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: AP
Oct 22, 2010
The British government Friday released a formerly secret autopsy report in an attempt to end speculation that the 2003 death of a government weapons scientist at the center of a controversy over the Iraq War was not a suicide.
The lengthy report reaffirms that David Kelly slit his wrist after he was exposed as the source of a British Broadcasting Corp. report that accused then Prime Minister Tony Blair's office of "sexing up" prewar intelligence to justify the 2003 invasio
Source: AP
Oct 22, 2010
An anonymous benefactor in New York City stuffed $10,000 in cash into a 9/11 donation box at the World Trade Center.
Joe Daniels, president of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, tells the New York Post that officials found 99 $100 bills and five 20s in the box on Tuesday night.
The box hangs on a wall at the 9/11 memorial preview site....
Source: CNN
Oct 22, 2010
Dick Cheney is certainly not one to hold back on how he really feels. George W. Bush, on the other hand, has been mum.
Despite their differing approaches to handling the post-White House years, their absence on the campaign trail has been obvious.
Cheney also has been dealing with health troubles -- undergoing heart surgery in July and spending the bulk of his time since then recovering.
But that is not stopping him. The 69-year-old soon will embark on a 1
Source: Reuters
Oct 21, 2010
EGELSBACH, Germany (Reuters) - The metal plaques, called Stolpersteine, or "stumble stones," are set into the ground at my father's ancestral home in this picturesque village south of Frankfurt.
The squares, 10 cm by 10 cm (4 inches by 4 inches), are barely conspicuous, but the words etched in brass seem to cry out for memory of the home's last five Jewish inhabitants....
The creation of Cologne artist Gunter Demnig, the Stolpersteine are set at homes of victi
Source: Time.com
Oct 21, 2010
Luxor has long been Egypt's prize possession. It was here that the ancient Egyptians at one time built their capital of Thebes; where Pharoahs dedicated massive temples to their gods; and where Howard Carter unearthed the world-famous boy King, Tutankhamen, in his tomb full of riches in 1922. "It has been one of the biggest and most famous tourist attractions for at least 200 years."says Francesco Bandarin, the head of the World Heritage Center at UNESCO. Adds Mansour Boraik, who overs
Source: Discovery News
Oct 21, 2010
Days before he was assassinated in Dallas, John F. Kennedy asked his secret service agents to give him space to campaign.
Blaine's revelations, as well as those from JFK's secret service agents in a forthcoming book, "The Kennedy Detail" and in a series of interviews with the Discovery Channel, reveal how challenging this charismatic president could be to protect and how shaken his murder left those whose job it was to keep him safe.
They were well trained and
Source: The Huffington Post
Oct 21, 2010
A Secret Service agent came close to shooting President Lyndon Johnson just hours after Kennedy's assassination, according to "The Kennedy Detail", a new book that claims to be the first account of the tragedy by members of Kennedy's security detail.
Though Kennedy assassination buffs already have their bookcases full with countless accounts of the assassination, the book by retired agent Gerald Blaine does contain some new revelations.
The book also includes
Source: AP
Oct 21, 2010
A fossil collector may have found a prehistoric bone with art work on it in Florida.
Last year, James Kennedy cleaned off a 15-inch bone he had found two years earlier. The lines on it looked like a four-inch etching of a walking mammoth with tusks.
University of Florida researchers examined the etching with an electron microscope. Their tests showed it was genuine....
Source: NPR
Oct 21, 2010
Descendants of Revolutionary War soldiers who fought in one of history's most important battles can now find their American ancestors in a computer database, and some day they might be guided by GPS to the exact spots where their relatives faced musket fire, cannon barrages and bayonet charges.
History buffs spent 12 years gleaning information from 200-year-old military documents to assemble the list of thousands who participated in the Battles of Saratoga. The database, recently un
Source: NYT
Oct 21, 2010
BELGRADE — After 15 years on the run — sometimes in plain sight at soccer matches and weddings and sometimes deep in the fabric of this secretive city — Europe’s most wanted war-crimes suspect, Ratko Mladic, is being hidden by no more than a handful of loyalists, most probably in a neighborhood of Communist-era housing towers, according to investigators and some of his past associates.
