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: CNN
Jun 20, 2010
Sons, daughters, grandchildren and other relatives of those who died in the Vietnam War gathered before dawn this Father's Day to remember their fallen relatives in a unique way.
With brushes, mops, hoses and soap, they set about cleaning the granite wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Their mission was to polish each of the more than 58,000 names of Americans who died.
The event was part of the commemoration of the 20th anniversary of a group called Sons and Daughte
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Jun 19, 2010
Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini hid a set of secret diaries in an Italian hillside and ordered them not to be opened until 2025, the son of the man who buried them has revealed.
Mussolini, who ruled Italy from 1922 until he was executed by partisans in 1945, has long been rumoured to have kept diaries which could detail the extent of his relationship with wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
There is even a theory among some Italian historians that he was execute
Source: CNN
Jun 19, 2010
More old documents unveiled are offering more fresh signs that Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan was an eager, tough-talking political player while working as a lawyer in the Clinton White House.
In one e-mail, she criticizes one of President Bill Clinton's most important speeches as "presumptuous."
The latest and final batch of more than 80,000 pages - mostly e-mails– were released Friday by the William J. Clinton Presidential Library. The 50-year-old Kagan w
Source: AP
Jun 19, 2010
Detail by painful detail, the CIA is coming to grips with one of the most devastating episodes in its history, a botched cloak-and-dagger flight into China that stole two decades of freedom from a pair of fresh-faced American operatives and cost the lives of their two pilots.
In opening up about the 1952 debacle, the CIA is finding ways to use it as a teaching tool. Mistakes of the past can serve as cautionary tales for today's spies and paramilitary officers taking on al-Qaida and
Source: BBC
Jun 19, 2010
A British World War II veteran who led a team of Commandos that seized a key German port, allowing the Allies to then secure Denmark, has been honoured.
Germany has bestowed the Great Seal of Kiel on Maj Tony Hibbert, who lives in Cornwall, for leading the 500-strong team in capturing the port of Kiel.
In May 1945, Operation Eclipse led to the surrender of a large German garrison and all the Nazis in Denmark.
The award is for his role in preventing Kiel
Source: BBC
Jun 19, 2010
The 65th birthday of Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma's detained opposition leader, is being recognised by supporters both at home and abroad.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, US President Barack Obama and the UK have marked the occasion by reiterating calls for the Nobel laureate's release.
Ms Suu Kyi has spent most of the last two decades in some form of detention.
Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, she is one of the world's best known political prisoners,
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jun 19, 2010
JD Salinger always insisted The Catcher in the Rye was "unactable" and refused to let Hollywood anywhere near his masterpiece.
But six months after his death, producers believe their chances of landing film rights to The Catcher in The Rye, considered the "holy grail" of scripts, are improving and a movie could be on the horizon.
Salinger maintained an intractable grip over the book during his lifetime and his publishers have insisted the rights are
Source: AP
Jun 19, 2010
Renowned Mexican journalist, critic and political activist Carlos Monsivais died Saturday at 72.
Examining his own country like a pop anthropologist, Monsivais chronicled Mexico's historic upheavals, social trends, and literature for over 50 years. He was also known as a tireless and ubiquitous activist for leftist causes.
He was an early and enthusiastic defender of the leftist Zapatista rebels who staged a brief armed uprising in Mexico's southernmost state of Chiapas
Source: Rapid City Journal (SD)
Jun 18, 2010
When the towers of the World Trade Center fell on Sept. 11, 2001, Clarence Wolf Guts asked his son to call the U.S. Department of Defense to see if the country needed his code talking abilities to find Osama Bin Laden.
Wolf Guts was in his late 70s at the time, so his son, Don Doyle, did not make the call, but said the request personified his father's love of country.
"He still wanted to help. He was trying to still be patriotic," Doyle said.
Wolf
Source: Keene Sentinel
Jun 18, 2010
Tools made about 11,000 years ago were found at the Maple Avenue site of Keene’s new middle school, which Stoddard archaeologist Robert Goodby said could “easily be one of the most important (archaeological) sites in the state, if not New England.
