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: Daily Mail (UK)
June 21, 2010
A soldier who seized a key German port during World War II has become the first Englishman to be given the freedom of a city - in Germany.
Major Tony Hibbert, 92, led a team of 500 commandos as part of Operation Eclipse to take Kiel in May, 1945.
The men secured the port which led to the surrender of a large German garrison and stopped Kiel falling into Soviet hands.
It also allowed the Allied forces to secure the whole of Denmark and seize all the Nazis th
Source: Guardian (UK)
June 20, 2010
t was the list that would have sent thousands more Jews to their deaths in Auschwitz and other extermination camps run by Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime during the second world war, but this time the victims were to be Spaniards.
The Spanish dictator, General Francisco Franco, whose apologists usually claim that he protected Jews, ordered his officials to draw up a list of some 6,000 Jews living in Spain and include them in a secret Jewish archive.
That list was handed over
Source: BBC News
June 18, 2010
John Lennon's handwritten lyrics to Beatles song A Day In The Life have sold for $1.2m (£810,000) at auction, well above the price expected.
The double-sided sheet of paper with notes written in felt marker and blue ink was sold at Sotheby's in New York.
The lyric sheet also contains some corrections and other notes penned in red ink.
The song - co-written with Paul McCartney - is the final track on the band's 1967 Sgt Pepper album.
The buyer was an
Source: BBC News
June 21, 2010
A British author says a senior official from the Rwandan war crimes tribunal flew to London last week to question her about the secret confessions of a 1994 Rwandan genocide organiser that she obtained for inclusion in a recently-published book.
At least 800,000 people are estimated to have been killed in the genocide at a rate - over just 100 days - that was far faster than the Holocaust of the Jews in World War Two.
According to the author, Linda Melvern, the official
Source: Discovery News
June 18, 2010
There have been no other cases of ancient humans eating hyenas, but this find may represent an exception.
The suspect hyena bones come from Maltravieso cave in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula, which is on the southwestern tip of Europe. The cave has rooms with archaeological sites ranging from the Middle Pleistocene to the Bronze Age. The Hyena bones come from what's called the Sala de Huesos (Hall of Bones), which is filled with debris dated to between 117,000 and 183,000 ag
Source: Discovery News
June 18, 2010
Five sharpshooters fired bullets through the heart of a double murderer in what was billed as a bloody throwback to Old West-style justice.
Shackled to a chair and with a black hood covering his head, Gardner, 49, was put to death just after midnight in a brightly lit execution chamber at Utah State Prison.
Gardner's gruesome death was billed as a bloody throwback to Old West-style justice, the first execution of its kind in the United States for more than a decade and
Source: AP
June 17, 2010
The remains of an ancient Roman town were on Thursday unveiled to the public in the centre of the Bulgarian capital Sofia.
Excavation of the site -- which currently includes a Roman palace, baths and burial sites, as well as a more recent 13th century church -- began several years ago.
It is hoped that the remains will be preserved as a major heritage site and tourist attraction....
Source: AP
June 17, 2010
The United States returned seven sculptures from the great Angkorian era on Thursday that had been smuggled out of Cambodia.
Cambodian Buddhist monks blessed the artifacts during a handover ceremony at the port of Sihanoukville, said John Johnson, a U.S. embassy spokesman.
The sandstone sculptures were recovered by U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials during an 2008 raid in Los Angeles. They arrived in Cambodia aboard the hospital ship USNS Mercy on Tuesday
Source: Discovery News
June 16, 2010
Swiss and German scientists have experimented with using airport body scanners for a less controversial purpose – screening ancient mummies.
Mummies are usually investigated with conventional X- rays or computer tomography scans, which provide the clearest images.
But high resolution comes at a price.
Ionizing radiation used by X-rays and CT scans can destroy highly fragmented ancient DNA. But the terahertz radiations of body scanners are completely harmless t
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 20, 2010
A new film based on the legend of Pope Joan – an Englishwoman who purportedly disguised herself as a man and rose to become the only female pontiff in history – has sparked debate in the Roman Catholic Church.
The film has fuelled disagreements over whether Pope Joan really existed or, as the Church has always maintained, she was a mythical figure used by the early Protestant Church to discredit and embarrass Rome.
