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)
July 14, 2008
A British pensioner claims to have produced to world's biggest family tree after tracing nearly 10,000 relatives and ancestors including Alfred the Great and William the Conqueror.
Roy Blackmore, 76, was orphaned as a child and became determined to find out more about the family he never knew.
He has spent around £20,000 and five hours a day for the past 28 years scouring archives, cemetery records and census registers to trace his roots back 1,500 years.
G
Source: LAT
July 13, 2008
Justices rely more than ever on the idea of constitutional 'original intent' in ruling on cases this year -- yet their decisions are still split.
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In 1985, President Reagan's attorney general, Edwin Meese III, criticized the Supreme Court's decisions and called on the justices to decide cases based on the "original intent" of the Constitution. The justices were wrong to rely on contemporary views of liberty and equality, Meese said; instead, they should rel
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 13, 2008
Maps showing the likely locations of thousands of unexploded bombs dropped during World War Two have been created for the first time.
Up to one in ten bombs dropped by the German Luftwaffe failed to detonate leaving a deadly legacy which still lies under the nation's streets and fields.
The new map will be used by builders to tell them the risks from unexploded bombs where they are working. Members of the public will also be able to access the map, which identifies 21,0
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 14, 2008
With its soaring stone pyramids and geometric temples, Teotihuacan was once the biggest city in the Americas and possibly the world.
However, experts have never been able to say with certainty who built it and why it was suddenly abandoned.
An international team of experts believes the answer may lie under the Pyramid of the Sun, the centre point of the vast ruined city 25 miles outside Mexico City.
Source: Newsweek
July 21, 2008
John McCain might not recognize Nguyen van Sy, but they used to be neighbors. Back in the 1960s, Sy was left behind as caretaker at the North Vietnamese Ministry of Culture's Film Institute after its staff was evacuated to the countryside to escape the U.S. bombing. The Hanoi regime converted part of the abandoned facility into a POW camp—"the Plantation," inmates called it—and the 31-year-old Navy pilot was taken there a few weeks after he was shot down over Hanoi in October 1967. Som
Source: http://www.scoop.co.nz
July 14, 2008
On Wednesday, just as the Senate passed sweeping new legislation to modernize a 30 year old federal surveillance law, President Bush signaled that he would swiftly veto a bill approved by the House earlier in the day that would overhaul the Presidential and Federal Records Act to ensure emails and other government documents are preserved in the age of the Internet.
The measure was passed by a vote of 286-137, more than a year after several Senate and House investigations discovered
Source: AP
July 13, 2008
About 5,400 residents were evacuated in Osaka in western Japan and flights at nearby airports were rerouted Sunday as army experts disposed of a large unexploded bomb believed to have been dropped by the U.S. military during World War II, authorities said.
An explosives disposal unit from Japan's Ground Self-Defense Force safely defused the rusty one-ton bomb in the crowded residential area during a 50-minute operation, local army spokesman Shoji Matsumoto said.
Nearby
Source: AP
July 13, 2008
An Israeli lifeguard taking his regular morning swim off the Mediterranean coast in southern Israel discovered a 2,500-year-old marble talisman to ward off the evil eye, the Israel Antiquities Authority said Sunday.
The lifeguard turned over the ancient disc that once adorned the bow of an ancient warship or cargo ship to keep evil away, the Israeli archaeology body said.
Experts say the relic, discovered off the coast Palmahim beach where the ancient Yavne-Yam port cit
Source: NYT
July 13, 2008
It is a nice bit of historic symmetry for the long-awaited opening of the new Capitol Visitor Center.
The $621 million underground center will be opened to the public on Dec. 2, the 145th anniversary of the placement of the final sections of the Statue of Freedom atop the inspiring Capitol dome in 1863, during the Civil War.
“The connection between the Capitol building and the new Capitol Visitor Center is natural and powerful,” said Stephen T. Ayers, the acting archite
Source: AP
July 10, 2008
Ukraine plans to open a formal investigation into a
Soviet-era famine that killed millions of people to see if it can prove
the famine was an act of genocide.
The 1932-33 famine was engineered by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to force
peasants to give up their private plots of land and join collective farms.
