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)
Feb 22, 2011
Britain and the US have fuelled instability in the Middle East by supporting autocratic regimes that suppress human rights, David Cameron has said.
The Prime Minister said that popular uprisings now flaring across the Middle East showed the West had been wrong to back dictators and undemocratic regimes.
Britain and other Western countries supported Hosni Mubarak, ousted by protests in Egypt earlier this month.
Under Labour from 2004, Britain also strengthe
Source: AP
Feb 22, 2011
ozens of Thomas Jefferson's books have been found in the rare books collection at Washington University in St. Louis.
Scholars are now poring through the 28 titles and 74 volumes, searching for the occasional handwritten note from the nation's third president. And librarians say it's possible more of Jefferson's books will be found in the school's collection.
The school announced the discovery Monday, on the Presidents Day holiday in the U.S.
Librarians say Jeffe
Source: CNN
Feb 22, 2011
A unique anniversary at the Supreme Court passed in silence Tuesday, befitting the occasion. It has been five years to the day since Justice Clarence Thomas last spoke at oral argument, another reflection of the complex, dynamic, often misunderstood personality of the court's only African-American jurist.
The two hours of morning arguments found the 62-year-old Thomas rocking in his high-backed leather chair, often consulting legal papers in front of him. He stroked his hair a few t
Source: This is Somerset (UK)
Feb 21, 2011
Stone will continue to be quarried from Ham Hill Country Park near Yeovil, Somerset, for the next 80 years after planning permission to extend the site was agreed.
The Iron Age hill fort, near Norton sub Hamdon, is the only place in the country where ham stone can be quarried but as of July 2010 it was estimated the current reserve would only last for 18 months.
With much of the remaining stone to the south of the park being deemed unusable, a new source was needed.
Source: Guardian (UK)
Feb 21, 2011
Etched into the surviving art of the Moche, one of South America's most ancient and mysterious civilisations, is a fearsome creature dubbed the Decapitator. Also known as Ai Apaec, the octopus-type figure holds a knife in one hand and a severed head in the other in a graphic rendition of the human sacrifices the Moche practiced in northern Peru 1,500 years ago.
For archaeologists, the horror here is not in Moche iconography, which you see in pottery and mural fragments, but in the h
Source: Archaeo News
Feb 21, 2011
A rock-cut tomb dating back to the Indian Megalithic period (Early Iron Age) has been found at Kodiyeri, Kerala, India. The tomb, cut in laterite - a local argillaceous red sandstone - has a dome ceiling and was unearthed accidentally at a private plot of land while soil was being removed, Kannur University Anthropology Department head S. Gregory said. The tomb was discovered at one-metre depth, Dr. Gregory added. A polished 75-centimetre-tall laterite pillar was at the centre of the semi-spher
Source: NYT
Feb 21, 2011
A literary detective story that began 18 months ago and was advanced through a chance reading of an 1880 edition of The Harvard Register has led researchers from the Jefferson Library at Monticello to a trove of books that were among the last ones that Thomas Jefferson, the nation’s most bibliophilic president, collected and read in the decade before he died.
The 28 titles in 74 volumes were discovered recently in the collection of Washington University in St. Louis, immediately el
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 21, 2011
Japan is creating an espionage agency for the first time since the end of the Second World War, amid growing tensions with its superpower neighbour China and nuclear-armed North Korea.
The new unit, modelled on MI6 and the CIA, will also be tasked with gathering information to prevent terrorist attacks against Japanese targets, according to a US government cable obtained by WikiLeaks.
The cable, which records an October 2008 discussion between Hideshi Mitani, Japan’s C
Source: Canada Free Press
Feb 21, 2011
Many former slaves left a political legacy that’s been ignored or completely forgotten by their descendants—even during Black History Month.
As they struggled against the violence and racism of the mid-1800s, it’s likely they thought the inheritance they left would continue to improve the lives of their descendants.
Their legacy is the Republican Party.
For decades, Black people have given over 90 percent of their votes to the Democrat Party. The Democrats
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Feb 21, 2011
He was the world’s first black heavyweight champion 100 years before Barack Obama became America’s first black president.
But more than a century on, boxer Jack Johnson's family say there is still a ‘stigma’ hanging over him after his relationship with a white woman landed him in prison.
Lawmakers are pushing a posthumous presidential pardon campaign for the boxer, whose flamboyant lifestyle and romantic ties with white women flamed racial tension.
