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: Columbus Dispatch
Oct 3, 2010
Two more flags that flew as Ohioans fought and died during the Civil War are being repaired and restored to their former glory thanks to private donations.
Although flags from the 5th U.S. Colored Infantry and the 4th Ohio Volunteer Cavalry will be saved, hundreds of others are falling to pieces at the Ohio Historical Society because of lack of funds to preserve them. Nearly 150 years later, the smell of gunpowder still clings to some.
The small "flank" flag f
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 3, 2010
Archaeologists have unearthed the upper part of a statue of a powerful pharaoh who ruled nearly 3,400 years ago, Egypt's Ministry of Culture has announced.
A ministry statement said the team of Egyptian archaeologists discovered the 4-foot by 3-foot statue of Amenhotep III in Kom el-Hittan, the site of the pharaoh's mortuary temple in the southern city of Luxor.
The temple is one of the largest on the west bank of the Nile in Luxor....
Source: France24
Oct 3, 2010
AFP - A French Nazi hunter announced on Sunday the discovery of the original document establishing WWII restrictions for Jews showing that Vichy leader Philippe Petain made stringent measures even harsher.
"The discovery of this plan is fundamental. This document establishes Petain's decisive role in drawing up this position in the most aggressive way, revealing (Petain's) deep anti-Semitism," Serge Klarsfeld told AFP....
The pencilled-in changes to the docume
Source: BBC
Oct 3, 2010
Germany has been celebrating the 20th anniversary of its reunification.
Chancellor Angela Merkel led the official celebrations, hosted by the northern city of Bremen and attended by tens of thousands of people.
Capitalist West and communist East Germany merged on 3 October 1990, nearly a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall which divided them.
Sunday is also the day Germany makes the last payment on debt stemming from reparations imposed after World War I
Source: Food Consumer
Oct 3, 2010
(This is a revised version with more information on the diseases added)
U.S. officials apologized on Friday for unethical medical studies that a federal doctor conducted 64 years ago among prisoners, soldiers and mental patients in Guatemala. The studies were conducted without the consent of the “participants.”
The studies, performed between 1946 and 1948, were meant to determine if use of penicillin right after sex would be effective in preventing sexually transmitted dise
Source: HNN Staff
Oct 3, 2010
Many media outlets have noted that John C. Cutler, the doctor who led the U.S. Public Health Service syphilis experiment on Guatemalan inmates and later participated in the Tuskegee experiment, defended Tuskegee well into the 1990s, most famously for a 1993 PBS Nova documentary entitled
Source: WaPo
Oct 2, 2010
A Virginia collector has donated to the Library of Congress the largest trove of Civil War-era photographs depicting average soldiers that the institution has received in at least 50 years, officials said last week.
The stunning photographs - small, elegant ambrotypes and tintypes - show hundreds of the young men who fought and died in the war, often portrayed in the innocence and idealism before the experience of battle.
The pictures, almost 700 in all, make up the bul
Source: CNN.com
Oct 2, 2010
Britain recognized Druidry, an ancient belief that worships deities that take different forms in nature, as a religion for the first time and gave it charitable status on Saturday.
"There is a sufficient belief in a supreme being or entity to constitute a religion for the purposes of charity law," declared the Charity Commission for England and Wales in response to the Druid Network's application.
The decision will give the neo-pagan religion, known for its cl
Source: Fox News
Oct 2, 2010
Justin Taylan boots up his laptop computer in the climate-controlled comfort of a cafe and clicks on photographs of a World War II airplane lying in pieces amid a steamy jungle on the other side of the world.
He browses through a series of digital images of the vine-entangled wreckage of the American C-47B Dakota, which slammed into a mountain in Malaysia during a supply mission in November 1945. The cockpit, believed to still contain the remains of the three-member crew, lies embed
Source: AP
Oct 2, 2010
ISTANBUL – About a week ago, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared to the United Nations that most people in the world believe the United States was behind the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
To many people in the West, the statement was ludicrous, almost laughable if it weren't so incendiary. And surveys show that a majority of the world does not in fact believe that the U.S. orchestrated the attacks.
However, the belief persists strongly among a minority
Source: Yahoo News
Oct 2, 2010
LONDON (AFP) – Britain has recognised druidry as an official religion for the first time, thousands of years after the Celtic pagan faith emerged in Europe, the country's charity commission said Saturday.
