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: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 11, 2009
A 90-year-old former German infantry commander has been jailed for life for ordering the murders of 14 civilians in an Italian village in 1944 during the Second World War.
In one of Germany's last Nazi war crimes trials the court found Josef Scheungraber ordered his troops to shoot dead three men and a 74-year-old woman in the street before driving another 11 men, aged between 15 and 66, into a barn and blowing it up.
Just one survived – 15-year-old Gino Massetti, thou
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 11, 2009
A Nasa space telescope has found evidence of a high-speed collision between two forming planets orbiting a young star.
Astronomers say the cosmic pile-up is similar to the one that formed our Moon some four billion years ago, when a Mars-sized object crashed into Earth.
Telltale plumes of vaporised rock and lava leftover from the collision which happened a few thousand years ago were picked up by the telescope.
The details are to be published in the Astr
Source: CNN
Aug 11, 2009
Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece the "Mona Lisa" was attacked with a mug earlier this month, but the world's most famous painting -- protected by thick glass -- emerged with its enigmatic smile undimmed.
French police say a woman "not in her senses" lobbed the mug at the 500-year-old painting, which hangs in the Louvre gallery in Paris.
The woman, a tourist, was later transferred from police custody to a psychiatric unit, a police spokesman told CNN.
Source: CNSNews.com
Aug 11, 2009
President Barack Obama this week will award the 2009 Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously to Harvey Milk, one of the nation’s first openly homosexual politicians, and to the late Jack Kemp, a leading proponent of supply side economics.
They are among 16 people to be honored at a White House ceremony on Wednesday.
Harvey Milk, an openly gay man elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, was shot and killed in November 1978 along with San Francisco Mayor Geo
Source: dailymail.co.uk
Aug 11, 2009
It has long been regarded as the greatest sporting snub in history -
when Adolf Hitler stormed out of the Olympic Stadium in Berlin because
Germany had been humiliated by a black man.
The moment was 1936 and an incredible American athlete called Jesse
Owens had just run his way to the first of four gold medals in the 100
metres.
Hitler, who had shaken hands the previous day with all the German
Olympic winners, left the stadium furious
Source: NYT
Aug 11, 2009
Eunice Kennedy Shriver, a member of one of the most prominent families in American politics and a trailblazer in the effort to improve the lives of people with intellectual disabilities, died early Tuesday morning at Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, Mass. She was 88. Her death, at 2 a.m., was confirmed by her family in a statement. A family friend said that Mrs. Shriver had been in declining health for months, having suffered a series of strokes.
A sister of President John F. Kennedy a
Source: AP
Aug 11, 2009
90-year-old former German army officer was convicted Tuesday of ordering the reprisal killings of 10 Italian civilians who were herded into a barn that was blown up. The Munich state court convicted World War II veteran Josef Scheungraber on 10 counts of murder and one of attempted murder, and sentenced him to life in prison. His lawyer said he would appeal.
Scheungraber was a 25-year-old Wehrmacht lieutenant during the June 1944 killings in Falzano di Cortona, near the Tuscan town
Source: Press Trust of India
Aug 10, 2009
A mysterious stone head from ancient Mesopotamia dating back more than 4,000 years has been matched up with a replica body in Iraq after years of delays brought on by sanctions and war.
The head from the Akkadian Empire, unearthed by Iraqi archaeologists in 1982, has been united with a replica of a headless torso discovered over a century ago, Baghdad Museum curator Mohsen Hassan Ali told AFP.
The replica of the stone torso held in Berlin's Pergamon Museum was handed ov
Source: NBC (Nashville)
Aug 10, 2009
Archaeologist Says He Found Remains Of Charles Dickinson's Coffin.
A discovery in the middle of a west Nashville couple's front yard could mean the chapter to a local legend is closed.
Archaeologist Dan Allen believes he's solved the mystery surrounding the grave of Charles Dickinson, who was killed by Andrew Jackson during a duel in 1806.
The location of Dickinson's final resting place has been a mystery since the 1860s, when historians in Maryland claimed
Source: MSNBC
Aug 10, 2009
It’s earliest evidence of extracting dye from plant to get pigment.
Four thousand years ago Egyptians had mastered the process of making madder, a red dye, according to a researcher who uncovered the earliest known example of the color still used today.
The find is some 700 years earlier than any previously known use of madder, which became highly popular in the Middle Ages and provides many of the red shades and glazes in the work of the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer.