Authorit
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 21, 2011
Four angels stand on grassy hummocks, their sandalled feet on tip-toe as they stretch up against a golden sky to support between them a wide disc of blue on which is displayed the Chi-Rho, the monogram of Christ, shining in tesserae of gold. The angels wear long tunics with palliums draped over their shoulders, for the mosaic that depicts them, on the vaulted ceiling of a chapel in the archbishop's palace in Ravenna, was made in the sixth century, nearly 1,500 years ago.
Two things
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 21, 2011
When Francis Pryor first started scraping building sites in Peterborough new town in the Seventies, he was met with incredulous looks from passers-by who imagined that archaeological remains only existed in Egypt and Greece. Now, nobody who has watched Francis and his colleagues on Channel Four’s Time Team can dispute that Britain is positively bursting with evidence of our predecessors’ lives. But are our back gardens really as interesting as he insists?
I have invited him to my ho
Source: NYT
Feb 21, 2011
WASHINGTON — Ron Reagan’s new memoir, “My Father at 100,” has touched off sensational headlines with its suggestion that President Ronald Reagan might have begun showing hints of Alzheimer’s disease while still in the White House.
But in two interviews this month, the younger Mr. Reagan said he never meant to suggest that his father had dementia before leaving office in 1989. And he graciously took the blame for not being more explicit in a passage that described a few personal obs
Source: NYT
Feb 21, 2011
Egypt has reopened many of its museums and historical sites, which were hit by sporadic looting during the uprising that led to President Hosni Mubarak’s ouster, Reuters reported.
On Sunday, the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, which is just off Tahrir Square and which served as an embattled backdrop during the protests, opened its doors again, and museum workers handed roses to the few visitors who came to see its treasures. The galleries of the museum, which are usually bustling, were ne
Source: NYT
Feb 21, 2011
Her memory is creaky, Dwania Kyles insisted, and most of the photographs that help unlock it are stored in her computer. But recently, sitting in a warren of rooms in Harlem as the light outside faded, she had a rush of recollections about her family and the night that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did not come to dinner.
Ms. Kyles and Thomas Allen Harris, a documentary filmmaker, had donned white gloves to thumb through photographs of her parents in high school. “My parents l
Source: NYT
Feb 21, 2011
One of Malcolm X’s daughters is being held in North Carolina on an arrest warrant from Queens, stemming from an accusation that she stole from the widow of one of her father’s bodyguards, the authorities said Monday.
The daughter, Malikah Shabazz, was arrested Friday night in Mars Hill, N.C., and faces an extradition hearing on Tuesday....
Source: NYT
Feb 21, 2011
On Monday, Radio Shack offered special prices for Presidents’ Day. Office Depot had discounts, too, in honor of President’s Day. Not to be left out, Macy’s advertised sales of its own to celebrate Presidents Day.
Never mind that the federal holiday observed on Monday didn’t go by any of those names — not officially, anyway. It was Washington’s Birthday, observed on the third Monday of February, as dictated by a 1968 law. But that statement of fact is a lost cause by now. So let us t
Source: NYT
Feb 21, 2011
In 1950, nearly half of the more than 10,000 New Yorkers living in the heart of Little Italy identified as Italian-American. The narrow streets teemed with children and resonated with melodic exchanges in Italian among the one in five residents born in Italy and their second- and third-generation neighbors.
By 2000, the census found that the Italian-American population had dwindled to 6 percent. Only 44 were Italian-born, compared with 2,149 a half-century earlier.
A ce
Source: NYT
Feb 21, 2011
NAIROBI, Kenya — President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan, who has been in power for more than 20 years and faces international charges of genocide, will not run for office again after his current term ends in four years, a Sudanese government spokesman said Monday.
Mr. Bashir seized power in 1989 in a military coup and has ruled with an iron fist ever since, crushing or trying to crush numerous rebellions across Sudan. But now, Mr. Bashir “has no will to be a president again,” said
Source: Ynet News
Feb 21, 2011
The family of Jewish physicist Albert Einstein is offering a €5,000 ($6,850) reward for information about the murder of three members of Einstein’s family by Nazi soldiers in 1944. The wife and two daughters of Eisntein's cousin Robert were murdered in August 3, 1944 near Florence, Italy.
Authorities have been investigating the murder since 2007 when new evidence surfaced, and have largely managed to reconstruct the events of the day of the murder....
