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
Jun 23, 2009
Three men and two women have launched a compensation claim for alleged human rights abuses in the 1950s and 1960s.
Thousands of people were rounded up and forced into camps by the British during what was known as the Mau Mau uprising.
The UK says the claim is not valid because of the amount of time since the abuses were alleged to have happened.
The five Kenyans - aged in their 70s and 80s - are the lead claimants in the reparations case.
Source: NYT
Jun 22, 2009
While serving as President Gerald R. Ford’s chief of staff in the mid-1970s, Donald Rumsfeld started keeping a list of rules and favorite sayings. They included “don’t stay on the job too long,” “if you foul up, tell the president and others fast, and correct it,” “don’t speak ill of another member of the administration,” “read and listen for what is missing” and keep other staff members in the loop because “if they are out of the flow of information, decisions will either be poorly made or not
Source: AP
Jun 22, 2009
People were storing grain long before they learned to domesticate crops, a new study indicates. A structure used as a food granary discovered in recent excavations in Jordan dates to about 11,300 years ago, according to a report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
That's as much as a thousand years before people in the Middle East domesticated grain, the research team led by anthropologist Ian Kuijt of the University of Notre Dame said.
Source: NYT
Jun 22, 2009
The illiterate Cherokee known as Sequoyah watched in awe as white settlers made marks on paper, convinced that these “talking leaves” were the source of white power and success. This inspired the consuming ambition of his life: to create a Cherokee written language.
Born around 1770 near present-day Knoxville, Tenn., he was given the name George Gist (or Guess) by his father, an English fur trader, and his mother, a daughter of a prominent Cherokee family. But it was as Sequoyah tha
Source: Deutsche Welle
Jun 22, 2009
Dresden's is likely to have its UNESCO World Heritage title revoked, after city planners decided to go ahead with a disputed bridge-building project that conservationists say will ruin the skyline.
The drawn-out saga of Dresden's UNESCO World Cultural Heritage status seems to be coming to an end. Observers expect the UNESCO committee to strike a stretch of the Elbe Valley in Dresden off its list this week.
The move would make Dresden just the second site to lose its sta
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Jun 22, 2009
A litter prevention program in the United States got an unusual ally last year when a neo-Nazi group adopted a section of highway in Springfield, Kansas, and picked up the trash.
The state said it had no way to reject the group's application, saying membership in the Adopt-A-Highway program can't be denied because of a group's political beliefs.
Lawmakers responded with an amendment to a large transportation bill that would rename that section of road after Abraham Josh
Source: AFP
Jun 22, 2009
Seventy years after the eruption of World War II, Poland is paying homage to Polish victims of the 1939-1945 Nazi occupation by posting their names on a vast historical list in cyberspace.
The project aims to bring to light the names of victims -- both those who perished and those who were persecuted but survived -- who were never registered, as well as to gather death records dispersed across Poland, Germany, Ukraine, and Israel in one place accessible to all.
People k
Source: BBC
Jun 22, 2009
The Scottish Parliament has been asked to support a campaign to clear the name of a captain who was hanged for piracy more than three centuries ago.
Captain William Kidd had been appointed by the Crown to tackle piracy and capture enemy French ships.
In 1698, he looted the Armenian ship the Quedagh Merchant, which was apparently sailing under a French pass.
A parliamentary motion has been lodged by SNP MSP Bill Kidd, who is not related to the pirate, urgi
Source: BBC
Jun 22, 2009
More than 50 years after a 7,600lb (3,500kg) nuclear bomb was dropped in US waters following a mid-air military collision, the question of whether the missing weapon still poses a threat remains.
Immediately after the crash, a search was set up to find the unexploded nuclear weapon, buried somewhere too close for comfort to the US's second-largest seaport and one of its most beautiful cities.
Numerous other searches have followed, both official and unofficial, and each
Source: Foxnews
Jun 22, 2009
The high court decides not to take a case dismissed by lower court that the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame caused suffering for Plame and her husband, Joe Wilson.
The decision is a victory for Cheney and his former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove, and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. They and nine unnamed co-defendants were sued by Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband Joseph after her CIA cover was
Source: AP
Jun 22, 2009
The towering tree is believed to have been Adolf Hitler's gift to the occupied town of Jaslo — planted to the sound of a Nazi band during World War II.
