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: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 29, 2010
An incredibly rare fake 20 pounds note printed by the Nazis in a scheme to ruin the British economy by flooding the country with fake cash has emerged.
"Operation Bernhard" was launched before the war and the plan was to print money - just like Gordon Brown's quantitative easing method that was designed to save our economy.
The Germans forced Jews in a concentration camp to forge £134 million worth of notes and they had 100 agents ready to put the money into c
Source: AP
Sep 29, 2010
WASHINGTON – New digital recordings of events in U.S. history and early radio shows are at risk of being lost much faster than older ones on tape and many are already gone, according to a study on sound released Wednesday.
Even recent history — such as recordings from 9/11 or the 2008 election — is at risk because digital sound files can be corrupted, and widely used CD-R discs only last three to five years before files start to fade, said study co-author Sam Brylawski.
Source: Independent (UK)
Sep 29, 2010
Archaeologists excavating at Angers, France
, have discovered the remains of a temple dedicated to the Indo-Iranian god Mithras. The small, rectangular chapel, in which worshippers gathered for banquets and sacrifices dedicated to the god, is dated to the third century AD.
At the sanctuary, a typical bas-relief of the god Mithras wearing his Phrygian cap shows him slaughtering a bull – the so-called tauroctony. The depiction of the god was intentionally damaged in ancient tim
Source: Stars and Stripes
Sep 29, 2010
Sometime in the past three months, a group of unknown scuba divers drifted 135 feet down into the deep blue waters here.
Their destination was the ghostly wreck of the USS Emmons, a World War II destroyer battered by kamikaze planes and scuttled by the U.S. military in 1945.
The divers slipped inside the Emmons, pried loose an engraved metal plate, and disappeared again into the blue.
The looting of the Emmons builder’s plaque – a plate showing construction
Source: BBC
Sep 29, 2010
A diary and sketch book recording life in the trenches of World War One has made £9,600 at auction.
Lieutenant Kenneth Edwin Wootton served with the Tank Corps on the western front, being decorated for bravery.
The volumes contain contemporary entries as well as reflections on what he had seen, along with drawings and paintings of battlefields and tanks.
Hansons Auctioneers, from Derbyshire, said they were special in giving "the spirit" of the war
Source: BBC
Sep 29, 2010
A US state department official has said there is no evidence in government records that oil firm BP sought the early release of the Lockerbie bomber.
Nancy McEldowney was speaking to a senate committee examining claims of a link to an oil deal.
Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi was freed from a Scottish prison on compassionate grounds after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer.
The Scottish government said the entire basis for the hearing had fallen away....
Source: AP
Sep 29, 2010
A Swiss artist's drawing seized by the Nazis during World War II has completed a 73-year journey from the hands of its original German-Jewish owner to the collection of a Jewish charity in Britain, Israel's national museum said Wednesday.
The convoluted passage of Paul Klee's drawing, from its seizure to the present destination, reflects an ongoing quest by Jewish organizations to restore artwork stolen by the Nazis to their rightful owners.
Klee's 1920 drawing, "
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.
Instead, she warned France that it was in technical breach of EU law by failing to properly incorporate a 2004 free mo
Source: AP
Sep 29, 2010
Prosecutors plan to give Osama bin Laden a starring role in the terrorism trial of the first Guantanamo Bay detainee to be tried in civilian courts, a test case in the debate over whether suspects scooped up in the war against terrorism can be prosecuted like everyone else.
Jury selection began Wednesday when 53 prospective jurors were introduced to the defendant, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, who turned briefly toward the group. He has been described by federal authorities as a bomb make
Source: NYT
Sep 29, 2010
...The offer by the Democratic National Committee to the University of Wisconsin-Madison [for the president to visit the campus] would seem like a no-brainer, conjuring images of university officials ostentatiously checking their calendars before saying: It just so happens that the Badgers of Wisconsin are free that day....
Over the decades, two other sitting presidents have visited the campus of this famously liberal, progressive university in this famously liberal, progressive cit
Source: NYT
Sep 29, 2010
MOSCOW — This capital city was on the brink of collapse when Yuri M. Luzhkov became mayor in 1992, with food shortages, trash-strewn streets and rampant crime. Cigarettes, one of the few luxuries available to the masses in the Soviet era, were in such short supply that Muscovites blockaded the city’s main thoroughfares in protest.
