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: IBN Live (India)
May 27, 2010
New Delhi: The Indian Army’s history of the 1999 Kargil war with Pakistan may have to be rewritten.
In a major embarrassment for the Army, a military tribunal has ruled that a senior commander had falsified records of the war that cost a brigadier a promotion.
The Armed Forces Tribunal has directed the Army to set the records straight and consider Brigadier (retd.) Devinder Singh, who commanded the Batalik-based 70 Infantry Brigade during the Kargil war, for a notional
Source: Newsweek
May 27, 2010
One of the longest serving members in Congressional history, Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia, has thrown his support behind the effort to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, which is expected to come to crucial votes in both the House and Senate shortly.
He is an unlikely civil rights advocate, and gay rights advocates are both surprised—and excited—by his support. Now the oldest member of Congress, Byrd began his career in the early 1940s by recruiting friends to form a Ku Klux Klan c
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 28, 2010
Jay McInerney, novelist and ladies' man, describes his serial crushes on Jane Austen's heroines - and how they shaped his romantic life
We love Jane Austen through her heroines. Knowing so little about her, we worship her surrogates. And generally speaking, unless we are cranky scholars or celibate critics, we love and rank the novels according to our regard for the female principals. I can’t help finding my own response to the novels coloured by the degree to which I find the heroi
Source: BBC News
May 28, 2010
Turkey's current tensions over the influence of the powerful military are rooted in a history of political turmoil and coups.
On 27 May, 1960, the Turkish armed forces overthrew the elected government, the first of a series of military interventions in politics which have continued to divide Turkish society.
I travelled to the island where the deposed political leaders were put on trial, with a group of relatives and activists who are campaigning for a new look at those
Source: SF Chronicle
May 28, 2010
"Ardi," the fossil female whose discovery is thought to stretch our human ancestry back more than 4 million years, has been challenged by specialists who discount the evidence of how she lived and maintain she was never a forerunner of the human line.
Last October, Tim D. White, the noted UC Berkeley paleoanthropologist, and his colleagues announced in the journal Science their analysis of a partial female skeleton they had discovered after 17 years excavating her fossils
Source: CNN.com
May 27, 2010
What does it feel like to kill a man? James Lenihan of Brooklyn knew. He fought in Europe in World War II and he killed a German soldier during a battle in Holland.
He described how it felt in a poem:
---
I shot a man yesterday
And much to my surprise,
The strangest thing happened to me
I began to cry.
---
So begins "Murder: Most Foul" a work that echoes poetry about war in the tradi
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 27, 2010
Second World War veterans will make an emotional journey across the English Channel to Dunkirk today to mark the 70th anniversary of the celebrated evacuation.
The former troops, accompanied by their families, will attend a ceremony at the French port to commemorate the historic rescue mission.
They will set sail from Dover following a departure ceremony attended by the Lord Lieutenant of Kent's office, senior military, government officials, police and others.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 27, 2010
The oldest US Medal of Honour recipient from the Second World War, has died aged 100.
Retired Navy Lt John Finn enlisted in the Navy just before his 17th birthday and went on to become the first man to receive America's highest military award for heroism during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec 7, 1941, according to a Navy statement.
Despite head wounds and other injuries, Finn, the chief of ordnance for an air squadron, continuously fired a .50-calibre machine
Source: Tejal Rao at the Atlantic
May 27, 2010
[Tejal Rao is a writer and translator from Northwest London, living in
Brooklyn.]
This was kind of a big deal: one day in 1912 a consulting editor at Ladies' Home Journal put down her sewing to listen to her husband and his friend talk about a new concept called efficiency. It gave her ideas! Soon after she wrote an essay about applying the ideas of industrial efficiency to the home to give middle-class women more time for the stuff they actually wanted to do. Lots of people
Source: ABC News
May 24, 2010
A team of Egyptian archaeologists headed by Abdel Rahman El-Aydi unearthed what he told ABC News was "the most important cemetery dating to the second dynasty," calling it an ''astonishing surprise."
The cemetery site is located southwest of Cairo in the oasis and lush city of Fayoum at Lahoun, where the team has spent the past four years digging. They've uncovered 45 ancient Egyptian tombs from varying periods.
