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
October 15, 2010
A Damien Hirst artwork created entirely from thousands of butterfly wings has been auctioned in London for £2.2m.
I am Become Death, Shatterer of Worlds - previously owned by the city's Gagosian Gallery - had been expected to fetch between £2.5m and £3.5m.
The title of the work - Hirst's largest using butterfly wings - echoes words scientist J Robert Oppenheimer later said after the first atomic bomb.
Christie's sale of post-war and contemporary art continu
Source: BBC
October 18, 2010
Roman, Bronze and Iron Age remains have been unearthed at the site of a new bypass in Powys.
Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust (CPAT) said a number of interesting finds had been made, but nothing unusual at Four Crosses, near Welshpool.
Among the earliest sites found is a ringed ditch representing an early prehistoric burial mound.
Roman metalworking and farming activity was also discovered by archaeologists in the village....
Source: BBC
October 17, 2010
A new festival to honour Mold's Daniel Owen, often described as the Welsh Dickens, takes place in his home town.
Events take place in locations which would have been familiar to the author, including the chapel he attended, Bethesda.
The Pentan pub, formerly the tailor's shop where Owen worked, will host the highlight of the festival, the launch of the first English translation of Enoc Huws, his best-known novel.
Owen was born in 1836 into a mining family.
Source: BBC
October 18, 2010
A Somerset village could lose its medieval cobbled paths because they are feared to be too dangerous.
People have been tripping over the cobbles in Dunster's High Street and suffering injuries, because of their poor state of repair.
Nobody is currently responsible for the cobbles.
The Dunster Working Group has said it wants to re-lay the cobbles but is worried about being sued if anyone falls in the future....
Source: Media Matters
October 18, 2010
Led by Glenn Beck -- who was once condemned by the Anti-Defamation League for saying Al Gore used "the same tactic" as Adolf Hitler -- Fox News personalities have frequently invoked Nazi Germany in their political commentary, often comparing progressives to Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and the Nazi "brownshirts."...
Beck: Obama advisers show "the kind of thinking that ... eventually led to the Holocaust." On his October 5 radio show, Beck said that statemen
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 17, 2010
A French researcher has unearthed evidence suggesting two French pilots beat America's Charles Lindbergh in his historic 1927 flight across the Atlantic only to vanish, perhaps shot down by Al Capone's bootleg mafia.
Charles Nungesser, known as French First World War aviation's "ace of aces" and François Coli, his navigator, were hailed as heroes when they took off from Paris on May 8, 1927, in the hope of reaching New York.
The prize for the first non-stop t
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 18, 2010
The campaign for a war-crimes tribunal to investigate alleged atrocities in the Sri Lankan civil war has intensified following the release of photographs which appeared to show a massacre of Tamils.
The photographs, which showed blood stained bodies of young men and women who had been blindfolded and had their hands tied behind their backs, were released by the Global Tamil Forum (GTF), a group which includes former supporters of the Tamil Tiger rebels.
Their release w
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 18, 2010
A rare poster showing the Titanic sailing into the sunset has sold for £69,000.
The 30x40 inch promotional poster was based on a painting by artist Montague Black showing the doomed liner and its sister ship Olympic passing each other at sea.
The 45,000 ton Olympic can be seen in the foreground with Titanic heading for the horizon in the distance.
The poster was commissioned by White Star Line before Titanic struck and iceberg and sank on April 15, 1912, k
Source: CNN
October 18, 2010
Australia got its first Catholic saint Sunday, a feisty 19th-century nun who was briefly excommunicated when her colleagues exposed an abusive priest.
Mary MacKillop co-founded the Sisters of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart in 1867, and gained a reputation as the first Australian nun to leave the cities and minister to the rural poor.
Nuns in her order got evidence that a priest was engaged in "scandalous behavior," according to the Rev. Paul Gardiner, who has
Source: CNN
October 18, 2010
Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri are believed to be hiding close to each other in houses in northwest Pakistan, but are not together, a senior NATO official said.
Pakistan has repeatedly denied protecting members of the al Qaeda leadership.
The official said the general region where bin Laden is likely to have moved around in recent years ranges from the mountainous Chitral area in the far northwest near the Chinese border, to the Kurram Valley, which ad
Source: Steven Aftergood at Secrecy News
October 18, 2010
[Steven Aftergood is a senior research analyst at the Federation of American Scientists.]
