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)
January 18, 2011
Barack Obama will on Wednesday grant Hu Jintao, the president of China, the honour of a White House state dinner, in marked contrast to his previous visit to the US when George W Bush offered him only lunch.
Mr Obama will be hoping for an evening free of controversy as he returns the hospitality he was shown at a state dinner in Beijing on a visit in November 2009.
That trip proved awkward however, with Beijing making it clear it was either unwilling or unable to play
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 18, 2011
The world has a lot to thank Edward Jenner for. The English scientist is credited with discovering the smallpox vaccine, then the first in the world.
As a 13-year-old, he observed that farm hands and milkmaids who contracted the less severe cowpox from cows were not afflicted during outbreaks of smallpox.
In 1796, as a young trained doctor, he took the fluid from a cowpox pustule on a sufferer's hand and inoculated an eight-year-old boy. The boy was then exposed to sma
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 18, 2011
Sir John Chilcot said he was ‘disappointed’ after being blocked from disclosing the contents of secret talks between Tony Blair and United States President George W Bush.
Correspondence between the two leaders in the run-up to the Iraq war will remain classified, along with notes of a meeting at which the then-prime minister is said to have “signed in blood” an agreement to send British troops to topple Saddam Hussein.
In a statement at the start of the resumed hearin
Source: Fox News
January 18, 2011
President Obama has started to come around to the Bush administration's way of thinking when it comes to fighting terrorism, former Vice President Dick Cheney said in an interview aired Tuesday.
Cheney, who two years ago accused Obama of endangering America by dismantling controversial counterterror policies from the Bush administration, said he's since observed Obama become "more sympathetic to the kinds of things we did." In the interview with NBC News, Cheney repeatedl
Source: AP
January 18, 2011
The composer of a song that inspired Romanians in their struggle against vestiges of the communist regime has died. He was 46.
A friend, Teodor Maries, told private Pro-Tv he found Cristian Paturca dead in his apartment Tuesday. Paturca was suffering from tuberculosis and long-term liver problems.
Paturca became one of Romania's most prominent democracy activists when he wrote "Imnul Golanilor" or "The Hooligans' Hymn" in 1990 for anti-government pr
Source: AP
January 18, 2011
Just months before the official opening of one of Christianity's holiest sites to visitors, the area where John the Baptist is said to have baptized Jesus remains surrounded by thousands of land mines.
Israel says the sites visited by pilgrims and tourists in an area known as Qasr el-Yahud will be safe, but advocacy groups warn that crowds could be in danger.
Worshippers from around the world dipped themselves in the muddy waters, facing fellow believers on the other si
Source: CNN
January 18, 2011
Rick Downes' mission has brought him here, to the National Archives in suburban Washington, D.C. His goal: to find any records, information -- anything at all -- that would tell him what happened to his father.
Lt. Harold Downes was a navigator on a B-26 bomber when his plane went down over North Korea on January 13, 1952. Some of the crew ejected and were captured by the North Koreans. Downes was never seen again. He remains to this day one of the more than 8,000 U.S. servicemember
Source: CNN
January 19, 2011
As history is made every day, history teachers' subject matter is growing with it -- even as the number of classroom hours stays the same.
That ever-expanding content is the crux of the social studies teacher's dilemma: How to cover every topic with limited class time?
When high school teacher David Plonski mentions the 1860s and 1960s, he expects those dates to trigger different ideas in the minds of his students at Tarboro High School in Tarboro, North Carolina.
Source: USA Today
January 16, 2011
One hundred years ago, the great African-American scholar W.E.B. DuBois famously wrote, "The problem of the 20th century will be the problem of the color line."
History proved DuBois correct. His century saw the struggles against, and ultimately the victory over, systems that separated and subjugated people based on race — from colonialism in India, to Jim Crow in the U.S., to apartheid in South Africa.
No American did more than Martin Luther King Jr. — whom A
Source: National Parks Traveler
January 16, 2011
Bibliographies and maps focused on the activities of black soldiers in the American West were produced in the initial phases of the Warriors Project, a university/government partnership designed to involve African American and Native American students in the exploration and documenting of their "shared history" in the frontier West. The National Park Service has supported this worthy endeavor with funding, training, and other support. A prime example of the agency's involvement is the
Source: Science Daily
January 12, 2011
ScienceDaily (Jan. 12, 2011) — Analysis by a UCLA-led team of scientists has confirmed the discovery of the oldest complete wine production facility ever found, including grape seeds, withered grape vines, remains of pressed grapes, a rudimentary wine press, a clay vat apparently used for fermentation, wine-soaked potsherds, and even a cup and drinking bowl.