Goodby began his site review, overseen by the N.H. Division of Historical Resources, in November. The review is a federal requirement for projects that are constructed near wetlands. In addition to the high number of artifacts, few Granite
Source: BBC News
Jun 18, 2010
John Lennon's handwritten lyrics to Beatles song A Day In The Life have sold for $1.2m (£810,000) at auction, well above the price expected.
The double-sided sheet of paper with notes written in felt marker and blue ink was sold at Sotheby's in New York.
The lyric sheet also contains some corrections and other notes penned in red ink.
The song - co-written with Paul McCartney - is the final track on the band's 1967 Sgt Pepper album.
The buyer was an
Source: Discovery News
Jun 18, 2010
There have been no other cases of ancient humans eating hyenas, but this find may represent an exception.
The suspect hyena bones come from Maltravieso cave in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula, which is on the southwestern tip of Europe. The cave has rooms with archaeological sites ranging from the Middle Pleistocene to the Bronze Age. The Hyena bones come from what's called the Sala de Huesos (Hall of Bones), which is filled with debris dated to between 117,000 and 183,000 ag
Source: Discovery News
Jun 18, 2010
Five sharpshooters fired bullets through the heart of a double murderer in what was billed as a bloody throwback to Old West-style justice.
Shackled to a chair and with a black hood covering his head, Gardner, 49, was put to death just after midnight in a brightly lit execution chamber at Utah State Prison.
Gardner's gruesome death was billed as a bloody throwback to Old West-style justice, the first execution of its kind in the United States for more than a decade and
Source: NYT
Jun 18, 2010
From the Oval Office the other night, President Obama called the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico “the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced.” Senior people in the government have echoed that language....
But is the description accurate?
Scholars of environmental history, while expressing sympathy for the people of the gulf, say the assertion is debatable. They offer an intimidating list of disasters to consider: floods caused by human negligence, the destru
Source: Spiegel Online
Jun 18, 2010
The riddle began 10 years ago, when Ralf Peters stumbled across an old box full of photographs in a cabinet at the Central Institute of Art History in Munich. Peters, an art history Ph.D., had just begun a new job at the institute and was trying to get an idea as to what the archive might contain. Little did he know that the box he found during his first days on the job would preoccupy him and his colleagues for years to come.
Inside the box were 600 undated black-and-white images.
Source: BBC
Jun 18, 2010
One of the most decorated French soldiers, who fought in the country's wars in Algeria and French Indochina, has died.
Gen Marcel Bigeard, 94, died on Friday, his wife told news agency Agence France-Presse.
Gen Bigeard was a commanding officer during the battle of Dien Bien Phu and the Battle of Algiers.
In 2000 he caused controversy in France by telling a newspaper that torture was a "necessary evil" in Algeria.
Source: BBC
Jun 18, 2010
Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998, has died at the age of 87, his publisher has announced.
Saramago, a communist and atheist, only began to become recognised for his work in his fifties.
Saramago moved to Lanzarote in the early 1990s after opposition from Portugal's right-wing government to his controversial work The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.
The administration barred his work from being entered in
Source: BBC
Jun 18, 2010
The remains of chess champion Bobby Fischer are to be exhumed in order to settle a paternity claim, an Icelandic court has ruled.
The Supreme Court in Reykjavik said a tissue sample was needed to prove whether nine-year-old Jinky Young was Fischer's daughter.
Fischer, who died in Iceland in 2008, left no will.
His estate, estimated to be worth $2 million (£1.4m), has been at the heart of several inheritance claims....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jun 18, 2010
A postcard sent home by a Bosnian soldier in the First World War has finally reached his family after 95 years, thanks to an antique collector who delivered it personally to the man's grandson after buying it at a fair in California.
For Nihad Eric Dzinovic, a 63-year-old retired jeweller living in California, it was as if one of the 200,000 old postcards he collected over the decades had come alive: In front of him stood someone who greatly resembled a face on the card mailed near
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jun 18, 2010
John Lennon's handwritten lyrics to 'A Day in the Life', have sold for $1.2 million (£810,000) at auction, double their pre-sale high estimate.
Lennon's handwritten lyrics to the song, the final number on the Beatles album "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", had been expected to fetch between $500,000 to $700,000 (£338,000 to £473,000) at the Sotheby's New York auction.
The most amount ever paid for Beatles lyrics at auction was $1.25 million in 2005 for
