the 1994 genocide has been arrested in the Democratic Republic of Congo, officials say.
A government statement named the suspect as Gregoire Ndahimana, who is wanted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR).
He was detained by Congolese soldiers in the eastern province of North Kivu. According to his ICTR indictment, Mr Ndahimana is responsible for the deaths of a
Source: AP
August 12, 2009
John Demjanjuk's attorney filed a motion Wednesday calling for the Nazi death-camp case against his client to be closed, saying the charges against him violate German legal precedent.
Attorney Ulrich Busch said in a filing faxed to the Munich state court that even if it could be proved that Demjanjuk trained as a death camp guard at the SS's Trawniki camp and served at Sobibor in Nazi-occupied Poland, he shouldn't have been charged.
Busch argued that previous German cou
Source: AP
August 12, 2009
A federal judge threw out a former Tennessee student's free-speech lawsuit against a school dress code that banned Confederate flag clothing.
Nearly a year after a jury failed to reach a verdict in Tommy Defoe's case, U.S. District Judge Tom Varlan ruled against a retrial.
The judge said there was undisputed evidence of racial threats against minorities at Anderson County High School and school officials "reasonably forecasted" that clothing such as Defoe's Co
Source: CNN
August 12, 2009
A pioneer, a preacher, an activist and an athlete were among 16 people who President Obama honored Wednesday with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
The Presidential Medal of Freedom, an annual award, was created after World War II when President Truman wanted to honor civilian service during the war.
Source: Liverpool Daily Post
August 12, 2009
Liverpool should mark the Civil War anniversary by securing Confederate paymaster Charles Prioleau’s former home, according to one US Civil War expert.
“This amazing house at 19 Abercromby Square should be given English Heritage Grade-I listing,” says Tom Sebrell, American Civil War historian.
“There is so much symbolism in that house to do with South Carolina, introduced by Charles Prioleau and his wife, Mary Elizabeth.”
Source: The Times (UK)
August 12, 2009
Archaeologists have uncovered the 4,000-year-old grave of a “Bronze Age hero” in a Perthshire field. The find was made at the Scottish Royal Centre, near the village of Forteviot, ten miles south of Perth, after a crane lifted up a four-tonne stone to reveal an intact burial chamber.
The carved capstone had sealed the grave so well that organic materials including wood, bark and leather survived intact as well as various metal objects. The man, who is believed to have been an import
Source: BBC
August 11, 2009
A parliamentary committee says an "impunity gap" is allowing some war criminals to avoid prosecution.
The Joint Committee on Human Rights said international law on atrocities is being applied inconsistently.
It also says victims of torture abroad should be allowed to use the British courts to pursue states responsible for their injuries.
Source: BBC
August 11, 2009
The trial of a former German infantry commander for Nazi war crimes took 11 months, and ended in what is nowadays a rare conviction.
The passage of time since the war and the patchy record of governments in pursuing Nazis and their collaborators mean that, while many Nazis have faced justice and been convicted, far more have slipped through the net.
In the 1950s and 1960s, German judge and prosecutor Fritz Bauer estimated there were 100,000 Germans responsible in one w
Source: BBC
August 12, 2009
The Geneva Conventions are 60 years old on Wednesday, but the anniversary comes amid concern that respect for the rules of war is small.
The three existing Geneva Conventions, which relate to the immunity of medical personnel on the battlefield and the treatment of prisoners of war, were extensively revised in 1949.
The fourth Geneva Convention, which stipulates that warring parties have an obligation to protect civilians, was added.
Unfortunately, signat
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 11, 2009
A 90-year-old former German infantry commander has been jailed for life for ordering the murders of 14 civilians in an Italian village in 1944 during the Second World War.
In one of Germany's last Nazi war crimes trials the court found Josef Scheungraber ordered his troops to shoot dead three men and a 74-year-old woman in the street before driving another 11 men, aged between 15 and 66, into a barn and blowing it up.
