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: Chicago Tribune
Jan 3, 2010
Archaeologists using ground-penetrating radar may have found the ruins of a grain mill owned by Revolutionary War figure George Rogers Clark on a bluff overlooking the Ohio River city named after him.
November's discovery left the team of researchers excited, said Cheryl Munson, an Indiana University archaeologist overseeing the high-tech imaging and excavations in a 280-acre historic district along Clarksville's riverfront.
She said the team picked up reflections fr
Source: BBC
Jan 3, 2010
Children of Blackshirt women, who joined Oswald Mosley's pro-Nazi British Union of Fascists, often feel that they have had to live with the burden of the guilt and shame caused by their mother's fascist sympathies.
Until then the most prominent political movement for women had been the Suffragettes.
Julie Gottlieb described the Blackshirt uniform as "a great marketing tool, and an incredible draw particularly for the youth. Some historians call this period the bat
Source: AP
Jan 3, 2010
Serbian police have arrested a war crimes suspect wanted for the killing of at least 19 civilians in eastern Bosnia and other atrocities of the 1992-95 war.
The war crimes prosecutor's office says Darko Jankovic was apprehended Sunday.
Spokesman Bruno Vekaric says Jankovic is "potentially linked to horrendous crimes," including the killing of Muslim civilians near the Bosnian town of Zvornik in 1992. He gave no other details.
Source: AP
Jan 3, 2010
Freya von Moltke, a former Nazi resister who made her home in Vermont, died at the age of 98.
Her son, Helmuth von Moltke, told the Valley News that his German-born mother died Friday after suffering a viral infection earlier in the week.
Freya von Moltke and her husband were prominent members of the German resistance to the Nazis during World War II. Born into a banking family in 1911, Freya Deichmann met her future husband, Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, at age 18 and
Source: New York Post
Jan 3, 2010
Some 65 years ago, as World War II raged in Europe and the Pacific, the American people faced an unprecedented constitutional crisis of which they were completely unaware -- and which has remained a secret ever since.
It has long been known that President Franklin D. Roosevelt, during the last year of his life, was gravely ill with serious cardiac problems: He'd been diagnosed with acute heart failure in March 1944 and suffered from astronomically high blood pressure and arterioscle
Source: BBC News
Jan 3, 2010
Children of Blackshirt women, who joined Oswald Mosley's pro-Nazi British Union of Fascists, often feel that they have had to live with the burden of the guilt and shame caused by their mother's fascist sympathies.
When I was 11, I was taken by my mother to visit her birthplace in Kennington, London.
As we walked around my mother showed me where the air-raid shelters were during the war, but then she began telling me about the Blackshirt meetings.
At 11 it
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 3, 2010
It was a turning point in the Second World War. As the Allies prepared to invade Sicily in 1943, they wanted to dupe the Germans into thinking that their attack would be aimed elsewhere.
To carry out the deception, a plan was concocted in which a body was dumped in the sea, to be discovered by Axis forces, carrying fake 'secret documents' suggesting the invasion would be staged in Greece, 500 miles away.
Incredibly, the trick worked and the diversion of German troops
Source: Boston.com
Jan 2, 2010
Fifty years ago today, John F. Kennedy launched his campaign for the presidency of the United States, a run that only 10 months later resulted in his election.
Now, history buffs and Kennedy fans will be able to relive some of that historic campaign through a Twitter feed, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum says.
The feed, JFK__1960 (that's a double underscore, the library notes), will use campaign documents to follow the trail. Daily updates will tell
Source: The Seattle Times
Jan 2, 2010
That Chile is recognizing victims of its military dictatorship in a striking new "monument to memories" is positive, said Iglesias, both a victim and a historian of Augusto Pinochet's bloody 17-year rule. As a high-school student activist in Santiago in 1975, she was tortured before fleeing with her family to France.
The $19 million museum that opens in downtown Santiago on Jan. 11 is dedicated to the 31,000 murder, torture and kidnapping victims during the 1973-1990 milit
Source: BBC
Jan 2, 2010
Former Prime Minister Sir John Major has criticised Tony Blair's handling of the Iraq war and his presentation of the case for invasion in March 2003.
Sir John said he had reluctantly backed the war because he believed what Mr Blair had said as prime minister.
But now, he said, big questions had been raised by the evidence given to the Chilcott Inquiry into the war.
