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: Fox News
June 13, 2010
The Fremont County Coroner's Office is sending skeletal remains thought to be of prehistoric origin to the University of Wyoming anthropology department for examination.
A maintenance worker found the bones while digging along a trail at the Central Wyoming College field station in Sinks Canyon near Lander....
Source: AP
June 11, 2010
Addressing the clerical abuse scandal from the heart of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Benedict XVI begged forgiveness Friday from victims and promised at a Mass to "do everything possible" to protect children.
While symbolic, Benedict's pledge failed to satisfy victims groups who said promises were useless without a clear-cut action plan to root out pedophile priests, expose the bishops who protected them and change the Vatican policies and culture that allowed abuse to
Source: WaPo
June 14, 2010
A rare original printing of the Declaration of Independence is visiting Maryland for the first time to help kick of the National History Day competitions....
Thousands of middle and high school students and teachers from across the country will get a chance to see the document Monday at the University of Maryland. They're gathering in College Park for the weeklong National History Day competitions.
Source: Science Daily
June 10, 2010
In the time before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, a cooler central Pacific Ocean has been connected with drought conditions in Europe and North America that may be responsible for famines and the disappearance of cliff dwelling people in the American West.
A new study from the University of Miami (UM) has found a connection between La Niña-like sea surface temperatures in the central Pacific and droughts in western Europe and in what later became the southwestern United States and
Source: Science Daily
June 10, 2010
Your mother was right: Fish really is "brain food." And it seems that even pre-humans living as far back as 2 million years ago somehow knew it.
A team of researchers that included Johns Hopkins University geologist Naomi Levin has found that early hominids living in what is now northern Kenya ate a wider variety of foods than previously thought, including fish and aquatic animals such as turtles and crocodiles. Rich in protein and nutrients, these foods may have played a
Source: BBC
June 11, 2010
Old soldiers who saw action in France after hundreds of thousands of Allied troops were evacuated at Dunkirk were honoured at a civic reception in Inverness this week.
The veterans had served with the 51st Highland Division, which recruited from communities across the Highlands and Islands.
On 12 June 1940, about 10,000 men of the division were captured at St Valery-en-Caux along with thousands of French soldiers.
Historians increasingly concede that the
Source: BBC
June 11, 2010
Belfast is proud of having built the Titanic, but the city has lost out on one piece of maritime memorabilia to landlocked Dudley in the West Midlands.
A reproduction of the doomed boat's 16-tonne anchor was built during the making of a television programme, provisionally titled We Built Titanic, at a cost of about £50,000.
Steelworkers at a foundry in Sheffield forged a replica of what was at the time billed as "the biggest anchor in the world", based on th
Source: BBC
June 13, 2010
The Secretary of State said he is hopeful that something constructive will emerge from Lord Saville's long awaited report on Bloody Sunday.
The report into the killings of 13 people in 1972 is due to be published on Tuesday.
The report took 12 years to compile, at a cost of almost £200m.
Owen Paterson said people should stop speculating and take the time needed to digest the report when it is published....
Source: BBC
June 13, 2010
The government considered denying North Korea visas to attend the 1966 World Cup, official documents have revealed.
The UK feared the presence of communist North Korea at the finals in England could cause diplomatic shockwaves.
But denying the squad entry could prompt the "disaster" of a relocated World Cup, warned a Foreign Office memo now released by the National Archives.
At the time the UK did not officially recognise the state that had pro
Source: BBC
June 12, 2010
The International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor has urged the UN Security Council to push for the arrest of two Sudanese men indicted for war crimes in Darfur.
Luis Moreno-Ocampo said Khartoum had failed to apprehend former minister Ahmed Haroun and Janjaweed militia leader Ali Kushayb.
The two men were indicted by the ICC in 2007 for war crimes and crimess against humanity....
Source: BBC
June 12, 2010
Sporadic demonstrations in Tehran and other Iranian cities have been reported on the anniversary of the disputed presidential election.
A massive security presence prevented any larger gatherings to protest at Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's re-election.