Egyptian Culture Minister Farouk Hosni said
Source: McClatchy Newspapers
May 27, 2010
The House of Representatives voted 234 to 194 Thursday night to repeal the military's 17-year-old policy that prohibits gay men and lesbians from serving openly in the nation's armed forces.
The historic House vote followed the Senate Armed Services Committee voted [sic] 16-12 to end former President Bill Clinton's 1993 "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy that allows gays and lesbians to serve in the military but subjects them to expulsion if their sexual orientation becomes kn
Source: AP
May 25, 2010
The castle on the Hudson River is crumbling.
One of the stranger sights on the river, Bannerman's island castle is a high-walled ruin topped with turrets that looks like it was built to repel catapult attacks. In reality, the century-old structure off the river's eastern shore was a warehouse for bayonets, pith helmets, rifles and other military relics.
The island has had a second life in recent years as a summer tourist attraction. Visitors — many who know the castle f
Source: The Guardian
May 28, 2010
Picasso was a steadfast communist, a tireless peace campaigner, and he loathed the fascists – depicting General Franco with witty brutality in works such as The Dream and Lie of Franco (1937).
But the Picasso who consorted with Soviet officials, who was photographed examining pictures of Stalin, who received telegrams from Fidel Castro, is only part of the story.
According to John Richardson, the biographer of the artist who knew him from the 1940s to the 1960s, the Spa
Source: AP
May 27, 2010
Fort Knox has long been known for its heavy metals — gold bricks and armored tanks.
But the tank's 70-year connection to the Army post in the hills of central Kentucky ended Thursday as the Armor Center, the training school for generations of tank soldiers, began its move to Fort Benning in Georgia.
The ceremony symbolized the shift of authority over Fort Knox from the Armor Center to Accessions Command, making the base the Army's home for recruiting, training and human
Source: Time
May 27, 2010
How do you atone for something terrible, like the Inquisition? Joseph Ratzinger attempted to do just that for the Roman Catholic Church during a grandiose display of Vatican penance — the Day of Pardon on March 12, 2000, a ritual presided over by Pope John Paul II and meant to purify two millenniums of church history. In the presence of a wooden crucifix that had survived every siege of Rome since the 15th century, high-ranking Cardinals and bishops stood up to confess to sins against indigenous
Source: BBC
May 27, 2010
The 400-year-old Llanrwst Almshouses, now a museum, are at the centre of a celebration of the Conwy Valley market town's history.
There will be performing arts and music on Friday 28 May and the following day the town centre will be given over to old-fashioned fair rides, side shows and a Victorian market.
The museum will also be launching its 400th anniversary exhibition, including a time-line of those four centuries in the almshouses, Llanrwst and the UK.
Source: BBC
May 28, 2010
The discovery of the remains of a woman - sparking police searches in Bradford's red light district - has brought back chilling memories of the 1970s.
Back then, it took six years to find and convict Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, for killing 13 women across the county - mainly prostitutes - and trying to murder seven more.
He had been in jail for three years by the time Fiona started walking the streets around Bradford's Lumb Lane, one of Sutcliffe's killing
Source: BBC
May 27, 2010
Dame Margot Fonteyn, one of Britain's most famous ballerinas, was "up to her neck" in a coup plot in Central America - along with Fidel Castro, according to government files released today at the National Archives.
It seemed "better than fiction" as the news reporters put it. Britain's leading ballerina, Dame Margot Fonteyn, had been accused of plotting to overthrow the government of Panama. She'd been arrested and held in jail overnight. Mobbed by press in New Y
Source: BBC
May 27, 2010
The fleet of "little ships" commemorating the 70th anniversary since the rescue mission that saved allied troops has arrived in Dunkirk.
Around 64 ships had headed to France from Ramsgate in Kent to mark Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of about 338,000 soldiers from Dunkirk's beaches.
The troops had been driven back to the coast by the German army.
Source: BBC
May 26, 2010
Horned dinosaurs previously considered native only to Asia and North America might also have roamed the lands of prehistoric Europe, say scientists.
Palaeontologists have announced the discovery of fossils belonging to a horned creature in the Bakony Mountains of western Hungary.
The find may give them a better understanding of the environment during the late period of dinosaur evolution.
They described their findings in the journal Nature.
