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
Sep 23, 2009
A Scottish banknote from 1836 has sold for a world record price at auction.
The £1 note sold for £9,000 ($US14,800) at the charity auction held by the Clydesdale Bank, beating the old record of £7,000 ($US11,500) set in 2001.
The note was issued by the North of Scotland Bank, which became part of Clydesdale Bank in 1951.
The auction, which included collectable notes from a series of new World Heritage designs as well as historic notes, raised £112,830 ($U
Source: BBC
Sep 23, 2009
A woman convicted over the assassination of Indian PM Rajiv Gandhi has ended a fast to demand her early release from jail.
Nalini Sriharan, who is in a prison in Tamil Nadu state, says she has been eligible for early release since 2005.
She ended her fast after officials said that her demand would be considered.
Rajiv Gandhi was killed by a suicide bomb at an election rally in May 1991. India has always blamed the attack on Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger rebels.
Source: BBC
Sep 23, 2009
South Korea has come up with a novel way to boost its defence budget - by selling a vast stockpile of old Korean-war rifles to collectors in the US.
The guns were originally sent to Korea as military aid, and some were also used during the war in Vietnam.
For more than five decades, they have been kept mothballed in warehouses.
Most of those on offer are M1 rifles - a weapon once described by US General George S Patton as "the greatest battle-impleme
Source: BBC
Sep 23, 2009
The UK's largest haul of Anglo-Saxon gold artefacts has been found in Staffordshire.
The items, which date from the 6th to 8th centuries, were discovered beneath a field on a farm in July.
The haul is much larger than the Sutton Hoo discovery in 1939 when 1.5kg of Anglo-Saxon gold was found near Woodbridge, Suffolk.
The Staffordshire coroner will decide later whether the hoard is to be classified as treasure. Related Links
Source: BBC
Sep 23, 2009
A commercial airline pilot has been arrested in Spain over his alleged role in Argentina's 1976-1983 "Dirty War".
Julio Alberto Poch, a Transavia airline pilot, was held at Valencia airport as he was about to fly a passenger plane to Amsterdam, Spanish officials say.
Mr Poch is wanted in Argentina for allegedly flying planes used to dump political opponents of the country's military regime into the sea.
Some 30,000 people disappeared or died dur
Source: BBC
Sep 23, 2009
The former Cuban President Fidel Castro has praised US President Barack Obama's speech before the UN General Assembly for its words on climate change.
Mr Castro described President Obama's admission that the US had been too slow to act on climate change as a brave gesture.
But he added that the American capitalist system was incompatible with a clean planet. He praised the American president for saying that the US had been slow to act o
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 23, 2009
A spy movie which recounts how a French double-agent changed the course of the Cold War has re-opened old wounds with Moscow, which allegedly threatened a Russian actor and bugged its director.
L'Affaire Farewell is the true story of how a French mole in the KGB helped break Russian spy rings to such a devastating extent that it hastened the demise of the Soviet Union.
Colonel Vladimir Vetrov of Directorate T, the industrial spying arm of the KGB leaked thousands of do
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 23, 2009
Shaun Woodward, the Northern Ireland Secretary, was said to be “profoundly shocked” last night after the findings of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry were delayed until March.
The probe into the deaths of 13 Catholic civil rights protesters in Londonderry in 1972 was due to report this autumn after 11 years, and the latest hold-up is set to add another £1 million to the £188 million price-tag.
An exasperated Mr Woodward was said to be planning to pass on his strong displeasu
Source: AP
Sep 23, 2009
Seventeen former Kosovo rebels went on trial Wednesday before the Serbian war crimes court, charged with murder, rape and torture of Serb civilians in 1999.
Nine of the men were arrested in December in a predominantly Albanian-populated region of Serbia bordering Kosovo. Eight of the suspects are at large and were accused in absentia.
The indictment accuses the men of the kidnapping of 153 Serbs and the deaths of at least 80 of them in the eastern Kosovo town of Gnjilan
Source: The Times (UK)
Sep 23, 2009
Chairman Mao’s grandson is believed to have been promoted to become the youngest major-general in the People’s Liberation Army.
Speaking recently in his capacity as a researcher at the Academy of Military Sciences and as an expert in Mao Zedong Thought, Mao Xinyu, 39, was introduced as a major-general.
It was the first clue that the only known surviving male heir to the Great Helmsman may have been promoted from senior colonel.
