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
April 18, 2011
Veterans of the Gloucestershire Regiment are to return to Korea to mark the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Imjin River.About 400 "Glorious Glosters" held out against 10,000 Chinese troops for three nights during the battle in April 1951.It remains the bloodiest battle fought by British Forces since World War II.Returning veterans will take part in a remembrance ceremony at the Gloster Valley Memorial at Solma-ri in South Korea on 23 April.
Source: BBC
April 15, 2011
The remains of Chile's former President Salvador Allende will be exhumed as part of an inquiry into historic rights abuses, a court has ordered.Investigators are trying to determine whether Allende killed himself, or was killed by soldiers in the 1973 coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power.Allende's body was found in the presidential palace after the building had been attacked by troops and planes.Judges ruled the exhumation would take place in the second half of May.
Source: BBC
April 14, 2011
Argentina's last military ruler, Reynaldo Bignone, has been sentenced to life in prison for the torture and murder of political opponents more than three decades ago.Four other former soldiers and police officers were also convicted.The trial is the latest in a series related to military rule in Argentina in 1976-83, when around 30,000 people were killed or made to disappear.Gen Bignone, 83, was already serving a 25-year sentence for other killings....
Source: BBC
April 17, 2011
Hollywood actor Samuel L Jackson is to make his debut on Broadway this autumn, playing Martin Luther King Jr in a play first staged in London in 2009.Written by Katori Hall, The Mountaintop depicts the civil rights leader on the night before his 1968 assassination.Producers Jean Doumanian and Sonia Friedman said they were "thrilled" and "honoured" that the 62-year-old Pulp Fiction star had agreed to appear.Performances will begin on 22 September at New York's Bernard B Jacobs Theatre.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 18, 2011
by Matthew Day
The German government tried to influence the Adolf Eichmann trial, fearful that his testimony would implicate former Nazis who held high office in post war Germany, new research has disclosed.Konrad Adenauer, Germany's chancellor at the time of the 1961 trial, personally dispatched one secret agent to Israel as part of a sensitive and classified operation to influence Eichmann's Jerusalem trial and suppress any embarrassment for the West German state.
Source: CNN
April 14, 2011
by Ivan Watson and Mohamed Fadel Fahmy
Aboud el Zomor watched the revolution in Tahrir Square with envy from his jail cell on a smuggled television.Thirty years ago, he and a group of conspirators plotted an Islamic Revolution to overthrow the Egyptian government.On October 6 1981, four of his associates succeeded in assassinating Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in a hail of gunfire during a military parade in Cairo. Zomor, an Egyptian intelligence officer gone rogue, was convicted for his role in the murder.
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
April 15, 2011
In California public schools, students are required to learn about black history and women’s history. And if a bill approved by the State Senate this week becomes law, the state will become the first in the country to mandate that schools also teach gay history.
Source: Fox News
April 13, 2011
...The Greens, of Oklahoma City, are owners of the Hobby Lobby Empire, one of the nation’s leading privately owned arts and crafts retailers. Forbes Magazine puts the family fortune at around $2.5 billion. Steve Green, president of Hobby Lobby and the leading family member behind the project, was eager to share his family’s new discoveries and pushed to have them featured in a traveling exhibit called, “Passages.”
Source: New Scientist
April 7, 2011
AS OUR ancestors moved north out of Africa and onto the doorstep to the rest of the world, they came across their long-lost cousins: the Neanderthals. As the popular story goes, the brutish hominins were simply no match for cultured, intelligent Homo sapiens and quickly went extinct. Maybe, but it's also possible that Neanderthals were simply unlucky and disappeared by chance, mathematicians propose.
Source: BBC
April 14, 2011
Fifty years ago, shortly before midnight on 16 April 1961, a group of some 1,500 Cuban exiles trained and financed by the CIA launched an ill-fated invasion of Cuba from the sea in the Bay of Pigs. The plan was to overthrow Fidel Castro and his revolution. Instead, it turned into a humiliating defeat which pushed Cuba firmly into the arms of the Soviet Union and has soured US-Cuban relations to this day. There is a small museum in Playa Giron.
