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
April 7, 2009
Salacious details of how Anne Boleyn was said to have cheated on Henry VIII with her own brother are contained in documents which have been put on the internet for the first time.
An official account of her trial in 1536, including graphic claims of incest, features in an online exhibition to mark the 500th anniversary of the Tudor monarch's accession to the throne.
Anne's relationship with Henry set the course of British history, triggering England's split with Rome a
Source: BBC
April 7, 2009
It was a small brass trinket box that held safe its secret link to the Titanic across the years and thousands of miles.
It was a gift from JJ Brown to his wife, better known as the Unsinkable Molly Brown, after she had survived the Titanic disaster and lived to make enough of a name for herself to inspire a Broadway musical.
The trinket box features in a new exhibition at Belfast's Linenhall Library as the 100th anniversary of the Titanic's launch looms.
Source: AP
April 7, 2009
A Peruvian court gave former President Alberto Fujimori 25 years in prison for his role in death squad activities during his 10-year rule in the 1990s.
Fujimori is the first democratically elected former president to be tried for rights violations in his own country. His lawyers have said he would appeal the verdict.
In its first bloody raid, the military death squad Fujimori was convicted of authorizing killed 15 people — including an 8-year-old — with silencer-equippe
Source: CNN
April 7, 2009
Critics of Obama's proposed $3.5 trillion federal budget say he's poised to jeopardize the economic gains unleashed by President Reagan.
They say he will make the same mistakes that President Lyndon B. Johnson did when he committed massive amounts of federal money to create a slew of anti-poverty programs dubbed "The Great Society."
"The Great Society created a lot of programs and wasted a lot of money," said Kenneth Khachigian, a former Reagan spee
Source: WaPo
April 7, 2009
You cannot plant a flag on the North Pole.
It is not Antarctica. It is not a body of land, but a mathematical spot, a maze of shifting ice floes that would swiftly carry any marker away from true north. When explorers reach the Pole, they must rely on navigational instruments and witnesses to prove their location.
One hundred years ago yesterday, Robert Peary and Matthew Henson said they had become the first to reach the North Pole. Yesterday morning at Arlington Nation
Source: Bloomberg
April 7, 2009
President Barack Obama is winning higher marks from Americans than the last three presidents early in their terms as he takes on a global recession, two wars and domestic fights over government spending, health care and taxes.
Obama’s approval rating climbed to a high of 66 percent in an April 1-5 New York Times/CBS News poll released today. The poll follows recent surveys by the Gallup Poll, Quinnipiac University and the Pew Research Center all showing that about six out of 10 Amer
Source: Reuters
April 7, 2009
Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison on Tuesday, the first time a democratically elected Latin American president was found guilty in his own country of human rights crimes.
A three-judge panel convicted him of ordering a military death squad to carry out two massacres that killed 25 people during his 1990-2000 rule, when he was battling guerrillas. Nearly 70,000 people died in two decades of conflict in the Andean country.
Source: WaPo
April 7, 2009
Medical officers who oversaw interrogations of terrorism suspects in CIA secret prisons committed gross violations of medical ethics and in some cases essentially participated in torture, the International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a confidential report that labeled the CIA program "inhuman."
Health personnel offered supervision and even assistance as suspected al-Qaeda operatives were beaten, deprived of food, exposed to temperature extremes and subjected to
Source: Times (UK)
April 6, 2009
Scientists blame Italy's tragic history of earth tremors on the fact that the country lies directly over the Eurasian and African faultlines, where the borders of two tectonic plates move together and apart.
This also accounts for Italy's relatively high number of active volcanoes - Etna, the largest active volcano in Europe, Vulcano, Stromboli, and Vesuvius, the only active volcano on the mainland of Europe.
1857 Several towns destroyed and 12,000 people killed in the
Source: BBC
April 7, 2009
Raul Castro has held talks with members of Congress in his first face-to-face meeting with US politicians since he became president last year.
State television showed Mr Castro talking to members of the delegation, which is in Havana to explore ways of improving US-Cuban relations.
Barack Obama is expected to ease some of the travel and economic restrictions imposed on Cuba nearly 50 years ago.
Barbara Lee, the leader of the seven-strong group of Democrats
Source: BBC
April 7, 2009
Rwandan President Paul Kagame has accused the international community of cowardice during a speech marking the 15th anniversary of Rwanda's genocide.
