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)
December 26, 2007
He is synonymous with the traditional image of the Victorian English Christmas but Ebenezer Scrooge may have his roots much further afield.
According to Sjef de Jong, a Dutch academic, the Charles Dickens character may have been inspired by the real life of Gabriel de Graaf, a 19th century gravedigger who lived in Holland.
De Graaf, a drunken curmudgeon obsessed with money, was said to have disappeared one Christmas Eve, only to emerge years later as a reformed characte
Source: Telegraph (UK)
December 24, 2007
Ice skating is enjoying a revival as a family day out - but 5,000 years ago it was invented as a means of survival, say scientists.
Archaeological evidence suggests the first skates were made of animal bones in around 3000 BC to aid travel during the frozen winters in Finland.
Scientists who made the discovery say it means that ice skating is the oldest form of human-powered transport.
Source: NYT
January 1, 2008
The old photo albums were such a familiar part of the Woods family’s Adirondack camp that no one paid them much notice. But when the 21-year-old James T. Stever took a closer look at the nearly 1,000 rare photographs that his great-great-grandfather Harry Fowler Woods had taken a century ago, he saw them with fresh eyes.
The sepia-toned black-and-white pictures showed candid moments from a groundbreaking diplomatic mission to the Far East, which William Howard Taft and a large entou
Source: China Daily
December 28, 2007
Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda on Friday said Japan would "very earnestly" reflect on the "agonizing part of history" and continue to follow the path of peaceful development so as to establish "forward-looking China-Japan relations".
Fukuda made the statement when meeting with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao. China and Japan have a long-standing disagreement over wartime history.
While speaking at the Peking University in the after
Source: Guardian
December 31, 2007
The chocolate aroma is unmistakeable. The only person missing is Willy Wonka - or possibly Augustus Gloop.
For more than 130 years the Red October chocolate factory in Moscow has been churning out bars for sweet-toothed Russians. But next week the factory, one of the capital's most recognisable central landmarks, is to close.
To the dismay of conservationists, the 19th-century redbrick building on the banks of the Moscow river, close to the Kremlin, is to be converted into lu
Source: AP
December 31, 2007
Sara Jane Moore, who took a shot at President Ford in a bizarre assassination attempt just 17 days after a disciple of Charles Manson tried to kill Ford, was paroled Monday after 32 years behind bars. Moore, 77, was released from the federal prison in Dublin, east of San Francisco, where she had been serving a life sentence, the Bureau of Prisons said.
Bureau spokeswoman Felicia Ponce said she had no details on why Moore was let out. But she said that with good behavior, inmates sen
Source: People's Daily Online
December 31, 2007
Chinese historians and researchers have identified more than 900 aviation martyrs who died in China during World War II, including 404 American pilots.
"The names of the martyrs were discovered during the information collection process ahead of the establishment of a memorial hall for the deceased aviators," said Wang Jian, vice president of the Nanjing Aviation Association, which is based in the eastern province of Jiangsu.
"These include 404 Americans
Source: Deutsche Presse-Agentur
December 30, 2007
Hanover - Some 14,000 people were ordered out of their homes in the central German city of Hanover Sunday, as bomb disposal experts prepared to defuse a World War II bomb discovered in a densely populated area in the south of the city.
Buildings in a radius of 1 kilometre were cleared by police and fire officers, beginning at around 8.00 am. The operation was expected to be concluded by mid-afternoon.
The bomb is believed to be a 1,000-pounder (500 kilograms) and is lyi
Source: AP
December 31, 2007
A former home of poet Robert Frost has been vandalized, with intruders destroying dozens of items and setting fire to furniture in what police say was an underage drinking party.
Homer Noble Farm, a former Frost residence that's now a historic landmark, was ransacked late Friday night during a party attended by up to 50 people, Sgt. Lee Hodsden said Monday.
The intruders broke a window to get into the two-story wood frame building — a furnished residence open in the sum
Source: NYT
December 31, 2007
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — In 1950, this cotton market town in northern Alabama lost a bid for a military aviation project that would have revived its mothballed arsenal. The consolation prize was dubious: 118 German rocket scientists who had surrendered to the Americans during World War II, led by a man — a crackpot, evidently — who claimed humans could visit the moon.
