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: New York Times 'The Lede' blog
Apr 20, 2007
American forces, struggling to improve security in Baghdad, are turning to an approach with a 4,500-year history in the region: They are building a three-mile wall around the heavily Sunni neighborhood of Adhamiya.
A news release said the project, which soldiers jokingly called “the Great Wall of Adhamiya,” was “one of the centerpieces of a new strategy by coalition and Iraqi forces to break the cycle of sectarian violence.”
By limiting entry points to the neighborhood,
Source: UPI
Apr 20, 2007
The Council of Europe awarded its Europe Museum Prize for 2007 to Geneva's International Museum of the Reformation, which is housed on the spot where the city's citizens voted to adopt the Protestant Reformation in 1536. The president of the Council's parliamentary assembly, Rene van der Linden, presented museum director Isabelle Graesslé with a bronze statuette by Catalan artist Joan Miro, a diploma and a check for 5,000 euros at a ceremony in Strasbourg on Tuesday.
The award jury
Source: Wabaunsee County Signal-Enterprise
Apr 20, 2007
ALMA, Kansas -- Commissioners have indicated interest in a proposal to give a small reward to those who work to restore stone fences.
In their Monday meeting, [Waubaunsee] County Attorney Norbert Marek, Landowner Paul Miller and Extension Agent Matt Pfeifer brought a draft of a policy that would provide a $1 per rod incentive for restoration of Wabaunsee County’s historic stone fences. [A rod is 16.5 feet.]
“This creates a program that sets a bounty to encourage mainte
Source: AP
Apr 20, 2007
BISMARCK, North Dakota -- Republicans in this northern state want to turn an abandoned nuclear missile silo into a tourist attraction named after former President Ronald Reagan.
Historic preservationists have been pushing the Legislature for $250,000 (€184,000) to acquire the site of the silo and a nearby launch center in east-central North Dakota.
The Air Force will demolish the site by year's end if the state does not want to take it over, said Merl Paaverud, superint
Source: Reuters
Apr 20, 2007
LONDON -- A bronze statue of Nelson Mandela is to be erected in front of the Houses of Parliament after a five-year row over where it should stand.
The nine-foot high statue of South Africa's first black president will take its place in Parliament Square alongside some of Britain's greatest statesmen like Winston Churchill and Benjamin Disraeli.
London Mayor Ken Livingstone had campaigned for years to have the statue on the north terrace of nearby Trafalgar Square but Westminster Council a
Source: AP
Apr 20, 2007
When astronauts return from space, what they talk about isn't the brute force of the rocket launch or the exhilaration of zero gravity -- it's the view. And it's mankind's rarest view of all, Earth from afar.
Only two dozen men -- those who journeyed to the moon -- have seen the full Earth view. Most space travelers, in low orbit, see only a piece of the planet -- a lesser but still impressive glimpse. They have seen the curvature of Earth, its magnificent beauty, its fragility, and
Source: New York Times
Apr 20, 2007
TIPP CITY, Ohio -— With his attorney general under fire in Washington and his fight with Congressional Democrats over paying for the war at a stalemate, President Bush came here Wednesday before a friendly audience to give his thinking on Iraq, Congress and the massacre at Virginia Polytechnic Institute.
“I’ve been in politics long enough to know that polls just go poof at times,” President Bush said on Thursday.
Speaking at a 90-minute, town-hall-style meeting in a hig
Source: Guardian
Apr 20, 2007
Incitement to racial hatred and xenophobia is to become a crime across the EU, although the long-fought agreement avoids singling out Holocaust denial and was watered down after differences between member states.
Six years of often fractious negotiations ended in Luxembourg yesterday with a compromise that struggled to balance freedom of expression with a tough stance on anti-semitism and other forms of racism and prejudice.
Justice ministers from all 27 EU countries agreed to punish inc
Source: Reuters
Apr 20, 2007
LONDON -- An early Victoria Cross awarded for a daring raid on Russian enemy couriers during the Crimean War was sold for $312,000 (155,350 pounds) at auction in London on Thursday...
The buyer was...the Conservative Party's millionaire chairman Lord Ashcroft. He owns the world's largest collection of Victoria Crosses.
The medal sold on Thursday was awarded to Lieutenant John Bythesea who volunteered with William Johnstone in 1854 to intercept a crucial dispatch from the Tsar to the
Source: Times (of London)
Apr 20, 2007
Russia has unveiled an ambitious plan to build the world’s longest tunnel under the Bering Strait as part of a transport corridor linking Europe and America via Siberia and Alaska.
The 64-mile (103km) tunnel would connect the far east of Russia with Alaska, opening up the prospect of the ultimate rail trip across three quarters of the globe from London to New York. The link would be twice as long as the Channel Tunnel connecting Britain and France.
