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: Ria Novosti
May 19, 2010
The area of the Polish presidential plane crash is presently being heavily guarded, but later a commemorative marker will be placed there, the Smolensk region governor said on Wednesday.
"Law enforcement officers see that no one performs unsanctioned excavations or rummaging at the plane crash site...We plan to put up a commemorative marker at the plane crash site," Sergei Antufiev said....
Source: AP
May 21, 2010
South Korean President Lee Myung Bak ordered his government to take systematic and resolute" countermeasures against North Korea after its torpedo attack on a South Korean warship in March that he said violated the U.N. Charter as well as the armistice agreement that effectively ended the 1950-1953 Korean War.
Lee, presiding over an emergency meeting of the National Security Council, instructed related ministries to take "systematic and resolute countermeasures against No
Source: NYT
May 20, 2010
After facing months of protest, conservative members of the Texas Board of Education were expected Thursday night to vote to teach schoolchildren a version of American history that emphasizes the roles of capitalist enterprise, the military, Christianity and modern Republican political figures.
The scheduled vote was a preliminary tally, with the final vote by the same group planned for Friday.
The decision, expected to fall largely along the party lines — the board has
Source: FOX News
May 21, 2010
Who's more important: Christopher Columbus or John Smith?
Clara Barton or Ruby Bridges?
Ruby Bridges or Dolores Huerta?
Is the story of Nathan Hale too gruesome for first graders?
Will history books refer to the 44th American president as Barack Obama, Barack H. Obama or Barack Hussein Obama?
Late into the night, the Texas Board of Education considered these and other questions for the state’s social studies curriculum. The debate
Source: Guardian (UK)
May 21, 2010
North and South Korea are still in a state of war technically because they never signed a peace treaty after an armistice ended the 1950-53 conflict.
Since the war in which hundreds of thousands died – the exact number remains unclear – relations between the two countries have been jolted by violent incidents. The latest – the alleged sinking of a South Korean warship by a North Korean submarine – is by no means the most blatant act of aggression from Pyongyang.
In Janu
Source: Reuters
May 21, 2010
Mexico is dusting off urns containing skulls and bones of the country's Independence War heroes to try to confirm their identities decades after the remains were stored in a Mexico City monument.
Soldiers will remove the urns from a mausoleum within the monument on May 30 and carry them through the Mexican capital in a procession before handing the bones over to forensic anthropologists.
Historians have long questioned the listed identities of eight Independence War fig
Source: AP
May 20, 2010
Israeli archaeologists say workers have uncovered an ancient pagan altar while clearing ground for construction of a hotly disputed hospital emergency room.
They say the discovery proves an ancient cemetery at the site that has been at the center of protests by ultra-Orthodox Jews does not contain the graves of Jews.
Protesters claim an emergency room extension at Barzilai Hospital in the city of Ashkelon is being built on an ancient Jewish cemetery. They demonstrated t
Source: Irish Times
May 20, 2010
A MEMORIAL service was held in Kilkenny yesterday to honour some 1,000 unnamed people whose remains were discovered in a previously unknown mass grave dating from the Great Famine.
Archaeologists said the majority were children who had died in a former workhouse on the site between 1847 and 1851. They were originally buried in unconsecrated ground as the local graveyard was filled to capacity in a city “overwhelmed by the scale of deaths in the local population arising from famine,
Source: AFP
May 19, 2010
The archeological team behind China's terracotta Xian Warriors was Wednesday awarded Spain's prestigious Prince of Asturias prize for scientific and technical research.
The army of thousands of life-size warriors and horses of the Qin emperor more than 2,200 years ago was discovered by chance in 1974. In 1987, it was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.
The award is aimed at rewarding "the scientific, technical, cultural, social and humanistic work performed b
Source: National Geographic
May 19, 2010
A massive, headless statue of a Greek king has been found in the ruins of an ancient Egyptian temple, adding to evidence that the structure could be the final resting place of Marc Antony and Cleopatra, excavation leaders say.
For the past five years archaeologists have been searching around the temple of Taposiris Magna, about 28 miles (45 kilometers) west of the port city of Alexandria (map), in hopes of finding the couple's graves.
