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: Daily Mail (UK)
November 25, 2010
The Netherlands has issued a European Arrest Warrant for an 88-year-old wartime collaborator and killer living in freedom in Germany.
Klass Carel Faber was already sentenced once to life imprisonment for war crimes but escaped over the border into Germany in 1952 where he has remained ever since.
His wartime service for the S.S. gave him German citizienship.
The warrant is seen as the first step in beginning extradition proceedings against Faber, who lives
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
November 29, 2010
The family of a real life Harry Potter who was killed in the army claim that his grave has been turned into a tourist attraction by fans of the hit book and movie series seeking their fictional hero.
Private Harry Potter was serving overseas when he died in Israel in 1939 during an uprising.
His grave had gone unnoticed in the British Military Cemetery in the town of Ramla for more than half a century.
But now the headstone has become an unlikely tourist at
Source: Tennessean.com
November 24, 2010
FRANKLIN — A state grant of $960,000 was awarded Wednesday to help preserve part of a Civil War battleground upon which a strip mall currently exists. The money, awarded by the Tennessee Department of Transportation as an enhancement grant, is to help purchase the property so that preservationists can install a small park.
The one-acre site on the corner of Columbia and Cleburne streets is near a former cotton gin and the Carter House. Historians describe it as the epicenter of the
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 29, 2010
Italian archeologists are to embark on a quest for a long-lost, 2,500-year-old Greek theatre, nearly a century after the hunt cost a British adventurer his fortune and his sanity.
Alexander Hardcastle spent a decade searching for the fabled theatre, which is said to be buried beneath the remains of Akragas, a city established by Greek colonists six centuries before Christ on the southern coast of Sicily.
The World Heritage site is best known for the Valley of the Templ
Source: The Sun (UK)
November 5, 2010
AT first glance it looks like any tatty old lampshade - the sort that are gathering dust in houses all over the world.
Then you notice the weird, parchment-like fabric stretched over eight panels, so thin it is almost translucent.
On closer inspection the yellowy material is marked with strange pores, filaments and patterns which look disturbingly like one thing only - HUMAN SKIN....
The lamp's owner Mark Jacobson said: "It weighs about a pound. But th
Source: Fox News
November 24, 2010
What Einstein called his worst mistake, scientists are now depending on to help explain the universe.
In 1917, Albert Einstein inserted a term called the cosmological constant into his theory of general relativity to force the equations to predict a stationary universe in keeping with physicists' thinking at the time. When it became clear that the universe wasn't actually static, but was expanding instead, Einstein abandoned the constant, calling it the '"biggest blunder"
Source: AFP
November 25, 2010
RIYADH (AFP) – US President Barack Obama's Kenyan grandmother says she prayed during a hajj pilgrimage to Mecca for the American leader to convert to Islam, a newspaper revealed on Thursday.
"I prayed for my grandson Barack to convert to Islam," said Sarah Omar, 88, in an interview with Al-Watan Saudi daily held in Jeddah after she had performed hajj.
The paper said that Omar was in Saudi Arabia on pilgrimage along with her son, Obama's uncle Saeed Hussein Oba
Source: NYT
November 29, 2010
TOKYO — Voters on the southern Japanese islands of Okinawa re-elected a governor on Sunday who campaigned for the removal of an American Marine base there, throwing a wrench into a deal between Japan and the United States to relocate the base and posing a challenge for the United States as it grapples with a response to North Korean aggression.
Gov. Hirokazu Nakaima, 71, had once supported the plan to transfer the base to a less populated part of Okinawa, but he reversed himself aft
Source: Politico
November 28, 2010
For Democrats in the South, the most ominous part of a disastrous year may not be what happened on Election Day but what has happened in the weeks since.
After suffering a historic rout — in which nearly every white Deep South Democrat in the U.S. House was defeated and Republicans took over or gained seats in legislatures across the region — the party’s ranks in Dixie have thinned even further.
In Georgia, Louisiana and Alabama, Democratic state legislators have become
Source: WaPo
November 29, 2010
Is this a great country or what?
"American exceptionalism" is a phrase that, until recently, was rarely heard outside the confines of think tanks, opinion journals and university history departments.