Ultimately those German immigrants made history, launching the first American satellite, Explorer I, into orbit in January
Source: NYT
December 30, 2007
“It’s gone,” said Ed Rollins, who once worked as President Reagan’s political director and recently became Mr. [Mike] Huckabee’s national campaign chairman. “The breakup of what was the Reagan coalition — social conservatives, defense conservatives, antitax conservatives — it doesn’t mean a whole lot to people anymore.”
Source: NYT
December 26, 2007
Calling it “an awful and disgusting lie,” Will Smith said through his publicist that he is angry with a newspaper reporter’s interpretation of comments he made about Hitler, The Associated Press reported. In an article published Saturday in The Daily Record, in Scotland, Mr. Smith was quoted as saying: “Even Hitler didn’t wake up going, ‘Let me do the most evil thing I can do today.’ I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was good
Source: NYT
December 27, 2007
The United States Mint has announced the designs for the next four coins in its decade-long series of one-dollar coins featuring American presidents. James Monroe, the fifth president, will appear on Feb. 14, followed at three month intervals by John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren. The Mint is also redoubling its efforts to get the public to use more of the dollar coins, which are the same size and color as the Sacagawea dollars first issued in 2000. A test program in the Wash
Source: NYT
December 25, 2007
At a time when some voters are asking how the religious views of candidates will shape their policies, a professor’s discovery of how little tax the biggest landowners in her state paid to finance the government has prompted some other legal scholars to scour religious texts to explore the moral basis of tax and spending policies.
The professor, Susan Pace Hamill, is an expert at tax avoidance for small businesses and teaches at the University of Alabama Law School. She also holds a
Source: NYT
December 29, 2007
A federal judge has ruled that a painting held by a German baroness belongs to the estate of a Jewish art dealer who was forced by the Nazis to auction it, The Associated Press reported. Chief Judge Mary M. Lisi of United States District Court for Rhode Island on Thursday ordered Maria-Luise Bissonnette to turn over “Girl From the Sabiner Mountains," above, to representatives of the estate of Max Stern, who died in 1987, stating that his “relinquishment of his property” was clearly “anythin
Source: Ascribe
December 26, 2007
"The human race has been dropping the ball both literally and metaphorically for much of its recorded history, and likely before that. However, no country has made a fetish of doing so prior to the United States in 1908 when we started the Times Square affair with a 700-pound monster some five feet in diameter," declares Hamilton College anthropologist Douglas Raybeck on the eve of the 100th drop.
"Anthropologists ponder the significance of all sorts of human
Source: Russia Today
December 27, 2007
Nineteen million documents stored in the archives of Russia's Defence Ministry have been digitalised. The aim of the project was to help people find relatives killed or never found during World War II. The site has attracted millions of visitors from across the world. All you need is a last name in order to trace a person.
It took a year of tireless work to sort and scan the records. Before scanning, the documents needed to be smoothed out to guarantee no information was lost.
Source: Der Spiegel
December 21, 2007
German urban planners have never been as active worldwide as they are today, and Albert Speer is the protagonist in the current success story. The son of the Nazi architect of the same name is preparing a new Olympic bid for Munich, has the ear of Moscow's mayor -- and is designing entire cities for the Chinese.
He changes the world wherever he goes, and yet he takes pains to keep as low a profile as possible. He builds new cities from scratch in China. As an advisor to Moscow Mayor
Source: AFP
December 26, 2007
AIN TAMUR, Iraq (AFP) - No-one celebrated Christmas in Al-Aqiser church on Tuesday, for what many consider to be the oldest eastern Christian house of worship lies in ruins in a windswept Iraqi desert.
Armed bandits and looters rule in the region and no one can visit the southern desert around Ain Tamur unescorted, local officials say.
But 1,500 years ago, the first eastern Christians knelt and prayed in this barren land, their faces turned towards Jerusalem.
Source: AP
December 26, 2007
A new book claims to have definitive evidence of a long-suspected technological crime — that Alexander Graham Bell stole ideas for the telephone from a rival, Elisha Gray.
In "The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret," journalist Seth Shulman argues that Bell — aided by aggressive lawyers and a corrupt patent examiner — got an improper peek at patent documents Gray had filed, and that Bell was erroneously credited with filing first.
Shulman
