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: Telegraph (UK)
March 11, 2009
An Australian man has taken a lie detector test as part of his battle against extradition to Hungary where he is alleged to have killed a Jewish teenager during the Second World War.
Charles Zentai, 87, is listed by the US-based Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center as among its 10 most wanted Nazis, but maintains he is innocent.
The Centre claims Zentai "participated in manhunts, persecution, and murder of Jews in Budapest in 1944".
Source: AP
March 10, 2009
Egyptian officials says archaeologists have found ancient golden jewelry in a pharaonic-era tomb that belonged to a senior official under Egypt's most powerful queen. The Supreme Council of Antiquities says five golden earrings and two rings were found in the tomb of Gahouti, the head of the treasury under Queen Hatshepsut, who ruled Egypt 3,500 years ago.
Source: Elizabeth Drew in the New York Review of Books
March 26, 2009
As carefully as Barack Obama prepared for it, the presidency has held some surprises for him—some foreseeable, some not, and some of his own making. Seeking to avoid the mistakes of the early Clinton era, Obama concluded that, unlike Clinton, he didn't want to hold the numerous meetings that can chew up so much of the president's time. Instead, according to his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, Obama's style is to drop by an aide's office—a restless man, he roams the White House corridors—or stop a
Source: Rasmussen Reports
March 10, 2009
Most Americans (53%) now think the United States is at least somewhat likely to enter a 1930’s-like depression within the next few years.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 39% think this outcome is unlikely.
Nineteen percent (19%) say a Depression is Very Likely while 7% say it is not at all likely.
The latest results are more pessimistic than those found in early January, when 44% said a 1930’s-like depression was likely in
Source: Politico
March 11, 2009
He’s touted his father’s Kenyan roots and his mother’s Kansas upbringing.
But Irish Americans say they’re still waiting for Barack Obama to embrace another influential figure from his past: his great-great-great-grandfather Falmouth Kearney.
An Irish immigrant who came to America in 1850, Kearney hailed from Moneygall, County Offaly, a tiny Irish village about an hour and a half west of Dublin. And according to Ancestry.com, this link makes Obama about 3.1 percent Irish
Source: EdWeek.org
March 9, 2009
Margo M. Loflin teaches sophomores in Oklahoma, a state that was once part of the Dust Bowl of the Great Depression era. But most school years, her high school students don’t find the struggles of Oklahoma farmers to combat drought and financial hardship in the 1930s relevant to their lives. That's not true this year.
"I've taught [the Great Depression] for a long time. Usually, kids are not interested at all. They were very interested this year," she said recently.
Source: AP
March 11, 2009
WASHINGTON – A famous early ancestor of humans was able to thrive in glacial weather that would send icy shivers up the spines of most modern people, new research shows.
New dating techniques suggest the remains of so-called Peking Man — a batch of Homo erectus fossils found in the 1920s — are 200,000 years older than previously calculated.
What's important about that date, about 770,000 years ago, is that this was a glacial period on Earth, and Peking Man was found in
Source: LiveScience
March 11, 2009
The remains of a medieval "vampire" have been discovered among the corpses of 16th century plague victims in Venice, according to an Italian archaeologist who led the dig.
The body of the woman was found in a mass grave on the Venetian island of Lazzaretto Nuovo. Suspecting that she might be a vampire, a common folk belief at the time, gravediggers shoved a rock into her skull to prevent her from chewing through her shroud and infecting others with the plague, said anthrop
Source: St. Petersburg Times -- politifact.com
March 5, 2009
Not content to emulate Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, Republican icons for whom President Obama has expressed admiration in the past, Obama has aligned himself with a third GOP hero on the issue of health care.
"The problems we face today are a direct consequence of actions that we failed to take yesterday," Obama said, opening a health care conference in the East Room of the White House on March 5. "Since Teddy Roosevelt first called for reform nearly a century a
Source: NYT
March 11, 2009
Pope Benedict XVI has written an unusually personal letter to bishops worldwide explaining why he revoked the excommunication of a Holocaust-denying bishop and admitting mistakes in how the Vatican handled the case.
The letter, which the Vatican will release Thursday, is a further attempt to calm the waters after Benedict pardoned four schismatic bishops, including Richard Williamson, who in a television interview aired in January said that there were no Nazi gas chambers.
