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: BBC News
Oct 9, 2009
This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.
But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.
And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.
So what on Earth is going on?
Climate chan
Source: Yahoo Buzz
Oct 9, 2009
Fire up the barbecue. Get the mall-walking shoes on. About 517 years have passed since Christopher Columbus stumbled onto North America, and it's time to remember that with a three-day weekend.
Well, for some of us. While national government offices can be depended upon to celebrate a federal holiday, Columbus Day isn't a day off for all Americans. Some schools will stay open, and local bureaucrats will still shuffle paperwork...but the department store sales soldier on.
Source: The Vancouver Courier
Oct 9, 2009
BALLYCASTLE, Ireland--It took 40 years, but Seamas Caulfield finally solved the puzzle of his father's peat bog, and in the process unearthed a 5,000-year-old Stone Age village.
Schoolteacher Patrick Caulfield was digging peat--long-decayed vegetation that has been used for domestic fuel in Ireland for centuries--in a bog near this western Ireland hamlet in the 1930s when his spade struck rocks two metres down.
He cleared the immediate area and discovered that the rocks
Source: TVNZ
Oct 9, 2009
Lincoln University near Christchurch has reprimanded 15 students who dressed as Nazis and concentration camp inmates for a party, with penalties including visiting a Holocaust Museum and paying a $200 fine.
The university disciplinary committee met on Friday to consider the conduct of the students, who pleaded guilty to the charge of bringing discredit on the university.
Source: CNSNews.com
Oct 9, 2009
Washington (AP) - Slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers will be honored Friday with a Navy supply ship named for him.
Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, a former governor of Mississippi, planned to announce the honor during a speech at Jackson State University in Jackson, Miss. The nearly 700-foot-long vessel named for Evers will deliver food, ammunition and parts to other ships at sea.
During the civil rights movement Evers organized nonviolent protests, voter registration dri
Source: The Washington Post
Oct 9, 2009
Nearly 70 years ago, the federal government began issuing hundreds of billions of dollars in savings bonds to finance the greatest war effort in the nation's history, with no less than President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who summoned patriotic Americans to "one great partnership," buying the very first.
But the bonds came with a catch: They wouldn't be paid off for 40 years, an unusually long time. As the decades passed after World War II, $16.7 billion worth of bond certific
Source: AFP
Oct 9, 2009
Around 3,000 Russians held an angry protest Saturday against a controversial plan by state-run energy giant Gazprom to build a huge skyscraper in the country's former imperial capital.
Demonstrators held signs saying "Gazprom go home" and "History is worth more than money" at the rally in central Saint Petersburg, one of the largest protests in the city in recent years, an AFP correspondent witnessed.
Prominent local historian Lev Lurye slammed the G
Source: BBC
Oct 9, 2009
A service to commemorate the life of the longest surviving soldier of World War I has taken place in Cornwall.
Harry Patch, who died in Somerset in July at the age of 111, served in the trenches in Ypres in 1917 as part of the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry.
The ex-machine-gunner, who was wounded by a German shell, bequeathed his medals to the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry Regimental Museum in Bodmin.
The service was held at St Petroc's church in B
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 9, 2009
Cuba's Fidel Castro is the latest world leader to opine on the controversial award of the Nobel peace prize to President Barack Obama.
But the endorsement of the veteran communist revolutionary may be the last thing Mr Obama wanted, as his words will only strengthen conservative complaints that the prize was an anti-American gesture.
The former dictator, who handed power to his brother Raul last year after falling seriously ill, made clear that he believed the award wa
Source: Guardian.CO.UK
Oct 9, 2009
Passage in official history of security services advises closer scrutiny of intelligence data kept by those in power.
The author of MI5's official history has asked the parliamentary intelligence and security committee to investigate the way government departments have succeeded in suppressing embarrassing information.
