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: Telegraph
Apr 3, 2007
MOSCOW -- An inept Soviet "triple agent" passed vital British secrets to Moscow in the late 1940s, Russian intelligence officers said yesterday as they unveiled details of one of the Cold War's most effective counter-espionage operations.
Viktor Bogomolets was regarded as such a vital intelligence source that his dispatches were handed directly to Stalin himself, the Russian foreign intelligence service, the SVR, revealed yesterday.
More details of Bogomolets'
Source: AP
Apr 2, 2007
CHICAGO -- A new 15-foot totem pole that marries traditional carving styles with contemporary techniques was erected Monday at The Field Museum, replacing a pole that was returned to an Alaskan tribe.
The new totem pole was carved by a father-and-son team from a western red cedar tree given as a gift to the museum from the Tlingit community of Cape Fox, Alaska.
In 2001, the museum returned one of its most treasured items -- a 26-foot totem pole removed from southeast Al
Source: AP
Apr 2, 2007
BEAUMONT, Tex. -- A team of anthropologists said their study of South Texas fossil deposits revealed evidence including ancient teeth that shows the area was home to numerous types of primates 42 million years ago.
Lamar University Professor Jim Westgate and two colleagues announced the discovery of three new genera and four new species of primates based on their examination of material removed from Lake Casa Blanca International State Park near Laredo and the Mexican border.
Source: AFP
Apr 2, 2007
PRAGUE -- One of the Czech Republic's oldest noble families put its family treasure trove of works of art on show to the public on Monday at a restored palace in the heart of Prague.
The "Prince's Collection" exhibition includes paintings by Bruegel, Canaletto and Velasquez, collected over the centuries by the Lobkowicz family and returned to them at the start of the 1990s following confiscation by the former communist regime...
As well as paintings, the colle
Source: AP
Apr 2, 2007
THE HAGUE, Netherlands -- A Dutch businessman appealing his war crimes conviction denied Monday that he knew chemicals he sold to Saddam Hussein's regime would be used to make poison gas.
Frans van Anraat, 64, is petitioning to overturn a 15-year prison sentence handed down in December 2005 for selling tons of chemicals made into mustard and nerve gas that was unleashed on Kurdish villages in northern Iraq in 1987-88 and against Iran during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.
Wh
Source: AP
Apr 2, 2007
BUENOS AIRES -- Argentina on Monday marked the 25th anniversary of its failed attempt to regain the Falkland Islands, reasserting its claim to the South Atlantic archipelago.
"Neither war nor the passage of time changes reality: The Malvinas are Argentine," said Vice President Daniel Scioli, using the islands' Argentine name, as 5,000 people, many of them veterans of the 1982 war with Britain, applauded.
"We call upon the United Kingdom to heed internatio
Source: Reuters
Apr 2, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Cities that quickly closed schools and discouraged public gatherings had fewer deaths from the great flu pandemic in 1918 than cities that did not, researchers reported on Monday.
Decisive, immediate action can reduce the most acute effects of a pandemic, while allowing the population to build some natural immunity to the virus, the U.S. government study found.
Experts agree that a pandemic of some virus, most likely influenza, is almost 100 percent certai
Source: Reuters
Apr 2, 2007
LOS ANGELES -- Newly released documents show that former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger delayed telling President Richard Nixon about the start of the Yom Kippur War in 1973 to keep him from interfering, according to new book excerpted in Vanity Fair on Monday.
"Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power," is by presidential historian Robert Dallek, who spent four years reviewing the Nixon administration's recently opened archives, including 20,000 pages of Kissinger's telephone transcr
Source: BBC News
Apr 2, 2007
Former Prime Minister Baroness Thatcher has attended a private ceremony at St Paul's Cathedral to mark the 25th anniversary of the Falklands invasion.
Lady Thatcher stood in silence [and laid a wreath] during the brief ceremony to remember the 255 Britons who died during the 74-day war...
Earlier, Prime Minister Tony Blair met Falklands veterans in Fife.
The 74-day war claimed the lives of 255 Britons, 655 Argentines and three islanders.
Lady Thatcher was prime minister w
Source: Woodstock (Ontario) Sentinel
Apr 2, 2007
Ninety years ago, on Easter Monday, April 9, 1917 troops of the Canadian Expeditionary Force’s four divisions launched a dawn assault on Vimy Ridge.
It was a momentous day, for the first time they were all fighting as a unit under their own general and, as many claim, Canada became a nation in the process.
