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 1, 2010
The costs of a Leonardo da Vinci theft investigation and extortion case at the High Court have exceeded £350,000.
The figures were obtained by the BBC via Freedom of Information requests.
Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary has spent nearly £250,000 on its operations since the Madonna of the Yarnwinder was stolen in 2003.
Prosecution costs of two extortion cases, which did not result in any convictions, have been estimated at a little more than £130,000.
Source: BBC
July 2, 2010
The contents of an "indecipherable" letter written by David Livingstone shortly before he met Henry Stanley have been revealed for the first time.
The so-called Letter from Bambarre was scribbled by the Scottish explorer on torn-out book pages in February 1871.
Livingstone's writing had faded so badly it was impossible to read but scientists used spectral imaging technology to recover the text.
It condemns slavery, relays details of Africa and rev
Source: BBC
June 30, 2010
The Great Fire of London started accidentally in a bakery, right? That wasn't the view at the time - many believed it was a terrorist attack and violent reprisals against possible suspects soon followed.
The date 1666 is one burned on to the collective memory of a nation.
But a new Channel 4 documentary focuses on the lesser known story of the fire - it sparked a violent backlash against London's immigrant population, prompted by the widely-held belief at the time that
Source: BBC
July 1, 2010
Somalia's President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed is on the front line, as fierce battles rage on the day the country marks 50 years of independence.
Eyewitnesses told the BBC that the president was dressed in military fatigues atop an African Union tank.
The president warned before the anniversary that Somalia was in danger of perishing as a nation.
Government troops, backed by African peacekeepers, are battling Islamist militants who control most of Somalia.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 1, 2010
Rio de Janeiro's Christ the Redeemer statue is back in plain sight after a four-month long £2.7 million renovation.
As it was unveiled, the monument was lit up in green and yellow to honour the Brazilian football team as it played in the World Cup.
The renovation to the 125-foot Christ the Redeemer, which draws nearly two million visitors a year, was funded through public and private donations. In an effort to match the colour of the soapstone, the restorers used more
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 1, 2010
Amedeo Guillet, who died on June 16 aged 101, was the Italian officer who led the last cavalry charge faced by the British Army.
Amedeo Guillet was born in Piacenza on February 7 1909 to a Savoyard-Piedmontese family of the minor aristocracy which for generations had served the dukes of Savoy, who later became the kings of Italy.
He spent most of his childhood in the south – he remembered the Austrian biplane bombing of Bari during the First World War – then followed
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 1, 2010
A terse letter in which Italy's national hero, Giuseppe Garibaldi, pleads poverty over an outstanding tax debt is among a cache of rare documents which will go on display for the first time at the world's oldest bank.
The documents come from the archives of the Monte dei Paschi bank, which was founded in 1472 in the Tuscan city of Siena and ranks as the oldest surviving bank in the world.
They include the earliest known prototype of today's travellers' cheques – a prea
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 1, 2010
A 75-year-old man has been sentenced to 25 years in jail for killing thousands of people during Rwanda's 1994 genocide.
Yussuf Munyakazi, a father of 13, was found guilty of "genocide and extermination" involving Tutsis who had sought refuge in Catholic churches, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda said in a statement.
In a summary of its judgement on Wednesday, the court said it accepted the accounts of witnesses, who said that Munyakazi led group
Source: CNN
July 1, 2010
Former military members on Thursday slammed Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan over her handling of military recruiters on the Harvard campus when she was dean of the university's law school.
On the final day of the Senate Judiciary Committee's confirmation hearing for Kagan, a total of 24 witnesses were scheduled to testify for and against President Barack Obama's pick to replace the retiring Justice John Paul Stevens.
The 50-year old Kagan has come under criticism from
Source: CNN
July 1, 2010
Researchers scanning the Peruvian desert for whale fossils have stumbled upon the remains of a "sea monster" three times the size of a modern day killer whale.
The teeth of "Leviathan Melvillei" were so large it was initially assumed they were elephant tusks.
They had been searching for other types of whale fossils in a remote area some 300 kilometers south of Lima. "The place where we found it was 20 kilometers from the nearest village," s
Source: Science Daily
June 30, 2010
To the untrained eye, University of Colorado at Boulder Research Associate Craig Lee's recent discovery of a 10,000-year-old wooden hunting weapon might look like a small branch that blew off a tree in a windstorm.
