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: AP
Apr 13, 2009
More than 65 years after villagers provided shelter to Italian Jews fleeing from the Nazis, a group of those who evaded capture rushed to repay that sacrifice in rural communities hard-hit by an earthquake.
A delegation of around 20 elderly Jews and their descendants — as well as community leaders — made their way to makeshift camps in the area around the mountain city of L'Aquila on Monday, peering into tents in a bid to find their saviors.
They offered everything fro
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Apr 13, 2009
Dr Geoff Crawford, who has been researching the infamous 1888 prostitute murders, believes the East End killer may have lived out his days in Australia.
He claims international con man Frederick Bailey Deeming could have been responsible for the murders.
Deeming lived in Britain in the 1880s, settling in Rainhill near Liverpool where he was later discovered to have killed his first wife and their four children.
He later emigrated to Melbourne, where he w
Source: Times (UK)
Apr 13, 2009
By authorising the use of military force for the first time outside the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan that he inherited, President Obama may hope that he has shut some of his critics up. For the moment, at least.
The sight of four pirates in a lifeboat holding off an $800-million warship and the world’s last superpower was not, after all, the image the White House wishes to project.
Mr Obama’s own silence on the subject last week, ducking questions about whether h
Source: Deutsche Welle
Apr 13, 2009
For the past several weeks, more than 60 firemen and volunteers have been spending most of their days at the site where the archive once stood. With scoops, cranes and even their bare hands, they search through the rubble not for bodies, but for paper.
That is because the documented history of the entire region now lays buried under 60 tons of rock and other debris.
"Today we just found a document from the 11th century," said Cologne fireman Thomas Buergerma
Source: Deutsche Welle
Apr 13, 2009
"Without God, everything is permitted."
With this famous quote from Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the bishop of the southern Bavarian town of Augsburg wanted to warn his congregation of what he sees as the dangers of atheism.
Bishop Mixa told churchgoers that a society without God was "hell on earth" and could result in bloody regimes such as those led by Adolf Hitler or the Soviet Union.
"Decades past have proven the inhumanit
Source: Tehran Times
Apr 13, 2009
Located five kilometers west of Behshahr in Iran’s northern province of Mazandaran, Gohar-Tappeh is the largest and most important prehistoric site so far, relative to those previously discovered in the region.
A joint team of German and Iranian archaeologists along with a number of Polish experts in interdisciplinary fields have recently been assigned to study the 13,000 year record of habitation at the site.
The new anthropological studies are led by Arkadiusz Solty
Source: CNN
Apr 12, 2009
(CNN) -- In a nondescript conference room tucked inside the library at the University of Delaware, a graduate student found a historian's equivalent to a needle in a haystack.
Amanda Daddona said she discovered a personal letter from Thomas Jefferson amid one of 200 boxes of legal documents, minutes from meetings and day-to-day correspondence of a prominent Delaware family.
"The first thing I recognized was his signature," said Daddona, 22, who is getting her
Source: USA Today
Apr 12, 2009
When Ira Hayes was alive, his image was captured in one of the most famous war photographs ever taken — the World War II image of U.S. military personnel raising the flag over Iwo Jima.
Last month, 54 years since his death, his family learned that another image of Hayes, a face mask, had been cast in plaster while he lay in a Phoenix mortuary. The mask of Hayes, a Pima Indian from Bapchule, Ariz., was made without the family's knowledge and ended up on display at the Gilbert Ortega
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Apr 12, 2009
The Ministry of Defence department that investigated UFOs sightings has been closed after almost 60 years, it has been disclosed.
The MoD department, which has dealt with more than 12,000 reports – including 135 last year - was used to assess threats posed by any Unidentified Flying Objects sightings throughout Britain.
Any reports made would now not be investigated or followed up as the hotline had been closed, a spokesman said.
UFO experts expressed anger
Source: BBC News
Apr 12, 2009
The birthday celebrations of King Bhumibol Adulyadej are muted this year as the king remains in hospital recovering from pneumonia.
Instead of hearing his annual speech and watching the king's inspection of the glittering trooping of the colour, his loving subjects are worrying about his - and their nation's - health.
More than 1.2 million people have visited the Siriraj Hospital in Bangkok where the king has been staying for more than two-and-a-half months.
