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: Discovery Channel News
Oct 23, 2008
Two Egyptian mummies who died more than 3,500 years ago have provided clear evidence for the earliest known cases of malaria, according to a study presented this week in Naples at an international conference on ancient DNA.
Pathologist Andreas Nerlich and colleagues at the Academic Teaching Hospital München-Bogenhausen in Munich, Germany, studied 91 bone tissue samples from ancient Egyptian mummies and skeletons dating from 3500 to 500 B.C.
Using special techniques from
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 23, 2008
Barack Obama and John McCain are nearing the finishing line in the 2008 US presidential campaign. As US voters prepare to elect their 44th president on November 4, the Telegraph's US correspondents compile a list of the 25 highlights of the race so far. On Thursday we publish 13 to 25. On Friday we will conclude with the top 12 turning points in the race to the White House. These are our lists. We know that you will not agree with all our choices and we encourage you to submit your own lists bel
Source: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,443789,00.html
Oct 23, 2008
The two teenage history buffs dressed up in military gear like so many times before for the seaside summer festival. One sported the green fatigues of the Red Army. The other donned the grayish uniform of the German Wehrmacht.
Only this time, they ended up in jail, charged with violating a new law banning public displays of communist and Nazi symbols.
Verdicts are expected Friday in a legal test for the disputed legislation pushed through Lithuania's Parliament in June
Source: Times (UK)
Oct 23, 2008
Sixteen crates locked in a dark store room in Madrid for more than 70 years hold the secret to how General Franco might have won the Spanish Civil War.
Inside the crates are Enigma code-making machines that Franco had bought from Nazi Germany and used to co-ordinate his troops who fought on fronts hundreds of miles apart.
The 26 machines were discovered this week by the Spanish daily newspaper El País, hidden in army headquarters since the Civil War ended in 1939, most
Source: Newsweek
Oct 23, 2008
John McCain recently accused Barack Obama of advocating socialist policies. It turns out he was channeling one of his illustrious home-state predecessors—Barry Goldwater.
In newly unearthed correspondence, Goldwater, the famed GOP senator from Arizona and a conservative icon, wrote a stinging letter to Lyndon Johnson just after he heard the news that the then Senate majority leader had agreed to be John F. Kennedy's running mate in the 1960 election.
Goldwater's complai
Source: AFP
Oct 23, 2008
Archaeologists in northern Greece have found the remains of a Stone Age homestead left intact for about 6,000 years, the culture ministry said on Thursday.
"This is a rare case where the antiquities remained undisturbed by farming or other activities for around 6,000 years," the ministry said in a statement.
The dwelling had been destroyed in a fire but its residents had time to flee taking most of their valuable stone tools with them, the ministry said.
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Oct 23, 2008
The papers of the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, including correspondence with fellow justices during 33 years on the Supreme Court, have been donated by his family to the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University, the institution announced Wednesday...
The papers include drafts and notes on his many books and speeches as well as documents and correspondence on court cases. Hoover spokeswoman Michele Horaney said the first material to be released to researche
Source: AFP
Oct 23, 2008
ATHENS – Archaeologists in northern Greece have found the remains of a Stone Age homestead left intact for about 6,000 years, the culture ministry said on Thursday.
"This is a rare case where the antiquities remained undisturbed by farming or other activities for around 6,000 years," the ministry said in a statement.
The dwelling had been destroyed in a fire but its residents had time to flee taking most of their valuable stone tools with them, the ministry sa
Source: Robert McFarlane in the NYT
Oct 23, 2008
Today is the 25th anniversary of [the Beirut] bombing, which killed 241 Americans who were part of a multinational peacekeeping force (a simultaneous attack on the French base killed 58 paratroopers). The attack was planned over several months at Hezbollah’s training camp in the Bekaa Valley in central Lebanon. Once American intelligence confirmed who was responsible and where the attack had been planned, President Reagan approved a joint French-American air assault on the camp — only to have th
Source: AP
Oct 23, 2008
CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C. — Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James T. Conway will deliver the Beirut memorial address marking the 25th anniversary of the Beirut barracks bombing.
The speech Thursday at the Camp Lejeune Memorial Gardens will be followed by a wreath laying and a private candlelight service.