The diminished circumstances of the former Bosnian Serb general, who once was protected by scores
Source: Minnesota Public Radio
Oct 21, 2010
Rwanda's top prosecutor wants an American professor to appear in a Rwandan court on charges of genocide denial.
Martin Ngoga says Peter Erlinder will be charged with denying Rwanda's genocide. Erlinder, a law professor at the William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota, was arrested in May and was granted bail in June....
Source: WaPo
Oct 21, 2010
Voltaire said history is a pack of tricks we play upon the dead. He should have added that the living are victims, too.
Virginia fourth-graders are the latest targets of historical misinformation. A textbook distributed to students last month included the gross falsehood that two battalions of African American soldiers fought for the Confederacy under famed Gen. Stonewall Jackson.
This wasn't just a minor factual error, like saying that Jackson lost his right arm at the
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 21, 2010
The landscape picture was given to Roland Davis, an airman who guarded Hess after the Second World War, as a keepsake.
Mr Davis joined the RAF as a rear gunner on Lancaster bomber and at the end of his career he guarded Hess in Berlin where the pair became friends.
The signed painting is thought to be of a Bavarian scene from Hess's childhood. The rest of the collection includes a helmet, gas mask, flight records and medals.
It is part of a collection of m
Source: AP
Oct 20, 2010
GENEVA (AP) -- Archaeologists in the Swiss city of Zurich have unearthed a 5,000-year-old door that may be one of the oldest ever found in Europe.
The ancient poplar wood door is "solid and elegant" with well-preserved hinges and a "remarkable" design for holding the boards together, chief archaeologist Niels Bleicher said Wednesday.
Using tree rings to determine its age, Bleicher believes the door could have been made in the year 3,063 B.C. - aroun
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 20, 2010
A senior member of the Australian trade union movement has come under fire after he claimed that the terrorist attacks on Sept 11, 2001 were part of an American conspiracy.
His call was prompted by an ongoing debate in the Australian parliament over the war in Afghanistan.
Mr Bracken told ABC Radio 774 that Australia should instead hold an inquiry into the events of 9/11, claiming that elements of the former Bush administration, US military and security services were
Source: Salon
Oct 20, 2010
The influential conservative publishing house Regnery has just released a book that argues, contrary to popular belief, that aviator and political leader Charles Lindbergh was neither anti-semitic nor pro-German, but rather was the victim of an unfounded smear campaign by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.According to promotional material, the book,"Lindbergh vs. Roosevelt: The Rivalry That Divided America" by
Source: NYT
Oct 20, 2010
When people compare New York to Rome, the reference is not usually meant to be flattering. But our town shares at least one inspiring quality with the Eternal City. Just about anytime you knock an old wall down, there is an even older wall behind it.
Columbus Circle mosaic The old mosaic’s guilloche pattern can be discerned under the decorative plaque by Grueby Faience.
Another keyhole to the past opened recently on the uptown platform of the No. 1 train at the 59th Street-Co
Source: NYT
Oct 20, 2010
NAJRAN, Saudi Arabia — Among the ruins on the edge of this ancient oasis city are deep trenches littered with bones. That, local people say, is all that remains of one of the great atrocities of antiquity, when thousands of Christians were herded into pits here and burned to death by a Jewish tyrant after they refused to renounce their faith.
The massacre, which took place in about A.D. 523, is partly shadowed by myth and largely unknown to the outside world. But it has become centr
Source: NYT
Oct 20, 2010
His ancestors were slaves. They worked this flat plantation land just west of the snaking Mississippi, chopping sugar cane with their machetes. They and some of their descendants lived in the plantation’s “quarters.” And when they died, most were buried here in a small patch of earth, for blacks only.
Ernest J. Gaines, 77, the acclaimed author of “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” and “A Lesson Before Dying,” is part of the fifth generation of this family to be born on the Riv
Source: ABC News
Oct 20, 2010
When you're President of the United States, you can lose a vote, you can lose popular support, and you can lose a round of golf. But you're never, ever supposed to lose the biscuit.
That's what they call the card the president is meant to keep close at hand, bearing the codes that he has to have in order to launch a nuclear attack. And for several months during the Clinton administration, a former top military officer says they lost the biscuit.
Gen. Hugh Shelton, who
