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
May 11, 2009
The defendants were officials of Iraq's former ruling Baath party who allegedly killed two British soldiers after they were captured by militias near Basra.
Pictures taken of Luke Allsopp and Simon Cullingworth after the ambush were later shown on al-Jazeera TV.
Faisal al-Saadoon and Khalaf Mufdhi are being tried under Iraqi jurisdiction.
Source: BBC
May 11, 2009
He will spend two days assessing the level of co-operation from Belgrade.
Mr Brammertz's top priority is the arrest of the two remaining fugitive war crimes suspects, including former Bosnian Serb army chief Ratko Mladic.
Serbia's path to EU membership will be blocked until it is judged to have fully co-operated with the tribunal.
Source: BBC
May 11, 2009
Lawyers for Mau Mau veterans said they had documented 40 cases of torture - including castration - sexual abuse and unlawful detention.
A spokesman for the veterans said in Nairobi they were confident of success.
The UK government has said the claim is invalid because of the time that had lapsed since the alleged abuses.
Five elderly Kenyans - three men and two women - detained during the 1950s insurgency are the lead claimants in the reparations case to
Source: Washington Post
May 11, 2009
PENARTH, Wales -- Derek Eveleigh walked carefully, searching for buried treasure.
"It's such a thrill when I find something -- and I often do," Eveleigh said as he listened to the steady beeps of his metal detector. Not far away from this Welsh seaside town, he recently found 6,000 copper coins dating to the Roman Empire.
"It turned out they were 1,700 years old! Many emperors ago," said Eveleigh, 79, one of thousands of British "metal detectori
Source: WaPo
May 9, 2009
As U.S. health officials consider rolling out a plan to inoculate the nation against swine flu in the next several months, they are haunted by the events that unfolded the last time the government stepped in to head off a surprise flu outbreak.
In the fall of 1976, dozens of Americans died within 48 hours of receiving a swine flu vaccine. To allay the public fears that threatened to unravel the mass inoculation program, President Gerald Ford rolled up his shirtsleeve and received hi
Source: AP
May 8, 2009
A historian says the Mormon church is working diligently on an application to secure National Historic Landmark status for Mountain Meadows, the southern Utah site of a pioneer wagon train massacre.
Assistant Church Historian Richard Turley says initial feedback from National Parks Service staff to a summary proposal has been positive. The final proposal will be submitted to a U.S. Interior Department committee.
In 1857, 120 men, women and children from an Arkansas wago
Source: Miami Herald
May 10, 2009
About 30 black seniors gathered Friday at the African-American Research Library and Cultural Center in Fort Lauderdale to start an estimated two-year project to tell the history and achievements of Broward County blacks and black communities. Follow-up individual interviews will be done later.
The effort will culminate in a book and oral histories on video tape.
''The risk is [the history] will be lost,'' said Marvin Dunn, a retired Florida International University prof
Source: AFP
May 9, 2009
Israel razed their ancestral village 56 years ago, but some Christians are determined to preserve its heritage by keeping alive the language that Jesus spoke."Shlomo malfonito" --"Hello teacher" -- intone some 20 pupils in the Arab-Israeli village of Jish, where half the population is Maronite, a people who for centuries have lived in the mountains of Lebanon and nearby.
The children get free lessons in Aramaic, an ancient tongue spoken during the time of Jesus Christ and kept alive down th
Source: Time Magazine
May 8, 2009
For the past two weeks, posters celebrating the Soviet triumph in World War II have been taped to the windows of every store in Russia, proudly displaying the date "9 May" and the orange and black striped ribbon of victory. Red banners have been draped across the fronts of apartment buildings all along the central Moscow parade route. And in the lead-up to the country's annual Victory Day celebrations, the Kremlin has made a move that it touts as yet another display of Russia's patriot
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 7, 2009
A journal from HMS Beagle, the ship that scientist Charles Darwin voyaged on, has sold for 97,250 pounds.
The ship was the vessel that Darwin used during some of his most important journeys that helped him form his ideas on evolution.
The journal was kept by a commanding officer on the ship, detailing the end of its first hydrographic surveying voyage to Patagonia in South America.
