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: NYT
Jul 11, 2009
The collapse of Communism in the East two decades ago did not provide
much of an opening for the Catholic Church to influence economic
policy, but perhaps the near-collapse of Western capitalism will. Two
German authors — one named Marx, the other his patron in Rome — are
certainly hoping so.
The first is Reinhard Marx, archbishop of Munich and Freising, who has
written a best seller in Germany that he cheekily titled “Das Kapital”
(and in which he addresses that other Marx — Karl —
Source: VOA
Jul 11, 2009
President Barack Obama, Speaker of Parliament Joyce Bamford-Addo, left, greet crowd following address, 11 Jul 2009
U.S. President Barack Obama has wrapped up his visit to the West African nation of Ghana with a tour of a former slave center from which thousands of Africans once were shipped off to America.
The president and his family on Saturday toured Cape Coast Castle, an ocean-front fortress that was converted to the slave trade by the British in the 17th century.
Source: The New York Times
Jul 11, 2009
How far can a major political party fall?
It’s a question Republicans seem determined to test these days. The party is shut out of power in the White House. In Congress, the Democrats now have enough votes to block a filibuster. Approval ratings for the Republican Party are at near-record lows. Worse still, at a time when Republicans are yearning for someone to lead them back to power, the party’s next generation of stars is drawing precisely the wrong kind of attention — from Sarah
Source: BBC
Jul 11, 2009
The remains of 534 newly identified Bosniak Muslim victims of the Srebrenica massacre have been buried 14 years after the event.
Some 8,000 Bosniak Muslims, mainly men and boys, were killed by Bosnian Serbs near the town of Srebrenica in 1995 and buried in mass graves.
About 5,000 of the victims have been identified to date. Thousands of mourners attended the ceremony, an annual reminder of the Bosniak Muslims' suffering in the war.
Source: NYT
Jul 11, 2009
Its name alone indicates what the western region of Xinjiang means to the Chinese state: it translates as New Frontier or New Dominion, a place at the margins of empire. For centuries, the rulers of China have sought to control and shape Xinjiang, much as the dry winds of the vast deserts here sculpt the rocks.
A history exhibition in the main museum in this regional capital goes one step further. “Xinjiang has been an inalienable part of the territory of China,” it asserts, implyi
Source: NYT
Jul 11, 2009
Lloyd Gaines was moody that winter of 1939, acting not at all like a man who had just triumphed in one of the biggest Supreme Court cases in decades. And oddly, even though it was raining and the sidewalks of Chicago were clogged with slush, he felt a need to buy postage stamps one night.
Or so he told a friend just before he left his apartment house on March 19, 1939, never to be seen again. Had he not vanished at 28, Lloyd Gaines might be in the pantheon of civil rights history wi
Source: AP
Jul 11, 2009
The end of slavery meant a kind of beginning for the family histories of many African-Americans: for the first time, the enslaved people’s identities and family connections became part of a public record. And the huge task of recording that data fell to the federal Freedmen’s Bureau.
After collecting dust in government warehouses since the late 1800s, the Virginia portion of the Freedmen’s Bureau records is now available electronically to the public. The online database that lists
Source: Independent (UK)
Jul 11, 2009
Today, fourteen years after the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica – the worst atrocity in Europe since the end of the Second World War – another 500 coffins will join the thousands buried in the memorial graveyard outside the town.
The International Commission on Missing Persons has been carrying out the grim task of identifying remains using DNA and other evidence, allowing relatives to bury their dead and gain "closure". To date, it has identified 6,186 of
Source: Guardian (UK)
Jul 11, 2009
A former head of MI5 discloses in the Guardian today that she warned ministers and officials that an invasion of Iraq would increase the terrorist threat to Britain.
Lady Manningham-Buller says that as US and British forces were preparing to invade Iraq, she asked: "Why now?" She adds: "I said it as explicitly as I could. I said something like, 'The threat to us would increase because of Iraq'."
MI5 knew that invading Iraq would make its task much mo
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Jul 11, 2009
Mummar Gaddafi demanded the return of the Lockerbie bomber yesterday in an extraordinary encounter with Gordon Brown.
The Libyan dictator used their first face-to-face meeting to raise the case of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, who was convicted of blowing up Pan Am flight 103 in 1988.
