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: Telegraph (UK)
Dec 6, 2009
Spain has apologised to a man jailed for being homosexual in the 1970s under a law introduced by General Francisco Franco.
Antoni Ruiz, 50, has become the first Spaniard to receive official recognition of his suffering more than three decades after he was imprisoned for his sexual orientation.
An estimated 5,000 men served prison sentences during the dictatorship of Gen Franco when homosexuality was made illegal but Mr Ruiz was one of the few sentenced for the crime fo
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Dec 6, 2009
The death certificate of Baron Manfred von Richthofen, the legendary First World War German flying ace better known as 'Red Baron', has been discovered in Poland.
Ninety-one years after Von Richthofen died after being shot down near the River Somme in France Maciej Kowalczyk, a genealogist, found the document in archives belonging to the western Polish town of Ostrow Wielkopolski.
Mr Kowalczyk explained that the town, which in 1918 was part of Germany, issued the death
Source: CNN
Dec 6, 2009
A letter penned by George Washington praising the new Constitution sold for $3.2 million at an auction, the highest price for a letter by America's first president.
The four-page letter in Washington's slanting penmanship was written to his nephew Bushrod Washington in November 1787, according to Christie's, the company that auctioned it.
It was in the possession of an unidentified British descendant of his family, Christie's said.
In the letter written fro
Source: BBC
Dec 6, 2009
Archaeologists have found evidence of mass cannibalism at a 7,000-year-old human burial site in south-west Germany, the journal Antiquity reports.
The authors say their findings provide rare evidence of cannibalism in Europe's early Neolithic period.
Up to 500 human remains unearthed near the village of Herxheim may have been cannibalised.
Source: AFP
Dec 6, 2009
THE US has lacked reliable information on al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden's whereabouts for years, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates says.
The revelation from Mr Gates, speaking in an interview with the ABC News This Week program to be aired overnight, comes days after US President Barack Obama announced he would send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan.
In excerpts of the interview released ahead of the broadcast, Mr Gates also could not confirm reports about a detainee
Source: Times Online (UK)
Dec 6, 2009
EGYPT is preparing to make a formal request for the return of the Rosetta Stone, the ancient artefact that helped to unlock the secrets of the pharaohs, from the British Museum.
Zahi Hawass, the head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, said he is preparing to "fight" for the restitution of the stone which has been on display in the museum in London since 1802.
Hawass hopes Britain will hand it back in time for the opening of a new museum near the pyra
Source: BBC
Dec 5, 2009
Thousands of people have attended the funeral of Chilean singer Victor Jara, who has been reburied 36 years after his death in a military coup.
Well-wishers scattered flowers as his cortege made its way to a cemetery.
Jara was one of the most prominent victims of the 1973 coup that brought Gen Augusto Pinochet to power.
His body was exhumed in June so that a court could clarify the circumstances of his death. It was established that he had been shot more
Source: Fox News
Dec 5, 2009
65 million years after they ruled the planet, dinosaurs are back.
A new four-part miniseries on the Discovery Channel peels back the millennia and the skin, revealing a never before seen look at the birth and death of dinosaurs.
Researchers have made incredible leaps in the last year or two, learning previously unknown details about how the giant creatures were born, smelled, thought, acted and more. This Sunday at 8 p.m., a new series captures those advances like never
Source: NYT
Dec 5, 2009
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — These are emotional times in Pakistan, particularly since President Obama told its leaders last week to fight harder against Islamist extremists, and expanded a deeply unpopular covert air strike program in Pakistani territory.
After Mr. Obama’s speech at West Point, newspapers and talk shows here were full of heated commentary that those demands would push Pakistan further toward disaster. “Approval of increasing drone strikes in Pakistan,” blared one headline
Source: Google News
Dec 5, 2009
WASHINGTON — The folks who sneaked into the president's state dinner are part of a long tradition of people showing up as they please at the People's House. It's just that the tradition vanished ages ago.
Americans staked their claim to the White House in muddy boots on fine carpet, picnicked on the grounds, parked their carriages and then their cars outside and tromped inside to look for the man, often finding him. They did not need invitations, engraved or otherwise.
Source: BBC
Dec 5, 2009
A retired colonel in the Guatemalan army has been sentenced to 53 years in prison for crimes committed during the country's civil war.
