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: BBC News
Apr 11, 2011
It has been claimed that as many as two out of five humans on the planet today owe their existence to the discoveries made by one brilliant German chemist.
Yet this is the same chemist denounced by young German students today as a "murderer".
No-one personifies better than Fritz Haber the debate over science's capacity for good and evil.
And there is more to his dramatic life even than this. For Haber personifies too the tragedy of a Jew desperate
Source: BBC News
Apr 11, 2011
The Americans won the race to the Moon when Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface in 1969.
That single act trumped the Soviet achievement of sending the first man into space eight years earlier. But what might have happened if the Soviet Union had got to the Moon first?
The first manned lunar landing was a triumph for Nasa, and when the Americans won the Space Race, they also sounded its death knell.
The Apollo lunar programme continued until 1972 an
Source: BBC News
Apr 11, 2011
The US is commemorating the 150th anniversary of the country's most destructive conflict, the Civil War. In Charleston in the state of South Carolina, where the war erupted, the BBC's Paul Adams says Americans remain divided over the roots of the conflict to this day.
On a patch of open ground near Charleston, the US Civil War came vividly, noisily to life on a rainy Sunday in late March.
Re-enactors played out the 1864 Battle of Bloody Bridge, a victory for Southern, o
Source: Guardian (UK)
Apr 11, 2011
SS architect of final solution hated life in hiding and wrote letter to West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer in 1956, book reveals.
For more than a decade after the second world war, his whereabouts were officially unknown. Adolf Eichmann, chief architect of the Holocaust, had escaped from a US POW camp, slipped into Italy and on to a ship bound for Argentina.
The West German government, busy rebuilding the country and rehabilitating its reputation, knew from at least
Source: BBC
Apr 11, 2011
On the 40th anniversary of Mother Teresa's visit to Northern Ireland, a new BBC NI documentary remembers her time there and examines the reasons surrounding her mysterious and sudden departure.
The documentary Mother Teresa 123 Springhill Avenue tells the remarkable story of Mother Teresa coming to Northern Ireland in 1971 and setting up a small mission to help the people of Ballymurphy, in west Belfast, who were enduring a time of terrible poverty and violence.
So why
Source: France24
Apr 11, 2011
AFP - On Tuesday, the world will be awash with talk of courage and vision as it looks back on 50 years of manned space flight, a trail blazed by Yuri Gagarin's 108-minute trip around the planet.
But what if the past half-century has been just a cosmic waste of money?
Presidents and space agencies insist manned missions will always be at the heart of their space programmes.
An astronaut not only embodies the human quest to explore, they argue. He or she can
Source: National Parks Traveler
Apr 11, 2011
One hundred and fifty years ago this Tuesday, April 12, the first salvos of the Civil War were launched when Confederate forces began a 34-hour bombardment that ended with the surrender of Fort Sumter.
“The firing upon that fort will inaugurate a civil war greater than any the world has yet seen,” declared Robert Toombs, Confederate secretary of state, not long before the conflict began.
Despite the lack of fatalities (except for two that a surrender ceremony accident p
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Apr 11, 2011
Secret FBI files have been released detailing how US officials saw a UFO explode over Utah – and aliens land near Roswell in New Mexico.
A declassified document from 1949 tells how three men, on patrols miles apart, each reported seeing a UFO break up over mountains north of Salt Lake City.
Their extraordinary accounts were sent to Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, in a memo titled "Flying Discs".
The file said that a policeman, a highway pa
Source: CNN
Apr 11, 2011
He stood 5-foot-8 and weighed 145 pounds. His face was gaunt and sunburned. Ticks, fleas and lice covered his body.
Before battle, his lips would quiver and his body went numb. When the shooting started, some of his comrades burst into maniacal laughter. Others bit the throat and ears of their enemy. And some were shattered by shells so powerful that tufts of their hair stuck to rocks and trees.
Take a tour of a Civil War battlefield today, and it's difficult to connect
Source: DNA India
Apr 10, 2011
America’s FBI is set to reveal its secret files on Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, which details the agency’s attempts to find him despite reports of his suicide in 1945.
On 29 April 1945 Hitler and Eva Braun, his wife of one day, killed themselves in the Berlin bunker. But Soviet authorities who found the remains were happy for rumours to persist that he got away.
