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)
August 3, 2010
Gordon Brown has been voted the third worst British Prime Minister since the Second World War by a poll of more than 100 academics.
The former Minister, who was beaten by David Cameron at the May election, only placed ahead of Sir Alec Douglas-Home and Sir Athony Eden, who led Britain into the Suez invasion.
It found Clement Attlee, the Labour leader who established the National Health Service, was the most successful prime minister since 1945, with a rating of 8.1 out
Source: Washington Post
August 3, 2010
Earlier this year, eighteen Catholic scholars from the United States, Germany, and Australia, took the unprecedented step of writing a letter to Pope Benedict XVI, urging him to slow down the canonization process that would designate Pope Pius XII a saint of the Catholic Church, until more evidence could be found to defend the action against charges that he failed to do enough during the Nazi Holocaust. Pope Benedict inherited the Pius XII dossier from his predecessors but angered critics, inclu
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
August 2, 2010
The final moments of Nazi Heinrich Himmler can be revealed 65 years after his suicide following the discovery of an old soldier's war diaries.
Corporal Harry Oughton Jones wrote an account of his top-secret encounter with the head of Hitler's SS police force while he was stationed at a prison camp at the end of the war.
According to his personal recollections, Hitler's number two bit on a cyanide capsule and dropped down dead.
And while Himmler's final words are
Source: Fox News
August 3, 2010
The man who made one giant leap for mankind takes one small step for himself Thursday: Neil Armstrong is turning 80.
Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, before the eyes of hundreds of millions of awe-struck television viewers worldwide.
After stepping from the ladder of his lunar lander, he spoke the words that would echo through American heads for decades: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."
Source: CNN
August 3, 2010
Monkeys on cocaine. New windows for a closed visitor center. Modern dance as a tool for software development.
A report to be released Tuesday by conservative Republican Sens. Tom Coburn and John McCain cited these and 97 other projects as leading examples of misguided or wasteful spending under the Obama administration's $862 billion economic stimulus bill.
Titled "Summertime Blues," the report is the third by the two senators targeting projects that they say fail t
Source: WaPo
August 2, 2010
TIMBUCTOO, N.J. -- In Timbuctoo lies a hill. Underneath that hill lies a house, or what archaeologists think might have been a house once upon a time. The silver clasp of a woman's handbag, piles of Mason jars, chips of dinner plates and an empty jar of Dixie Peach Pomade lie among the bricks that have broken away from the foundation.
These are crushed fragments of a past life when free black people lived in this New Jersey community almost 200 years ago -- free even then, 45 years
Source: NYT
August 2, 2010
A ferocious swarm of earthquakes shook the center of the United States two centuries ago, and it remains a mystery how such strong temblors could have occurred there, in the middle of the North American tectonic plate where the ground ought to be stable.
In the current issue of the journal Nature, researchers suggest that the quakes were essentially set off by the end of the last ice age thousands of years earlier.
In a three-month period starting in December 1811, thre
Source: BBC News
August 2, 2010
An antiques dealer has been jailed for eight years for handling a stolen copy of Shakespeare's first folio.
Raymond Scott, 53, from County Durham was cleared of stealing the treasure, but found guilty of handling stolen goods at a trial in June.
The 1623 work was taken from a display cabinet at Durham University in 1998.
Judge Richard Lowden called the folio "quintessentially English treasure" and said damage to it was "cultural vandalisation
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 30, 2010
Two tobacco tins used by Lawrence of Arabia’s army have been discovered during an excavation of a campsite used during the 1916-18 Great Arab Revolt.
The tins were discovered by archaeologists who have been surveying the Arab army site in Wuheida, southern Jordan, since it was discovered in November.
They were used to supply Wills cigarettes from Bristol to British and Arab troops fighting the Ottoman Turks during the First World War.
Archaeologists from
Source: Manchester
August 2, 2010
An archaeologist studying a remote Pacific island, world famous for its strange stone statues, says outsiders - and not its ancestors - should be blamed for its historic demise hundreds of years ago.
Dr Karina Croucher from The University of Manchester says her research backs a growing body of opinion which casts new light on the people living on the island of Rapa Nui, named ‘Easter Island’ by its discoverers in 1722.