Town authorities now want it cut down and burned to make way for a new roundabout. But some residents have become attached to the 40-foot oak and are lobbying to save it.
But Mayor Maria Kurowska said it was a reminder of Jaslo's connection to Hitler, whose Nazi troops razed the town in late 1944 as the Soviet Army advan
Source: Independent (UK)
Jun 22, 2009
A UN court trying masterminds of Rwanda's 1994 genocide today gave a 30-year jail sentence to a former interior minister accused of tricking thousands of people to hide on a hill before they were killed.
The Tanzania-based International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) said Callixte Kalimanzira, a close ally to the president and prime minister during the killing spree, was guilty of genocide and complicity to commit genocide.
"Yes, it is 30 years," Bocar
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jun 22, 2009
The drawing, which dates from the late 1600s, offers a rare insight into the appearance of the flightless bird that was the first recorded casualty of human interference in the habitat of other creatures.
Dodos were the main predators on Mauritius until settlers introduced bigger animals to Indian Ocean island, including pigs. Many were shipped to Europe as curiosities or had their nesting areas destroyed and the species was extinct by 1700.
The 350-year-old drawing,
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jun 22, 2009
Napoleon's great army threatened the peace of Europe once more at the weekend, although the turn out was a little short of the 74,000 French who battled an allied force of 67,000 in 1815.
On the Belgian battlefield, the 1,200 uniformed "soldiers" who had come from all over Europe prepared to meet their fates.
About 100 cavalry went galloping off, sabres drawn; the gunfire started and the infantry advanced, howling horribly.
The outcome was of cour
Source: Tehran Times
Jun 22, 2009
“We witnessed an influx of people (from Britain) before the election. Elements linked to the British secret service were flying in in droves,” Mottaki told a group of foreign diplomats.
He called on Britain to stop interfering in Iran’s internal affairs, saying its officials must realize that the expression “the sun never sets on the British Empire” is no longer true.
Mottaki also said the world’s nations, particularly those in the Middle East, know that Britain helpe
Source: BBC
Jun 22, 2009
In his own mind, retired 87-year-old Colonel Howard Richardson is a hero responsible for one of the most extraordinary displays of aeronautic skill in the history of the US Air Force.
His view carries a lot of weight and he has a large number of supporters - including the Air Force itself which honoured his feat with a Distinguished Flying Cross.
But to others, he is little short of a villain: the man who 50 years ago dropped a nuclear bomb in US waters, a bomb nobody
Source: BBC
Jun 22, 2009
The descendants want to rebury Geronimo, who was buried in Oklahoma in 1909, in his native land in New Mexico.
They are also seeking the return of body parts they say were stolen in 1918 or 1919 by a secret society at Yale University known as Skull and Bones.
But justice officials say the law cited by the plaintiffs is not applicable.
Source: Daily Record
Jun 21, 2009
It took decades before [Myron] Swack, 83, of Independence, told his wife and family about months spent at a slave labor camp called Berga an der Elster — a story that involved 350 American soldiers, but which received only limited attention until recently.
Many of the Americans ended up at Berga either because they were Jewish or because the Germans thought they were. They lived on small bits of bread and thin turnip soup, working in mine shafts where rock dust ripped their lungs. T
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
Jun 21, 2009
Beth Guyver never knew her father. For most of her life, the London resident believed he was a British pilot, killed during World War II. She thought he had died just before her birth in 1945.
The truth came out at a family Christmas dinner in 1990. Her mother looked across the table at one of Guyver's sons, then 18, and made a startling observation: He looked just like an American GI she had known in 1944 . . . just like Guyver's father.
The revelation changed Guyver's
Source: Sky News
Jun 21, 2009
According to reports, the former Prime Minister who took Britain into the conflict warned that the long-awaited hearings would become a "show trial" if they were held in public.
He is said to have communicated his view to his successor, Mr Brown, via the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O'Donnell. He feared that a direct conversation would be leaked, The Observer claimed.
A spokesman for Mr Blair said: "This is a decision for the current Prime Minister, not the
