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: National Parks Traveler
Nov 26, 2010
Main Street in West Branch will start off the celebration on Friday, December 3, with a tree lighting ceremony as the West Branch High School Chorus sings on the Village Green at 6:30 p.m. During the weekend, downtown West Branch will feature brick fireplaces for roasting marshmallows, homemade doughnuts, photos with Santa (and perhaps one of his reindeer), along with family-friendly holiday crafts and activities to celebrate the season.
Shops will be open for business all weekend.
Source: Time
Nov 26, 2010
Pity poor Leif Ericsson. The Viking explorer may well have been the first European to reach the Americas, but it is a certain Genoan sailor who gets all the glory. Thanks to evidence that has until now consisted only of bare archeological remains and a bunch of Icelandic legends, Ericsson has long been treated as a footnote in American history: no holiday, no state capitals named after him, no little ditty to remind you of the date of his voyage. But a group of Icelandic and Spanish scientists s
Source: BBC News
Nov 26, 2010
Three men have pleaded guilty to the theft of the infamous "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign from the Auschwitz death camp, Polish prosecutors have said.
Under a plea bargain, the men - two Poles and a Swede - accepted prison terms of between 28 and 32 months.
The sign was recovered cut into three pieces three days after its theft in December last year.
Of the six million people, mostly Jews, murdered in the Nazi Holocaust, one million were killed at Ausch
Source: BBC News
Nov 26, 2010
Russia's lower house of parliament has condemned Joseph Stalin by name for the mass execution of Poles at Katyn during World War II.
The Duma declared that the Soviet dictator and other Soviet officials had ordered the "Katyn crime" in 1940.
The statement, which comes weeks before a Russian presidential visit to Poland, was welcomed in Warsaw.
In a stormy debate, Communist MPs opposed the declaration, some seeking to deny Soviet guilt.
Source: BBC News
Nov 26, 2010
Land mammals went from small "vermin" to giant beasts in just 25 million years, according to a new study.
Writing in the journal Science, researchers say mammals rapidly filled the "large animal" void left by the dinosaurs' demise 65 million years ago.
They then went from creatures weighing between 3g and 15kg to a hugely diverse group including 17-tonne beasts.
Further growth was capped by temperature and land availability, the scientis
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Nov 25, 2010
The Netherlands has issued a European Arrest Warrant for an 88-year-old wartime collaborator and killer living in freedom in Germany.
Klass Carel Faber was already sentenced once to life imprisonment for war crimes but escaped over the border into Germany in 1952 where he has remained ever since.
His wartime service for the S.S. gave him German citizienship.
The warrant is seen as the first step in beginning extradition proceedings against Faber, who lives
Source: AFP
Nov 25, 2010
RIYADH (AFP) – US President Barack Obama's Kenyan grandmother says she prayed during a hajj pilgrimage to Mecca for the American leader to convert to Islam, a newspaper revealed on Thursday.
"I prayed for my grandson Barack to convert to Islam," said Sarah Omar, 88, in an interview with Al-Watan Saudi daily held in Jeddah after she had performed hajj.
The paper said that Omar was in Saudi Arabia on pilgrimage along with her son, Obama's uncle Saeed Hussein Oba
Source: Fox News
Nov 25, 2010
JACKSON, Miss. – Mississippi bred some of the worst violence of the civil rights era, yet nearly a half-century after a barrage of atrocities pricked the conscience of the nation, it's one of the few civil rights battleground states with no museum to commemorate the era.
Emmitt Till, a 14-year-old black boy, was bludgeoned to death for "sassing" a white woman and his body dumped in the Tallahatchie River in 1955. Mississippi NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers was gunned d
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 25, 2010
Holocaust survivors welcomed the decision, calling it "a symbolic signal of modern Germany's moral and political maturity", said Elan Steinberg, Vice-President of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants.
The decision follows the publication of a book which reveals the ministry played a more active role in the Holocaust than previously thought.
"The intention is to only include the portraits of diplomats sent abroad since the Fo
Source: AP
Nov 25, 2010
A new species of crocodile that lived 100 million years ago has been identified from a fossil found in Thailand, researchers said Thursday.
Komsorn Lauprasert, a scientist at Mahasarakham University, said the species had longer legs than modern-day crocodiles and probably fed on fish, based on the characteristics of its teeth.
