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: Daily Mail (UK)
Aug 19, 2009
French anti-war campaigners have desecrated a statue of Winston Churchill in Paris on the anniversary of the death of Rudolf Hess.
They daubed the statue's hands in red paint to signify blood and scrawled the initials RH on the plinth.
It has been 22 years since the death of Adolf Hitler's deputy, who flew to Britain at the height of the Second World War, allegedly to try to make peace.
Prime minister Churchill had him thrown in prison in 1941 and the wa
Source: BBC
Aug 19, 2009
She said it would be "absolutely wrong" for the Scottish Government to release Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi or transfer him to jail in his homeland of Libya.
Megrahi, dying from terminal prostate cancer aged 57, dropped his second appeal against conviction on Tuesday.
Some 189 Americans were among the 270 people killed in the airliner bombing.
Source: BBC
Aug 19, 2009
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has visited Hungary for festivities marking the 20th anniversary of the opening of its borders to the non-communist West.
The decision paved the way for the fall of the Berlin Wall three months later.
The open Hungarian border with Austria allowed hundreds of people to leave communist Eastern Europe.
The event was called the "Pan-European Picnic". Mrs Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, thanked Hungarian
Source: Times (UK)
Aug 19, 2009
A letter from Neville Chamberlain now on display at the Imperial War Museum, London, demonstrates how unfit he was to lead Britain during the Second World War, a historian said.
A pocket diary owned by Chamberlain, also included in the exhibition on the outbreak of war 70 years ago, even shows how he incorrectly entered “War declared” on September 4, 1939, before scribbling over the words and rewriting them under September 3.
The documents shed light on the thinking o
Source: Times (UK)
Aug 19, 2009
A silver pocket watch that spent 130 years at the bottom of the sea will be reunited with the nearest living relative of its owner after the diver who found it turned amateur detective.
The watch was found by Rich Hughes near the spot off the Pembrokeshire coast where the Barbara went down in 1881. The square-rigged barque had sailed from Burma with a cargo of rice but was wrecked when she was steered on to rocks by her inexperienced captain.
Engraved on the back of the
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 19, 2009
Scientists have found the largest dinosaur footprints ever to be discovered in Europe - half way up a Swiss mountain.
The 15-inch-long prints belonged to a carnivore from the Triassic period that would have been the biggest predator on the planet at the time.
A team of palaeontologists from the Natural History Museum in Basel found the prints at 3,300 metres on a mountain in Ela Nature Reserve, Switzerland's largest park.
Source: Agence France-Presse
Aug 19, 2009
THE ornate pharaonic tombs in Egypt's Valley of the Kings are doomed to disappear within 150 to 500 years if they remain open to tourists, the head of antiquities has warned.
Zahi Hawass said humidity and fungus are eating into the walls of the royal tombs in the huge necropolis on the west bank of the Nile across from Luxor, which is swamped daily by several thousand tourists.
Poor ventilation and the breath of the hordes of visitors are causing damage to the carving
Source: Heritage Key
Aug 18, 2009
Cherchen Man, who died around 1000 BCE, is tall, dark-haired, clad in a red tunic and tartan leggings and sporting a beard as ginger as a burning fox. His DNA attests to his Celtic origins. So why on earth, then, was his mummified corpse discovered buried in the barren sands of the Taklamakan Desert, in the far-flung Xinjiang region of western China?
It's a question that still has experts scratching their heads, especially since Cherchen Man is just one of hundreds of ancient d
Source: Indiana University
Aug 18, 2009
A prehistoric water-filled cave in the Dominican Republic has become a 'treasure trove' with the announcement by archaeologists of the discovery of stone tools, a small primate skull in remarkable
condition, and the claws, jawbone and other bones of several species of sloths. The discoveries extend by thousands of years the scope of investigations led Charles Beeker, director of Academic Diving and Underwater Science Programs at IU Bloomington's School of Health, Physical Education and Recreati
Source: BBC
Aug 18, 2009
Palaeontologists have drawn with ink extracted from a preserved fossilised squid uncovered during a dig in Trowbridge, Wiltshire.
The fossil, thought to be 150 million years old, was found when a rock was cracked open, revealing the one-inch-long black ink sac.
