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: Times of Malta
Jan 12, 2010
Centuries ago, come September, galleys would be rowed into Mġarr ix-Xini harbour and loaded with amphorae filled with wine that had been pressed in the valley.
Winemakers would fill shallow basins with grapes and, once pressed, the juice would flow through holes and channels into a deeper collecting holder, all carved into the rock.
These wine presses, said to date back to 500 BC, can still be seen embedded in the Gozitan valley and are being studied and docume
Source: AP
Jan 12, 2010
Pope Benedict XVI should be welcomed when he visits Rome's main synagogue, but he should halt moves to beatify wartime pontiff Pius XII, criticized for not doing enough to stop the Holocaust, a former chief rabbi of Israel said Tuesday.
Israel Meir Lau, a Holocaust survivor and now chief rabbi of Tel Aviv, said Benedict's synagogue visit Sunday would be "appreciated and blessed." But in an interview with Italy's Sky TG24 television, he said he was "surprised" by
Source: Chicago Sun-Times
Jan 12, 2010
The City Council’s resident historian cracked open the history books for another re-write Tuesday, this time involving some of Chicago’s most notorious characters: mob boss Al Capone; Prohibition Agent Eliot Ness and Edward J. O’Hare, father of the city’s most famous war hero.
Thirteen years after absolving Mrs. O’Leary’s cow of responsibility for the Great Chicago Fire, Ald. Edward M. Burke (14th) wants to set the record straight about the role O’Hare played in Capone’s conviction
Source: AP
Jan 12, 2010
The Supreme Court on Tuesday reinstated for a second time the death sentence of a neo-Nazi convicted of murdering three men in Ohio more than a quarter century ago.
Spisak was convicted of three murders at Cleveland State University over a seven-month period in 1982 — crimes he said were motivated by his hatred of gays, blacks and Jews. At the same time, Spisak claimed his crimes were sparked by mental illness related to confusion about his sexual identity. He wants to have surgery
Source: Guardian (UK)
Jan 12, 2010
Of all the obstacles strewn in Jesus's path, keeping his weight to 51kg (8st) to ride a donkey into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday was not one of them. But health and safety requirements will be uppermost in the minds of a group staging a Passion play in Trafalgar Square, the first to be performed in the central London location.
At a press conference today in the crypt of St Martin-in-the-Fields, director Ashley Herman said: "There are laws regarding the use of animals and children i
Source: Guardian (UK)
Jan 12, 2010
A rare and luminously beautiful landscape by Gustav Klimt that was crated up by its owners during the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938 and then more or less disappeared for decades is to be auctioned in London, Sotheby's announced today.
The painting – which represents a key turning point for the artist – is being sold in what the auction house says is one of the most eye-catching sales of impressionist and modern art it has ever held. As well as the Klimt, conservatively valued a
Source: Guardian (UK)
Jan 12, 2010
The traffic-choked roads still roaring past Stonehenge in Wiltshire have earned the world's most famous prehistoric monument a place on a list of the world's most threatened sites.
The government's decision to abandon, on cost grounds, a plan to bury roads around Stonehenge in a tunnel underground and the consequent collapse of the plans for a new visitor centre, have put the site on the Threatened Wonders list of Wanderlust magazine, along with the 4x4-scarred Wadi Rum in Jordan, a
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 12, 2010
Despite the singer being close to the Mob and Democrats the former Republican president planned to establish "a personal relationship" with Sinatra.
Nixon's initiative, however, was blocked by the then attorney general John Mitchell because Sinatra had long been alleged to have personal and professional links with organised crime, including prominent figures such as Lucky Luciano.
The singer had been under watch by the FBI since the late 1940s. He was never pr
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Jan 12, 2010
The lawyer representing John Demjanjuk, the 89-year-old accused of being an accessory to the murder of thousands of Jews at a Nazi death camp, today called for his trial to be suspended.
Ulrich Busch told the Munich hearing that German law can't be applied to the case of the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk.
He also argued that the trial should be suspended because documents from earlier proceedings against his client in the US, Israel and elsewhere weren't given to the defence
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Jan 12, 2010
Richard Nixon never considered himself a great orator, a judgment shared by those who heard him speak.
But it has emerged that the US President was secretly envious of Winston Churchill's way with words and instructed his speechwriters to learn from the former British Prime Minister.
