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: AP
October 22, 2010
Two mass graves that may hold the remains of up to 2,000 Japanese soldiers have been discovered on the island of Iwo Jima, one of the bloodiest and most iconic battlesites of World War II, a report and officials said Friday.
A team of Japanese searchers has discovered 51 remains in two areas listed by the U.S. military after the war as enemy cemeteries, one of which could contain as many as 2,000 bodies, Japan's Kyodo news agency said Friday.
Officials at Japan's health
Source: AP
October 22, 2010
The British government Friday released a formerly secret autopsy report in an attempt to end speculation that the 2003 death of a government weapons scientist at the center of a controversy over the Iraq War was not a suicide.
The lengthy report reaffirms that David Kelly slit his wrist after he was exposed as the source of a British Broadcasting Corp. report that accused then Prime Minister Tony Blair's office of "sexing up" prewar intelligence to justify the 2003 invasio
Source: AP
October 22, 2010
An anonymous benefactor in New York City stuffed $10,000 in cash into a 9/11 donation box at the World Trade Center.
Joe Daniels, president of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, tells the New York Post that officials found 99 $100 bills and five 20s in the box on Tuesday night.
The box hangs on a wall at the 9/11 memorial preview site....
Source: CNN
October 22, 2010
Dick Cheney is certainly not one to hold back on how he really feels. George W. Bush, on the other hand, has been mum.
Despite their differing approaches to handling the post-White House years, their absence on the campaign trail has been obvious.
Cheney also has been dealing with health troubles -- undergoing heart surgery in July and spending the bulk of his time since then recovering.
But that is not stopping him. The 69-year-old soon will embark on a 1
Source: NYT
October 21, 2010
BELGRADE — After 15 years on the run — sometimes in plain sight at soccer matches and weddings and sometimes deep in the fabric of this secretive city — Europe’s most wanted war-crimes suspect, Ratko Mladic, is being hidden by no more than a handful of loyalists, most probably in a neighborhood of Communist-era housing towers, according to investigators and some of his past associates.
The diminished circumstances of the former Bosnian Serb general, who once was protected by scores
Source: Salon
October 20, 2010
The influential conservative publishing house Regnery has just released a book that argues, contrary to popular belief, that aviator and political leader Charles Lindbergh was neither anti-semitic nor pro-German, but rather was the victim of an unfounded smear campaign by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.According to promotional material, the book,"Lindbergh vs. Roosevelt: The Rivalry That Divided America" by
Source: Minnesota Public Radio
October 21, 2010
Rwanda's top prosecutor wants an American professor to appear in a Rwandan court on charges of genocide denial.
Martin Ngoga says Peter Erlinder will be charged with denying Rwanda's genocide. Erlinder, a law professor at the William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota, was arrested in May and was granted bail in June....
Source: NYT
October 20, 2010
When people compare New York to Rome, the reference is not usually meant to be flattering. But our town shares at least one inspiring quality with the Eternal City. Just about anytime you knock an old wall down, there is an even older wall behind it.
Columbus Circle mosaic The old mosaic’s guilloche pattern can be discerned under the decorative plaque by Grueby Faience.
Another keyhole to the past opened recently on the uptown platform of the No. 1 train at the 59th Street-Co
Source: NYT
October 20, 2010
NAJRAN, Saudi Arabia — Among the ruins on the edge of this ancient oasis city are deep trenches littered with bones. That, local people say, is all that remains of one of the great atrocities of antiquity, when thousands of Christians were herded into pits here and burned to death by a Jewish tyrant after they refused to renounce their faith.
The massacre, which took place in about A.D. 523, is partly shadowed by myth and largely unknown to the outside world. But it has become centr
Source: NYT
October 20, 2010
His ancestors were slaves. They worked this flat plantation land just west of the snaking Mississippi, chopping sugar cane with their machetes. They and some of their descendants lived in the plantation’s “quarters.” And when they died, most were buried here in a small patch of earth, for blacks only.
Ernest J. Gaines, 77, the acclaimed author of “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” and “A Lesson Before Dying,” is part of the fifth generation of this family to be born on the Riv
Source: WaPo
October 21, 2010
Voltaire said history is a pack of tricks we play upon the dead. He should have added that the living are victims, too.
