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: Telegraph (UK)
February 28, 2011
Five thousand years after the bundle of frozen bones that became known as Otzi the Iceman met his end at the hands of Alpine robbers, two Dutch forensic artists have reconstructed his face.
Otzi is believed to have been killed in 3289 BC, while trekking up the Schnalstal glacier in the Italian Alps.
Wearing a coat and leggings made from sheepskin, and cattle-hide moccasins, Otzi was eating a last meal of unleavened bread and meat when he was ambushed.
Hit
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 28, 2011
Two former Argentine military dictators have gone on trial charged with the kidnapping of babies allegedly seized from political prisoners and opponents minutes after birth.
Jorge Videla, who ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1981, and Reynaldo Bignone, the last leader of the military regime from 1982 to 1983, are accused along with six other former military figures.
Federico Delgado, federal prosecutor, called the theft of children "one of the darkest episodes in Argen
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 28, 2011
Ted Kennedy, the late US senator and youngest of the three brothers who lit up Washington in the 1960s, rented an entire brothel for a night during a South American junket, it has emerged.
The FBI's file on Mr Kennedy states that he "made arrangements" to hire a bordello in Santiago, Chile, while visiting the region in 1961 - toward the end of his brother John's first year as US president.
Mr Kennedy, then a 29-year-old district attorney in Massachussets, also
Source: NYT
February 27, 2011
At some point, Thomas Jefferson realized, you just can’t do business with pirates any more.
For years, the infant American government, along with many others, had accepted the humiliating practice of paying tribute — essentially mob-style protection fees — to a handful of rulers in the Barbary states so that American ships crossing the Mediterranean would not get hijacked. But in 1801, Tripoli’s pasha, Yusuf Karamanli, tried to jack up his prices. Jefferson said no. And when the st
Source: Washington Post
February 27, 2011
Arnost Lustig, a Czech-born fiction writer who drew on his experience as the survivor of three concentration camps to create unsentimental portrayals of life during the Holocaust, died Feb. 26 of cancer in Prague. He was 84.
Mr. Lustig, a retired professor of literature at American University, had written more than a dozen novels and short story collections since the late 1950s. He won acclaim for his finely rendered portraits of people who confront terrible choices - and manage to
Source: Daily Mail
February 28, 2011
A Canadian tourist who thought it was amusing to give a Heil Hitler! salute outside the Reichstag in Berlin has ended up behind bars.
The 30-year-old man, from Quebec, was standing on the steps of the German parliament building with his right arm raised as his girlfriend photographed him in the forbidden pose.
Police arrived within seconds, clapped him in handcuffs and took the chip card from his 29-year-old girlfriend's digital camera.
He risked being form
Source: Baxter Bulletin (Arkansas)
February 28, 2011
Bombs that fell from Jack's Hack and eight other B-29 bombers on Aug. 14, 1945, onto Japanese naval arsenals at Hikari are believed to have broken the back of the Japanese Navy and placed an exclamation mark after Victory In Japan Day, Aug. 15.
Niel Eskildsen, 86, of Bull Shoals and Henry Chodacki, 91, of Mountain Home put their lives on the line for each other, their country and fellow crew members on Jack's Hack, the bomber that flew 20 combat missions during World War II against
Source: CNN
February 28, 2011
Frank Buckles, the last U.S. World War I veteran, has died, a spokesman for his family said Sunday. He was 110.
Buckles "died peacefully in his home of natural causes" early Sunday morning, the family said in a statement sent to CNN late Sunday by spokesman David DeJonge.
Buckles marked his 110th birthday on February 1, but his family had earlier told CNN he had slowed considerably since last fall, according his daughter Susannah Buckles Flanagan, who lives at
Source: BBC News
February 27, 2011
Turkey's first Islamist Prime Minister, Necmettin Erbakan, has died at the age of 84, one of his aides has said.
Mr Erbakan served only a year as prime minister before he was forced to stand down in 1997 by Turkey's staunchly secular military.
His Islamist Welfare Party was banned in 1998, while Mr Erbakan was barred from politics for five years for violating the constitution.
The governing AK Party, which has Islamist roots, grew out of Welfare.
Source: BBC News
February 28, 2011
Bob Dylan's former girlfriend Suze Rotolo, the inspiration for some of the singer's love songs, has died at 67.
Rotolo also appeared with Dylan on the iconic cover of his 1963 breakthrough LP The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.