Preparing for an address to the Canadian Parliament in early 1972 the president worried that his rhetoric was so tedious it would cost him politically.
'The speeches I make ar
Source: Times (UK)
Jan 12, 2010
The invasion of Iraq had no sound mandate under international law, according to the Dutch inquiry into the war released this morning.
In a devastating rejection of the position of the British and Dutch governments, the inquiry, led by the former head of the Netherlands' Supreme Court, decided that the United Nations resolutions did not provide a legal basis for the use of force.
Dutch ministers were further criticised in the report of the Davids Commission, which sat
Source: Times (UK)
Jan 12, 2010
Tony Blair sent President Bush a series of secret notes in the run-up to the Iraq war in which he promised that Britain would "be there" if it came to military action against Saddam Hussein, it emerged today.
The existence of the letters, sent from Downing Street in 2002, was revealed by Mr Blair's chief spin-doctor, Alastair Campbell, as he gave evidence to an independent inquiry into the origins of the Iraq war.
The former director of communications at No
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 12, 2010
A tape recording of Nazi officers describing the moment they found Adolf Hitler's body in his Berlin bunker has been discovered.
The recording was made on October 25 1956 in a courtroom in Berchtesgaden, site of the Fuehrer's mountaintop home in Bavaria. The court was convened to officially declare the former leader of Nazi Germany dead so that his fortune and rights to his book "Mein Kampf" could be seized by the state government.
Among those giving evidence
Source: BBC News
Jan 12, 2010
A historic map of the world, with China at its centre, has gone on display at the Library of Congress in Washington.
The map was created by Italian missionary Matteo Ricci in 1602. It is one of only two copies in existence in good condition.
Because of its rarity and fragility - the map is printed on rice paper - the map has become known as the "Impossible Black Tulip of Cartography".
This is the first time it has been on public show in north Am
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 11, 2010
The Australian government has placed a ban on businesses using the name of the country's first saint in an attempt to prevent them cashing in on the late Catholic nun's growing celebrity.
The move, which will dismay scores of small businesses that had been hoping to capitalise on an influx of Catholic pilgrims, comes as Mary Mackillop-mania takes hold across Australia in the lead up to her canonisation by the Pope this weekend.
Julia Gillard, the prime minister, annou
Source: Valley News Dispatch
Jan 11, 2010
The saying "History is everywhere" once again has proven to be true — this time in a pasture in Clinton Township.
John and Kathy Allen discovered their property, Armstrong Farms, holds the remains of a Grand Army of the Republic building, where Civil War veterans met starting in 1886.
All that's left of the G.A.R. — an organization similar to a VFW or American Legion, but whose members fought for the Union in the Civil War — is the building's foundation, but t
Source: The Hedgehog Blog
Jan 11, 2010
Israeli archaeologists have confirmed that an inscribed pottery shard, reliably dated by Carbon 14 testing of organic material found with it to the 10th century BCE--the time of King David-- is in fact written in Hebrew, making the shard the oldest known Hebrew inscription. Moreover, both the location where the shard was discovered --the Valley of Elah, well to the west of the Judaen hills--and the translation of the ancient Hebrew text bolster the case of the "traditionalist school" o
Source: NYT
Jan 11, 2010
Joe Rollino once lifted 475 pounds. He used neither his arms nor his legs but, reportedly, his teeth. With just one finger he raised up 635 pounds; with his back he moved 3,200. He bit down on quarters to bend them with his thumb....
On Monday morning, Mr. Rollino went for a walk in his Brooklyn neighborhood, a daily routine. It was part of the Great Joe Rollino’s greatest feat, a display of physical dexterity and stamina so subtle that it revealed itself only if you happened to ask
Source: AFP
Jan 11, 2010
The Hamas-run ministry of tourism and antiquities in Gaza on Monday announced the discovery of ancient artifacts near the Egyptian border town of Rafah.
"The most important of the findings are 1,300 antique silver coins, both large and small," said Mohammed al-Agha, tourism and antiquities minister in the Islamist-run government.
He said archaeologists had also uncovered a black basalt grinder, a coin with a cross etched on it, and the remains of walls and arc
Source: AP
Jan 11, 2010
Missing moon rocks from the first and last human lunar landings have been discovered in a locked cabinet in Hawaii.
The rare rocks from the Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 missions were found last week during a routine inventory of gifts to the Hawaii governor's office over the years....