Now 752 sides of FBI reports chart how agents previously thought he was hiding out on a ranch in Argentina, livi
Source: WaPo
Apr 10, 2011
The Civil War began here shortly before dawn when a mortar on the starlit beach fired a single shot high into the sky over this proud and elegant city.
From Fort Sumter, the gun’s target out in the harbor, and from points ashore, people watched the shell arc overhead, the path marked by its burning fuse.
It was a fateful moment — one of the most profound in U.S. history — and in many ways the moment modern America was born.
Turn back the pages of the nation
Source: ANI
Apr 10, 2011
Chinese archaeologists have excavated a tomb built more than 2,000 years ago in the ancient capital of Xi’an to study the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC - AD 24).
The tomb was discovered in a southern suburb of the city, which is now the capital of Northwest China’s Shaanxi province, reports the China Daily.
Ding Yan, a research assistant of the Shaanxi provincial institute of archaeology and head of the tomb archaeological excavation site, said the tomb was the only one n
Source: Discovery News
Apr 10, 2011
Many items, including artifacts from the famous King Tutankhamun collection, were targeted by thieves.
The inventory of all the items that were stolen during the uprising and the weeks of unrest that followed will be given to UNESCO, the UN cultural agency, Hawass said.
The tomb of Hetep-ka at Saqqara and the tomb of Em-pi at Giza as well as the Egyptian museum in Cairo, which houses most of the King Tutankhamen collection, were among the places targeted by thieves, he
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Apr 10, 2011
The British ambassador to the US told America it should not intervene to stop the release of the Lockerbie bomber from a Scottish prison, according to leaked diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks and passed to the Daily Telegraph.
Nigel Sheinwald told James Steinberg, the US Deputy Secretary of State, that he was "concerned" that the demands of victims' families were unduly influencing US policy.
His comments came during critical negotiations over whether
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Apr 10, 2011
The 1962 book, subtitled In Search of America, finds the ageing author of The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men attempting to recapture his youth and survey the state of the nation for a final time.
But serious doubts about the veracity of Steinbeck's story have now been raised. A writer who retraced the author's steps claims to have discovered a string of inaccuracies, half-truths and fabricated events.
Nights that Steinbeck supposedly endured in his truck were in fa
Source: National Parks Traveler
Apr 10, 2011
Sometime this summer a truck, or trucks, loaded with artifacts and papers at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in Montana, will slowly pull away from the monument and set out on a 20-or-so-hour drive south.
When the truck, or trucks, pull into the National Park Service's Western Archaeological and Conservation Center in Tucscon, Arizona, workers will unload roughly 150,000 artifacts and archives tied in some fashion to the U.S. Army's 7th Cavalry's darkest days in June 18
Source: The Local (Germany)
Apr 10, 2011
The SS officer responsible for the arrest of Anne Frank was one of many Nazis employed by Germany's Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) foreign intelligence agency after World War II, Focus reported on Saturday.
The magazine said Karl Josef Silberbauer worked as a confidential informant and recruiter for the BND, according to evidence found by Hamburg journalist and author Peter-Ferdinand Koch in US archives.
Silberbauer was a feared interrogation specialist who spent years w
Source: BBC News
Apr 10, 2011
Yuri Gagarin's single orbit of Earth 50 years ago this month ushered in the era of human spaceflight.
Gagarin's 108-minute flight was another major propaganda coup for the Soviet Union, which had successfully launched the first satellite - Sputnik - in 1957.
"I was a young fighter pilot in Germany I was flying F-102s in Rammstein Germany. We were more focused on the building of the Berlin Wall that year, rather than the space race," says Nasa astronaut Charles
Source: NYT
Apr 10, 2011
...Mandates are elusive because voters cast ballots for people, not policies. As fluctuating polls demonstrate, public preferences represent an ephemeral composite of considerations — some contradictory, like the simultaneous desire for minimal taxes and robust services.
Mr. Obama, running in 2008, promised “affordable, accessible health care for every American.” He won 53 percent of the vote.
But Mr. Obama promised many things and watched as economic conditions deterio
Source: NYT
Apr 10, 2011
MOSCOW — Ceremonies on Sunday and Monday in memory of the president of Poland and dozens of the country’s top political and military leaders who died in an airplane crash a year ago are being overshadowed by a dispute between Russia and Poland over the wording of a memorial plaque.
Both nations had agreed to erect a memorial at the crash site in western Russia, and in preparation the Russians moved a large boulder to serve that purpose. President Lech Kaczynski and 95 other Polish
