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: Daily Mail (UK)
Feb 17, 2009
Hitler had 'shocking' table manners, gorged on cake in his bunker and suffered from a digestive disorder that might have resulted in flatulence, it has been revealed.
The dictator also bit his fingernails at meal times and nervously rubbed his index finger back and forth across his moustache, according to newly-discovered documents.
The top secret papers also state Hitler believed Joseph Goebbels' own propaganda about himself, genuinely believing he was the 'greatest mi
Source: BBC
Feb 17, 2009
Kaing Guek Eav - better known as Duch - was head of a notorious prison camp and is accused of presiding over the murder and torture of at least 15,000 inmates.
The trial is the result of a decade of painstaking and often ill-tempered negotiations, a BBC correspondent says.
People queued for hours to attend the hearing and see the ex-prison chief.
For the survivors, the opening day of the hearing offered the first opportunity to see a leading figure in th
Source: BBC
Feb 17, 2009
Kosovo has been striving to secure its borders and develop its economy in the face of opposition from Serbia, which refuses to recognise its independence.
Prime Minister Hashim Thaci says it is building a homeland for all its people.
But correspondents say parts of northern Kosovo remain tensely divided between ethnic Albanians and Serbs.
MPs from the Serbian parliament in Belgrade are due to hold a committee meeting in Kosovo in protest against the anni
Source: CNN
Feb 16, 2009
The world may soon know for sure where Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca rests after fascists executed him in 1936 during Spain's Civil War.
Officials in southern Spain Friday cleared the last legal hurdle to permit exhuming a mass grave site in a village near Granada where Lorca and some other Civil War victims are thought to be buried, CNN partner station CNN+ reported.
The area has been fenced off for weeks as scientists conducted preparatory work.
Source: NYT
Feb 16, 2009
Great museums engender great debate, and there is no exception for Iraq. Officials here
are at odds over the reopening of Iraq’s National Museum, the renowned institution that was pillaged
after the American invasion in 2003 and has been closed to the public ever since.
Last week, Iraq’s state minister for tourism and antiquities announced that next Monday the museum
would reopen, an eagerly anticipated event seen as a milestone in the country’s recovery. In a
Source: USA Today
Feb 16, 2009
The nation's new president has been compared to FDR. His economic views go by the catchy code word Obamanomics. The transition of power at the White House is always a big deal on Wall Street — but never more so than this year with the stock market, banking system and economy in the throes of the worst crisis since the 1930s.
Enter President Obama, a politician with JFK-like charisma and high approval ratings. Wall Street and Main Street are counting on him to be Mr. Fix-it.
Source: NYT
Feb 16, 2009
For the first time in its history, every member of the United States Supreme Court is a former federal appeals court judge. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., in a lively and surprising talk a couple of weeks ago, said that development might be a good thing.
Over the life of the Supreme Court, its members were quite likely to be former governors, legislators, cabinet members, law professors and practicing lawyers. That mix of backgrounds and expertise might strike some as valuable,
Source: Rocku Mount Telegram
Feb 16, 2009
It could be one of the nation’s oldest cold case files: What happened to eight Confederate sailors aboard the CSS H.L. Hunley after it became the first submarine in history to sink an enemy warship?
Their hand-cranked sub rammed a spar with black powder into the blockade ship USS Housatonic off Charleston on a chilly winter night in 1864 then disappeared.
The Hunley’s fate has been the subject of almost 150 years of conjecture and almost a decade of scientific researc
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Feb 16, 2009
It may look like just another hole in the ground, but this is no ordinary hole in the ground - it contains the remnants of one of the earliest watermills ever found.
The mill, which dates back to the 12th century, was discovered at Greenwich Wharf as developers prepared the way for a new building.
It has been preserved against centuries of damage by riverside peat deposits. Carpenters' or millwrights' assembly marks are clearly visible on the timbers.
Thi
Source: Guardian (UK)
Feb 16, 2009
Not all treasure thieves tiptoe through the shells of Iraqi museums or churn up the deserts of Peru in their hunt for valuable antiquities. Nearer to home "nighthawkers" are using metal detectors and online auctions to strip rural Britain of its archaeological riches, and their illegal activities are proving every bit as destructive.
English Heritage has been so concerned about the extent of the depredation that it commissioned a study, which revealed that what was once an
Source: BBC
Feb 16, 2009
China is to lend 29 treasures to Taiwan for an exhibition - the first such cultural exchange in 60 years.
