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: Times (UK)
Dec 1, 2009
A medieval book is to become the first item from a British national museum to be returned to its rightful owners under a new law governing looted artefacts.
The Benevento Missal, which was stolen from a cathedral in southern Italy soon after the Allies bombed the city during the Second World War, has been in the collection of the British Library (formerly the British Museum Library) since 1947. After a change in the law, it could be back in Italy within months, according to The Art
Source: Reuters
Nov 30, 2009
Long shadows from the global financial downturn hang over the United Arab Emirates as it marks its 38-year existence with flags and fireworks this week.
A debt crisis in Dubai has undercut investor confidence in the brash emirate's ambitions. It remains to be seen whether the UAE's oil-producing powerhouse Abu Dhabi will seize the chance to puncture the dreams of its freewheeling neighbour.
Balloons in the green, white, red and black of the UAE flag adorn myriad shoppin
Source: Bloomberg
Nov 30, 2009
The trial of John Demjanjuk, Germany’s most prominent Holocaust case in decades, may demonstrate the justice system’s limits in helping the nation come to terms with its troubled past, lawyers said.
Demjanjuk, 89, appeared in a Munich court today to face charges of being a Nazi guard who aided in the murder of 27,900 people in 1943 at the Sobibor death camp in then German-occupied Poland. About 35 relatives of the camps’ victims registered as co-plaintiffs. The first day of trial op
Source: CNN
Nov 30, 2009
(CNN) -- Against the chilling scale of the Rwandan genocide, the events that unfolded on May 7, 1994, at the Kibeho College of Arts appear as a blip of horror.
Eighty Tutsi students perished at the hands of their teachers, fellow students and security forces. They died that day, according to the Rwandan government, because of the groundwork laid by one man: Emmanuel Uwayezu.
That he was an educator and a priest made the act that much more inhuman to his accusers.
Source: LA Times
Nov 30, 2009
Reporting from Washington - After Zacarias Moussaoui -- the accused "20th hijacker" in the Sept. 11 attacks -- was sentenced to life in prison in 2006 because one juror in Virginia refused to agree to the death penalty, Moussaoui clapped his hands and called out, "America, you lost and I won." Now the Obama administration plans to seek a death sentence for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind.
Some legal experts say President Obama was
Source: CNSNews
Nov 30, 2009
New York (AP) - By a wide margin, Americans consider Rush Limbaugh the nation's most influential conservative voice.
Those are the results of a poll conducted by "60 Minutes" and Vanity Fair magazine and issued Sunday.
The radio host was picked by 26 percent of those who responded, followed by Fox News Channel's Glenn Beck at 11 percent. Actual politicians -- former Vice President Dick Cheney and former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin -- were the choic
Source: BBC
Nov 30, 2009
Across Timbuktu, in cupboards, rusting chests, private collections and libraries, tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of manuscripts bear witness to this legendary city's remarkable intellectual history, and by extension, to Africa's much overlooked pre-colonial heritage.
Now a giant, new, state of the art library has landed - rather like a spaceship - in the dilapidated centre of Timbuktu, offering the best hope of preserving and analysing the town's literary treasures.
Source: BBC
Nov 30, 2009
Rwanda and France have restored diplomatic relations three years after they were broken in a row over responsibility for the 1994 genocide.
Both governments said they had agreed to appoint ambassadors at the end of long negotiations.
The two nations fell out after a French judge said President Paul Kagame helped spark the genocide, and Rwanda accused France of arming the Hutu militias.
On Sunday Rwanda was also admitted to the Commonwealth.
Source: Times (UK)
Nov 30, 2009
Tony Blair ordered military chiefs secretly to prepare plans for an invasion of Iraq nine months before the start of the war, an inquiry into the conflict was told today.
Sir David Manning, the Prime Minister’s foreign policy adviser, said that Mr Blair asked the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to draw up options in June 2002 when he discovered that the United States was planning for war. The following month Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, offered three alternatives. The first “in-pla
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 30, 2009
Sir Isaac Newton's landmark account on how white light is comprised of the colours of the spectrum and Professor Stephen Hawking's early writing on black holes are among 60 papers to be put online.
More esoteric writings include a paper written by leading 18th century scientists confirming Mozart as a child genius, and a gruesome 1666 account of an early blood transfusion.
Asked to name his favourite, Lord Rees, president of the Royal Society, and a professor of cosmolo
Source: NYT
Nov 29, 2009
If they crave comfort, Democratic candidates can grab onto this: political science research finds little historical connection between unemployment and midterm Congressional elections....
