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 2, 2009
The Conservative leader is understood to be holding open the option of withdrawing the Tory whip from the MP if he fails to say sorry for his remarks.
Mr Cameron made clear his displeasure when asked about the backbencher’s comments, made in an email to an angry voter, during a question and answer session following a speech in London.
In the message, written after he was accused of being a “trougher” for using his allowances to pay his own company £100,000, the MP com
Source: BBC
Nov 2, 2009
He boycotted the trial's start last week saying he needed more time to prepare his defence.
In a letter to the presiding judge, Mr Karadzic says he will attend a procedural hearing at the court on Tuesday to discuss his defence.
His letter also calls for a fair and expeditious trial.
Proceedings were adjourned when Mr Karadzic failed to appear in court last Monday.
Source: Al Jazeera
Nov 2, 2009
Hundreds of former Chilean military conscripts have offered to reveal details of crimes they committed and witnessed during the late General Augusto Pinochet's rule.
The former soldiers, who served in the army during Pinochet's 1973 coup against Salvador Allende, the then president of Chile, made the offer to talk during a demonstration on Sunday to seek financial and medical benefits from the state.
They said they would reveal details such as where bodies of victims we
Source: Yahoo News
Nov 1, 2009
BATTLE GROUND, Ind. (AP) - Tippecanoe County officials want to create a computer-assisted map of a historic battlefield that could yield clues about archaeological remnants buried there.
The Tippecanoe County Historical Association plans to use a device to measure anomalies in the earth's magnetic field to find underground objects. It also might use ground-penetrating radar to find items if funding can be found.
Archaeologist Colby Bartlett says it would be the first p
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education
Nov 1, 2009
The Background
Some 2.3-million people are incarcerated in the United States. From the 1920s to 1975, the imprisonment rate hovered around 110 per 100,000 U.S. residents; it has since rocketed to 760—proportionally five to 12 times as high as any other industrialized nations.
The annual bill: $64-billion.
Reacting to that scale and to increasingly harsh methods of imprisonment, scholars across the social sciences and humanities are energetically stud
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education
Nov 1, 2009
People have changed the planet's climate, warming the atmosphere by churning out greenhouse gases.
But that process didn't start during the Industrial Revolution. It began thousands of years ago, according to a controversial hypothesis, before anyone uttered the phrase "global warming."
The warming, triggered by a relative handful of farmers, some cutting and burning forests and others planting rice paddies, could be the best way to explain one of the stranges
Source: Salon
Nov 1, 2009
This story is part of a special Salon investigation of problems at Arlington National Cemetery.
Air Force Master Sgt. Marion Grabe passed away on Christmas day in 2007. She had served 26 years as an operating room nurse in the Air Force she loved, including 17 months in a Manila hospital treating wounded soldiers during the Vietnam War.
In death, Grabe wanted to mark her service to her count
Source: Guardian (UK)
Nov 1, 2009
A fateful blunder by British military intelligence allowed the Nazis to seize 50,000 Allied prisoners of war from the Italians during the Second World War and transport them to camps in Germany and Poland where thousands are believed to have perished.
Newly published evidence reveals that a top-secret branch of the Ministry of Defence known as MI9 ordered British PoWs in Italy to remain in their camps after Italy surrendered. The order, issued in June 1943 as Field Marshal Bernard M
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Nov 1, 2009
The row over the release of the Lockerbie bomber was reignited last night after it emerged he has been released from hospital.
Abdelbaset Al Megrahi was freed from a Scottish jail on compassionate grounds in August after a medical assessment concluded he had only three months to live because of his prostate cancer.
But the 57-year-old former Libyan intelligence agent and his family now say that, while weak and terminally ill, he is not close to death, and continues to
Source: Deutsche Welle
Nov 1, 2009
German news magazine Der Spiegel reports in its Monday edition that the witness, identified only as Samuel K., is "suspected of assisting in the gruesome murder of at least 434,000 people" when he was a guard at the Belzec death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Samuel K., an 88-year-old man who lives near Bonn, had given descriptions of his time as a guard to investigators in 1969, 1975, 1980 and again this past June.
"It was clear to us that Jews were kil
Source: LA Times
Nov 1, 2009
Reporting from Berlin and Zirndorf, Germany, - Martina Metzler peers at the piles of paper strips spread across four desks in her office. Seeing two jagged edges that match, her eyes light up and she tapes them together.