Source: AFP
May 8, 2009
When Ayad Tariq paces the dusty ruins of the ancient citadel towering over the disputed city of Kirkuk he sees a dazzling new tourist attraction just waiting to rise from the ruins.
"We are going to make this a tourist citadel. So a house like this could be a museum," the city's antiquities director explained as he strode through the ruins of a 19th century mansion that belonged to a wealthy Christian family.
Tariq wants visitors from around the world to see t
Source: China View
May 8, 2009
GUIYANG, May 8 (Xinhua) -- A group of construction workers have accidentally stumbled upon a prehistoric man's cave underneath a Buddhist temple in southwest China's Guizhou Province, archaeologists said here Friday.
The stone structure, containing hundreds of mammal fossils and stone implements, was between 10,000 and 40,000 years old and presumably dated back either to the end of the Old Stone Age or the start of New Stone Age, said Cai Huiyang, a top archaeologist with the Gui
Source: NYT
May 9, 2009
Israel is quietly carrying out a $100 million, multiyear development plan in some of the most significant religious and national heritage sites just outside the walled Old City here as part of an effort to strengthen the status of Jerusalem as its capital.
The plan, parts of which have been outsourced to a private group that is simultaneously buying up Palestinian property for Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem, has drawn almost no public or international scrutiny. However, certain
Source: NYT
May 8, 2009
With health authorities now gearing up for what could be a huge vaccination campaign against a new strain of swine flu, the experience of 1976 is raising a note of caution.
The feared swine flu epidemic of 1976 never materialized. And several hundred people, including Ms. [Janet] Kinney, who is now 68 and lives in Gig Harbor, Wash., developed Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare neurological condition that causes temporary muscle weakness or paralysis. More than 30 of those people died.
Source: NYT
May 9, 2009
As a freshman senator, Barack Obama accused one of President George W. Bush’s judicial nominees of changing her approach from case to case to ensure outcomes favorable to powerful parties, like property owners. That one-sided record, he said, showed a mission of “not blind justice, but political activism.”
But in another floor speech soon afterward, Mr. Obama seemed to emphasize a different ideal than blind justice. Judges should “recognize who the weak are and who the strong are in
Source: Independent (UK)
May 9, 2009
In the wake of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, military commanders gave soldiers carte blanche to shoot hostages should nuclear weapons be the target of terrorists. The murder of Israeli athletes at the Games sent a wave of panic through Western governments at the bloody arrival of a new breed of terrorism. In Britain, the atrocity struck such fear into the hearts of military chiefs that they believed their nuclear weapons could be the next target.
A top-secret document obtained
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 9, 2009
Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's president, has warned at a military parade in Red Square that Moscow will teach foreign aggressors the "lessons" of the Second World War.
Nuclear missile launchers and battle tanks were driven through the centre of Moscow, while air force bombers flew above the city's skyline, as Russia celebrated victory over Nazi Germany 64 years ago. Mr Medvedev ordered the Soviet-style parade of might to remind the world that Russia remained a powerful milita
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 8, 2009
The Israeli government demanded that Pope Benedict XVI explicitly condemn Catholics who deny the Holocaust, as he arrived in Jordan on the first leg of his tour of the Holy Land billed as an act of 'reconciliation'.
The intervention came despite repeated concessions in the lead-up to the tour by the Vatican, which is desperate to smooth difficult relations with both the Jewish and Muslim worlds.
The Pope insists his eight-day trip is a "pilgrimage" to Holy La
Source: AFP
May 8, 2009
Sixty-five years ago Waclaw Sobczak hid a message in a bottle between the bricks of a wall in a building of the Nazi German Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, a last sign of life as he prepared to die.
"It was an attempt to leave a trace of our existence as we thought we were going to die," said Sobczak, sent to Auschwitz in 1943 as a slave labourer.
Since, it has emerged that three of the men on the list are still alive.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 9, 2009
When a "self-portrait" of Adolf Hitler was sold amid much fanfare last month for 10 times its reserve price, the auctioneer's historical documents expert boasted about the amount of interest that it had received. The same "expert" has, however, now admitted that the painting, signed "A. Hitler 1910", might be a fake after Mandrake pointed out to him that it was, in fact, likely to be a painting of Clapper Bridge on Dartmoor.
"It's impossible to kn
