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: AP
September 10, 2010
Fidel Castro said Friday his comments about the Cuban economic model no longer working were misinterpreted by a visiting American journalist — taking back an admission that caused a stir around the globe.
The 84-year-old ex-president said he was not misquoted but meant "the opposite" of what he was reported as having said by The Atlantic magazine reporter Jeffrey Goldberg.
Since July 2006, when serious intestinal illness nearly killed Fidel Castro and forced h
Source: AP
September 10, 2010
Juan Mari Bras, an elder statesman of Puerto Rico's independence movement who gave up U.S. citizenship in an act that inspired hundreds of other activists, died Friday. He was 82.
Mari Bras died at his home in the San Juan suburb of Rio Piedras, said Elaine Mulet Hocking, a spokeswoman for his Hostosiano independence movement. He had lung cancer and had recently taken a fall, she said.
A writer and law professor, Mari Bras was deeply involved in the independence cause f
Source: AP
September 10, 2010
The lawyer for Kosovo's former Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj says the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal rejected his provisional release during his retrial on murder and torture charges.
No date has been set for the retrial ordered by the tribunal after Haradinaj, a former rebel commander, was cleared of charges in 2008. The tribunal said the initial proceedings had been marred by witness intimidation.
Haradinaj is accused of killing and torturing prisoners during the 1998
Source: CNN
September 10, 2010
India plans to hold a full count of its citizens and their castes, the country's first since 1931.
Prime minister Manmohan Singh's Cabinet on Thursday approved proposals to hold the count separately next year after the ongoing general census is over, a government statement said.
The move largely aims to enumerate low-caste groups called Other Backward Classes (OBCs), which a government-appointed commission in 1980 reported makes up 52 percent of the population.
Source: CNN
September 10, 2010
Medals of Honor have been rare since the end of the Vietnam war. And not one of the recipients from the Somalia, Iraq or Afghanistan deployments have been alive to have the iconic blue ribbon with the gold star draped around his neck. Until now.
The White House Friday announced that Staff Sgt. Salvatore Giunta, 25, of Hiawatha, Iowa, will be awarded the nation's highest medal for valor for his actions in Afghanistan, and he will come to the White House to receive the medal himself.
Source: AP
September 10, 2010
After a decade–long facelift, the ancient Greek temple of Athena Nike is back up, patched up and unfettered on the Acropolis.
The slender marble building first erected in the 5th century B.C. was unburdened of its scaffolding in recent days — 10 years after being completely dismantled for repairs.
Unlike other ancient monuments battered by war or natural disaster, the four–columned temple near the entrance of the world–renowned Athens citadel fell prey to the best of in
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
September 10, 2010
Smiling enigmatically, this is the British opera singer-turned-spy who captivated Adolf Hitler.
Margery Booth led a double life inside Nazi Germany, where she performed for Hitler and his henchmen while smuggling the Third Reich's secrets to British intelligence.
She helped British prisoners of war to send coded messages back to spy chiefs in London, and even performed for the Fuehrer with cyphers hidden inside her costume.
A British Army officer shoved the secre
Source: Telegraph (UK)
September 10, 2010
A new show pays tribute in art and music to the influential and controversial Black Panthers. Tom Horan reports.
To anyone with an interest in the upheavals of the late Sixties, to anyone who lived through the era itself, one of its most indelible images must be that of the Black Panthers. It’s no accident that their memory endures. The defiant afros, the black quasi-military outfits, the droll sloganeering and funky artwork in which they couched their ideas amounted to a kind of su
Source: Telegraph (UK)
September 10, 2010
Seventy years on from the Battle of Britain an appeal is being launched to open a new museum at Bentley Priory in Hertfordshire, the headquarters of RAF Fighter Command during the Second World War.
The 57 acre estate, the centre of which is a magnificent house designed by Sir John Soane dating back to the 1770s, is famous for being Lord Dowding’s operation room from where he coordinated 'the Few’.
Bentley Priory stopped being an operational RAF base in 2008 and has now
Source: Fox News
September 9, 2010
On the eve of Sept. 11, Fox News has learned the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency has attempted to block a book about the tipping point in Afghanistan and a controversial pre-9/11 data mining project called "Able Danger."
