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
Dec 8, 2009
Investigators say the accidental discharge of a World War II-era flare gun ignited a fire that heavily damaged a home in Reno.
A man who lived in the house was inspecting the flare gun when it went off just before 11 a.m. on Monday.
Reno fire spokesman Steve Frady says the man and a woman who also lived there escaped with a pet cat unharmed.
Source: Times (UK)
Dec 8, 2009
The North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, has a network of 300 metre (1,000 ft) deep emergency escape tunnels connecting Pyongyang with key sites around the country, a top-level defector claims.
The tunnels, reminiscent of the lair of a James Bond villain, are reported to contain railway lines, a water supply and even vegetation. According to Hwang Jang Yop, formerly North Korea’s chief political philosopher, they connect areas as far as 30 miles (50km) away from Pyongyang, enabling th
Source: Times (UK)
Dec 8, 2009
Gordon Brown failed to grasp the significance of the war in Afghanistan until a few months ago, according to General Sir Richard Dannatt, the former Chief of the General Staff who now advises the Conservative Party.
General Dannatt claimed that the Prime Minister did not understand the importance of the Afghan military campaign until late this summer, even though British troops had been fighting there since the 2001 invasion.
The general was outspoken in his criticism
Source: Times (UK)
Dec 8, 2009
An Iraqi taxi driver who overheard two military commanders talking about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was allegedly the “intelligence sub-source” quoted in the Government’s dossier to prove that chemical missiles could be fired in 45 minutes, according to a report by a Tory MP.
Adam Holloway, a former army officer and Conservative MP for Gravesham, told The Times last night that he had been given information that the taxi driver’s recollections of the conversation in the back
Source: Times (UK)
Dec 8, 2009
Egypt’s most senior antiquities official will visit Britain tomorrow to push on with a campaign to have the Rosetta Stone returned from the British Museum to its native country.
Speaking in his offices, amid piles of Pharaonic books, museum records and archaeological dig requests, Zahi Hawass, the head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, said he would not be swayed by the British Museum’s refusal to return the item, which he considers the “icon of Egyptian identity”.
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Dec 8, 2009
Russian secret service officials claim they have genuine fragments of the skull of Adolf Hitler and have dismissed American reports which suggest it belongs to a woman.
Vassili Khristoforov, head of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), said: ‘The FSB archives hold the jaw of Hitler and the state archives a fragment of Hitler’s skull.
‘With the exception of these remains, seized on May 5, 1945, there exist no other bits from the body of Hitler.’
In Sep
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Dec 8, 2009
Actors in South Africa are campaigning to stop Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Hudson from playing the lead role in a new film about Winnie Mandela.
The Creative Workers Union of South Africa said using foreign actors to tell the country's stories undermined efforts to develop the national film industry.
'It can't happen that we want to develop our own Hollywood and yet bring in imports,' the union's president Mabutho Sithole said.
'This decision must be rev
Source: Spiegel Online
Dec 8, 2009
How do you carve up a cow? First you cut the meat off the bones. You start by severing the muscles from the joints with a sharp knife. The fibrous meat can then easily be scraped off, from top to bottom. After you've removed the flesh there's still a lot of goodness left. Deep in the long bones and vertebrae lies the marrow. To get at this delicacy you smash the bones and scrape out the marrow or simply boil it out in water. What's left is a pile of naked bones with traces of scratching and scra
Source: Deutsche Welle
Dec 8, 2009
Heinrich Boere announced in an Aachen state court on Tuesday that he killed three Dutch civilian resistance fighters at the end of World War II.
Boere said the three were a bicycle-shop owner, a pharmacist, and another civilian.
Murders "weren't a crime"
He told prosecutors, however, that he did not kill the men in cold blood.
"At no point did I feel like I was committing a crime. Now I see things from a different perspective,&qu
Source: Artdaily.org
Dec 8, 2009
Former President George H.W. Bush is helping dedicate a $15.5 million gallery expansion that carries his name at the National Museum of the Pacific War in Texas.
Bush is expected at the museum in Fredericksburg on Monday, the 68th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attacks. Bush was a World War II naval aviator and survived being shot down by the Japanese over the Pacific.
