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 News
Mar 1, 2010
Former leader Radovan Karadzic has said the Serb cause in the Bosnian war was "just and holy" as he began his defence at his genocide trial at The Hague.
Mr Karadzic, who led the Bosnian Serbs during the war in the 1990s, said there was a core group of Muslims in Bosnia - then and now - who wanted 100% power.
He said the Serbs acted in self-defence after their peace plans were rejected.
He insists he is innocent of all 11 charges from the 1992-95
Source: Steve Aftergood at Secrecy News (Blog)
Mar 1, 2010
The House of Representatives last week approved two secrecy-related amendments to the pending FY 2010 intelligence authorization act (HR 2701). The amendments and the bill itself await further action by the Senate.
An amendment by Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) would require the Director of National Intelligence to identify records held by U.S. intelligence agencies that deal with human rights violations in Argentina committed by that country’s military dictatorship between 1976 and 1
Source: BBC
Mar 1, 2010
The 3,000-year-old head of Amenhotep III - grandfather of Tutankhamun - was dug out of the ruins of the pharaoh's mortuary temple.
Experts say it is the best preserved example of the king's face ever found.
The 2.5m (8ft) head is part of a larger statue, most of which was found several years ago.
Antiquities officials say the statue is to be reconstructed.
Source: Times (UK)
Mar 1, 2010
The first explosion shook the land and sent a plume of black smoke 30 metres into the air. Seven others followed in close succession until a pall of peat and sandy dust hung over the narrow peninsula, flanked by the breakers of Surf Bay, which connects Stanley to its old airport.
A casual visitor arriving on a cruise ship at the weekend might have thought that Argentina was mounting a second invasion — a response to the oil drilling that began last week in the disputed waters off th
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 1, 2010
Mary Eleanor Bowes, the Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne, became known as the 'Unhappy Countess' after being fooled into marriage by the self-styled 'Captain' Andrew Robinson Stoney in the late 18th century.
Bowes, who was said to be the richest heiress in Britain, was an attractive 37-year-old widow with five children when Stony hatched his plan to win her affection.
He arranged to have scurrilous stories about her published in the Morning Post newspaper, and the
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Mar 1, 2010
A German woman has become the first of an estimated 2 million victims of rape by Soviet soldiers in the Second World War to break the taboo on talking publicly about the crimes.
Gabriele Koepp's book Why Did I Have To Be A Girl, about the rapes carried out by the Red Army as they marched on Berlin, is the first to be published under a victim's real name.
The soldiers were encouraged by their leader Josef Stalin to regard the crime as a spoil of war after Hitler's inva
Source: 60 Minutes
Feb 28, 2010
The Armenians call it their holocaust - the 1915 forced deportation and massacre of more than a million Armenians by the Turks. But the Turks and our own government have refused to call it genocide.
Source: Times Online (UK)
Feb 28, 2010
Tony Blair was in such despair over the aftermath of the Iraq war that he told Gordon Brown and John Prescott that he intended to stand down as prime minister, according to a new book.
The claim, which provides a striking contrast with Mr Blair’s appearance before the Chilcot inquiry last month, when he said he had no regrets, appears in the latest instalment of Andrew Rawnsley’s The End of the Party, and confirms in detail widespread reports in recent years that Mr Blair almost re
Source: BBC
Feb 28, 2010
A memorial has been unveiled to the 222 Chorley Pals who served in World War I, after three years of fundraising.
The 7ft (2m)-high statue of a uniformed soldier on a plinth, overlooking Chorley's main market, was unveiled in an official ceremony on Sunday.
It features the names of the men who served with the company.
The Chorley Pals eventually joined the better-known Accrington Pals and were decimated at the opening of the Battle of the Somme on 1 July
Source: Telegraph(UK)
Feb 28, 2010
Israel's president Shimon Peres is among the many who owe their lives to the son of a founder of Hamas, according to a dramatic account to be published this week.
The full story of how Mosab Hassan Yousef became an informant for Shin Bet, the Israeli domestic security service, will reveal the heroic risks he took during a decade as a spy for Israel - and the extraordinary impact he has had on the course of history in the Middle East.
