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: Yahoo News
Oct 27, 2009
MOSCOW – A Moscow subway station is the newest focus of Russia's bitter dispute over the legacy of Josef Stalin, whose outsize shadow still haunts the nation more than 50 years after his death.
Critics of the Communist era were outraged when old Soviet national anthem lyrics praising Stalin were restored to a rotunda in the Kurskaya station this summer. Now there is talk of putting a statue of the dictator back where one used to stand, facing commuters entering the station.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 27, 2009
Official figures show that in 131 state schools, not a single pupil sat GCSE history last year.
That is 4.1 percent of all 3,159 maintained mainstream secondary schools whose results are published by the Department of Children, Schools and Families.
Separate figure suggest that the move away from history has been greatest among poorer children.
Around 75,000 children in each year group are eligible for free school meals. Another parliamentary answer reveal
Source: Time
Oct 27, 2009
For Omar Bin Laden, the fourth eldest of Osama bin Laden's 20 known children, the awful realization that his own father was a terrorist mastermind plotting a global conspiracy that would destroy the lives of thousands of innocent people and even his own family came gradually. Of course, there were warning signs: Omar's childhood was marked by regular beatings and survivalist training; there was the growing army of ruffians and retainers who called his father "Prince"; and then there wa
Source: Lee P. Ruddin
Oct 27, 2009
One of Britain’s most respected political figures talked about the Grand Old Man of British politics on Tuesday evening.
Speaking before a sell-out St George’s Hall, the Independent Crossbench Peer, David Alton, provided an hour-long “tour de force” on the “son of Liverpool, Scourge of Tyrants.”
Guest of honour at the 87th Roscoe Lecture was Sir William Gladstone (great, great grandson), the present head of the family, who lives in his namesakes former home, Hawarden Ca
Source: BBC
Oct 27, 2009
A 13th Century Pembrokeshire castle has been completely wrapped in plastic as it undergoes a total refurbishment.
Roch Castle near Haverfordwest, once damaged in a Civil War siege, is being turned into a corporate retreat.
Contractors have wrapped the 100ft (30m) tall building in sheeting to protect the stonework as most of the internal floors and roof are replaced.
The castle has been bought by a company which will develop a six-bedroom facility, includi
Source: BBC
Oct 27, 2009
An autobiography claiming to be the memoirs of Jack the Ripper has been unearthed at a Somerset museum.
Experts said the book, written by a James Carnac, is almost certainly a fake but is in places "very accurate" and the earliest work of its kind.
It was discovered amongst the effects of a children's entertainer, handed to Montacute TV Radio and Toy Museum. The book, thought to have been written in the 1920s, is typewritten a
Source: BBC
Oct 27, 2009
When it comes to majestic grandeur, few monarchies in the world matched the opulence of India's royal courts in their heyday.
The Victoria and Albert (V&A) museum in London has brought some of that splendour to life in a new exhibition featuring more than 250 rarely seen objects, including thrones, gem-encrusted weapons and even a life-sized and bejewelled maharaja's model elephant.
Organisers say that Maharaja: The Splendour of India's Royal Courts is the first di
Source: BBC
Oct 27, 2009
The 1989 revolution has its unforgettable images, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, and its famous figures - Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel and Mikhail Gorbachev.
But the man who made a crucial first breach in the Iron Curtain which divided Cold War Europe has received far less attention in the West.
He is Miklos Nemeth, an economist who became Hungarian prime minister in November 1988 and proceeded to tear up the rule book for leaders of communist bloc countries.
Source: BBC
Oct 27, 2009
Twenty four years after the military left power in Brazil, the government is to create a Truth Commission to investigate crimes committed by the security forces between 1964 and 1985.
Brazil is the only country in Latin America which has not investigated deaths, disappearances and torture which took place during its dictatorship, or put alleged perpetrators on trial.
Although the number of victims is far smaller than those who died during military rule in neighbouring
Source: AP
Oct 27, 2009
Heinrich Boere has admitted to gunning down three men as part of a Waffen SS death squad — civilians killed in retribution for partisan attacks in Holland as the tide of World War II turned against the Nazis.
But for more than six decades after the war, he managed to avoid punishment — first escaping from a prisoner of war camp in the Netherlands, then successfully eluding the courts in Germany.
