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: Reuters
Jan 1, 2010
An Antarctic expedition has found what it believes to be remains of the first aeroplane brought to the frozen continent, on an icy shore near where it was abandoned almost a century ago.
Australia has searched for many years for the old single-propeller Vickers plane at Cape Denison, where the nation's most famous polar explorer, Douglas Mawson, abandoned it after it proved to be a failure during his 1911-14 expedition.
The Mawson's Huts Foundation, an officially backed
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 1, 2010
A 13th-century letter from Genghis Khan’s grandson demanding homage from the pope is among a collection of documents from the Vatican’s Secret Archives that has been published for the first time.
Although scholars have had access to the secret archives since 1881, they remain closed to the general public
The Holy See’s archives contain scrolls, parchments and leather-bound volumes with correspondence dating back more than 1,000 years.
High-quality reproduct
Source: Washington Post
Jan 1, 2010
Margaret Garritsen deVries, 87, an economist and historian at the International Monetary Fund, died of pneumonia Dec. 18 at Suburban Hospital. She lived in Bethesda.
Dr. deVries was among the first employees hired by the IMF, joining it as an economist in 1946. She represented the agency on missions to Mexico, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Turkey, Israel, Yugoslavia, Costa Rica and Nicaragua.
She was appointed assistant chief of the multiple exchange rate divisio
Source: BBC
Jan 1, 2010
A Scottish poet who killed himself after being rejected by a publisher is to be remembered on the 200th anniversary of his death.
Robert Tannahill, also known as the Weaver Poet, was once viewed as being almost comparable to Burns.
The centenary of his death saw 15,000 people head to Paisley's Gleniffer Braes, one of his favourite spots, to listen to his songs. It is hoped that Paisley buddies and poetry lovers will again turn out in force to pay tribute to the poet.
Source: BBC
Jan 1, 2010
A Belfast-based choreographer who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp has died aged 93.
Helen Lewis, who had a long association with the Lyric Theatre, settled in Northern Ireland after WWII.
Born in Czechoslovakia, she trained as a dancer and having made a new life in Belfast became involved in dance teaching and choreography.
In 1992 she published a widely acclaimed autobiography A Time To Speak which recounted her time in the camp.
Source: BBC
Jan 1, 2010
A replica of a Roman pavement worth about £1m and currently on show at an abbey in Gloucestershire is for sale as it is not attracting enough visitors.
The original mosaic, the Great Orpheus Roman Pavement, was part of a floor of a Roman villa in Woodchester and is now buried in the village churchyard.
The real pavement, thought to date from AD 325, was last shown in 1973 and was seen by 140,000 people in 50 days.
It was decided not to unearth it again fo
Source: Guardian (UK)
Jan 1, 2010
Britain's special relationship with the United States is "stronger than ever" under Barack Obama, the American ambassador to London said today.
There has been speculation that Obama's foreign policy approach – and his personal history of his grandfather being tortured by British colonial authorities during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya – might lead to a cooler relationship than was the case when his predecessor George Bush and Tony Blair went to war together in Iraq and A
Source: New York Times
Dec 31, 2009
Love him or hate him, Antonin Scalia has had a greater influence on the way Americans debate the law today than any other modern Supreme Court justice. Conservatives hail Scalia as the founding prophet of their true faith — the Jurisprudence of Original Understanding — and the leader of the opposition to moral relativism and judicial imperialism in the age of Obama. Liberals scorn Scalia as a show-off and intellectual bully who is quick to betray his constitutional principles when they clash wit
Source: Scarborough Evening News (UK)
Dec 31, 2009
Archaeologists have snapped the first picture of an ancient monument on the North York Moors near Scarborough which could date back more than 4,500 years to neolithic times.
Aerial surveyors from English Heritage recently flew two sorties over moorland near Goathland after a wildfire swept across 62 acres revealing the full extent of a prehistoric stone enclosure and multiple stone cairns.
The blaze struck in early October, but caused no lasting damage to the environment.
However, it
Source: BBC
Dec 31, 2009
A councillor who became a spokeswoman for the people of Lockerbie in the wake of the 1988 aircraft bombing has become an MBE in the New Year Honours list.
Marjory McQueen, 63, was a Conservative councillor for Lockerbie on Dumfries and Galloway Council for 12 years.
