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: Times (UK)
April 13, 2009
By authorising the use of military force for the first time outside the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan that he inherited, President Obama may hope that he has shut some of his critics up. For the moment, at least.
The sight of four pirates in a lifeboat holding off an $800-million warship and the world’s last superpower was not, after all, the image the White House wishes to project.
Mr Obama’s own silence on the subject last week, ducking questions about whether h
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 13, 2009
Dr Geoff Crawford, who has been researching the infamous 1888 prostitute murders, believes the East End killer may have lived out his days in Australia.
He claims international con man Frederick Bailey Deeming could have been responsible for the murders.
Deeming lived in Britain in the 1880s, settling in Rainhill near Liverpool where he was later discovered to have killed his first wife and their four children.
He later emigrated to Melbourne, where he w
Source: Deutsche Welle
April 13, 2009
For the past several weeks, more than 60 firemen and volunteers have been spending most of their days at the site where the archive once stood. With scoops, cranes and even their bare hands, they search through the rubble not for bodies, but for paper.
That is because the documented history of the entire region now lays buried under 60 tons of rock and other debris.
"Today we just found a document from the 11th century," said Cologne fireman Thomas Buergerma
Source: Deutsche Welle
April 13, 2009
"Without God, everything is permitted."
With this famous quote from Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the bishop of the southern Bavarian town of Augsburg wanted to warn his congregation of what he sees as the dangers of atheism.
Bishop Mixa told churchgoers that a society without God was "hell on earth" and could result in bloody regimes such as those led by Adolf Hitler or the Soviet Union.
"Decades past have proven the inhumanit
Source: Tehran Times
April 13, 2009
Located five kilometers west of Behshahr in Iran’s northern province of Mazandaran, Gohar-Tappeh is the largest and most important prehistoric site so far, relative to those previously discovered in the region.
A joint team of German and Iranian archaeologists along with a number of Polish experts in interdisciplinary fields have recently been assigned to study the 13,000 year record of habitation at the site.
The new anthropological studies are led by Arkadiusz Solty
Source: WaPo
April 11, 2009
DALLAS -- The new couple at 10141 Daria Place accepted an invitation to a neighborhood dinner party last month. The guest list totaled eight. The main dish was chicken potpie. George and Laura Bush left their cul-de-sac in the back of a dark sedan, exited through a Secret Service checkpoint and rode down streets bordered by lawn signs adorned with gigantic W's to welcome them home.
It had been a bad week for the country. President Obama spoke on television about the burdens he had i
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 11, 2009
A British ancestor of US President Barack Obama left 12 pence to his son in a will, it has been revealed.
Peter Blossom, who genealogists claim is a forefather of the US President, was a farm labourer in Stapleford, near Cambridge.
Experts believe his son, Thomas, born in nearby Great Shelford in around 1580, sailed to America in about 1620 and the current president of the US is a direct descendant of Thomas.
Now details of Peter's will have emerged - an
Source: Foxnews
April 12, 2009
Grassroots organizations have produced a cottage industry of Tea Party-themed products that are funding nationwide protests of government spending and bailouts -- and they're generating a mini-stimulus to boot.
Online retailers are recording hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales of mugs and sweats, buttons and bumper stickers, with much of the proceeds going toward organizing the tax-day tea parties, takeoffs on the original 1773 protest of British taxes.
Source: BBC
April 12, 2009
A roman statue has been returned to a National Trust site in West Sussex after undergoing conservation work.
The human-height herm know as Antique Youth, which had stood in the garden at Nymans, near Handcross, had deteriorated because of acidic rain.
The restored statue is now located at the end of a corridor inside the house. A copy has been placed in the garden.
A herm is a sculpture with a head, and perhaps a torso, on a squared section. The trust ra
Source: NYT
April 11, 2009
An American skipper in the hands of seafaring rogues. Some of the world’s busiest shipping lanes under attack. Tough men from a messy patch of Africa eluding and harassing the world’s greatest powers.
