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: Reuters
May 8, 2007
MUMBAI, India -- The investigation into the 1991 assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi is the subject of a Bollywood thriller which promises to reveal new facts about the suicide attack, a report said on Tuesday.
Gandhi was killed by a suicide bomber while he was on his way to address an election meeting near the southern Indian city of Chennai.
The assassination was blamed on neighboring Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger rebels. It was seen as revenge for Ga
Source: AP
May 8, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Queen Elizabeth II...was to honor American soldiers with a visit Tuesday to the National World War II Memorial...
It will be the queen's first visit to the war memorial, which was dedicated in 2004. The queen, a teenage princess during World War II, won permission in 1945 from her father, King George VI, to join the war effort as a driver in the Women's Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women's branch of the British Army. She became No. 230873 Second Subaltern Elizabe
Source: Los Angeles Times
May 8, 2007
PERQUIN, El Salvador —- Efrain Perez moves with a slight shuffle as he escorts visitors through the Museum of the Salvadoran Revolution. His halting gait, the result of bomb shrapnel that nearly pierced his brain, has slowed the 38-year-old ex-guerrilla's body, but not his mind.
Effortlessly, he rattles off the dates of battles and assassinations, lists the names of obliterated villages and fallen comrades in arms. Then he leads his guests through narrow rooms filled with propaganda
Source: Washington Post
May 8, 2007
PHNOM PENH -- In a country where half the students who enter grammar school never finish, Cheak Socheata, 18, is among the most privileged of her generation: She made it to college.
But even Cheak, a first-year medical student at Phnom Penh's University of Health Sciences, has learned next to nothing in school about the Khmer Rouge, who in a little less than four years in power executed, tortured and starved to death an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians, about a quarter of the popula
Source: Times (of London)
May 8, 2007
Australia –- along with the rest of the world –- was first settled by a single group of settlers who left Africa more than 55,000 years ago, DNA research suggests.
Once there, they apparently evolved in relative isolation, developing genetic characteristics and technology found nowhere else until the arrival of the first European settlers.
The uniqueness of Australia’s ancient Aborigines and archaeological finds on the continent have previously threatened to undermine t
Source: New York Times
May 8, 2007
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. —- Fifty years after the epic desegregation struggle at Central High School, the school district here is still riven by racial conflict, casting a pall on this year’s ambitious commemorative efforts.In the latest clash, white parents pack school board meetings to support the embattled superintendent, Roy Brooks, who is black. The blacks among the school board members look on grimly, determined to use their new majority to oust him. Whites insist that test s
Source: Times (of London)
May 8, 2007
BRUSSELS -- The Dutch national airline is facing calls for an inquiry into its role in helping Nazis to flee to South America, after the discovery of documents suggesting that it played an active role in smuggling suspected war criminals out of Germany.
KLM, Royal Dutch Airlines, has always denied that it had a policy of assisting Nazis to escape justice at the hands of the Allies after the Second World War, when hundreds escaped to Argentina.
But papers revealing the a
Source: Times (of London)
May 8, 2007
A Tudor drama is to be performed in the magnificent Great Hall of Hampton Court Palace for the first time since it was staged there for Henry VIII about 480 years ago.The Play of the Weather was written in the early 1530s by John Heywood, the playwright and poet who was to inspire Shakespeare. Although he was a Roman Catholic who included extremely daring digs at the monarch in his writings, he managed to avoid having his head chopped off.The play, which u
Source: Los Angeles Times
May 8, 2007
WASHINGTON —- In 1961, Sam Jordan had just finished a six-year stint flying helicopters in the Marine Corps when he saw a want ad for an upstart airline called Air America.
"They said they wanted pilots," he recalled. "They didn't say anything about where the flying would be."...
In 14 years working for Air America, Jordan was never formally told who was footing the bill for his often-harrowing flights. But he and the other Air America pilots knew. T
Source: New York Times
May 8, 2007
TOKYO -— Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan made a ceremonial offering to a controversial Tokyo war shrine last month but did not go himself, a shrine official said Tuesday.
Yasukuni Shrine, a Shinto memorial that commemorates Japan’s wartime dead, including Class A war criminals from World War II, has been a focal point of Chinese and South Korean ire over what many in Asia see as Japan’s lack of remorse for its wartime deeds.
