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: USA Today
Dec 22, 2009
The decade began with a national sigh of relief — no Y2K terrorist attack or computer meltdown. A traveler named Luis Salcedo, boarding a flight in New Orleans on Jan. 1, 2000, summed it up: "Nothing to worry about now."
Not with the lowest unemployment rate in nearly 30 years and a stock market that had just closed at a historic high. Not in the world's only superpower.
So began a decade when America experienced its worst attack by foreigners and its worst na
Source: BBC
Dec 22, 2009
The CIA used at least two secret detention centres in Lithuania after the 11 September 2001 terror attacks on the US, a Lithuanian inquiry has found.
The report by a Lithuanian parliamentary committee says that in 2005 and 2006 CIA chartered planes were allowed to land in Lithuania.
It says that no Lithuanian officials were allowed near the aircraft, nor were they told who was on board.
Poland and Romania hosted similar CIA "black sites", media
Source: BBC
Dec 22, 2009
German officials have ruled out returning an ancient bust of Queen Nefertiti to Egypt - saying it is too fragile to be transported.
And they have insisted that the bust was acquired legally by the Prussian state nearly a century ago.
Egypt first requested the return of the antiquity in 1930, but successive German governments have refused.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Dec 22, 2009
The leading English seminary in Rome has unveiled documents that suggest William Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic.
The Venerable English College has claimed that England's leading playwright was a secret Catholic who spent "lost years" in Rome.
Father Andrew Headon, the vice-rector of the college, said that college records correspond with a previously undocumented period in Shakespeare's life after he left Stratford in 1585 and before he emerged as a playwri
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Dec 22, 2009
The mistress of France's 16th century King Henry II was poisoned by a gold elixir she drank to keep herself looking young, scientists have discovered.
Diane de Poitiers was renowned for her youthful looks and porcelain skin and thought the concoction preserved her youth.
Experts say she was up to 20 years older than the king but her appearance made them look the same age. One courtier said she was "as fresh and lovable" in her final years as when aged 30 and
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Dec 22, 2009
Former President Bill Clinton came within minutes of being assassinated in the Philippines by terrorists controlled by Osama bin Laden, a new book has revealed.
The US leader was saved shortly before his car was due to drive over a bridge in Manila where a bomb had been planted.
The foiled attack came during Mr Clinton's visit to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in the city in 1996. Prof Gormley’s book, for which he intervie
Source: CNN
Dec 22, 2009
Fitrie Ani was three months pregnant when she heard neighbors in her corner of Banda Aceh screaming: "The sea is rising! The sea is rising!"
A wall of water twice as high as a house engulfed communities like Ani's around the Indian Ocean, from Indonesia to East Africa, the day after Christmas 2004, leaving some 200,000 people dead or missing in 12 countries in a tsunami that the U.S. Geological Survey says caused more casualties than any other in recorded history.
Source: CNN
Dec 22, 2009
Ann Nixon Cooper, the Atlanta centenarian whose name Barack Obama invoked in his post-election speech as a symbol of America's struggles and progress, died Monday. She was 107.
In his victory speech in Chicago, Obama said of Cooper, who was African-American: "She was born just a generation past slavery ... when someone like her couldn't vote for two reasons -- because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin.
Cooper was born in Shelbyville, Tennessee, i
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Dec 22, 2009
Twenty years after his execution by firing squad, the former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu has become a major tourist draw despite lingering memories of his despotic regime.
Foreign tourists are dwarfed by Alexandru Ioan Cuza hall at the parliament palace known as "The House of the People" in Bucharest Photo: AFP/Getty Images Nowhere is that so marked as at the grandiose palace in central Bucharest, which he had built at enormous human and financial cost to his long-
Source: History Today
Dec 22, 2009
On Friday, December 18th, Cambridge University Library took delivery of the personal archive of Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967), marking the culmination of a six-month campaign to restore the collection for the nation.
The Sassoon Archive was in the possession of the poet’s son until his death in 2006. It went on the market two years later. Siegfried Sassoon studied as an undergraduate at Cambridge University and later became an Honorary Fellow of Clare College. The library already he
Source: BBC News
Dec 22, 2009
Polish police have taken three men who admitted stealing the "Arbeit macht frei" sign from Auschwitz back to the site to re-enact its theft.
