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
July 9, 2010
A Rwandan priest captured last week and accused of helping to orchestrate the 1994 genocide has pleaded not guilty at a UN-backed tribunal.
Jean-Bosco Uwinkindi was arrested after entering western Uganda from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
He is accused of ordering the killing of ethnic Tutsis after they sought refuge in his church.
Mr Uwinkindi was indicted in 2001 by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), which is based in Tanzania, on
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 9, 2010
Two Australian towns have become engaged in a fierce war of words over which can lay the bigger claim to the legacy of Mary Poppins creator Pamela Travers.
Maryborough, on the south east coast of Queensland, Australia, has been hosting a Mary Poppins festival for several years in honour of Travers, who was born in the town in 1899.
The five-day event draws tourists to the region during the quiet winter months to enjoy Poppins-themed activities such as nanny races, umb
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 10, 2010
A former president of Bosnia, Ejup Ganic, says he fears being murdered in a Serbian prison if a British court sends him to Belgrade to face war crimes charges.
Serbian prosecutors accuse Dr Ganic, 64, of responsibility for the shooting of Serbian soldiers after they had surrendered in May 1992 at the chaotic outbreak of Bosnia's civil war.
Dr Ganic, now a professor of engineering who spends much of his time in Britain, was arrested at Heathrow in March on a warrant iss
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 11, 2010
Vlad the Impaler, the medieval Romanian prince who inspired the character of Count Dracula, was not a blood-thirsty tyrant, he was simply a misunderstood victim of bad Western European propaganda, a new exhibition has claimed.
The show, which has just opened in Bucharest, attempts to rehabilitate Vlad Tepes, also known as Vlad Dracula or Vlad the Impaler, who ruled Wallachia in the 15th century.
The exhibition includes portraits of Vlad from the Kunsthistoriches Museu
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 11, 2010
Historians claim to have finally located the site of King Arthur’s Round Table – and believe it could have seated 1,000 people.
Researchers exploring the legend of Britain’s most famous Knight believe his stronghold of Camelot was built on the site of a recently discovered Roman amphitheatre in Chester.
Historians believe regional noblemen would have sat in the front row of a circular meeting place, with lower ranked subjects on stone benches grouped around the outsid
Source: AP
July 11, 2010
Justice Anthony Kennedy, who already decides whether liberals or conservatives win the Supreme Court's most closely contested cases, is about to take on an even more influential behind-the-scenes role.
Kennedy will inherit retiring Justice John Paul Stevens' power to choose the author of some court opinions, an authority that has historically been used to subtly shape a ruling or preserve a tenuous majority.
David Garrow, a Cambridge University historian who has writt
Source: AP
July 11, 2010
Taiwan's president urged his Chinese counterpart to work toward improving historically testy ties following the signing of a landmark trade deal.
Ma Ying-jeou — who has sought to build better relations with the mainland since taking office in May 2008 — said this was an opportunity for the two sides to end decades of mistrust and search for common ground.
Taiwan and China signed a broad trade pact last month....
Source: AP
July 11, 2010
Hoisting hundreds of coffins aloft, a line of weeping relatives stretched for at least a mile (1.6 kilometers) Sunday as they honored Srebrenica massacre victims on the 15th anniversary of the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II.
A whole hillside in the eastern Bosnian town was dug out with graves, waiting for 775 coffins covered in green cloths to be laid to rest at the biggest Srebrenica funeral so far.
Still, that was less than a tenth of the total number of
Source: AP
July 11, 2010
British veterans of the Battle of Britain, the furious aerial conflict between British and German aircraft in 1940, joined Sunday in a ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the battle.
Around 5,000 people, including Prince Michael of Kent and Air Chief Marshal Sir Stephen Dalton, the senior commander of the Royal Air Force, converged at the Battle of Britain memorial at Capel-le-Ferne near the English Channel port of Dover.
It is believed that about 100 British air f
Source: CNN
July 11, 2010
Two years ago, U.S. military officials came knocking on Michael Frisbie's door asking for information on his family tree.
They returned about a year ago, this time informing him that the remains of his great-great-uncle -- a soldier missing in action since World War I -- had been identified.
More than 90 years after his death, Costello will finally be buried with full military honors Monday.
Costello, from New York City, enlisted in the Army on September 19
Source: AOL News
July 11, 2010
New photographs of a smiling, tracksuit-clad Fidel Castro greeting workers at a scientific think tank were posted on the blogs of two Cuban journalists and a media website Saturday, offering a rare glimpse of the reclusive revolutionary leader in a public forum.
