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: www.australia.to
August 10, 2009
Greg Combet, Minister for Defence Personnel, Materiel and Science, today announced that full analysis and matching of DNA from Australian and British World War One soldiers discovered in France will proceed.
Today’s announcement follows the successful conclusion of a pilot study to evaluate if the DNA present in the remains found at the Fromelles site could be used to identify our fallen soldiers.
Over 1300 descendants of Australian soldiers who died in the Battle of Fr
Source: AP
August 10, 2009
Belarusian officials says that a massive statue of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin collapsed on a man who was hanging from it, killing him on the spot.
The Emergency Situations ministry said Monday that the 21-year-old man was drunk when he climbed onto the five-meter (16-feet)-high plaster monument early Monday and hung from its arm. It then broke into pieces and he was crushed.
The statue in the southeastern Belarus town of Uvarovichi was built in 1939.
Source: BBC
August 10, 2009
A team of history and woodwork experts have teamed up to build a replica Bronze Age logboat at Loch Tay.
The group will work with the tools and techniques that were used about 3,000 years ago.
They will make the boat from a single Douglas Fir trunk, measuring about 12m in length.
The project was inspired by the discovery of a logboat in the loch dating back to 1500 BC and another one in the River Tay dating to 1000 BC.
Source: Multi-National Force--Iraq
August 9, 2009
In an attempt to restore national pride and tourism to one of the oldest landmarks in Iraq, American Paratroopers and Iraqi Army (IA) Soldiers discussed plans for renovating the area here surrounding the famous Arch of Ctesiphon, Aug. 5.
The all-brick arch was built nearly 16 centuries ago and is one of the oldest free standing arches in the world. But years of neglect and war in the region have transformed the once popular attraction into an IA outpost surrounded by acres of trash
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education
August 10, 2009
By 1806, the American explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had solved the greatest question about their young nation: What lies beyond the wilderness?
Three years later, Lewis's death. at age 35. gave rise to a new mystery: one that hasn't been solved in 200 years: Did he die by his own hand, as many textbooks claim, or was he, in fact, murdered?
The collateral descendants of Lewis, who had no children, brought their case to Washington last month.
F
Source: CNSNews.com
August 10, 2009
The Senate Committee on Indian Affairs passed a resolution by voice vote last week apologizing "on behalf of the people of the United States" to all Indian tribes for the mistreatment and violence by American citizens.
Senate Joint Resolution 14, sponsored by Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), states that its purpose is “to acknowledge a long history of official depredations and ill-conceived policies by the Federal Government regarding Indian Tribes and offer an apology to all
Source: CNSNews.com
August 10, 2009
A Senate bill establishing a Native Hawaiian government is necessary to reverse the United States’ role in the "regime change" that led to Hawaii becoming a state, the bill’s supporters said at a Senate hearing last week.
The Senate Committee on Indian Affairs held a hearing on Aug. 6 on the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act of 2009 (S. 1011), sponsored by Senator Daniel Akaka (D-Alaska).
The bill would allow Hawaii's indigenous people to establish
Source: The Washington Post
August 10, 2009
Schools across the country will soon be forced to alter the way they teach the most disturbing event of the past century. The reason: Old age is claiming what Hitler could not.
For decades, men and women have visited classrooms to give firsthand accounts of the systematic elimination of Europe's Jews. As survivors, they were the exception, because far more perished than made it out alive. Stories from eyewitnesses to the Holocaust have been seen as the best way to help students unde
Source: TheStar.com
August 9, 2009
The looting of Iraq's National Museum was one of the greatest scandals of the U.S. invasion in 2003.
Archaeologists had repeatedly warned Washington that, without protection, the Baghdad museum – which held the priceless cultural heritage of not just of Mesopotamia, but of mankind – would be ransacked by looters.
And it was...
...The oldest known sculpture of a natural human face, the Warka Head, known as the Sumerian Mona Lisa, gone. A 4,500-year-old bronz
Source: BBC
August 10, 2009
The funeral has taken place of a soldier who spent four years as a prisoner of war in Auschwitz.
Charlie Evans, 90, of Presteigne, Powys, was a private in 1st Battalion, Royal Welsh Fusiliers when wounded and captured at Dunkirk in 1940.