It is to be expected that national intelligence services will sometimes fail to identify and discover a threat to the nation in a timely fashion. But when intelligence warns of a threat that isn’t really there, and then nations go to war to meet the phantom threat — that is a serious, confounding and deeply disturbing problem.
But in a nutshell, that is the story of the war in Ira
Source: Wall Street Journal
October 18, 2010
By the end of World War II, nearly 4,000 Boeing B-29 Superfortresses had been built, most of them to rain bombs on targets across the Pacific Theater. Today, there's only one B-29 still flying, and she's nicknamed "Fifi."
At a time when most vintage warplanes have retired to a quiet life on display in drafty museums, 65-year-old Fifi is embarking on a new mission: giving rides to paying enthusiasts and once again making the air-show rounds, which occasionally feature a sim
Source: AP
October 18, 2010
Russia's Interfax news agency is reporting that President Dmitry Medvedev has bestowed the country's highest state honors on the sleeper agents deported from the United States.
The report says the awards were made in a Kremlin ceremony on Monday, less than four months after the biggest spy swap between the U.S. and Russia since the Cold War. The report cites Medvedev's spokeswoman, Natalya Timakova.
In June, 10 Russian agents who infiltrated suburban America were deport
Source: AP
October 17, 2010
The U.S. government has recognized the World War II architect of a mission to rescue more than 500 U.S. bomber fliers shot down over Nazi-occupied Serbia -- the largest air rescue of Americans behind enemy lines in any war.
George Vujnovich, a 95-year-old New Yorker, is credited with leading the so-called Halyard Mission in what was then Yugoslavia.
On Sunday, he was awarded the U.S. Bronze Star Medal, presented by Rep. Joseph Crowley, at Manhattan's St. Sava Serbian O
Source: BBC News
October 17, 2010
It is not much to look at - a small pitted brass coin with a square hole in the centre - but this relatively innocuous piece of metal is revolutionising our understanding of early East African history, and recasting China's more contemporary role in the region.
A joint team of Kenyan and Chinese archaeologists found the 15th Century Chinese coin in Mambrui - a tiny, nondescript village just north of Malindi on Kenya's north coast.
In barely distinguishable relief, the t
Source: CNN
October 18, 2010
The distant rumble of big guns on Fort Hood's artillery range rattles the ceiling tiles in the small military courtroom.
But the sounds of war training don't interrupt the intensity inside the military hearing as dozens of witnesses here recall that day last November when 13 people were shot to death and 32 wounded on the base in central Texas.
Training with Paladin howitzers is part of everyday life at Fort Hood, the country's largest Army base. Most of the shooting vi
Source: BBC News
October 17, 2010
Benoit Mandelbrot, who discovered mathematical shapes known as fractals, has died of cancer at the age of 85.
Mandelbrot, who had joint French and US nationality, developed fractals as a mathematical way of understanding the infinite complexity of nature.
The concept has been used to measure coastlines, clouds and other natural phenomena and had far-reaching effects in physics, biology and astronomy.
Mandelbrot's family said he had died in a hospice in Camb
Source: BBC News
October 18, 2010
A new online database lets Holocaust survivors and their relatives search details of more than 20,000 artworks stolen from Jews during World War II.
The database of works stolen from occupied France and Belgium between 1940 and 1944 includes Monet paintings.
It is a joint project of the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Art collectors, galleries and museums can also make use of the free ser
Source: BBC News
October 18, 2010
A woman's account of escaping the sinking Titanic in 1912 has sold for £20,000 at auction.
Laura Francatelli's story was published for the first time in early October.
It was bought by an Eastern European collector when it went under the hammer at Henry Aldrige and Son in Wiltshire at the weekend.
In it, Miss Francatelli described how she heard an "awful rumbling" as the liner went down and "screams and cries" from 1,500 drowning passeng
Source: Foreign Policy
October 15, 2010
The Avtomat Kalashnikova, C.J. Chivers writes in The Gun, is "the world's most widely recognized weapon, one of the world's most recognizable objects." The AK-47 and its descendants have defined and exacerbated half a century of guerrilla conflict, terrorism, and crime; it is the most abundant firearm in the world, with as many as 100 million Kalashnikovs in circulation, 10 times more than any other rifle.
Chivers, a Marine Corps veteran and senior writer at the New York T