Nothing could be further from the truth, according to Lee, a research associate with CU-Boulder's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research who found the atlatl dart, a spear-like hunting weapon, melting out of an ice patch high in the Rocky Mountains close to Yellowstone N
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 30, 2010
A lock of Napoleon's hair has fetched nearly £9,000 at auction.
The hair was cut from his head after he died in exile in 1821 on St Helena by Denzil Ibbetson, commissionary officer on the during the French Emperor's incarceration on the island.
The lock was one of 40 lots of memorabilia from Napoleon up for auction in New Zealand which fetched a total of NZ$140,000 (£64,336).
Bidders from England, France, Lithuania, Hong Kong and the United States joined t
Source: Daily Times (Pakistan)
June 21, 2010
Almost half of Russians in a recent poll blamed dictator Joseph Stalin’s “blunders” for the Soviet Union’s huge losses of life in World War II, Russian news agencies reported on Sunday.
Forty-nine percent of respondents told the Levada polling agency that “the blunders of Stalin” were the “main reason” for massive Red Army losses in the first two years of the war, the Interfax news agency reported. Stalin erred by purging the military of top officials, failing to prepare for combat
Source: Newsweek
June 30, 2010
If Tim Scott, the Republican nominee in South Carolina's first congressional district, wins election in November, he will become the first African-American Republican to be elected to Congress from the former Confederacy since Reconstruction....
...The state Republican Party has had a complicated history with race in recent years. Lee Atwater—the Republican strategist accused of pandering to racial fears with a commercial for George H.W. Bush's 1988 campaign focusing on Willie Horto
Source: Jewish Exponent
July 1, 2010
It's accepted as a truism that the majority of Philadelphians take the wealth of historical artifacts that surround them -- the most significant dating from the period of this country's struggle for independence -- pretty much for granted. I say this with some certainty since I count myself as typical of those who've spent most of their lives in and around Philly. For example, I always stop for a second to admire Independence Hall's trim classical lines (when I'm in the area, that is), and enjoy
Source: NYT
June 20, 2010
When John Updike died of lung cancer in January 2009, at 76, there seemed little left to learn about him. Not only was he among the most prolific writers of his time, but he was also among the most autobiographical, recasting the details of his life in an outpouring of fiction, poetry, essays and criticism that appeared with metronomic regularity in the pages of The New Yorker and in books published at a rate of almost one a year for more than half a century.
Yet Updike was a privat
Source: NYT
June 30, 2010
When the managers from the federal Fish and Wildlife Service talk about this 2,800-acre preserve of moss-draped cypress, palmetto and marsh, they speak of endangered wood stork rookeries and disappearing marsh habitat, dike maintenance and interpretive kiosks.
But when the members of the Harris Neck Land Trust talk about it, they speak of injustice, racism and a place they used to call home.
In 1942, Harris Neck, a thriving community of black landowners who hunted, farm
Source: Politico
July 1, 2010
Key parts of the antiquated U.S. Capitol campus are literally crumbling, desperately in need of more than $200 million in repairs.
Water is leaking through pin holes in the Statue of Freedom. Lead-based paint chips are flaking off the Rotunda walls and collecting on the tour route to the Capitol dome, putting visitors at risk. Last summer, a U.S. Capitol Police officer was injured when he was struck by a falling ceiling tile in the Cannon House Office Building. And in the garage of
Source: The Scotsman (UK)
June 26, 2010
WHEN word spread that Bollywood planned a movie called Dear Friend Hitler, screenwriter Nalin Singh was genuinely shocked it stirred even a small controversy.
The media expressed disdain, Jewish groups were horrified and his lead actor – though a bit baffled by the reaction – quit.
While such a response would seem, if anything, understated in much of the world, Singh had reason to believe his film would not generate even a ripple of scandal.
In India, Hitle
Source: WKRN (TN)
June 25, 2010
The great, great, great grandson of Charles Dickinson placed the first scoop of dirt over his new gravesite Friday.
Dickinson was killed 204 years ago after losing a pistol duel with Andrew Jackson.
"This is the culmination of many, many years of searching, trying to prove where he was buried, finding his grave, exhuming his remains, bringing him here to Old Nashville Cemetery and re-interring him," said Charles Miller....