Source: Independent (UK)
March 11, 2009
In the early hours of a July day in 1918, one of history's most infamous murders was perpetrated on parents, their five children and their loyal servants in a cellar in the city of Yekaterinburg, central Russia.
The gunshot-and-bayonet murder of the Romanovs – the family of the last Tsar and Tsarina of Russia – spawned countless conspiracy theories, including the belief that at least one child had survived to escape abroad.
Since that fatal dawn, about 200 people have c
Source: Telegraph (UK)
March 11, 2009
Charles Zentai, 87, is listed by the US-based Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center as among its 10 most wanted Nazis, but maintains he is innocent.
The Centre claims Zentai "participated in manhunts, persecution, and murder of Jews in Budapest in 1944".
Hungary accuses him of torturing and killing 18-year-old Peter Balazs in a Budapest army barracks on Nov 8, 1944, for failing to wear a star that would identify him as a Jew. Zentai allegedly carried out the
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
March 11, 2009
The Slovenian and Croatian delegations have laid a wreath at the entrance of the mine near Lasko, where a post-Second World War mass grave was discovered last week.
Croatian Deputy Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor told the Slovenian news agency, STA, that she was horrified by the sight of the victims in photographs.
The mass grave in eastern Slovenia is believed to hold up to 300 victims killed after the Second World War by the former communist regime, authorities confirm
Source: International Herald Tribune
March 9, 2009
For Turkey, the number should have been a bombshell.
According to a long-hidden document that belonged to the interior minister of the Ottoman Empire, 972,000 Ottoman Armenians disappeared from official population records from 1915 through 1916.
In Turkey, any discussion of what happened to the Ottoman Armenians can bring a storm of public outrage. But since its publication in a book in January, the number - and its Ottoman source - has gone virtually unmentioned. Newsp
Source: International Herald Tribune
March 11, 2009
A former North Korean agent who confessed to bombing a passenger jet in 1987 met Wednesday with relatives of a Japanese woman abducted to the Communist North in an encounter that shed little new light on the fate of the missing woman but was expected to anger North Korea.
The meeting, sponsored by the Japanese and South Korean governments amid rising tensions with the North, was the first public appearance of Kim Hyon Hui, the former North Korean agent, in almost 20 years, and was i
Source: International Herald Tribune
March 11, 2009
When Libya gave up its nuclear and chemical weapons programs in late 2003, President George W. Bush pointed to the decision as a victory in Washington's so-called war on terror and as a potential model for pressing Iran and North Korea to give up their weapons programs, too.
But now Libyan officials say they are dissatisfied with the way the deal worked out, insisting that the United States has done too little to reward Libya's concessions. Officials here say they believe that Libya
Source: Spiegel Online
March 11, 2009
There were some who immediately dove into the trenches of old. The tabloid Sun wrote "if the Mafia were handed power in New York, would anyone expect them to go straight?" Then, they added the kicker: "It's the same with the IRA and Northern Ireland."
But the overwhelming reaction to the recent killings in Northern Ireland has been one of solidarity between the country's erstwhile bitter rivals. On Tuesday evening, the leaders of Northern Ireland's coalition, Fir
Source: Deutsche Welle
March 11, 2009
The well-preserved footwear dating back to the Stone Age, is of great historical significance, the head of Stuttgart's City Council Johannes Schmalzl said on Tuesday, March 10.
He described the find as a "small sensation," comparing it to fragments of clothing once worn by Oetzi, an Alpine ice man whose 5,000-year-old mummified body was discovered in a melting glacier in the nearby Alps in 1991.
The European size 36 sandal, made of woven wood, was discovered i
Source: Tehran Times
March 11, 2009
The classification was carried out by a joint team of Italian-Iranian experts led by Iranian archaeologist Mansur Sajjadi over the 12th season of excavation that began in late December 2008.
This season was more focused on classification of those artifacts discovered in the Burnt City so far, Sajjadi told the Persian service of CHN on Tuesday.
“Classifying the artifacts was very essential for us… so they were categorized as pottery works, metal artifacts, tiny relics,
Source: BBC
March 9, 2009
It has been through three phases. The first was an over-ambitious attempt to subtly continue the British Empire by other means.
The second saw it torn apart by divisions, often over white rule in southern Africa, and was also marked by coups and chaos in many member states.
It wasn't until the third phase that it emerged into what it is today - a middle-ranking, reasonably useful organisation with a formal commitment to democracy and good governance and able to bring