Source: NYT
April 14, 2011
A researcher analyzing the sounds in languages spoken around the world has detected an ancient signal that points to southern Africa as the place where modern human language originated. The finding fits well with the evidence from fossil skulls and DNA that modern humans originated in Africa. It also implies, though does not prove, that modern language originated only once, an issue of considerable controversy among linguists.
Source: NYT
April 13, 2011
The year was 1962, and nuclear power was in the ascendant.
A handful of atomic plants had opened across the country, with more in the pipeline. Across the ocean, a depressed coal town in the Japanese prefecture of Fukushima had welcomed overtures from Tokyo Electric to build a nuclear generating station, and the utility was surveying the site.
Thirty miles north of New York City, the Consolidated Edison Company’s Indian Point plant, the nation’s biggest, had just achiev
Source: AP
April 13, 2011
A raid 150 years ago by Confederate sympathizers on a Union fort at what is now Pensacola Naval Air Station was likely little more than an ill-planned and drunken misadventure, perhaps ended by one soldier's warning shot — and a blank one, at that. But don't tell Pensacola residents that the Jan. 8, 1861, skirmish meant nothing — the event is the stuff of legend in this military town. Some even claim the clash was the Civil War's first, three months before the battle on April 12, 1861, at South Carolina's Fort Sumter, which is widely recognized as the start of the war.
Source: AFP
March 14, 2011
It's safe to say that the Emperor Nero -- the subject of a major new exhibition and archaeology trail that opened in the Roman Forum this week -- has always had something of an image problem.
He has gone down in the history books as the man who had his domineering mother Agrippina killed, kicked his pregnant wife Poppaea to death and -- as legend would have it -- played his lyre on a hill while Rome burnt below him.
The new exhibit "Nero", which runs until Sep
Source: BBC
April 13, 2011
Academics at Dundee University have helped recreate the face of a Viking woman whose skeleton was unearthed in York more than 30 years ago.
The facial reconstruction was achieved by laser-scanning her skull to create a 3D digital model.
Eyes were then digitally created, along with hair and a bonnet, to complete the look.
The project was part of a £150,000 investment at York's Jorvik Viking Centre.
The Dundee academics were brought in by the ce
Source: AP
April 14, 2011
Workers in Warsaw laying a new tram line have uncovered a German bunker dating back to World War II, officials said Thursday.
The bunker was discovered in recent days at Plac Zbawiciela, or Savior's Square, a major traffic hub in the Polish capital where tram tracks and the street are undergoing thorough renovation.
City archaeologist Barbara Piotrowska said it was a surprise that such a massive concrete and metal structure had remained hidden from view for many decades
Source: CNN
April 13, 2011
It's not every day you hear an ex-president discuss his memories of a hooker.
But that's what Bill Clinton did Wednesday at a press conference in New York during which he praised the redevelopment that city's famed Times Square has undergone in the last two decades.
Appearing alongside New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to announce that the two leaders are joining forces to combat climate change, the former president beat back suggestions Times Square has lost the un
Source: CNN
April 13, 2011
The remains of a Massachusetts airman missing in action from World War II have been identified and will be returned to his family for burial, the Department of Defense said Wednesday.
Army Air Forces 2nd Lt. Martin P. Murray, 21, of Lowell, Massachusetts, took off on October 27, 1943, from an airfield near Port Moresby, New Guinea, with 11 other crew members aboard a B-24D Liberator.
At the time, plans were being formulated to mount an attack on the Japanese fortificati
Source: AOL
April 13, 2011
A century and a half after the opening shots of the U.S. Civil War, nearly four in 10 Southerners say they still sympathize with the Confederacy. That's according to a new CNN poll released on the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, when Union soldiers raised a U.S. flag over Fort Sumter in South Carolina and the opening shots of the war rang out. The poll's results reveal that the war that divided the nation for four years still divides American public opinion today.
