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
Aug 20, 2010
BERLIN (AP) — Germans have long harbored an obsession about protecting privacy, with memories of Nazi-era denouncements of neighbors and East German secret police snooping still alive. Now they have found a new target for their fears: Google "Street View."
Under strong government pressure, the Internet giant made Germany the only country where people can request to have images of their homes deleted from the project before it goes online in November, along with other conce
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 20, 2010
A little-known skirmish between a downed German bomber crew and a group of British soldiers, the last ever military conflict to take place on British soil, is finally being marked 70 years after the event.
Most history books have Bonny Prince Charlie's 1746 defeat at Culloden as the final battle to occur in this country.
But the virtually unheard of Battle of Graveney Marsh in the Kent countryside 194 years later was actually the last action involving a foreign enemy.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 20, 2010
The world's oldest working mechanical clock is to be fitted with an electric motor for the first time after being wound by hand every week for more than 600 years.
The mechanism on the Clock, at Wells Cathedral in Somerset, will be set manually for the last time next week, following the retirement of the last member of a family who has maintained it for almost a century.
Experts say the clock, which tracks the sun across the sky and records the stages of the moon, is a
Source: BBC News
Aug 20, 2010
A toilet described as once having belonged to US author JD Salinger has been put on sale on the online auction site eBay for $1m (£644,000).
The vendor says he obtained the "used toilet commode" from a couple who now own the former home of the Catcher in the Rye author.
It comes "uncleaned and in its original condition", the ad for it states.
"Who knows how many of [his] stories were thought up and written while Salinger sat on this
Source: BBC
Aug 20, 2010
A toilet described as once having belonged to US author JD Salinger has been put on sale on the online auction site eBay for $1m (£644,000).
The vendor says he obtained the "used toilet commode" from a couple who now own the former home of the Catcher in the Rye author.
It comes "uncleaned and in its original condition", the ad for it states.
The toilet comes with a letter from Joan Littlefield, attesting that the toilet was removed duri
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 20, 2010
Two infant skeletons wrapped in 1930s newspapers and placed in doctor's bags have been found inside an unclaimed suitcase in a Los Angeles apartment building.
The skeletons, believed to be decades-old remains of fetuses or infants, were discovered in the trunk inscribed with the initials JMB.
Other things found in the trunk included cigarettes, a green bowl, black and white photos, letters, a book club membership certificate inscribed Jean M. Barrie and ticket stubs fr
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 20, 2010
The Russian state has been given a month by a court to prove it owns the Kremlin after descendants of Ivan the Terrible filed a lawsuit to stake their claim to the Moscow landmark.
The Princes Foundation, an organisation representing the descendants of Rurik, a ninth century prince whose eponymous dynasty ruled until 1598, has argued that its ancestors built and lived in the 69-acre Kremlin complex and that it should now be returned to their ownership.
The prince said
Source: CNN
Aug 20, 2010
The Democratic National Committee is out Friday with a new television ad that looks forward to the November elections and closes with a cameo from former President George W. Bush.
Entitled "Big Choices," the ad frames the midterm elections as a choice between the policies of President Obama and national Democrats and the policies of Bush and the GOP. It captures a view of idealistic Americana –rolling fields of wheat, windmills, a teacher in a classroom, a welder in a fact
Source: LA Times
Aug 20, 2010
Who was Jean M. Barrie, the woman whose steamer trunk stored for decades in the basement of a Los Angeles apartment building contained the mummified remains of two babies?
That's the question investigators were mulling Thursday, two days after the babies — wrapped in newspapers from the 1930s — were discovered when the basement was being cleared out. As the county coroner began an autopsy on the bodies Thursday, Los Angeles Police Department detectives were left to sift through a cr
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Aug 20, 2010
Under the fire of Nazi guns and wading through a sea turning crimson with the blood of fallen colleagues, Bill Millin struggled towards the Normandy sands.
Waist deep in water, he led the commandos of the 1st Special Service Brigade on to the beach as they fought to their deaths on the most famous day of World War II.
Amid the clatter of battle and dreadful cries of the injured, Millin only just caught the five words that turned him into a hero. 'Give us "Highland Laddi
Source: BBC News
Aug 20, 2010
Scientists working in Chernobyl have found a way to predict which species there are likely to be most severely damaged by radioactive contamination.