"Another join, another small success," she says with a wry smile -- even though at least two-thirds of the sheet is still missing.
Metzler, 45, is a "puzzler," one of a team of eight government workers that has attempted for the las
Source: Time (Nov 9th Issue)
Nov 1, 2009
Lunch period at an inner-city all-boys school is an event associated with the sounds of chaos, not classical music. And yet there are definitely strains of Beethoven coming from the piano in the cafeteria at the University of Detroit Jesuit High School and Academy. Behind the pianist, another student waits patiently for his turn. Upstairs in the art room, a senior is using the lunch hour to apply more brushstrokes to a portrait. A few kids are playing pickup ball in the gym, but more are crowded
Source: BBC
Nov 1, 2009
Archaeologists have unearthed what they say could be a prehistoric Bronze Age burial site in central Oxford.
Experts say important chiefs may have been laid to rest at the site of the former Radcliffe Infirmary.
Land around the River Thames, known as the River Isis as it passes through Oxford, was often used for prehistoric burial, ritual and social monuments.
The Museum of London Archaeology (Mola) also revealed evidence of a later 6th Century Saxon sett
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 1, 2009
Russia has provoked outrage in Poland by simulating an air and sea attack on the country during military exercises.
The armed forces are said to have carried out "war games" in which nuclear missiles were fired and troops practised an amphibious landing on the country's coast.
Documents obtained by Wprost, one of Poland's leading news magazines, said the exercise was carried out in conjunction with soldiers from Belarus.
After spending 40 years
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 1, 2009
An epic film about the Prophet Mohammad backed by the producer of "The Lord of the Rings" is being planned with the aim of "bridging cultures".
Filming of the £90 million English-language film was set to start in 2011, with Barrie Osborne as its producer, Almoor Holdings, a Qatari media company, said.
The company said the film - in which the Prophet would not be depicted, in accordance with Islamic strictures - was in development and talks were bei
Source: AP
Nov 1, 2009
Thousands of ethnic Albanians braved low temperatures and a cold wind in Kosovo's capital Pristina to welcome former President Bill Clinton on Sunday as he attended the unveiling of an 11-foot statue of himself on a key boulevard that also bears his name.
Clinton is celebrated as a hero by Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority for launching NATO's bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999 that stopped the brutal Serb forces' crackdown on independence-seeking ethnic Albanians.
Source: CNN
Nov 1, 2009
A man faces charges of arson after he allegedly set fire to a section of Memorial Park, which houses the remains of victims of September 11, 2001, attacks, police said Saturday.
Brian Schroeder, 26, who was arrested Saturday, faces charges of criminal mischief, police said.
Memorial Park, a large white tent in east midtown Manhattan, is the temporary resting place for unclaimed and unidentified remains, according to the chief medical examiner's office.
The
Source: Mike Allen's Playbook in Politico
Nov 1, 2009
From Mike Alllen’s Playbook, exclusive excerpts from “The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory” — $15.09 on Amazon – by DAVID PLOUFFE, campaign manager of Obama for America:
“The remarkable Obama for President campaign, led by a once-in-a-generation candidate, had the audacity to win — and not just to win, but to do so with guts, defying conventional wisdom again and again. We talked to voters like adults and organized a grassroots movemen
Source: Guardian.co.uk
Nov 1, 2009
It has witnessed some of Iran's most tumultuous events: the fall of the shah, the return of Ayatollah Khomeini and the transformation from pro-western monarchy to revolutionary Islamic republic.
Now Tehran's days as the Iranian capital appear numbered after a powerful state body approved a plan for a new principal city. The idea was proposed by the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and rubber-stamped by the expediency council.
Seismologists have warned t
Source: Deutsche Welle
Oct 31, 2009
The House of Terror Museum is located in the building which served as the successive secret police headquarters of both Hungary's fascist and communist governments.
The Nazi-affiliated Arrow Cross party took over Hungary in the last months of World War II. During the regime's short rule from October 1944 to January 1945, 80,000 Jews were deported to the Nazi death camps, while an estimated 20,000 Jews were killed outright – hundreds of them in the basement of the building which now
