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)
Nov 26, 2009
Sir Christopher Meyer told the Iraq Inquiry that the two men spent an afternoon meeting in private at the former president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, in April 2002, which appeared to lead to a shift in the then Prime Minister’s stance on Iraq.
Sir Christopher said: “I took no part in any of the discussions and there was a large chunk of that time when no adviser was there.
“The two men were alone in the ranch so I’m not entirely clear to this day what degree of conve
Source: The Daily Beast
Nov 25, 2009
President Obama will withhold the release of millions of pages of military and intelligence documents even though the information was scheduled to be declassified at the end of the year. The decision runs counter to a White House that promised transparency and openness, the Boston Globe reports. The documents are all more than 25 years old, with some dating back to World War II. “The national-security bureaucracy is deeply entrenched and is not willing to give up some of the protections they fee
Source: The Jerusalem Post (via OpEdNews)
Nov 25, 2009
A British diplomat has criticized the appointment of two leading Jewish academics to the UK's Iraq Inquiry panel, stating it may upset the balance of the inquiry.
Sir Oliver Miles, a former British ambassador to Libya, told The Independent newspaper this week that the appointment of Sir Martin Gilbert, the renowned Holocaust historian and Winston Churchill biographer, and Sir Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies and vice-principal of King's College London, would be seen as &
Source: NYT
Nov 25, 2009
ALEXANDRIA, Egypt — It is not that Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution are unknown here. But even among those who profess to know something about the subject, the common understanding is that Darwin said man came from monkeys.
Darwin, of course, did not say man came from monkeys. He said the two share a common ancestor. But to discuss Darwin anywhere is not just to explore the origin of man. It is inevitably to engage in a debate between religion and science. That is why, 150
Source: Barbados Advocate
Nov 25, 2009
THE lone collection of Prehistoric Amerindian carvings so far discovered on this island has been damaged.
“Unfortunately, these have not been looked after awfully well,” Archaeologist and Professor at the University of Sussex Professor Peter Drewett said while displaying pictures of carvings in the Spring Head cave.
He pointed out several modern carvings that have been placed on top of the prehistoric ones, some of which were scoured out with a knife.
“Fort
Source: Nashua Telegraph
Nov 25, 2009
BURLINGTON, Vt. (AP) — Archaeologists from the University of Vermont are searching for the remains of a War of 1812 hospital near Battery Park in Burlington.
The archaeologists are using a grant from the National Park Service’s American Battlefield Protection Program to try to learn more about the encampment where 5,000 soldiers were stationed. The war against Great Britain lasted from 1812 through 1815.
Source: Google News
Nov 25, 2009
MILFORD, Conn. — A Colonial-era skull believed to belong to a Revolutionary War soldier is set to be reburied in Connecticut with full military honors.
The unidentified skull was discovered in the 1840s when railroad tracks were being laid near where 46 soldiers died of smallpox. British troops had captured the soldiers in 1776 and abandoned them by what is now Milford Cemetery.
Source: 11-25-09
Nov 25, 2009
Former Khmer Rouge prison chief Duch should be jailed for 40 years, a prosecutor has told Cambodia's UN-backed war crimes court.
Duch, whose real name is Kaing Guek Eav, had overseen the deaths of 15,000 people at Tuol Sleng jail in the 1970s, the court heard.
In a closing statement, Duch apologised to his victims but said he had not carried out the massacres alone.
The tribunal is not expected to give a verdict before early next year.
Source: BBC
Nov 25, 2009
Seventy former Argentine army officers are accused of crimes against humanity for the alleged abuse, torture and, in one case, murder of their own troops during the 1982 war with Britain over the Falklands, or Malvinas, Islands. As the BBC's Angus Crawford reports, the case has divided Argentina's veteran community.
After the brief war with Britain, Argentine forces were defeated, and soon after the dictatorship fell.
The conscripts were sent home and, according to Mic
Source: Rasmussen Reports
Nov 25, 2009
Voters are a bit less inclined this month to blame President Obama’s policies for the country’s current economic problems.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 50% of U.S. voters now say the problems are due to the recession which began under the Bush administration. Forty-two percent (42%) blame Obama’s policies, and eight percent (8%) are not sure.