The secret to a species' vulnerability, they say, lies in its DNA.
This discovery could reveal which species are most likely to decline or even become extinct in response to other types of environmental stress.
The researchers published their findings in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology.
Profess
Source: BBC News
Aug 20, 2010
The UK government has urged Libya not to celebrate the first anniversary of the release of the Lockerbie bomber.
Scottish ministers released Abdelbasset Ali al-Megrahi, who has cancer, citing medical advice that three months was a "reasonable" life expectancy estimate.
He got a hero's welcome in Tripoli and the Foreign Office said similar scenes would be deeply insensitive to families of the 270 people killed in 1988.
The Scottish government said
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 20, 2010
US senators last night renewed their call for full independent probe into the decision to free the Lockerbie bomber.
Democratic Senators Robert Menendez, Frank Lautenberg, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand made their appeal in letters to Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond and Prime Minister David Cameron.
The Americans have alleged that Scottish authorities may have let Megrahi return to his native Libya because of pressure from energy giant BP, eager to safeguard
Source: AOL News
Aug 19, 2010
(Aug. 18) -- Descendants of Russia's first ruling dynasty have gone to court to reclaim their ancestral lands – specifically, the Kremlin.
On Monday, the Moscow Arbitration Court decided the case will be heard Oct. 18. The plaintiff is the Princes' Foundation for the Advancement of Religious and National Consensus, founded in May 2009 by Valery Kubarev, who traces his lineage to the Rurik dynasty. It was under the reign of Rurik grand princes, Kubarev claims, that the Kremlin was co
Source: AP
Aug 19, 2010
SAN DIEGO – Salvage divers gently cleared away silt and mud covering a WWII dive bomber buried in the bottom of the San Diego reservoir, carefully working Thursday to lift the rare plane from the water 65 years after it was ditched during a training run.
Bob Metz, 84, who watched the painstaking work, said he recalls his oldest brother, Sgt. Joseph Metz, telling about how he and the pilot — who have both since died — managed to swim ashore to safety, then hitchhiked back to the near
Source: Montreal Gazette
Aug 19, 2010
A debate still smoulders over one of the most ambitious, and disastrous, military endeavours in Canadian history that took place here 68 years ago today.
The Dieppe raid, to be marked here by Canadian and local French officials and some veterans with a series of wreath-laying events and an outdoor mass, is still viewed by some as a useless waste of lives.
But Antony Beevor, considered by some the most prominent military historian in the world, supports the argument that
Source: WaPo
Aug 19, 2010
Okay, liberty lovers -- time for your summer-slowdown pop quiz:
True or false? The following sentence appears in the U.S. Constitution:
"No freeman shall be taken, imprisoned . . . or in any other way destroyed . . . except by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land. To no one will we sell, to none will we deny or delay, right or justice."
...False.
In 1215, scribes for King John of England wrote that declaration,
Source: NYT
Aug 19, 2010
The Moon is shrinking.
In making the announcement, scientists were quick to add that the Moon has not shrunk by much, that the shrinking may have occurred over a billion years, and that the Moon will not shrink out of view in the future.
“The kind of radius change and shrinking we’re describing here is so small that you would never notice it,” said Thomas R. Watters of the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, during
Source: Politico
Aug 19, 2010
The recent call by Senate Republicans to hold hearings on revising the 14th Amendment seemed to introduce a new wrinkle in the polarizing debate over illegal immigration.
Or did it?
In the mid-1990s, House Judiciary Committee panels held two separate hearings on birthright citizenship, the policy protected under the 14th Amendment that automatically grants citizenship to people born in the United States.
What's striking is that the hearings on GOP-sponsored
Source: Reuters
Aug 19, 2010
Archeologists have uncovered more than 500-year-old remains of about 50 Aztec children, some of them stuffed into ceramic jars for burial, during excavations for a new subway line in Mexico City.
The team from Mexico's National Institute for Anthropology and History also found the foundations of Aztec homes, hundreds of small figurines, and pots and plates dating from 1100 to 1500 AD, on the eve of the Spanish conquest, along the 15-mile (24-km) subway line, due to open in 2012 in s
