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
Sep 30, 2010
The Royal Spanish Academy has invited people around the world to record short chunks of the classic novel Don Quixote and upload them to YouTube.
Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote is often described as Spain's most famous novel - and yet few have ever read it.
Now the academy, the official guardian of the Spanish language, has divided the work into more than 2,000 segments.
They will be read and recorded - in Spanish only - by volunteers visiting a special Y
Source: NYT
Sep 30, 2010
ERFURT, Germany — The air here used to stink from the low-grade coal people burned for heat. That is easy to forget 20 years after East and West reunited and well more than a trillion dollars has been spent to prop up and rebuild the dilapidated region that was the German Democratic Republic....
“You could barely breathe,” said Ms. Kummer, a lifelong resident of this history-rich city, where Martin Luther studied, Napoleon met Czar Alexander and the first small step toward unificati
Source: NYT
Sep 30, 2010
When drafts of a United Nations study recently surfaced accusing Rwandan forces of committing atrocities against Hutu refugees in Congo in the 1990s — crimes that could constitute acts of genocide — the Rwandan government protested vociferously. It even threatened to withdraw its peacekeepers from Sudan and elsewhere if the report was published....
In the fall of 1994, just after nearly a million people had been killed in the Rwandan genocide, a team of United Nations investigators
Source: Jewish Exponent
Sep 30, 2010
The sun rose over Mount Sinai, illuminating the other-worldly landscape and imbuing the unusually thin parchment with a translucent glow. Reciting the Ten Commandments on the spot in Egypt that represents perhaps the best guess of where God, according to tradition, revealed the law to Moses amounted to a sort of homecoming for a 200-year-old Torah scroll, recalled Rabbi Marcia Prager.
A decade ago, the Mount Airy religious leader and her husband, Jack Kessler, a cantor, led an inter
Source: Kennebec Morning Sentinel
Sep 30, 2010
MADISON -- The town can't change the history that comes with the site of one of the largest slaughters of native Americans in Maine. But it can mend the landscape and teach people about the area's significance.
"The Pines," an area next to the Kennebec River on Father Rasle Road, is near where the Norridgewock Indians, a band of the Abenaki tribe, were massacred by the English in 1724. The conflict, pitting the French and Abenakis against the English, marked the end of the
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 30, 2010
Worms seven feet in length, the first documented case of a hermaphrodite and the tale of a sailor who was saved from death by tobaccco smoke have emerged in a catalogue of bizarre Naval doctors' records disclosed by the National Archives.
In the calm lines of the notebooks' closely spaced copperplate are records of lightning strikes, gun fights and mutinous crews.
There are courts martial, shipwrecks and even murder during the long ocean journeys undertaken by the docto
Source: Salon
Sep 30, 2010
A new poll came out this week and, as you might have already read, Bill Clinton is America's most popular politician.
That's how the findings of the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey are being reported, anyway. In reality, the poll only found that Clinton is more popular than Barack Obama, Mike Huckabee, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Harry Reid, Sarah Palin and Nancy Pelosi -- the only other politicians who were included in the mix. Still, there
Source: LiveScience
Sep 29, 2010
Rediscovered letters and postcards highlight the fierce competition among scientists who discovered DNA's famous double-helix structure and unraveled the genetic code.
Francis Crick and James D. Watson shared a 1962 Nobel Prize with Maurice Wilkins for their work on revealing the structure of the DNA molecule that encodes instructions for the development and function of living beings. But formerly lost letters kept by Crick add more color to the well-known rivalries between Wilkins
Source: USA Today
Sep 29, 2010
WASHINGTON — A letter from two senators is the only thing blocking congressional approval of a decade-long effort to build a women's history museum in the nation's capital.
Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Jim DeMint, R-S.C., have placed a "hold" on a bill that would sell land near the Smithsonian Institution for the National Women's History Museum. A "hold" is a Senate practice that prevents bills from passing with unanimous consent — and implicitly threatening a
Source: Huffington Post
Sep 29, 2010
Henry Kissinger, who helped steer Vietnam policy during the war's darkest years, said Wednesday he is convinced that "most of what went wrong in Vietnam we did to ourselves" – beginning with underestimating the tenacity of North Vietnamese leaders.