But the art which adorns Easter Island’s landscape,
Source: Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty
August 2, 2010
A senior Iraqi official says that international cooperation has resulted in the recovery of thousands of ancient artifacts stolen from the country's national museum and historical sites since 2003, RFE/RL's Radio Free Iraq reports.
Tourism and Antiquities Minister Qahtan al-Juburi told RFE/RL that more than 36,000 various artifacts have been recovered in the past seven years.
Juburi said that figure includes roughly 8,000 items that were stolen from the national museum
Source: BBC
July 2, 2010
Scotland's First Minister Alex Salmond has again denied that the convicted Lockerbie bomber was released from prison because of pressure from BP.
In a letter, he has challenged US senator Robert Menendez to provide evidence Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi was freed on economic grounds.
Mr Salmond also reiterated that Scottish ministers would not attend a US inquiry into last year's release.
Mr Salmond said it was "puzzling" that former UK Prime Minister
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 2, 2010
Campaigners against fox hunting have found an unlikely ally: Winston Churchill.
Documents found in the National Archives show that the former Tory prime minister supported attempts to stop British troops fox hunting in occupied Germany after the Second World War.
The commander of the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR), Sir John Harding, wrote to the government to ask for help in attempting to stop the activity being banned.
It had been banned under the Naz
Source: AP
August 2, 2010
Romania's central bank has issued a special coin commemorating a prime minister and religious leader who stripped Jews of their citizenship before World War II. The move prompted protest Monday from Romanian Jews as well as a director at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Radu Ioanid, who runs the museum's international archives, said he was "shocked" by the bank's decision to mint the coin depicting late Patriarch Miron Cristea, who led the Romanian Orthodox Church from
Source: CNN
August 2, 2010
The defense in the war crimes trial of former Liberian President Charles Taylor filed an emergency motion to delay supermodel Naomi Campbell's testimony against him, the court announced Monday.
She is scheduled to take the stand against him at the Special Tribunal for Sierra Leone on Thursday.
Prosecutors say Taylor gave her a diamond during the brutal war in Sierra Leone, contradicting Taylor's testimony that he never handled the precious stones that fueled the conflic
Source: CNN
August 2, 2010
The wave of Independence across Africa in the 1950s and 1960s brought to the end around 75 years of colonial rule by Britain, France, Belgium, Spain, Portugal and -- until World War I -- Germany.
Before 1880, Europeans had only made small incursions into Africa, with forts and trading posts mainly around the coast, according to Richard Dowden, director of the Royal African Society in Britain.
In 1884-5, the Berlin Conference was called to carve up Africa between Britain
Source: WaPo
August 1, 2010
The original Tea Party may have been in Boston, but some modern-day "tea party" activists are finding a powerful narrative this summer at a different historic landmark: Colonial Williamsburg....
They stand in the crowd listening closely as the costumed actors relive dramatic moments in the founding of our country. They clap loudly when an actor portraying Patrick Henry delivers his "Give me liberty or give me death" speech. They cheer and hoot when Gen. George Wa
Source: Guardian (UK)
August 2, 2010
Their right hands rise to black-clad chests and flash out in salute to their nation: "Sieg heil!" They praise Hitler's devotion to ethnic purity.
But with their high cheekbones, dark eyes and brown skin, they are hardly the Third Reich's Aryan ideal. A new strain of Nazism has found an unlikely home: Mongolia.
Once again, ultra-nationalists have emerged from an impoverished economy and turned upon outsiders. This time the main targets come from China, the risi
Source: Irish Times
August 2, 2010
HEIRS OF Hungary’s greatest prewar art collector are suing the country in the US courts over ownership of paintings worth an estimated $100 million (€76 million) in the largest unresolved claim for art confiscated during the Holocaust.
The collection of banker Baron Mor Lipot Herzog included works by El Greco, Lucas Cranach the Elder, de Zurbaran, van Dyck, Velázquez and Monet, some of which now hang in Budapest’s finest museums. But they are tainted by the tragedy that befell Europ
Source: Discovery News
July 29, 2010
Internationally-renowned dinosaur hunter Phil Manning, from the University of Manchester, and his team are hoping to bag a Triceratops skeleton from a 'secret location' they've found in the South Dakota Badlands, according to Manning.
He and his colleagues believe at least three skeletons of this iconic dinosaur are gently weathering in 65-million-year-old rocks at the undisclosed site.
At present, Manning and his colleagues are trying to figure out how they can excava
