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: AP
April 2, 2007
BUENOS AIRES -- Argentina on Monday marked the 25th anniversary of its failed attempt to regain the Falkland Islands, reasserting its claim to the South Atlantic archipelago.
"Neither war nor the passage of time changes reality: The Malvinas are Argentine," said Vice President Daniel Scioli, using the islands' Argentine name, as 5,000 people, many of them veterans of the 1982 war with Britain, applauded.
"We call upon the United Kingdom to heed internatio
Source: BBC News
April 3, 2007
The remains of one of the earliest modern humans to inhabit eastern Asia have been unearthed in a cave in China.
The find could shed light on how our ancestors colonised the East, a movement that is only poorly understood by anthropologists.
Researchers found 34 bone fragments belonging to a single individual at the Tianyuan Cave, near Beijing.
Details of the discovery appear in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.
Radiocarb
Source: Telegraph
April 3, 2007
MOSCOW -- An inept Soviet "triple agent" passed vital British secrets to Moscow in the late 1940s, Russian intelligence officers said yesterday as they unveiled details of one of the Cold War's most effective counter-espionage operations.
Viktor Bogomolets was regarded as such a vital intelligence source that his dispatches were handed directly to Stalin himself, the Russian foreign intelligence service, the SVR, revealed yesterday.
More details of Bogomolets'
Source: Scott Shane in the NYT
April 1, 2007
Historians of the Vietnam era suggest that those who look to Congress for decisive action to end the current war will be disappointed. But they say that today, just as in the 1960s and 70s, Congress both reflects and amplifies public disillusionment; its votes, however symbolic, could set political limits on the president’s options.
“Congress becomes the public voice of opposition,” said Robert Dallek, the presidential historian, who has dissected the interaction of Congress with bo
Source: NYT
April 1, 2007
... [I]n reading the prosecutors’ e-mail messages released by the Justice Department, the chastened words [of the fired prosecutors] could be disorienting to those accustomed to some federal prosecutors of the past, swaggering princes who often boasted of their independence from Washington.
“Big” Jim Thompson, the Chicago federal prosecutor, claimed many political scalps in the 1970s, not least that of former Gov. Otto Kerner Jr.
Herbert J. Stern, United States attorne
Source: Reuters
April 2, 2007
LOS ANGELES -- Newly released documents show that former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger delayed telling President Richard Nixon about the start of the Yom Kippur War in 1973 to keep him from interfering, according to new book excerpted in Vanity Fair on Monday.
"Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power," is by presidential historian Robert Dallek, who spent four years reviewing the Nixon administration's recently opened archives, including 20,000 pages of Kissinger's telephone transcr
Source: Linux.com
March 28, 2007
The Library of Congress, where thousands of rare public domain documents relating to America's history are stored and slowly decaying, is about to begin an ambitious project to digitize these fragile documents using Linux-based systems and publish the results online in multiple formats.
Thanks to a $2 million grant from the Sloan Foundation, "Digitizing American Imprints at the Library of Congress" will begin the task of digitizing these rare materials -- including Civil W
Source: Reuters
April 2, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Cities that quickly closed schools and discouraged public gatherings had fewer deaths from the great flu pandemic in 1918 than cities that did not, researchers reported on Monday.
Decisive, immediate action can reduce the most acute effects of a pandemic, while allowing the population to build some natural immunity to the virus, the U.S. government study found.
Experts agree that a pandemic of some virus, most likely influenza, is almost 100 percent certai
Source: AP
March 30, 2007
DETROIT —- A federal judge has revoked the citizenship of an 85-year-old Michigan man after finding that he shot Jews as a member of a Nazi police unit.
U.S. District Judge Marianne O. Battani ruled Thursday that John Kalymon, of Troy, served as a member of the Nazi-operated Ukrainian Auxiliary Police during World War II in the city of Lviv.
Kalymon's unit rounded up Jews, imprisoned them in a ghetto, oversaw forced labor, killed those attempting to escape, and delivere
Source: AP
March 31, 2007
WICHITA FALLS, Tex. -— For more than 50 years, Nat Fleming's western wear store didn't just sell cowboy hats — it became a shrine to them.
The hundreds of worn hats nailed to the wooden rafters actually were a tribute to his customers -— the ranch hands, wealthy oil investors and businessmen who gave him their old hats when they bought new ones. He even had one from Gene Autry, although it was stored in a glass case and on loan from the collector who owned it.