The $65 billion (£33
Source: Times (of London)
Apr 20, 2007
A First World War bomber found in a maharajah’s elephant stable in India finally returned to its Cambridgeshire base yesterday.
The rare DH9 was originally based at the airfield, now part of the Imperial War Museum, and widely used over the Western Front.
A total of 2,000 were built by Warings of Hammersmith, West London, a furniture manufacturer, but only six are known to survive worldwide and the aircraft is the only one in a British national collection. It was sent t
Source: IndyStar/Indianapolis Star
Apr 19, 2007
t's one of the most divisive emblems in American history, yet Carmel resident John Buckner is proud to hang it outside of his house -- even if it means buying a new one every other month.
The emblem? A Confederate battle flag.
Buckner, a 73-year-old Greensboro, N.C., native who moved to Indiana 30 years ago, said he's had the flag stolen from his house eight times since February 2006 and that Carmel police aren't doing enough to catch the culprits. He lives north of 106
Source: Washington Post
Apr 19, 2007
WASHINGTON DC -- The small, white porcelain button lay just inches below the asphalt.
It was found three years ago when Alexandria archaeologists started digging beneath the surface of a gas station that had been sitting for decades at the busy intersection of South Washington and Church streets.
The button, from a dead person's clothing, was evidence of what lay there more than a century ago: Freedmen's Cemetery, a burial ground that opened in 1864 to accommodate the f
Source: AP
Apr 19, 2007
WARSAW -- The last surviving leader of the Warsaw ghetto uprising placed yellow daffodils on a granite memorial Thursday to commemorate the 64th anniversary of the start of the ill-fated, armed resistance.
Marek Edelman, shivering on a chilly spring day, walked arm-in-arm with his granddaughter from the stark monument for heroes of the uprising in downtown Warsaw to several other sites within the Nazi-era ghetto for Warsaw Jews.
On one of Edelman's stops, a group of tee
Source: AFP
Apr 19, 2007
ABLAIN SAINT NAZAIRE, France -- The gravestones of 52 French Muslim soldiers have been daubed with Nazi slogans in a military cemetery in northeastern France, officials said on Thursday.
Swastikas and slogans such as "Heil Hitler" were also painted on Wednesday night on the ossuary of the Notre Dame de Lorette cemetery, the biggest military graveyard in the country, said the local prosecutor.
A hundred gendarmes were scouring the site on Thursday for clues abo
Source: CTK (Czech News Agency)
Apr 19, 2007
BRATISLAVA, Slovakia -- A touring exhibition on the Holocaust of Romanies and Sintis during World War II and on racism in the present Europe was today opened at Bratislava Castle in the Slovak capital...
"The Romany Holocaust issues were tabooed and concealed for years not only in Slovakia and facts on the extermination of this minority are today unknown for a majority society, and unfortunately also for many Romanies," said Dusan Gabor, manager of the Council of Romany Co
Source: AFP
Apr 19, 2007
LONDON -- Two Italian Renaissance masterpieces which had been missing since the 19th century fetched 1.7 million pounds ($3.4 million) at an auction in southwest England on Thursday.
The two works of art, painted by an Italian monk known as Fra Angelico in 1439, were only found late last year after the pensioner who bought the pair for 200 pounds in the 1960s, and had little inkling of their significance, showed them to an art historian.
According to Duke's auction hous
Source: AFP
Apr 19, 2007
NEW YORK -- A collection of more than 30 Old Masters looted from a Dutch dealer by the Nazis during World War II and returned to his heirs last year fetched almost $10 million at auction Thursday.
The 31 lots sold for a total of $9.7 million, Christie's auction house said, with a river landscape by Salomon van Ruysdael the top-selling lot, bought for $2.2 million, well below its estimate of three to five million.
The lots were part of a collection of 200 artworks looted
Source: AP
Apr 19, 2007
It has been nearly 70 years since German and Italian fighter planes backing the fascist forces of Gen. Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War leveled this historic Basque town on April 26, 1937.
Myths and misinformation have shrouded the bombing from the outset, starting with the death toll, which historians have been gradually revising downward for decades. But Guernica has come to be seen as a foretaste of the aerial blitzes of World War II, immortalized in Pablo Picasso's &quo
Source: AFP
Apr 19, 2007
ROME -- The city of Rome has approved plans to create a museum sector encompassing the Colosseum, the Imperial Forums and the Campidoglio to rival Paris's Louvre, press reports said Thursday.
Covering an area of six hectares (15 acres), the "Great Campidoglio" will be achieved by converting several buildings into museums. One of them will house collections currently at the Museum of Roman Civilisation, located far from Rome's historic centre.
"We will fre
