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
Jun 23, 2010
The Russian government is pushing a bill through parliament that critics say would give the country's main intelligence agency, the FSB, powers similar to those once held by its Soviet predecessor, the KGB.
At the time, almost all opponents of the communist regime were ruthlessly silenced.
The bill has been described by Russia's top human rights official as one of the most dangerous pieces of legislation to be put before parliament - but the government says it is needed
Source: BBC News
Jun 23, 2010
Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe is to play a German soldier in a new film version of All Quiet on the Western Front, according to Variety.
The 20-year-old will play Paul Baumer, a young infantryman fighting in the trenches of France during World War I.
Shooting will begin in spring 2012, following Radcliffe's Broadway run in How to Succeed Without Really Trying.
Erich Maria Remarque's novel was first adapted for the screen in 1930, with Lew Ayres in the
Source: BBC News
Jun 23, 2010
The UK faces the "longest, deepest, sustained period of cuts to public services spending at least since World War II", said an economic think tank.
It is the first time that six years of consecutive spending cuts will have been endured, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said.
Some government departments may see budgets slashed by a third, it added.
The IFS also said government claims that the rich would "feel more pain" than the poo
Source: BBC News
Jun 23, 2010
A self portrait by French painter Edouard Manet has been sold for more than £22m - a record price for the artist's work.
Called Manet A La Palette, it shows the artist in a bowler hat, posing with a paintbrush in his hand.
It sold for £22,441,250 at Sotheby's auction house in London, towards the lower end of its £20-30m estimate.
The previous highest price for a Manet was £16m in New York in 1989.
Painted between 1878 and 1879, Sotheby's said t
Source: EU Observer
Jun 22, 2010
Louis Michel, the Belgian former EU development commissioner and current prominent Liberal MEP has shocked his home nation and its one-time central African subjects by calling King Leopold II, the Congo's colonial master responsible for between 3 million and 10 million deaths, a "visionary hero."
"Leopold II was a true visionary for his time, a hero," he told P-Magazine, a local publication, in an interview on Tuesday. "And even if there were horrible event
Source: Discovery News
Jun 22, 2010
The world's largest dinosaur graveyard has been discovered in Alberta, Canada, according to David Eberth of the Royal Tyrrell Museum and other scientists working on the project.
The Vancouver Sun reports that the massive dinosaur bonebed is 1.43-square miles in size. Eberth says it contains thousands of bones belonging to the dinosaur Centrosaurus, which once lived near what is now the Saskatchewan border.
A journal paper outlining details about it is expected later th
Source: AFP
Jun 22, 2010
A senior Western archaeologist in Afghanistan says he is struggling to protect a vast wealth of cultural treasures from being stolen and smuggled to wealthier countries, or worse, destroyed altogether.
"I think there is absolutely no site in this country which is unaffected," Philippe Marquis, the director of a team of French government-funded archaeologists operating in Afghanistan, told AFP in a recent interview.
"The illegal trade in antiquities is ver
Source: Guardian (UK)
Jun 22, 2010
Letter stolen by notorious 19th-century book thief Guglielmo Libri had been gathering dust in a US college library.
The name Guglielmo Libri will mean little to anyone outside the inner circles of academia. But a mere mention of the 19th-century Tuscan noble and polymath to European scholars still has the power to provoke hand-wringing and despair.
Count Guglielmo Libri Carucci dalla Sommaja was more than a respected scientist and a decorated professor of mathematics. H
Source: BBC
Jun 22, 2010
A Roman fort which has been discovered in Cornwall is challenging previous historical views about the South West.
Pottery and pieces of slag have been found at the undisclosed location near St Austell, suggesting an ironworks.
Experts said the discovery challenges previous thinking about the region's history as it had been thought Romans did not settle much beyond Exeter.
Source: BBC
Jun 22, 2010
A three-day celebration of the life and works of JRR Tolkien aims to turn a part of mid Wales into Middle Earth.
The Festival in the Shire will include re-enactments, games, and storytelling on a Tolkien theme.
It will analyse The Lord of the Rings author, looking at Welsh influences on his work, and welcome fans.