"They were living on land and could run very fast," said Komsorn, who noticed the skull fossil in a museum in the summer of 2006. The 6
Source: BBC News
Nov 25, 2010
The Netherlands has issued a European arrest warrant for a Dutch-born Nazi war criminal, Klaas-Carel Faber, now living in Germany.
Faber, 88, was sentenced to death in 1947 for the deaths of Jews at the Westerbork transit camp but his term was commuted to life.
He escaped in 1952, was given German citizenship and now lives in Bavaria.
Local media say it is the first time the Netherlands has issued a European arrest warrant for a war criminal.
I
Source: BBC News
Nov 25, 2010
3D models of famous landmarks such as Rome's Colosseum have been recreated using millions of pictures from photo-sharing websites such as Flickr.
The images were analysed by a modified home PC and detailed models created in less than a day.
The team behind the system think it may help preserve heritage sites, ensuring they don't end up swamped by tourists.
It was created by a team of researchers from the University of North Carolina and the Swiss university
Source: Tennessean.com
Nov 24, 2010
FRANKLIN — A state grant of $960,000 was awarded Wednesday to help preserve part of a Civil War battleground upon which a strip mall currently exists. The money, awarded by the Tennessee Department of Transportation as an enhancement grant, is to help purchase the property so that preservationists can install a small park.
The one-acre site on the corner of Columbia and Cleburne streets is near a former cotton gin and the Carter House. Historians describe it as the epicenter of the
Source: Fox News
Nov 24, 2010
What Einstein called his worst mistake, scientists are now depending on to help explain the universe.
In 1917, Albert Einstein inserted a term called the cosmological constant into his theory of general relativity to force the equations to predict a stationary universe in keeping with physicists' thinking at the time. When it became clear that the universe wasn't actually static, but was expanding instead, Einstein abandoned the constant, calling it the '"biggest blunder"
Source: NV Daily News
Nov 24, 2010
STRASBURG -- The Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation is interested in purchasing the "Island Farm" property in Strasburg.
The foundation signed an option to buy for the property on Tuesday from the Island Farm's current owner, Doug Boyd, according to John Hutchinson, director of preservation and planning with the battlefields foundation. The option secures the property, which is adjacent to Cedar Creek, for six months while the foundation conducts a feasibility study
Source: San Jose Mercury News
Nov 24, 2010
When you sit down tomorrow to enjoy your Thanksgiving dinner, you're honoring a tradition that stretches back to some of the first Europeans to settle in America. While the pilgrims' story is closely tied to beer, it may have played less of a role than we've come to believe.
Legend has it that the Pilgrims decided to settle at Plymouth Rock, instead of continuing south to Virginia as originally planned, because they had run out of beer. There is a grain -- barley, perhaps -- of trut
Source: AP
Nov 24, 2010
NEW YORK – Walk along the boardwalk on a late autumn day, and Brighton Beach can seem like an old-age home by the sea, where stooped ladies wear rouge like armor and almost everyone lives in the shadow of a difficult past.
Along this Brooklyn outpost's ocean edge — the heart of much community life here — locals are talking about the betrayal they feel after the arrest of 17 people, mostly Brighton Beach residents, on charges that they faked stories of Holocaust survival to profit fr
Source: WaPo
Nov 24, 2010
IN A ROUGH and challenging time, inhabitants of this land - including different peoples not always trusting of one another - come together to give thanks and perhaps to replenish their hopes of better, safer times to come. That's the theme (at least in national legend) of the first Thanksgiving, and it's not a bad one for the fractious year 2010.
The Pilgrims gave thanks to a Protestant God at that first feast, the Indian people mostly to other spiritual forces. But the basic sentim
Source: Live Science
Nov 24, 2010
A carved wooden hand and a marble head of a Greco-Roman god are just two of the 200 artifacts that had been stored away in the national bank of Egypt. The ancient pieces were just sent to the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) this week, according to Farouk Hosny, the minister of culture.
The recovered collection was likely in the possession of foreigners who lived in Egypt during the late 19th and 20th centuries. These antiquities collectors had stored their collection inside box
Source: BBC News
Nov 24, 2010
This week a Darth Vader costume dating from the era of Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back (1980) is to be sold at auction at Christie's in London. We talk to actor Dave Prowse about his time as the man behind the mask.
"We were filming during the hot summer of 1976," says Dave Prowse, the man who was Darth Vader.
"The suit was made from quilted leather. I wore a t-shirt and a pair of swimming trunks underneath - and the heat would rise into the mask
