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
Aug 3, 2009
Opinions on graffiti are as diverse as the designs themselves, which either blight or brighten city walls the world over, depending on how you view them.
The issue could not be more topical than in the Italian capital, Rome, where no less a person than the prime minister has immersed himself in the debate.
The ancient city centre, which is a Unesco World Heritage Site, is home to some of the most stunning monuments and architecture to be found anywhere in the world.
Source: NYT
Aug 3, 2009
The current crisis over North Korea's pursuit of nuclear weapons has unmistakable parallels with the events of spring 1994. Then, as now, North Korea was plunging ahead to make bomb-grade plutonium at its nuclear complex in Yongbyon.
Then as now, the United States was rallying international support for sanctions against the North. Tensions spiked as North Korea warned it would consider any sanctions an "act of war."
There is, however, one key difference. In 19
Source: NYT
Aug 3, 2009
The central figure in a scandal that badly tarnished the legacy of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the father of German unification, arrived in Germany on Monday to face charges of bribery and tax evasion after a final attempt to delay his extradition from Canada failed.
The figure, Karlheinz Schreiber, an arms dealer and lobbyist, returned to Germany after a 10-year legal battle to remain in Canada, his adopted homeland.
Coming six weeks before national elections, Mr. Schreibe
Source: AP
Aug 3, 2009
The recession is starving the government of tax revenue, just as the president and Congress are piling a major expansion of health care and other programs on the nation's plate and struggling to find money to pay the tab.
The numbers could hardly be more stark: Tax receipts are on pace to drop 18 percent this year, the biggest single-year decline since the Great Depression, while the federal deficit balloons to a record $1.8 trillion.
Other figures in an Associated Pres
Source: NPR
Aug 3, 2009
Human fossils have been found from the Ethiopian highlands to the Indonesian island of Java. However, the single site with the biggest deposits is located in northern Spain.
About 150 miles north of Madrid, a jeep pulls up to a clump of trees in the Sierra de Atapuerca, a collection of hills that are rich with caves.
A man with a helmet and a miner's headlamp gets out. He looks more like a mountain guide than a scientist. He's Juan Luis Arsuaga, Spain's best-known paleo
Source: McClatchy
Aug 3, 2009
The false allegation that President Barack Obama was born in another country is more than a fact-free smear.
Marked by accusations and backstabbing, it's the story of how a small but intense movement called"birthers" rose from a handful of people prone to seeing conspiracies, aided by the Internet, magnified without evidence by eager radio and cable TV hosts, and eventually ratified by a small group of Republican politicians working to keep the story alive on the floors of Congress and th
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 3, 2009
Almost 400 British servicemen killed by guerillas in Cyprus in the 1950s are finally to be honoured after Telegraph readers helped raise £80,000 to build a memorial to them.
A monument bearing the names of all 371 soldiers, sailors and airmen killed during four years of bloodshed will be unveiled on Remembrance Day in a military cemetery on the island.
The vast majority of those who died at the hands of Greek-Cypriot terrorists were young men carrying out National Ser
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 3, 2009
An antique dealer believes that an ornate piece of wood he picked up at a car boot sale may be a 1,300-year-old artefact from the Crusades.
Christie's auction house in London is analysing the item after experts suggested that it could be the door of a tabernacle – a box used to carry and protect sacred texts – carried by the Knights Templar.
Measuring just ten inches by four inches, it is decorated with intricate military and religious images and is thought to date fro
Aug 3, 2009
A Bronx woman has been charged with murder and robbery in the death of an 89-year-old Nazi concentration camp survivor, and police said a man is still being sought in connection with the death.
Angela Murray, 30, was arrested Saturday, according to the Manhattan district attorney's office, and is accused of strangling Guido Felix Brinkmann on Thursday in his Upper East Side apartment
Brinkmann, a native of Latvia, was a Holocaust survivor who escaped death for a year wh
Source: Independent (UK)
Aug 3, 2009
During the first fortnight of August as the Tokyo summer gets into its sticky stride, its citizens gear up for a string of painful Second World War anniversaries, climaxing on the 15th – the date the nation surrendered.
Fresh controversy invariably flares over how to remember the conflict: as a shameful stain, or a futile but honourable attempt to resist foreign aggressors.
