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: The News (Portugal)
Aug 22, 2009
Located between Mafra and Torres Vedras, the fort is thought to have sheltered General Wellington’s troops serving the Torres Vedras line during the French invasions, between 1807 and 1814.
The General’s private quarters, a store room, a warehouse and a weapons locker were defined during the excavation. The division had been previously outlined in maps but this is the first time excavations were attempted to unearth them.
Of the weaponry storeroom, Archeologist Artur Ro
Source: Google News
Aug 22, 2009
Chancellor Angela Merkel reiterated her support Saturday for a memorial to Germans forced to relocate from eastern Europe after World War II, but said it did not mean Germany was seeking to diminish responsibility for starting the war.
After the Third Reich collapsed in 1945 and borders were moved westward, millions of ethnic Germans in Poland, then-Czechoslovakia and elsewhere were viewed as traitors and were expelled or fled.
Backed by the German government, a group c
Source: NYT
Aug 22, 2009
President Obama had not even taken office before supporters were etching his likeness onto Mount Rushmore as another Abraham Lincoln or the second coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Yet what if they got the wrong predecessor? What if Mr. Obama is fated to be another Lyndon B. Johnson instead?
To be sure, such historical analogies are overly simplistic and fatally flawed, if only because each presidency is distinct in its own way. But the L.B.J. model — a president who asp
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Aug 22, 2009
Authorities in China are moving to snuff out petitioning, a centuries-old form of protest that brings thousands of aggrieved people to the capital each year seeking justice.
The new rules come as authorities are seeking to keep a lid on protests ahead of the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China in October. One official from the legislative affairs committee said recently that an "improvement" of the petitioning situation was needed to ensure "a harmoniou
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Aug 22, 2009
The government of Scotland found itself scrambling Friday to control political fallout from a decision to flex its independence by releasing a Libyan man convicted in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing.
Television footage of a crowd of welcoming Libyans waving Scottish flags has fanned anger about the release of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, who has terminal prostate cancer. He was allowed to travel to Libya on Thursday despite demands from victims' family members and a host of U.S. off
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 22, 2009
British volunteers have launched a privately-funded mission to recover the remains of eight RAF crew killed in Malaya in 1945, after the Government refused to help.
Sunday is the 64th anniversary of the crash that killed the crew of the 356 Squadron Liberator KL654 while on a resupply sortie over Negeri Sembilan in central Malaya.
Japan had announced its surrender only eight days earlier and part of the crew’s mission was to search for prisoners of war still held in c
Source: AP
Aug 22, 2009
Relatives of Americans killed when Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland, plan to converge on New York City in September to protest Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's speech at the United Nations.
Family members are furious that convicted Libyan bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi was released from a Scottish prison Thursday and was greeted in Libya by cheering crowds. He and his family also met later with Gadhafi.
Scottish officials said al-Megrahi, a former
Source: CNN
Aug 22, 2009
A former Bush administration official said she thinks former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge's recent charges that politics were behind raising the terror level in 2004 were "personally motivated."
In a new book, Ridge says top Bush administration officials may have tried to raise the nation's terror alert for political reasons in the days before the 2004 presidential vote.
In response, Frances Townsend, a former Homeland Security adviser to President Ge
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 22, 2009
Former lieutenant William Calley said: "There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai.
"I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry."
Mr Calley was addressing members of the Kiwanuis Club in Greater Columbus, Georgia, in remarks delivered on Wednesday but which have only now emerged.
The killin
Source: Independent (UK)
Aug 22, 2009
He is accused of stealing a priceless first edition work of Shakespeare – and arrived at court in a horse-drawn carriage, wearing Highland tartan and swigging from a bottle of Drambuie.
Raymond Scott, who claims to be distantly related to Bonnie Prince Charlie, faced a judge at Durham Crown Court dressed in a kilt of Royal Stewart tartan, a Harris Tweed jacket, cravat and a pair of limited edition £1,000 Fendi sunglasses.
The eccentric antique book dealer, who faces cha
Source: Times (UK)
Aug 22, 2009
The face of Chairman Mao is possibly the most reproduced in the world, printed, as it is, on every banknote in China and on countless mementoes around the land.