The artefacts from Beijing's Palace Museum date from the Qing Dynasty, and will be shown for three months at the National Palace Museum in Taipei.
Between them, the two museums are believed to have the world's most precious collection of Chinese relics.
A huge collection has been kept in Taiwan since nationalists headed there when China's civil war e
Source: Deutsche Welle
Feb 16, 2009
Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, Poland's special representative for relations with Germany, met in Berlin with Merkel on Monday, Feb. 16. There was no news conference, but he told Polish reporters later he was "fully calmed and satisfied."
Tension had earlier flared after Polish diplomats reportedly heard that Association of Expellees President Erika Steinbach, 65, would be appointed to the board of the planned Berlin center, which is to depict how ethnic Germans had to flee many
Source: BBC
Feb 16, 2009
But simmering nationalistic emotions are being brought to the surface by painful memories.
Hoang Thi Lich, 72, remembers vividly the morning of 17 February 1979, when she and her family woke to a suffocating sense of panic in the mountains of Cao Bang.
As dawn broke, China launched attacks on a number of positions in Vietnam's northernmost provinces with a staggering display of so-called "human waves" and artillery power.
Mrs Lich's family was
Source: BBC
Feb 16, 2009
The Council of State said the state had permitted or facilitated deportations that led to anti-Semitic persecution without being coerced by the occupiers.
But the council also found reparations had since been made "as much as was possible, for all the losses suffered".
Correspondents say the ruling is the clearest such recognition of the French state's role in the Holocaust.
Between 1942 and 1944 some 76,000 Jews were deported from France by th
Source: Rasmussen Reports
Feb 16, 2009
It’s a good thing today’s holiday isn’t Father’s Day because the Father of our Country sure isn’t getting much respect.
George Washington is a distant second to Abraham Lincoln in a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey asking Americans which of the men whose birthdays we honor on Presidents’ Day has had the more lasting impact on U.S. history.
Sixty-nine percent (69%) say Lincoln, the 16th president who served from 1861 to 1865, while 23% say Washington, our
Source: BBC
Feb 16, 2009
The Royal Navy has unveiled its plans for celebrations to mark the centenary of British naval air power.
The anniversary will be celebrated throughout the year with a series of flypasts, concerts and other events.
On 7 May, 1909 the Admiralty put aside funds for its first airship, changing the face of warfare to come.
One hundred years later, the navy's Fleet Air Arm can boast more than 250 aircraft and helicopters - a third of the UK forces' air strengt
Source: BBC
Feb 16, 2009
A study has concluded that many of the UK's historic sites are under threat from illegal metal detector users. History enthusiasts are frustrated that little is being done to prevent the damage.
One landowner tells of discovering a gang armed with bicycle chains and other weapons, as well as dozens of maps, highlighted with sites of historical interest.
Responsible metal detectorists, as they are called, are just as angry about what the criminal minority do in their n
Source: BBC
Feb 16, 2009
Twenty years on from the Soviet Union's pull-out from Afghanistan, the BBC's Rayhan Demytrie looks at the role soldiers from the Central Asian nations played in the conflict.
In the almost 10 years that Soviet forces battled Afghanistan's Mujahideen, hundreds of thousands of soldiers from across the USSR took part in the conflict.
The troops included soldiers recruited from Afghanistan's mainly Muslim northern neighbours, who shared culture with their Afghan cousins.
Source: BBC
Feb 16, 2009
One of pop superstar Michael Jackson's brothers, Marlon, is involved in a controversial plan to develop a $3.4bn (£2.4bn) slavery memorial and luxury resort in Badagry, Nigeria.
The historic slave port is to be transformed through the bizarre combination of a slave history theme park and a museum dedicated to double Grammy-winning pop-soul group the Jackson Five.
The idea is that the band will help attract African-American tourists keen to trace their roots back to Ni
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 16, 2009
Pope John Paul II was the subject of two assassination plots in his native Poland a senior member of the Polish Catholic Church has claimed.
Zdzislaw Krol, chancellor of Warsaw Metropolitan Curia, said the late pontiff faced plots against his life during his 1983 and 1987 pilgrimages to Poland.
Before the start of the 1987 pilgrimage the Church received information from a woman of a plan to kill the pope while his was in the town of Czestochowa, a focal point of Polish
