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: Duke University News
May 5, 2009
A Duke-Durham collaboration merges Google Earth technology with historic city maps to offer a new online resource for educators, historians.
The Digital Durham Web site (http://digitaldurham.duke.edu/) -- which includes U.S. Census data, photographs, personal and public records dating back to post-Civil War Durham -- recently added more than 30 newly digitized maps from the city Department of Public Works and university libraries, includ
Source: BBC
May 5, 2009
No 10 has denied it snubbed requests from Joanna Lumley for a meeting with the prime minister over the right of Gurkhas to settle in the UK.
The actress and campaigner said she wrote three letters to Mr Brown over the issue but none were acknowledged.
Ms Lumley wants all Gurkhas to be given equal right to settle in the UK, no matter when they served in the British army. Some 36,000 Gurkhas - a brigade of Nepalese soldiers w
Source: AP
May 10, 2009
The girl screaming in a familiar image taken after the Kent State shootings has reunited on campus with the man who took the photo.
John Filo kissed Mary Vecchio on the cheek Monday after they appeared together at an anniversary event at Kent State University.
It was the first time the two were together at the school since May 4, 1970. That's when a Vietnam War protest ended with the National Guard shootings that left four dead.
Source: NYT
May 5, 2009
In 1901, Nikola Tesla began work on a global system of giant towers meant to relay through the air not only news, stock reports and even pictures but also, unbeknown to investors such as J. Pierpont Morgan, free electricity for one and all. It was the inventor’s biggest project, and his most audacious.
The first tower rose on rural Long Island and, by 1903, stood more than 18 stories tall. One midsummer night, it emitted a dull rumble and proceeded to hurl bolts of electricity into
Source: Time
May 4, 2009
George W. Bush has often said that historians will vindicate his presidency. And since he left office, he's been moving fast to give them the tools.
Longtime financial backers of the 43rd President have raised more than $100 million for a presidential library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas that will house his official papers, sources close to Bush told TIME. Much of the money was collected in the 100 days or so since Bush left the White House, a pace much faster than tha
Source: Times (UK)
May 4, 2009
The makers of an acclaimed documentary about the Tiananmen Square demonstrations say that a lawsuit brought against them by one of the leading student activists shows that she has abandoned the principle of freedom of speech.
Chai Ling, once among the most-wanted people in China, is suing the makers of Gate of Heavenly Peace, claiming that a website accompanying the film infringes the trademark of her US-based software firm, Jenzabar Inc. The company claims that Long Bow Group, a s
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 4, 2009
A spokesman from the Auschwitz museum said they had agreed to a request from the authorities in southern Poland for prisoners to visit the camp as "an element of their rehabilitation programme".
The convicts will get a guided tour of the camp, in which an estimated 1. 5 million people perished, and attend a course on Auschwitz's history and the crimes the Third Reich perpetrated against millions of people across Europe.
"It's going to be shock therapy for
Source: Guardian (UK)
May 4, 2009
Vincent van Gogh's fame may owe as much to a legendary act of self-harm, as it does to his self-portraits. But, 119 years after his death, the tortured post-Impressionist's bloody ear is at the centre of a new controversy, after two historians suggested that the painter did not hack off his own lobe but was attacked by his friend, the French artist Paul Gauguin.
According to official versions, the disturbed Dutch painter cut off his ear with a razor after a row with Gauguin in 1888.
Source: NYT
May 5, 2009
In the summer of 1920, William H. McMasters, one of Boston’s top publicists, was in a pickle. A new client, a dapper and charming Italian immigrant named Charles Ponzi, was raking in millions on promises to pay investors 50 percent interest in 45 days.
“If he was everything he claimed, I would have a client such as no man ever had in the publicity field,” Mr. McMasters wrote in a newly found and never published memoir. But, he reflected, “if he was crooked or deluded, I must make up
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 4, 2009
The face of the first European has been recreated from bone fragments by scientists.
The head was rebuilt in clay based on an incomplete skull and jawbone discovered in a cave in the south west of the Carpathian Mountains in Romania by potholers.