The newfound black granite statue—w
Source: CNN
September 20, 2010
Betty Kilby was gripped with apprehension. Descendants of the white family that enslaved her kin were coming to dinner.
She scrolled through a mental Rolodex of relatives who might flip out. Her brothers had already asked her: Why would you want to meet the family of those who held our loved ones in bondage?
Phoebe says it started out awkwardly in those first few minutes when they met. One of Betty's brothers was awfully skeptical, she says, but he "warmed up a lit
Source: AFP
May 16, 2010
Young Japanese infantryman Sawamura turned numb when he was ordered to bayonet a Chinese peasant as fellow soldiers looked on and taunted him.
"You captured him, so you get rid of him," his lieutenant barked, yanking the 21-year-old soldier toward his writhing victim, only days after Japanese troops had overrun the Chinese city of Nanking in December 1937.
"I stumbled forward and thrust the blade into his body until it came out on the other side," sa
Source: BBC
May 20, 2010
Israel has released a leading Hamas figure jailed after the captured of an Israeli soldier by militants in Gaza almost four years ago.
Muhammad Abu Tir was one of at least 60 top Hamas officials arrested and detained by Israel after Gilad Shalit was captured in 2006.
They were charged with belonging to an illegal organisation and associating with terrorists.
Nine other Hamas legislators have been released in recent months.
Israeli military
Source: BBC
May 20, 2010
A baby has been delivered on a Dorset island for what is thought to be the first time in more than 80 years.
Researchers believe Eric Warwick is the first baby born on Brownsea Island in Poole Harbour since 1927.
Anita and Trevor Warwick, the parents of the baby who was born in April, already have a daughter, Edith. The National Trust searched the archive and initially thought it was the first birth on the island since 1905 but found a
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 20, 2010
Carlos the Jackal, the former Venezuelan revolutionary who is serving a life sentence in a French jail, has complained that the film of his life is riddled with "historial inaccuracies"
Carlos the Jackal - whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez -made a failed legal bid to stop the Cannes launch of the five-and-a-hour film by French director Oliver Assayas.
Shot over seven months in Lebanon, Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and Hungary, it was made
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 20, 2010
Thousands of provocative images of the Prophet Mohammed have been uploaded to the social networking site Facebook, sparking a fresh wave of outrage in Pakistan.
internet regulators shut down YouTube and hundreds of other websites in protest at the online contest "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day".
Students and Islamist militants marched in their thousands through the cities of Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad. Any representation of t
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 20, 2010
Giant posters of Hitler dressed in bright pink, with a love heart in place of a swastika, have provoked a furious debate in Italy.
The 18ft high posters of the Nazi leader advertise a line of clothing for young people and adorn street corners and bus stops in Palermo, Sicily's biggest city.
The ads show the Fuhrer in a lurid pink uniform, with his swastika armband replaced with one bearing a bright red heart, above the slogan "Change Style – Don't Follow Your Lea
Source: CNN
May 20, 2010
War crimes prosecutors Thursday asked a court to order supermodel Naomi Campbell to give evidence in the trial of former Liberian President Charles Taylor.
They said Campbell received rough diamonds from Taylor, and claimed her testimony would prove that the former president "used rough diamonds for personal enrichment and arms purchases," according to papers filed with the U.N.-backed court.
Campbell has said she does not want to be involved in the case, pros
Source: CNN
May 20, 2010
Five paintings, including a Matisse and a Picasso, were stolen overnight from a Paris museum, the Paris mayor's office said Thursday.
The paintings were stolen from the Museum of Modern Art and included works by Georges Braque, Ferdinand Leger and Amedeo Modigliani, French police said.
The artworks are worth a total of just less than 100 million euros ($123.7 million), said Christophe Girard, an aide to the mayor of Paris. The city runs the museum.
But the
Source: Jerusalem Post
May 20, 2010
It was a scene Saudi women’s rights activists have dreamt of for years.
When a Saudi religious policeman sauntered about an amusement park in the eastern Saudi Arabian city of Al-Mubarraz looking for unmarried couples illegally socializing, he probably wasn’t expecting much opposition.
But when he approached a young, 20-something couple meandering through the park together, he received an unprecedented whooping.
A member of the Commission for the Promotion
