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
January 24, 2011
An online poll organised by Russia's ruling party suggests there is strong support for burying Lenin's body.
Of more than 250,000 people who have voted in the poll, two-thirds so far say Lenin should now be buried.
The revolutionary leader's embalmed body has been on display in a mausoleum in Red Square in Moscow since his death in 1924.
The debate about what to with his body resurfaces with every anniversary of his death - on 21 January 1924.
Source: WaPo
January 23, 2011
RICHMOND, Va. -- Nearly 150 years after Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant fought in northern Virginia, a conflict over the battlefield is taking shape in a courtroom.
The dispute involves whether a Walmart should be built near the Civil War site, and the case pits preservationists and some residents of a rural northern Virginia town against the world's largest retailer and local officials who approved the Walmart Supercenter.
Both sides are scheduled to make arguments
Source: NYT
January 24, 2011
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe — The exhibit at the National Gallery is now a crime scene, the artwork banned and the artist charged with insulting President Robert Mugabe. The picture windows that showcased graphic depictions of atrocities committed in the early years of Mr. Mugabe’s 30-year-long rule are now papered over with the yellowing pages of a state-controlled newspaper.
But the government’s efforts to bury history have instead provoked slumbering memories of the Gukurahundi, Zimbabwe’
Source: NYT
January 21, 2011
WHAT drives an ordinary man to burn himself to death?
That question has echoed across the Arab world and beyond in the weeks since an unemployed Tunisian, Mohamed Bouazizi, doused himself with paint thinner and lit a match on Dec. 17. His desperate act set off street clashes that ultimately toppled the country’s autocratic ruler, and inspired nearly a dozen other men to set themselves on fire in Egypt, Algeria and Mauritania....
Yet burning oneself as political protest
Source: NYT
January 22, 2011
FOR a superpower, dealing with the fast rise of a rich, brash competitor has always been an iffy thing.
Just ask the British, who a century ago were struggling to come to terms with the erosion of their status as the world’s No. 1 empire. It didn’t help that they were being upstaged by a former colony that had turned into an upstart sea-power with money, talent, and a knack for mangling a perfectly good language. Eventually they took the hit to the national ego from those Americans
Source: NYT
January 23, 2011
What story will it tell? As part of the Smithsonian, the museum bears the burden of being the “official” — that is, the government’s — version of black history, but it will also carry the hopes and aspirations of African-Americans. Will its tale be primarily one of pain, focused on America’s history of slavery and racial oppression, and memorializing black suffering? Or will it emphasize the uplifting part of the story, highlighting the richness of African-American culture, celebrating the brav
Source: BBC
January 20, 2011
The first British portrait of a freed slave, which faced being lost to the nation, will remain in the UK for the next five years.
William Hoare's painting of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, also known as Job ben Solomon, was purchased by the Qatar Museums Authority (QMA) in 2009.
The government imposed a temporary export bar last year because of its historic importance to the UK.
Money was raised to buy the work back, but the QMA agreed to lend it instead.
Source: BBC
January 22, 2011
A Wiltshire village that was deserted after being taken over by troops for training during the Second World War is being remembered at a special event.
People living in Imber, on Salisbury Plain, were evacuated in December 1943 and have never been allowed to return.
Fifty years ago, thousands of people marched into the village to protest at its continued use by the Army.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) said the village still plays a vital role in training tro
Source: BBC
January 22, 2011
When John Barratt drilled a hole into an old vase and turned into an electric lamp, he had no idea he was messing with a 2,000-year-old relic worth more than a third of a million pounds.
He fitted a lamp socket and furnished the 19-inch urn with a red lamp shade.
Nearly 40 years later, despite his alterations, it sold for £370,000 at Christie's auction house on Friday.
Mr Barratt, a retired school teacher who died last year, had inherited the urn and kept i
Source: BBC
January 21, 2011
Tony Blair has said he "regrets deeply and profoundly the loss of life" during and after the 2003 Iraq war.
The ex-PM said his refusal to express regret for the decisions that led to war at his first appearance before the committee had been misinterpreted.
But his words were met with cries of "too late" from the public gallery.
Mr Blair also urged the West to stop apologising for its actions and warned of the threat from Iran, during a f
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 21, 2011
The surprise return of ousted dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier to Haiti may have been part of a plan to unlock $5.7 million (£3.6 million) held in Swiss bank accounts.