Police found the metal sign cut into three pieces on Sunday and arrested five men in northern Poland.
Three of the five have confessed to the theft from the site in southern Poland.
The 5m (16ft) wrought iron sign - the words on which translate as "Work sets you free" - symbolises for many the atr
Source: Times (UK)
Dec 22, 2009
War Horse, the children’s story that became a huge West End hit, is galloping towards the silver screen after it emerged yesterday that Steven Spielberg has bought the film rights.
Theatre audiences have been mesmerised by the tale of a boy who braves the trenches of the First World War in the hope of finding his beloved horse. Michael Morpurgo, who wrote War Horse in 1982, welcomed news that his story was being developed by the director. “I can think of no one better to do this,”
Source: NYT
Dec 21, 2009
Add this to Richard M. Nixon’s résumé: Godfather of the Democrats’ big health care legislation in 2009.
Nixon, the 37th president, was known for working with Democrats on health care policy, including legislation in 1971 that opened a major government effort to fight cancer.
But his contribution to the current bill was to serve as more of a political counterforce: five of the six Democratic committee chairmen primarily responsible for writing the current health legislat
Source: National Geographic News
Dec 21, 2009
Jurassic Park was packed with pseudo-science, but one of its fictions may have accidentally anticipated a dinosaur discovery announced today—venomous raptors.
Though a far cry from the movie's venom-spitting Dilophosaurus, the 125-million-year-old Sinornithosaurus may have attacked like today's rear-fanged snakes, a new study suggests.
Rear-fanged snakes don't inject venom. Instead, the toxin flows down a telltale groove in a fang's surface and into the bite wound, indu
Source: Science Daily
Dec 21, 2009
When a team of archaeologists began excavating an old coral reef in Vanuatu in 2008 and 2009, they soon discovered it had served as a cemetery in ancient times. So far, 71 buried individuals have been recorded, giving new information on the islands' inhabitants and their funeral rites.
Relatives did not treat their dead gently. Besides being headless, some of them had had their arms and legs broken, in order to fit into the coral reef cavities. Ravn suggests they may have been left
Source: New York Times
Dec 21, 2009
Midtown Manhattan has been overhauled so thoroughly in the last two decades that any structure not made of glass and steel looks old. In that realm, the tightly packed pile of stones that appeared at the base of 11 Times Square last week looked positively ancient.
Its sudden unveiling caused passers-by and neighbors to wonder how old it was and what purpose it had served.
Was it a furnace? A fireplace? A coal vault?Time to call in an ex
Source: MSNBC
Dec 21, 2009
Sign will be welded, restored to death camp gate; five arrested.
The three pieces of the infamous sign proclaiming "Arbeit Macht Frei" ("Work Sets You Free)" will be welded together and restored to the main gate at the former Auschwitz death camp after an improved security system is put in place to guard against another theft.
Officials at the Auschwitz memorial museum said Monday the new system would be aimed at better protecting not just the recove
Source: Kansascity.com
Dec 21, 2009
As Kansas City’s Liberty Memorial has gained acclaim with its World War I museum, the flow of donated artifacts has also greatly increased.
But officials are reeling from the immensity of a recent gift from the widow of a lifelong collector. A semi-trailer truck was needed to haul in the roughly 1,700 items, most of them related to the ferocious machine guns of that era.
“It was like getting a whole other museum,” said Eli Paul, vice president of museum programs at Libe
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Dec 21, 2009
A rare piece of 3D Nazi propaganda designed to show the German army's march across Europe is to be auctioned
The rare boxed set of stereo cards were a basic version of "virtual reality" and allowed families and children feel like they were on the front line from their living rooms.
They were dreamt up by Hitler's evil war machine and showed the progress of the army as it conquered the West.
Rich Nazi families, who were able to buy them with specia
Source: Spiegel Online
Dec 21, 2009
German historian Joachim Riecker recently published a book about Hitler's hatred of Jews. British newspapers soon printed articles containing inaccurate information about the book. Now the researcher is battling to save his reputation. In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, Riecker expresses his frustration and demands a correction.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Mr. Riecker, you wrote a book about Hitler and the Holocaust. Your central thesis in "Hitler's November 9," is that Germany's de
