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: AP
Mar 26, 2007
KIEV, Ukraine -- An ad campaign featuring billboards and commercials with images of the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin exhorting people to pay their bills was pulled on Monday after protests from rights groups and nationalists.
The campaign in the eastern Ukraine town of Donetsk came after utility rates in Ukraine increased markedly last year and people stopped paying their bills.
Irina Taran, a spokeswoman for Donetsk governing council, said dozens of billboards featurin
Source: AP
Mar 26, 2007
WASHINGTON --An image of the Liberty Bell, an icon of American freedom and independence, will adorn the Postal Service's new forever stamp.
The design of the stamp was unveiled Monday at the National Postal Forum, a gathering of companies in the mailing industry.
The forever stamp goes on sale April 12 at 41 cents. The rate for first-class postage rises to 41 cents May 14.
The stamp, which will carry the word"Forever" instead of a price, will remain valid for sending a letter,
Source: AP
Mar 26, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO -- It took seven years after the fighting had ended for the nation to dedicate the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. This time around, Americans aren't waiting for the shooting to stop.
On beaches and bases, town squares and veterans' clubs, they are building their monuments to America's fallen as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan grind on.
Vietnam, in one way or another, looms large over this impulse to memorialize the war dead in real time. Some ar
Source: AP
Mar 26, 2007
ATHENS -- A geological engineering company said Monday it has agreed to help in an archaeological project to find the island of Ithaca, homeland of Homer's legendary hero Odysseus.
It has long been thought that the island of Ithaki in the Ionian Sea was the island Homer used as a setting for the epic poem "The Odyssey," in which the king Odysseus makes a perilous 10-year journey home from the Trojan War.
But amateur British archaeologist Robert Bittlestone bel
Source: Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader
Mar 26, 2007
PETERSBURG, Ky. -- Tyrannosaurus rex was a strict vegetarian, and lived with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
There were dinosaurs of every kind aboard Noah's ark. Some dinosaurs managed to hang around until just a few hundred years ago. The legend of St. George slaying the dragon? That probably was a dinosaur.
Exhibits showing all this and more will be at the Creation Museum, a $27 million religious showcase nearing completion in Northern Kentucky.
The museum, in Boone Coun
Source: Vatican News Service
Mar 26, 2007
VATICAN CITY -- Europe’s rejection of its traditional Christian identity is leading to its imminent disappearance from the world stage, Pope Benedict XVI said in an address to a congress of the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community (COMECE) on March 24.
"[I]n demographic terms, it must unfortunately be noted that Europe seems set on a path that could lead to its exit from history," Pope Benedict XVI stated at the event commemorating the 50th anni
Source: Derry Journal/Derry Today (Northern Ireland)
Mar 26, 2007
The Bloody Sunday Trust have described an attack on the Museum of Free Derry as a "major threat" to its future.
Vandals caused substantial damage to the waterproof covering on the roof of the Bogside museum sometime late on Wednesday night.
A spokesperson for the Trust said..."The damage caused could run into thousands of pounds to repair and, while there is no way that anyone can get into the museum through the roof...rain has been pouring through the ho
Source: Forbes
Mar 26, 2007
In yet another sign of trouble for the ailing newspaper industry, Time Warner's Time Inc. said Monday that it will shutter Life magazine next month, citing an increasingly tough environment for papers...
Life will continue to have an online presence where Time plans to push ahead with its plans to post the magazine's entire collection of 10 million photographs online by the end of the year.
Life became a magazine icon during its first incarnation as a weekly magazine fr
Source: Times (of London)
Mar 26, 2007
A shy spinster who spent her life amassing an extraordinary collection of fine watercolours worth millions of pounds has bequeathed them to the nation.
Dorothy Scharf was so reticent that she relied on her mother, who lived next door, to communicate on her behalf.
The collection of paintings that she built up until her death two years ago has astonished the art world. Eight masterpieces by Turner, along with paintings by Gainsborough and Constable, are among 51 importan
Source: Kathimerini (Athens)
Mar 26, 2007
About 30 members of the extreme right-wing group Chryssi Avgi (Golden Dawn) burned copies of a primary school history book outside Parliament on Saturday because they said its narrative favors the Turks.
Militants yelled anti-Turk slogans and distributed pamphlets urging resistance to closer ties between Greece and Turkey. Riot police eventually broke up the demonstration.