She inspired such songs as Don't Think Twice, It's All Right, Boots of Spanish Leather and Tomorrow Is a Long Time.
Her friend and Village Voice critic Jim Hoberman wrote that she died in her New York apartment "and the arms of her husb
Source: Guardian (UK)
February 27, 2011
Britain is coming under increasing pressure to provide Ukraine with an extra €50m (£43m) to construct a new contamination shield over the top of the stricken Chernobyl nuclear plant before the old one collapses.
Officials from the European commission said governments around the world were being urged to find €750m to help build a more sophisticated roof over the burnt-out reactor and storage for 200 tonnes of highly radioactive fuel.
Jean-Paul Joulia, from the commissio
Source: NYT
February 27, 2011
...The politicization of science isn’t particularly new; the Bush administration was famous for pressuring government agencies to bring their vision of reality in line with White House imperatives. In response to this, and with a renewed culture war over the very nature of scientific reality clearly brewing, the Obama administration tried to initiate a pre-emptive strike earlier this winter, issuing a set of “scientific integrity” guidelines aimed at keeping the work of government scientists fre
Source: Pew Research Center
February 22, 2011
The bitter fight over union rights in Wisconsin calls to mind a labor battle that helped define the first year of Ronald Reagan's presidency. Thirty years ago in August, Reagan fired more than 11,000 air traffic controllers after they staged a strike against the federal government.
Reagan's reaction to the PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization) strike was widely portrayed as harsh -- not only did Reagan fire the controllers, he banned the government from ever rehi
Source: NYT
February 26, 2011
MOSCOW — Let the Middle East and North Africa be buffeted by populist discontent over repressive governments. Here in Lenin’s former territory, across the expanse of the old Soviet Union, rulers with iron fists still have the upper hand....
Nearly two decades ago, the collapse of Soviet Communism offered the promise that power would soon be wielded differently in this region: The newly independent former Soviet republics, sprung from the shackles of totalitarianism, would embrace fr
Source: NYT
February 25, 2011
The blind sheik in charge of blowing up New York City had invited reporters to interview him one evening in 1993, so 57 of us stood in his bare living room. The floor shuddered every time another person or camera crew squeezed in. Then, for more than half an hour, the sheik, Omar Abdel Rahman, spoke at a dead sprint, in Arabic. The translators panted. From the sound of things, they apparently were able to render only about one phrase in English for every three he spoke in Arabic.
Th
Source: NYT
February 25, 2011
A trove of historic archive documents dating from Catherine the Great that were stolen after the Soviet breakup were returned to Russia on Friday by the United States. The 21 documents include decrees issued by Czar Nicholas II and Marshal Georgy Zhukov....
Source: Sydney Morning Herald
February 27, 2011
A treasure trove of World War I photographs of soldiers relaxing away from the front has been found in France, Ross Coulthart reveals.
Thousands of photographs of Australian Diggers and other allied soldiers taken during World War I have been discovered in France, in a find hailed as "wonderful and thrilling" by military historians.
More than 3000 candid and often delightfully informal pictures of Australian, British, Canadian, US and other allied troops hav
Source: WaPo
February 23, 2011
Here's Abraham Lincoln on Bolshaya Pirogovskaya Street, larger than life, shaking hands with Czar Alexander II. They are the Emancipator and the Liberator, joined together in a new work by sculptor Alexander Burganov. They're looking jolly, these men who, half a world apart, presided over the freeing of serfs and slaves.
Behind them, in the building of the Russian federal archives, an exhibit opened Tuesday that looks at Lincoln's life, and Alexander's. In this season of sesquicente
Source: Guardian (UK)
February 25, 2011
Second world war papers by the UK's most famous codebreaker, Alan Turing, have been bought for the nation with an 11th-hour bid by the National Heritage Memorial Fund.
Turing's work was in danger of going to a private buyer abroad but will now stay in its "spritual home", Bletchley Park, which was the centre of Britain's top secret code-breaking effort during the war.
The mathematician, often dubbed "the father of computer science", helped crack the
Source: NYT
February 25, 2011
ST. LOUIS — They call this the Gateway to the West, but for the past six decades that gateway has more resembled an exit, as this city, once the nation’s fourth largest, has lost roughly half a million people.
Though recent estimates had given city officials reason to believe the downward trend had finally stalled, those hopes were dashed Thursday when the Census Bureau released new data showing that the city’s population had shrunk by 29,000 over the last decade — an 8.3 percent de
