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: CNN
Jan 29, 2010
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said he fully believed his pre-war claim that Iraq was capable of launching chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes.
Blair said Friday that concern over Iraq's ambitions to develop weapons of mass destruction had been the main factor behind Britain's decision to back the war.
But he admitted Washington and London had different views, with the U.S. favoring regime change to overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime.
Source: CNN
Jan 29, 2010
The White House is considering moving the site of the September 11 attack trial from Manhattan if the U.S. Justice Department sees fit, senior administration officials confirmed Friday.
The turnabout comes after New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other politicians expressed great concern over the costs and disruption of holding the September 11 trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four accomplices at a courthouse near ground zero in Lower Manhattan.
White House offici
Source: BBC News
Jan 29, 2010
Some of the ashes of Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi are to be scattered at sea off South Africa's coast on Saturday.
Gandhi's grand-daughter, Ela Gandhi, told the BBC that a family friend had kept the ashes for decades. They were handed over to the family last year.
After Gandhi was assassinated 62 years ago, his ashes were distributed among family, friends and followers.
Ashes are customarily scattered over a body of water shortly after crematio
Source: BBC News
Jan 29, 2010
In 1945, in the heat of war, a young John Pistone helped himself to a book. Now he is giving it back.
To be fair, Mr Pistone, a private in George Patton's army, never thought of his act as theft. He just needed proof he was there.
"I thought who the hell's going to believe I was in Berchtesgaden?" he said. "I'm going to need some proof."
As the Americans raced across southern Germany in the spring of 1945, Mr Pistone recalled, the soldie
Source: BBC News
Jan 29, 2010
You no longer have to eye his hairline to determine a man's age. There's a new way to figure out just how old he is: take a look at his beltline....
A survey from department store Debenhams (illustrated below) suggests that a man's waistband rises and falls throughout his life. Trousers bottom out at the age of 16 with below-the-hip styles and peak at 57, just seven inches below the armpit.
Fashion history shows this seesaw isn't such a new thing - waistlines have been
Source: Times Online (UK)
Jan 29, 2010
There were 200,000 British prisoners in Germany by the end of the Second World War and most spent their time in uncomfortable tedium.
Yet many hundreds did try to escape, even though success was highly unlikely. Most were soon recaptured and only a few dozen made it all the way home.
Two of the most famous escapes took place in Stalag Luft III. Designed to be the most secure prisoner-of-war camp, it was a bleak place hundreds of miles from the Swiss border and the Balti
Source: BBC
Jan 28, 2010
The Serbian government has raised to 10m euros (£8.7m, $13.8m) its reward for information leading to the capture of war crimes suspect Ratko Mladic.
It said that by raising the reward tenfold it showed a clear commitment to removing the final obstacle to Serbia's entry into the European Union.
Gen Mladic is accused by international prosecutors of genocide while leading Bosnian Serb forces in 1992-95.
The reward for the capture of Croatian Serb leader Goran
Source: Irish Central
Jan 28, 2010
Newly released historical photographs reveal that famous Irish musician Sean Dempsey played for Adolf Hitler in 1936, and the Nazi dictator loved his music.
Dempsey, an uileann piper, was invited to play for Hitler and propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels during a visit to Berlin in 1936 after being told that Hitler was an Irish folk music fan....
The bizarre scene was revealed for the first time in a new exhibition of Irish photographs from that era called 'Ceol na Cathra.
Source: National Geographic
Jan 28, 2010
A thousand-year-old temple complex (including a tomb with human sacrifice victims, shown in a digital illustration) has been found under the windswept dunes of northwestern Peru, archaeologists say.
The discovery of the complex, excavated near the city of Chiclayo (map) between 2006 and late 2009, has injected a dose of reality into the legend of Naylamp, the god who supposedly founded the pre-Inca Lambayeque civilization in the eighth century A.D., following the collapse of the Moc
Source: Spiegel Online
Jan 28, 2010
As a young woman, Annette Schücking-Homeyer served as a Red Cross volunteer on the Eastern Front in Ukraine. In an interview with SPIEGEL, the retired judge discusses the horrors committed against the Jews there, how everyone knew about them and why, even after the war, most people just wanted to forget.
