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: CNN
May 20, 2009
The National Archives -- a repository of important government documents, including the U.S. Constitution -- has lost a computer hard drive containing large volumes of Clinton administration records, including the names, phone numbers and Social Security numbers of White House staff members and visitors.
Officials at the Archives say they don't know how many confidential records are on the hard drive. But congressional aides briefed on the matter say it contains "more than 100,0
Source: NYT
May 20, 2009
Tens of thousands of Irish children were sexually, physically and emotionally abused by nuns, priests and others over 60 years in a network of church-run residential schools meant to care for the poor, the vulnerable and the unwanted, according to a report released in Dublin on Wednesday.
The 2,600-page report paints a picture of institutions run more like Dickensian orphanages than 20th-century schools, characterized by privation and cruelty that could be both casual and choreograp
Source: NYT
May 20, 2009
It’s an underappreciated, almost ignored fact in the grand narrative of World War II that the Allied invasion of Normandy caused something on the order of 19,890 civilian deaths in the five French departments that saw most of the fighting.
These deaths took place in the two and a half months between June 6, 1944, and Aug. 25, when, as the historian William I. Hitchcock has put it, “Normandy would be chewed into a bloody, unrecognizable mess.” It is important to stress that these civ
Source: Independent (UK)
May 20, 2009
They were icons of the Cold War: the Brandenburg Gate symbolised the division of Berlin and Checkpoint Charlie was the East-West crossing of spy novel fame, where heavily armed Allied soldiers and Communist border guards confronted each other.
Now two figures stand as if frozen in front of the Brandenburg Gate. One is dressed in the uniform of an East German border guard, the other as a Soviet army officer. Both are covered from top to toe in sickly dark green paint to make them loo
Source: Deutsche Welle
May 20, 2009
Italy's holding centers for immigrants are like "concentration camps," Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said in an apparent justification of his country's new practice of deporting to Libya migrants picked up at sea in international waters. He added that it was more humane to send migrant boats back to Libya than to let them enter Italy.
Berlusconi was speaking at a joint news conference on Tuesday with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, who said the priori
Source: Deutsche Welle
May 20, 2009
Biden continues his landmark tour of the Balkans when he visits Belgrade Wednesday, May 20, hoping to mend ties with Serbia which were badly damaged over Washington's support for Kosovo independence.
Biden is the highest level US official to visit Serbia since Jimmy Carter in 1980. During his visit he is to hold talks with President Boris Tadic, Prime Minister Mirko Cvetkovic and Defense Minister Dragan Sutanovac.
The vice president's visit aims to assert US leadership
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 20, 2009
Antique furniture from Windsor Castle that originally belonged to Queen Victoria is to be sold at auction later this month.
Four items are going under the hammer with a combined guide price of up to £12,000.
They were bought by the current vendor's parents shortly after Queen Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953.
The sale, which includes a pair of giltwood chairs, a green-silk screen, a table, and a pair of cabinets, will be held at Moore Allen & Innocent
Source: CNN
May 20, 2009
DreamWorks Studios will back out of plans to produce a movie about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. unless King's three surviving children settle their differences over the deal, the studio said Wednesday.
A longtime friend of the three Kings predicted peace may be at hand for the squabbling siblings and that all of them want Steven Spielberg's studio to portray their father's life on the big screen.
The latest public rift between Dexter King, the chief executive of the
Source: Times (UK)
May 20, 2009
The wreck of HMS Victory, a British warship sunk in the English Channel in 1744, is being destroyed by fishing trawlers, according to the American treasure hunters who discovered the site last year.
Odyssey — the world’s only publicly-listed shipwreck exploration company — surveyed 4,725 sq miles (12,300 sq km) of the western Channel during its search for high-value shipwrecks. It discovered 267 wrecks, of which 112, or 41 per cent, show evidence of damage from a type of fishing kno
Source: Los Angeles Times
May 20, 2009
Efforts to gain justice for thousands of Polish captives executed apparently at Stalin's orders have been rebuffed by Russia's courts. The country's mood has swung away from probing the Soviet past.
