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: http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk
October 24, 2007
Thousands of protesters took to the streets of Budapest yesterday, the anniversary of Hungary's uprising against Soviet domination, and authorities were braced for a second night of violence after 19 people were injured in clashes between police and nationalist gangs the previous evening.
Yesterday's march, on a national holiday to recall the doomed 1956 revolt against Moscow, took place as council workers were still clearing up after a night that left parts of the city strewn with
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
October 25, 2007
Sometimes it can take a half-century to realize you’ve made a mistake. Homer Jacobson, a professor emeritus of chemistry at the City University of New York’s Brooklyn College, learned that lesson when he decided to Google himself and found that incorrect statements he made in 1955 had come back to haunt him.
To make amends, Mr. Jacobson retracted two statements from an article published in American Scientist magazine more than five decades ago. In a letter in the magazine’s November
Source: AP
October 26, 2007
s the Watergate scandal enveloped U.S. President Richard Nixon in the summer of 1974, he was buoyed by a secret message of moral support from Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, according to newly released U.S. State Department documents.
Brezhnev told Nixon he knew he would not" crack under the pressure."
The message, delivered to Nixon by Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, proposed"self-control and fortitude" in conducting foreign policy, Dobrynin wrote in a foreword to the documents.
At fir
Source: BBC
October 22, 2007
Plans for a former tourist attraction to be handed a permanent home on the banks of the Mersey have been given the go-ahead.
Wirral council has approved Merseytravel's proposal to house a German World War II U-boat at the Woodside Ferry Terminal.
The submarine was formerly an attraction at the Historic Warships Museum at Seacombe docks.
Plans include the provision of a visitor exhibition centre at the site.
Source: BBC
October 24, 2007
Two former Tory HQs are in the running to house an EU "super embassy" in London, but finding somewhere to fly the flag is proving to be a problem.
Smith Square and Victoria Street are among options being considered for a joint office for two sets of EU staff.
But if they are to fly the EU flag at Victoria Street, they would need to rent the whole block, at £3.2m a year.
Tory MEP Martin Callanan said it would mean £1.3m a year being "squandered"
Source: BBC
October 24, 2007
A fashion designer who was recently comparing the looks and styles of the main Argentine presidential candidates described Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner as a "very sexy, very strong and very attractive" woman.
He had not seen such a good-looking woman in Argentina politics since Eva Peron, who died 55 years ago, he said.
The designer's comments, however ungallant to the other two women also running for president, show how Cristina Kirchner, wife of the curren
Source: AP
October 22, 2007
Jerusalem's tiny Armenian community held banners and flags at a protest Monday to demand that Israel recognize the mass killings of ethnic Armenians in Turkey nearly a century ago as genocide.
About 100 people stood outside Israel's Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, singing songs in Armenian and holding banners. A group of teenage girls stood in school uniforms alongside an elderly woman holding a sign that read, "I am a survivor," in English and Hebrew, and others waved colo
Source: AP
October 20, 2007
Marion Oltman spent the last eight months of World War II in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, and tears still fill his eyes when he recalls those desperate days.
After working all day to fill craters left from Allied bombing, each prisoner got a boiled potato and a slice of bread with sawdust used as filler. Oltman was given the task of slicing the bread to feed 12 men.
"You don't know what it's like to look in the eyes of guys that are that hungry," the 89-year-o
Source: AP
October 18, 2007
SALT LAKE CITY: A vase that was a gift to Adolf Hitler was turned over to investigators, who are rounding up a collection of Nazi artifacts stolen from a Utah storage unit in 2005, authorities said Friday.
The vase was one of five items stolen in that burglary. Three other items were confiscated this week from an antiques dealer, who had been approached by a man who wanted to sell them.
The items apparently were taken from Hitler's "Eagle's Nest" mountain home
Source: AP
October 23, 2007
Romania's president apologized for the deportation of thousands of Roma to Nazi death camps during World War II, the first time a government official has done so publicly.
President Traian Basescu also awarded the Order for Faithful Service to three Roma Holocaust survivors at a ceremony Monday.