Source: NYT
Apr 12, 2009
Ninety-six-year-old Goodsprings Elementary is a three-room schoolhouse with just six students: a fifth-grader, four fourth-graders and Briana, who is in first grade. If no one else moves to town, she will be the only student left at the start of the 2010-11 school year.
The board of the Clark County School District was poised to close Goodsprings Elementary in May, but protests from parents and residents persuaded the board to delay the decision a year.
The T-shaped, 1,
Source: AFP
Apr 12, 2009
Archaeologists working in an Egyptian oasis have found a necropolis containing dozens of brightly painted mummies dating back as far as 4,000 years, the country's antiquities chief said on Sunday.
"The mission found dozens of mummies in 53 rock-hewn tombs dating to the Middle Kingdom" from 2061-1786 BC, Zahi Hawass told AFP.
The team also found 15 painted masks, along with amulets and clay pots, Hawass said.
Source: AP
Apr 12, 2009
Archaeologists say they have found the buried remains of a Colonial tavern near the site of a planned highway bridge outside of Easton.
Household ceramics, tobacco pipes and bones from food have already found. The items date to the early 1700s when a town named Dover occupied the area.
Source: The Hindu (India)
Apr 12, 2009
A rare granite sculpture of Goddess Laxmi, believed to be 1,400 years old, has been found at Waghama village along the river Jehlum in Anantnag district of Jammu and Kashmir.
The sculpture, that was found by the farmers a few days ago, has been taken in possession by the state Archives and Archeology department and its antiquity and artistic details are being studied, its Deputy Director Peerzada Mohammad Ashraf said on Sunday.
He said the farmers stumbled upon the id
Source: BBC
Apr 12, 2009
A roman statue has been returned to a National Trust site in West Sussex after undergoing conservation work.
The human-height herm know as Antique Youth, which had stood in the garden at Nymans, near Handcross, had deteriorated because of acidic rain.
The restored statue is now located at the end of a corridor inside the house. A copy has been placed in the garden.
A herm is a sculpture with a head, and perhaps a torso, on a squared section. The trust ra
Source: Foxnews
Apr 12, 2009
Grassroots organizations have produced a cottage industry of Tea Party-themed products that are funding nationwide protests of government spending and bailouts -- and they're generating a mini-stimulus to boot.
Online retailers are recording hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales of mugs and sweats, buttons and bumper stickers, with much of the proceeds going toward organizing the tax-day tea parties, takeoffs on the original 1773 protest of British taxes.
Source: Independent (UK)
Apr 12, 2009
Vincent Bajinya had already left one nightmare behind. He had seen first hand the horrors of the civil war in Rwanda as a doctor in the capital, Kigali, and was forced to flee when the genocidal madness that overtook the country in 1994 looked like it would catch up with him.
Twelve years later, however, after rebuilding his life in Britain and changing his name to Vincent Brown, out of nowhere his second nightmare began. As he parked his car outside the refugee charity where he wo
Source: Times (UK)
Apr 12, 2009
AN unusual history of the Nazis in France has trampled on one of the country’s most painful taboos by focusing on women who slept with the enemy during the occupation.
Flouting a long-running convention of silence on what he calls “horizontal collaboration”, Patrick Buisson, the author, describes the Nazi occupation as the “golden age” of the French brothel, chronicling a dramatic growth in prostitution to satisfy German demand.
The book, 1940-1945, Erotic Years, is t
Source: Times (UK)
Apr 12, 2009
Last week, on the day the world marked the 15th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, Britain officially became a safe haven for suspected mass murderers. This is the incomprehensible and inhumane message two senior judges have given the grieving survivors of the Rwandan genocide by freeing four genocide suspects Rwanda wanted to put on trial – effectively saying that alleged Rwandan mass murderers are welcome to live in Britain.
I know for sure that several Rwandan killers are hidi
Source: The Virginian-Pilot
Apr 11, 2009
An Elizabeth City slave who escaped, most likely through the local Underground Railroad system, and later married famous former slave and abolitionist Harriet Tubman, is the focus of a new search to find details on his life.
Tubman biographer Kate Clifford Larson and local Underground Railroad researcher and advocate Wanda Hunt-McLean are seeking more information about Nelson Davis. They are especially interested in details of his youth as a slave to a Charles family in Elizabeth Ci
