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 2, 2010
The arrest of 10 alleged spies in the United States has thrust the ancient practice of steganography into the limelight.
Several of the suspects are accused of using the method to conceal data being transmitted from the US to Russia.
That question mark over it dates from the text in which the word was coined, Steganographia, which was written in 1499 by Johannes Trithemius but not published until 1606.
The name of the book derives from the Greek for conce
Source: BBC
July 4, 2010
Lebanon's top Shia Muslim cleric, seen as a key figure in the founding of militant group Hezbollah, has died at the age of 74.
Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah was regarded as Hezbollah's spiritual guide after the group was founded in 1982, a charge both denied.
An implacable critic of the US, he had a wide following among Shias and backed the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran.
But he was known among Shias for his moderate social views.
Source: AP
July 4, 2010
Pope Benedict XVI traveled to a central Italian town Sunday to pay homage to Celestine V, saying the simple lifestyle of the 13th-century hermit who resigned the papacy can serve as an example for modern men and women.
Benedict praised his predecessor for his detachment from material things such as money and clothes.
Celestine V assumed the papacy in 1294 at age 85 and resigned five months later, saying he was not up to the task. He was later put under guard for fear he
Source: CNN
July 3, 2010
Abu Daoud, the man who claimed to be the mastermind behind the massacre that marked the 1972 Munich Olympics, has died, according to the official news agency of the Palestinian Authority.
On September 5 of that year, Palestinian terrorists killed 11 Israeli athletes who were taken hostage.
Daoud, also known as Mohammed Oudeh, died Friday night, the WAFA news agency reported Saturday. The former Palestinian politician and commander in the Fatah and Palestinian Liberation
Source: Politics Daily
July 2, 2010
Every eight years Siena College in Loudonville, N.Y., asks scholars to rank the best and worst presidents in American history, and every survey since 1982 has seen Franklin D. Roosevelt in the number one spot. This year is no exception.
But there's a shakeup at the number two position in the 2010 ranking. For the first time in 20 years, Abraham Lincoln has been supplanted as second-best by another Roosevelt: Teddy.
Rounding out the top five in the survey of 238 presid
Source: Huffington Post
July 2, 2010
In the wake of the passing of Sen. Robert Byrd, the Ku Klux Klan, an organization Byrd briefly belonged to, is coming to the defense of the West Virginia Democrat who served in the Senate for 51 years. The Daily Caller reports:As politicians and columnists across the country debate the life and legacy of the
Source: CNN.com
July 2, 2010
Ethnic Tibetans' ability to thrive in high altitudes with low oxygen is the fastest genetic change ever observed in humans, according to a study published Friday in the journal Science.
Researchers at the University of California-Berkeley said their comparison of the genomes of ethnic Tibetan and Han Chinese could help scientists understand how the body deals with decreased oxygen and diseases associated with oxygen deprivation in the womb, according to a news release on the univers
Source: LA Times
July 3, 2010
Paleontologists digging near the coast of Peru have uncovered the largest fossilized skull of a sperm whale ever found.
The 12-million-year-old skull, which measures nearly 10 feet across, belonged to a now-extinct genus and species of sperm whale that may have been as long as 57 feet. The fossil includes the longest documented sperm whale teeth, measuring more than 14 fearsome inches.
The whale, described in a paper published Thursday in the journal Nature, was christe
Source: Canada.com
July 3, 2010
Career diplomat Roza Otunbayeva was sworn in as conflict-torn Kyrgyzstan’s president on Saturday, making her the first female leader in the history of ex-Soviet Central Asia.
Standing before an audience of more than 1,000 cheering onlookers in a packed Soviet-era concert hall in the capital Bishkek, Otunbayeva solemnly took her oath and promised a new political era for increasingly-unstable Kyrgyzstan.
"As president, I will spare no effort to create a new political
Source: Jacksonville Patriot
July 2, 2010
Dorothy Gardner, a former Army nurse, and Betty Krause, a former Navy WAVE, both Hot Springs Village residents, shared their World War II experiences with members of the Jacksonville Historical Society at the Jacksonville Museum of Military History on Thursday.
