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
February 14, 2009
Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese have taken to the streets in Beirut for the fourth anniversary of the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
People waved red and white Lebanese flags and listened to speeches from political leaders amid tight security.
They are also showing support for a UN tribunal into the killing which starts in early March, correspondents say.
Syria has long been suspected of involvement in the massive truck bomb that
Source: BBC
February 16, 2009
Twenty years on from the Soviet Union's pull-out from Afghanistan, the BBC's Rayhan Demytrie looks at the role soldiers from the Central Asian nations played in the conflict.
In the almost 10 years that Soviet forces battled Afghanistan's Mujahideen, hundreds of thousands of soldiers from across the USSR took part in the conflict.
The troops included soldiers recruited from Afghanistan's mainly Muslim northern neighbours, who shared culture with their Afghan cousins.
Source: BBC
February 16, 2009
One of pop superstar Michael Jackson's brothers, Marlon, is involved in a controversial plan to develop a $3.4bn (£2.4bn) slavery memorial and luxury resort in Badagry, Nigeria.
The historic slave port is to be transformed through the bizarre combination of a slave history theme park and a museum dedicated to double Grammy-winning pop-soul group the Jackson Five.
The idea is that the band will help attract African-American tourists keen to trace their roots back to Ni
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 16, 2009
Pope John Paul II was the subject of two assassination plots in his native Poland a senior member of the Polish Catholic Church has claimed.
Zdzislaw Krol, chancellor of Warsaw Metropolitan Curia, said the late pontiff faced plots against his life during his 1983 and 1987 pilgrimages to Poland.
Before the start of the 1987 pilgrimage the Church received information from a woman of a plan to kill the pope while his was in the town of Czestochowa, a focal point of Polish
Source: CNN
February 16, 2009
France bears responsibility for deporting Jews to their deaths in concentration camps during World War II, the country's highest court ruled Monday.
But, the Council of State said, "measures taken since the end of the Second World War have compensated for the damage."
The trial of Maurice Papon, a civil servant in the collaborationist Vichy government, for deporting Jews, forced the country to confront its role in the Holocaust.
Papon was convicte
Source: The Times of India
February 16, 2009
Just days after Americans honoured the 200th anniversary of his birth, 65 historians ranked Abraham Lincoln as the best US president.
Former President George Bush, who left office last month, was ranked 36th out of the 42 men who had been chief executive by the end of 2008, according to a survey conducted by the cable channel C-SPAN.
Bush scored lowest in international relations, where he was ranked 41st, and in economic management, where he was ranked 40th. His highe
Source: AP
February 12, 2009
Anne Frank called them the Helpers. They provided food, books and good cheer while she and her family hid for two years from the Nazis in a tiny attic apartment.
On Sunday, the last surviving helper, Miep Gies, celebrates her 100th birthday, saying she has won more accolades for helping the Frank family than she deserved — as if, she says, she tried to save all the Jews of occupied Holland.
"This is very unfair. So many others have done the same or even far more da
Source: Times (UK)
February 15, 2009
Charles Darwin’s moral philosophy may have been inspired by the writings of Buddhist monks, according to one of the world’s leading experts on the evolution of emotions.
Research by Paul Ekman, a psychologist whose work has shown how the facial expressions that signal emotion are universal across all cultures, has identified striking similarities between Darwin’s attitude to compassion and morality and that of Tibetan Buddhism.
Darwin, who was born 200 years ago last
Source: Guardian (UK)
February 16, 2009
Not all treasure thieves tiptoe through the shells of Iraqi museums or churn up the deserts of Peru in their hunt for valuable antiquities. Nearer to home "nighthawkers" are using metal detectors and online auctions to strip rural Britain of its archaeological riches, and their illegal activities are proving every bit as destructive.
English Heritage has been so concerned about the extent of the depredation that it commissioned a study, which revealed that what was once an
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 15, 2009
Highly decorated by both the British and French governments for his work during World War II, Brocard was one of some 100 agents in the Agir (Action) network set up in 1941 by French Colonel Michel Hollard.
Hollard became known as "the man who saved London" for detecting and identifying some 100 launching ramps for V1's in northern France, enabling them to be destroyed by allied bombers.
