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: Independent
Aug 21, 2008
Images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of the Perseus cluster of stars have helped scientists to solve a 100 million-year-old mystery of how giant structures in deep space are prevented from disintegrating. The spectacular pictures show vast, thread-like "filaments" of gas which emerge from the centre of a galaxy known as NGC 1275, situated some 235 million light years away from Earth.
Astronomers have tried to explain how these beautiful structures can have survived f
Source: Independent
Aug 21, 2008
The merciless punishments Henry VIII meted out to his enemies have been well documented. Less is known about how, on the rarer occasions when the king was happy with the service of his courtiers or the country's most eminent noblemen, he liked to give them a golden livery collar or heavy chain as a token of his gratitude.
Henry VIII only awarded around 20 of the chains. They were all engraved with the characters SS, referring to the Latin religious creed, Spiritus Sanctus (Holy Spir
Source: The Times
Aug 21, 2008
Captain Cook's boomerang has returned - and could bring its owner £60,000.
The explorer collected the strange, crooked stick in 1770 while surveying Australia, but he had no idea what it was for, or even what it was called. He thought that it was a wooden sword; his botanist, Sir Joseph Banks, believed it to be a short scimitar.
Captain James Cook returned to England with the boomerang in 1771, and was still ignorant of its secrets when he was killed eight years later.
Source: The Times
Aug 21, 2008
John Lennon's killer has provided new details of the murder of the former Beatle in his latest unsuccessful attempt for parole.
Mark David Chapman, 53, disputed media accounts that he called out to Lennon before shooting him in New York on December 8, 1980. “I don't recall saying, 'Mr. Lennon',” Chapman told the parole board. “I think that was something the press elaborated on. That didn't happen. He didn't turn. I shot him in the back,” he said.
Chapman fired five sh
Source: The Times
Aug 21, 2008
For decades she has swum in the public memory as the irresistible Mata Hari of Korea — a dastardly seductress who played both sides, charming military secrets out of an American colonel and feeding them to her lover in the communist North.
In 1950, three days after conflict broke out on the Korean peninsula, Kim Soo Im was executed by the Seoul regime: a mysteriously hasty killing, the real motive of which was lost as the country descended into the bloody chaos of war.
Source: The Times
Aug 21, 2008
It has taken 110 years to cover 27 painstaking metres, but one of Britain's most recently discovered species has finally found a home.
Papillifera papillaris - a type of Italian snail - arrived in England near the end of the 19th century, having hitched a ride on a stone balustrade imported from Rome. It then disappeared.
A colony of the tiny snails, which have distinctive spindle-shaped shells 11mm long, has now been found on the “tortoise fountain” in the Italian-st
Source: Sydney Morning Herald
Aug 20, 2008
Ninety-one years ago, an Australian soldier fell dead on a Belgian battlefield and unnoticed by his mates, was buried, perhaps by a shell blast.
Last week he was found, astonishingly still clutching his rifle and carrying every other item of equipment with which he lumbered into battle.
Battlefield historian Mat McLachlan said that made him very unusual indeed.
"This is an interesting discovery and a lot more important for us because he was dressed in
Source: Salt Lake Tribune
Aug 20, 2008
KANAB - For a nearly 1,200-year-old home, it's held up pretty well. "Amazing" and"pristine" were the words archaeologists used to characterize the site of the ancient settlement just north of Kanab in southern Utah. It is believed that the single-family dwelling belonged to the Virgin Anasazi, who once flourished in the region, said Utah Department of Transportation spokesman Kevin Kitchen. The Virgin Anasazi was a prehistoric American Indian culture that lived along the Virgin River.
Source: AP
Aug 20, 2008
One hundred years ago, nearly half a million people
cheered as 16 white-painted American warships cruised into Sydney Harbor,
forging an alliance between the United States and the fledgling Down Under
nation.
On Wednesday, it was a small group of Australian and American military
officials and diplomats who welcomed the USS John S. McCain into the
harbor in a commemoration of the 1908 visit of the Great White Fleet.
A military band on shore at the navy's fleet base played"Walt
Source: Salon
Aug 20, 2008
One of the presidential campaign's most pitched battles is already blazing away. But the action won't be coming to you live from Denver or St. Paul in the next two weeks, pollsters can barely track it and -- most important -- there aren't any rules.