The Druid Network, an organisation representing the religion in Britain, was granted charitable status in a decision that not only gives it tax breaks but also lets the religion take its place alongside more mainstream beliefs.
"This has been a long hard struggle,
Source: The Root
Oct 2, 2010
[Linda Villarosa directs the journalism program at City College in New York and is a regular contributor to The Root.]
On Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius apologized for a diabolical human experiment conducted in Central America 64 years ago and engineered by the U.S. government. From 1946 to 1948, scientists deliberately infected Guatemalan research subjects with syphilis to study how well penicillin worked.
Source: NewsInEnglish.no
Oct 1, 2010
The most well-preserved pottery from the Stone Age ever found in Norway has turned up in an unspoiled dwelling site not far from Kristiansand. The find is considered an archaeological sensation.
The discovery of a “sealed” Stone Age house site from 3500 BC has stirred great excitement among archaeologists from Norway’s Museum of Cultural History at the University in Oslo. The settlement site at Hamresanden, close to Kristiansand’s airport at Kjevik in Southern Norway, looks like it
Source: BBC
Oct 1, 2010
US testing that infected hundreds of Guatemalans with gonorrhoea and syphilis more than 60 years ago was a "crime against humanity", Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom has said.
President Barack Obama has apologised for the medical tests, in which mentally ill patients and prisoners were infected without their consent.
Mr Obama told Mr Colom the 1940s-era experiments ran contrary to American values, Guatemala said.
The US has promised an investigat
Source: CNN.com
Oct 1, 2010
The Tuskegee syphilis experiment of the 20th century is often cited as the most famous example of unethical medical research. Now, evidence has emerged that it overlapped with a shorter study, also sponsored by U.S. government health agencies, in which human subjects were unknowingly being harmed by participating in an experiment.
Research from Wellesley College professor Susan Reverby has uncovered evidence of an experiment in Guatemala that infected people with sexually transmitte
Source: NYT
Oct 1, 2010
The Tea Party is a thoroughly modern movement, organizing on Twitter and Facebook to become the most dynamic force of the midterm elections.
But when it comes to ideology, it has reached back to dusty bookshelves for long-dormant ideas.
It has resurrected once-obscure texts by dead writers — in some cases elevating them to best-seller status — to form a kind of Tea Party canon. Recommended by Tea Party icons like Ron Paul and Glenn Beck, the texts are being quoted every
Source: The Canadian Press
Oct 1, 2010
Atop an oak-shaded hill at Mount Hope Cemetery, an epitaph chiselled in Latin on Col. Nathaniel Rochester's headstone whispers on the wind: "If you seek his monument, look around you."
Mount Hope, America's oldest municipal park-garden graveyard, is a refuge not only for the departed. Curious souls still tramp through the 78-hectare arboretum by the tens of thousands each year, among them picnickers, bird watchers, joggers and history buffs.
In the Romantic er
Source: The Boston Globe
Oct 1, 2010
Historians at the President Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site in Plymouth Notch, Vt., which houses the president’s collection, are trumpeting the discovery of the tablecloth that was used during Silent Cal’s makeshift swearing-in ceremony in 1923.
Coolidge, who had served as the governor of Massachusetts from 1919 to 1921 before becoming vice president, was visiting his family at his childhood home in Plymouth Notch when he received the news of President Warren Harding’s death.
Source: BBC
Oct 1, 2010
Turkish nationalists have said Muslim prayers inside the ruins of a historic Christian cathedral in a move likely to cause friction with Armenians.
Hundreds of nationalists travelled to the ruins of the 11th Century cathedral at Ani in eastern Turkey to commemorate a Muslim victory there.
The action is being seen as a response to the reopening of another historic Armenian church last month in Turkey.
Ani, an uninhabited archaeological site, was once the cap
Source: BBC
Oct 1, 2010
North and South Korea have agreed to hold another round of reunions of families split by the countries' war in the 1950s, officials say.
One hundred families from each side of the border will be allowed to meet their relatives from 30 October at a mountain resort in the North.
There are no communications across the border for ordinary citizens.
The meetings would be the first since the South accused the North of sinking one of its warships in March.