Source: Blackanthem Military News
Aug 10, 2009
The ancient Assyrian City of Ashur faces
imminent threats. Recent construction of a dam on the Tigris River is causing large sections of the
City to be swept away, while other precious artifacts are being looted from one of three World
Heritage sites in Iraq. The United States Embassy, with the assistance of the American military,
and officials from Iraq's Board of Antiquities organized the first international assessment of the
site since 2003. The Embassy's most senior diplomat in the regi
Source: Deutsche Welle
Aug 10, 2009
The first steps towards European unity in the aftermath of World War II were taken at the Hague Congress in May 1948. Under the chairmanship of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, representatives from 16 countries met to lay the foundations for a European Union, a consultative assembly and a European Court of Human Rights.
One year later, in May 1949, the Council of Europe was founded in London. The new organisation was signed into existence by ten states: Belgium, Denmark, F
Source: guardian.co.uk
Aug 10, 2009
Tom Sebrell, an American academic, has rediscovered the lost grave of
Charles Prioleau in Kensal Green cemetery, London. Photograph: Martin
Godwin.
The grave of a man who bankrolled the Confederate side in the American
civil war, and ended up costing the British government £3.3m in
compensation to the victorious north, has been tracked down in a patch
of brambles in a London cemetery.
Charles Kuhn Prioleau, a cotton merchant born in Charleston, South
Carolina, was based in Liverp
Source: NYT
Aug 10, 2009
Gaeyado today presents an idyllic scene.
But decades ago, the arrival of ferries was anticipated with dread. Often they brought the counterintelligence detectives, agents in successive South Korean military governments’ drives to root out Communists and their sympathizers.
The extent of the terror they spread in places like Gaeyado is only now coming to light with the revelations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This panel was set up in 2005 to investigate
Source: CNSNews.com
Aug 10, 2009
The Senate Committee on Indian Affairs passed a resolution by voice vote last week apologizing "on behalf of the people of the United States" to all Indian tribes for the mistreatment and violence by American citizens.
Senate Joint Resolution 14, sponsored by Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), states that its purpose is “to acknowledge a long history of official depredations and ill-conceived policies by the Federal Government regarding Indian Tribes and offer an apology to all
Source: CNSNews.com
Aug 10, 2009
A Senate bill establishing a Native Hawaiian government is necessary to reverse the United States’ role in the "regime change" that led to Hawaii becoming a state, the bill’s supporters said at a Senate hearing last week.
The Senate Committee on Indian Affairs held a hearing on Aug. 6 on the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act of 2009 (S. 1011), sponsored by Senator Daniel Akaka (D-Alaska).
The bill would allow Hawaii's indigenous people to establish
Source: The Washington Post
Aug 10, 2009
Schools across the country will soon be forced to alter the way they teach the most disturbing event of the past century. The reason: Old age is claiming what Hitler could not.
For decades, men and women have visited classrooms to give firsthand accounts of the systematic elimination of Europe's Jews. As survivors, they were the exception, because far more perished than made it out alive. Stories from eyewitnesses to the Holocaust have been seen as the best way to help students unde
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education
Aug 10, 2009
By 1806, the American explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had solved the greatest question about their young nation: What lies beyond the wilderness?
Three years later, Lewis's death. at age 35. gave rise to a new mystery: one that hasn't been solved in 200 years: Did he die by his own hand, as many textbooks claim, or was he, in fact, murdered?
The collateral descendants of Lewis, who had no children, brought their case to Washington last month.
F
Source: BBC
Aug 10, 2009
The funeral has taken place of a soldier who spent four years as a prisoner of war in Auschwitz.
Charlie Evans, 90, of Presteigne, Powys, was a private in 1st Battalion, Royal Welsh Fusiliers when wounded and captured at Dunkirk in 1940.
His captors later transferred him to the Nazi concentration camp. Mr Evans, who died in hospital in Knighton, was honoured by his former regiment last year, with the presentation of a bugle and plaque.
Source: BBC
Aug 10, 2009
A team of history and woodwork experts have teamed up to build a replica Bronze Age logboat at Loch Tay.
The group will work with the tools and techniques that were used about 3,000 years ago.
They will make the boat from a single Douglas Fir trunk, measuring about 12m in length.
The project was inspired by the discovery of a logboat in the loch dating back to 1500 BC and another one in the River Tay dating to 1000 BC.
