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 10, 2010
The British Museum has settled a dispute with Iran's national museum over the loan of ancient Persian treasure the Cyrus Cylinder.
In February, the museum in Tehran said it would cut all ties with its British counterpart in protest at a decision to delay an agreed loan of the artefact.
But officials in Tehran now say the 2,500-year-old cylinder has arrived "under special security".
The piece, discovered in Iraq in 1879, will be displayed for four
Source: BBC News
Sep 10, 2010
An ally of German Chancellor Angela Merkel says she will resign from a top party post after suggesting that Poland may have been as responsible as Hitler for the outbreak of World War II.
Erika Steinbach said Poland had mobilised its troops months before the Nazis invaded in September 1939.
Her remarks were criticised by senior politicians including Mrs Merkel.
Mrs Steinbach heads a conservative body representing Germans who were expelled from Eastern Europ
Source: BBC News
Sep 10, 2010
A celestial event seen by the ancient Greeks may be the earliest sighting of Halley's comet, new evidence suggests.
According to ancient writers, a large meteorite smacked into northern Greece between 466BC and 467BC.
The writers also described a comet in the sky at the time the meteorite fell to Earth, but this detail has received little attention, say the researchers.
Comet Halley would have been visible for about 80 days in 466BC, researchers write in th
Source: NJ.com
Sep 9, 2010
SANDYSTON TOWNSHIP — A rutted dirt road that once carried American troops on their way to fight the British in the Revolutionary War became a different sort of battleground when the federal government sued two New Jersey couples who blocked the road where it traversed their property.
Eighteen months later, a settlement is imminent in a case that has rekindled memories of more recent clashes in the picturesque Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area over an abandoned federal dam
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 9, 2010
According to a new book on the famine, Sir Winston ignored pleas for emergency food aid for millions in Bengal left to starve as their rice paddies were turned over to jute for sandbag production and supplies of rice from Burma stopped after Japanese occupation.
Between one and three million died of hunger in 1943.
The wartime leader said Britain could not spare the ships to transport emergency supplies as the streets of Calcutta filled with emaciated villagers from the su
Source: Kansas City Star
Sep 9, 2010
Federal officials have approved a regional Civil War commemorative plan.
The proposal, drafted by local organizers of the Freedom’s Frontier National Heritage Area, seeks to showcase the local conflicts that preceded the larger war. It recently received U.S. Interior Department sanction.
The federal district, established in 2006, now is entitled to apply for additional funds.
Organizers want to use the money to coordinate events interpreting the border war
Source: WV Gazette
Sep 9, 2010
The Sierra Club, the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OVEC), Friends of Blair Mountain and the West Virginia Labor History Association filed a legal challenge today to reverse the decision by the National Park Service to remove the Blair Mountain Battlefield from the National Register of Historic Places. Filed in federal district court in Washington, D.C., the lawsuit alleges that the decision to delist Blair Mountain—the site of a famous 1921 battle in Logan County, West Virginia, involving
Source: BBC
Sep 9, 2010
A rare copy of John James Audubon's Birds of America, billed as the world's most expensive book, is to go on sale at Sotheby's, it has been announced.
Only 119 complete copies of the 19th-century book are known to exist, and 108 are owned by museums and libraries.
A separate edition of the wildlife book sold for a record-breaking price of $8.8m (£5.7m) a decade ago.
The copy going under the hammer in December comes from the collection of Lord Hesketh....
Source: Scotsman
Sep 9, 2010
IT IS one of the most evocative sites in Scotland's turbulent history - the place where Robert the Bruce was crowned King of Scots before his victory over the English at Bannockburn.
The ancient mound known as the Moot Hill in the ground of Scone Palace was once the site of the "lost" abbey of Scone, founded in 1114 by Alexander I, where Scottish kings are believed to have assumed the mantle of power on the Stone of Destiny.
It was revealed yesterday that arc
Source: Fox News
Sep 9, 2010
Nine years have passed since Al Qaeda orchestrated the deadliest attack ever on U.S. soil, claiming nearly 3,000 lives.
But reports from the New York State Health Department suggest the carnage may not have ended that day.