The event, at the Pavilion in Pontrhydfendigaid, Ceredigion, in August, also includes an exhibition of Tolkien-inspired art....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jun 22, 2010
Souvenir statues of Chairman Mao must not be cast from plastic or plaster and must be an "authentic likeness" of the Great Helmsman, according to new Chinese regulations.
Chinese officials in Mao's home province of Hunan said they were concerned about the flow of shoddy Mao souvenirs that has flooded the Chinese market.
According to Xinhua, Mao's hometown of Shaoshan sold 124 million yuan (£12.4 million) worth of trinkets last year, of which almost three-quart
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jun 22, 2010
The earliest known icons of four of Christ's apostles have been found adorning an elaborately decorated chamber in a catacomb beneath the streets of Rome.
Scientists used advanced laser technology to remove a hardened crust of dirt and calcium deposits in order to bring to light the brightly coloured 4th century paintings of Saints John, Paul, Andrew and Peter.
The images adorn the ceiling of a vault, carved out of volcanic rock, which provided the last resting place
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jun 22, 2010
A single plume from the extinct huia bird has sold for a record sum at auction in New Zealand making it the most expensive feather ever.
The brown and white feather fetched NZ$8,000 (£3,800), far exceeding the NZ$500 that it had been estimated to reach. The feathers were traditionally used to adorn Maori chiefs.
The huia bird is thought to be extinct and has not been seen since 1907.
The feather went under the hammer at Webb's Auction House in Auckland..
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jun 22, 2010
Dutch police are to use "decoy Jews", by dressing law enforcers in Jewish religious dress such as skullcaps, in an effort to catch anti-Semitic attackers.
Lodewijk Asscher, Amsterdam's mayor, has ordered the new decoy strategy to cut the number of verbal and physical attacks on Jews, amid fears that anti-Semitic "hate crime" is on the rise.
Secret television recordings by the Jewish broadcasting company, Joodse Omroep, broadcast at the weekend, hav
Source: AP
Jun 22, 2010
A red wooden box that has carried the government's budget to the House of Commons since 1860 made its last official appearance on Tuesday.
Treasury chief George Osborne struck the traditional pose, holding the box aloft for photographers, before he set off to the House of Commons to announce the government's budget plans. But he left it behind.
The box was first used by William Ewart Gladstone in 1860, and most Chancellors of the Exchequer have used it ever since. Forme
Source: AP
Jun 22, 2010
Americans remain a generally upbeat lot, but all the skepticism, snark and dismal rhetoric being bandied about may be taking their toll.
Nearly two-thirds of people answering a Pew Research Center for the People and the Press/Smithsonian Magazine poll said they are optimistic about their future and that of the country — and a majority expect the economy to be strong in the future.
A whopping 89 percent expect to see a woman president within 40 years and 69 percent say a
Source: CNN
Jun 22, 2010
...One president sealed his greatness with his handling of an oil crisis. Another was doomed by his inability to contain an oil crisis, scholars say.
President Eisenhower was the first president to warn the nation about oil in 1957, says James Hedtke, a history professor at Cabrini College in Radnor, Pennsylvania.
Other presidents delivered the same talk -- Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush -- but America's depen
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jun 22, 2010
Chinese archaeologists have unearthed about 120 more clay figures in their latest round of excavations at the terracotta army site that surrounds the tomb of the nation's first emperor in the northwestern Shaanxi Province [Photo gallery <a href"http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/worldnews/7843691/China-unearths-more-Terracotta-Warriors.html">
Source: Press Release
Jun 21, 2010
The USA Pavilion at Expo 2010 Shanghai today launched a virtual tour at http://pavilion.expo.cn/c5001/ssize/en/index.html, which gives a global audience a glimpse of the Pavilion and the exhibits that have already delighted more than a million guests. "World's Fairs are about creating enduring ties, and Expo 2010 is building a stronger
Source: Daily Times (Pakistan)
Jun 21, 2010
Almost half of Russians in a recent poll blamed dictator Joseph Stalin’s “blunders” for the Soviet Union’s huge losses of life in World War II, Russian news agencies reported on Sunday.
Forty-nine percent of respondents told the Levada polling agency that “the blunders of Stalin” were the “main reason” for massive Red Army losses in the first two years of the war, the Interfax news agency reported. Stalin erred by purging the military of top officials, failing to prepare for combat
