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: NYT
May 30, 2011
KASHIMA, Japan — When the Shimane nuclear plant was first proposed here more than 40 years ago, this rural port town put up such fierce resistance that the plant’s would-be operator, Chugoku Electric, almost scrapped the project. Angry fishermen vowed to defend areas where they had fished and harvested seaweed for generations.
Source: NYT
May 30, 2011
It was a warm, damp day in central Nebraska, heavy and still. The tornado arrived at the Madsen farm just before 3 p.m. Mads Madsen, 63, his wife Minnie, 59, three of their children and five of their grandchildren were in the parlor eating Sunday dinner. Twenty minutes later all 10 of them were dead.
Source: NYT
May 30, 2011
At first it seemed an oddity: a scattering of reports in the spring and early summer of 1981 that young gay men in New York and California were ill with forms of pneumonia and cancer usually seen only in people with
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 30, 2011
A revolver belonging to Al Capone, the Chicago mobster, could fetch as as much as £70,000 when it is auctioned next month, experts say.
Source: AP
May 30, 2011
Underneath the crowded alleys and holy sites of old Jerusalem, hundreds of people are snaking at any given moment through tunnels, vaulted medieval chambers and Roman sewers in a rapidly expanding subterranean city invisible from the streets above.
At street level, the walled Old City is an energetic and fractious enclave with a physical landscape that is predominantly Islamic and a population that is mainly Arab.
Underground Jeru
Source: AP
May 30, 2011
The Hamas militant group has turned the modest home of its founder into a museum -- seven years after the wheelchair-bound Palestinian cleric was killed in an Israeli airstrike as he was wheeled out of a mosque.
The Sheik Ahmed Yassin museum, located in an alleyway in the rundown Sabra neighborhood of Gaza City, has become a popular destina
Source: CNN
May 30, 2011
Ratko Mladic's lawyer has requested a new medical examination for the former Bosnian Serb general, arguing that Mladic is not healthy enough to face charges of genocide at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, he said Monday.
Mladic would not be able to participate in a trial because of his ill health, lawyer Milos Saljic said.
Chief prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic denied Monday that Mladic was in poor health, saying that he was "lively and joking," and had asked for Russian classics to read.
Source: Guardian (UK)
May 29, 2011
Which was more important in the making of Britain, a ruined abbey, a Dorset tree, a Liverpool cellar or a painted gable in Northern Ireland?
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
May 29, 2011
A library of 8.7 million digital volumes. A trove of 100,000 ocean-science photos. An archive of 57,000 Mexican-music recordings.
Source: CNN
May 28, 2011
Roland Marbaugh wrote 509 pages of his tales of war -- from the swampy Solomon Islands in World War II to the frozen Chosin Reservoir in Korea.
His son typed them all up on an electric typewriter in the 1980s but unpublished, Marbaugh's stories remained largely in his mind. Until now.
Marbaugh's story will soon be among 600 others on Witness to War, a virtual library of Americans in combat.
Source: AP
May 28, 2011
VATICAN CITY -- Pope Benedict XVI, who was forced to join the Hitler Youth as a child, has made a rare mention of life in Germany under the Nazis, calling it a "dark time."The 84-year-old, German-born pontiff turned his thoughts to 70 years ago, a time "already marked by war" and in which Adolf Hitler "had already subjugated" one country after another, including Poland, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and France....
Source: NYT
May 28, 2011
LESS than a mile from the Syrian frontier, in the land of Kemal Ataturk, Ahmed Sheikh Said defies the identities that borders inspire.Mr. Said was born in the Syrian town of Azaz and raised across a line on the map in Kilis, Turkey. A grocer, he speaks Turkish like a native to his customers, while holding an ear open to the Arabic telecasts of Al Jazeera playing in his store. His wife and his mother are Turkish, but Arab blood runs through his veins, he says, “till the end of time.”
Source: NYT
May 28, 2011
BELGRADE, Serbia — Serbian officials vowed on Saturday to track down all those who had helped hide Ratko Mladic and other fugitives accused of war crimes, but their prime interest now is to get the former Bosnian Serb general packed off to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, which could happen as early as Tuesday.
Source: AP
May 27, 2011
Archaeologists recovered the first anchor from what's believed to be the wreck of the pirate Blackbeard's flagship off the North Carolina coast Friday, a move that might change plans about how to save the rest of the almost 300-year-old artifacts from the central part of the ship.
Source: AP
May 27, 2011
The shipping label said the mailed package contained replicas of Peruvian ceramics.
Source: Lee White at the National Coalition for History
May 27, 2011
The House Education and Workforce Committee this week approved, by a strict party line vote of 23-16, H.R. 1891 the “Setting New Priorities in Education Act.” This bill would eliminate 43 programs at the Department of Education including Teaching American History (TAH) grants.
Source: Lee White at the National Coalition for History
May 27, 2011
On May, 26, David S. Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States, announced that the Pentagon Papers have been declassified and will be released in their entirety in hard copy and online in digital format on June 16– except for eleven words that will remain classified.
Source: Lee White at the National Coalition for History
May 27, 2011
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History recently announced that Barry M. Meyer, chairman and chief executive officer of Warner Bros., and Bob Uhler, chairman and chief executive Officer of MWH Global, Inc., have become members of its advisory board effective May 12. Three historians, Ellsworth Brown, David McCullough and Vicki Ruiz have also been reappointed to the board. The Smithsonian’s Board of Regents approved the five candidates for three-year terms.
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
May 27, 2011
With her steering jammed and her speed slashed by torpedo attacks, the Bismarck and her crew of 2,200 were a sitting duck for the Royal Navy.
And in two hours the German battleship was a helpless wreck of twisted metal, raging fires and dead and dying crew.
But the ship’s agony was not over. After the bombardment by British battleships, she was finished off by torpedoes, slipping under the Atlantic with all but 200 of those aboard.
Source: The Scotsman
May 27, 2011
The discovery of the remains of five "high status" individuals beneath Stirling Castle throws new light on the Wars of Independence of the 13th and 14th centuries. The significant find offers an extraordinarily rare insight into medieval warfare....