His captors later transferred him to the Nazi concentration camp. Mr Evans, who died in hospital in Knighton, was honoured by his former regiment last year, with the presentation of a bugle and plaque.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 10, 2009
The ancient ancestors of humans were tree dwellers, rather than the often depicted knuckle-dragging apes who slowly raised themselves up and evolved into walking humans, claim North American scientists.
Researchers believe that early human ancestors never used their knuckles to walk like gorillas but evolved from other apes that spent most of their time in trees.
They found that although our wrists were capable of 'knuckle walking', our predecessors were more likely t
Source: CNN
September 10, 2009
Forty years ago, a group of young people led by a charismatic, 5-foot-2-inch ex-con named Charles Manson set out on a murderous spree in Los Angeles, California. They planned to spark an apocalyptic race war that Manson called "Helter Skelter," after a song by the Beatles.
Crimes linger in our memories when they are especially horrific or when they represent the era in which they occur. The Manson murders did both. And they grew to symbolize the dark side of the California
Source: NYT
August 7, 2009
FOR the first time since the Depression, the American economy has added virtually no jobs in the private sector over a 10-year period. The total number of jobs has grown a bit, but that is only because of government hiring.
The accompanying charts show the job performance from July 1999, when the economy was booming and companies were complaining about how hard it was to find workers, through July of this year, when the economy was mired in the deepest and longest recession since Wo
Source: AP
August 9, 2009
The fire began in the galley, where the crew had kept a stove burning while they visited a tavern ashore. As the flames devoured her stern, the Anna Maria sank through the ice in the Stockholm archipelago.
The Anna Maria is part of a vast graveyard of ill-fated ships hidden in the murky waters of the Baltic Sea, protected from the shipworm that destroys wooden wrecks in saltier oceans. Some 20,000 shipwrecks have been found — half of them in Swedish waters — dating back to as far as
Source: AP
August 9, 2009
Hebrew University has received a surprise donation of more than $100,000 from an unexpected benefactor — a woman who survived the Nazi Holocaust and appeared to be destitute, a university official said Sunday.
Upon her death two years ago, a homeless Holocaust survivor living on the streets of New York City willed the gift to the university. The Jewish woman lived out of a shopping cart in Manhattan and had no known relatives, said Yefet Ozery, Hebrew University's director of develo
Source: http://www.mydesert.com
August 9, 2009
What Lolly Burns remembers most about Watergate is Maureen Dean, sitting behind her husband John Dean, in the congressional chamber where the Watergate hearings were held in 1973.
“I remember his gorgeous wife,” Burns said Saturday. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, to look like that.' I thought it was major.”
Burns, 70, was one of about 80 Palm Springs Rotary Club members who turned out Saturday for a spaghetti lunch and a chance to grill the former White House counsel, who accu
Source: NYT
August 8, 2009
President Obama has issued signing statements claiming the authority to bypass dozens of provisions of bills enacted into law since he took office, provoking mounting criticism by lawmakers from both parties.
President George W. Bush, citing expansive theories about his constitutional powers, set off a national debate in 2006 over the propriety of signing statements — instructions to executive officials about how to interpret and put in place new laws — after he used them to assert
Source: Trevor Griffey at NixonGhosts (blog)
August 6, 2009
Activists in Washington state announced to a July 21, 2009 Olympia City Council meeting that the U.S. Army had been spying on them. Soon after they sent out a mass email alerting the public that the U.S. Army's John Jacob Towery II, stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington, had infiltrated the local chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, the NW Anti-Imperialist Direct Action C
Source: OpEdNews
August 8, 2009
Leading Chinese dissident Tang Baiqiao doesn't take misbehavior from the Chinese government sitting down. Recently, violence was directed against him with a suspicious attack in Flushing, New York.
The attack came after threats of violence that Tang received last year while Chinese pro-democracy campaigners were opposing the Beijing Olympics and CCP violence then directed against Falun Gong practitioners in Flushing, New York.
Tang was a leader in the student uprising o
Source: Lee P. Ruddin
August 9, 2009
The Merchant Navy training ship HMS Conway opened in August 1859 and was moored on the River Mersey until after the Blitz in May 1941.
Much like the service 25 years ago when the school closed, Liverpool Cathedral was full of Old Conways and shipping representatives. The ceremony remembered the foundation of Conway, gave thanks for the spirit of loyalty and adventure shown by former cadets on the high seas, under the sea, on land and in the air, in peace and war.
The v