The facility, which dates back to roughly 4100 B.C. -- 1,000 years before the earliest comparable find -- was unearthed by a t
Source: Yahoo News
January 18, 2011
BUCHAREST, Romania – Tears run down Elena Bocanu's careworn cheeks as she lights a candle and places it on the grave, next to chrysanthemums left by another admirer.
The object of her devotion is Nicolae Ceausescu, the communist dictator most Romanians associate with hunger, state paranoia, AIDS-ridden orphanages, and chronic power outages. Today, as the new EU member grapples with economic havoc and widening gaps between rich and poor, more people remember not the dysfunctional fin
Source: Times of India
January 18, 2011
An art form of French resistance at the height of Nazi occupation has come to the fore after it emerged that Adolf Hitler was portrayed as blood-thirsty King Herod killing a Jew in a church's stained glass window created during World War II.
The extraordinary work of art, depicting a black fringed Hitler as Herod, the infamous biblical king renowned for slaughtering children, remained unnoticed for 70 years at St Jacques Church in Montgeron, south of Paris, Britian's Daily Mail repo
Source: AP
January 18, 2011
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — Haitian police led ex-dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier out of his hotel and took him to court Tuesday without saying whether he was being charged with crimes committed under his brutal regime. His longtime companion denied that he had been arrested.
A contingent of police led the former dictator known as "Baby Doc" through the hotel and to a waiting SUV. He was not wearing handcuffs.
Duvalier, 59, was calm and did not say anything, ig
Source: CHE
January 16, 2011
If you ever catch Timothy J. Johnson in a deerstalker hat, it's more likely to be blaze orange than the subdued houndstooth associated with Sherlock Holmes. The game Mr. Johnson stalks really is deer, not London's criminal element. As the recently appointed E.W. McDiarmid curator of the Sherlock Holmes Collections at the University of Minnesota Libraries, though, the native Minnesotan has developed a close bond with the fictional London detective and his world.
Mr. Johnson has charg
Source: NYT
January 17, 2011
As they did in other corners of the city and the country, shadows of Arizona hovered gloomily on Monday over Brooklyn’s annual tribute to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
How could they not? Dr. King, born 82 Januarys ago, was murdered with a firearm 39 years later. Now, out West, yet more insanity with a gun has claimed fresh victims, including a badly wounded congresswoman. The leap from Memphis, 1968, to Tucson, 2011, was predictable and easy for a series of elected officials
Source: NYT
January 17, 2011
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — One year after Haiti was hit by a devastating earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people, the country grappled on Monday to absorb yet another potentially destabilizing blow: the surprising return of the former dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, whose emergence from nearly a quarter-century in exile prompted condemnations from around the world and ignited new fears of conflict.
Mr. Duvalier, known as Baby Doc, returned to Haiti 24 years and 11 months after h
Source: The Local (Germany)
January 18, 2011
Klaus Barbie, the Nazi war criminal known as the ‘butcher of Lyon’ for his hideous treatment of Jewish prisoners, was paid by the German intelligence services for political information during the 1960s, according to Der Spiegel.
Barbie fled to Bolivia after the war, in which he had served as the head of the SS in Lyon, and lived there under the name Klaus Altmann from 1951. It was there that he was recruited by the BND intelligence service, the magazine reported on Saturday.
Source: BBC News
January 17, 2011
In the spring of 1941, a top secret plot was being hatched that, if successful, would have changed the face of Europe.
It was a plan to kidnap Adolf Hitler at the aerodrome in Lympne in Kent.
Hitler was to be taken alive from the plane after a rapid descent over The Channel before being bundled into the back of a car and driven to London.
Evidence of the plan can be found in official RAF documents kept at the National Archives in Kew.
The story
Source: BBC News
January 18, 2011
A former Rwandan mayor has gone on trial accused of ordering three Tutsi massacres during the country's 1994 genocide, in the first such case prosecuted in Frankfurt, Germany.
Onesphore Rwabukombe, a 54-year-old ethnic Hutu who has lived in Germany for several years, was arrested by German police last summer.
He is charged with genocide, murder, and incitement to genocide and murder.
He could face life in prison if convicted.
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