Opposition leaders earlier called off protests, saying they did not want to cause the loss of innocent lives.
The BBC's Tehran correspondent says the day has left the opposition once again with no sense of directi
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 11, 2010
Mark Twain's scandalous relationship with his "filthy-minded and salacious" secretary, Isabel Van Kleek Lyon, is to be revealed in memoirs published 100 years after the author's death.
The unedited 5,000-page autobiography, which Twain refused to make public during his lifetime, will lay bare his feelings for Isabel Van Kleek Lyon.
The book is likely to shatter the myth that America's great writer and humourist was a cheerful old man, instead detailing his pe
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 12, 2010
Iran's hardline Revolutionary Guards have been rewarded with multi-billion dollar business contracts as payback for helping to suppress the mass protests that convulsed the country a year ago.
In return for standing by him in the bloody crackdown that saw thousands arrested and up to 100 people killed, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has awarded a series of lucrative oil and gas deals to Guards-owned front companies.
The deal will hugely boost the power of the group, a
Source: AP
June 13, 2010
A Slovenian student who was captured, tortured and killed by communists during World War II was beatified on Sunday by Pope Benedict XVI's state secretary at a Mass attended by thousands.
Lojze Grozde, who died at the age of 20, is the first beatified martyr in the predominantly Roman Catholic country where the church was long suppressed.
Grozde, a high school student, was captured in Jan. 1943, when Slovenia was occupied by Italy and Germany. Communist-run antifascist
Source: AP
June 13, 2010
...If confirmed by the Senate as a justice, Kagan would have to sit out high court review of the government's decade-old racketeering lawsuit against cigarette makers. That's because she already has taken sides as solicitor general, signing the Obama administration's Supreme Court brief in the case — an automatic disqualifier.
Kagan is expected to step aside from 11 of the 24 cases the court has so far agreed to hear beginning in October.
A justice's decision not to par
Source: National Security Archive at George Washington University
June 11, 2010
To mark the first-ever criminal conviction in Colombia's infamous Palace of Justice case, the Archive today posts a selection of key declassified documents pertaining to the episode, including a 1999 U.S. Embassy cable that found that Colombian Army soldiers under the command of Col. Alfonso Plazas Vega had "killed a number of M-19 members and suspected collaborators hors de combat ["outside of combat"], including the Palace's cafeteria staff."
On Wednesday, a C
Source: Jerusalem Post
June 11, 2010
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas laid out new requirements for moving to direct talks with Israel Thursday, dropping earlier calls for a settlement freeze in favor of progress on borders and security.
Specifically, he said he was looking for agreement from the Netanyahu government that the basis for borders would be the 1967 lines with agreed land swaps, an arrangement he said was in place during his direct talks with the previous prime minister, Ehud Olmert.
Source: Enid News and Eagle
June 10, 2010
Remember Mr. Short-Term Memory, played on several occasions by Tom Hanks on “Saturday Night Live” in the late-1980s and early ’90s? He couldn’t remember a thing he had seen just minutes before.
That’s kind of the way we are when it comes to the spilling of crude oil around our globe throughout the relatively short period in history oil has been pumped, spewed, piped or carried around the globe.
I have to include myself in this memory loss, for after researching the subj
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
June 10, 2010
A letter from wartime Pope Pius XII to American President Franklin Roosevelt asking him to spare Italy and Rome from bombing has emerged from a secret archive.
The letter has been kept hidden away for more than 60 years in the headquarters of the Knights of Columbus, a 128 year old American Catholic organisation.
Pope Pius wrote the letter in English at the end of August 1943 as the Allies surged up from the south of Italy towards Rome which had endured several bombing
Source: MercoPress
June 10, 2010
Agustin Blanco Muñoz, PhD in Social Sciences from the Central University of Venezuela said the book is based on testimonies from retired Army Captain Otto Gebauer who by random was sent by the rebellious Army high command to custody Chavez while retained.
“Gebauer was sent to custody the man that had resigned to his post as president of Venezuela. At that moment he went to the room where Chavez was being held and found him crying. When he asks Chavez why the tears, the then former p
