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: Breitbart
Dec 12, 2006
Officials in central Latvia said they were stumped by the theft of
a 300-kilogram (660-pound) bust of Lenin from in front of a museum
in the town of Rujiena.
The headless torso of the first leader of Soviet Russia, which had been
displayed outside the museum since 1998, disappeared one night late last
week. The head had been detached by hooligans in an earlier incident and
was kept inside the museum."We have no tangible leads as to what happened," Normunds Sulcs of the
Rujiena polic
Source: Reuters
Dec 12, 2006
CAPE EVANS, Antarctica (Reuters) - A neat stack of seal meat sits in an
enclosed porch, tins of cocoa and cabbage are piled on shelves inside, and
all seems ready for Antarctic explorers Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest
Shackleton to take shelter.
Of course they won't: their kind of exploration of the southern continent
ended nearly a century ago. But this remote, snow-shrouded shelter hut
appears eerily intact.
Prefabricated in New Zealand in 1910, transported by ship and reassem
Source: Breitbart
Dec 12, 2006
Sheet music of all of Mozart's works is now available online for
free, following an initiative by Salzburg's International
Foundation Mozarteum in honour of the 250th anniversary of his
birth."With over 400,000 hits on the website in the first 12 hours, one can say
demand surpassed our expectations," Mirjam Nellman, spokeswoman for the
foundation, based in Mozart's birthplace of Salzburg, told AFP Tuesday.
Source: Breitbart
Dec 12, 2006
An Ethiopian court has convicted former dictator Mengistu Haile
Miriam of genocide for atrocities committed during his 1974-1991
Marxist regime after a marathon 12-year trial.
Mengistu, on trial in absentia, and 11 co-defendants who served on the
ex-government's central committee were found guilty, of genocide,
homicide, illegal imprisonment and illegal confiscation of property by
Ethiopia's Federal High Court Tuesday.
"Accused numbers one to 12 are found guilty of all charges," Justic
Source: Breitbart
Dec 12, 2006
The White House denounced Iran's Holocaust conference, featuring
revisionist historians who doubt the World War II-era slaughter,
as"an affront to the entire civilized world.""The United States condemns the conference on the Holocaust convoked by
the Iranian regime on Monday in Tehran," spokeswoman Dana Perino told
reporters.
"The gathering of Holocaust deniers in Tehran is an affront to the entire
civilized world, as well as to the traditional Iranian values of
tolerance and mutual r
Source: AP
Dec 12, 2006
After more than 160 years, the twin masts of the Milan still
stand erect _ all the more remarkable because the commercial
sailing ship sits in the dark depths of Lake Ontario."It almost looks like it could be floated" to the surface, said shipwreck
explorer Dan Scoville on Monday.
Scoville and fellow explorer Jim Kennard located the schooner in the
summer of 2005 off the southern shore of the lake. They videotaped the
93-foot-long, square-stern vessel this year using an unmanned subm
Source: Asian History Carnival
Dec 12, 2006
The tenth edition of the Asian History Carnival, a monthly roundup of blog posts about the history of Asia -- Near East to Far -- is up at Westminster Wisdom.
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, is published by the Federation of American Scientists
Dec 12, 2006
The apparent murder of former Russian intelligence officer Alexander
Litvinenko through polonium poisoning seemed like an outlandish
innovation in crime. But it was not the first time that polonium
had been deliberately administered to human subjects.
In 1944 at the University of Rochester in New York,"tracer amounts
of radioactive polonium-210 were injected into four hospitalized
humans and ingested by a fifth," according to a 1995 retrospective
account.
Four men and one wome
Source: HNN summary of CBS report
Dec 12, 2006
A new poll by CBS News broadcast Monday night indicates that 62 percent of the American people now believe that it was a mistake to invade Iraq.
At the height of the Vietnam War in 1973 only 60 percent said it was a mistake to send troops to Vietnam, according to a Gallup Poll.Related Links
HNN Staff: Have Americans Usually Supported Their Wars?
Source: AP
Dec 12, 2006
Scientists hope that a reproduction of the 2,100-year-old Antikythera Mechanism, believed to be the earliest surviving mechanical computing device, will provide clues to a variety of questions: who built the device, and for what purpose? Why did the technology behind it disappear for the next thousand years? What does the device tell us about ancient Greek culture? And does the marvelous construction, and the precise knowledge of the movement of the sun and moon and Earth that it implies, tell u
Source: Deutsche Welle
Dec 12, 2006
Leading Holocaust historians gathered in Berlin to discuss the current state of Holocaust studies. The meeting has been widely seen as a reaction to a controversial Holocaust conference in Iran.The conference -- organized by the German Federal Agency for Civic Education (BPB) -- is seen by many as a response to a two-day conference on the Holocaust, which started in Teheran on Monday.