But with Republicans and tea party activists accusing President Obama and the Democrats of turning the country toward socialism, the idea that the United States is inherently superior to the world's other nations has become the battle cry from a new front in the
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 29, 2010
Libya is not an easy country to visit, but the magnificent Roman site of Leptis Magna makes it well worth the effort, says Annabel Simms.
A majestic but forgotten Roman city overlooking the Mediterranean in North Africa? It sounded too good to be true when I first read about Leptis Magna in an article by Geoff Dyer in Prospect magazine 10 years ago. He had been haunted by it after seeing a background of columns by the sea on an old photo and the name acted on him like a summons.
Source: Fox News
November 28, 2010
A key senator in the issue of terrorism trials said Sunday he will do whatever he can to prevent alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed from seeing the inside of a civilian courtroom.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said he has the votes to block Justice Department moves to get civilian trials for the alleged Sept. 11 conspirators and a better place for the Sept. 11 leadership is in a military court at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
"I think
Source: BBC News
November 29, 2010
A retired electrician in southern France who worked for Pablo Picasso says he has hundreds of previously unknown works by the artist.
The treasure trove of 271 pieces includes lithographs, cubist paintings, notebooks and a watercolour and is said to be worth about 60m euros (£50.6m).
Pierre Le Guennec, 71, reportedly says Picasso gave him the works as gifts.
But the estate's administrators have filed a case for alleged illegal receipt of the works of art.
Source: NYT
November 27, 2010
...The ferocity of the attack and the deaths of the civilians appear to have started a shift in South Koreans’ conflicted emotions about their countrymen in the North, and not just among those who were shot at.
After years of backing food aid and other help for the North despite a series of provocations that included two nuclear tests, many South Koreans now say they feel betrayed and angry.
“I think we should respond strongly toward North Korea for once instead of bein
Source: NYT
November 27, 2010
WASHINGTON — In 1976, just six months after he joined the Supreme Court, Justice John Paul Stevens voted to reinstate capital punishment after a four-year moratorium. With the right procedures, he wrote, it is possible to ensure “evenhanded, rational and consistent imposition of death sentences under law.”
In 2008, two years before he announced his retirement, Justice Stevens reversed course and in a concurrence said that he now believed the death penalty to be unconstitutional.
Source: NYT
November 27, 2010
Earlier this month, Sarah Palin showed up in Bucks County, Pa., with “dozens and dozens” of cookies, suggesting that the state’s schoolchildren risked losing the right to the occasional classroom treat because of a high-minded anti-sugar edict from the board of education. Pretty much everything about the setup was wrong. Pennsylvania wasn’t, as Palin tweeted, in the midst of a “school cookie ban” debate. And the school she turned into a photo op wouldn’t have been subject to such a ban had one e
Source: The Irrawaddy (SE Asia)
November 26, 2010
The on-going construction of the Sittwe-Amm-Minbu railroad is damaging important cultural heritage sites in Mrauk U, a well-known site of ancient pagodas and buildings in Arakan State, according to concerned local residents.
"Although we have called for an end to this project, they haven't complied,” a Mrauk U resident told The Irrawaddy. He said damage to some pagodas has been covered over with earth. The railroad construction started on Nov. 7.
The construction p
Source: MonsterCritic
November 22, 2010
Jerusalem - Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Centre announced Monday it was close to identifying the names of some two- thirds of the six million Jews killed by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II.
The number of names known to the centre has doubled in the last ten years, from two million to four million, Archives Director Haim Gertner told journalists.
'The digitilisation process helped very much,' he said....
Source: Time
November 26, 2010
Pity poor Leif Ericsson. The Viking explorer may well have been the first European to reach the Americas, but it is a certain Genoan sailor who gets all the glory. Thanks to evidence that has until now consisted only of bare archeological remains and a bunch of Icelandic legends, Ericsson has long been treated as a footnote in American history: no holiday, no state capitals named after him, no little ditty to remind you of the date of his voyage. But a group of Icelandic and Spanish scientists s
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 26, 2010
Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, will launch a new "de-Stalinisation" drive by reminding Russians of the crimes ordered by the Soviet dictator, according to reports.
Stalin's role in Russia's history will be addressed in January when Mr Medvedev meets with his new human rights envoy Mikhail Fedotov and rights activists, the Vedomosti business paper said.
The campaign will be based on declassifying all secret Soviet archives and the millions of case fil
