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: BBC News
May 14, 2010
The US space shuttle Atlantis is about to undertake what is expected to be its final mission before retirement.
The vehicle is on the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center ready to lift off at 1420 local time (1820 GMT).
Big crowds are anticipated on the roads leading to the Nasa facility and on the beaches of Florida's Space Coast, all eager to catch a piece of history.
Atlantis will be delivering a Russian module to the space station, as well as batterie
Source: CNN
May 14, 2010
It was dismissed by some scientists as "a solution looking for a problem."
But when the first working laser was rolled out 50 years ago this week -- developed at California's Hughes Research Laboratory -- it didn't take long for the hyperfocused beams of light to find work.
Having fascinated science-fiction fans since the origins of ray guns in the late 1800s, lasers (literally "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation") have become co
Source: San Jose Mercury
May 13, 2010
Stan Yogi is no stranger to injustice. At an early age, he was aware of his parents' internment during World War II, even though the family did not speak of it.
"We had a few books in our home and I remember looking through them, seeing photos of the World War II incarceration and recognizing that if I had been born 20 years earlier that would have been me," Yogi said. "That injustice has really resonated for me throughout my life and has sparked my passion for justic
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 13, 2010
Veterans of Bomber Command have celebrated after they were given the go ahead to build a memorial to 55,573 of their comrades killed in the Second World War.
Planners at Westminster City Council approved on Thursday the proposed £3.5 million memorial, which will now be built in Green Park, central London.
Readers of The Daily Telegraph helped raised more than £1.8 million towards the cost of the monument, which should be completed by 2011.
After the meetin
Source: WaPo
May 13, 2010
The Thai authorities' latest attempt to bring an end to eight weeks of anti-government rallies turned bloody on Thursday night with one of the protest leaders shot and severely wounded in unclear circumstances and number of clashes between demonstrators and security forces.
In the aftermath of the protest leader's shooting, the Thai government has extended a state of emergency to cover 17 provinces to prevent rural protesters from joining the massive rally in the capital, according
Source: WaPo
May 13, 2010
Hemp needed a hero. Needed one bad.
The gangly plant -- once a favorite of military ropemakers -- couldn't catch a break. Even as legalized medical marijuana has become more and more commonplace, the industrial hemp plant -- with its minuscule levels of the chemical that gives marijuana its kick -- has remained illegal to cultivate in the United States.
Enter the lost hemp diaries.
Found recently at a garage sale outside Buffalo but never publicly released,
Source: I.H.T.
May 13, 2010
When Han Han, China’s 27-year-old superstar blogger, author and literary bad boy, who loves to drive racing cars and thumb his nose at the establishment, announced the title of his hotly anticipated new literary magazine last summer, he immediately had to disappoint fans.
“Renaissance” had been nixed by state censors, blogged Mr. Han, who may be the most popular blogger in the world — his site on Sina.com registers more than 372 million hits, and individual entries regularly top 1 m
Source: NYT
May 13, 2010
Neil A. Armstrong, the most famous man in the history of NASA and the first man to walk on the moon, on Wednesday sharply criticized President Obama’s plan to cancel the space agency’s program to send astronauts back to the moon.
“If the leadership we have acquired through our investment is allowed simply to fade away, other nations will surely step in where we have faltered,” Mr. Armstrong said in testimony before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. “I do
Source: NYT
May 12, 2010
In the spring of 1988, Justice Thurgood Marshall assigned a clerk, Elena Kagan, to write a first draft of his opinion in a case considering whether a school district could charge a poor family for busing a child to the nearest school, which was 16 miles away.
A majority on the Supreme Court ruled that the busing fee was constitutional. Justice Marshall, who was 80, was incensed and wanted a fiery dissent. But the 28-year-old Ms. Kagan, now a Supreme Court nominee, thought her boss’s
Source: WaPo
May 13, 2010
The Civil War Preservation Trust will announce Thursday morning that Washington's beleaguered Fort Stevens, where Abraham Lincoln came under enemy gunfire in 1864, has again been placed on the trust's annual list of most endangered Civil War battlefields.
The fort, off Georgia Avenue at 13th and Quackenbos streets NW, is one of 10 endangered Civil War sites threatened by development and other factors across the country, the trust said.
