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 6, 2011
The mystery over the murder of a former defence official in the George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan administrations has deepened after CCTV footage emerged showing him wandering around a car park wearing one shoe.
Surveillance video, filmed in the car park of a nearby office block two nights before his death, shows John Wheeler stumbling around, holding one of his shoes, and telling an attendant he was not drunk.
Mr Wheeler, a 66-year-old defence contractor and ex-Pentag
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 6, 2011
China is to rebuild Burma's historic 'Stilwell Road', the route from India used by British and American forces to supply Chinese troops in the battle against Japanese occupation during the Second World War.
The road was named after American General 'Vinegar Joe' Stilwell by nationalist China leader Chiang Kai-shek to honour his determination to find a faster way to get more military supplies from India to Chinese troops in Kunming.
Allied forces had been hampered afte
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 6, 2010
Alexandre Jardin, a top French novelist, has blamed his grandfather for the biggest wartime round up of French Jews, igniting a literary and family row as historians and critics trade blows over whether he has re-written history to suit the story.
Until now, Mr Jardin has been known for a string of fluffy, feel-good bestsellers in which he often makes light of his family.
But in his latest book, Very Nice People, out next week, he launches a scathing attack on his gra
Source: CNN
January 6, 2011
The isolated kingdom of Bhutan has opened its doors to a team of art experts in order to preserve its Buddhist history.
Working for the first time in collaboration with Bhutan's Department of Culture, conservators from The Courtauld Institute of Art in England have spent the last three years documenting some of the reclusive kingdom's most precious wall paintings.
According to Lisa Shekede, leader of the project, the wall paintings date from around the 17th century and
December 30, 2010
Dilma Rousseff, Brazil's president-elect, has invited to her inauguration 11 women with whom she shared a prison cell in the 1970s.
A spokesman for Ms Rousseff said that the women were militants fighting the dictatorship, as Ms Rousseff herself was.
She said on Thursday that all 11 have accepted the invitation for the Jan. 1 inauguration.
Ms Rousseff joined the anti-dictatorship Palmares Armed Revolutionary Vanguard at the age of 19. For three years she he
Source: BBC News
January 6, 2011
A new edition of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is causing controversy because of the removal of a racially offensive word.
Twain scholar Alan Gribben says the use of the word "nigger" had prompted many US schools to stop teaching the classic.
In his edition, Professor Gribben replaces the word with "slave" and also changes "injun" to "Indian".
But the publisher says hundreds of people have complained abo
Source: UPI
January 3, 2011
Archaeologists in Iraq have begun working to protect and restore parts of ancient Babylon for the first time since the 2003 U.S. invasion, officials said.
The World Monuments Fund, working with Iraq's State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, has created a conservation proposal to halt any further deterioration of Babylon's mud-brick ruins, The New York Times reported.
In November, the U.S. State Department announced a $2 million grant to start efforts to preserve the s
Source: The Times-Picayune
January 3, 2011
More than a century before the first modern-day civil rights march, there was Charles Deslondes and his make-do army of more than 200 enslaved men battling with hoes, axes and cane knives for that most basic human right: freedom.
They spoke different languages, came from various parts of the United States, Africa and Haiti, and lived miles apart on plantations along the German Coast of Louisiana. Yet after years of planning at clandestine meetings under the constant threat of immed
Source: Haaretz (Israel)
January 5, 2011
Over 915,000 visitors viewed exhibit in 2010, with 28% from Berlin, just under 40% from the rest of Germany and some 32% from abroad.
The exhibition "Hitler and the Germans" in Berlin has been extended by three weeks because of the throngs of visitors it continues to attract, the German Historical Museum announced on Wednesday.
Instead of ending on February 6, it will now close on February 27.
The exhibition features 600 objects and 400 photos in
Source: National Parks Traveler
January 6, 2011
During 2011-2015, the Civil War will be commemorated with special events in more than 70 Civil War-related national parks. This month's schedule includes highlighted events in four different parks.
A Great Opportunity
The National Park System's large complement of Civil War-related sites and related human and cultural resources ensure that the National Park Service and its partners will have a prominent role to play in the Civil War sesquicentennial commemoration that g
Source: Polskie Radio (Poland)
January 6, 2011
Roman legionary quarters have been discovered on the Crimean peninsula on the Black Sea by Polish archeologists.