Almost 250 American serviceman — including 220 Marines — were killed when two truck bombs struck the Marine barracks in 1983. Another 60 Americans were injured.
Source: Guardian (UK)
Oct 23, 2008
An Israeli cabinet minister stepped into a row with the Vatican today, saying it was "unacceptable" to consider canonising Pius XII, who was pope during the second world war and has been criticised by some for not publicly opposing the Holocaust.
In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, Isaac Herzog, Israel's social affairs minister, who is responsible for relations with Christian communities, said efforts to turn Pius into a saint were "an exploitation of
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 23, 2008
The monarch will meet Sir Nicholas Winton, 99, as she travels to the capital Bratislava.
The Nobel Peace Prize nominee rescued around 670 Jewish Czech children in the run up to the Second World War.
In 1938, Winton, then a young stockbroker, cancelled a skiing holiday to Switzerland and went instead to Czechoslovakia on a friend's recommendation.
There he found camps full of Jewish refugees who had fled Nazi-occupied Sudetenland, and set about trying to
Source: International Herald Tribune
Oct 22, 2008
The prison inmates had to think for a moment when Missy Shea of the Vermont Secretary of State's office asked them to name the only crime that would prevent an incarcerated person from voting in the state.
"Murder," answered one of the men gathered in the library of the Marble Valley Regional Correctional Facility. Others guessed treason or domestic assault.
"You're all going to have really good answers, but you're not going to get it," Shea said dur
Source: BBC
Oct 22, 2008
Relatives of a sea captain from Sunderland have heard their long dead ancestor singing sea shanties recorded in the 1920s.
The songs, which were in a collection recorded on wax cylinders by American academic James Madison Carpenter, were restored for a BBC documentary.
Mark Page, born in 1836, ran away to sea as a boy and contributed to the scholar's work when he retired.
The recordings then lay untouched in an attic for decades.
Source: NYT
Oct 22, 2008
Last year, in the gleeful afterglow of his deal for The Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch agreed to cooperate with Michael Wolff, a columnist at Vanity Fair and a longtime chronicler of the media scene, for a book about Mr. Murdoch’s career and family.
Now, with about six weeks to go before publication, Mr. Murdoch has raised objections with Mr. Wolff and his publisher about portions of the book, titled “The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch,” that s
Source: MSNBC
Oct 22, 2008
Facing the biggest crisis of his political career in late 1989, John McCain telephoned Jay Smith, an old friend and strategist, and asked him to come to a damage-control session in McCain's Washington office.
McCain was under investigation for his connection to a pushy savings-and-loan operator named Charles H. Keating Jr., and Smith worried that the senator had created an appearance of impropriety because of his uncharacteristically guarded response to the accusations and his stubb
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Oct 22, 2008
The University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities will help the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation develop interactive digital re-creations of five of the town’s historic sites as they appeared in 1776.
The three-dimensional models, intended for use by researchers as well as the general public, will incorporate “the wealth of historical documentation amassed by Williamsburg scholars,” the foundation said in a news release. The project is being paid for b
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 22, 2008
Thousands of tiny gold pins which lay hidden in a desk drawer for 40 years have been described as one of Britian's most important archeological finds.
The artifacts were part of a dagger buried with a warrior chief, near Stonehenge, nearly 4,000 years ago.
Archeologists said they were known as 'the work of the gods'.
The pinhead-sized studs form an intricate pattern on the handle of a dagger, but archeologists failed to realise their significance when they
Source: AP
Oct 22, 2008
Milan Kundera, the author of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," has demanded that a Czech weekly apologize for publishing allegations that he once informed on a purported Western spy, his representative said Wednesday.
The Respekt weekly was given two weeks to apologize in a letter delivered to the publisher Oct. 16, said Jiri Srstka, the director of the Dilia agency, which represents Kundera in the Czech Republic.
"We haven't heard from them yet,"
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 22, 2008
Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were working on a Big Brother-style cable television propaganda industry to be broadcast across Germany.
Plans for the system were first found when Soviet soldiers entered Berlin but have recently been reexamined by researchers for a new Russian documentary.
The Orwellian screens would have been set up in public places and would show "people's television", depicting how the Aryan race should live, with the Nazis focusing