In the 15 midterm elections since Harry S. Truman won the White House in 1948, the sitting president’s party lost House seats 13 times. The exceptions were in 1998, when Democrats benefited from a robust economy and a backlash against the Republican drive to impeach President Bill Clinton over the
Source: North Jersey
Nov 29, 2009
They called him "Valhalla."
But it was more than a nickname.
For more than five years, Hal Turner of North Bergen lived a double life.
The public knew him as an ultra-right-wing radio talk show host and Internet blogger with an audience of neo-Nazis and white supremacists attracted to his scorched-earth racism and bare-knuckles bashing of public figures. But to the FBI, and its expanding domestic counter-terror intelligence operations in the wake
Source: AP
Nov 29, 2009
Just north of I-20 on Moreland Avenue in Atlanta sits an intersection on a low hill. There's a gas station and a liquor store and some other businesses, but not much else.
Though you would never know it from the unremarkable view, thousands of men died here 145 years ago in one of the fiercest fights of the Civil War.
A small but growing number of Georgia archaeologists and history buffs are starting to use high-tech gear, ground-penetrating radar, metal detectors, new
Source: New York Times
Nov 29, 2009
Dredged up from the murky depths of the Rhône River, beneath a heap of wrecked cars, rotting tires and more than 20 centuries of silt, the statue’s white marble visage was plain as day.
“My God, it’s Caesar!” Luc Long remembers shouting after his team of archaeologists and divers discovered the statue in 2007.
The Roman appears with little hair, a wrinkled forehead, a prominent Adam’s apple and features that, for Mr. Long, “seem carved in human flesh.” But Mr. Long did
Source: BBC
Nov 29, 2009
A lawyer for John Demjanjuk, accused of helping to murder 27,900 Jews at a Nazi death camp, has accused German prosecutors of double standards.
Mr Demjanjuk, 89, denies he was a guard at Sobibor camp, in wartime Poland.
As the case began in Munich, his legal team said in previous cases Germans assigned to the camp had been cleared.
Doctors have said Mr Demjanjuk is in poor health, and asked that hearings be limited to two 90-minute sessions a day.
Source: Mary Elise Sarotte, a professor of international relations at the University of Southern California, in an NYT op ed
Nov 29, 2009
TWENTY years ago, dictatorships across Central and Eastern Europe toppled. During this season of remembering, the focus has rightly been on celebration of the new freedoms gained by the inhabitants of those countries: to speak freely, to travel, to vote and to choose their own national futures and alliances. Yet the legacy of 1989 has difficult aspects as well, mostly centering on the origins and legitimacy of later NATO expansion to former East German and Warsaw Pact territory; acknowledgment o
Source: NYT
Nov 29, 2009
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — The first trial to showcase the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge three decades ago concluded with the regime’s chief torturer still seemingly unable to grasp the magnitude of his actions. Yet despite that surprising end, the trial may have helped Cambodia begin to move beyond the horrors of its past...
... The case broke new ground as a hybrid of national and international justice systems with the support of the United Nations. In another innovation, it included
Source: Examiner
Nov 29, 2009
145 years ago today, November 29, 1864, Colorado's Sand Creek Massacre took the lives of 160 Cheyenne and Arapahoe tribal members when the 1st and 3rd Colorado Calvary attacked. Under the leadership of Col. John Chivington, they opened fire on a peaceful camp of Native Americans in Southeastern Colorado and left only a handful of survivors.
About 40 tribal members and Native American supporters gathered in Denver to join in the 11th Annual Spiritual Healing Run/Walk which started at
Source: Dallas News
Nov 29, 2009
In the 1920s, fiction outsold nonfiction 4-to-1; in the 1960s, the ratio was reversed. Ben Yagoda charts the genre of memoir-autobiography over its 2,000-year history to make sense of that change.
He begins with Julius Caesar and moves through St. Augustine, the unfortunate Peter Abelard, the humanist Aeneas Sylvius (Pope Pio II), the rogue-artist Benvenuto Cellini, the philosopher Rousseau and others before arriving at his principal focus, the American memoir. Yagoda maps the vario
Source: Yahoo News
Nov 29, 2009
BAGHDAD – Turning on their TVs during the long holiday weekend, Iraqis were greeted by a familiar if unexpected face from their brutal past: Saddam Hussein.
The late Iraqi dictator is lauded on a mysterious satellite channel that began broadcasting on the Islamic calendar's anniversary of his 2006 execution.
No one seems to know who is bankrolling the so-called Saddam Channel, although the Iraqi government suspects it's Baathists whose political party Saddam once led. T