The list comes ahead of next year'
Source: People's Daily Online (CN)
May 13, 2010
The old Silk Road with a history of some 2,000 years has long linked China to the Arab world. A new Silk Road featuring close trade and economic cooperation is now being built by the two sides through their joint efforts.
The fourth Ministerial Conference of the China-Arab Cooperation Forum, which starts in China's northern port city of Tianjin on Thursday, is expected to inject new vigor into bilateral trade and economic cooperation.
PRACTICAL COOPERATION
Source: Westmorland Gazette (UK)
May 13, 2010
A LOCAL historian has unearthed rare film footage of three Lake District events taken more than half a century ago.
Judith Keep, a retired teacher who wants to set up a history group in Hawkshead, was given a surprise when she spotted herself on recordings of the 1953 Grasmere Rushbearing and the Hawkshead May Queen Festival the same year.
The archive was contained on DVDs made by 101-year-old Ellaline Jennings, a former teacher who now lives in St Helens.
Source: AP
May 11, 2010
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed a bill targeting a school district's ethnic studies program on Tuesday, hours after a report by United Nations human rights experts condemned the measure.
State schools chief Tom Horne, who has pushed the measure for years, said a Tucson school district program promotes "ethnic chauvinism" and racial resentment toward whites while segregating students by race.
"It's just like the old South, and it's long past time that we pr
Source: BBC News
May 13, 2010
The funeral has taken place of a Scottish grandmother who played a vital role as a schoolgirl resistance fighter in occupied France during World War II.
Family and friends gathered at St Nicholas Parish Church in Lanark to remember Marguerite Garden.
In 2003 she was awarded the Legion d'Honneur for her services to the French resistance.
She married a Scottish doctor and settled in Scotland after the war. She died in hospital last week, aged 84.
Source: Ynet News
May 13, 2010
Daily food intake of Aushchwitz prisoner, original Schindler's list, names of children on Exodus, blood-curdling account of millions of those murdered – and overwhelming response to deniers. Dor Glick takes trip among shelves of largest archive in world of Nazi horrors, and receives chilling greeting from his grandmother who survived and her brother who didn't
Dor Glick
Welcome to Grosse Allee 5 in the town of Bad Arolsen. Here you will find just one thing: documents. Fifty m
Source: University of Manchester
May 12, 2010
Archaeologists have disproved the fifty-year-old theory underpinning our understanding of how the famous stone statues were moved around Easter Island.
Fieldwork led by researchers at University College London and The University of Manchester, has shown the remote Pacific island’s ancient road system was primarily ceremonial and not solely built for transportation of the figures.
A complex network of roads up to 800-years-old crisscross the Island between the hat and st
Source: NAture News
May 12, 2010
Discovery that some humans are part-Neanderthal reveals the promise of comparing genomes old and new.
by Rex Dalton
The worlds of ancient and modern DNA exploration have collided in spectacular fashion in the past few months. Last week saw the publication of a long-awaited draft genome of the Neanderthal, an archaic hominin from about 40,000 years ago1. Just three months earlier, researchers in Denmark reported the genome of a 4,000-year-old Saqqaq Palaeo-Eskimo2 that w
Source: AP
May 12, 2010
Nine people have been indicted in federal court on charges they accessed President Obama's student loan records while they were employed for a Department of Education contractor in Iowa.
The U.S. attorney's office says a grand jury returned the indictments Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Davenport.
The nine individuals are charged with exceeding authorized computer access.
They are accused of gaining access to a computer at a Coralville, Iowa, office wh
Source: Press Release from Cambridge
May 12, 2010
The forgotten story of the British organisation that enabled the development of a system for measuring Longitude, only to disappear from memory after its demise, is to be told in full for the first time.
In a new project announced today (Wednesday, May 12th), researchers will embark on the first full investigation of the barely-studied archives of the British Board of Longitude, the eighteenth century organisation which oversaw the search for an accurate method of determining how fa
Source: AFP
May 11, 2010
Ancient Greeks were forced to tighten their tunics thousands of years before their descendants faced a similar fate under debt-cutting austerity measures, a senior archaeologist said on Tuesday.
Graves excavated in recent months in the northern Greek region of Macedonia show the population scaled back on funeral offerings some 2,300 years ago, probably under royal decree, archaeologist Manthos Besios told Ta Nea daily.
The graves in Pydna, a prominent city in the ancien
