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 (UK)
Apr 1, 2011
Court life in the dying days of Imperial China was a hotbed of sex and scandal, according to a salacious memoir by a British sinologist that has lain unpublished for more than half a century.
'Décadence Mandchoue', written by Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse, a homosexual British sinologist who claimed to have slept with Oscar Wilde and raised money to fund the writer's legal defence, paints a pornographic portrait of Manchu officials, court eunuchs and the bordellos and bathhouses th
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Apr 1, 2011
The Kennedy family is the closest thing Americans have had to a Royal family.
From their Hyannis Port compound, where the rambunctious Kennedy children would play touch football and go sailing while Joseph Kennedy planned world political domination for his talented children, they seemed a family blessed with ambition, intelligence, athleticism and good looks.
They embodied the American dream: an Irish immigrant family that in a mere two generations achieved the most po
Source: BBC News
Apr 1, 2011
The United Nations' top court has dismissed a case filed by Georgia that accuses Russia and separatist rebels of ethnic cleansing.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague said it could not examine Georgia's complaint because negotiations had not taken place.
Georgia said Russia and the rebels had used ethnic violence against Georgians in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Russia took control of the two Georgian regions in a brief war in August 2008.
Source: BBC News
Apr 1, 2011
The author of a book on Mahatma Gandhi has said it is "shameful" that it has been banned in India's western state of Gujarat.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joseph Lelyveld said the book was banned on the basis of newspaper reviews.
He said the reviews had sensationalised his account of Gandhi's friendship with a German man, who may have been homosexual.
Although legal, homosexuality still carries a stigma in India.
Gujarat's state ass
Source: NYT
Apr 1, 2011
YORBA LINDA, Calif. — Most presidential libraries are as much celebrations of a president as historical repositories. They are packed with official papers, photographs, limousines, proclamations and baby shoes representing the president’s life and times; dark chapters are traditionally ignored or at least understated.
That tradition was exploded Thursday as the Watergate Gallery opened here at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. The unveiling ended a nearly yearlong s
Source: Hurriyet (Turkey)
Mar 31, 2011
Officials in Ankara have held a ceremony following the return of archaeological artifacts that had previously been smuggled out of Anatolia to Serbia.
Turkish Culture and Tourism Minister Ertuğrul Günay attended the ceremony at his ministry's opera building on the occasion of the return of 1,865 artifacts that had been illegally transported to Serbia, as well as 17 others that had been taken to Britain.
Günay said his ministry attached great importance to cultu
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Mar 31, 2011
Hitler's propaganda stressed the importance of keeping fit and abstaining from drink and tobacco to keep the Aryan race strong and pure.
But in reality his soldiers were taking addictive and damaging chemicals to make them fight longer and more fiercely.
A study of medicines used by the Third Reich exposes how Nazi doctors and officers issued recruits with pills to help them fight longer and without rest.
The German army's drug of choice as it overran Polan
Source: NYT
Mar 31, 2011
GANDHI is still so revered in India that a book about him that few Indians have read and that hasn’t even been published in this country has been banned in one state and may yet be banned nationwide.
The problem, say those who have fanned the flames of popular outrage this week, is that the book suggests that the father of modern India was bisexual.
The book’s author, Joseph Lelyveld, does write extensively about the close relationship Mohandas K. Gandhi had with a Germ
Source: Press Release
Mar 31, 2011
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (03/30/2011) —U.S. District Court Judge Donovan Frank today dismissed a lawsuit filed by the Turkish Coalition of America against the University of Minnesota. The lawsuit arose from materials posted on the university’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS) website, including a list of websites CHGS considered “unreliable” for purposes of conducting scholarly research. The Turkish Coalition claimed the university violated its constitutional rights, and committed
Source: AFP
Mar 31, 2011
A US federal appeals court has sided with Iran in a long-running legal battle over whether Persian artifacts in Chicago museums can be seized as compensation for victims of a terror attack in Israel.
Tuesday's ruling overturns a lower court's rejection of Iran's sovereign immunity and order that Iran must provide the victims with a list of all its US assets.
However, the ruling will make it harder for the victims to find other assets which could be considered exempt fro
Source: Discovery News
Mar 31, 2011
The thigh bone of a huge extinct mammal may have helped inspired a beast or two in classical mythology.