Both women said they joined their respective services up to two years after the entry of the U.S. into World War II, not because of the shock of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Each said they knew where Pearl Harbor was, but dist
Source: NYT
July 2, 2010
...In 90,000 pages of letters and memorandums released Friday by the Nixon Presidential Library, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, counselor and assistant to the president for urban affairs from January 1969 through December 1970 and a future senator from New York, prodded the president and his White House colleagues to deliver on a domestic agenda and expressed exasperation over the government’s entropy....
Source: CNN
July 2, 2010
Would the spirit of the Declaration of Independence have been any different if it referred to Americans as "subjects" instead of "citizens?"
Thomas Jefferson apparently thought so, and recent analysis of a rough draft of the Declaration has confirmed speculation that he considered both before settling on "citizens."
Recent hyperspectral imaging by scientists in the Library of Congress' Preservation Research and Testing Division performed on
Source: AP
July 2, 2010
Historical records from the prison that held Adolf Hitler in 1924 documenting the future dictator's time behind bars sold to an anonymous bidder for euro27,000 ($33,400) Friday at an auction in Germany.
The approximately 500 documents from the Landsberg prison were recently found by a Nuremberg man among the possessions of his late father, who had purchased them at a flea market in the 1970s, according to Werner Behringer, whose auction house put them up for sale.
The B
Source: CNN
July 2, 2010
He was raised an orphan of the West Virginia coal mines years before the Great Depression.
On Friday -- as his body made a final return to the state he loved -- Sen. Robert C. Byrd was remembered as a political titan, champion of the poor, and defender of the Constitution.
Political leaders from both parties and every corner of the country came together at the start of the Independence Day weekend to pay homage to America's longest serving member of Congress, who died
Source: CNN
July 2, 2010
A man wanted in Hungary for the torture and killing of a Jewish teenager during World War II averted extradition Friday after an Australian federal court ruled in his favor, an Australian news agency reported.
Hungary issued a warrant for Perth resident Charles Zentai, 88, in 2005. He is suspected of being a Nazi collaborator who killed Peter Balazs in Budapest in November 1944, the Australian Associated Press said.
Zentai is on the list of most wanted Nazis compiled by
Source: CNN
July 2, 2010
A fugitive Rwandan clergyman wanted for his role in the 1994 genocide has been arrested in Uganda, a police spokesman told CNN Friday.
A 2001 indictment from the U.N.-backed International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda alleges that Jean-Bosco Uwinkindi, now 59, led a group that sought out and killed Tutsis in the genocide. Some 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered in 100 days, many of them brutally bludgeoned or sliced open with machetes.
The indictment says that about 2,000
Source: CNN
July 2, 2010
If she's confirmed, Solicitor General Elena Kagan would become the fourth woman to sit on the Supreme Court. If not, at least she'll earn a spot on a future version of this list -- nominees who didn't make it to the bench, at least on their first try.
1. Robert Bork
In our time, the most famous rejected nominee is Robert H. Bork, a legal scholar and U.S. Court of Appeals judge with a long paper trail of conservative opinions. Nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 19
Source: Discovery News
June 30, 2010
Everybody likes a good soak in a hot bath from time to time. But new research suggests that some dinosaurs took it to the extreme, laying their eggs in the steaming hot soils near hot springs and Old Faithful-like geysers in what is now northwestern Argentina.
In the Cretaceous period over a hundred million years ago, Argentina's Sanagasta Valley was alive with hydrothermal activity, much like Yellowstone National Park or Iceland are today. Tunnels of near-boiling, mineral-rich wate
Source: Discovery News
June 30, 2010
The bridge bell of the Andrea Doria, the Italian ocean liner that famously sank in the Atlantic in 1956, rang out this week for the first time since the ship disappeared in the waters off Nantucket, Mass.
Partially buried at the ocean bottom, the 75-pound bronze bell was recovered by two divers, Carl Bayer and Ernest Rookey. They were part of a private expedition run by Tech Diving Limited, a company specializing in dives to some of the world's most famous shipwrecks.
Source: BBC
July 1, 2010
This week marks the 70th anniversary of a tragedy which deeply affected the Italian community in Wales.
A ship called the Arandora Star was sunk off the coast of Ireland. It was carrying Italians and Germans who had been arrested after the outbreak of war.
The sinking of the Arandora Star touched virtually every Italian family living in south Wales, as it did so many other Italian families in London and Scotland....