The true spiritual home of revisionist debate is Yasukuni, a Shinto temple in the heart of Toky
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 3, 2009
A monument bearing the names of all 371 soldiers, sailors and airmen killed during four years of bloodshed will be unveiled on Remembrance Day in a military cemetery on the island.
The vast majority of those who died at the hands of Greek-Cypriot terrorists were young men carrying out National Service, some of the last British conscripts to lose their lives in service of their country, but their sacrifice had remained largely unrecognised for 50 years.
The campaign fo
Source: BBC
Aug 3, 2009
Karlheinz Schreiber, 75, is wanted for tax evasion, bribery and fraud in Germany, and has been fighting extradition for nearly 10 years.
He figured in a fund-raising scandal involving ex-Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
Mr Schreiber, who denies wrongdoing, arrived in Germany early on Monday after losing his extradition battle.
Source: Time Magazine
Aug 3, 2009
People born after 1980 tend to have a distinctive style of handwriting: a little bit sloppy, a little bit childish and almost never in cursive. The knee-jerk explanation is that computers are responsible for our increasingly illegible scrawl, but Steve Graham, a special-education and literacy professor at Vanderbilt University, says that's not the case. The simple fact is that kids haven't learned to write neatly because no one has forced them to. "Writing is just not part of the national a
Source: Taranga.com
Aug 2, 2009
An 8,000-year-old human skeleton was found during excavations in one of the oldest residential areas in southern Turkey, a media report said.
The skeleton was discovered inside a Neolithic-age tomb unearthed in Yumuktepe Hoyuk of the southern Mersin province by archeologists from the Italian Lecce University and Turkish Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, the semi-official Anatolia news agency reported.
Source: The Telegraph (India)
Aug 2, 2009
A village in Kerala’s Periyar delta may be the site of a port that has remained untraced for centuries although ancient Indian and Greek texts had described it as an Indian Ocean trade hub, researchers have said.
Archaeological excavations at Pattanam, about 25km north of Kochi, have yielded an abundance of artefacts — a 2,000-year-old brick-layered wharf, a wooden canoe and hundreds of fragments of Roman and West Asian pottery, including wine jars.
The findings of th
Source: ABC News
Aug 2, 2009
In 2003, archaeologists excavating in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores made a discovery that forced scientists to completely rethink conventional theories of human evolution.
They reported the discovery of a new species of human, one that lived as recently as 12,000 years ago, at the same time as modern humans.
But others disagreed, arguing the one-metre-high skeleton was a modern human that suffered from a deformity known as microcephaly.
Source: Observer (UK)
Aug 2, 2009
For a few weeks only, visitors to Westminster Abbey can gaze on the second-last resting place of Oliver Cromwell, the grave which the Lord Protector occupied for less than three years before being dug up, ritually executed, decapitated, and buried again in quicklime at the foot of the gallows.
The stone slabs engraved in the 19th century with the name of Cromwell and his relatives are usually covered by a blue carpet bearing the RAF crest. Recently moths were discovered in the build
Source: NYT
Aug 2, 2009
The girls have toured the Eiffel Tower and ogled the stone majesties of the Pantheon. They have swooned over the Jonas Brothers, giggled over wax likenesses of their parents and romped with friends at Camp David, all in the span of two blissfully school-free months.
Welcome to Sasha and Malia Obama's fabulous summer vacation, a hodgepodge of foreign travel, concerts, birthday parties and just plain fun carefully organized by the president and first lady. (The first lady has dubbed i
Source: The Times (UK)
Aug 2, 2009
On March 2, 1882, Roderick Maclean brandished a pistol outside Windsor railway station and attempted to shoot Queen Victoria.
Things did not go according to plan. The monarch lived and Maclean was charged with high treason, but “acquitted on the grounds of insanity”. Ordered “to be kept in strict custody and gaol until Her Majesty’s pleasure shall be known”, he spent the rest of his life in Broadmoor Hospital.
His case is one of 1.4 million criminal trials from the 18
Source: AP
Aug 2, 2009
Technically demanding and at times furiously paced, two newly identified Mozart works unveiled Sunday are helping scholars complete their assessment of the maestro's very early achievements. The childhood creations — an extensive concerto movement and a fragmentary prelude — provide yet more proof the Salzburg native was a true prodigy. And maybe a bit of a showoff.
Leisinger said Mozart likely wrote the two newly attributed pieces when he was 7 or 8 years old, with his father, Leop