On Wednesday, the 88-year-old goes on trial at the state court in Aachen, c
Source: AP
Oct 27, 2009
An ultraconservative British bishop was fined $16,822 in Germany for denying the Holocaust in an interview with Swedish television, his lawyer said Tuesday.
A court in the Bavarian city of Regensburg issued the fine against Richard Williamson for incitement in connection with his Holocaust denial, Williamson's lawyer Matthias Lossmann said.
An order of punishment is a German legal tool that involves no trial but is equivalent to a conviction if accepted by the defendant
Source: Fox News
Oct 27, 2009
Peter Gadiel wants everyone to remember his son, James, who was killed during the September 11 terrorist attacks.
And he also wants people to remember how he died: "Murdered by Muslim terrorists."
Eight years ago, 23-year-old James Gadiel worked for Cantor Fitzgerald on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center. He died when a hijacked plane crashed into the North Tower.
For years, Gadiel's hometown of Kent, Conn., has wanted to honor the young ma
Source: CNN
Oct 27, 2009
Former Bosnian Serb leader Biljana Plavsic was released from prison in Sweden Tuesday, after serving two thirds of an 11-year sentence for crimes against humanity.
Plavsic, 79, who was once dubbed the "Iron Lady" of the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, left the country after her release, Sweden's prison service said.
Plavsic's early release last week prompted angry protests in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which spent nearly four years besieged by Bosnian
Source: CNN
Oct 27, 2009
Former President George W. Bush made his debut as a motivational speaker Monday night, telling a Fort Worth, Texas crowd it's futile to waste energy chasing popularity.
The president himself saw wild popularity swings during his eight years in the White House, garnering nearly a 90 percent approval rating in the months following the attacks on September 11, 2001 and exiting office with only the support of 31 percent of Americans, according to a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 27, 2009
War crimes prosecutors have opened Europe's first trial for genocide since the Second World War with evidence that Radovan Karadzic was the "supreme commander" behind the mass killings and ethnic cleansing of the Bosnian war.
Alan Tieger, a counsel for the prosecution, quoted from official Serb documents and intercepted telephone conversations to show Mr Karadzic as the "supreme commander" in a violent campaign to "forcibly carve out an ethnic state".
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 27, 2009
The skull of a pliosaur, a sea monster that experts said could have bitten a car in half, has been found along Britain's Jurassic Coast.
The 7.8ft (2.4m) skull of the predator, which lived 150 million years ago, could belong to one of the largest pliosaurs ever found, and could measure up to 52.48ft (16m).
The fossil, a lower jaw and upper skull, found by a local collector, has been purchased by Dorset County Council for £20,000 using money from the Heritage Lottery F
Source: NYT
Oct 26, 2009
TAESUNG FREEDOM VILLAGE, Korean demilitarized zone — Kim Han-seul, a fifth grader, has the most heavily armed crossing guard in the world.
Each morning, his school bus picks him up at a bustling town outside the demilitarized zone that separates South and North Korea. It drives through wire fences, tank traps and military checkpoints along a road flanked by minefields.
After a 50-minute drive escorted by a military jeep with a United Nations flag, the bus unloads Han-se
Source: NYT
Oct 26, 2009
A new examination of skulls from the royal cemetery at Ur, discovered in Iraq almost a century ago, appears to support a more grisly interpretation than before of human sacrifices associated with elite burials in ancient Mesopotamia, archaeologists say.
Palace attendants, as part of royal mortuary ritual, were not dosed with poison to meet a rather serene death. Instead, a sharp instrument, a pike perhaps, was driven into their heads.
Archaeologists at the University of
Source: gothamist
Oct 26, 2009
This past Friday, as construction on Washington Square Park's redesign entered Phase II, a tombstone was unearthed. Dun dun dun. An eagle-eyed reader of the WSP Blog wrote in to that website Friday after "he noticed that there was a large hole dug about 6 feet below the surface in the fenced-off construction area" where two people were seen dusting off the tombstone. Creepy!
Washington Square Park was a potter's field from 1797 to 1826, and in early 2008, during a soil tes
Source: NYT
Oct 26, 2009
KUNDUZ, Afghanistan — Forced to confront the rising insurgency in once peaceful northern Afghanistan, the German Army is engaged in sustained and bloody ground combat for the first time since World War II.
Soldiers near the northern city of Kunduz have had to strike back against an increasingly fierce campaign by Taliban insurgents, while carrying the burden of being among the first units to break the German taboo against military combat abroad that arose after the Nazi era.