More than 800 responders to the World Trade Center ruins have died -- some, advocates say, from illnesses related to their heroic efforts. One advocate says the actual total of deaths is likely higher -- and growing.
The data is a sober
Source: Fox News
Sep 9, 2010
On the eve of Sept. 11, Fox News has learned the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency has attempted to block a book about the tipping point in Afghanistan and a controversial pre-9/11 data mining project called "Able Danger."
In a letter obtained by Fox News, the DIA says national security could be breached if "Operation Dark Heart" is published in its current form. The agency also attempted to block key portions of the book that claim "Able Danger" success
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 9, 2010
Nazi U-boats dropped saboteurs onto American shores as part of a secret mission during the Second World War, a documentary has claimed.
Eight men landed on beaches off Long Island and Florida with the intention of sabotaging targets across the country over a period of up to two years.
Four men arrived ashore near Manhattan on June 13, 1942 carrying weapons, explosives and primers.
On 17 June 1942 a further four men landed off Ponte Verda Beach in Florida.
Source: WaPo
Sep 9, 2010
In 1909, at the height of the last great immigration wave, when immigrants reached a peak of almost 15 percent of the U.S. population, they made up about half of all public welfare recipients.
They were two-thirds of welfare recipients in Chicago.
In the country's 30 largest cities, meanwhile, more than half of all public school students were the children of immigrants. They were three-fourths in New York.
This history is forgotten in the angry debate over
Source: AP
Sep 9, 2010
An archive in the Netherlands has uncovered what it says is the oldest known share of stock in a company.
The West Fries Archive says the share in the Dutch East India Company is dated Sept. 9, 1606. That's more than two weeks before what had been the oldest known share in the corporation, which is held by a group of German investors....
Source: Time
Sep 9, 2010
A remarkable discovery along the River Thames in London, has uncovered the remains of an incredible creature, equal in both size and proportion to Herman Melville's legendary whale, Moby Dick.
“Moby”, it's believed, has been stranded in Greenwich, along the shore of the River Thames, for almost three centuries. The remains of the colossal creature, buried two meters beneath the earth, also reveal how the animal was butchered for its valuable oils and bones, a common game from the pe
Source: AOL News
Sep 9, 2010
Two nights of violent street demonstrations over the police shooting of a Guatemalan-born day laborer is the legacy of long-simmering distrust between residents in an immigrant neighborhood west of downtown and a police department trying to shake off a dark legacy, experts said today....
And it was in keeping with Los Angeles' long history of civic unrest, from the Watts riots of the 1960s through the Rodney King riot in 1992 to occasional rambunctious, window-breaking street demons
Source: Politico
Sep 9, 2010
This year, September 11 is going to include something different — politics, and lots of it.
On the eve of the ninth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on Washington and New York, all evidence suggests that the once-sacrosanct nature of a day when candidates used to clear their schedules except for the most solemn and intimate of events and take down their television ads has fundamentally changed....
In New York City, dueling rallies are planned by opponents and suppor
Source: Time
Sep 9, 2010
The Holocaust is a crime that never seems to quit. Even as the ranks of survivors grow smaller each year, the impact of that dark passage in history continues to be to be felt. And it's not just the victims who feel the effects; it's their children too.
Psychologists have long been intrigued by the emotional profile of so-called second-generation Holocaust survivors. Parents who lived through the camps were forever changed by the horrors they witnessed. In the 21st century, many - p
Source: WaPo
Sep 9, 2010
For almost a decade, the annual commemoration of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has been seen as a day of national unity and sober remembrance. This year, contentious issues of religious freedom and national identity threaten to color the ninth anniversary of those tragic events.
Controversies over calls to burn the Koran and an ongoing debate over a proposed mosque and Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero in New York are drawing particular attention as the anniversar
Source: AP
Sep 9, 2010
The number of people dying on the nation's roads has fallen to its lowest level in six decades, helped by a combination of seat belts, safer cars and tougher enforcement of drunken driving laws.
The Transportation Department said late Wednesday that traffic deaths fell 9.7 percent in 2009 to 33,808, the lowest number since 1950. In 2008, an estimated 37,423 people died on the highways....
Year-to-year declines in highway deaths have occurred in previous economic downtur
