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: AP
May 19, 2010
Seven score and seven years ago, a wounded Wisconsin soldier stood his ground on the Gettysburg battlefield and made a valiant stand before he was felled by a Confederate bullet.
Now, thanks to the dogged efforts of modern-day supporters, 1st Lt. Alonzo Cushing shall not have died in vain, nor shall his memory have perished from the earth.
Descendants and some Civil War history buffs have been pushing the U.S. Army to award the soldier the Medal of Honor, the nation's h
Source: BBC
May 19, 2010
Tests carried out on a skeleton discovered at an archaeological dig in Derbyshire have found it was that of a pregnant woman.
Experts said they were surprised by the female find because the site, near Monsal Dale in the Peak District, had been believed to be a military scene.
Now, extra lottery funding means there can be a second dig at the Fin Cop hill fort site to find out more.
Archaeologists unearthed the Iron Age skeleton last August.
Duri
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 18, 2010
Israeli contractors building a controversial "museum of tolerance" in West Jerusalem have been accused of digging up and damaging hundreds of human skeletons from an ancient Muslim graveyard.
Reigniting a dispute that has simmered for six years, Israel's left-leaning Haaretz newspaper claimed that overseers badly botched a "clandestine" five-month operation to excavate the highly-sensitive Mamilla Cemetery.
The allegations are almost certain to rous
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 19, 2010
Vladimir Putin has admitted for the first time that he spent his stint as a KGB spy in 1980s East Germany conducting industrial espionage against the West, lamenting that the secrets he stole were ignored.
n his most candid comments on the subject to date, the Russian prime minister said that at least part of his job as a KGB agent in East Germany involved acquiring sensitive technological and industrial secrets from the West.
But he told a meeting of the Russian Acade
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 19, 2010
A US immigration judge has ordered an 85-year-old retired steelworker be deported to Austria, or to any other country that will accept him, for serving as an armed Nazi death camp guard during the Second World War.
Anton Geiser was born in what is now part of Croatia and came to the United States from Austria in 1956. He has lived outside of Pittsburgh since 1960, became a citizen in 1962 and is married with three sons.
Geiser has the right to appeal to the Board of Imm
Source: AP
May 19, 2010
Christie's is set to auction a series of mostly black and white photographs, including one from Mario Testino's Vanity Fair shoot of Princess Diana.
The striking black and white 1997 Testino image shows the princess of Wales reclining on a sofa, her chin resting on folded hands. It is valued at 18,000 pounds-22,000 pounds ($26,000-32,000) and was taken only months before her death.
Also included in the sale are images by Andy Warhol of the Rolling Stones, including an i
Source: Fox News
May 19, 2010
What started out as a cartoonist's call to action against censorship -- an open invitation to submit caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad -- has led to death threats, a court order to temporarily block parts of the website in Pakistan and a call for a boycott of Facebook to protest what Muslims believe is blasphemy.
As a way to protest the network's decision -- which came after an Islamic extremist website warned of retaliation against the show's creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker
Source: CNN
May 19, 2010
he Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was leaving a news conference one afternoon when a tall man with a coppery complexion stepped out of the crowd and blocked his path.
Malcolm X, the African-American Muslim leader who once called King "Rev. Dr. Chicken-wing," extended his hand and smiled.
That encounter on March 26, 1964, lasted only a minute. But a photo of that meeting has tantalized scholars and supporters of both men for more than 45 years.
As the
Source: NYT
May 18, 2010
Robert Edsel, author of “The Monuments Men,” came to town the other day with a heavy album bound in green Moroccan leather. “Gemäldegalerie Linz XIII” was embossed on the spine. Inside were black-and-white photographs of mostly obscure 19th-century German paintings.
The album was one of the long-missing volumes cataloging the never-built Führermuseum in Linz, Austria, which Hitler envisioned someday rivaling Dresden and Munich. Starting in 1939, Nazi henchmen and art dealers bought
Source: NPR
May 18, 2010
Police in southern Greece have seized a rare twin pair of 2,500-year-old marble statues and arrested two farmers who allegedly planned to sell them abroad for euro10 million ($12.43 million), authorities said Tuesday.