But Flemi
Source: Woodstock (Ontario) Sentinel
April 2, 2007
Ninety years ago, on Easter Monday, April 9, 1917 troops of the Canadian Expeditionary Force’s four divisions launched a dawn assault on Vimy Ridge.
It was a momentous day, for the first time they were all fighting as a unit under their own general and, as many claim, Canada became a nation in the process.
Although Canada had earned many Empire battle honours, from Lundy’s Lane in 1814 to the Boer War in South Africa to repulsing the German gas attacks at Ypres in 1915, Vimy was the
Source: AP
April 2, 2007
TEL HABUWA, Egypt -- Egyptian archaeologists on Monday presented white stones of pumice that they believe a tsunami in ancient times carried 850 kilometers (530 miles) across the Mediterranean to north Sinai.
The pumice was discharged by a volcanic eruption in the ancient Greek island of Santorini in the 17th century B.C. Traces of this solidified lava foam that floats have been found in Crete and southwestern Turkey, but Egypt's archaeologists believe it also reached this site in t
Source: Times (of London)
April 2, 2007
Labour’s first postwar Prime Minister demanded that Whitehall should explain why the Soviet spies Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess remained as British diplomats despite Foreign Office knowledge of their poor characters.
An exasperated Clement Attlee sought the details on the two men as their disappearance was about to be made public in 1951. With typical understatement, Attlee told his Foreign Secretary: “There is likely to be a lot of public criticism.”
The Prime Ministe
Source: ZDNet News
April 2, 2007
Accused by a Democrat in the U.S. Congress of "airbrushing history," Google said it has now replaced pre-Hurricane Katrina satellite images of the Gulf Coast region with more recent aerial photographs.
The search giant came under fire late last week after the Associated Press reported the company had traded imagery documenting the August 2005 storm's devastating effects in its mapping services for higher-resolution images depicting pre-hurricane calm.
Google o
Source: UPI
April 2, 2007
WASHINGTON -- The Piast Institute for Polish and Polish-American Affairs launched an international symposium on a controversial theory on anti-Semitism in post-war Poland.
Jan Gross, an expert on Eastern European politics, believes anti-Semitism developed after World War II due to Polish guilt over ill treatment of Jews.
Gross focuses on the killing of 42 Jews in the Polish town of Kielce in 1946. Using this event and some anecdotes as his evidence, he created a psychos
Source: BBC News
April 2, 2007
Germans have been embarrassed by the fact that Adolf Hitler remains an honorary citizen of Bad Doberan, a town that will host the annual G8 summit.
The town council will hold a special meeting shortly to officially remove Hitler from the roll of honour.
Leaders from the world's major industrial nations will meet in one of the town's districts, Heiligendamm, in just over two months' time...
During the Nazi period, more than 4,000 towns and cities awarded Ado
Source: Turkish Press
April 1, 2007
BUENOS AIRES -- Argentina accused Britain Sunday of"arrogance" for its rejection of international demands for dialogue over the islands that led to the Falklands War 25 years ago.
As both countries prepared to mark the 25th anniversary of the outbreak of war on April 2, 1982, Argentine Foreign Minister Jorge Taiana denounced parades planned by the British."What they want to do is not what (Tony Blair) called a commemoration, but a triumphant military parade, a typical gesture of arrogan
Source: Christian Science Monitor
March 29, 2007
After nearly a week, Iran and Britain are no closer to resolving a territorial-waters dispute that led to the capture and arrest of 15 British navy personnel...
For all the possible political motives...the main cause of the showdown could be a centuries-old dispute over the water border between Iran and Iraq.
It began with the 1639 Treaty of Zuhab between the Persian and Ottoman empires, which divided the land without a careful survey.
Disagreements through the 1980s, and some
Source: New York Times
April 2, 2007
They swab the cheeks of strangers and pluck hairs from corpses. They travel hundreds of miles to entice their suspects with an old photograph, or sometimes a free drink. Cooperation is preferred, but not necessarily required to achieve their ends.
Derrell Teat, determined in her research, once waited outside a restaurant with a test kit hoping to capture a reluctant would-be relative’s DNA on a coffee cup.
If the amateur genealogists of the DNA era bear a certain resemb
Source: Telegraph
April 2, 2007
A drunken doodle on a wall by Picasso has been bought for £250,000 by the nation's biggest medical charity because it symbolises an unusual meeting of great scientific and artistic minds.
Representing the only "mural" Picasso produced in England, the work was created in November 1950 while the artist visited the home of his friend, Prof John Desmond Bernal of Birkbeck College, one of the greatest British scientists of the last century.
Drawn in crayon on plast
