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
Jan 18, 2010
Edgar Allan Poe's fertile imagination has endured for more than 150 years — and so has his pale, death-haunted image, with his sunken eyes, a trim mustache and unruly mop of curly hair.
However, scholars say Poe looked far more vigorous, perhaps even dashing, in his earlier years than he does in the well-known series of daguerreotypes taken in the final years of his life.
The more robust Poe is captured in a small watercolor by A.C. Smith, one of just three surviving po
Source: AFP
Jan 18, 2010
The mystery of Russia's famed Amber Room, seized as the spoils of war by the Nazis, has puzzled historians and experts since it disappeared in 1945.
Sergei Trifonov, however, believes he has solved the riddle, and that the treasure -- ornately carved panels of glowing amber, formed from fossilized resin -- lies underneath a bunker in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.
To test his theory, Trifonov has begun to probe the soil under the bunker using a ground-penetrating r
Source: LA Times
Jan 18, 2010
Amateur historian Rick Rogers just knows Europeans visited the islands two centuries before Captain Cook landed in 1778. Trying to prove it and convince professionals, that's another story.
Finding evidence of a shipwreck beneath the ocean would finally prove a theory that Rogers, an amateur historian, has been promoting for decades. He thinks a handful of Spanish and Dutch ships visited Hawaii in the centuries before Captain Cook landed there in 1778. Some Europeans came ashore aft
Source: BBC
Jan 18, 2010
Welsh museums are joining a BBC campaign to create a unique digital record online telling a history of the world through objects.
People are being asked to log on to a BBC website to upload their own entries and build a picture of the impact of Wales on the world.
It will coincide with television and radio programmes looking at artefacts in museums across the UK.
The History of the World will be shown on BBC Wales in the spring.
Source: BBC
Jan 18, 2010
China's oldest cliff-carved Buddha statue is to be saved from collapse, with a $10.8m (£6.6m) facelift, a state-run news agency has reported.
Found by a farmer in 2005, the 1,459-year-old statue was carved on Meng Mountain near Taiyuan, Shanxi province.
But the huge form was now in danger of collapsing into abandoned coal mines, Xinhua news agency said.
Seven coal mines in the area had been closed in 2007 to protect the ancient stone statue, Xinhua said.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 18, 2010
Mehmet Ali Agca, the man who tried to kill Pope John Paul II in 1981, proclaimed the world will end this century as he was released from prison in Turkey.
Agca has promised to explain his motives for the failed assassination attempt in 1981 but questions about his mental state and outlandish claims have raised doubts over whether the mystery will ever be solved.
He was taken to a Turkish military hospital where doctors concluded that he was unfit for compulsory milita
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 18, 2010
Britain went to war in Iraq on an 'assumption' that Saddam Hussein still possessed weapons of mass destruction, according to Jonathan Powell.
Intelligence on Saddam's WMD was not the pivotal factor in Tony Blair's decision to go to war in Iraq, Mr Powell, the former chief of staff to Mr Blair, has told the Chilcot Inquiry.
Mr Powell said there was a long-standing "assumption" that Saddam had WMD because of the fact that he had used them in the past.
Source: Times (UK)
Jan 18, 2010
A half-smoked cigar stubbed out by Sir Winston Churchill in the Second World War is expected to fetch £300 at auction.
The 4in long stub was left by the Prime Minister before he dashed off for a Cabinet meeting on August 22, 1941 - the day German troops reached Leningrad.
Whitehall valet Nellie Goble found it when cleaning and sent it to a friend, with a note on No10 paper reading: 'Just a small souvenir to remind you at some future date of one of the greatest men that
Source: Fox News
Jan 18, 2010
It always falls down. That's how the apple helped Isaac Newton.
An 18th-century account of how Newton developed the theory of gravity was posted to the Web Monday, making the fragile paper manuscript widely available to the public for the first time.
Newton's encounter with the apple ranks among science's most celebrated anecdotes, and it can now be read in the faded cursive script in which it was recorded by William Stukeley, Newton's contemporary.
Roya
Source: BBC News
Jan 18, 2010
A Spanish court has agreed to extradite a pilot held for his alleged role in Argentina's "dirty war".
Julio Alberto Poch, 57, an airline pilot, has been in custody in Madrid since his arrest last month.
He is wanted in Argentina for allegedly flying planes used to dump opponents of the military regime into the sea - known as "death flights".