Using radiocarbon analysis scientists say the man or woman, it is still not possible to determine the sex, lived between 34,000 and 36,000 years ago.
Source: CNN
May 4, 2009
Roy Braswell was 9 years old when the flu pandemic of 1918 hit.
"I know it's a bad feeling, 'cause I had it," said Braswell, 100, who now lives in Cobb County in Georgia. "It makes you have headaches, you be out of your head, you don't know nothing."
Margaret Duchez, 94, did not have the flu, but remembers that in 1918 her grandmother locked the door so that she couldn't go outside during the pandemic. In her community near Cleveland, Ohio, people were af
Source: NYT
May 1, 2009
The current Supreme Court, made up entirely of former federal appeals court judges, is in some ways the most insulated and homogenous in American history.
None of the justices have held elective office. All but one attended law school at Harvard or Yale. And the only three justices in American history who never worked in private practice are on the current court....
The current court is the first to be made up entirely of former federal appeals court judges. And only a
Source: BBC
May 4, 2009
War crimes judges have rejected a request to acquit Liberia's former President Charles Taylor on charges of crimes against humanity. Mr Taylor's defence team argued that there was not enough evidence for the trial to proceed.
The decision by the Special Court for Sierra Leone at The Hague means that Mr Taylor, who has pleaded not guilty, must now present his defence.
Tens of thousands of people died in Sierra Leone's decade-long civil war.
Source: AP
May 2, 2009
Doctors at the University of Maryland School of Medicine say John Paul Jones, known as the father of the United States Navy, died of chronic inflammation of the kidneys two centuries ago. Jones was born in Scotland in 1747 and died at age 45. Previously, his cause of death was listed as “dropsy of the chest.”
Source: AP (& White House press release)
May 3, 2009
ITOMAN, Okinawa, Japan -- Under a blazing mid-afternoon sun, 1st Lt. Toshikazu Nakano squats in a muddy pit at the edge of a housing development and brushes rocks away from a shiny metal object lodged firmly in the ground. He stops for a moment and barks orders to the rest of his team.
"This one might explode," he yells. "Everyone take cover."
Like former battlefields all over the world, the southern Japan island of Okinawa - home to more than one mi
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 4, 2009
Up to 400 soldiers are thought to still lie in the pits where they were buried by German forces in the days immediately after the Battle of Fromelles.
Tomorrow archaeologists will begin the formal recovery of the bodies on behalf of the Australian and British governments, supervised by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC).
The painstaking operation in Pheasant Wood, which lies near the village of Fromelles around seven miles south of the French-Belgian border,
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
May 4, 2009
It is 30 years to the day since she became our first female Prime Minister.
And despite her increasingly frailty, Margaret Thatcher was determined to celebrate the occasion this weekend.
The 83-year-old Baroness's famously steely gaze was very much in evidence as she attended a dinner in Glasgow to honour her achievements.
It is one of a series of events which have been laid on to mark the anniversary of her election and the wave of change it brought wit
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
May 4, 2009
This is the face of the first early European human which has been painstakingly constructed by scientists from bone fragments.
The man or woman - it is still not possible to determine the sex - lived 35,000 years ago in the Carpathian Mountains that today are part of Romania.
Their face was rebuilt in clay based on an incomplete skull and jawbone discovered in a cave where bears hibernated.
Forensic artist Richard Neave made the model based on his measureme
Source: Spiegel Online
May 4, 2009
German police have their doubts about whether Aribert Heim, the Nazi war criminal reported in February to have died of cancer in 1992, is really dead.
Specialists of the regional criminal police force in the south-western state of Baden-Württemberg have examined documents found by journalists in an old briefcase in Cairo and don't believe that the papers constitute "evidence of the death" of Heim, SPIEGEL has learned.
New information from the police's own sour
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 3, 2009
Britain was "dragged into a war in Iraq which was always against our better judgment" the former deputy head of MI6 has claimed, in a remark that will reignite the debate over political interference in the war.
The comments, made by Nigel Inkster, who was deputy director of MI6 at the time, make clear there were reservations over the war at a very senior level within the Secret Intelligence Service.
MI6 was blamed for the failure of intelligence that took Bri