Mr. Abe, who has worked to improve relatio
Source: Time Magazine
May 1, 2007
Freedom of the press is a constitutionally guaranteed right in Japan — as long as you stick to what the authorities want you to write. How does a developed democratic country manage to rank lower in last year's Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom index than Ghana or Bosnia? Just ask Takichi Nishiyama, whose promising career as a star political journalist at a national daily ended in 1971, when he came across what should have been a career-making scoop —- official documents revealing that the
Source: AP
May 7, 2007
WARSAW -- Poland is preparing a law that will give local authorities a free hand to remove monuments of ''praise for the communist dictatorship'' but also will require the preservation of memorials that honor Soviet soldiers, a Cabinet minister said Monday...
Culture Minister Kazimierz Michal Ujazdowski said the Polish legislation was conceived months before the [Estonian] dispute and was intended to deal with the issue in an orderly manner.
''The point of the law is to
Source: Seattle Times
May 4, 2007
SOMEWHERE NEAR YAKIMA -- Clyde Friend was bulldozing a driveway around his shop when he first saw them in the dirt: gleaming pieces of the past. A forest of stone, more than 15 million years old.
For the past five years, on this hillside above Yakima, Friend has been pulling out pieces of rare petrified wood, no two pieces alike. Branches, trunks and slices in sunset colors. Pieces purple and blue as mussel shells. Pieces like winter sky, gray and white and all the tones in between.
Source: Washington Post
May 7, 2007
On Douglas Feith's first day as a visiting professor at Georgetown last year, he dropped in on another new professor down the hall. George Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, was friendly and welcoming, Feith recalled. Feith, who as the No. 3 at the Pentagon had served in the Bush administration with Tenet, suggested they get together for lunch.
Not long afterward, Tenet moved his office, four floors down. He told friends he wanted to be as far away as possible from
Source: AP
May 5, 2007
Israel, Palestinians slowly pushing through disputes in race to save a biblical and ecological treasure, Dead Sea.
The famously salty sea, which lies at Earth's lowest point, is shrinking. It has receded by some three feet a year for the past 25 years. Jordan and Israel warn that if the trend continues, it will vanish by 2050 along with its unique ecosystem, defeated by river diversions, mineral extraction and natural phenomena like evaporation.
A crucial project to boo
Source: China Daily
May 4, 2007
Chinese archaeologists say they have uncovered strong evidence that Stone Age people in southern East Asia were at least as technologically advanced as their European cousins -- challenging the long-standing theory of "two cultures".
Excavations at the Dahe Stone Age site, in southwest China's Yunnan Province, had revealed elaborate stone tools and instruments that rivaled those of the Mousterian culture that existed at that time in Europe, said Ji Xueping, chief archaeolo
Source: AP
May 7, 2007
BISMARCK, N.D. -- The U.S. Forest Service has completed the purchase of a historic Badlands ranch where Theodore Roosevelt once ran his cattle, in a deal worth $5.3 million, the federal Agriculture Department said Monday...
The deal, first announced in August, was completed April 25, the 60th anniversary of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park, said Valerie Naylor, the park superintendent. Federal Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns announced it in a statement Monday.
The 5,200-acre p
Source: KQED, "California Report" (audio links)
May 4, 2007
More than a hundred years ago, Riverside was the richest city in the nation, thanks to a booming citrus industry. Oranges fueled the region's rapid growth. But that growth is also what led to the area's decline. The story all begins at the intersection of Washington and Magnolia streets in Riverside -- the site of what some say is the oldest living navel orange tree in the world...
Source: Haaretz (Tel Aviv)
May 7, 2007
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem announced Monday night that it has uncovered the grave and tomb of King Herod, who ruled Judea for the Roman empire from circa 37 BCE.
According to a press release from the Hebrew University, the news of the archeological find at Herodium was to be announced Tuesday morning at a special news conference, and was to be kept secret until then, but the discovery by Haaretz of the story had led to the premature announcement.The tomb
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
May 6, 2007
ORAN, Algeria -- An Ottoman-era bathhouse is an unlikely symbol of Algeria's future, yet that is how the young people who have spent four painstaking years restoring the old building's intricate brickwork regard it.
In a country where more than a million people died in the fight that ended 132 years of French rule in 1962, and more than 150,000 were slaughtered in a brutal decadelong campaign by Islamist extremists, shifting rubble and restoring old buildings is not simply an exerci
