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: NYT
Nov 14, 2009
JERUSALEM — At the heart of this contested city, the holy site known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary, has become, for many, the epicenter of the conflict between Israel, the Palestinians and the wider Muslim world.
The mere mention of the place stirs passions and memories of centuries of bloodshed. Its alternative names evoke the depth of religious devotion and the competing claims.
Many of those contradictions are encap
Source: NYT
Nov 14, 2009
WASHINGTON — Not long after he was rousted from bed and seized in a predawn raid in Pakistan in March 2003, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed gave his captors two demands: He wanted a lawyer, and he wanted to be taken to New York.
After a nearly seven-year odyssey that took him to secret Central Intelligence Agency jails in Europe and an American military prison in Cuba, Mr. Mohammed is finally likely to get his wish.
He will be the most senior leader of Al Qaeda to date held to
Source: Fox News
Nov 14, 2009
The Ziggurat of Ur has stood for 4,000 years in the desert near Nasiriyah in southeastern Iraq, but this unique historical site had been almost completely off limits to visitors under Saddam Hussein.
All that has changed since the old regime was overthrown in 2003, and now, U.S. soldiers are some of the site's most receptive visitors.
The temple-pyramid is part of the ruins of an ancient Sumerian city.
Dhair Muhsen, an Iraqi tour guide, said Hussein made i
Source: NYT
Nov 14, 2009
VENICE — At high noon on Saturday, a gondola bearing a hot-pink plywood coffin decked with yellow flowers made its way down the Grand Canal. Onlookers watched from the shore and shouted greetings from the Rialto Bridge before the boat alighted nearby in front of the Venice city hall.
Part photo opportunity, part political theater, the spectacle was the centerpiece of a fake funeral for the city of Venice. A group of prankster-provocateurs organized it to protest the fact that the nu
Source: NYT
Nov 14, 2009
THIS past week the Supreme Court heard arguments about whether children should ever be sentenced to life without parole for crimes that don’t involve murder.
At the heart of the argument lies a vexing question: When should a person be treated as an adult?
The answer, generally, is 18 — the age when the United States, and the rest of the world, considers young people capable of accepting responsibility for their actions. But there are countless deviations from this benc
Source: The Border Mail (AU)
Nov 14, 2009
BEECHWORTH’S noted Ned Kelly historian Ian Jones says the skull handed to Victorian authorities for DNA authentication this week is not likely the famous bushranger’s.
Mr Jones said the skull was likely Ernest Knox’s, who was executed at Old Melbourne Gaol 14 years after Kelly.
“His initials are EK (the same as Edward Kelly) and it appears the grave that was dug up in 1929 as Ned Kelly’s grave was Ernest Knox’s,” Mr Jones said.
Mr Jones first saw the skull
Source: WSJ
Nov 14, 2009
Google Inc. and two author and publisher groups submitted a narrower version of a legal settlement that would allow Google to distribute millions of digital books online, hoping to mollify the Justice Department and other critics who blasted the original settlement as overly broad and anticompetitive.
The revised settlement will only cover books that were either registered with the U.S. Copyright Office or published in the U.K., Australia, or Canada.
The new agreement a
Source: WSJ
Nov 14, 2009
ANKARA -- Turkey's government laid out long-awaited plans Friday to reconcile with the country's large Kurdish minority and end a separatist war that has cost tens of thousands of lives, prompting the main opposition party to storm out of parliament in protest.
The heated debate was symbolic of the sensitivities of the Kurdish issue in Turkey, which has only recently begun to be debated openly and impartially.
Opponents accused the government of pandering to terrorists.
Source: BBC
Nov 14, 2009
The discovery of a rare 15th Century gold coin in Powys has triggered a legal row.
The coin, from the reign of Henry IV, was unearthed by contractor Shaun Bufton on 28 April while he was working on a new water pipeline in Newtown.
But archaeologists failed to return it to him.
Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust said it had made a mistake in not returning the coin and it regretted not having told him what was happening.
When it was minted in ab
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 14, 2009
An apology is to be made to the victims of child migration schemes who were shipped from Britain to Australia, where many suffered abuse and neglect.
On Monday, the Australian government will say sorry to the thousands of children deported there during the twentieth century.