US historian Raul Hilberg, the author of "Destruction of the European Jew
Source: National Security Archive
Dec 11, 2006
Twenty-five years after Polish authorities, on December 13, 1981, declared martial law and cracked down on the Solidarity movement, the Washington DC-based, non-governmental National Security Archive is publishing, through Central European University Press, a collection of previously secret documentation entitled "From Solidarity to Martial Law," edited by Andrzej Paczkowski and Malcolm Byrne. The documents from inside Solidarity, the Polish leadership, the Kremlin as well as the White
Source: AP
Dec 11, 2006
Government health officials tried to build their case for school
closings and similar steps during a flu pandemic by showcasing
new research Monday that suggests such measures seemed to work
during the deadly Spanish flu of 1918.
Researchers found that cities like St. Louis, which instituted"social
distancing" at least two weeks before flu cases peaked in their
communities, had flu-related death rates less than half that of
Philadelphia, which didn't act until later.
The whirlwind
Source: IHT
Dec 11, 2006
MEMPHIS, Tennessee -- Elizabeth "Lizzie" Bolden, recognized as the world's oldest person, died early Monday, the administrator of the nursing home where she lived said Monday. She was 116.
Bolden was born Aug. 15, 1890, according to the Gerontology Research Group, a Los Angeles-based organization that tracks the ages of the world's oldest people.
Guinness World Records recognized Bolden as the oldest person in August after the death of Maria Ester de Capovill
Source: Times Online (UK)
Dec 11, 2006
Dozens of Iranian students burnt pictures of President Ahmadinejad and chanted “Death to the dictator” as he gave a speech at a university in Tehran yesterday.
Never has the hardline leader faced such open hostility at a public event, which came as Iran opened a conference questioning whether Nazi Germany murdered six million Jews.
One student activist said that the protest was against the “shameful” Holocaust conference and the “fact that many activists have not been
Source: CNN
Dec 11, 2006
Iran on Monday opened a two-day conference exploring the validity of the Nazi Holocaust, a move that has sparked outrage among Jewish groups.
One such group, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, planned to counter the event with a teleconference showcasing stories from Holocaust survivors.
Manouchehr Mohammadi, Iran's deputy foreign minister for research, told Iran's state-run news agency, IRNA, that Tehran's leaders would accept that the Holocaust occurred if scholars attendin
Source: Christian Science Monitor
Dec 11, 2006
... Choeung Ek is one of Cambodia's handful of memorials of the Khmer Rouge genocide that, between 1975 and 1979, claimed the lives of nearly 2 million citizens - a third of the nation's population then.
Van and Bei - and 396 fellow villagers from across the country - are here on a two-day, all-expense-paid educational trip organized by the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), a leading research institution on the killing fields.
Mention Cambodia, and the first im
Source: Guardian
Dec 11, 2006
One of the most controversial armed conflicts of the cold war era and one which caused a rift between Britain and the US is to be revisited this week in a British court. The case will re-examine an episode that led to more than 100 deaths on the Caribbean island of Grenada and still has ramifications for the region today.
The 14 Grenadians sentenced to death for the assassination of the former prime minister Maurice Bishop more than 20 years ago are due to have their case for an a
Source: WaPo
Dec 11, 2006
The device is so famous that an international conference organized in Athens a couple of weeks ago had only one subject: the Antikythera Mechanism.
Every discovery about the device has raised new questions. Who built the device, and for what purpose? Why did the technology behind it disappear for the next thousand years? What does the device tell us about ancient Greek culture? And does the marvelous construction, and the precise knowledge of the movement of the sun and moon and Ear
Source: NYT
Dec 11, 2006
Three star General Frederick Weyand was the secret source for a front page New York Times story in 1967 that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, according to an op ed published in the paper today by Murray Fromson.
The 1967 story in the Times was written by the late R.W. Apple and dealt a thunderous blow to the Johnson administration's claim that the war was being won.
Weyand, now 90 and living in Hawaii, agreed to reveal his identity in time for a public memorial that is
