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: Yahoo News
Nov 15, 2010
PARIS (AFP) – When it comes to meal time, the French do it differently. That is the argument being put to UNESCO as it decides this week whether French cuisine deserves a spot on its intangible heritage list.
"The gastronomic meal of the French" is seen as a strong contender as the UN agency meets in Nairobi from Monday to Friday to consider new submissions for the list, set up in 2003 to safeguard cultural traditions, rituals and crafts.
France's submission t
Source: Yahoo News
Nov 15, 2010
PRAGUE – An international team of scientists opened the tomb of a famous 16th-century Danish astronomer Monday in an effort to shed light on his sudden and mysterious death.
Tycho Brahe, who was born in 1546, has been buried in the Church of Our Lady Before Tyn near Prague's Old Town Square since his death in 1601.
Brahe was in Prague at the invitation of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II after he left his scientific observatory on the island of Hven over disagreements
Source: CS Monitor
Nov 15, 2010
Congressional activity that occurs after an election but before new lawmakers are sworn in, such as that now getting under way in Washington, is called a “lame-duck session.” A lawmaker who has been defeated but gets to return to Capitol Hill and cast votes one last time is called a “lame duck.” Where did this colorful avian-based language originate?
Like many aspects of US politics, it apparently has its roots in England. In the late 1700s, a “lame duck” was a British stockbroker w
Source: Irish Times
Nov 15, 2010
THE IRISH at Gallipoli is one of the most marginalised stories of all, those attending an event commemorating the first World War heard in Dublin on Saturday.
Historian and author Philip Orr said that, while the struggle at Gallipoli was part of the narrative of many nations, describing it as a “founding myth” of Australia and New Zealand and an important part of identity in Northern Ireland, it had only come back into the consciousness of the Republic in recent years.
Source: Independent (UK)
Nov 14, 2010
When "A M", a Spanish lawyer in her forties, talks about the Franco death squads who murdered her grandfather and tossed his body in a roadside ditch where it remained hidden for the next 74 years, any hatred or anger at the perpetrators is either long gone or deeply buried. But a huge reservoir of sorrow remains, together with resentment at extreme bureaucratic insensitivity.
"In the records of the government office where he worked, he's still noted as 'absent from h
Source: Yahoo News
Nov 14, 2010
BERLIN – Germany's defense minister has honored the 395 Jewish soldiers who died serving their homeland in World War I as part of services marking the National Day of Mourning....
Source: Yahoo News
Nov 14, 2010
GRAND FORKS, N.D. (AP)—Duke without the Blue Devil? Notre Dame without the Fighting Irish? Most students and alumni at those proud universities wouldn’t dream of dropping those enduring symbols of school pride.
But that’s exactly what’s happening at the University of North Dakota, where the state’s flagship school is undergoing a mandatory facelift after the NCAA concluded the 80-year-old Fighting Sioux nickname was hostile and abusive.
North Dakota was the nation’s las
Source: WaPo
Nov 14, 2010
In 1969, Richard Nixon was eager to spend time at the Catoctin Mountains retreat reserved exclusively for the fraternal order he had just joined: U.S. presidents. His daughter Julie accompanied him as he whisked into the secluded sylvan enclave, where a jarringly simple sign announced their arrival in "Camp 3."
What happened to "David"? The disappearance of that name erased a dictate of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the GOP general Nixon had served as vice president. It
Source: CNN
Nov 14, 2010
He was an adventurer, a scholar, and possibly a spy -- but as Dutchman Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje proved with his rare 1885 photographs and sound recordings of Mecca, he was also a pioneering multimedia journalist.
Snouck's extraordinary collection of sepia-tinted images of Mecca in a bygone age have gone on display in Dubai ahead of the annual Hajj pilgrimage that originally drew him to the heart of Islam.
Accompanied by crackling, eerie soundscapes captured by Snouck
Source: AP
Nov 14, 2010
It was another day on the rocky hillside, as archaeologists and laborers dug out statues of Buddha and excavated a sprawling 2,600-year-old Buddhist monastery. A Chinese woman in slacks, carrying an umbrella against the Afghan sun, politely inquired about their progress.
She had more than a passing interest. The woman represents a Chinese company eager to develop the world's second-biggest unexploited copper mine, lying beneath the ruins.
