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: NPR
Oct 18, 2008
Retired U.S. Marine Col. Timothy Geraghty says the morning of Oct. 23, 1983, was a bright one — before a truck filled with explosives slammed into the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. Hundreds of U.S. troops were killed in what was the deadliest day for America's military since 1945.
Geraghty was in command of the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit in Beirut at the time of the attack. He says the massive explosion — nearly 25 years ago to the day — blew out the windows of his office.
Source: San Jose Mercury News
Oct 17, 2008
Nobody who swung a sledgehammer Friday at a slice of San Jose history shed any tears.
And with the help of a powerful backhoe, the crowd standing around a drab concrete guard shack on Hedding Street cheered and whooped as slabs of the small, boxy structure crashed to the ground and dust choked the air.
By midday, the guard shack built in 1972 for the trial of Black Panther activist Angela Davis was reduced to a mere memory.
Police Chief Rob Davis was glad.
Source: International Herald Tribune
Oct 17, 2008
Life appears to be imitating art in a drama convulsing the Czech Republic: the charge that when he was a 21-year-old student, Milan Kundera, now one of eastern Europe's most celebrated writers, denounced a Western intelligence agent to Czechoslovakia's communist police.
The denunciation resulted in a 22-year jail sentence for the agent, Miroslav Dvoracek, including hard labor in a uranium mine.
In Kundera's first novel, "The Joke," a mordantly comic satire of
Source: Daily Telegraph (UK)
Oct 17, 2008
The allegation came as graffiti questioning the veracity of the attempted extermination of Europe's Jews was daubed on a bridge on the outskirts of the capital.
"The Holocaust is the biggest lie in history," one slogan read, signed by a neo-Nazi group calling itself 'Militia'.
Last month the same group defaced the walls of a historic cemetery, calling the speaker of Italy's Senate, Renato Schifani, a "Jew" for having paid a visit to Auschwitz.
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Oct 17, 2008
For more than 60 years Britain's Bomber Command led by Arthur 'Bomber' Harris has been vilified for causing up to 500,000 deaths in the carpet bombing of Dresden during World War II.
But now, after a four-year investigation, a panel of German historians has said that the true number of dead from the Allied air raids in January 1945 was between 18,000 and 25,000.
They reached the figure after combing through death certificates, hitherto sealed eyewitness reports, registr
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Oct 17, 2008
A middle-aged man has launched a bizarre legal bid - claiming to be the secret love child of John F Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 53, insists he is the legal heir to JFK's cash - and is suing the late President's estate for what he says is his fair share.
And he says he has kept his identity secret for 45 years since Kennedy's death because he was hoping his estate would "do the right thing" and pay him.
Lawyers for the esta
Source: AP
Oct 17, 2008
It's long been a mystery why the H.L. Hunley never returned after becoming the first submarine in history to sink an enemy warship in 1864, but new research announced Friday may lend credence to one of the theories. Scientists found the eight-man crew of the hand-cranked Confederate submarine had not set the pump to remove water from the crew compartment, which might indicate it was not being flooded.
That could mean crew members suffocated as they used up air, perhaps while waitin
Source: Reuters
Oct 17, 2008
In the past two and a half thousand years, the temples of the Acropolis have suffered fire, bombing and earthquake. Now, scientists are trying to save them from a new modern enemy: pollution.
Standing on a hilltop at the centre of Athens, a city of 4 million people, the Acropolis' elaborately sculptured stones have fallen prey to a film of black crust from car exhaust fumes, industrial pollution, acid rain and fires.
A team of Greek engineers and restorers are using an
Source: Science News Daily
Oct 17, 2008
According to legend, Genghis Khan lies buried somewhere beneath the dusty steppe of Northeastern Mongolia, entombed in a spot so secretive that anyone who made the mistake of encountering his funeral procession was executed on the spot.
Once he was below ground, his men brought in horses to trample evidence of his grave, and just to be absolutely sure he would never be found, they diverted a river to flow over their leader's final resting place.
What Khan and his follow
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Oct 17, 2008
Archaeologists working at Hampton Court Palace have uncovered the earliest foundations ever found at King Henry VIII's famous royal residence.
The significant 13th century building remains predate any other finds made at the palace by nearly 200 years.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 17, 2008
Gerald Fredrick Toben, 64, was arrested at Heathrow at the request of German authorities for publishing "anti-Semitic and/or revisionist" material between 2000 and 2004.