Eighteen years later, as Mr. Luzhkov steps down after being unceremoniously fired on Tuesday by Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, he is leaving behi
Source: NYT
Sep 29, 2010
...Depending on whom you talk to in the steep, alpine enclaves of Graubünden, otherwise known as Grisons, the easternmost wedge of the country, there is either strong support or bitter resistance to Romansh, the local language. “When people talk about the death of Romansh,” said Elisabeth Maranta, who for the last 18 years has run a Romansh bookshop, Il Palantin, which sells books in Romansh and in German, “then I say that there are days when I only sell books in Romansh.”...
Romans
Source: NYT
Sep 29, 2010
NEW DELHI — The case has existed almost as long as independent India itself. Dating from 1950, the legal battle between Hindus and Muslims over a religious site in the city of Ayodhya began as a little-noticed title dispute. With a ruling finally expected on Thursday, the case has become something altogether different: a test of India’s secular soul....
Ayodhya is located in the state of Uttar Pradesh. India’s first Mughal ruler, Babur, constructed a domed mosque on the contested pr
Source: NYT
Sep 29, 2010
MIAMI — Arrest the bum and run him out of town: that was the approach of the Miami police when Alphonse Gabriel Capone moved to South Florida in 1928. But when he sued the city for harassment two years later and was then tried for perjury, the authorities ended up looking like chumps....
Why then would the Eleventh Judicial Circuit Court and Miami-Dade County go out of their way to re-enact the perjury trial on Tuesday — in a courthouse already overwhelmed with a backlog of cases? P
Source: Science Daily
Sep 28, 2010
A new paper is set to re-ignite debate over the origins of so-called Homo floresiensis -- the 'hobbit' that some scientists have claimed as a new species of human.
The University of Western Australia's Emeritus Professor Charles Oxnard and his colleagues, in a paper in PLoS ONE have reconfirmed, on the post-cranial skeleton, their original finding on the skull that Homo floresiensis in fact bears the hallmarks of humans -- Homo sapiens -- affected by hypothyroid cretinism.
Source: NY Daily News
Sep 28, 2010
Exactly 234 years ago this month, a Revolutionary War general died from wounds incurred during a defiant showdown with the British - a gripping tale of patriotism that began in Queens.
But the spot where Nathaniel Woodhull was mortally wounded in 1776 does not bear tribute to the first high-ranking colonial officer to become a prisoner of war and die in enemy captivity.
"It needs to be preserved as a reminder of his sacrifice," said John Mauk Hilliard, preside
Source: BBC News
Sep 28, 2010
Sixteen people were murdered by republican paramilitaries and secretly buried in isolated parts of Ireland during the Troubles.
Nine bodies of the people known as the Disappeared remain unfound but advances in technology alongside traditional methods means fresh hope for their families.
Forensic archaeologists work alongside the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims' Remains (ICLVR) to try and find their bodies.
John McIlwaine, who is originall
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 28, 2010
A wartime poster has revealed how a teenage opponent of the Nazis was arrested and executed for listening to the BBC.
The rare World War Two poster declaring the execution of 17-year-old Helmuth Hubener is set to be auctioned off at Mullock's Specialist Auctioneers in Ludlow, Shrops.
The red poster printed with bold, black writing was put on display to the German public to announce the youngster's beheading by guillotine on October 27, 1942....
Source: AP
Sep 28, 2010
In 1939, about 5,000 copies of a book offering hopeless drunks a spiritual path to recovery through 12 steps were released by a fledgling fellowship of alcoholics.
They called it "Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How More Than One Hundred Men Have Recovered From Alcoholism."
Sales were dismal at first, but interest picked up in 1941 with help from a story in The Saturday Evening Post and grew into a recovery revolution for everybody from over-eaters and the
Source: The Canadian Press
Sep 28, 2010
Greek archaeologists have found an ancient skeleton covered with gold foil in a grave on the island of Crete, officials said Tuesday.
Excavator Nicholas Stampolidis said his team discovered more than 3,000 pieces of gold foil in the 7th-century B.C. twin grave near the ancient town of Eleutherna.
Cemeteries there have produced a wealth of outstanding artifacts in recent years.
The tiny gold ornaments, from 1 to 4 centimetres (0.4 to 1.5 inches) long, had be
