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
Mar 12, 2009
An Iraqi journalist hailed as a hero in the Arab world for throwing his shoes at former US President George W Bush has been jailed for three years.
Muntadar al-Zaidi had told the court his actions were "natural, just like any Iraqi" against a leader whose forces had occupied his country.
Shoe hurling is a grave insult in Arab culture, but Mr Bush - on a farewell trip to Iraq - shrugged off the attack.
Defence lawyers described the sentence as &
Source: Times (UK)
Mar 12, 2009
Edward Gibbon once said: “I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging of the future but by the past.” It is a lesson that the British nation needs to learn again.
In a recent report on the teaching of history in schools, Ofsted pointed out that, too often, British children had no clear sense of chronology and no vantage point on historical change. For too long, the idea of a story unfolding in real time has given way
Source: Times (UK)
Mar 12, 2009
An Auschwitz survivor is fighting to keep her full pension after the tax authorities in Sweden decided to cut it back because she received compensation from the German Government for her wartime trauma.
Miriam Landau, 84, was told by the Swedish Social Insurance Agency that it was clawing back much of the 80,000 krona (£6,400) in reparations that she was given for the time spent working in a ghetto in Hungary and in the death camp in Poland, because it counted as a pension.
Source: Times (UK)
Mar 12, 2009
The new evidence suggesting that Britain was aware of Witold Pilecki's plans to liberate Auschwitz will reignite the long-running debate over how much Winston Churchill knew about the death camp and whether he did enough to prevent the genocide taking place there.
There is little doubt that Churchill, in contrast to many of his contemporaries, was a staunch defender of the Jews and one of the few statesmen to grasp the enormity of the Holocaust.
As early as 1941 the cod
Source: Times (UK)
Mar 12, 2009
It was perhaps the bravest act of espionage of the Second World War. After voluntarily being imprisoned in the Auschwitz concentration camp for 2 and one half years, and smuggling out its darkest secrets to the Allies, Witold Pilecki overcame a guard and, with two comrades, escaped almost certain death.
Now new details have emerged of the extraordinary tale of the Polish officer who hatched a plot with the country's resistance to be rounded up by the occupying Germans in September
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Mar 12, 2009
For nearly 150 years, a story has circulated about a hidden Civil War message engraved inside Abraham Lincoln's pocket watch. On Tuesday, museum curators confirmed it was true.
A watchmaker used tiny tools to carefully pry open the antique watch at the National Museum of American History, and a descendant of the engraver read aloud the message from a metal plate underneath the watch face.
"April 13 - 1861," the first line reads, "Fort Sumpter (sic) was at
Source: http://qconline.com
Mar 11, 2009
Whether for his association with the Civil War or civil rights, another United States President from Illinois is currently getting more attention as the nation draws closer to the 150th anniversary of the War Between the States in 2011.
Ulysses S. Grant, the 18th President of the United States, was elected in 1868 while a resident of Galena, Illinois and visitors to that town may still tour his fully restored home. His two terms in office, spanning the years 1869 – 1877, saw some of
Source: The Hill
Mar 11, 2009
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) is poised to reintroduce a highly controversial resolution that seeks to condemn the Armenian "genocide" of 1915-1917.
The introduction of the measure, expected to happen within a month, will reignite a fierce debate in Congress.
Schiff's renewed push comes in the wake of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's recent visit to Turkey and President Obama's planned trip there next month.
Source: Fox News
Mar 11, 2009
A San Francisco police union has accused former domestic terrorist William Ayers, co-founder of the Weather Underground, and his wife in a 1970 bombing that killed one sergeant, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
The union, in a letter to a conservative organization lobbying for arrests in the case, accused Ayers and wife Bernardine Dohrn of bombing a city police station.
On Feb. 16, 1970, a bomb placed on a window ledge of Park Station killed Sgt. Brian McDonnell and
Source: Forbes
Mar 11, 2009
The richest people in the world have gotten poorer, just like the rest of us. This year the world's billionaires have an average net worth of $3 billion, down 23% in 12 months. The world now has 793 billionaires, down from 1,125 a year ago.