Some 30,000 people disappeared or died during the junta's 1976-1983 rule. He denies the allegatio
Source: BBC News
Jan 18, 2010
The man who tried to kill Pope John Paul II in 1981 has been released from prison in Turkey.
Mehmet Ali Agca served 19 years in an Italian prison for shooting John Paul, and another 10 years in Turkey for the earlier murder of a newspaper editor.
Agca's motives for attempting to kill the Pope remain a mystery, although when he was arrested he said he was acting alone.
In 1983 John Paul announced he had forgiven Agca after meeting him.
There hav
Source: Guardian (UK)
Jan 17, 2010
Israel is to fund a rare genetic study to determine whether there is a link between the lost tribes of Israel and the Pashtuns of Afghanistan and northern Pakistan.
Historical and anecdotal evidence strongly suggests a connection, but definitive scientific proof has never been found. Some leading Israeli anthropologists believe that, of all the many groups in the world who claim a connection to the 10 lost tribes, the Pashtuns, or Pathans, have the most compelling case. Paradoxicall
Source: NYT
Jan 17, 2010
Pope Benedict XVI, in a visit to Rome’s main synagogue, sought to soothe tensions between Catholics and Jews on Sunday, though he and Jewish leaders aired one main point of contention: whether the church did enough against the Holocaust.
At least one prominent Italian rabbi boycotted Benedict’s visit after a move by the pope last month to advance Pope Pius XII, who led the Roman Catholic Church from 1939 to 1958, one step closer to sainthood. Many Jews, especially in Rome, say Pius
Source: LA TTimes
Jan 17, 2010
A little-known program of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services provides information that bridges oceans.
At first glance, the photo-copied documents simply looked like government forms and applications.
But when Susanne Mori read more closely, she found the story of her grandfather's life as he made his way in America more than five decades ago.
The documents came from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which runs a little-known genealogy s
Source: AP
Jan 17, 2010
Gaudencio Sotio injured his left leg fighting to expel the Japanese military from the Philippines during World War II. Though Filipino, he was fighting under the command of the United States, which had colonized his homeland in the early 1900s.
Last February, the U.S. said it would pay a lump sum — $9,000 or $15,000 — to veterans like Sotio in lieu of pensions it had promised Filipino soldiers during the war but reneged on paying.
Since then, more than 11,000 surviving
Source: New York Daily News
Jan 17, 2010
The director of a forthcoming movie about Martin Luther King Jr. has vowed he won't show him in bed with a prostitute.
For months now, King's family has been nervous about "Selma." Produced by Brad Pitt and "Slumdog Millionaire" Oscar-winner Christian Colson, the project's script portrays King (r.) as the tireless martyr of America's civil rights movement. But Paul Webb's screenplay also shows him to be a flesh-and-blood man who had, as his colleague Ralph Aberna
Source: BBC
Jan 17, 2010
Pope Benedict XVI has defended the Vatican against accusations of indifference towards the Nazis' annihilation of Europe's Jews in WWII.
On a landmark visit to Rome's main synagogue, the Pope said the Vatican helped Jews and "provided assistance, often in a hidden and discreet way".
The pontiff responded after an Italian Jewish leader spoke of the painful "silence" of wartime Pope Pius XII.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 17, 2010
Saddam Hussein's notorious cousin "Chemical Ali" has been found guilty of crimes against humanity and given a death sentence for his involvement in a poison gas attack.
Families of victims in court cheered when the judge handed down the guilty verdict against Ali Hassan al-Majid in a trial for one of the worst poisonous gas attacks against civilians.
He has already received three previous death sentences for atrocities committed during Saddam's rule, particul
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 17, 2010
A twelfth-century poem newly translated into English casts fresh light on the origin of today's Francophobic stereotypes.
Although it is meant to be an 'entente cordiale', the relationship between the English and the French has been anything but neighbourly.
When the two nations have not been clashing on the battlefield or the sporting pitch they have been trading insults from 'frogs' to 'rosbifs'. Written between 1180 and 1194, a century after the
Source: CNN
Jan 17, 2010
Pope Benedict XVI is set to take one step forward in Catholic-Jewish relations Sunday when he becomes the first pope since 1986 to visit the main Jewish synagogue in Rome, Italy.
The problem is, the step forward comes immediately after he took one step back last month by moving his Holocaust-era predecessor closer toward sainthood.
In fact, much of Benedict's papacy has seen swings back and forth in the Vatican's relationship with the Jewish world.
The visi
