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: Discovery News
April 10, 2011
Many items, including artifacts from the famous King Tutankhamun collection, were targeted by thieves.
The inventory of all the items that were stolen during the uprising and the weeks of unrest that followed will be given to UNESCO, the UN cultural agency, Hawass said.
The tomb of Hetep-ka at Saqqara and the tomb of Em-pi at Giza as well as the Egyptian museum in Cairo, which houses most of the King Tutankhamen collection, were among the places targeted by thieves, he
Source: The Vancouver Sun
April 8, 2011
A Vernon site where human remains were found last week has been identified as an ancient, archeological site.
The orchard off Pleasant Valley Road remains taped off and has been turned over to the Coroners Branch and the Provincial Archeology Branch for further investigation.
Vernon RCMP are working closely with the property owners while waiting for the results of the remains from an anthropologist.
The anthropologist located additional remains on Thursday.
Source: Guardian (UK)
April 11, 2011
SS architect of final solution hated life in hiding and wrote letter to West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer in 1956, book reveals.
For more than a decade after the second world war, his whereabouts were officially unknown. Adolf Eichmann, chief architect of the Holocaust, had escaped from a US POW camp, slipped into Italy and on to a ship bound for Argentina.
The West German government, busy rebuilding the country and rehabilitating its reputation, knew from at least
Source: BBC
April 11, 2011
On the 40th anniversary of Mother Teresa's visit to Northern Ireland, a new BBC NI documentary remembers her time there and examines the reasons surrounding her mysterious and sudden departure.
The documentary Mother Teresa 123 Springhill Avenue tells the remarkable story of Mother Teresa coming to Northern Ireland in 1971 and setting up a small mission to help the people of Ballymurphy, in west Belfast, who were enduring a time of terrible poverty and violence.
So why
Source: BBC
April 11, 2010
Irish Polar explorer Tom Crean has been commemorated with a Greenland mountain bearing his name.
The 700 metre peak was named last week by a group of Irish mountaineers on a charity expedition.
The climbers hope to present a picture of Mount Crean, in eastern Greenland, to relatives of the late explorer.
Crean is known for his service with two of the most celebrated heroes of the age of empire and exploration, Robert Falcon Scott and Sir Ernest Shackleton.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 10, 2011
The British ambassador to the US told America it should not intervene to stop the release of the Lockerbie bomber from a Scottish prison, according to leaked diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks and passed to the Daily Telegraph.
Nigel Sheinwald told James Steinberg, the US Deputy Secretary of State, that he was "concerned" that the demands of victims' families were unduly influencing US policy.
His comments came during critical negotiations over whether
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 10, 2011
The 1962 book, subtitled In Search of America, finds the ageing author of The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men attempting to recapture his youth and survey the state of the nation for a final time.
But serious doubts about the veracity of Steinbeck's story have now been raised. A writer who retraced the author's steps claims to have discovered a string of inaccuracies, half-truths and fabricated events.
Nights that Steinbeck supposedly endured in his truck were in fa
Source: National Parks Traveler
April 10, 2011
Sometime this summer a truck, or trucks, loaded with artifacts and papers at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in Montana, will slowly pull away from the monument and set out on a 20-or-so-hour drive south.
When the truck, or trucks, pull into the National Park Service's Western Archaeological and Conservation Center in Tucscon, Arizona, workers will unload roughly 150,000 artifacts and archives tied in some fashion to the U.S. Army's 7th Cavalry's darkest days in June 18
Source: Ynet News
April 9, 2011
Two days before Israel commemorates the 50th anniversary of the beginning of Adolf Eichmann's trial, a leaked document reveals that West Germany attempted to influence one of the judges in the case.
According to the document, which was released by German newspaper Der Spiegel, West German authorities considered assisting the judge with getting reparations. Though the measure was eventually ruled out, it betokens the fear that prevailed in West Germany at that time that Israel woul
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
April 4, 2011
A Jewish extremist who murdered a British government minister during the Second World War also proposed assassinating Winston Churchill, MI5 records show.
Eliyahu Bet-Zuri suggested sending agents of the Stern Gang, a Zionist paramilitary group devoted to forcing the British out of Palestine, to London to kill the then-prime minister.