After slipping in recent years, the U.S. is regaining its dominance as a repository of wealth. Americans account for 44% of the money and 45% of the list's slots, up seven and three percentage points from last year, respectively. Bill Gates lost
Source: China Daily
Mar 11, 2009
Chinese archaeologists will start later this year to salvage a ship thought to be a Ming Dynasty merchant vessel that sank off the Guangdong coast 400 years ago, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage (SACH) said Wednesday.
The SACH approved the excavation plan early this year, it said in a statement to Xinhua. The administration hasn't yet announced all details of the salvage plan, but the Guangdong provincial cultural heritage department will organize an excavation team, th
Source: Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Mar 11, 2009
Beautiful mosaics and a dedicatory inscription were uncovered in a church that dates to the Byzantine period.
A church that dates to the Byzantine period which is paved with breathtakingly beautiful mosaics and a dedicatory inscription was exposed in an archaeological excavation the Israel Antiquities Authority is conducting near Moshav Nes-Harim, 5 kilometers east of Bet Shemesh (at the site of Horvat A-Diri), in the wake of plans to enlarge the moshav.
Various phases
Source: The Sydney Morning Herald
Mar 11, 2009
Jack Ross, who lives at the Golden Oaks nursing home in Bendigo in central Victoria, turned 110 on Wednesday.
Mr Ross joins a select group of the world's super centenarians as Australia's oldest man and the nation's sole surviving World War I veteran.
He enlisted to help the war effort in February 1918 but the war ended nine months later, before he saw active service.
Mr Ross' daughter Peggy Ashburn said her father was frail but otherwise in good health, ea
Source: Spiegel
Mar 11, 2009
Public prosecutors in Munich have filed charges against John Demjanjuk on more than 29,000 counts of accessory to murder. Officials allege the 88-year-old, who lives in a Cleveland suburb, was a guard at the Sobibor death camp.
In what could become one of the final war crimes trials related to the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany in World War II, German prosecutors on Wednesday filed charges against alleged death camp guard John Demjanjuk. Accused of having worked in the Sobibo
Source: RawStory
Mar 11, 2009
Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh dropped a bombshell on Tuesday when he told an audience at the University of Minnesota that the military was running an "executive assassination ring" throughout the Bush years which reported directly to former Vice President Dick Cheney.
The remark came out seemingly inadvertently when Hersh was asked by the moderator of a public discussion of "America's Constitutional Crisis" whether abuses of executive power, like those whi
Source: Spiegel Online
Mar 11, 2009
When the Romans weren't busy conquering their enemies, they loved to waste massive quantities of water, which gurgled and bubbled throughout their cities. The engineers of the empire invented standardized lead pipes, aqueducts as high as fortresses, and water mains with 15 bars (217 pounds per square inch) of pressure.
In the capital alone there were thousands of fountains, drinking troughs and thermal baths. Rich senators refreshed themselves in private pools and decorated their ga
Source: Spiegel Online
Mar 11, 2009
In economic times like these, a little historical perspective can go a long way. That, at least, was the message delivered by German Chancellor Angela Merkel in an interview with the mass-circulation tabloid Bild published on Wednesday.
"In Germany, we have overcome other major challenges," she said. "This year we are celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Federal Republic of Germany and 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. We succeeded ... in rebuilding after
Source: Deutsche Welle
Mar 11, 2009
Spanish lawmakers held a minute's silence in parliament to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the Madrid train bombings on Wednesday, March 11.
The 2004 terrorist attack killed 191 people and injured more than 1,800 others.
"Five years on, I want to express, in the name of the government, our support and recognition for all the victims and their families of that terrible tragedy," said Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero. "I hope that a terrorist attack w
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Mar 11, 2009
Even in citations, print is the default no more. The seventh edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, released Tuesday, states that the Modern Language Association no longer recognizes print as the default medium, and suggests that the medium of publication should be included in each works cited entry.
Moreover, the MLA has ceased to recommend inclusion of URLs in citing Web-based works – unless the instructor requires it or a reader would likely be unable to loca
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Mar 11, 2009
The trial in Ward Churchill's lawsuit against the University of Colorado got under way here on Tuesday with lawyers for the opposing sides painting starkly different pictures of both the controversial ethnic-studies professor and the circumstances surrounding his dismissal by the university in 2007.
In delivering their opening remarks in a crowded courtroom, both sides agreed that the university had been under intense outside pressure to fire Mr. Churchill as a result of the media u