Chryssi Avgi’s protest also coincided with a student march in Athens on Saturday marking Greece’s
Source: Washington Post
Mar 26, 2007
Lawrence M. Small, the banker who took over the Smithsonian Institution seven years ago, resigned under pressure, museum officials announced today.
Cristian Samper, a biologist who heads the National Museum of Natural History, was named acting secretary, according to an announcement by Roger Sant, head of the Smithsonian's executive committee.
Small's management of the Smithsonian has been sharply criticized by members of Congress, and his compensation and spending prac
Source: BBC
Mar 26, 2007
Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has apologized in parliament for the country's use of women as sex slaves during World War II.The apology comes after Mr Abe was criticized by Asian neighbors for previous comments casting doubt on whether the women were coerced.
Mr Abe told parliament: "I apologies here and now as prime minister."
This appears to be part of a concerted bid to reduce the fall-out of earlier comments, a BBC correspondent sa
Source: Telegraph
Mar 26, 2007
Institutions that profited from the slave trade should make amends -- possibly financially, the Archbishop of Canterbury says today.
Following emancipation in 1833, the government of the day compensated all slave owners for loss of property and revenue to the tune of about £20 million.
In a radio interview on BBC Radio 4 today, Dr Rowan Williams suggests that organisations which received compensation in the 1830s were still"living off the historical legacy" and had a responsibility t
Source: Times (of London)
Mar 26, 2007
Mites that eat llama dung are providing scientists with critical new clues to the rise and fall of the Inca empire and the civilisations that preceded it.
The soil invertebrates are allowing researchers to trace the growth and decline of the peoples of the Andes several centuries before the Spanish conquest in 1532 brought written records to the region for the first time.
The evidence gleaned from fossilised mites, preserved in sediments at a lake about 50km (30 miles)
Source: Times (of London)
Mar 26, 2007
SUDELEY CASTLE, England -- The christening gown worn by the future Queen Elizabeth I nearly 500 years ago has been [re]discovered during a clear-out at a stately home.
The gown was found at Sudeley Castle in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, recently the setting for Liz Hurley’s wedding. [Story includes photo.]
In the 1880s experts authenticated the garment, worn by Henry VIII’s daughter at her baptism at Greenwich in 1533, but it was then left in a box of textiles and forgo
Source: Guardian
Mar 26, 2007
MADRID -- Up to a billion dollars worth of gold and silver on a sunken 17th-century English warship may soon be recovered following an agreement with Spanish authorities.
Professional marine treasure hunters working with the British government have reportedly been given the go-ahead to recover gold and silver pieces from what is thought to be the wreck of the HMS Sussex, which took 560 sailors to a watery grave off Gibraltar in 1694.
Although the Spanish government had
Source: BBC News
Mar 26, 2007
It was an Easter Sunday on 26 March 1967. At around 3pm that day Jim Thompson, already well known as the "Thai Silk King", walked out of Moonlight Cottage where he was holidaying with friends in Malaysia's Cameron Highlands and was never seen again.
It was not simply Thompson's fame and wealth that guaranteed his disappearance would become one of South East Asia's greatest modern mysteries -- it was his past.
He had spent World War II with the OSS, the US inte
Source: Independent
Mar 26, 2007
For centuries, two paintings in the Royal Collection lay in the dusty storerooms of Hampton Court after experts dismissed them as worthless imitations of Caravaggio's masterpieces.
The experts were wrong. This week, those works will emerge out of storage where they were obscured by varnish and dirt, to be triumphantly displayed to the public. [A spokeswoman for the Royal Collection said the two Caravaggios would appear in public for the first time since confirmation of their authent
Source: Independent
Mar 26, 2007
At 10 o'clock on a hot and humid Kenyan morning, as the sun rises above the Rabai hills that slope down towards the port of Mombasa, Frederick Omondi finds himself peering underneath a train carriage. "It is OK," he says. "It is only a burst pipe."
The Nairobi-Mombasa train left the cool of Kenya's capital 15 hours ago. It was supposed to arrive in Mombasa at 8 o'clock this morning but three breakdowns -- make that four now there is a burst pipe -- have delayed i
Source: HNN Staff summary of New Yorker article
Mar 26, 2007
Seymour Hersh reports in this week's New Yorker Magazine that in 1972 President Richard Nixon told National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger he wanted the Air Force to begin the all-out bombing of Surface to Air Missile (SAM) sites in North Vietnam. The rules of engagement previously permitted bombing the sites in response to attack. Nixon can be heard on a newly-released White House tape saying he wanted the SAM sites bombed whether attacks were launched from them or not. When Secretary of
