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: International Herald Tribune
Oct 16, 2008
The posters on Claudio Velardi's office walls mix alluring Neapolitan sites with phrases like "Monnezza a chi?" (Who are you calling trash?) Velardi, a public relations whiz recruited from Rome, runs the regional tourism office here. His advertising campaign to counter images that have plagued Naples since last year - the endless news photographs of rotting garbage in the streets - clearly hasn't done much, not yet, anyway, to turn around the city's fortunes. Tourists still stay away i
Source: International Herald Tribune
Oct 16, 2008
CUMBERLAND ISLAND, Georgia: John Fry mashes the brakes and curses under his breath as a pack of wild hogs scurries across the narrow dirt road, where spiky palmetto fronds claw at both sides of his National Park Service pickup truck.
It takes nearly an hour to drive the bumpy 13-mile (21-kilometer) Main Road on wild Cumberland Island. Fry's truck passes within inches (centimeters) of burly live oak branches drooping overhead. Backpackers hiking the route are forced to step off and l
Source: AFP
Oct 16, 2008
Ancient history is getting in the way of construction in Beirut's building boom as new archaeological discoveries delay the springing up of long-planned high rises.
And the delays can be long, frustrating and expensive.
Construction on a luxury 23-storey residential building in the heart of the Lebanese capital, for example, has been stalled for 15 months after excavators stumbled on a 2,000-year-old Roman bath house.
"Imagine a developer waiting a yea
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 16, 2008
The Second Kushite Kingdom controlled the whole Nile valley from Khartoum to the Mediterranean from 720BC to 660BC.
Now archaeologists have discovered that a region of northern Sudan once considered a forgotten backwater once actually "a real power-base".
They discovered a ruined pyramid containing fine gold jewellery dating from about 700BC on a remote un-navigable 100-mile stretch of the Nile known as the Fourth Cataract, plus pottery from as far away as Tur
Source: NYT
Oct 16, 2008
MADRID -- The crusading investigative judge Baltasar Garzón opened Spain’s first criminal investigation into Franco-era executions and repression with an order on Thursday to open 19 mass graves, including one believed to contain the remains of the poet Federico García Lorca.
Judge Garzón, who has focused on terrorism cases in recent years, is often lauded for his failed attempt to prosecute Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998 for crimes against humanity. But his Thursday orde
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Oct 16, 2008
Two decades after the Berlin Wall fell, communism's founding father Karl Marx is back in vogue in eastern Germany -- thanks to the global financial crisis.
His 1867 critical analysis of capitalism, "Das Kapital", has risen from the publishing graveyard to become an improbable best-seller for academic publisher Karl-Dietz-Verlag.
"Everyone thought there would never ever again be any demand for 'Das Kapital'," said managing director Joern Schuetrumpf.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 16, 2008
The 1,800-year-old stone mausoleum on the banks of the River Tiber was hailed by experts as an "extraordinary discovery" and one of the most important Roman finds for decades.
It was built to contain the remains of Marcus Nonius Macrinus, a proconsul and a favourite of Marcus Aurelius, who ruled as emperor from 161 AD to his death in 180 AD.
Macrinus was born in Brescia, in northern Italy, and won victories leading Roman legions into battle.
He
Source: Deutsche Welle
Oct 16, 2008
German police have uncovered over 2,100 unexploded bombs dating back to World War Two in the largest discovery of its kind this year.
More than 2,100 explosives dating back to the World War II era have been uncovered in a small town in central Germany over the last several days.
The bombs, which were of German origin, were found in the area surrounding Koethen, a town about 70 kilometers (40 miles) northwest of Leipzig in the central German state of Saxony-Anhalt.
Source: BBC
Oct 16, 2008
Ten years ago, on 16 October, UK police officers marched into a London clinic and arrested Chile's former military leader Augusto Pinochet as he lay convalescing from surgery.
His dramatic detention sent shockwaves around the world, producing both euphoria and condemnation. It is still reverberating today.
Lawyers at Human Rights Watch and at the US-based International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) say it contributed to the establishment in 2002 of the Intern
Source: BBC
Oct 16, 2008
Chile's supreme court has jailed five retired senior military officers over the killing of dozens of government opponents under military rule.
The officers were all members of a military committee known as the Caravan of Death, which criss-crossed the country killing suspected leftists.
Their crimes date back to shortly after the late Gen Augusto Pinochet took power in a military coup in 1973.