The museum expansion has been planned for about a decade. It takes visitors on a chronological jour
Source: NYT
Dec 7, 2009
From Joseph Fourier to James Hansen, NOAA to I.P.C.C., and Kyoto to Copenhagen, a look at the history of climate study and diplomacy in the modern age of global warming.
Source: Yahoo News
Dec 7, 2009
Potsdam, Germany – Handsome villas on Karl Marx street here look out on the bending Griebnitzsee River. In one villa, occupied by Harry Truman in July 1945, history itself would fatefully bend.
President Truman called it "the little White House" – and it was here, while he was in Berlin for the Potsdam Conference, that word arrived of the first atom bomb test in New Mexico July 14. With strong urging from Winston Churchill, the Americans sent a letter to Japan, asking for
Source: Science Daily
Dec 7, 2009
Tel Kabri is the only site in Israel where wall paintings similar in style to those found in the Aegean 3,600 years ago have been found; researchers say this was a conscious decision made by the city rulers to lean toward Mediterranean culture.
The remains of a Minoan-style wall painting, recognizable by a blue background, the first of its kind to be found in Israel, was discovered in the course of the recent excavation season at Tel Kabri. This fresco joins others of Aegean style t
Source: NYT
Dec 7, 2009
Nearly one in six American workers is foreign-born, the highest proportion since the 1920s, according to a census analysis released Monday.
Because of government barriers to immigration, the share of foreign-born workers dipped from a 20th-century high of 21 percent in 1910 to barely 5 percent in 1970, but has been rising since then, to the current 16 percent.
In 2007, immigrants accounted for more than one in four workers in California (35 percent), New York (27 percen
Source: Physorg
Dec 7, 2009
The oral history archive, held at Cambridge University, features more than 300 recordings, including first-hand accounts of meetings with Mahatma Gandhi and testimonies by freedom fighters whose terrorist acts aimed to force an end to British rule.
Alongside the campaigners, freedom-fighters and assassins, ordinary people such as doctors, missionaries, farmers and police officers give intimate reminiscences of Empire, Indian independence, and of partition.
The collectio
Source: NYT
Dec 7, 2009
AYODHYA, India — To reach the most hotly disputed religious site in India, a pilgrim must negotiate a maze of caged paths, designed so that worshipers can approach it only single file, pockets emptied of everything but lint. Only the monkeys are not frisked by its thorough phalanx of security guards.
From 1528 until 1992, a squat, nondescript mosque sat on this spot. But 17 years ago this week, a mob of Hindu activists tore the building to pieces with little more than their bare han
Source: Yahoo
Dec 7, 2009
Y2K, the first year of a new century, arrived after much anticipation. Any decade is going to be full of the predictable and the unexpected — this one was no different. We talked to a few historians to make sense of what happened.
Brian Balogh, a history professor at the University of Virginia, pointed out that 9/11 demonstrated the power of non-state actors and has kept us talking about “homeland security,” a term not widely used before the attacks. Hoffman said 9/11 revealed that
Source: Times (UK)
Dec 7, 2009
Mehmet Ali Agca, the gunman who tried to kill Pope John Paul II nearly 30 years ago, is to be released from a Turkish prison in January after 28 years in Italian and Turkish jails. He plans to pray at the late pontiff's tomb in Rome.
It was reported in Italy that he hoped to move to the country after he is released on January 18, 2010 from Yenikent prison in Ankara, where he is serving a sentence for crimes committed before the attack on the Pope.
La Repubblica said t
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Dec 7, 2009
In a jungle clearing on a small Pacific island, the descendants of a tribe of cannibals bow to a British pensioner and apologise for having his relative for dinner - literally.
The man they were apologising to was Charles Milner-Williams, 65, of Hampshire.
The meal they were apologising for was his great-great grandfather, the Reverend John Williams, who was killed on the island of Erromango, now part of Vanuatu, 170 years ago.
Williams, a prominent miss
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Dec 7, 2009
The former Christian Democratic party leader died during routine surgery and his relatives have long suspected that he was the victim of foul play at the hands of secret police operating under the 1973-1990 military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
The four doctors arrested include two who took part in the surgery and two others who had a role in an initial autopsy of Frei's body.
Two other suspects in the case are accused of having spied on Frei, who at the time was s