SPIEGEL: After World War II, most Germans denied having known about the Holocaust. From 1941 to 1943, you were a volunteer with the German Red Cross behind the lines on the Eastern
Source: Pew Research Center
Jan 28, 2010
The public has consistently expressed strong interest in the health care debate, but relatively few Americans can correctly answer two key questions related to the Senate’s consideration of health care legislation.
In the latest installment of the Pew Research Center’s News IQ Quiz, just 32% know that the Senate passed its version of the legislation without a single Republican vote. And, in what proved to be the most difficult question on the quiz, only about a quarter (26%) knows t
Source: Pew Research Center
Jan 28, 2010
The public has consistently expressed strong interest in the health care debate, but relatively few Americans can correctly answer two key questions related to the Senate's consideration of health care legislation.
In the latest installment of the Pew Research Center's News IQ Quiz, just 32% know that the Senate passed its version of the legislation without a single Republican vote. And, in what proved to be the most difficult question on the quiz, only about a quarter (26%) knows t
Source: Fox News
Jan 28, 2010
A parent complaint has prompted the Culpeper County school system to pull a version of Anne Frank's diary off library shelves.
The county's director of instruction Jim Allen says the book pulled is "The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition."
Allen says the parent complained because the version contains sexual references. The school system will use an alternative version of the diary that does not contain such references.
Source: World Jewish Congress
Jan 28, 2010
Anti-Semitism has reached its highest level since the end of World War II, the Jewish Agency for Israel (JAFI) has concluded in its latest report released in Jerusalem on Sunday. Jews in Europe were particularly affected by the dramatic rise of incidents in 2009.
The JAFI report says that the number of anti-Semitic incidents recorded in the first three months of 2009 in western Europe surpassed that of the entire year 2008. The data showed a spike in anti-Semitic violence during and
Source: Haaretz.com
Jan 28, 2010
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told dignitaries gathered at the Auschwitz extermination camp on Wednesday that the world must learn from the Holocaust to unite against new threats.
In what was apparently a thinly veiled reference to Iran, Netanyahu called on the international community to come together to confront "impending dangers".
Israel believes Iran to be building a nuclear bomb and views the Islamic Republic as an existential threat. Iran insists it
Source: CBC News
Jan 28, 2010
Mexican archeologists have found an 1,100-year-old tomb from the twilight of the Mayan civilization that they hope may shed light on what happened to the once-glorious culture.
Archeologist Juan Yadeun said the tomb, and ceramics from another culture found in it, may reveal who occupied the Mayan site of Tonina in southern Chiapas state after the culture's classic period began fading.
Many experts have pointed to internal warfare between Mayan city states, or environmen
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 28, 2010
The Obama administration may be forced to back down on plans to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other September 11 suspects in New York after Michael Bloomberg, the city's mayor, withdrew his support.
The decision of the mayor, an ally of the president, was a blow to the White House as it sought to hold trials that were intended in part make a statement about how its handling of justice and terror issues differed from the George W. Bush era.
With opposition to the
Source: CNN
Jan 28, 2010
J.D. Salinger, the famously reclusive author whose 1951 novel, "The Catcher in the Rye," became a touchstone for generations of readers, has died. He was 91.
The author died Wednesday of natural causes at his home in New Hampshire, according to a family statement that his literary agent, Phyllis Westberg, provided Thursday.
Though he wrote more than 30 short stories and a handful of novellas -- many published in The New Yorker and collected in works such as &q
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Jan 28, 2010
Marching along the frozen roads of Poland and northern Germany this week, a hardy group of young RAF recruits - accompanied by relatives of the survivors of the famous Great Escape of 1944 - are commemorating a legendary moment in history.
Sixty-five years on, they are recreating the deadly 1,000-mile march which the Nazis forced captured Allied airmen to undertake at the end of World War II.
It is a fitting commemoration of the bravery and toughness of a remarkable gro
Source: Global Times (China)
Jan 28, 2010
Unidentified tomb raiders hit more than 10 ancient tomb sites Monday in east Jiangsu Province, using bulldozers, and stealing most of the articles they unearthed, in an unprecedented sacking of the country's cultural relics, local archaeologists said.
The incident came almost a month after the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences claimed a major discovery of the tomb of Cao Cao, a renowned warlord and politician in the 3rd century AD, in central China.
Although the authen