He told a rally of 20,000 people in the capital, Kigali, UN troops abandoned their posts without firing a shot.
He led commemorations at Nyanza, where more than 5,000 people were slaughtered after peacekeepers pulled out.
President Kagame said: "We are not like those who abandoned people they had come to
Source: NYT
April 1, 2009
AT a time when life in America is beginning to resemble a roller-coaster ride on the way down and everyone is trying to find ways to save money, it may be instructive — both in terms of offering helpful hints and putting things in perspective — to look at how people ran their households during the Great Depression.
Back then there was little money for food, let alone new curtains, but people found ways to cope. Backyard gardens were cultivated not because of a sudden itch to eat loc
Source: Azzaman
April 7, 2009
US President Barack Obama called on Turkey to address the killings of Armenians in eastern Anatolia nearly a century ago but gave clear signs that he would stay out of the debate, saying it is up to Turkey and Armenia to deal with history.
"History is often tragic. But if unresolved, it can be a heavy weight. Each country must work through its past," Obama said in an address to the Turkish Parliament, noting that although there are strong views on the issue, Turkey should
Source: Stephen D. Crocker in the NYT. Mr. Crocker wrote the first RFC.
April 7, 2009
TODAY is an important date in the history of the Internet: the 40th anniversary of what is known as the Request for Comments. Outside the technical community, not many people know about the R.F.C.’s, but these humble documents shape the Internet’s inner workings and have played a significant role in its success....
The early R.F.C.’s ranged from grand visions to mundane details, although the latter quickly became the most common. Less important than the content of those first docume
Source: Foxnews
April 6, 2009
President Obama on Monday declined to repeat his claim that the deaths of up to 1.5 million Armenians during World War I was a "genocide," stepping back from his campaign pledge to Armenian Americans that the "widely documented fact" would be fully commemorated during his presidency.
During a joint news conference alongside Turkish President Abdullah Gul, Obama said he did not want to "focus on my views" or in any way interfere with delicate negotiation
Source: Independent (UK)
April 7, 2009
The city struggling to come to terms with the massive destruction of its ancient fabric was founded in 1254 by order of Corrado IV, the son of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. The importance to the city of the emperor's patronage is clear: L'Aquila means "The Eagle", a reference to the emperor's coat of arms.
The emperor had accepted the petitions of local people who wanted a city to protect them from the depredation of local barons, and was formed by bringing together
Source: Times (UK)
April 7, 2009
Confessions extracted under torture in the Khmer Rouge's brutal prisons were rarely true, the regime's prisons chief admitted today.
Kaing Guek Eav, or 'Duch' the director of the Khmer Rouge's most infamous prison S-21, told a Cambodia war crimes tribunal he took part in torture sessions and ordered his subordinates to beat prisoners who were to be 'smashed' to death with an iron bar.
Duch was renowned for reading every confession brought to him from the interrogation
Source: Salon
April 6, 2009
Dave Cullen's "Columbine" is a chilling page-turner, a striking accomplishment given that Cullen's likely readers almost certainly know how the tragic story ends. Twelve students and one beloved teacher died at the suburban Denver high school on April 20, 1999, the worst school shooting rampage until two years ago, when Cho Seung-Hui slaughtered 32 classmates at Virginia Tech....
In "Columbine," Cullen is surprisingly but appropriately modest (appropriately, beca
Source: AP
April 6, 2009
The former chief of the Khmer Rouge's most notorious prison said his group would not have risen to power in the 1970s if it weren't for the policies of former U.S. President Richard Nixon and his top diplomat, Henry Kissinger.
Kaing Guek Eav (pronounced Gang Geck EE-UU), better known as Duch, made the comments Monday before Cambodia's genocide tribunal during testimony charting his personal journey to revolution.
He also said that he realized early on that the Khmer Rou
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 6, 2009
Rwanda has chosen a symbolic location to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the genocide against the Tutsi minority and highlight "the bankruptcy of humanity" during the 1994 massacres.
Tuesday's national ceremony will take place in Nyanza, a hill in Kigali where thousands of people were slaughtered on April 11 after the Belgian UN contingent that had been protecting them pulled out.
Belgium had decided to pull its troops out after 10 commandos from the UN fo