Source: Sky News
February 16, 2009
A child survivor of the Khmer Rouge's largest torture centre has emerged from obscurity to tell his story on the eve of a crimes against humanity trial in Cambodia.
Norng Chan Phal, now a 39-year-old father of two, said he was eight when the Vietnamese stormed into Phnom Penh to end the Khmer Rouge reign of terror.
He was held at the notorious S-21 prison where some 16,000 men, women and children were brutally tortured and executed.
Phal came forward last w
Source: C-SPAN
February 14, 2009
Timed for Presidents Day 2009, C-SPAN today releases the results of its second Historians Survey of Presidential Leadership, in which a cross-section of 65 presidential historians ranked the 42 former occupants of the White House on ten attributes of leadership.
Source: NYT
February 15, 2009
NIKOLAI KONDRATIEFF was not exactly a faceless bureaucrat in post-revolutionary Russia. He had held an important economic post in the last, short-lived government of Alexander Kerensky before the Bolsheviks took charge; then he founded an influential research organization, the Institute of Conjecture, and became an important theorist of the New Economic Policy under Lenin.
But he would long ago have been consigned to the dustbin of history had it not been for his quirky academic pas
Source: Leicster Mercury
February 13, 2009
For years it gathered dust – maybe in an attic or a shed somewhere, possibly in a box on top of somebody's wardrobe.
Somehow, a First World War pistol was scooped up in a pile of clothes and handed into a charity shop.
Now, the gun – a prized possession of Captain Hugh Winfield Sayres, who died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme – is finding a new home in a museum.
The discovery of the pistol – a Wilkinson Webley revolver – was made when staff at t
Source: Huddersfield Daily Examiner
February 14, 2009
HISTORIAN John Reid is asking Examiner readers to help him track down RAF prisoners of war who produced a secret newspaper.
The archivist is looking for details of 10 Huddersfield men who were in the German prisoner camp Stalag Luft VI during the Second World War.
Along with 290 other Yorkshire POWs, they produced a newspaper in 1944 – a year before their prison was liberated.
After the war, 300 copies of the paper were made for the Yorkshire prisoners.
Source: IHT
February 15, 2009
The police clashed with stone-throwing demonstrators across the predominantly Kurdish southeast of Turkey on Sunday during protests marking the 10th anniversary of a separatist leader's capture.
At least eight protesters and 17 police officers were hurt in the protests, which the authorities had prohibited.
Fighting also broke out in Istanbul, where young boys, some wearing face masks, threw rocks at heavily armed officers during another protest against the continued im
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 15, 2009
Cambodia is to relive the horrors of the Khmer Rouge's S-21 torture prison when its jailer goes on trial.
The old prison is a museum now, lined with the haunting black and white portraits of its inmates. Each one of them was grotesquely tortured with the tools still on display until they confessed to crimes they never committed. Many victims implicated everyone they ever met in fantastical conspiracies in their desperation to satisfy the inquisitors. John Dawson Dewhirst, the only
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 15, 2009
The first member of the Khmer Rouge to stand trial for crimes against humanity is to appear in the dock this week.
But Cambodia's 30-year wait for justice is far from over.
The first defendant, on Tuesday, is Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Comrade Duch, 66, a quietly spoken maths teacher turned chief executioner of the ultra-Maoist regime that ruled Cambodia between 1975-79.
Duch, pronounced "Doik", was the commandant of the S-21 prison, where
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 15, 2009
Miep Gies, who looked after Anne Frank and her family as they hid from the Nazis in Amsterdam during World War Two, has turned 100 years old.
She celebrated her milestone quietly in Friesland with her friends and family.
Mrs Gies talked about the day Nazis broke into the Franks' hiding place in Amsterdam, tipped off by a still unknown collaborator, and marched the Franks out of the building along the Princengracht and off to a miserable, lonely death in the Nazi termi
Source: Foxnews
February 13, 2009
German authorities have received original documents indicating the world's most-wanted Nazi fugitive died in Cairo in 1992, and are investigating their validity, an official said Friday.
The papers — personal musings, official documents and other items that allegedly belonged to SS doctor Aribert Heim — were turned over to the Baden Wuerttemberg state police office that has led the manhunt for the former Nazi for decades, spokesman Horst Haug said.
He told The Associate