Col Marco Antonio Sanchez's conviction is the first against an army officer since the war ended.
It spanned 36 years and led to the deaths of at least 200,000 people.
Col Sanchez was found guilty of being responsible for the forced disappearance of eight farm workers in what is being seen as a test case.
Source: AP
Dec 5, 2009
William Wilson, a member of President Reagan's "kitchen cabinet" of advisers, dies at the age of 95.
Wilson was among a group of about a dozen conservative, wealthy Los Angeles businessmen who became confidantes and advisers to Reagan, first as he sought to become governor of California, and later, president. They also helped bankroll his campaigns for office.
Reagan first appointed Wilson as presidential envoy to Rome in 1981, when the United States did not h
Source: AP
Dec 5, 2009
Six families nervously awaited the DNA tests on the young man who returned from Iran. They wondered: Could this be their son who was just an infant in 1988 and somehow lived through a deadly chemical attack by Saddam Hussein's regime?
There was absolute silence as the judge announced the lab results. The man, who called himself Ali, was deemed to be the sole surviving child of 58-year-old Fatima Mohammed Salih, who had lost her husband and all her other six children in the poison ga
Source: AP
Dec 5, 2009
Italian tax police said Saturday that they had seized works by Van Gogh, Picasso, Cezanne and other giants of art in a crackdown on assets hidden by the disgraced founder of the collapsed dairy company Parmalat.
Authorities estimated the 19 masterpieces stashed away in attics and basements were valued at some $150 million.
Parma Prosecutor Gerardo Laguardia said that, based on wiretapped phone conversations, officials believed at least one of the paintings was about to
Source: Fox
Dec 5, 2009
The fact that there is a hall of ages within the haphazard maze of tunnels and aqueducts beneath Jerusalem’s old city is not a great discovery. Archeologists knew this hall existed for more than 30 years. They Just could not enter the hall because ancient building techniques and materials left the place unstable. The walls were buckling in and part of the ceiling had collapsed. Since thousands of years with no particular strategy in city planning left rooms, hallways and chambers stacked on e
Source: Time
Dec 5, 2009
The road to success for President Obama's Afghanistan strategy runs through India, goes an increasingly familiar refrain. That's because reversing the Taliban's momentum requires getting rid of the movement's sanctuary in Pakistan, where the insurgent leadership is known to be based in and around the city of Quetta. But while Pakistan is aggressively tackling its domestic Taliban, it has consistently declined to act against Afghan Taliban groups based on its soil — because it sees the Afghan Tal
Source: Air Education and Training Command
Dec 4, 2009
12/4/2009 - SHEPPARD AIR FORCE BASE, Texas -- Just after 7 a.m. on Dec. 7, 1941, a sleeping giant was woken, fresh off the heels of the worst financial times in American history. The Great Depression starved families, wore down the country's financial epicenter and depleted a military that, not long before the depression, helped win a great war against tyranny.
But the day the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked U.S. naval ports and Army Air Corps bases on Hawaii, it also brought the
Source: Live Science
Dec 4, 2009
A massive volcanic eruption that occurred in the distant past killed off much of central India's forests and may have pushed humans to the brink of extinction, according to a new study that adds evidence to a controversial topic.
The Toba eruption, which took place on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia about 73,000 years ago, released an estimated 800 cubic kilometers of ash into the atmosphere that blanketed the skies and blocked out sunlight for six years. In the aftermath, globa
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Dec 4, 2009
The 7,112 acres - or 11 square miles - of Crow Creek Sioux ancestral land in central South Dakota was auctioned off on Thursday by the US Internal Revenue Service to help pay off more than $3.1 million (£1.9 million) in unpaid taxes, penalties and interest.
The land, part of the tribe's original reservation established in an 1868 treaty, was originally held by the federal government in a trust for the tribe.
However, it was later divided up between individual tribal mem
Source: Yahoo News
Dec 4, 2009
A massive volcanic eruption that occurred in the distant past killed off much of central India's forests and may have pushed humans to the brink of extinction, according to a new study that adds evidence to a controversial topic.
The Toba eruption, which took place on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia about 73,000 years ago, released an estimated 800 cubic kilometers of ash into the atmosphere that blanketed the skies and blocked out sunlight for six years. In the aftermath, global