Ukraine, which has rich farmland, suffered the most of all Soviet regions
and President Viktor Yushchenko has led efforts to win international
recognition of the tragedy as
Source: Deutsche Welle
July 11, 2008
More than 30,000 people gathered on Friday, July 11, to remember the 1995 Srebrenica massacre and attend a funeral for 308 recently identified victims.
The massacre of at least 8,000 Muslim men and boys took place while the entire enclave was under the protection of the United Nations as a "UN safe zone" during the 1992-1995 Balkans conflict.
Soon after troops led by Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic captured Srebrenica, Dutch UN troops left the area, leaving
Source: Juan Cole at his blog Informed Comment
July 13, 2008
Greg Mitchell points out that the media continue to give little coverage to non-combat-related deaths among American troops in Iraq. Actually, they seldom mention the number of those wounded in combat, much less putting them and their stories on the screen. (It happens. It is rare.)Even as much press as the elect
Source: Guardian
July 13, 2008
Ancient bones from the city of Jericho are to be used by British scientists to develop treatments for tuberculosis. The project is part of a new scientific discipline in which archaeologists and medical researchers are cooperating to gain insights into modern ailments.
Other diseases being tackled this way include syphilis, malaria, arthritis and influenza. Ancient history holds vital clues in seeking out treatments for modern diseases, according to these real-life counterparts of T
Source: Independent (UK)
July 12, 2008
Unesco, the world cultural body, has threatened to humiliate France by placing the Lascaux caves – known as the "Sistine Chapel of prehistory" – on its list of endangered sites of universal importance.
The Unesco world heritage committee, meeting this week in Quebec, has given the French government six months to report on the success of its efforts to save the Lascaux cave paintings in Dordogne from an ugly, and potentially destructive, invasion of grey and black fungi.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 12, 2008
A mild-mannered Chinese professor is being hailed as the world's greatest palaeontologist for his part in the discovery of 30 new species of dinosaurs over the past 15 years.
Prof Xu inspects a feathered, four-winged dinosaur fossil
Now China hopes Xu Xing's work will help attract a new kind of tourist to China - one for whom a fossilised raptor holds more appeal than the country's millennia of history and culture.
He specialises in the winged and feathered dinos
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 13, 2008
A ghostly figure, supposedly the spirit of a dead soldier from a key battle in the English Civil War, has been captured on film by a group of paranormal enthusiasts.
The Northampton Paranormal Group caught the figure on camera during a visit to the site of the Battle of Naseby, a field between the villages of Clipston and Naseby in Northamptonshire, last month.
The visit coincided with the 363rd Anniversary of the Battle of Naseby. Members said they heard clunking noise
Source: AP
July 12, 2008
For more than six decades, the family of U.S. Army 1st Lt. Archibald Kelly had no way of being certain he was killed when his bomber smashed into a rocky cliff in Croatia in World War II.
They didn't know his bones lay under a makeshift cairn cobbled together by villagers. Without a body or a proper burial they could never completely convince themselves he was dead.
"We didn't have anything confirmed," the navigator's brother, Samuel Kelly, 85, recalled. "
Source: NYT
July 11, 2008
Generations of recovering alcoholics, soldiers, weary parents, exploited workers and just about anybody feeling beaten down by life have found solace in a short prayer that begins, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.”
Now the Serenity Prayer is about to endure a controversy over its authorship that is likely to be anything but serene.
For more than 70 years, the composer of the prayer was thought to be the Protestant theologian Reinhold Nieb
Source: NYT
July 11, 2008
Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes, according to a new book on counterterrorism efforts since 2001.
The book says that the International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, t
Source: NYT
July 11, 2008
In the most detailed examination yet of Senator John McCain’s eligibility to be president, a law professor at the University of Arizona has concluded that neither Mr. McCain’s birth in 1936 in the Panama Canal Zone nor the fact that his parents were American citizens is enough to satisfy the constitutional requirement that the president must be a “natural-born citizen.”
The analysis, by Prof. Gabriel J. Chin, focused on a 1937 law that has been largely overlooked in the debate over
