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: Rasmussen Reports
Feb 26, 2009
In early October, as the meltdown of the financial industry gained momentum following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, a Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 59% of U.S. voters agreed with Ronald Reagan that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
Since then, the stock market has fallen roughly 3,000 points, millions of jobs have been lost, nearly a trillion dollars has been spent so far to bail out the financial industry, an add
Source: BBC
Feb 26, 2009
Narayanhiti, the former royal palace in the centre of the Nepalese capital, Kathmandu, has been reopened as a museum, nine months after the centuries-old monarchy was abolished.
It is a sign of Nepal's huge changes that the red ribbon opening the museum was cut by a Maoist former rebel - the Prime Minister, Prachanda.
The museum has been sensitively assembled in the rooms where the monarchs, including Birendra's brother and successor, Gyanendra, lived and worked.
Source: AP
Feb 26, 2009
Geologists, biologists and other scientists convened Thursday in Paris to discuss how to stop the spread of fungus stains — aggravated by global warming — that threaten France's prehistoric Lascaux cave drawings.
Black stains have spread across the cave's prehistoric murals of bulls, felines and other images, and scientists have been hard-pressed to halt the fungal creep.
Marc Gaulthier, who heads the Lascaux Caves International Scientific Committee, said the challenges
Source: AP
Feb 26, 2009
Landscapers were digging a hole for a fish pond in the front yard of a Boulder home last May when they heard a "chink" that didn't sound right. Just some lost tools. Some 13,000-year-old lost tools. They had stumbled onto a cache of more than 83 ancient tools buried by the Clovis people — ice age hunter-gatherers who remain a puzzle to anthropologists.
The home's owner, Patrick Mahaffy, thought they were only a century or two old before contacting researchers at the Univer
Source: Reuters
Feb 26, 2009
Japanese archaeologists working in Egypt have found four wooden sarcophaguses and associated grave goods which could date back up to 3,300 years, the Egyptian government said on Thursday.
The team from Waseda University in Tokyo discovered the anthropomorphic sarcophaguses in a tomb in the Sakkara necropolis, about 25 km (15 miles) south of Cairo, the Supreme Council for Antiquities said in a statement.
Sakkara, the burial ground for the ancient city of Memphis, remains
Source: AP
Feb 26, 2009
After helping to fund the reopening of Iraq's National Museum, Italy is planning a virtual exhibition of Mesopotamian and Islamic treasures, many of which are still missing from the looted Baghdad repository, officials said Wednesday.
Starting late next month, Internet surfers will be able to roam eight virtual halls showcasing artifacts dating from the birth of civilization in ancient Iraq to the founding of Baghdad in A.D. 762.
The Web site will include 3-D models, vi
Source: NYT
Feb 26, 2009
The Senate Intelligence Committee is completing plans to begin a review of the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program, another sign that lawmakers are determined to have a public accounting of controversial Bush administration programs despite White House concerns about the impact of unearthing the past.
The review, Congressional officials said, will focus in part on whether harsh interrogation procedures authorized by President George W. Bush actually succeeded in extracting
Source: NYT blog: The Caucus
Feb 26, 2009
MALBORK, Poland — The damp mud falls away easily from the long thighbone jutting out of the dirt wall of the trench at the gentle prod of the shovel’s tip. Beyond the mass grave filled with the skeletal remains of some 2,000 people, presumed to be Germans who died in the closing months of World War II, stands the red-brick fortress of the Teutonic Knights that was once one of Germany’s greatest landmarks until it was forced to cede the territory to Poland after the war....
Europe ha
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Feb 26, 2009
Neo-Nazis are on the rise in Germany and are planning to exploit the economic crisis to build a Fourth Reich, a defector from their ranks warned yesterday.
Uwe Luthardt painted a chilling picture of the far-Right trying to recruit the record number of young Germans facing a bleak future as the country's economy contracts and unemployment mounts.
Experts fear that the worsening conditions are worryingly similar to those of the late 1920s and early 1930s which propelled H
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 26, 2009
Chancellor Angela Merkel is being pressed by the German Federation of Expellees to decide on a controversial museum that will depict refugees' post-War experiences, despite a potential backlash from Warsaw.