Christopher Andrew, a Cambridge historian, urged the committee of MPs and peers to act in a hitherto unnoticed passage of his authorised history of MI5,
Source: Washington University in St. Louis
Oct 9, 2009
An historian of American politics and political institutions at Washington University in St. Louis says that there is a "profound" difference between the awarding of a Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama and ones to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.
And it has nothing to do with the fact that President Obama is only eight months into his first term as president and Presidents Roosevelt and Wilson were both near the end of their second terms when th
Source: BBC
Oct 9, 2009
Some of the surviving veterans gathered at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, to receive commemorative badges from Foreign Secretary David Miliband.
Mr Miliband said: "The people of Bletchley Park helped win the war... we must never forget."
Many historians agree the codebreakers' efforts shortened the war by two years.
Source: BBC
Oct 9, 2009
A pair of Sir Winston Churchill's customised gloves reached nearly three times their expected value at auction in Gloucestershire.
The tiny gloves, made to fit Churchill's famously small hands, sold for £1,400 at Dominic Winter in Cirencester on Thursday.
They had a guide value of between £500 and £800.
But fierce bidding between a Lincolnshire Churchilliana fan and a US collector pushed the price up.
Source: BBC
Oct 9, 2009
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has described himself as the most persecuted person "in the entire history of the world".
Mr Berlusconi also said he was "the best prime minister we can find today".
In an impassioned statement, he then mistakenly told reporters he had spent millions of euros on "judges", before correcting himself to say "lawyers".
Correspondents say the Constitutional Court's ruling means th
Source: BBC
Oct 9, 2009
The Louvre museum in Paris will return five ancient fresco fragments to Egypt within weeks, France's government says.
The announcement comes two days after the head of antiquities in Cairo said he would cease all co-operation with the museum until they were sent back.
The Egyptians say the Louvre bought the Pharaonic steles in 2000 even though it knew they had been stolen in the 1980s.
They are believed to be from a 3,200-year-old tomb of the cleric, Teta
Source: Fox News
Oct 9, 2009
The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama is an "embarrassment" to the process, a presidential historian told FOXNews.com.
President Obama said Friday he was "most surprised and deeply humbled" to win the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, adding that he accepts the honor as "a call to action to confront the common challenges of the 21st century."
In a brief statement in the White House Rose Garden on Friday, the president said he does
Source: AP
Oct 9, 2009
At a memorial service honoring Britons who died during the Iraq war, the Archbishop of Canterbury said Friday it will take time for historians and moralists to decide if the conflict was justified.
Rowan Williams — an outspoken critic of Britain's role in the war — told a congregation at St. Paul's Cathedral that there are lessons to be learned from it. His audience included Queen Elizabeth II, Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Iraq President Jalal Talabani, former Prime Minister Tony Bl
Source: AP
Oct 9, 2009
The U.S. is taking legal steps in Miami to return a stolen, 3,000-year-old sarcophagus to Egypt.
Federal prosecutors filed court papers Thursday seeking forfeiture of the ancient artifact.
It wound up in Miami last year following a series of transactions that began at an antique dealership in Barcelona, Spain.
Source: CNN
Oct 9, 2009
Did President Obama land a Nobel peace prize at such an early stage of his presidency simply because he's not George W. Bush?
Diplomatic circles are certainly not dismissing such a notion and a "surprised and humbled" Obama has himself agreed that the award (for which nominations had to be submitted only two weeks after his inauguration) can hardly have been a recognition of anything he has yet accomplished. It is a prize for aspiration rather than achievement.
Source: Guardian (UK)
Oct 9, 2009
Even its most ardent defenders would struggle to claim that Coventry is a beautiful city. Despite efforts in recent years to spruce the place up, it is still seen by many as an expanse of gloomy postwar concrete and tarmac.
Which is why, according to poet and writer Jackie Litherland, many people have forgotten the real reason why the Nazis launched their savage attack on the city at the start of the second world war. Litherland caused a flutter among historians todayafter claiming