The mine is the centerpiece of
Source: Denver Post
Nov 14, 2010
This place is a pit. A giant, oozing, squishy bog of malodorous peat, sticky clay and mud that can suck the boots off your feet. But for anyone looking for a spot where everything went right for paleontology and posterity, it is here at Ziegler Reservoir.
For two weeks, Denver Museum of Nature & Science crews have been pulling out treasures: five or more mastodons, a bison skull with 7-foot horn span, a couple of Columbian mammoths, a giant Jefferson ground sloth (the state's fi
Source: BBC
Nov 14, 2010
Remembrance Sunday services have taken place across the country in memory of Scotland's war dead.
A ceremony was held at the Stone of Remembrance on Edinburgh's Royal Mile, with a march by serving and ex-service personnel and civilian organisations.
HMS Ark Royal crew members led a parade as part of Glasgow's ceremony in George Square, while a service was held in Glasgow Cathedral.
Events also took place in towns and cities across Scotland.
Fir
Source: BBC
Nov 14, 2010
The 70th anniversary of the Coventry Blitz has been marked in the city.
Coventry saw one of Britain's largest raids of World War II on 14 November, 1940. An estimated 1,200 people died with most of the city centre destroyed.
A remembrance service at Coventry Cathedral earlier was attended by dignitaries including the German ambassador and the Mayor of Dresden.
A civic service was later held at the cathedral and an air-raid siren sounded within the buildi
Source: BBC
Nov 14, 2010
Singer James Blunt has told the BBC how he refused an order to attack Russian troops when he was a British soldier in Kosovo.
Blunt said he was willing to risk a court martial by rejecting the order from a US General.
Blunt was ordered to seize an airfield - but the Russians had got there first.
The confusion surrounding the taking of Pristina airfield in 1999 has been written about in political memoirs, and was widely reported at the time.
But
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 14, 2010
Georgi Arbatov, who has died aged 87, was for 30 years the Kremlin's chief "Amerikanist"; a man whose knowledge of the West convinced him that Soviet communism was doomed, he remained an enigmatic figure.
As head of the Moscow US and Canada Institute from 1967 to 1995, Arbatov was, during the Cold War, one of the Soviet leadership's most trusted advisers and propagandists. For more than two decades, under Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko and Mikhail Go
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 14, 2010
The US Secret Service agent who ran to President John F Kennedy’s side when he was shot has described the harrowing seconds after the assassination.
Breaking a silence of nearly half a century, Clint Hill told how he jumped into the president’s car and consoled Jacqueline Kennedy, the First Lady, as she cradled her husband’s head in her lap.
Mr Hill, now in his late 70s, had been assigned to protect Mrs Kennedy as she and the president were driven through Dallas in an
Source: CNN
Nov 14, 2010
Former President George W. Bush defended his administration's handling of the war in Afghanistan on Sunday, telling CNN that some NATO allies who contributed troops to the conflict "turned out not to be willing to fight."
In an interview with CNN's Candy Crowley, Bush strongly refuted criticism that his administration took its "eye off the ball" in Afghanistan when he ordered troops to invade Iraq. He said he ordered American forces to overthrow Iraqi dictator Sa
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 13, 2010
Mark Twain's autobiography, released on Monday 100 years after his death, has reopened old wounds, as Philip Sherwell reports.
But in the his final life work, a 429-page manuscript that has gone unpublished for a century, Twain claims it was he who was "hypnotised" by Isabel Van Kleek Lyon, his once trusted secretary, personal assistant and confidante.
The diatribe against Miss Lyon, whom he denounced as a "forger, thief, drunkard, traitor and salacious
Source: NYT
Nov 13, 2010
France’s national railway, the S.N.C.F., has issued its first public apology for its involvement in the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews to Nazi death camps during World War II. Guillaume Pepy, the railway’s director, expressed the company’s “profound sorrow and regret for the consequences of its acts” in a statement released last week but first reported Friday.... “
Source: NYT
Nov 13, 2010
YANGON, Myanmar — Myanmar’s pro-democracy leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, was freed from house arrest on Saturday, setting her on the path to a possible new confrontation with the generals who had kept her out of the public eye for 15 of the past 21 years.
As she stepped to the gate of the lakeside compound where she had been confined, she was greeted by thousands of jubilant supporters, some of them in tears.
Waving and beaming in a long-sleeve pink shirt and a purple sa
