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)
May 29, 2009
Barack Obama faced unprecedented public criticism from a member of his own family when his great uncle said he was only visiting a concentration camp next week for 'political reasons'.
Charles Payne, 84, was among the American infantrymen who liberated Ohrdruf, a subdivision of the Buchenwald camp, in April 1945.
Mr Obama will next week attend a memorial ceremony at the former camp with Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, before heading to Normandy to commemorate the
Source: Time Magazine
May 29, 2009
France and England have fought each other in the 100 Years' War, the Seven Years' War, the Napoleonic Wars and scads of less memorably named conflicts. And more recently, the French and English have treated the blood-and-tears clashes between their national rugby and soccer teams as fetishes for those battles of yore. The geysers of bile pouring forth from the London tabloids this week suggests a new chapter in Anglo-French enmity may be upon us. Call it the "Great D-Day Hissy Fit."
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 29, 2009
Barack Obama has reassured Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president,
of Washington's support for Palestinian statehood during his first
visit to the White House.
Following their Oval Office talks, Mr Obama said he was" confident" of
moving the Middle East peace process forward and said freezing the
expansion of settlements was now a public priority for the US.
Mr Obama said that"time is of the essence" in securing Arab Israeli
peace and that it is"in US interests to do so quic
Source: Sky News
May 29, 2009
They looked at the lush green hills and rice paddies along the Korean border through very different eyes.
Searching for landmarks that could bring them back to a war that ended 56 years ago.
For 20 US Army and Marine veterans of the Korean War, their return to the demilitarised zone was a painful visit.
They had fought hard in the hills around Panmunjeom in 1952/53. They had lost many friends and their memories were undimmed.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 29, 2009
Charles Payne, 84, was among the American infantrymen who liberated Ohrdruf, a subdivision of the Buchenwald camp, in April 1945.
Mr Obama will next week attend a memorial ceremony at the former camp with Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, before heading to Normandy to commemorate the 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings.
Asked if his great nephew was following in his footsteps, which the White House has suggested as a reason for the trip, Mr Payne told the German
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 29, 2009
Gordon Newton, 84, who parachuted into Normandy on D-Day, wrote invitations to the royal but received letters from Buckingham Palace last month that said "with regret" both the brothers were involved in flight training with the RAF and Army. The Earl and Countess of Wessex were said to be on a pre-arranged trip to Canada.
"I said that on behalf of the veterans of the 9th Bn the Parachute Regiment we would love to see them at our memorial service on Friday June 5th,&q
Source: BBC
May 29, 2009
Underneath the streets of Belfast lies a hidden history which archaeologists have been exploring for years.
However, until now, locals and visitors have not had the chance to actively explore the history that lies beneath them.
Since 1983, more than 50 excavations have taken place all over the city, in order to discover information about Belfast's 800 years of history.
Foundations of 17th Century red brick tenements were uncovered in a dig in front of Cot
Source: BBC
May 29, 2009
An unidentified corpse found in the basement of a Berlin hospital could be that of murdered revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, say German authorities.
A pathologist at Berlin's Charite hospital told Der Spiegel magazine the headless corpse bore "striking similarities" to the left-wing icon.
Ms Luxemburg was murdered by right-wing paramilitaries in 1919 at the age of 47 and thrown in an icy canal. Months later, a body thought to hav
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 29, 2009
George W Bush, the former US president, has spoken for the first time about the things he misses the most after leaving office.
Flying on Air Force One, eating meals prepared by the White House kitchen staff and drawing inspiration from his encounters with US military personnel were among his favourite things, he said.
The often-tearful meetings with relatives of fallen soldiers were "in some ways... very hard and in some ways, it was very uplifting," the he
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 29, 2009
Matthew Boulton and James Watt, leading figures of the Industrial Revolution, are to be the new faces of the Bank of England's redesigned £50 banknotes.
Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, made the announcement on Friday evening when he opened a new exhibition at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery: "Matthew Boulton: Selling what all the world desires".
Boulton and Watt formed a successful partnership in the 18th century, eventually helping t
Source: Foxnews
May 29, 2009
An Iraqi-born 16-year-old reportedly has cracked a math puzzle that has gone unsolved for over 300 years.