A team of Polish archeologists supervised by Radoslaw Karasiewicz-Szczypiorski
from the Archeology Institute at the University of Warsaw have discovered a house of a Roman legionary consisting of several spacious rooms in Balaklava in the Crimea.
“The discovery suggests that there must have been a Roman fort here. We aren’t sure yet how big it was and
Source: CNN
January 5, 2011
Austrian officials plan to exhume a mass grave near a psychiatric hospital that could contain victims of the Nazis' so-called euthanasia program.
Officials in the western Austrian city of Hall told UPI that they will begin digging in March, when the ground thaws. The process could take two years.
The Irish Times reported that construction workers at the hospital, about 6 miles east of Innsbruck, found 220 decomposed bodies while they were excavating the site for a new b
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 6, 2011
A little known drawing kept in a provincial British museum has been revealed to depict the product of a meeting between two of the country's most beloved and famous artistes.
The sparse sketch by John Constable has been identified as showing another 19th century artistic great - the poet William Wordsworth.
The drawing belonging to the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) in Exeter, Devon, was being formatted for inclusion on the museum's website when the curator of art,
Source: AP
January 6, 2011
The first study to link a childhood vaccine to autism was based on doctored information about the children involved, according to a new report on the widely discredited research.
The conclusions of the 1998 paper by Andrew Wakefield and colleagues was renounced by 10 of its 13 authors and later retracted by the medical journal Lancet, where it was published. Still, the suggestion the MMR shot was connected to autism spooked parents worldwide and immunization rates for measles, mumps
Source: CNN
January 5, 2011
Several million people will decide in the next week or so whether to give birth to the world's newest nation.
They will cast ballots on whether to declare independence at polling stations sprinkled across the vast, flat plains of Southern Sudan, an East African landscape long riven by chaos.
War and famine have ravaged generations in the south for as long as anyone can remember. Fighting forced more people from their homes than in any other nation on earth. Hope remaine
Source: BBC News
January 6, 2011
He was famous for painting the town red, but now a mural of George Best in his native east Belfast has been painted out of history.
The mural of the former Manchester United legend on the Woodstock Road was a popular attraction for tourists from around the world.
But now a decision has been made to replace it with another, to the concern of a number of people in the area.
Andy Moorhead of East Belfast Alternatives, which is in charge of the mural, explained
Source: Spiegel Online
January 5, 2011
Not many people want to live in the isolated tracts of Siberia, where temperatures can fall to minus 40. But for the Old Believers, members of an offshoot of the Russian Orthodox Church who were persecuted by the Soviets, it's paradise. Now Moscow is trying to lure the deeply devout ethnic Russians back out of exile in a bid to repopulate the region.
With his white beard and felt jacket, Fjodor Kilin looks like he has stepped straight out of an oil painting by an old Russian master.
Source: NYT
January 4, 2011
The crime evoked a touch of nostalgia, tracing back to an era when political activism and crime sometimes went hand in hand. Hijackings, especially to Cuba, seemed commonplace.
Luis Armando Peña Soltren was one of three men accused of hijacking of Pan American Flight 281, bound for Puerto Rico but taken to Cuba on Nov. 24, 1968. The other two men have long since pleaded guilty and served their sentences.
After 40 years living as a fugitive in Cuba, Mr. Soltren, now 67,
Source: WaPo
January 4, 2011
The actual process is getting increasingly complicated -- the Senate's first "legislative day" might take a couple of weeks, for instance -- but Senate Democrats look to be pushing forward with their effort to reform the filibuster. Cue shock and horror. It's "a radical changing of the Senate's rules," writes Brian Darling, "a naked power grab." Democrats used much the same language in 2005, when Sen. Bill Frist sought to eliminate the filibuster on judicial nominat
Source: National Parks Traveler
January 2, 2011
We usually think of the National Park Service as being in charge of campsites, not camp sites. As part of its mandate to preserve and protect sites of historical and cultural significance, the Park Service's Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program has awarded $3,895,000 in federal funds to private nonprofit organizations; educational institutions, and; state, local, and tribal governments to preserve and provide interpretation resources to the 10 relocation camps scattered in the West.