Although Canada had earned many Empire battle honours, from Lundy’s Lane in 1814 to the Boer War in South Africa to repulsing the German gas attacks at Ypres in 1915, Vimy was the
Source: AP
Apr 2, 2007
TEL HABUWA, Egypt -- Egyptian archaeologists on Monday presented white stones of pumice that they believe a tsunami in ancient times carried 850 kilometers (530 miles) across the Mediterranean to north Sinai.
The pumice was discharged by a volcanic eruption in the ancient Greek island of Santorini in the 17th century B.C. Traces of this solidified lava foam that floats have been found in Crete and southwestern Turkey, but Egypt's archaeologists believe it also reached this site in t
Source: Times (of London)
Apr 2, 2007
Labour’s first postwar Prime Minister demanded that Whitehall should explain why the Soviet spies Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess remained as British diplomats despite Foreign Office knowledge of their poor characters.
An exasperated Clement Attlee sought the details on the two men as their disappearance was about to be made public in 1951. With typical understatement, Attlee told his Foreign Secretary: “There is likely to be a lot of public criticism.”
The Prime Ministe
Source: ZDNet News
Apr 2, 2007
Accused by a Democrat in the U.S. Congress of "airbrushing history," Google said it has now replaced pre-Hurricane Katrina satellite images of the Gulf Coast region with more recent aerial photographs.
The search giant came under fire late last week after the Associated Press reported the company had traded imagery documenting the August 2005 storm's devastating effects in its mapping services for higher-resolution images depicting pre-hurricane calm.
Google o
Source: UPI
Apr 2, 2007
WASHINGTON -- The Piast Institute for Polish and Polish-American Affairs launched an international symposium on a controversial theory on anti-Semitism in post-war Poland.
Jan Gross, an expert on Eastern European politics, believes anti-Semitism developed after World War II due to Polish guilt over ill treatment of Jews.
Gross focuses on the killing of 42 Jews in the Polish town of Kielce in 1946. Using this event and some anecdotes as his evidence, he created a psychos
Source: BBC News
Apr 2, 2007
Germans have been embarrassed by the fact that Adolf Hitler remains an honorary citizen of Bad Doberan, a town that will host the annual G8 summit.
The town council will hold a special meeting shortly to officially remove Hitler from the roll of honour.
Leaders from the world's major industrial nations will meet in one of the town's districts, Heiligendamm, in just over two months' time...
During the Nazi period, more than 4,000 towns and cities awarded Ado
Source: New York Times
Apr 2, 2007
They swab the cheeks of strangers and pluck hairs from corpses. They travel hundreds of miles to entice their suspects with an old photograph, or sometimes a free drink. Cooperation is preferred, but not necessarily required to achieve their ends.
Derrell Teat, determined in her research, once waited outside a restaurant with a test kit hoping to capture a reluctant would-be relative’s DNA on a coffee cup.
If the amateur genealogists of the DNA era bear a certain resemb
Source: Times (of London)
Apr 2, 2007
ROME -- A British officer murdered by the Nazis in Rome and until now honoured only as “The Unknown Englishman” has been identified after more than 60 years.
Second World War veterans and local historians in Rome who have sought to identify the officer for more than a decade have named him as Captain John Armstrong. But so little is known about his service record that they are appealing to Times readers to help to track down his surviving relatives. It is thought that he might have
Source: Times (of London)
Apr 2, 2007
Mystery surrounding the sinking of the Lusitania may be resolved after the American owner of the Cunard liner won his case to dive on the wreck.
The decision by the Supreme Court in Dublin, the highest court in the Irish Republic, to overturn a refusal for an exploration licence from the Arts and Heritage Ministry clears the way for Gregg Bemis to realise a 40-year dream to uncover what made “the Greyhound of the Sea” sink so fast after she was torpedoed by a German U-boat off south
Source: Telegraph
Apr 2, 2007
A drunken doodle on a wall by Picasso has been bought for £250,000 by the nation's biggest medical charity because it symbolises an unusual meeting of great scientific and artistic minds.
Representing the only "mural" Picasso produced in England, the work was created in November 1950 while the artist visited the home of his friend, Prof John Desmond Bernal of Birkbeck College, one of the greatest British scientists of the last century.
Drawn in crayon on plast
Source: Scott Shane in the NYT
Apr 1, 2007
Historians of the Vietnam era suggest that those who look to Congress for decisive action to end the current war will be disappointed. But they say that today, just as in the 1960s and 70s, Congress both reflects and amplifies public disillusionment; its votes, however symbolic, could set political limits on the president’s options.
“Congress becomes the public voice of opposition,” said Robert Dallek, the presidential historian, who has dissected the interaction of Congress with bo
