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: Reuters
May 4, 2009
Judges at the Special Court for Sierra Leone ruled Monday against a defense request to acquit former Liberian President Charles Taylor on war crimes' charges.
Taylor, 61, has pleaded not guilty to 11 counts involving murder, rape, conscripting child soldiers and sexual slavery during the intertwined wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone in which more than 250,000 people were killed.
Defense lawyers said in April he should be acquitted because there was no evidence he planned
Source: China View
May 4, 2009
Chinese scientists will soon launch an excavation at a cave where the first Peking Man skull was found with an aim to find more relics of ape men who were believed to live as early as 770,000 years ago.
The excavation will start in mid May and last two months at the western slope of the Peking Man Site, said Gao Xing, deputy director and a research fellow of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Palaeoanthropology, in an interview with Xinhua on Monday.
Excavat
Source: LA Times
May 4, 2009
The Greek-born fighter survived Auschwitz by participating in win-or-die bouts staged by the Nazis. Decades after the Holocaust, Arouch served as a consultant on a film about his captivity.
Arouch's harrowing series of win-or-die bouts during the final two years of World War II was immortalized in 1989 in "Triumph of the Spirit," the first major motion picture filmed on location at Auschwitz. The film, along with Arouch's inspirational postwar speeches, became part of his
Source: Times (UK)
May 4, 2009
The makers of an acclaimed documentary about the Tiananmen Square demonstrations say that a lawsuit brought against them by one of the leading student activists shows that she has abandoned the principle of freedom of speech.
Chai Ling, once among the most-wanted people in China, is suing the makers of Gate of Heavenly Peace, claiming that a website accompanying the film infringes the trademark of her US-based software firm, Jenzabar Inc. The company claims that Long Bow Group, a s
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 4, 2009
A spokesman from the Auschwitz museum said they had agreed to a request from the authorities in southern Poland for prisoners to visit the camp as "an element of their rehabilitation programme".
The convicts will get a guided tour of the camp, in which an estimated 1. 5 million people perished, and attend a course on Auschwitz's history and the crimes the Third Reich perpetrated against millions of people across Europe.
"It's going to be shock therapy for
Source: Time
May 4, 2009
George W. Bush has often said that historians will vindicate his presidency. And since he left office, he's been moving fast to give them the tools.
Longtime financial backers of the 43rd President have raised more than $100 million for a presidential library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas that will house his official papers, sources close to Bush told TIME. Much of the money was collected in the 100 days or so since Bush left the White House, a pace much faster than tha
Source: Guardian (UK)
May 4, 2009
Vincent van Gogh's fame may owe as much to a legendary act of self-harm, as it does to his self-portraits. But, 119 years after his death, the tortured post-Impressionist's bloody ear is at the centre of a new controversy, after two historians suggested that the painter did not hack off his own lobe but was attacked by his friend, the French artist Paul Gauguin.
According to official versions, the disturbed Dutch painter cut off his ear with a razor after a row with Gauguin in 1888.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 4, 2009
The face of the first European has been recreated from bone fragments by scientists.
The head was rebuilt in clay based on an incomplete skull and jawbone discovered in a cave in the south west of the Carpathian Mountains in Romania by potholers.
Using radiocarbon analysis scientists say the man or woman, it is still not possible to determine the sex, lived between 34,000 and 36,000 years ago.
Source: CNN
May 4, 2009
Roy Braswell was 9 years old when the flu pandemic of 1918 hit.
"I know it's a bad feeling, 'cause I had it," said Braswell, 100, who now lives in Cobb County in Georgia. "It makes you have headaches, you be out of your head, you don't know nothing."
Margaret Duchez, 94, did not have the flu, but remembers that in 1918 her grandmother locked the door so that she couldn't go outside during the pandemic. In her community near Cleveland, Ohio, people were af
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 4, 2009
Up to 400 soldiers are thought to still lie in the pits where they were buried by German forces in the days immediately after the Battle of Fromelles.
Tomorrow archaeologists will begin the formal recovery of the bodies on behalf of the Australian and British governments, supervised by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC).
The painstaking operation in Pheasant Wood, which lies near the village of Fromelles around seven miles south of the French-Belgian border,
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
May 4, 2009
It is 30 years to the day since she became our first female Prime Minister.
