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
Jan 28, 2011
Hundreds of people have attended an event at Kennedy Space Center in Florida to mark the 25th anniversary of the space shuttle Challenger explosion, in which seven astronauts died.
Special guests at the Cape Canaveral visitor's complex included the widow of Challenger's commander.
The event comes one day after a national day of remembrance for those killed in the 1986 incident.
Flags flew at half-mast at Nasa centres across the country on Thursday.
Source: CNN
Jan 28, 2011
Former President George W. Bush is landing a stinging jab at his former longtime aide and press secretary, Scott McClellan, saying the man who served as the public face of his administration for three years was irrelevant.
In an interview with CSPAN scheduled to air this weekend, Bush says he deliberately didn't include McClellan – who held the high profile post longer than anyone else during the administration – in his memoir, "Decision Points."
McClellan had
Source: CNN
Jan 28, 2011
Anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela was discharged from a South African hospital Friday after treatment for an acute respiratory infection, the nation's surgeon general said.
The 92-year-old former president left the hospital in a motorcade that included an ambulance in the middle.
Doctors are happy with his recovery and he will continue to receive treatment at home, said V.J. Ramlakan, the surgeon general....
Source: CNN
Jan 28, 2011
Twenty-five years ago today, Concord, New Hampshire, was abuzz with excitement as teacher Christa McAuliffe was about to make history.
Thousands of educators had applied to be the first teacher in space, but NASA chose McAuliffe, a 10th-grade social studies teacher at Concord High School.
Micaela Pond, who was 17 and McAuliffe's neighbor at the time, remembers getting a ride home one day from the teacher turned astronaut.
On January 28, 1986, the day of
Source: CS Monitor
Jan 28, 2011
It was shortly before noon on January 28, 1986. President Ronald Reagan was in the Oval Office, preparing for a traditional pre-State of the Union luncheon with television news anchors. Then, as Reagan remembered it, Vice President Bush and National Security Advisor John Poindexter strode into the room with terrible news.
“All they could say at the time was that they had received a flash that the space shuttle had exploded,” Reagan said later.
In that flash, US history
Source: Der Spiegel (Germany)
Jan 28, 2011
For years, the site was left to crumble and decay. But now, following extensive renovation, the factory where the Auschwitz ovens were designed and built has reopened as a memorial. It shows the intimate involvement of German industry in the mass murder of the Holocaust.
For years, the site was little more than a typical industrial ruin -- the kind of modernist decay that became synonymous with Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism. The crumbling buildings just outside the
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 28, 2011
Christie's has announced record sales for 2010 after the auction house enjoyed the best 12 months in its 245-year history.
Total sales rose more than 50pc to hit £3.3bn last year, as the company retained its position as the world’s largest auction house.
Christie's was involved in two-thirds of global artwork sales worth more than $50m (£32m).
Works sold over the course of 2010 included Pablo Picasso’s Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, which sold for an auction
Source: Fox News
Jan 28, 2011
A key member of a Miami-based marijuana-smuggling ring was reportedly arrested by the U.S. Marshals Service on Thursday, more than 31 years after skipping out of a federal trial.
Mark Steven Phillips, 62, was arrested in his apartment at Century Village, a seniors community where he had been living in recent months, the Miami Herald reports.
Along with 13 others, Phillips was charged in May 1979 in what was then the country's largest marijuana importation prosecution in
Source: NYT
Jan 28, 2011
A cache of stone tools found on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula has reopened the critical question of when and how modern humans escaped from their ancestral homeland in eastern Africa.
The present view, based on both archaeological and genetic evidence, holds that modern humans, although they first emerged in Africa some 200,000 years ago, were hemmed in by deserts and other human species like Neanderthals and did not escape to the rest of the world until some 50,000 years
Source: Fox News
Jan 28, 2011
It's been 25 years since teacher Christa McAuliffe died aboard the Challenger space shuttle, and people in her hometown of Concord, New Hampshire, still don't like to talk about it.
"It hurts every time the anniversary comes around. Especially for those that knew her," said New Hampshire Executive Council member Daniel St. Hilaire, 43. "My son is 18 and a freshman in college, and I've never sat down with him to talk about it."
