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: Telegraph (UK)
February 26, 2009
Chancellor Angela Merkel is being pressed by the German Federation of Expellees to decide on a controversial museum that will depict refugees' post-War experiences, despite a potential backlash from Warsaw.
The focus of Poland's ire is the federation's president and a member of Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, Erika Steinbach, who it perceives as the strident voice of an organisation associated with Nazism and the German occupation "and one who will push an anti-Polish agen
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 27, 2009
A mock-up edition of the paper, named Lecher, also included photographs of students superimposed on pornographic images.
One story is said to talk of two students sexually abusing and killing babies while another includes a spoof image of a former editor of the paper dressed in a Ku Klux Klan costume making racially loaded remarks.
A spoof story about a busker whose bagpipe music had annoyed Oxford residents joked that the instrument had been used as a means of torture
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 27, 2009
The ground-breaking model, which recognises and responds to human emotions, uses 31 motors and a patented flesh-like material called Frubber to make lifelike facial expressions.
Scientists hope it will defy the perception that human-like robots are "creepy" and could be the first step to making robots emotionally sensitive, preventing a "Matrix"-style war between man and machine.
Einstein, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist noted for his theory of rel
Source: International Herald Tribune
February 27, 2009
International judges handed down long prison sentences to five senior political, military and police officials in the government of the former Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic for their roles in the 1999 war in Kosovo. But the court acquitted Milan Milutinovic, the wartime Serbian president, who had the highest rank of the men on trial but who was effectively a figurehead.
The trial held special significance as the closest that an international criminal court was likely to come
Source: BBC
February 27, 2009
Ingrid Betancourt, a former prisoner of Farc rebels in Colombia, was selfish and domineering in captivity, three fellow hostages say in a new book.
In their memoir, the three US military contractors describe their five-year ordeal in the jungles of Colombia.
One of them says that Ms Betancourt was even worse than the Farc guards.
Ms Betancourt, the French-Colombian ex-politician, received a hero's welcome upon her rescue last year. She has not commented
Source: AP
February 26, 2009
PARIS – Geologists, biologists and other scientists convened Thursday in Paris to discuss how to stop the spread of fungus stains — aggravated by global warming — that threaten France's prehistoric Lascaux cave drawings.
Black stains have spread across the cave's prehistoric murals of bulls, felines and other images, and scientists have been hard-pressed to halt the fungal creep.
Marc Gaulthier, who heads the Lascaux Caves International Scientific Committee, said the ch
Source: NYT
February 26, 2009
Researchers into the ancient human past are used to wandering the world in search of artifacts. But scientists at the University of Colorado said Wednesday that a major cache of Stone Age tools, believed to be 13,000 years old, had been found in a suburban backyard just six blocks from the campus in Boulder.
“I’m used to going hell and gone across the landscape to look,” said Douglas Bamforth, a professor of anthropology who analyzed the cache. “This time I walked.”
The
Source: Newsweek
March 2, 2009
Tuesday, Feb. 24, is the 206th anniversary of Marbury v. Madison, the most important decision the Supreme Court—and perhaps any court—has ever issued. The late chief justice William Rehnquist hailed it as "the most significant single contribution the United States has made to the art of government"; nations around the world look to Marbury as they work to create institutions that will protect the rule of law. As the United States thinks anew about its commitment to these rules, it woul
Source: BBC News
February 26, 2009
The earliest footprints showing evidence of modern human foot anatomy and gait have been unearthed in Kenya.
The 1.5-million-year-old footprints display signs of a pronounced arch and short, aligned toes, in contrast to older footprints.
The size and spacing of the Kenyan markings - attributed to Homo erectus - reflect the height, weight, and walking style of modern humans.
The findings have been published in the journal Science.
Source: USA Today
February 25, 2009
President Obama, who will decide the fate of struggling Detroit automakers, may need to brush up on his industry history.
In promising support in his speech to Congress Tuesday, he said, "I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it."
Actually, history — and the U.S. Library of Congress — credits Germany.