Mrs McQueen became a public face for the town during the trial of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, who was convicted of carrying out the atrocity.
She also co-ordinated the media during the 10th ann
Source: BBC
Dec 31, 2009
An artwork by Impressionist artist Edgar Degas has been stolen from a Marseilles museum, police have said.
Les Choristes (The Chorus) was missing when staff at the Catini Museum opened the premises on Thursday morning.
There were no signs of a break-in, said Jacques Dallest, the French city's public prosecutor. The museum will now remain closed while the theft is being investigated, including the examination of CCTV footage from securit
Source: The Economist
Dec 31, 2009
Man is one of a number of animals that make things, but man is the only one that depends for its very survival on the things he has made. That simple observation is the starting point for an ambitious history programme, "A History of the World in 100 Objects", which BBC Radio 4 will begin broadcasting on January 18th. A joint venture four years in the making between the British Museum (BM) and the BBC, the series features 100 15-minute radio broadcasts, a separate 13 episodes in which
Source: More Intelligent Life
Dec 31, 2009
Lady Jane Grey is mythologised, even festishised, as an innocent girl sacrificed on the altar of her mother's ambition. But behind the popular biographies of the Tudor Queen lies a different story of misogyny and masochism. It seems the much-maligned mother is in fact the victim.
The traditional story runs like this: Lady Jane Grey was born in 1537, the daughter of Henry VIII's royal niece, Frances, and her husband, Harry Grey, Marques of Dorset. The stout, bejewelled woman in a dou
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Dec 31, 2009
– Coin flipping as a game was known to the Romans as "navia aut caput" (ship or head), as some coins had a ship on one side and the head of the emperor on the other.
– A related game, Cross and Pile, was played in medieval England. The cross was the major design on one side of many coins, and the Pile was the mark created by the hammer used to strike the metal on the other side.
– One of the most significant coin tosses in the United State's history involved t
Source: New York Times
Dec 31, 2009
An organization called the Berlin Underworlds offers visitors an unexpected perspective of the German capital.
Founded in 1997, Underworlds is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the documentation and preservation of Berlin’s vast network of subterranean spaces. It funds its projects by giving tours of bunkers, sewers, air raid shelters and catacombs. The tours are offered in a variety of languages, including English.
The 300-plus members of the association inclu
Source: Haaretz (Israel)
Dec 31, 2009
An American appeals court on Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit by Holocaust survivors who alleged the Vatican bank accepted millions of dollars of their valuables stolen by Nazi sympathizers.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld a lower court ruling that said the Vatican bank was immune from such a lawsuit under the 1976 Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which generally protects foreign countries from being sued in U.S. courts.
Holocaust survivors from Cro
Source: BBC News
Dec 31, 2009
Much has changed in the 10 years since Vladimir Putin first became Russia's president. Now serving as prime minister with a possible view to running for the presidency again in 2012, James Rodgers assesses the rise and rise of the spy who came to control the Kremlin.
Cast your mind back to 31 December 1999. In Moscow, it is the last day of a century that has seen revolution and the collapse of communism.
Everyone in the Russian capital is waiting for reassurance from re
Source: CNN
Dec 31, 2009
Off the coast of Algiers one day in 1944, a young Navy officer plea-bargained with God as his torpedoed ship, the USS Lansdale, took on water.
If he survived, he vowed, he would dedicate his life to public service.
"I'd always thought of going into government service," Robert M. Morgenthau recalled recently. "But when my ship was torpedoed off Algiers and I was floating around in the water, I made promises to the Almighty."
He kept those
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Dec 31, 2009
Previously secret papers released at the National Archives show how James Callaghan, the Labour prime minister, was informed in August 1977 of a secret test site in the Kalahari Desert in a personal letter from Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet president.
A Soviet spy satellite had discovered the site at Vastrap, in a remote area south of South Africa's border with Botswana, a week earlier. Two 750-foot shafts had been drilled in preparation for underground explosions. The Americans appe
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Dec 30, 2009
The heirs to Argentina’s most powerful media empire have been ordered to take DNA tests that could establish whether they were part of a forced adoption scheme during the country’s darkest era.
Civil rights campaigners claimed that the real parents of Marcela and Felipe Noble Herrera, whose mother controlled the country’s biggest newspaper, were abducted and murdered by the last dictatorship during its “Dirty War” against Left-wing dissidents.
The pair were adopted in