He describes his remarkable double
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 28, 2010
An 80-year-old German woman has broken an old taboo of silence over the rapes she endured at the hands of Soviet soldiers in the second world war with a searing book about the crimes of the Red Army as it marched towards Berlin.
"Why Did I Have To Be A Girl" by Gabriele Koepp is the first book published about the rapes under a victim's real name. Mrs Koepp was one of an estimated two million German girls and women raped by Soviet soldiers, encouraged by their leader Josef
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 27, 2010
‘It’s absolutely ridiculous,” bellows Jean Procter. “It’s insulting. It’s very galling. I feel really mutinous about this.” What on earth is making the redoubtable Mrs Procter, aged 91, so angry? Road works through her village? A new appointments system at her surgery?
The subject of her ire is a new book, Once a Land Girl. The sequel to Angela Huth’s best-selling 1994 novel Land Girls, which was turned into an acclaimed film starring Rachel Weisz, Anna Friel and Catherine McCormack
Source: AP
Feb 27, 2010
President Barack Obama has signed a one-year extension of several provisions in the nation's main counterterrorism law, the Patriot Act.
Provisions in the measure would have expired on Sunday without Obama's signature Saturday.
Obama's signature comes after the House voted 315 to 97 Thursday to extend the measure.
Source: Fox News
Feb 27, 2010
An abandoned apartment building in Hollywood, Florida where two of the September 11 hijackers lived for several months before the attack was demolished Friday, MyFox National reported.
A crowd gathered to watch the building in Jackson Street be torn down, MyFox Phoenix reported.
Not long after hijackers flew two planes into New York City's World Trade center towers in 2001, police descended on the Florida property gathering evidence.
Mohamed Atta and Marwan
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 27, 2010
President Jacob Zuma is to be given a fascinating "history lesson" this week when the Queen shows him a special, private exhibition of memorabilia revealing Britain's ties to South Africa.
Scores of gifts, photographs, letters, speeches and other artefacts – previewed exclusively by The Sunday Telegraph – will be on eight tables in the first-floor Picture Gallery at Buckingham Palace, where the President of South Africa and one of his three wives are staying as guests of
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 27, 2010
Falkland Islanders have criticised the Government's official history of the 1982 war, claiming that it contains a series of "serious" errors which make it too sympathetic to Argentina's claims to the territory.
The critics say that several apparent statements of fact in the book are "nonsense" and "seriously defective", making Buenos Aires's historical claim to the South Atlantic archipelago "appear stronger than it actually is".
Source: The Age (AU)
Feb 27, 2010
AUSTRALIA'S national school curriculum will return history, grammar, literature and phonetics to the classroom, in what Prime Minister Kevin Rudd describes as a ''back to basics'' approach to education.
However, it will also place Aboriginal and Asian ways of seeing the world into almost every subject....
The draft puts a new emphasis on Australia's geography, by introducing Asian texts and Aboriginal examples into the classroom across all subjects.
Profess
Source: FOX News
Feb 27, 2010
President Obama is in a bind as a House committee prepares to vote on a resolution that would recognize the World War I-era killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks as genocide.
While a White House candidate, then-Sen. Obama said he believed the killings were genocide. A congressional resolution to that effect could alienate Turkey, a NATO ally and traditional friend of the United States that is crucial to America's foreign policy goals.
Past administrations have defeated
Source: Times (UK)
Feb 27, 2010
Two parts of an ancient biblical manuscript separated across centuries and continents were reunited for the first time in a joint display yesterday, thanks to an accidental discovery that is helping to illuminate a dark period in the history of the Hebrew Bible.
The 1,300-year-old fragments, which are among a handful of Hebrew biblical manuscripts known to have survived the era in which they were written, existed separately and with their relationship unknown, until a news photograp
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 27, 2010
The family of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the only man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, hopes he will beat cancer six months after he was released from jail on compassionate grounds.
His elderly father, Ali, keeps a vigil at his son’s side at the family’s home in Tripoli as Megrahi, 57, battles a serious prostate cancer. The father hopes a “miracle” could happen.
Mr Megrahi Snr said that his son was working on his autobiography and remains determined to prove