For months, anonymous e-mail chain letters, blog posts and message board items attacking Barack Obama have been flying around the country. Obama's campaign is concerned enough about the rumor mill to devote an entire Web site to fightin
Source: AP
Aug 20, 2008
The White House is missing as many as 225 days of e-mail dating back to 2003 and there is little if any likelihood a recovery effort will be completed by the time the Bush administration leaves office, according to an internal White House draft document obtained by the Associated Press.
The nine-page outline of the White House's e-mail problems invites companies to bid on a project to recover the missing electronic messages.
The work would be carried out through April 1
Source: International Herald Tribune
Aug 20, 2008
JERUSALEM: It began with a late-night call one Friday in July. A woman from New York was asking Gila Flam, who runs the music section of Israel's national library, about a century-old autographed manuscript by a Swiss composer. Was it in the library's collection?
When Flam checked, she discovered that the piece was in her inventory but not in the folder where it belonged. Other items were also missing from the folder. In fact, she said she began to recall, users of the library had b
Source: progress-index.com
Aug 20, 2008
Dinwiddie County native Lucas L. Meredith Jr., 84, doesn’t look like a man who has a unique link to history.
He looks more like a wealthy retiree from Florida with a pink polo shirt, white sailor’s shorts and black loafers with full white hair neatly trimmed, and the soft and clean-shaven face that doesn’t reveal his 84 years.
But Meredith is the son of a Confederate soldier. Meredith is one of an estimated dozen people in the nation whose father fought in the Civil War
Source: MSNBC.com
Aug 20, 2008
Jerry Beau is a national treasure, not only for his service to his country but also for his service to his fellow Marines and their families.
Beau, 89, served 24 years in the Marine Corps and has spent the last 52 years as the unpaid historian of the Marine Raiders Association, meticulously collecting service records and other information on 7,600 men who served with the elite Marine Raiders during World War II.
"We only have about 200 of the original Raiders left,
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 20, 2008
On 20 July 1944, a German colonel left a bomb in the Führer's office. It exploded, just missing its target, and the following day the officer was shot. With the daring plot now being made into a film - starring Tom Cruise - Berthold von Stauffenberg, son of the would-be assassin, tells Nigel Jones how his father's 'moral sacrifice' shattered his and his family's lives
Just before 1pm on a boiling hot day in 1944, a 10-year-old boy sat down to lunch at a grand country house in the h
Source: MiamiHerald.com
Aug 20, 2008
Archaeology students from across the country have delved into the underwater mystery of a steamship that sank more than a century ago off Key Largo.
For two weeks, archaeology students pieced together an underwater puzzle of weathered artifacts -- the metal bands of a paddle wheel, a portion of a smokestack, remnants of boiler plates.
They mapped and measured these artifacts resting on the ocean's floor, trying to solve the mystery of the shipwrecked Menemon Sanford, a grand
Source: Salon blog: War Room
Aug 20, 2008
Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com published a short, sidebar analysis in the latest issue of the New Republic showing that in recent decades the candidate with the larger post-convention poll bounce invariably wins the national popular vote. That is, Al Gore out-conventioned George W. Bush, as did the other outright presidential winners. (TNR requires a subscription, but its link to Silver's analysis and accompanying chart is no longer available anyway; however, here is a more technical post fr
Source: Washington Post
Aug 20, 2008
Hua Guofeng, who succeeded Mao Zedong as China's Communist Party leader for a short period before being brushed aside by economic reformers 30 years ago, died in the Chinese capital Wednesday afternoon, state media reported. He was 87.
Although analysts say Hua was not an overtly popular figure and has lived outside the spotlight for decades, funeral arrangements could create a sensitive issue for the party's current leadership, especially since the world's attention is focused her
Source: National Security Archive
Aug 20, 2008
Washington, DC, August 20, 2008 - On the tenth anniversary of U.S. cruise missile strikes against al-Qaeda in response to deadly terrorist attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, newly-declassified government documents posted today by the National Security Archive (www.nsarchive.org) suggest the strikes not only failed to hurt Osama bin Laden but ultimately may have brought al-Qaeda and the Taliban closer politically and ideologically.
Source: AP
Aug 20, 2008
It was an engineering marvel that brought tremendous
wealth to New York and opened up the North American interior, helping turn
the United States into an international commercial powerhouse in the 19th
century.
Today, managers of the storied Erie Canal are pouring tens of millions of
dollars of public money into it each year as they struggle to transform
the once vital freight route into a tourist destination.
The spending, and the state's decision to subsidize the canal with