Mohamed Altoumaimi, who immigrated to Sweden six years ago, took only four months to find a formula that explains a sequence of calculations known as the Bernoulli numbers, a code that had stumped some of the best experts in the field, Agence France-Presse reported.
Altoumaimi said after his high school teachers were skeptical about his work he contacted professors
Source: CNN
May 29, 2009
Former President George W. Bush on Thursday repeated Dick Cheney's assertion that the administration's enhanced interrogation program, which included controversial techniques such as waterboarding, was legal and garnered valuable information that prevented terrorist attacks.
Bush told a southwestern Michigan audience of nearly 2,500 -- the largest he has addressed in the United States since leaving the White House in January -- that, after the September 11 attacks, "I vowed to
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
May 29, 2009
Many of the 1989 movement's most famous leaders fled, like Wu'er and Wang, to the West. Several enrolled at U.S. universities. A few continued to advocate for human rights from abroad. Others went into business. Wu'er now manages an investment fund in Taiwan. After earning an M.B.A. from Harvard University, Chai Ling, another student leader, started a Boston software company that provides free Web portals to universities in exchange for students' contact information, promoting its product with p
Source: St Louis Post-Dispatch
May 28, 2009
White-gloved archivists digging through brittle pages inside metal file drawers at the St. Louis circuit clerk's office have unlocked never-before told stories of looting, betrayal and slavery in the years following the Civil War.
Now these rare documents, unearthed during a 10-year preservation project, will be available to anyone who wants to read about how Missourians attempted to bring law and order after the chaos of war.
"This is a treasure trove of informati
Source: http://www.capitalnews9.com
May 28, 2009
LENOX, Mass - It's one of the largest and rarest collections of Civil War memorabilia in the entire country. And soon, it could be yours.
"This is probably one of the hardest things that we had to do, emotionally," said Eastover Resort owner Ticki Winsor.
Eastover Resort in Lenox is the home of the Civil War Museum. But because of the bad economy, Winsor is forced to sell the entire property, including everything in the museum.
"I feel that w
Source: WaPo
May 28, 2009
In the seven years since enactment of the federal No Child Left Behind law, students have spent ever more time filling in bubbles on high-stakes tests. But Virginia could soon join a movement to roll back testing programs, as it considers abandoning an exam that spans such matters as bartering, the ancient empire of Mali and pie charts.
Florida and Georgia have cut testing budgets, citing financial pressures. North Carolina might soon follow. And today, the Virginia Board of Educati
Source: http://www.kansascity.com
May 28, 2009
Authorities broke a cold case that involves the history of cow town exploits of Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson, the FBI said Thursday.
A stolen Dodge City police docket ledger for 1878 to 1882 — missing since the 1950s — has been found in Ohio, they reported.
Federal prosecutors on Wednesday filed a civil lawsuit in Topeka to take possession of the large historic book. How it disappeared remains a mystery, but court records list recent travels that almost ended in public
Source: NYT
May 28, 2009
A group of Orthodox Jewish leaders from New York has called on Spain to stop what they said is the excavation of an ancient Jewish burial site in Toledo, in central Spain.
Rabbi David Niederman, president of the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg and one of those leading the campaign, said that the cemetery lay beneath, and adjacent to, a school built in Toledo in the 1970s. Builders, who unearthed Jewish graves during the school’s original construction, were now excavatin
Source: AP
May 28, 2009
A mass extinction some 260 million years ago may have been caused by volcanic eruptions in what is now China, new research suggests.
The so-called Guadalupian Mass Extinction, devastating marine life around the world, was preceded by massive eruptions in the Emeishan geological province of Southwest China, researchers led by Paul Wignall of Britain's University of Leeds report in Friday's edition of the journal Science.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 28, 2009
The heir to a Tsarist-era aristocrat has launched a legal fight to reclaim a Van Gogh masterpiece that could decide the future of artwork seized by the Bolsheviks after the 1917 revolution.
Pierre Konowaloff, a naturalised Frenchman, claims that Van Gogh's Night Cafe, which has hung on the walls of Yale University for nearly 50 years, was confiscated from his great-grandfather Ivan Morozov on the orders of Lenin.
A court ruling in his favour would trigger a flood of si