Castro, 83, appears slightly stooped but otherwise healthy in the pictures, which were said to have been taken Wednesday during a visit to the National Center for Scientific Investigation in Havana.
One set of f
Source: AOL News
July 11, 2010
When a devastating war has displaced half the population, it might be time for a new census. But many in Bosnia say such a reckoning would entrench the ethnic divisions that were forced upon it with a brutal violence unknown in Europe since World War II.
Bosnia's last census was in 1991, a year before it seceded from the former Yugoslavia. At the time, its population of 4.4 million consisted of 43 percent Muslim Bosniaks, 31 percent Eastern Orthodox Serbs and 17 percent Catholic Cro
Source: NYT
July 9, 2010
Wry and cranky, droll and cantankerous — that’s the Mark Twain we think we know, thanks to reading “Huck Finn” and “Tom Sawyer” in high school. But in his unexpurgated autobiography, whose first volume is about to be published a century after his death, a very different Twain emerges, more pointedly political and willing to play the role of the angry prophet.
Whether anguishing over American military interventions abroad or delivering jabs at Wall Street tycoons, this Twain is strik
Source: WaPo
July 9, 2010
An elaborate spy swap reminiscent of the Cold War took place Friday at Vienna International Airport -- a minutely choreographed operation involving 10 members of a Russian espionage ring that infiltrated American suburbia and four Russians who had been jailed in Russia for their contacts with the West....
Though in some ways a throwback to the Cold War, Friday's drama was a far cry from the last major spy swap, which took place in 1986 at Berlin's Glienicke Bridge, an Iron Curtain c
Source: The Columbus Dispatch
July 8, 2010
These days, Edward Low is fighting on two fronts: to get his precious "Indian rock" back from the Ohio Historical Society and to stay alive.
The 77-year-old Reynoldsburg man has been in a three-year battle with the Historical Society to recover an artifact he found as a boy - a piece of pre-history from the Early Woodland Adena culture that was probably created 400 years or more before the birth of Christ. Its value at auction has been estimated at $200,000, possibly much
Source: AP
July 7, 2010
Israel's antiquities agency says workers found a century-old hand grenade in Jerusalem's Old City.
The Israel Antiquities Authority says workers doing restoration at the city's historic stone walls were digging through crushed stone when they found a "fist-sized chunk of metal."
The antiquities agency said on Wednesday the workers concluded it was a grenade hidden there about 100 years ago....
Source: Science Daily
July 6, 2010
Among various important discoveries, the 2010 Kinneret Regional Project discovered an ancient synagogue, in use at around 400 AD. This year's archeological focus is the first systematic excavation on Horvat Kur, a village inhabited from the Early Roman through the Early Medieval periods located on a gentle hill two kilometers west of the Lake of Galilee.
Thirty volunteers -- mostly students of theology, religious studies, and archeology -- and staff from the Netherlands, Finland, Sw
Source: The Boston Globe
July 5, 2010
...Vic Mastone, a state archeologist, is an excited bundle of animation as he scans the Revolutionary War battlefield. Like a general on high ground, he surveys a checkerboard of fuel tanks, mountains of road salt, rotted wharf pilings, and a jumble of shoehorned tenements.
Welcome to Chelsea Creek.
The two-day fight in May 1775 is largely forgotten, overshadowed by the momentous clashes at Lexington and Concord the month before, and the Battle of Bunker Hill in June. B
Source: The China Post
July 8, 2010
Archaeologists working at a site in Hanoi's Dong Anh District have stumbled across 11 tombs dating back to the Phung Nguyen culture, days before they were about to wind up the dig.
The Phung Nguyen remains, the best-preserved of any found in and around the city, date back about 4,000 years, archaeologists from the Viet Nam Archaeology Institute said.
The tombs were discovered 1.5 meters below ground.
One of the tombs, provisionally called number nine, cont
Source: BBC
July 8, 2010
A beam of light will be shone from the highest point of the Clwydian Range, to mark the 200th anniversary of Moel Famau's Jubilee Tower.
The tower's foundation stone was laid on 25 October 1810 to commemorate King George III's Golden Jubilee.
Wrexham-based artist Chris Oakley has been commissioned by Flintshire and Denbighshire councils to install a light beam in the tower.
It will be one of a series of events planned in October.
The councils h