He insisted that Al Megrahi, who is suffering from prostate cancer in a Scottish jail, be returned to Libya.
Source: Discovery.com
Jul 10, 2009
Tuscan discovery was found almost intact in a cosmetics case
Italian archaeologists have discovered lotion that is over 2,000 years old, left almost intact in the cosmetic case of an aristocratic Etruscan woman.
The discovery, which occurred four years ago in a necropolis near the Tuscan town of Chiusi, has just been made public, following chemical analysis which identified the original compounds of the ancient ointment. The team reports their findings in the July issue
Source: BBC
Jul 10, 2009
The world's oldest dinosaur burrows have been discovered in Australia.
Three separate burrows have been found in all, the biggest 2m long, each built to a similar design and just big enough to hold the body of a small dinosaur.
The 106-million-year-old burrows, the first to be found outside of North America, would have been much closer to the South Pole when they were created.
That supports the idea that dinosaurs living in cold, harsh climates burrowed u
Source: Spiegel Online
Jul 10, 2009
Germany has been scratching an old itch this week. The issue of what to do with those Germans who once worked for the East German secret police, most commonly known as the Stasi, has come up again with figures released earlier in the week indicating there were still around 17,000 ex-Stasi employees in Germany's civil service.
Even more troubling, some of them appear to be employed by the police or in various national or state offices of criminal investigation. One was even rumored t
Source: Spiegel Online
Jul 10, 2009
The court stipulated that they were not to mention so much as a word about the case. Instead, Vera Demjanjuk, 84, told her husband John, 89, what she had planted in their garden at home. The telephone conversation, which lasted 20 minutes, was the only conversation to date between the Stadelheim Prison in Munich and Cleveland, Ohio. An official interpreter listened in on the conversation. "She hopes and believes that he will somehow return home," says John Demjanjuk, Jr., the couple's
Source: http://www.physorg.com
Jul 10, 2009
David Cameron’s Jewish history goes back hundreds - if not thousands - of years, according to a University of Manchester historian.
Dr Yaakov Wise, who specialises in Jewish history, says the Tory leader is descended from a German-born Jewish scholar whose writings furthered the study of Hebrew in European Christendom at a time of widespread hostility toward its Jews.
Source: U.S News and World Report
Jul 10, 2009
The president held a dinner at the White House for leading presidential scholars.
President Obama has found another way to break out of the White House "bubble"—holding private discussions with eminent historians who have studied the successes and failures of his predecessors. His goal is to better understand what has worked and what has failed in the past as he makes policy today.
Obama held a dinner at the White House residence with nine such scholars on Jun
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jul 10, 2009
A tin lifeboat station which is rusting away is an important part of Britain's archaeological heritage and must be saved, conservation chiefs have ruled.
The 100-year-old building in Tenby, Pembrokeshire launched thousands of rescue missions.
But it was on the brink of collapse and the RNLI and the Pembrokeshire Coast agreed it should be demolished.
Source: BBC
Jul 10, 2009
Fifty-one dismembered skeletons found in a burial pit on the site of a planned £87m relief road in Dorset are from the Saxon period, tests show.
Initially, it was thought the burial site on Ridgeway Hill, near Weymouth, dated from the Iron Age (from BC 800) to early Roman times (from AD 43).
But radio carbon dating shows the male rib cages, skulls and leg bones date between AD 890 and AD 1030.
Experts made the earlier estimate after examining pottery foun
Source: BBC
Jul 10, 2009
Five hundred years after the birth of French Protestant theologian John Calvin, his teachings seem more topical than ever.
Hard work and frugality, the values espoused by Calvinism, are back in fashion as people reassess their lives because of the economic crisis.
Nowhere is this more so than in the Netherlands, which is often described as the most Calvinist nation in the world. Calvin never set foot there, but his influence is hard to miss.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jul 10, 2009
Kim Jong-il is seriously ill and is likely to be dead before the end of the year, according to a source within the North Korean leader's own family.
The latest speculation over the health of the reclusive Kim has been triggered by his appearance on state television on Wednesday to mark the 15th anniversary of the death of Kim Il Sung, his father and the man revered as the founder of North Korea.
He looked gaunt, his hair has thinned dramatically and he walked with a li