The surprise return of ousted dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier to Haiti may have been part of a plan to unlock $5.7 million (£3.6 million) held in Swiss bank accounts.
Duvalier, who presided over a nightmarish period in Haitian history with his infamous Tonton Macoute
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 22, 2011
Victims of Baby Doc's brutal regime are warily watching his moves after the former ruler returned to Haiti last week, writes Jacqui Goddard in Port au Prince.
It was known to some as Haiti's Auschwitz, a death camp where innocent hordes met with horror at the hands of a regime determined to cleanse the country of political dissenters and democratic thinkers.
Hidden inside a slum, whose dirt-poor residents now face their own daily battles for survival, crumbled walls a
Source: AP
January 22, 2011
For more than a century, tens of thousands worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, building some of the nation's most storied warships — sailing frigates, Civil War ironclads, gunboats, sloops and 20th-century warships and submarines. The yard's sprawling hospital treated soldiers from the 1860s through World War II.
Now, more than four decades after the largest-scale shutdown of any military facility in U.S. history, the Navy Yard is coming to life again.
Today, the 300-acr
Source: Fox News
January 22, 2010
President Barack Obama is marking the 38th anniversary of the Supreme Court's landmark decision on abortion by calling the procedure a constitutional right he's committed to protecting.
Obama also said in a statement Saturday that he remains committed to policies designed to prevent unintended pregnancies. And he called on Americans to recommit themselves to ensuring that, in the president's words, "our daughters have the same rights, the same freedoms, and the same opportuniti
Source: CNN
January 21, 2011
Ernest Hemingway hasn't lived here in over 50 years but Finca Vigia is still his home.
In the garden there's his boat "the Pilar" used to hunt marlin and then Nazi subs off Cuba during World War II. Scrawled on a bathroom wall next to a scale are the daily records of what the writer weighed.
Lizards and frogs he caught rest in jars filled with formaldehyde. Antelopes and buffalo heads taken as trophies from African safaris decorate the walls. Yellowing Time
Source: CNN
January 21, 2011
Facial protrusions that look like hands; dangling sticks and feathers; a wide and mischievous grin: It's no wonder this rare Eskimo shaman's mask was so precious to the Surrealists.
And now a price has been put on the value of the Donati Studio Mask -- it was sold for over $2.5 million Thursday to a U.S. collector.
It breaks the previous record for indigenous U.S. art sold at public auction, said a spokesman for the Winter Antiques Show in New York, where the mask was
Source: AP
January 17, 2011
COLUMBIA, S.C. —
Speakers at an annual rally honoring Martin Luther King Jr. said Monday the Confederate battle flag flying above their heads on Statehouse grounds is a symbol of the injustice that still exists 43 years after the civil rights leader was slain.
They renewed a call to legislators to move the flag, and concentrate on ideas that will put people to work, keep them healthy and provide children of all backgrounds a good education.
"Take down that f
Source: Deutsche Welle
January 20, 2011
Reinhard Gehlen was a flexible man: The former major-general and chief of the Foreign Armies East military intelligence organization within the German military once spied for Hitler; soon afterward he was in the service of the United States.
Gehlen helped set up Germany's post-war secret service for the Americans, the body that would go on to become the Federal Intelligence Service (BND).
With the Cold War looming, Gehlen did not hesitate to look to the ranks of former
Source: BBC News
January 20, 2011
Thousands of years of history at a remote priory in Norfolk could be unearthed after the discovery of giant medieval graffiti on its walls.
The Norfolk Medieval Graffiti Survey (NMGS) group claims to have found 8ft (2.4m) building plans etched into the stonework of Binham Priory, near Wells.
The drawings, which are too faint to photograph, seem to show how the building's west front was built.
"It was difficult to believe what I was seeing," said N
Source: SwissInfo
January 20, 2011
After works of art plundered by the Nazis ended up in Switzerland, a report commissioned by the government says more needs to be done to trace the origins of these objects.
The report, published this week by the Federal Culture Office, said access to the results of provenance research and to relevant archives must be simplified.
“There’s a need to improve information and awareness at all levels in public and private museums,” Benno Widmer, head of the contact bureau on