A long-time resident o
Source: BBC News
Jan 28, 2011
A 450-year-old Madonna and Child work by Titian has sold for $16.9m (£10.7m) in New York, setting a new auction record for the Renaissance master.
A Sacra Conversazione: The Madonna and Child with Saints Luke and Catherine of Alexandria was sold at Sotheby's to a European telephone bidder.
It beat the previous Titian auction record of £7.5m ($11.9m) paid at Christie's in London in December 1991.
That was the price achieved for the artist's Venus and Adonis
Source: Hampton Roads Pilot Online
Jan 27, 2011
Each day, when the General Assembly is in session, 81-year-old Bud Roderick slips on a pair of white gloves.
At precisely three minutes before the gavel bangs in the House of Delegates, Roderick - dressed always in a blue blazer, gray slacks, white shirt - opens a glass case, tenderly removes a golden mace and carries it on extended arms into the chamber.
In a Capitol rich with pomp, few things embody it more than Virginia's solid silver, 24-karat-coated ceremonial mace
Source: SC Now
Jan 27, 2011
The long and controversial road to bring a statue of Revolutionary War Gen. Francis Marion to Johnsonville may be nearing its end.
Johnsonville City Administrator Scott Tanner said fundraising for the statue is closing in on its original goal of $100,000.
As of Dec. 8, the total amount of pledged funding reached $82,981 with the total amount received being $65,481. The funding includes major donations from Florence County and Santee Cooper.
“We’re getting t
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 27, 2011
Google has partnered with Israel’s Yad Vashem museum, to help digitise the largest collection of Holocaust photos and documents in the world, to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The search giant is working with the Jerusalem-based archive to properly index and store in Google’s cloud 130,000 photographs, some of which are currently available on Yad Vashem’s website, but until now have been difficult to locate and discover online....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 27, 2011
An association fighting for the stolen children and their families, Anadir, presented the demand at the Madrid attorney general's office with evidence including DNA tests and testimony from nurses who admitted stealing babies.
The demand was made on behalf of the victims and families of 261 snatched babies. Anadir lawyer Enrique Vila said many others are expected to join the complaint.
"We get more and more calls from people who have doubts about their origins, bec
Source: AFP
Jan 27, 2011
A French architect campaigning for a new exploration of the 4,500-year-old Great Pyramid of Giza said on Thursday that the edifice may contain two chambers housing funereal furniture.
Jean-Pierre Houdin -- who was rebuffed three years ago by Egypt in his appeal for a probe into how the Pyramid was built -- said 3-D simulation and data from a US egyptologist, Bob Brier, pointed to two secret chambers in the heart of the structure.
The rooms would have housed furniture fo
Source: CS Monitor
Jan 27, 2011
Will the unnamed author of "O," the new novel about a quasi-realistic 2012 presidential campaign, take his or her identity to the grave? Considering the horrific critical reaction to the book – "trite, implausible and decidedly unfunny," grumbled Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times – it might not be a bad idea. And there just so happens to be some precedent.
he anonymous author of a sensational and female-friendly 19th-century bestseller about the dangers of a
Source: AP
Jan 27, 2011
The ancient gods and fantastical creatures going on show in Berlin this week have made an unlikely comeback from near-destruction.
Unearthed in present-day Syria a century ago, the 3,000-year-old basalt statues and stone reliefs in the exhibition, "The Tell Halaf Adventure," shattered into thousands of pieces when their Berlin home was destroyed by bombing in 1943.
The rubble was rescued, then slumbered in the vaults of the capital's Pergamon Museum, then in E
Source: Boston.com
Jan 27, 2011
For years it has been buried, swallowed up by layers of earth, muck, and water, a once-prominent landmark concealed by time.
And the late-1700s wharf might have remained that way — embedded for the ages — had it not been for a recent accidental find.
Last June, as workers excavated portions of Newburyport’s Water Street for the city’s new waste-water operations building, they unearthed large, centuries-old slabs of granite. Based on maps and archaeological research, the
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 27, 2011
Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov has been posthumously proved right over his roundly criticised evolution theory that a type of butterfly migrated from Asia to the New World over a period of millions of years.
The man known primarily for being one of the 20th Century's most famous novelists was dismissed by some as an amateur in the field of insect evolution.
But now a decade long genetic study has proved that, against the odds, Nabokov was right and showed "extraord