His elevation, reportedly rec
Source: The Daily Beast
Sep 23, 2009
It seems unlikely that building a hotel is the best way to commemorate one of the Holocaust's most notorious massacres of Jews, but that's what's on the table in Ukraine. Haaretz reports that last week, Kiev approved a plan to build 28 hotels to accommodate tens of thousands of visitors expected to mob the town during the 2012 European Championships in soccer, including one hotel on the site of the Babi Yar massacre, which is now in a residential district of Kiev. On September 29th and 30th, of
Source: The Daily Beast
Sep 23, 2009
In another reversal from Bush-era policies, the Obama administration will announce new rules on Wednesday that will make it harder for the government to withhold information about programs such as warrantless wiretapping and rendition on the grounds that a revelation would threaten national security. Under the old policy, in order to invoke "state secret" privilege, the government only needed one official to back the claim, The Washington Post reports. Under the new rules, government a
Source: Balkan Travellers
Sep 22, 2009
A royal burial vault was discovered by archaeologists in the area of Pavla chuka, between the villages of Bonche and Podmol near the town of Prilep in southern Macedonia.
The circular vault dates to the fourth century BC, the Vecher newspaper reported today. It has a diameter of 30 metres and is made of monolithic stones, each of them weighting two tons, which are undamaged although they are nearly 2,500 years old.
The vault has an opening dug into a wall, and antique tombs w
Source: Time
Sep 22, 2009
Journalists often stand accused of neglecting good news in favor of bad. And on Monday evening, some of the most eminent names in British journalism seemed frankly perplexed at how to handle a piece of good news: namely, that their employer, the Observer, had been saved from the chop. They had called a meeting in London to plot a campaign to rescue the world's oldest Sunday newspaper. Despite news of the paper's reprieve, they assembled anyway. As the room filled to capacity and then filled beyo
Source: Science Daily
Sep 22, 2009
The archaeological excavations at the royal palace in the ancient city of Qatna, north east of the Syrian city of Homs, have once again unfolded a remarkable archaeological discovery. The summer excavations, due to end September 25, located a rock tomb-cellar underneath the palace containing hundreds of artifacts as well as human bones from the period 1600-1400 BC.
In 2002, excavations at this site found a tomb with accessibility from the central palace rooms. The present excavation
Source: George Stephanopoulos blog
Sep 22, 2009
It’s not uncommon in Washington for a book or an article to become the must-read of the moment for every player in town. (You may recall Atul Gawande's New Yorker article last Spring looking at the health care system in McAllen, Texas that was required reading for everyone at the White House and up on Capitol Hill as the health care debate was kicking into high gear. )
With President Obama expressing skepticism about a further troop buildup in Afghanistan and his commander on the g
Source: Reuters
Sep 22, 2009
Archaeologists in the ancient city of Troy in Turkey have found the remains of a man and a woman believed to have died in 1,200 B.C., the time of the legendary war chronicled by Homer, a leading German professor said on Tuesday.
Ernst Pernicka, a University of Tubingen professor of archaeometry who is leading excavations on the site in northwestern Turkey, said the bodies were found near a defense line within the city built in the late Bronze age.
The discovery could ad
Source: Rasmussen Report
Sep 22, 2009
Fifty-nine percent (59%) of U.S. voters believe that the current level of political anger in the country is higher than it was when George W. Bush was president.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that only 22% think the level of political anger is lower now, while 16% rate it as about the same.
Despite frequent Republican complaints about the vitriol leveled at President Bush, 69% of GOP voters say the level of anger is higher now, a view shared
Source: Google News
Sep 22, 2009
BEIJING — Chinese archaeologists have discovered a new section of the Great Wall, showing that it stretched at least 11 kilometres further east than previously thought, state media said on Tuesday.
The newly discovered section, built during the Qin (221-206 BC) and Han (206 BC to 220 AD) dynasties, was found in northeastern Jilin province, Xinhua news agency said.
A state-sponsored study team found a 172-metre-long section of ruins from the wall section in Tonghua count
Source: The Daily Citizen
Sep 22, 2009
Dalton State College’s newly opened Bandy Heritage Center will preserve not just Dalton’s history but also the history of all of Northwest Georgia, officials said.
College officials on Tuesday introduced the heritage center’s new director, Kentucky native John Fowler, and assistant director, Rome native Heather Howell, during a ceremony to celebrate the creation of the history preservation program. Both come from the Center for the Study of the Civil War Era at Kennesaw State Univer