In a letter obtained by Fox News, the DIA says national security could be breached if "Operation Dark Heart" is published in its current form. The agency also attempted to block key portions of the book that claim "Able Danger" success
Source: BBC News
September 10, 2010
Harrowing details of some 300 cases of alleged sexual abuse by Roman Catholic clergy in Belgium have been released by a Church investigator.
Peter Adriaenssens said cases of abuse, mostly involving minors, had been found in nearly every diocese, and 13 alleged victims had committed suicide.
Two-thirds of victims were boys but 100 girls also suffered, he said.
Belgian media have accused the Church of seeking to hide abuse despite prosecutions of abusers.
Source: BBC News
September 10, 2010
The British Museum has settled a dispute with Iran's national museum over the loan of ancient Persian treasure the Cyrus Cylinder.
In February, the museum in Tehran said it would cut all ties with its British counterpart in protest at a decision to delay an agreed loan of the artefact.
But officials in Tehran now say the 2,500-year-old cylinder has arrived "under special security".
The piece, discovered in Iraq in 1879, will be displayed for four
Source: BBC News
September 10, 2010
An ally of German Chancellor Angela Merkel says she will resign from a top party post after suggesting that Poland may have been as responsible as Hitler for the outbreak of World War II.
Erika Steinbach said Poland had mobilised its troops months before the Nazis invaded in September 1939.
Her remarks were criticised by senior politicians including Mrs Merkel.
Mrs Steinbach heads a conservative body representing Germans who were expelled from Eastern Europ
Source: BBC News
September 10, 2010
A celestial event seen by the ancient Greeks may be the earliest sighting of Halley's comet, new evidence suggests.
According to ancient writers, a large meteorite smacked into northern Greece between 466BC and 467BC.
The writers also described a comet in the sky at the time the meteorite fell to Earth, but this detail has received little attention, say the researchers.
Comet Halley would have been visible for about 80 days in 466BC, researchers write in th
Source: Telegraph (UK)
September 9, 2010
Nazi U-boats dropped saboteurs onto American shores as part of a secret mission during the Second World War, a documentary has claimed.
Eight men landed on beaches off Long Island and Florida with the intention of sabotaging targets across the country over a period of up to two years.
Four men arrived ashore near Manhattan on June 13, 1942 carrying weapons, explosives and primers.
On 17 June 1942 a further four men landed off Ponte Verda Beach in Florida.
Source: WaPo
September 9, 2010
In 1909, at the height of the last great immigration wave, when immigrants reached a peak of almost 15 percent of the U.S. population, they made up about half of all public welfare recipients.
They were two-thirds of welfare recipients in Chicago.
In the country's 30 largest cities, meanwhile, more than half of all public school students were the children of immigrants. They were three-fourths in New York.
This history is forgotten in the angry debate over
Source: AP
September 9, 2010
An archive in the Netherlands has uncovered what it says is the oldest known share of stock in a company.
The West Fries Archive says the share in the Dutch East India Company is dated Sept. 9, 1606. That's more than two weeks before what had been the oldest known share in the corporation, which is held by a group of German investors....
Source: Time
September 9, 2010
A remarkable discovery along the River Thames in London, has uncovered the remains of an incredible creature, equal in both size and proportion to Herman Melville's legendary whale, Moby Dick.
“Moby”, it's believed, has been stranded in Greenwich, along the shore of the River Thames, for almost three centuries. The remains of the colossal creature, buried two meters beneath the earth, also reveal how the animal was butchered for its valuable oils and bones, a common game from the pe
Source: NYT
September 8, 2010
The Lewis Chessmen are the most famous and important chess pieces in history. They have a long historical and scholarly record, part of which is that they were made in Norway roughly 800 years ago. But now two Icelandic men are challenging that belief and trying to prove that the pieces came from their country.
The pieces were discovered on the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland, in 1831 — hence their name. Carved mostly out of walrus tusk, they were found inside a sand
Source: AOL News
September 9, 2010
Two nights of violent street demonstrations over the police shooting of a Guatemalan-born day laborer is the legacy of long-simmering distrust between residents in an immigrant neighborhood west of downtown and a police department trying to shake off a dark legacy, experts said today....
And it was in keeping with Los Angeles' long history of civic unrest, from the Watts riots of the 1960s through the Rodney King riot in 1992 to occasional rambunctious, window-breaking street demons