The bone of a large extinct creature, once treasured by the ancient Greeks, has finally found a permanent home in England.
Known as the Nichoria bone, the blackened fossil is part of the thigh bone of an immense extinct mammal that roamed southern Greece perhaps a million years ago. The bone was collected by ancient Greeks and may have even helped inspire certain beas
Source: AP
Mar 31, 2011
History is being restored at the Richard Nixon Library, where the Watergate exhibit once told visitors nearly four decades after the scandal led to his resignation that it was really a "coup" by his rivals.
For years the library exhibit that retraces the former president's notorious saga was a target of ridicule, panned for omissions and editing that academics and critics said shaped a legacy favorable to the tainted 37th president.
On Thursday, archivists wil
Source: BBC
Mar 31, 2011
A memorial to the Royal Marines who canoed almost 100 miles behind enemy lines to blow up ships in a daring World War II raid has been unveiled in France. But what did the secret mission entail, and why was it so important?
For 10 marines in December 1942, their secret mission was so daring and dramatic they were hailed as the Cockleshell Heroes and in 1955, immortalised in film.
Unbeknown to them when they signed up for "hazardous service", their job was to t
Source: BBC
Mar 31, 2011
A giant predatory theropod dinosaur, similar in size and stature to Tyrannosaurus rex, has been identified by palaeontologists.
The new dinosaur, named Zhuchengtyrannus magnus, probably stood four metres tall, was 11 metres long and weighed around six tonnes.
Like T. rex, it was a carnivore with huge powerful jaws.
It ran on strong back legs, with puny front limbs, scientists report in the journal Cretaceous Research....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 31, 2011
Scottish prosecutors have requested an interview with Moussa Koussa over the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, following the Libyan foreign minister's apparent defection to Britain.
Mr Koussa, a former head of Libyan intelligence and one-time member of leader Col Muammar Gaddafi's inner circle, arrived unexpectedly in Britain on Wednesday and said he was resigning as foreign minister, the Foreign Office said.
His arrival was welcomed by relatives of those killed in the bombing
Source: NYT
Mar 30, 2011
When Richard C. Holbrooke died in December, he left behind the notes for a project he never had time to finish.
Mr. Holbrooke, a prominent diplomat in Democratic administrations since the 1960s, had planned to write a memoir, the story of a life that spanned numerous international conflicts, many of which he saw up close.
Now the keys to that archive have been handed over to George Packer, the author and a staff writer for The New Yorker, who has signed a deal with Knop
Source: National Geographic
Mar 30, 2011
Marks on a clay tablet fragment found in Greece are the oldest known decipherable text in Europe, a new study says.
Considered "magical or mysterious" in its time, the writing survives only because a trash heap caught fire some 3,500 years ago, according to researchers.
Found in an olive grove in what's now the village of Iklaina (map), the tablet was created by a Greek-speaking Mycenaean scribe between 1450 and 1350 B.C., archaeologists say.
The
Source: Bloomberg
Mar 30, 2011
Austria plans to spend 1.7 million euros ($2.4 million) to restore and redesign the Mauthausen concentration camp, where 200,000 people were imprisoned by the Nazis between 1938 and 1945.
The project, to run through 2013, includes renovating the station building, revamping the main exhibition, adding a new display on the Holocaust and creating a “room of names” to commemorate the camp’s victims, the Austrian Interior Ministry said in a statement on its website today.
“W
Source: ColorLines
Mar 30, 2011
It’s a heartbreaking, but often understated, reality that America’s criminal justice system imprisons black folks at astonishingly high rates. The U.S. Bureau of Justice estimated that as of 2008, there were over 846,000 black men in prison, making up 40.2 percent of all inmates in the system. But in a recent talk, noted author Michelle Alexander put those numbers in grave historical perspective.
“More African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were ensl
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Mar 30, 2011
For scholars of faith and history, it is a treasure trove too precious for price.
This ancient collection of 70 tiny books, their lead pages bound with wire, could unlock some of the secrets of the earliest days of Christianity.
Academics are divided as to their authenticity but say that if verified, they could prove as pivotal as the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947.
On pages not much bigger than a credit card, are images, symbols and words that appear