Offering a somber assessment of the conflict, which ended in 1975 with the humiliating fall of Saigon, Kissinger lamented the anguish that engulfed a generation of Americans as the war dragged on.
And he said the co
Source: Downtown Express
Sep 29, 2010
Revolutionary war hero Nathan Hale was honored last Wednesday in a ceremony at City Hall Park. The event marked the 234th anniversary of Hale’s execution at the hands of the British soldiers in 1776.
A wreath was laid at the foot of the 13-foot bronze statue of Hale depicting the 21-year-old patriot’s final moments....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 29, 2010
A new computer game based on the Iron Curtain has been accused of being 'tasteless and inappropriate' by victims of the former East Germany regime.
The game is called 1378 KM, named after the 1,378 kilometre long Iron Curtain that stretched across Europe from 1945 to 1991.
It is based on the real-life tragedy of 1,000 victims from the German Democratic Republic who were shot while trying to escape.
Game players become border guards along the hated 'inner Ge
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 29, 2010
The European Commission has stepped back from formally accusing France of carrying out racist expulsions of Roma gipsies despite previously comparing the policy to Nazi deportations.
Viviane Reding, the EU’s fundamental rights commissioner, dropped her previous accusation that the “disgraceful” policy amounted to illegal discrimination against gipsies....
Source: AP
Sep 29, 2010
KIEV, Ukraine — Hundreds of people gathered in the Ukrainian capital on Wednesday to mark the 69th anniversary of the Nazi massacre of tens of thousands of Jews.
President Viktor Yanukovych, government officials and relatives of the victims laid flowers at the monument to those killed by the Nazis in the Babi Yar ravine in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev.
More than 33,700 Jews were shot in Babi Yar over the course of two days, beginning Sept. 29, 1941, one of the most horri
Source: Life Site News
Sep 29, 2010
ROME, September 29, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The late Polish midwife Stanislawa Leszczynska will be honoured in a display at the 5th World Prayer Congress for Life in Rome next month for her heroic efforts in saving hundreds of newborn babies from a brutal end at Auschwitz.
Before she arrived at the camp in April 1943, all the newborns of prisoners in the infamous Nazi concentration camp were drowned and allowed to be ripped apart by rats before his or her mother’s eyes.
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Sep 29, 2010
The ancient language of Babylonian can be heard for the first time in almost 2,000 years after Cambridge University scholars posted readings and poems online.
Babylonian, one of the chief languages of Ancient Mesopotamia, dates back as far as the second millennium BC but died out around 2,000 years ago.
However, Cambridge historians have resurrected the ancient tongue by discovering how the language was pronounced and spoken.
Researchers have now recorded r
Source: NYT
Sep 29, 2010
Much of the debate about whether to extend the Bush tax cuts has focused on big economic issues: how the decision might affect the fragile economy, the widening federal deficit and hiring by small businesses....
Today’s tax code not only has far lower rates than it had a half century ago, it has fewer brackets — just six. Mr. Obama’s plan would raise the top bracket (which affects income for individual filers who earn over $382,550) to 39.6 percent, from 35 percent. It would also ra
Source: NYT
Sep 29, 2010
When Rome magistrates opened an investigation last week into the Vatican bank over transparency issues, it was not only a bold assertion of state over church, it also pointed to one of the Vatican’s greatest continuing challenges: facing modernity.
As in the sexual abuse scandal, in which for years the Vatican appeared to declare itself outside — or above — civil law, this time the issue is the Vatican’s famously opaque finances, which for the first time are being held to tightened
Source: National Geographic
Sep 29, 2010
Sorry, archaeologists. A new study says animal footsteps might have made artifacts seem thousands of years older than they are.
Around the world, the hooves of water buffaloes, goats, and other large animals may have propelled countless Stone Age artifacts back in time, at least as far as archaeologists are concerned.
In wet areas, wild or domestic animals' heavy footfalls can push stone artifacts deep into the ground, making them seem older than they really are—i
Source: Prague Daily Monitor
Sep 29, 2010
Some Czech shops selling things for modellers offer figures of Nazi leaders, including Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, Radiozurnal station of public Czech Radio (CRo) reported Monday.
The shop owners say they sell the figures as part of a collection of World War Two leading figures and that this is not meant as propagation of Nazism.
The co-owner of one such shop, Matej Pecka, has decided to withdraw the figure of World War Two Bohemia and Moravia