Officials fear, however, that a huge number of Mao knick-knacks on the market fail to show proper respect for the man revered as the founding father of modern China. That is why the Quality and Technology Supervision Bureau in Mao Zedong’s native Hunan Province is planning to put new standards in place before next year. Any
Source: Times (UK)
Aug 22, 2009
It is one of the mysteries of Whitehall: why did Harold Wilson resign as Prime Minister only two years into his second reign?
Conspiracy theories have abounded about the events preceding March 16, 1976, when Wilson stunned the country and his Cabinet colleagues. Was he the victim of a plot by the security services, who thought that he had communist sympathies and was a KGB asset, or had the onset of Alzheimer’s already claimed his faculties?
At the time Wilson, later
Source: Times (UK)
Aug 22, 2009
The release of the Lockerbie bomber is casting a long shadow over relations between Britain and the United States, where senior figures in the Obama Administration have expressed dismay over the Government’s failure to take a stand.
The controversy over the decision to let Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi go home to Libya was further stirred after Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the son of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, said in a Libyan television interview yesterday that his release was linked to nego
Source: Russia Today
Aug 21, 2009
Russian diplomats have been invited for the first time to commemorate the last war between Russia and Sweden.
The Russian delegation visited the place where the final shots of the Russian-Swedish war of 1808-1809 rang out, and laid flowers on Russian soldiers’ graves.
Aleksandr Kadakin, the Russian ambassador to Sweden, said that the end of the war marked the beginning of fruitful bilateral cooperation between the two countries.
Source: Newsday.com
Aug 21, 2009
A number of modern homes paid for by American taxpayers stand empty. The freshly painted church welcomes no one. The stark landscape and empty buildings gives this atoll the feeling of a ghost town abandoned by its residents.
Though the government says a portion of Rongelap is safe, the former residents will not return to live there. The northern part of Rongelap - one of a string of tiny islands spread across the vastness of the southern Pacific Ocean - was left so radioactive from
Source: Spiegel Online
Aug 21, 2009
Following reports on "black site" prisons in Poland, ABC News is now reporting that a third jail existed in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius. According to the report, as many as eight prisoners were held there for at least one year.
The United States is believed to have used the third black site prison in Europe to hold high-value al-Qaida suspects after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and to question them using "special interrogation techniques." These included t
Source: BBC
Aug 21, 2009
People who have not been to Belfast City Cemetery for years are being invited to come and visit the graves of friends and family this weekend.
The city council has organised a visitors' day this Sunday between 1000 BST and 1500 BST.
Staff will be on hand to do genealogical searches to help those who do not know where their family members are buried. Sinn Fein Councillor Tom Hartley who has helped organise the day said: "It is a wonderful
Source: Deutsche Welle
Aug 21, 2009
The Federal Prosecutor's Office in Karlsruhe revealed that genetic material unmistakably belonging to Becker had been found on several envelopes of letters claiming responsibility for the attack on April 7, 1977.
The assassination of Siegfried Buback, a strong opponent of the left-wing extremist terrorist group, marked the beginning of a wave of terrorist acts by the RAF in their radical opposition to the West German government. It remained one of the highest-profile political kill
Source: BBC
Aug 21, 2009
The descendants of the former princely rulers of Tonk in the Indian state of Rajasthan have won a legal battle to raise their monthly allowances.
Each of the 570 descendants will now get a minimum of 100 rupees ($2). The earlier minimum was set at 50 paise (less than a cent).
The allowance was started in 1944 and the maximum amount was fixed at 500 rupees ($10).
Tonk was the only Muslim princely state in Rajasthan before India gained independence in 1947.
Source: The Times (UK)
Aug 21, 2009
Is he the evil perpetrator of the deadliest terrorist attack in British history, or a sick old man, a loving father and grandfather, who has suffered a terrible miscarriage of justice? Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi put on a virtuoso performance when The Times came calling yesterday.
He did not come across as bitter or angry but continued to insist on his innocence, as he has done from the day of his conviction. He abandoned his appeal, he said, not because he was guilty but to give him