Sound familiar? Well, it’s not last week’s drama on the high seas we’re talking about, when Somali pirates attacked an American freighter in the Indian Ocean and took its captain hostage, then made off with him in a lifeboat. We’re talking about the Barbary Wars, about 200 years ago, w
Source: Archaeo News Stone Pages
April 8, 2009
A particular archaic blend of wine, beer, apple juice and honey. This is the composition of a sort of Grog, as Patrick McGregor says, an archaic drink that has been recently market in USA and named 'Midas Touch'. McGovern, professor at the Pennsylvania University, Philadelphia, studied the evolution of viticulture in the East and West, finding some earthenware along the Tigris river showing traces of tartaric acid - an element which is characteristic of the grape fermentation - honey, apple juic
Source: Archaeo News Stone Pages
April 8, 2009
Archaeological sites from the frozen steppes of Central Asia to the coast of Greenland are threatened by climate change. In the survey Sites in Peril for the Archaeological Institute of the American publication Archaeology, Andrew Curry says that "archaeologists can't stop global warming but they can make dealing with it a priority". One project is to save frozen tombs in the Altai Mountains of Kazakhstan and Russia, which in the past 60 years have yielded burials with well-preserved g
Source: Independent (UK)
April 12, 2009
Vincent Bajinya had already left one nightmare behind. He had seen first hand the horrors of the civil war in Rwanda as a doctor in the capital, Kigali, and was forced to flee when the genocidal madness that overtook the country in 1994 looked like it would catch up with him.
Twelve years later, however, after rebuilding his life in Britain and changing his name to Vincent Brown, out of nowhere his second nightmare began. As he parked his car outside the refugee charity where he wo
Source: Times (UK)
April 12, 2009
AN unusual history of the Nazis in France has trampled on one of the country’s most painful taboos by focusing on women who slept with the enemy during the occupation.
Flouting a long-running convention of silence on what he calls “horizontal collaboration”, Patrick Buisson, the author, describes the Nazi occupation as the “golden age” of the French brothel, chronicling a dramatic growth in prostitution to satisfy German demand.
The book, 1940-1945, Erotic Years, is t
Source: Times (UK)
April 12, 2009
Last week, on the day the world marked the 15th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, Britain officially became a safe haven for suspected mass murderers. This is the incomprehensible and inhumane message two senior judges have given the grieving survivors of the Rwandan genocide by freeing four genocide suspects Rwanda wanted to put on trial – effectively saying that alleged Rwandan mass murderers are welcome to live in Britain.
I know for sure that several Rwandan killers are hidi
Source: CBS News
April 11, 2009
This month marks the 41st anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Now, thanks to a quirk of fate, some of his most stirring words are getting a whole new hearing, as CBS News correspondent Michelle Miller reports.
The halls of the University of Dayton field house echoed with the voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. The November 1964 speech was powerful and passionate in its optimism.
"I must say that we have come a long, long wa
Source: Times (UK)
April 11, 2009
Times readers who fancy themselves as amateur codebreakers are invited to decipher a 350-year-old message sent by French spies conniving to strike a killer blow against England’s allies in Europe. Only one man, a 17th-century master cryptographer, has ever been able to crack the message but his method remains a mystery because he refused to say how he did it.
John Wallis, whose breaking of the French codes was pivotal in thwarting England’s longstanding enemy, shared his techniques
Source: AP
April 10, 2009
Federal customs agents say a pearl-handled AK-47 that belonged to Saddam Hussein is being sent back to Iraq.
The weapon had been in the hands of the U.S. Army. Immigration and Customs Enforcement says the automatic rifle is chrome-plated and has a photo of Hussein near the sight.
ICE agent Peter J. Smith calls the AK-47 "a priceless symbol of Iraqi history."
Source: AP
April 11, 2009
They've been described as "noble heroes" by sympathetic Somalis, denounced as criminals by critics. But the word most used to describe the men holding an American captain off the Horn of Africa is "pirate" — conjuring images of sword-wielding swashbucklers romanticized by Hollywood.
The 21st century reality, though, is a far cry from that. There are no treasure-laden islands or Blackbeards in this part of the world, no wooden schooners flying skull and crossbone
Source: Google Book Settlement
April 11, 2009
This is the settlement administration website for the Google Book Search Copyright Class Action Settlement. The purpose of this website is to inform you of a proposed Settlement of a class action lawsuit brought by authors and publishers, claiming that Google has violated their copyrights and those of other Rightsholders of Books and Inserts (click for definitions), by scanning their Books, creating an electronic database and displaying short excerpts without the permission of the copyright hold