Police said two Greeks aged 42 and 48 were arrested in the Peloponnese area late Friday as they were loading the illegally excavated figures of young men into a truck. Authorities are seeking a third man suspected of belonging to a smuggling gang that planned to spiri
Source: BBC
May 18, 2010
Unlicensed salvagers have been identified as the biggest threat to the shipwreck of HMS Victory in a report.
More than 1,000 sailors drowned when the British warship, the predecessor to Lord Nelson's Victory, sank in a storm.
The report is part of the public consultation into the future management of the 1744 shipwreck in the English Channel. Consultation ends on 30 June.
The authors of the report said unauthorised salvage could result in "irreparab
Source: Newsweek
May 18, 2010
A reporter who covered 24-year-old intern Chandra Levy's death looks at a new book about the case—and shares where the mainstream media went wrong.
When Chandra Levy went missing in 2001, she left a road map to her body. The 24-year-old intern quit her gym the day before she disappeared and spent her last known moments searching online for jogging paths in the same Washington, D.C., park where she would ultimately be found dead. But right from the start, a combination of police inco
Source: BBC
May 18, 2010
Captain Peter Neale went to war in 1942 as an apprentice architect, and came home a decorated hero.
Only 65 years later is his full story coming to light, as his Military Cross and accompanying documents were sold for £3,200 at a Colwyn Bay auctioneers on Tuesday.
Born in Stratford Upon Avon, Capt Neale lived the latter half of his life in north Wales, firstly in Deganwy, and then in Llandudno.
Displaying the modesty typical of his generation, Capt Neale,
Source: BBC
May 18, 2010
Builders have found what is believed to be a World War Two bomb in the grounds of a school in County Down.
The device, believed to be a mortar, was discovered at the rear of the Assembly Hall at Banbridge Academy on the Lurgan Road.
Source: BBC
May 18, 2010
Connecticut Senate hopeful Richard Blumenthal has denied allegations he misrepresented his military service during the Vietnam war era.
The New York Times ran video from a 2008 veterans ceremony in which he said: "I served in Vietnam."
The Democrat did not serve in Vietnam, instead spending six months in the Marine Reserve in the US.
His campaign team said the newspaper coverage was an "outrageous distortion".
Source: BBC
May 17, 2010
Kim Phuc, the girl in one of the unforgettable images of the Vietnam War, has been reunited for a BBC radio programme with Christopher Wain, the ITN correspondent who helped save her life 38 years ago.
When Chris last saw Kim, she was lying on a hospital bed with third-degree burns to more than half of her body, after a South Vietnamese napalm bomb attack.
It was 8 June 1972 and Chris and his crew had been in Vietnam for seven weeks, covering the conflict for ITN.
Source: AFP
May 18, 2010
An Australian adventurer will set out to solve Mount Everest's greatest mystery this week by searching for long-lost evidence that the peak was conquered in 1924, 29 years earlier than previously thought.
Mountaineer Duncan Chessell said conditions were the best in decades to find the missing body of Andrew "Sandy" Irvine and perhaps photographic evidence that he reached the world's highest peak with fellow Briton George Mallory.
Mallory and Irvine perished ne
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 18, 2010
The icons of skeletal heads with bared teeth, found carved into wooden seats and shells worn by natives as jewellery, were widely interpreted by early European colonisers to be hostile, anti-Christian and frightening.
But an analysis of human and primate behaviour indicates that the motifs were more likely symbols of non-aggression and good will, similar to a smile.
Dr Bridget Waller, co-author of the report, said the misunderstanding of the motif by Europeans could h
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 18, 2010
The Rev Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's controversial former pastor, has accused the President of "throwing him under the bus", in his bid for election.
The Chicago pastor, who has had a rift with Mr Obama's administration for two years, told a group raising money for African relief that his pleas to release frozen funds for use in earthquake-ravaged Haiti would likely be ignored.
When he was still a senator, Mr Obama cut ties with Mr Wright after the pastor'
Source: KGUN 9 {AZ)
May 18, 2010
- An Arizona law professor working with the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, is defending his position, this week, on Arizona's new laws regarding immigration and ethnic studies in public schools.
James Anaya, is a professor of Human Rights Law and Policy at the university. He's also a member of a six person panel, appointed by the U.N., that issued a statement last Monday in Geneva.
In the statement, the team criticizes Arizona's new cra