Bet-Zuri was hanged in 1945 for murdering Lord Moyne, the UK's minister resident in the Middle East and a close friend of Churchill, in C
Source: France24
April 11, 2011
AFP - On Tuesday, the world will be awash with talk of courage and vision as it looks back on 50 years of manned space flight, a trail blazed by Yuri Gagarin's 108-minute trip around the planet.
But what if the past half-century has been just a cosmic waste of money?
Presidents and space agencies insist manned missions will always be at the heart of their space programmes.
An astronaut not only embodies the human quest to explore, they argue. He or she can
Source: The Local (Germany)
April 10, 2011
The SS officer responsible for the arrest of Anne Frank was one of many Nazis employed by Germany's Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) foreign intelligence agency after World War II, Focus reported on Saturday.
The magazine said Karl Josef Silberbauer worked as a confidential informant and recruiter for the BND, according to evidence found by Hamburg journalist and author Peter-Ferdinand Koch in US archives.
Silberbauer was a feared interrogation specialist who spent years w
Source: National Parks Traveler
April 11, 2011
One hundred and fifty years ago this Tuesday, April 12, the first salvos of the Civil War were launched when Confederate forces began a 34-hour bombardment that ended with the surrender of Fort Sumter.
“The firing upon that fort will inaugurate a civil war greater than any the world has yet seen,” declared Robert Toombs, Confederate secretary of state, not long before the conflict began.
Despite the lack of fatalities (except for two that a surrender ceremony accident p
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 11, 2011
Secret FBI files have been released detailing how US officials saw a UFO explode over Utah – and aliens land near Roswell in New Mexico.
A declassified document from 1949 tells how three men, on patrols miles apart, each reported seeing a UFO break up over mountains north of Salt Lake City.
Their extraordinary accounts were sent to Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, in a memo titled "Flying Discs".
The file said that a policeman, a highway pa
Source: CNN
April 11, 2011
He stood 5-foot-8 and weighed 145 pounds. His face was gaunt and sunburned. Ticks, fleas and lice covered his body.
Before battle, his lips would quiver and his body went numb. When the shooting started, some of his comrades burst into maniacal laughter. Others bit the throat and ears of their enemy. And some were shattered by shells so powerful that tufts of their hair stuck to rocks and trees.
Take a tour of a Civil War battlefield today, and it's difficult to connect
Source: BBC News
April 10, 2011
Yuri Gagarin's single orbit of Earth 50 years ago this month ushered in the era of human spaceflight.
Gagarin's 108-minute flight was another major propaganda coup for the Soviet Union, which had successfully launched the first satellite - Sputnik - in 1957.
"I was a young fighter pilot in Germany I was flying F-102s in Rammstein Germany. We were more focused on the building of the Berlin Wall that year, rather than the space race," says Nasa astronaut Charles
Source: NYT
April 10, 2011
...Mandates are elusive because voters cast ballots for people, not policies. As fluctuating polls demonstrate, public preferences represent an ephemeral composite of considerations — some contradictory, like the simultaneous desire for minimal taxes and robust services.
Mr. Obama, running in 2008, promised “affordable, accessible health care for every American.” He won 53 percent of the vote.
But Mr. Obama promised many things and watched as economic conditions deterio
Source: NYT
April 10, 2011
MOSCOW — Ceremonies on Sunday and Monday in memory of the president of Poland and dozens of the country’s top political and military leaders who died in an airplane crash a year ago are being overshadowed by a dispute between Russia and Poland over the wording of a memorial plaque.
Both nations had agreed to erect a memorial at the crash site in western Russia, and in preparation the Russians moved a large boulder to serve that purpose. President Lech Kaczynski and 95 other Polish
Source: CBS
April 10, 2011
We are about to visit a place few people have seen firsthand: the Vatican Library, a vast collection of historic treasures beyond compare. It was founded over five centuries ago, when Europe was coming out of the Dark Ages. It was a period of so-called humanism when the Catholic church was open to new ideas in philosophy, science and the human spirit.
It's the pope's library, but it contains much more than just church documents. There are manuscripts going back nearly 2,000 years o
Source: CBS
April 10, 2011
Five years ago, the FBI announced that it was reopening more than 100 unsolved murder cases from the civil rights era of the 1950s and 60s. The goal of the "Cold Case Initiative" was to try and mete out justice in what seemed to be racially motivated killings that were never prosecuted.
Not many 50-year-old cold cases ever get solved - memories fade, evidence is lost, witnesses and suspects die or disappear. But that's not the case in the death of Louis allen, a mostly for