And despite her increasingly frailty, Margaret Thatcher was determined to celebrate the occasion this weekend.
The 83-year-old Baroness's famously steely gaze was very much in evidence as she attended a dinner in Glasgow to honour her achievements.
It is one of a series of events which have been laid on to mark the anniversary of her election and the wave of change it brought wit
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
May 4, 2009
This is the face of the first early European human which has been painstakingly constructed by scientists from bone fragments.
The man or woman - it is still not possible to determine the sex - lived 35,000 years ago in the Carpathian Mountains that today are part of Romania.
Their face was rebuilt in clay based on an incomplete skull and jawbone discovered in a cave where bears hibernated.
Forensic artist Richard Neave made the model based on his measureme
Source: Spiegel Online
May 4, 2009
German police have their doubts about whether Aribert Heim, the Nazi war criminal reported in February to have died of cancer in 1992, is really dead.
Specialists of the regional criminal police force in the south-western state of Baden-Württemberg have examined documents found by journalists in an old briefcase in Cairo and don't believe that the papers constitute "evidence of the death" of Heim, SPIEGEL has learned.
New information from the police's own sour
Source: BBC
May 4, 2009
War crimes judges have rejected a request to acquit Liberia's former President Charles Taylor on charges of crimes against humanity. Mr Taylor's defence team argued that there was not enough evidence for the trial to proceed.
The decision by the Special Court for Sierra Leone at The Hague means that Mr Taylor, who has pleaded not guilty, must now present his defence.
Tens of thousands of people died in Sierra Leone's decade-long civil war.
Source: The Canadian Press
May 3, 2009
Like former battlefields all over the world, the southern Japan island of Okinawa - home to more than one million people and the site of some of the Second World War's most savage fighting - is a tinderbox of unexploded bombs, thousands and thousands of tonnes of them, rusted and often half buried.
The bombs are the bane of construction crews, divers and unsuspecting children. Because of their age and the layers of crusty dirt that usually cover them, they often don't seem dangerous
Source: AP (& White House press release)
May 3, 2009
ITOMAN, Okinawa, Japan -- Under a blazing mid-afternoon sun, 1st Lt. Toshikazu Nakano squats in a muddy pit at the edge of a housing development and brushes rocks away from a shiny metal object lodged firmly in the ground. He stops for a moment and barks orders to the rest of his team.
"This one might explode," he yells. "Everyone take cover."
Like former battlefields all over the world, the southern Japan island of Okinawa - home to more than one mi
Source: AFP
May 3, 2009
Nearly everyone who could read the Hebrew verses carved into the walls of
Ezekiel's tomb left Iraq almost 60 years ago, but their memory is preserved in what is today a
revered Muslim shrine.
Between 1948 and 1951 nearly all of Iraq's 2,500-year-old Jewish community fled amid a region-wide
outbreak of nationalist violence, but today Iraq's Muslims and Christians still visit its most
important holy sites.
In the little town of Kifl, south of Baghdad, the shrine of Ezekiel -- the
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 3, 2009
Britain was "dragged into a war in Iraq which was always against our better judgment" the former deputy head of MI6 has claimed, in a remark that will reignite the debate over political interference in the war.
The comments, made by Nigel Inkster, who was deputy director of MI6 at the time, make clear there were reservations over the war at a very senior level within the Secret Intelligence Service.
MI6 was blamed for the failure of intelligence that took Bri
Source: IHT
May 3, 2009
After decades of dictatorship and disrepair, Iraq is celebrating its renewed sovereignty over the Babylon archaeological site — by fighting over the place, over its past and future and, of course, over its spoils.
Now with the support of some officials in Baghdad, the local government has reopened the excavated ruins of Babylon’s ancient core, shuttered ever since the American invasion in 2003. It has done so despite warnings by archaeologists that the reopening threatens to damage
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 3, 2009
The body of a 37,000 year old baby mammoth found frozen in the artic tundra is starting to reveal new insights about the now extinct ice age beasts.
Clumps of brown hair still cling to the three foot tall body, hinting at the coarse coat that would have once covered the infant. Even her eylasahes are intact.
These extraordinary images show why scientists are so excited by the discovery of Lyuba – the most complete body of a woolly mammoth ever found
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