In a survey at the end of last month, voters were inclined to assess blame a bit more evenly. For
Source: NYT
Nov 25, 2009
Since at least the time of Abraham Lincoln, presidents have sent letters of condolence to the families of service members killed in action, whether the deaths came by hostile fire or in an accident.
So after his son killed himself in Iraq in June, Gregg Keesling expected that his family would receive a letter from President Obama. What it got instead was a call from an Army official telling family members that they were not eligible because their son had committed suicide.
Source: NYT
Nov 25, 2009
NIKOLSKI, Alaska — This distant dot in the Aleutian Islands needed just 10 students for its school to dodge a fatal cut from the state budget. It reached across Alaska and beyond but could find only nine.
Built by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1939, the little Nikolski School will not be the last in Alaska to close. Four others have closed this fall and at least 30 more are at risk because of dwindling enrollment; one school in remote southeast Alaska survived only by advertising
Source: NYT
Nov 25, 2009
On that supercharged day in 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Ala., she rode her way into history books, credited with helping to ignite the civil rights movement.
But there was another woman, named Claudette Colvin, who refused to be treated like a substandard citizen on one of those Montgomery buses — and she did it nine months before Mrs. Parks. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made his political debut fighting her arrest
Source: The Christian Science Monitor
Nov 25, 2009
Leiden, The Netherlands - The first Pilgrims of the first American Thanksgiving in 1621 were unusually devout – even by Puritan standards. They crossed the ocean on a conviction that "the Lord has more truth and light yet to break forth out of his holy Word," as pastor John Robinson said before they sailed from the Netherlands.
Yet the Pilgrim band that braved the Mayflower and shared deer and turkey with native Americans were also some of the most cosmopolitan and toleran
Source: National Geographic
Nov 25, 2009
Recent reports have held up a remote Brazilian town—filled with blonde, blue-eyed twins—as evidence of Mengele's postwar attempts to add to the ranks of an Aryan "master race."
But research announced today says Cândido Godói's "Nazi twins" are nothing more than a myth.
The outback town of about 7,000 has a twin rate nearly 1,000 percent higher than the global average.
The twins' fair features are no mystery—Cândido Godói (map) is largel
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 25, 2009
John Mulholland was paid the then princely sum of $3,000 for tips on slipping a pill into the drink of the unsuspecting, tying shoelaces to give uncover signals and on the "surreptitious removal of objects by women".
Fortunately for posterity and today's budding spies, the agency's paper shredders were not as thorough in their work. Though it was believed every copy of his report had been destroyed in 1973, one survived and has been turned into a book, The Official CIA Man
Source: CNSNews
Nov 25, 2009
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) told CNSNews.com that President Barack Obama was giving 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed “his wish” by giving him a trial in federal civilian court instead of trying him before a military tribunal.
McCain was asked on Nov. 19 whether the administration might have to produce Mohammed’s CIA interrogators if the terrorist’s defense lawyers call them as witnesses.
McCain said the answer was not clear because Obama had opened the civilian jus
Source: CNSNews
Nov 25, 2009
Paris (AP) - The Great Debate gets under way Wednesday, led off with a grand question: "For you, what does it mean to be French?"
This is neither a pompous academic exercise in France's elite schools nor a TV game show. It is the French government's effort to clarify -- with citizen participation -- the nation's values, increasingly fraught with tensions as customs brought in by immigrants, for instance, rub up against traditional French values.
France's immig
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education
Nov 25, 2009
The scholarly book getting the most buzz at the American Anthropological Association's annual conference next week is likely to be a doctoral dissertation published 15 years after its author's death. Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia is by S. Ann Dunham, the mother of President Obama, a connection noted on the book's front cover. The publisher, Duke University Press, will unveil the book on December 3 at the conference, to be followed by a special session devoted to Dunha
Source: Azzaman
Nov 25, 2009
The U.S. embassy in Baghdad has given 515 archaeological items to the Iraq Museum, Antiquities Department chief said.
Qais Rasheed said the treasures date to “various ancient periods” of Iraq’s history.
“The FBI and the American embassy in Baghdad passed the treasures to the Iraq Museum,” he said.
“The collection includes pottery pieces, cuneiform tablets, cylinder seals, precious stones and statues from different Mesopotamian epochs,” he added.