Virginia fourth-graders are the latest targets of historical misinformation. A textbook distributed to students last month included the gross falsehood that two battalions of African American soldiers fought for the Confederacy under famed Gen. Stonewall Jackson.
This wasn't just a minor factual error, like saying that Jackson lost his right arm at the
Source: ABC News
October 20, 2010
When you're President of the United States, you can lose a vote, you can lose popular support, and you can lose a round of golf. But you're never, ever supposed to lose the biscuit.
That's what they call the card the president is meant to keep close at hand, bearing the codes that he has to have in order to launch a nuclear attack. And for several months during the Clinton administration, a former top military officer says they lost the biscuit.
Gen. Hugh Shelton, who
Source: CNN.com
October 19, 2010
Washington (CNN) -- The government will provide $680 million in compensation to settle a class-action lawsuit by Native American farmers against the U.S. Department of Agriculture, according to a proposed agreement announced Tuesday.
Under the agreement, which requires federal court approval, Native Americans can file claims for discrimination involving farm loans that occurred in the period from 1981-1999, said statements by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Attorney General Er
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 21, 2010
The landscape picture was given to Roland Davis, an airman who guarded Hess after the Second World War, as a keepsake.
Mr Davis joined the RAF as a rear gunner on Lancaster bomber and at the end of his career he guarded Hess in Berlin where the pair became friends.
The signed painting is thought to be of a Bavarian scene from Hess's childhood. The rest of the collection includes a helmet, gas mask, flight records and medals.
It is part of a collection of m
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 16, 2010
A new exhibition is to reveal the story of how a heroic British merchant navy captain tried to ram a German U-boat intent on sinking his vessel before he was executed by the Germans for his actions.
It was one of the most controversial episodes of the First World War, ruthlessly exploited by both sides for maximum propaganda advantage.
But while other stories from the conflict remain familiar, the act of bravery shown by British merchant sailor Charles Fryatt as he tri
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 19, 2010
A mysterious ghostly image has been taken at the execution site where hundreds of criminals were tried and put to death.
The Galleries of Justice in Nottingham claims to be one of the most haunted locations in Great Britain.
Scores of highwayman, murderers and thieves were subjected to public hangings from within its walls.
Many modern visitors to the site in Nottingham, now a museum, claim to have witnessed spooky goings-on from flying orbs to strange sme
Source: CNN.com
October 20, 2010
Eleven Tucson, Arizona, educators sued the state board of education and superintendent this week for what the teachers consider an "anti-Hispanic" ban looming on Mexican-American studies.
The suit comes in a state already roiled by a controversial immigration law that is being challenged in court.
On Tuesday, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne defended the new law, which will go into effect December 31. The law authorizes the superintendent t
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 20, 2010
A site which may house Britain's earliest known hospital has been uncovered by archaeologists.
Radio carbon analysis at the former Leper Hospital at St Mary Magdalen in Winchester, Hampshire, has provided a date range of AD 960-1030 for a series of burials, many exhibiting evidence of leprosy, on the site.
A number of other artefacts, pits, and postholes also relate to the same time including what appears to be a large sunken structure underneath a medieval infirmary..
Source: AOL News
October 20, 2010
(Oct. 20) -- In a striking admission sure to stoke the imaginations of conspiracy theorists everywhere, a former Secret Service agent reveals how he came "chillingly close" to shooting President Lyndon B. Johnson right outside his home just hours after John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
So reads "The Kennedy Detail: JFK's Secret Service Agents Break Their Silence," a new book co-authored by the former agent himself, Gerald "Jerry" Blaine, and writer Lisa
Source: NYT
October 20, 2010
The British economist John Maynard Keynes may live on in popular legend as the world’s most influential economist. But in much of Europe, and most acutely here in the land of his birth, his view that deficit spending by governments is crucial to avoiding a long recession has lately been willfully ignored....
“Everything Keynes established about the primacy of maintaining demand at a steady pace is gone,” Brad DeLong, a liberal economist and blogger at the University of California, B
