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: BBC News
May 5, 2011
The name Elvis was not among the top 1,000 US baby names in 2010, the first year it had not made the list since 1954, the US government said.Jacob and Isabella topped the list for the second year in a row, the Social Security Administration said.And Aiden was the only new name among the top 10 for either gender.Tiana - the name of the main character in the 2009 Disney movie The Princess and the Frog - was one of the biggest gainers, the agency said on Thursday.
Source: BBC News
May 5, 2011
The famed Musee Picasso in the heart of Paris, and home of the personal collection of Pablo Picasso, has closed for a three-year renovation.And where is all the art? Forget New York or Chicago, some of Picasso's most highly regarded works have gone to the heart of Virginia.In this First Person account, the director of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Alex Nyerges explains how he brought Picasso to Richmond, and why he's giving big city museums a run for their money....
Source: 5-5-11
BBC
Archaeologists have uncovered evidence of medieval industry on the outskirts of Bury St Edmunds town centre.
The clay ovens and leather tanneries appear to date from the 12th-16th Centuries.
Housing developers called county historians after they found mortar and flint footings for wooden buildings.
The precise location of the site is not being publicised to protect the dig.
The Warren Map of 1740 showed the area to be fields - so this is the first evidence of pr
Source: BBC
May 4, 2011
Two "new" novels by Scots author DE Stevenson are being published nearly 40 years after her death.
The manuscripts were found by one of the writer's granddaughters among family belongings stored in an attic.
One of the stories, The Fair Miss Fortune, was submitted to publishers Hodder and Stoughton in 1938.
It was rejected, apparently because the subject matter - the antics of identical twins - was considered too old fashioned.
The other manuscript is thought to date back to the 1920s.
Source: BBC
May 5, 2011
An Austrian museum is to sell a prized Egon Schiele painting to cover the $19m (£11.5m) cost of recovering another of the artist's works.
The Leopold Museum says proceeds of the 1914 Houses with Colourful Laundry (Suburb II) will pay the loan it took out to recover Portrait of Wally.
The museum paid the money to a Jewish art dealer's estate as the painting had been stolen from her by the Nazis.
The settlement last year ended a 12-year-long US legal battle.
The museum, in Vienna, has always insisted it acquired the paint
Source: AP
May 5, 2011
The Dwight D.
Source: CNN
May 5, 2011
One of the world's most wanted Nazi war suspects, Sandor Kepiro, 97, went on trial Thursday, in Hungary charged with the murder of 36 Jews and Serbs in Novi Sad, Serbia in 1942.
Kepiro, a former officer in the Hungarian gendarmerie, protested his innocence in the Budapest municipal court saying, "I am not guilty and I have always lived a decent life."
He denied having killed anyone during a raid on Novi Sad, instead claiming to have saved the lives of five people.
And he said he did not know Jews or Serbs were the targets of the raid, saying that as far as he knew it
Source: NYT
April 17, 2011
Once they were the shipshape town houses of the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s senior officers, but now the gray buildings sit like ruins encountered in a jungle, their facades, roofs and interiors overgrown with ivy, weeds, even saplings.
Source: NYT
May 5, 2011
CASTIGLIONE A CASAURIA, Italy — A little more than two years after an earthquake destroyed broad stretches of Italy’s central Abruzzo region, this normally low-buzz community of some 900 souls was a beehive of activity.Under sunny April skies, residents both wizened and young gathered for the much awaited reopening of the medieval Abbey of San Clemente, a beloved local landmark that was shattered by the April 6, 2009, temblor that killed more than 300 and left tens of thousands homeless.
Source: NYT
May 4, 2011
ALASEHIR, TURKEY — Knapsacks shouldered and bibles in hand, a group of Christian pilgrims from Indonesia, China and the United States trooped into the remains of a fourth-century church in ancient Philadelphia last month. Gazing up at the columns that tower over what is today the Turkish market town of Alasehir, the pilgrims listened as their Australian guide read from the Apostle John’s letter to the early Christians of this city, one of the biblical Seven Churches of Revelation.
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
May 4, 2011
The Polish Resistance fighter nervously crawled through the dank underground tunnel in desperate wartime Warsaw. But Jan Karski was not an escaper on his way to freedom. Quite the opposite.When he emerged into the sunlight of a summer’s day in August 1942, he was inside an unimaginable hell-hole — the walled-up Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland’s capital.He had crossed, he would recall with horror, from ‘the world of the living to the world of the dead’.
Source: BBC News
May 4, 2011
The US assault on Osama Bin Laden's compound in Pakistan has been hailed as a brilliant example of its kind. By taking big risks, special forces operations can achieve goals that few would have believed possible - or they can turn into bloody disasters.Here are 10 notable examples from the last four decades....
Source: BBC News
May 4, 2011
Nasa's Gravity Probe B has produced remarkable new confirmation of some key predictions by Albert Einstein.The satellite's observations show the massive body of the Earth is very subtly warping space and time, and even pulling them around with it.Scientists were able to see these effects by studying the behaviour of four perfectly engineered spinning balls carried inside the probe.
Source: BBC News
May 5, 2011
The extinct Australian carnivore known as a thylacine was an ambush predator that could not outrun its prey over long distances, a new analysis shows.The thylacine has been variously described as a "marsupial wolf" or a "Tasmanian tiger".This study suggests the latter term might be more appropriate; the animal's hunting strategy was more like that of a big cat than that of a wolf.Details appear in Biology Letters journal.
Source: BBC News
May 5, 2011
A 97-year-old Hungarian accused of massacring civilians in Serbia in 1942 has gone on trial in Hungary.Sandor Kepiro was listed by the Simon Wiesenthal Center as the world's most wanted Nazi war crimes suspect.More than 1,200 Jewish, Serb and Roma civilians were murdered over three days by Hungarian forces in a notorious massacre in the city of Novi Sad.As Mr Kepiro arrived at court he told reporters he was "completely innocent" and called the trial a "circus".
Source: BBC News
May 5, 2011
The world's last known combat veteran of World War I, Claude Choules, has died in Australia aged 110.Known to his comrades as Chuckles, British-born Mr Choules joined the Royal Navy at 15 and went on to serve on HMS Revenge.He moved to Australia in the 1920s and served in the military until 1956.Mr Choules, who had been married to his wife Ethel for 76 years, was reported to have died in his sleep at a nursing home in his adopted city of Perth.He is survived by three children and 11 grandchildren. His wife died three years ago.
Source: The Root
May 2, 2011
"This is a fiction," Fergus M. Bordewich, renowned historian and author of five nonfiction books, told The Root about the latest rancorous debate about black Confederates that comes as the nation's commemoration of the Civil War's 150th anniversary continues.
Source: CBS News
May 4, 2011
Source: AP
May 2, 2011
Nutcracker Man didn't eat nuts after all. After a half-century of referring to an ancient pre-human as "Nutcracker Man" because of his large teeth and powerful jaw, scientists now conclude that he actually chewed grasses instead.
The study "reminds us that in paleontology, things are not always as they seem," commented Peter S. Ungar, chairman of anthropology at the University of Arkansas.
The new report, by Thure E.