Meanwhile, Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, will this week say he is to look into what can be done to make amends to all the children who were shipped to Australia, Canada and other former coloni
Source: Fox News
Nov 14, 2009
Michael Mukasey, the final attorney general in the Bush administration, defended military tribunals, asserting that they were created for this kind of case and noting that they were used during and after World War II.
Holder said he decided to seek justice against the suspects in federal court rather than a military tribunal because the attacks targeted civilians on U.S. soil. But Mukasey and other critics say the attack was an act of war that should be prosecuted in a military trib
Source: Fox News
Nov 14, 2009
Some critics say a civilian trial -- instead of a military tribunal -- for self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his accomplices could end up targeting the Bush administration and its anti-terror policies.
One of those five defendants, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, has been at the center of the debate over those Bush-era polices, in particular the harsh interrogation techniques used on Mohammed and others in an effort to obtain information on Al Qaeda and any add
Source: CNN
Nov 14, 2009
What could be the last autograph signed by President Kennedy was sold recently at an auction of itmes linked to his assassination in Texas.
Kennedy reportedly signed the front page of the Dallas Morning News, which contained a photo of him and the first lady and a preview of their arrival that day in Dallas.
A Dallas woman handed the president the newspaper and he signed it for her, according to Heritage Auctions, the company that sold the item. The date of his assassin
Source: CNN
Nov 14, 2009
He is a former Marine who has lived with battleground nightmares for 40 years and now plans a return to the land that haunts him.
But Kevin Roberts' decision is not fueled by remorse. Nor is it about healing a life defined by 13 stinging months in Vietnam. Rather, late-in-life altruism has led him to volunteer to build houses for poor families residing along Vietnam's Mekong River.
Next week, he'll pick up a hammer and saw for the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Work Project
Source: AP
Nov 14, 2009
Sarah Palin's new book reprises familiar claims from the 2008 presidential campaign that haven't become any truer over time.
Ignoring substantial parts of her record if not the facts, she depicts herself as a frugal traveler on the taxpayer's dime, a reformer without ties to powerful interests and a politician roguishly indifferent to high ambition.
Palin goes adrift, at times, on more contemporary issues, too. She criticizes President Barack Obama for pushing through a
Source: Times (UK)
Nov 14, 2009
The Pakistani Army ran training camps for a Muslim extremist group, at least until recently, with the acceptance of the US Central Intelligence Agency, according to France’s foremost anti-terrorist expert.
Jean-Louis Bruguière, who retired in 2007 after 15 years as chief investigating judge for counter-terrorism, reached this conclusion after interrogating a French militant who had been trained by Lashkar-e-Taiba and arrested in Australia in 2003.
In a book in his cou
Source: Times (UK)
Nov 14, 2009
Turkey’s Government has unveiled a “historic” offer to end its 25-year armed conflict with Kurdish fighters that has cost more than 40,000 lives.
Besir Atalay, the Interior Minister, told parliament that he intended to end permanently the conflict with separatists, who are thought to have about 6,000 fighters. “Our slogan is more freedom for everybody,” Mr Atalay said yesterday, outlining what he described as “an open-ended process” to “end terrorism and raise the level of democracy
Source: CNSNews.com
Nov 13, 2009
Chicago (AP) - Gov. Pat Quinn and U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin on Sunday tried to build support and counter criticism of a proposal to sell a prison in rural northwestern Illinois to the federal government to house Guantanamo Bay detainees and other inmates.
Federal officials are expected to visit the maximum security Thomson Correctional Center, about 150 miles west of Chicago, on Monday.
Both Quinn and Durbin said the possibility of selling the prison to the federal governme
Source: Kansas City
Nov 13, 2009
When Bob Enright first showed Kevin Corbett a small doll a sailor took off a Japanese kamikaze pilot whose plane struck a ship in World War II, he knew it was special.
“Bob said people had given him advice, saying sell the doll,” Corbett said. “He asked me what I thought and I told him not to listen to anyone; it was something special, something culturally significant.” ...
... The next day, he received a reply from Ellen Schattschneider, who teaches anthropology at Bra
Source: NYT
Nov 13, 2009
WASHINGTON — How do you defend one of the most notorious terrorist figures in history?
One step, legal analysts say, may be to ask for a change of venue.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s lawyers, whoever they are, will no doubt question whether he can get a fair trial from a jury sitting, as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. noted, in a Manhattan courthouse “just blocks away from where the Twin Towers once stood.”
Then will come the inevitable challenges to inter