Sir John said it now seemed there were doubts before the invasion about whether there were
Source: BBC
Jan 2, 2010
A Blue Plaque has been unveiled in a Devon fishing port to commemorate a dramatic rescue at sea during WWI.
On 1 January 1915, the crew of the Brixham trawler Provident saved 71 sailors from HMS Formidable after she was torpedoed by a German U-boat.
Despite Provident's efforts, more than 500 of HMS Formidable's sailors lost their lives.
The English Heritage blue plaque is a permanent sign installed in a public place to serve as a historical marker and com
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 2, 2010
Relatives of those who died in the Lockerbie bombing are launching a new legal bid to force the Government to hold a public inquiry.
UK Families Flight 103, the relatives' campaign group, will use human rights laws in a bid to uncover the truth about the terrorist attack, which claimed 270 lives in December 1988.
The group has hired Gareth Peirce, the prominent human rights solicitor better known for her work representing terror suspects, to devise a legal strategy to
Source: Fox News
Jan 2, 2010
House Democrats began an ad campaign in December assailing Republicans for opposing legislation restructuring federal financial rules and recalling the final days of the Bush presidency, when the economy tanked
With the congressional GOP poised for a comeback in the 2010 midterm elections, Democrats are dusting off an old playbook, using George W. Bush as their boogeyman and castigating Republicans as cozy with Wall Street.
But that was three years ago. Democrats have b
Source: AP
Jan 2, 2010
A Somali man was charged with two counts of attempted murder on Saturday for an attack on a Danish artist whose 2005 cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad ignited riots and outrage across the Muslim world, authorities said.
The 28-year-old Somali man with ties to Al Qaeda broke into Kurt Westergaard's home in Aarhus on Friday night armed with an ax and a knife, said Jakob Scharf, head of Denmark's PET intelligence agency.
The 75-year-old artist, who has been targeted with sev
Source: Deseret News (Utah)
Jan 2, 2010
Remember the last scene of the movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark," where the Bible's ark of the covenant is packaged up and lost in a large government warehouse?
That actually is happening to untold artifacts and documents, because the Department of Interior largely doesn't know what is in its collections, often doesn't know if items were obtained legally and doesn't properly care for many of them, according to the department's inspector general.
"Elements o
Source: BBC
Jan 1, 2010
Scientists have analysed DNA extracted from the remains of a 30,000-year-old European hunter-gatherer.
Studying the DNA of long-dead humans can open up a window into the evolution of our species (Homo sapiens).
But previous studies of this kind have been hampered by scientists' inability to distinguish between the ancient human DNA and modern contamination. In Current Biology journal, a German-Russian team details how it was possible to
Source: NYT
Jan 1, 2010
Choi Sung-Yong remembers his father as a war hero who became a successful fishing boat captain, a reserved man who helped at orphanages and once splurged to buy his music-loving teenage son a record player, a true luxury at the time.
But all the memories are tinged with loss. In 1967, when Mr. Choi was just 15, his father’s boat failed to return from sea. The family went into mourning, assuming the boat had sunk. But three months later they were shocked to learn that Mr. Choi’s fath
Source: Live Science
Jan 1, 2010
The dawn of 2010 promises more amazing developments in the world of technology. Already, tourists can visit space, for a price, nearly everything and everyone is going digital, and medical science continues to test the boundaries of what makes us truly human.
One full century ago, the new technologies that had people talking were considered just as groundbreaking. Electricity led the charge of developments that were changing the way people lived every day, with transportation and c
Source: Smithsonian Magazine
Jan 1, 2010
We think we know the Revolutionary War. After all, the American Revolution and the war that accompanied it not only determined the nation we would become but also continue to define who we are. The Declaration of Independence, the Midnight Ride, Valley Forge—the whole glorious chronicle of the colonists’ rebellion against tyranny is in the American DNA. Often it is the Revolution that is a child’s first encounter with history.
Yet much of what we know is not entirely true. Perhaps m
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 1, 2010
With hindsight we can see that two events occurring within days of each other in late 2001 brought about an epochal change in the world's strategic system, drawing China and the Mid-East oil powers into each other's arms again after five centuries of estrangement. The old Silk Road came back to life.
The Twin Towers attack of 9/11 – and the backlash that followed – caused the Arab world and its money to turn away from the US. That much is well known.
Six days later, t