The prisoners were mostly military officers, police, gendarmes and landlords, rounded up as a dangerous "bourgeois" elite when the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland in the run-up to World War II. The following year, 1940, the Communist Party decided to eliminate them.
Source: Scotsman
May 20, 2009
RUSSIAN president Dmitry Medvedev has formed a commission to protect Moscow's version of Second World War history from "falsifications", amid growing concern over attempts to downplay or criticise the country's war record.
A presidential decree posted on the Kremlin's website said "the commission will engage in the compilation and analysis of information on the falsification of historical facts and events, directed at lowering the international prestige of the Russian
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 20, 2009
Descendents of China's revolutionary army generals have formed a choir to tour the country in the year the People's Republic turns 60.
Over 200 men and women, all offspring of People's Liberation Army generals, are touring Chinese cities giving renditions of the songs that spurred the Communist Party to conquer its enemies. The tour is part of a publicity campaign ahead of the 60th anniversary of Communist Party rule later this year.
Dressed in army uniform, the member
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 20, 2009
Steven Spielberg has acquired the rights to make a film about the life of the black civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
Dreamworks Studios said it had secured the rights to make the film from the King estate, which it hoped would create the "the definitive portrait" of the murdered activist's tumultuous life.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 20, 2009
Louis XVI's final testament written shortly before his execution has been recovered more than two centuries after it disappeared during the French Revolution.
In the text, Louis accuses revolutionary lawmakers of attacking the "dignity of the French Crown" and defends the king's right to an absolute veto, but he is conciliatory towards demands for social equality.
The manuscript disappeared shortly after his death and although its 16-page contents were known
Source: AP
May 20, 2009
Bones found in the basement of a small-town barbershop in eastern Indiana are those of prehistoric American Indians, a coroner said, but how the bones got there is unknown.
Gary Engelbrecht discovered the bones in a basement vault when he opened his Fading Tradition barbershop about a year ago in Albany, about 10 miles northeast of Muncie.
Engelbrecht mentioned the bones to Clevenger, who investigated. About 125 bone fragments were found in a deteriorating cardboard box
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 20, 2009
Lord Nelson shared the considerable financial costs of pleasing his
mistress with her husband when the three of them lived together,
newly-uncovered documents show.
Sir William Hamilton became one the most famous cuckolds in British
history when he moved with his younger wife Emma, Lady Hamilton, into
the celebrated admiral's house in Merton, south London in 1801.
But not only did the two men share a lover, they also pooled their
resources to cover the huge sums necessary to m
Source: Miami Herald
May 20, 2009
Black leaders are mobilizing to pressure Homestead leaders to stop the
Confederate flag from flying at parades and city-sponsored events.
It started during a day of patriotism. The Sons of Confederate
Veterans waved the Confederate battle flag as they marched for the
first time in a Veterans Day parade in Homestead last November.
Six months later, the Miami-Dade chapter of the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People has launched a campaign to
prevent future
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 20, 2009
The last Speaker to be ejected from the Commons was Sir John Trevor, a lawyer, who was made a King’s Counsel by Charles II.
In 1685 he was appointed Master of the Rolls and also the Speaker of the House of Commons by James II.
He was a partisan of James II and was deprived of office on the accession of William III. In 1690, however, he once again returned to parliament as Speaker
As Speaker, he was memorable for being severely cross-eyed. The affliction was
Source: VOA
May 19, 2009
The Kremlin has posted a decree that aims to prevent what are described as efforts to falsify history and harm the interests of Russia. The government move to set up a commission to deal with the issue, comes after the party of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin called for measures to criminalize the defamation of any Soviet contribution to victory in World War II.
The Kremlin Web site posted a decree Tuesday signed by President Dimitry Medvedev on May 15 that authorizes the establishm
Source: Deutsche Welle
May 19, 2009
Chancellor Merkel revealed a little bit more about her youth in then-communist East Germany on a television talk show on Tuesday, amid implications from the leader of the Left Party that she was somehow complicit in the abuses of the regime.
Based on her involvement in the Free German Youth, the official socialist youth group of the communist German Democratic Republic, or GDR, Left Party leader Oskar Lafontaine said last week that Merkel had "belonged to the party's reserve of