Just one survived – 15-year-old Gino Massetti, thou
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 11, 2009
A Nasa space telescope has found evidence of a high-speed collision between two forming planets orbiting a young star.
Astronomers say the cosmic pile-up is similar to the one that formed our Moon some four billion years ago, when a Mars-sized object crashed into Earth.
Telltale plumes of vaporised rock and lava leftover from the collision which happened a few thousand years ago were picked up by the telescope.
The details are to be published in the Astr
Source: CNN
August 11, 2009
Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece the "Mona Lisa" was attacked with a mug earlier this month, but the world's most famous painting -- protected by thick glass -- emerged with its enigmatic smile undimmed.
French police say a woman "not in her senses" lobbed the mug at the 500-year-old painting, which hangs in the Louvre gallery in Paris.
The woman, a tourist, was later transferred from police custody to a psychiatric unit, a police spokesman told CNN.
Source: CNSNews.com
August 11, 2009
President Barack Obama this week will award the 2009 Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously to Harvey Milk, one of the nation’s first openly homosexual politicians, and to the late Jack Kemp, a leading proponent of supply side economics.
They are among 16 people to be honored at a White House ceremony on Wednesday.
Harvey Milk, an openly gay man elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, was shot and killed in November 1978 along with San Francisco Mayor Geo
Source: NYT
August 10, 2009
Gaeyado today presents an idyllic scene.
But decades ago, the arrival of ferries was anticipated with dread. Often they brought the counterintelligence detectives, agents in successive South Korean military governments’ drives to root out Communists and their sympathizers.
The extent of the terror they spread in places like Gaeyado is only now coming to light with the revelations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This panel was set up in 2005 to investigate
Source: guardian.co.uk
August 10, 2009
Tom Sebrell, an American academic, has rediscovered the lost grave of
Charles Prioleau in Kensal Green cemetery, London. Photograph: Martin
Godwin.
The grave of a man who bankrolled the Confederate side in the American
civil war, and ended up costing the British government £3.3m in
compensation to the victorious north, has been tracked down in a patch
of brambles in a London cemetery.
Charles Kuhn Prioleau, a cotton merchant born in Charleston, South
Carolina, was based in Liverp
Source: dailymail.co.uk
August 11, 2009
It has long been regarded as the greatest sporting snub in history -
when Adolf Hitler stormed out of the Olympic Stadium in Berlin because
Germany had been humiliated by a black man.
The moment was 1936 and an incredible American athlete called Jesse
Owens had just run his way to the first of four gold medals in the 100
metres.
Hitler, who had shaken hands the previous day with all the German
Olympic winners, left the stadium furious
Source: AP
August 11, 2009
90-year-old former German army officer was convicted Tuesday of ordering the reprisal killings of 10 Italian civilians who were herded into a barn that was blown up. The Munich state court convicted World War II veteran Josef Scheungraber on 10 counts of murder and one of attempted murder, and sentenced him to life in prison. His lawyer said he would appeal.
Scheungraber was a 25-year-old Wehrmacht lieutenant during the June 1944 killings in Falzano di Cortona, near the Tuscan town
Source: NYT
August 11, 2009
Eunice Kennedy Shriver, a member of one of the most prominent families in American politics and a trailblazer in the effort to improve the lives of people with intellectual disabilities, died early Tuesday morning at Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, Mass. She was 88. Her death, at 2 a.m., was confirmed by her family in a statement. A family friend said that Mrs. Shriver had been in declining health for months, having suffered a series of strokes.
A sister of President John F. Kennedy a
Source: The Wall Street Journal
August 8, 2009
As Facebook, Twitter and other popular Internet services investigated the cause of this week's massive computer attacks, attention turned to a blogger whose writings blasting Russian officials may have been the target...
...The blogger has been a prolific critic of Russian officials through accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal and YouTube, Google Inc.'s video-sharing service. On Twitter -- where he calls himself George and describes his location as "Georgia, Tbilisi"