The focus of Poland's ire is the federation's president and a member of Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, Erika Steinbach, who it perceives as the strident voice of an organisation associated with Nazism and the German occupation "and one who will push an anti-Polish agen
Source: AP
Feb 26, 2009
PARIS – Geologists, biologists and other scientists convened Thursday in Paris to discuss how to stop the spread of fungus stains — aggravated by global warming — that threaten France's prehistoric Lascaux cave drawings.
Black stains have spread across the cave's prehistoric murals of bulls, felines and other images, and scientists have been hard-pressed to halt the fungal creep.
Marc Gaulthier, who heads the Lascaux Caves International Scientific Committee, said the ch
Source: NYT
Feb 26, 2009
Researchers into the ancient human past are used to wandering the world in search of artifacts. But scientists at the University of Colorado said Wednesday that a major cache of Stone Age tools, believed to be 13,000 years old, had been found in a suburban backyard just six blocks from the campus in Boulder.
“I’m used to going hell and gone across the landscape to look,” said Douglas Bamforth, a professor of anthropology who analyzed the cache. “This time I walked.”
The
Source: BBC News
Feb 26, 2009
The earliest footprints showing evidence of modern human foot anatomy and gait have been unearthed in Kenya.
The 1.5-million-year-old footprints display signs of a pronounced arch and short, aligned toes, in contrast to older footprints.
The size and spacing of the Kenyan markings - attributed to Homo erectus - reflect the height, weight, and walking style of modern humans.
The findings have been published in the journal Science.
Source: BBC
Feb 26, 2009
Three suspects, held over the assassination of Lebanon's former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, have been freed.
The three are all civilians, two of them Lebanese and one Syrian. Four Lebanese generals remain in custody.
The three had been held on suspicion of withholding information and misleading the assassination inquiry.
Their release comes before the start on Sunday of a UN special tribunal in the Hague which is due to try suspects in the case.
Source: BBC
Feb 26, 2009
Kuwait's foreign minister has flown to Iraq for the highest-level visit since Iraq's armed forces invaded its southern neighbour in 1990.
Sheikh Muhammad al-Sabah, who is also Kuwait's deputy prime minister, met Iraq's PM and other top officials.
They discussed joint oilfields, maritime borders and war reparations, exactly 19 years after Iraqi forces were expelled from Kuwait.
Iraqi officials said it was "illogical" to continue paying Kuwait co
Source: IHT
Feb 26, 2009
A founding member of a left-wing terrorist group turned neo-Nazi was convicted Wednesday in Munich of Holocaust denial and sentenced to six years in prison after a judge accused him of using the courtroom to spread his message of hate.
Horst Mahler — a founder of the Red Army Faction in 1970 — was convicted of incitement for posting videos denying the Holocaust on the Internet and distributing CDs promoting anti-Jewish hatred and violence. Denial of the Nazi Holocaust is a crime in
Source: Reuters
Feb 26, 2009
Former Serbian president Milan Milutinovic was acquitted Thursday by the Hague tribunal of war crimes against Kosovo Albanians in 1999, but his five co-accused were given jail terms of between 15 and 22 years.
Milutinovic, 66, an ally and successor of late Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, and five co-accused went on trial in July 2006 charged with the deportation of 800,000 civilians from Kosovo and the murders of hundreds by Serb forces in 1999.
The verdict is th
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 26, 2009
A defector from Germany's hard-core neo-Nazi party the NPD has painted a chilling picture of the rise of new Hitler worshippers and their plans to build the "Fourth Reich".
Uwe Luthardt was a senior member of the NPD but quit to inform on the party which Germany tried unsuccessfully to ban several years ago.
He told of weapons stores and how members greet each other with "Heil Hitler" salutes, sing the banned songs of the Third Reich and relish the
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 26, 2009
Some of the oldest words in use in have been identified by scientists studying the evolution of language.
English and Indo-European words including 'I', 'we', 'two' and 'thou' have changed so little in tends of thousands of years that ancient hunter-gatherers would have been able to understand them.
Researchers have also identified several words that could die out within 1,000 years because they are likely to evolve into different forms. They include "throw",
Source: BBC
Feb 26, 2009
The strong statement said China did not recognise the 31m euro (£28m, $39m) sale of the bronze rat and rabbit.
It also ordered tighter checks on artefacts that Christie's auction house takes into or out of China.
The bronzes were sold as part of the estate of late French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent.
China says the animal heads were part of a collection of 12 looted from the Old Summer Palace in Beijing in 1860 when it was sacked and burnt by Fren