For a Church that even in the 21st century remains st
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 21, 2010
The roar of combat and smell of gunpowder returned to the fileds of Belgium on Sunday as enthusiasts re-enacted the Battle of Waterloo.
The June 18, 1815 battle saw Napoleon Bonaparte defeated by the Duke of Wellington.
Around 3,000 military enthusiasts from across Europe, armed with 50 heavy guns and supported by 150 cavalry, took part in the reconstruction of five scenes of the battle, organised as a rehearsal for the 200th anniversary of the battle in 2015.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 20, 2010
The only photos of French Resistance agents facing the firing squad at the Nazis' largest execution site in France are on public display for the first time.
They are being displayed to the public for the first time in Mont Valérien, a 19th century fort outside Paris where the Nazis executed more than 1,000 resistance fighters and hostages during the Second World War – the largest number in one site in France.
The Nazis arrested Resistance members and "hostages&qu
Source: AP
June 20, 2010
The Rev. Nico Smith, a white pastor who challenged South Africa's apartheid system by moving with his wife into a black township in the 1980s, has died of a heart attack, one of his daughters said Sunday. He was 81.
Smith collapsed while attending a friend's birthday party Saturday in Pretoria, and died before he could be taken to a hospital, said Marita Laubscher, the eldest of his three daughters.
In the tumultuous '80s, Smith was one of a tiny handful of clerics who
Source: AP
June 20, 2010
New Agers and neo-pagans descended on Stonehenge to celebrate the summer solstice, each hoping to catch a glimpse of the sun as it rises above the ancient stone circle early Monday morning.
The annual all-night party typically draws thousands of alternative-minded revelers to the prehistoric monument on Salisbury Plain as they wait for dawn at the Heel Stone, a pockmarked pillar just outside the circle proper which aligns with the rising sun.
The annual celebrations at
Source: CNN
June 19, 2010
More old documents unveiled are offering more fresh signs that Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan was an eager, tough-talking political player while working as a lawyer in the Clinton White House.
In one e-mail, she criticizes one of President Bill Clinton's most important speeches as "presumptuous."
The latest and final batch of more than 80,000 pages - mostly e-mails– were released Friday by the William J. Clinton Presidential Library. The 50-year-old Kagan w
Source: CNN
June 20, 2010
Sons, daughters, grandchildren and other relatives of those who died in the Vietnam War gathered before dawn this Father's Day to remember their fallen relatives in a unique way.
With brushes, mops, hoses and soap, they set about cleaning the granite wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Their mission was to polish each of the more than 58,000 names of Americans who died.
The event was part of the commemoration of the 20th anniversary of a group called Sons and Daughte
Source: Spiegel Online
June 18, 2010
The riddle began 10 years ago, when Ralf Peters stumbled across an old box full of photographs in a cabinet at the Central Institute of Art History in Munich. Peters, an art history Ph.D., had just begun a new job at the institute and was trying to get an idea as to what the archive might contain. Little did he know that the box he found during his first days on the job would preoccupy him and his colleagues for years to come.
Inside the box were 600 undated black-and-white images.
Source: AP
June 19, 2010
Detail by painful detail, the CIA is coming to grips with one of the most devastating episodes in its history, a botched cloak-and-dagger flight into China that stole two decades of freedom from a pair of fresh-faced American operatives and cost the lives of their two pilots.
In opening up about the 1952 debacle, the CIA is finding ways to use it as a teaching tool. Mistakes of the past can serve as cautionary tales for today's spies and paramilitary officers taking on al-Qaida and
Source: BBC
June 18, 2010
One of the most decorated French soldiers, who fought in the country's wars in Algeria and French Indochina, has died.
Gen Marcel Bigeard, 94, died on Friday, his wife told news agency Agence France-Presse.
Gen Bigeard was a commanding officer during the battle of Dien Bien Phu and the Battle of Algiers.
In 2000 he caused controversy in France by telling a newspaper that torture was a "necessary evil" in Algeria.
Source: BBC
June 18, 2010
Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998, has died at the age of 87, his publisher has announced.
Saramago, a communist and atheist, only began to become recognised for his work in his fifties.
Saramago moved to Lanzarote in the early 1990s after opposition from Portugal's right-wing government to his controversial work The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.
The administration barred his work from being entered in