"The authorities were merciless. They took the Roma from their homes, from the towns and army and sent them far away, to obtain a pure nation," Basescu said.
Source: Times (UK)
October 22, 2007
The mystery thief of some of the rarest maps in the world has been unmasked after a worldwide investigation by Spanish police that led them to Britain, Australia, America and Argentina.
Spanish detectives flew this weekend to Buenos Aires after a man there admitted to stealing up to 19 valuable maps from a collection held at the Spanish National Library, some more than 500 years old.
The discovery in August that the cream of the Spanish cartographic collection had been
Source: Guardian
October 21, 2007
Thousands of eyewitness accounts recounting the bloodshed and violence of the Irish Rebellion of 1641 are to be made public for the first time.
More than 3,000 testimonies, which have been in storage at Trinity College, Dublin, for almost 300 years, are to be transcribed and digitised in a project to be launched on Tuesday that aims to shed light on one of the darkest moments in Ireland's past.
The Catholic uprising remains one of the bitterest controversies in Irish hi
Source: http://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland
October 20, 2007
The North's first Minister, Dr Ian Paisley has said he will hold talks with the Taoiseach about developing a shared memorial for Irish people from North and the Republic who died in both world wars.
Dr Paisley said the time was right to remember those who gave their lives to save democracy.
He said Irish men and women contributed just as much as those from the UK.
He also added that he will gladly come south of the border more often if organisations are pre
Source: WaPo
October 24, 2007
About one-sixth of the books, monographs and bound periodicals at the Library of Congress weren't where they were supposed to be because of flaws in the systems for shelving and retrieving materials, according to a survey to be made public at a congressional hearing today.
Officials at the library say they believe most of the missing materials are misplaced, not stolen or lost.
Investigators for the congressional library have told lawmakers on a House oversight committe
Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH)
October 23, 2007
The National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) has announced it will open for the first time all of the individual Official Military Personnel Files (OMPFs) of Army, Army Air Corps, Army Air Forces, Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard military personnel who served and were discharged, retired or died while in the service, prior to 1946.
Collectively, these files comprise more than six million records. This is the second step in the progressive opening of the entire paper and microfiche
Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH)
October 23, 2007
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the Genealogical Society of Utah (GSU) have announced a five-year partnership agreement to digitize case files of approved pension applications of widows of Civil War Union soldiers from NARA’s holdings.
The partnership will begin with a pilot project to digitize, index, and make available the first 3,150 of the pension files. Upon successful completion of the pilot, GSU, doing business as
Source: NYT
October 22, 2007
Several major research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google and Microsoft to scan their books into computer databases, saying they are put off by restrictions these companies want to place on the new digital collections.
The research libraries, including a large consortium in the Boston area, are instead signing on with the Open Content Alliance, a nonprofit effort aimed at making their materials broadly available.
Libraries that agree to work with Google must agr
Source: NYT
October 23, 2007
He was code-named “Carat,” and, for four years during World War II and after, he played the Great Game in the Middle East as an American spy. He died when his Army transport crashed near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1947 in what a press report called “one of Africa’s loneliest spots.”
In Lebanon, where he had been posted at the embassy, he worked undercover as a State Department cultural attaché. At home, in Massachusetts, he had an infant daughter who was six weeks old and whom he nev
Source: Jerusalem Post
October 23, 2007
Unlike Rachel Ya'akov, the sister of slain prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, President Shimon Peres carefully refrained from allowing the name of assassin Yigal Amir to pass his lips while speaking on Tuesday night at the state ceremony at Beit Hanassi marking the 12th anniversary of Rabin's murder.
Instead he referred to him as "the son of iniquity," saying: "He shot Yitzhak in the back and killed him. He shot the nation in the heart and traumatized it."
Source: Times (UK)
October 24, 2007
The five periods in the history of Earth that had the highest levels of extinction were all linked to climate change, fossil evidence shows.
The findings support fears that wild-life will be driven to extinction in the next few centuries in numbers to rival the death of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
Higher temperatures found to be associated with four of the mass extinctions were at about the same level that is forecast by climate change scientists for the next 10