"It's a fact that Daimler invented the car," says Han Tjan, U.S. spokesman for the German automaker. &qu
Source: Time Magazine
February 24, 2009
Viewers at home may wonder why, when the camera pans to the audience, most of the members of Congress, cabinet, Supreme Court and Joint Chiefs have their heads down. The answer is simple: they're reading along in prettily bound commemorative copies of Obama's speech. Why, you may ask, would the the audience be given copies of the speech beforehand in this manner? After all, it potentially breeds a colder crowd (though Obama clearly isn't suffering from this problem tonight) and doesn't make for
Source: NYT blog: The Caucus
February 25, 2009
Senator Robert C. Byrd, whose career in the Senate has spanned five decades, advised President Obama this week to keep in check the powers of members of the White House staff to prevent an erosion of the “Constitutional system of checks and balances.”
In a letter, Mr. Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat, drew examples from the Republican administrations of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush to drive home his concerns.
He suggested that the president’s creation of offices of
Source: Guardian (UK)
February 24, 2009
The women of the world have even more reason to be proud of what they have accomplished during the entire month of March as the country celebrates National Women’s History Month.
Thanks to women in New York City factories who held a protest over their working conditions in 1857, there is an entire month dedicated to women everywhere. Although it started out as just a day, National Women’s History Month was lengthened to a week and now it is expanded into an entire month.
Source: AP
February 23, 2009
Long overlooked in favor of hot spots like Orlando and Miami, Pensacola hopes a yearlong 450th birthday bash will lure visitors to this city on the western edge of Florida's Panhandle.
Festivals, parades, battle reenactments, art exhibits and other events will commemorate Spanish explorer Don Tristan de Luna's 1559 arrival at Pensacola Bay.
King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia of Spain set the tone with a royal visit Feb. 19, touring the city of 60,000 and visiting Pensacola Nava
Source: Boston Globe
February 25, 2009
Andrew Jackson, Martin Luther King Jr., and Franklin D. Roosevelt will have to wait for a place in the state's 10th-grade MCAS exams, after the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education decided yesterday to delay the history test's premiere as a high school graduation requirement.
The board voted 8 to 2 to put off the exam for at least two years because of concerns that state budget cuts would leave the agency without enough money to administer the test. They also questioned
Source: Reuters
February 26, 2009
Former Serbian president Milan Milutinovic was acquitted Thursday by the Hague tribunal of war crimes against Kosovo Albanians in 1999, but his five co-accused were given jail terms of between 15 and 22 years.
Milutinovic, 66, an ally and successor of late Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, and five co-accused went on trial in July 2006 charged with the deportation of 800,000 civilians from Kosovo and the murders of hundreds by Serb forces in 1999.
The verdict is th
Source: IHT
February 26, 2009
A founding member of a left-wing terrorist group turned neo-Nazi was convicted Wednesday in Munich of Holocaust denial and sentenced to six years in prison after a judge accused him of using the courtroom to spread his message of hate.
Horst Mahler — a founder of the Red Army Faction in 1970 — was convicted of incitement for posting videos denying the Holocaust on the Internet and distributing CDs promoting anti-Jewish hatred and violence. Denial of the Nazi Holocaust is a crime in
Source: BBC
February 26, 2009
Three suspects, held over the assassination of Lebanon's former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, have been freed.
The three are all civilians, two of them Lebanese and one Syrian. Four Lebanese generals remain in custody.
The three had been held on suspicion of withholding information and misleading the assassination inquiry.
Their release comes before the start on Sunday of a UN special tribunal in the Hague which is due to try suspects in the case.
Source: BBC
February 26, 2009
Kuwait's foreign minister has flown to Iraq for the highest-level visit since Iraq's armed forces invaded its southern neighbour in 1990.
Sheikh Muhammad al-Sabah, who is also Kuwait's deputy prime minister, met Iraq's PM and other top officials.
They discussed joint oilfields, maritime borders and war reparations, exactly 19 years after Iraqi forces were expelled from Kuwait.
Iraqi officials said it was "illogical" to continue paying Kuwait co
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 26, 2009
A defector from Germany's hard-core neo-Nazi party the NPD has painted a chilling picture of the rise of new Hitler worshippers and their plans to build the "Fourth Reich".
Uwe Luthardt was a senior member of the NPD but quit to inform on the party which Germany tried unsuccessfully to ban several years ago.
He told of weapons stores and how members greet each other with "Heil Hitler" salutes, sing the banned songs of the Third Reich and relish the