Holocaust denial is an offence in Germany where Dr Toben faces up to five years in prison if found guilty.
The Australian citizen was arrested while travelling from America to Dubai under a European Arrest Warrant designed to fast-track extraditions.
Dr Toben is due to appear before Cit
Source: Times (UK)
Oct 17, 2008
The remains of Spanish poet Federico García Lorca and others buried in mass graves during the Civil War are to be exhumed as part of an investigation into mass killings, a judge has ordered.
Judge Baltasar Garzon authorized the opening of the graves containing remains of the victims of General Franco’s victims all over Spain, including one where Lorca is thought to lie in Viznar near Granada.
Lorca was shot dead for being a leftist and homosexual in August 1936, one m
Source: Times (UK)
Oct 17, 2008
Archeologists say that they have found the underground passage in which the Emperor Caligula was murdered by his own Praetorian Guard to put an end to his deranged reign of terror.
Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (AD12–AD41), known by his nickname Caligula (Little Boots), was the third emperor of the Roman Empire after Augustus and Tiberius, and like them a member of the Julio-Claudian dynasty.
His assassination was the result of a conspiracy by members of the
Source: L.A. Times
Oct 17, 2008
BEIRUT -- A new report based on previously classified documents suggests that the Nixon and Ford administrations created conditions that helped destabilize Iran in the late 1970s and contributed to the country's Islamic Revolution.
A trove of transcripts, memos and other correspondence show sharp differences over rising oil prices developing between the Republican administrations and Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi in the mid-1970s, says a report to be published today in the fall issue o
Source: National Geographic News
Oct 16, 2008
A development boom near Egypt's Abydos archaeological site is damaging one of the most sacred gathering places for ancient pilgrims, experts say.
Millions of Egyptians crossed the desert surrounding Abydos from 664 B.C. to A.D. 395 to pay homage to the god of the dead, Osiris. Many of Egypt's earliest pharaohs were buried at the site.
Modern pressures in the form of new farms and buildings have taken their toll on the 3.1-mile (5-kilometer) wide area, sometimes called t
Source: NYT
Oct 16, 2008
RIVERTON, Wyo. — At 69, her eyes soft and creased with age, Alvena Oldman remembers how the teachers at St. Stephens boarding school on the Wind River Reservation would strike students with rulers if they dared to talk in their native Arapaho language.
“We were afraid to speak it,” she said. “We knew we would be punished.”
More than a half-century later, only about 200 Arapaho speakers are still alive, and tribal leaders at Wind River, Wyoming’s only Indian reservation,
Source: NYT
Oct 16, 2008
“To Keep or Not Keep the Electoral College.”
With a Shakespearean flourish, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology plans to apply its engineering and systems know-how to that question at a conference tomorrow that brings together Constitutional scholars and mathematics experts.
“Since its creation in 1787, the Electoral College has remained the most mysterious mechanism for electing a president of a country,’’ said Alexander S. Belenky, head of the Center for Enginee
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 16, 2008
A politician's call for British history to become the focus of world history lessons in Australian schools has angered the country's academics.
Tony Abbott, an Opposition frontbencher, had said the history component of a new draft national curriculum failed to give Britain due credit for shaping Australia.
He said Australians were "a product of English-speaking civilisation" and that English history should be at the core of history classes – a claim strongly d
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 16, 2008
Researchers examining coroners' reports from Sussex between 1485 and 1688 found 30 per cent of deaths were a result of injury involving travelling on land.
Accidents included falling into ditches and being hit by a horse and cart.
The study found 413 of around 1,000 adult inquests involved unintentional injuries, with 124 from land travel.
Of those, eight died when falling from horses and carts, while 43 were the result of falling from farm wagons.
Despite centu
Source: FoxNews.com
Oct 16, 2008
Workers renovating a rugby stadium have uncovered a vast complex of tombs beneath Rome that mimic the houses, blocks and streets of a real city, officials said Thursday as they unveiled a series of new finds here.
Culture Ministry officials said that medieval pottery shards in the city of the dead, or necropolis, show the area may have been inhabited by the living during the Dark Ages [HNN Editor: sic] after being used for centuries for burials during the Roman period.