The find was made at a site which was first excavated in Victorian times where thousands of Jurassic fossils with preserved soft tissues were found.
Source: Reuters (blog)
Aug 18, 2009
Steve Hanke and Alex Kwok just published a paper calculating last year’s hyperinflation in Zimbabwe, when “conventional inflation measures were not available.” Their conclusion is that in mid-November, prices were doubling every day. That means Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation ranks second worst in world history.
Source: NYT
Aug 18, 2009
For the first time, a building block of proteins — and hence of life as we know it — has been found in a comet.
That adds to the prevailing notion that many of the ingredients for the origin of life showered down on the early Earth when asteroids (interplanetary rocks orbiting the inner solar system) and comets (dirty ice balls that generally congregate in the outer solar system beyond Neptune) made impact with the planet.
In the new research, scientists at the Goddard
Source: NYT
Aug 18, 2009
... Spending two days with Agent Bernardino’s 21-member threat squad, known as Counterterrorism 6, or CT-6, offered a rare window on the daily workings of an F.B.I. transformed after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The bureau now ranks fighting terrorism as its No. 1 priority. It has doubled the number of agents assigned to counterterrorism duties to roughly 5,000 people, and has created new squads across the country that focus more on deterring and disrupting terrorism than on solving crimes...
Source: CNSNews.com
Aug 18, 2009
Less than a week after the Environmental Protection Agency restarted a controversial dredging project on the Hudson River, dredgers operated by the General Electric Company dislodged wooden beams that are the last remnants of one of the largest British forts in the American colonies.
The EPA now says that the beams are contaminated with potential carcinogens known as PCBs and therefore must be buried in a landfill.
The dredging operation is being conducted to remove se
Source: The Washington Times
Aug 18, 2009
A centuries-old way of doing business is taking center stage on Capitol Hill as a cutting-edge and potentially politically viable alternative to the government-run health insurance plan long preferred by President Obama.
Cooperatives, first organized in the 18th century, are being considered in the health care reform debate after the Obama administration signaled Sunday that it isn't wedded to the taxpayer-funded public plan, once considered by Democrats as essential to any substant
Source: telegraph.co.uk
Aug 18, 2009
Guy Burgess, one of the Cambridge Five traitors, lived a life of big bar bills and first class travel tickets on the BBC expenses system, according to documents made public by the corporation.
Burgess, who passed British secrets to the Soviet Union during the Cold War, worked for the BBC as a radio producer in two spells between 1936 and 1944 before joining the Foreign Office.
Entertainment expenses were frowned upon by his superiors, with one memo saying: "The ent
Source: The Kingston Whig Standard
Aug 18, 2009
Seventy-one years ago today, Kingston hosted U. S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Arthur Milnes, a fellow with the Centre for the Study of Democracy at Queen's University, wants you to know why it matters.
"It's probably the most significant speech ever given by a politician in Canada," Milnes said.
To commemorate it, Milnes says he would like to see the cities of Kingston and Watertown, N. Y., work together to celebrate it annually.
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Source: History Today
Aug 18, 2009
Almost exactly 200 years ago, on August 5th 1809, John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) set sail from Boston to St. Petersburg. President James Madison had appointed him minister plenipotentiary to Russia on June 27th and, sailing first to Denmark, Adams eventually arrived in Russia in October. From the day of his departure, he began to summarise each day of his three-month voyage in a line-a-day diary. 200 years on, since August 5th, the Massachusetts Historical Society has published John Quincy Adams’
Source: BBC
Aug 18, 2009
Plans to revamp a memorial to Jack Phillips, chief telegraphist on The Titanic, will go before a public meeting in Godalming on Thursday.
The organisers want to refurbish the memorial, built in 1914, in time for the 2012 centenary of the sinking of the ship on its maiden voyage.
The Grade II-listed Phillips Memorial Cloister is the largest of any built to remember a single Titanic victim.
Source: BBC
Aug 18, 2009
Poor farmers in the heart of Bolivia's Amazon are being encouraged to embrace the annual floods - by using a centuries-old irrigation system for their crops.
They are experimenting with a sustainable way of growing food crops that their ancestors used.
It could provide them with better protection against the extremes of climate change, reduce deforestation, improve food security and even promise a better diet.