The head of the committee, Gen Sergio Arellano Stark, is now
Source: BBC
Oct 16, 2008
A policy researcher has beaten nearly 3,000 applicants to join a bid to complete Sir Ernest Shackleton's failed South Pole trek.
Andrew Ledger, 23, from Dronfield, Derbyshire, was chosen to join five descendants of the pioneering explorer and his crew for the journey.
Three of the team will set off on 29 October on the same 900-mile, 80-day route as the 1908-09 Nimrod expedition.
Mr Ledger and the others will join them 97 miles (156km) from the South Pol
Source: BBC
Oct 16, 2008
The last remaining survivor of the Titanic plans to sell mementoes from the ship to pay her nursing home fees.
Now 96, Millvina Dean was nine weeks old when the liner sank in the North Atlantic in 1912.
She hopes to raise £3,000 by selling items including a suitcase full of clothes given to her by the people of New York after her rescue.
The auction in Wiltshire will also feature compensation letters sent to her mother by the Titanic Relief Fund.
Source: Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone
Oct 16, 2008
At Fort McNair, an army base located along the Potomac River in the nation's capital, a chance reunion takes place one day between two former POWs. It's the spring of 1974, and Navy commander John Sidney McCain III has returned home from the experience in Hanoi that, according to legend, transformed him from a callow and reckless youth into a serious man of patriotism and purpose. Walking along the grounds at Fort McNair, McCain runs into John Dramesi, an Air Force lieutenant colonel who was als
Source: Times (UK)
Oct 15, 2008
Winston Churchill authorised millions of dollars in bribes to stop General Franco from entering the Second World War on the side of Germany, a new book claims.
The British wartime leader persuaded Juan March, a Spanish banker, to act as a secret agent, organising payments of millions of dollars to the generals. In return the generals persuaded Franco not to side with Hitler.
The plot was revealed by the historian Pere Ferrer in Juan March: The Most Mysterious Man in the
Source: AP
Oct 15, 2008
BERLIN — East German leader Erich Honecker famously proclaimed in 1989 that the Berlin Wall could remain in place for another 100 years.
It turns out that his faith in East German construction was almost as off the mark as his political instincts. The Wall opened for traffic a few months after Honecker spoke. And now the remaining pieces are crumbling physically.
On Wednesday, some 19 years after the barrier was opened, restoration work began on the longest remaining st
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 15, 2008
Norway is fighting a legal battle to stop a German clothing brand popular with neo-Nazis from using the Norwegian flag to promote its clothes.
The Norwegian Foreign Ministry claims the Thor Steinar brand's association with the far right in Germany goes against the Scandinavian nation's values.
"The clothing is a unifying symbol for people whom the Norwegian Government really does not want to be associated with," said Morten Paulsen, Norway's Counsel General in
Source: FoxNews.com
Oct 15, 2008
A top lieutenant to Martin Luther King Jr. was sentenced to 15 years in prison for incest.
The Rev. James L. Bevel was a key architect of the 1963 Children's Crusade in Birmingham, Ala., and other pivotal moments of the civil rights movement.
He was convicted earlier this year of having sex 15 years ago with his then-teenage daughter in Virginia.
The prison sentence was the most severe the Virginia circuit judge could impose. Sentencing guidelines called fo
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 15, 2008
THE confrontation between Thailand and Cambodia over a jungle-clad Hindu temple escalated into bloodshed when two soldiers died in fierce exchanges of rocket and machine-gun fire.
This fighting, heavier than anything seen before, inflicted the first loss of life since the stand-off began. Both of those killed were Cambodian troops, while five of their Thai rivals were wounded. Another 10 Thai soldiers were captured and are now being held by their neighbour.
The clashes,
Source: LiveScience
Oct 15, 2008
Women had poor dental health compared to men back in the hunter-gatherer era, and it got worse as societies turned to farming.
Now an anthropologist is pointing to an overlooked explanation — hormonal and dietary changes related to higher pregnancy rates.
Anthropologists usually argue that women's poor dental health resulted from culture-driven factors, such as cooking duties and the ongoing nibbling that can go along with that. But that narrow focus may overlook biolog
Source: Times (UK)
Oct 15, 2008
The earliest known cases of human tuberculosis have been found in millennia-old bones that were buried off the coast of Haifa, Israel.
New research by scientists from institutions including University College London (UCL) and Tel Aviv University shows that the infection is 3,000 years older than was previously imagined and that TB in people evolved before bovine TB.
Professor Israel Hershkovitz of Tel Aviv University noticed lesions that are a sign of TB in the bones
