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)
Jun 12, 2010
Iran's hardline Revolutionary Guards have been rewarded with multi-billion dollar business contracts as payback for helping to suppress the mass protests that convulsed the country a year ago.
In return for standing by him in the bloody crackdown that saw thousands arrested and up to 100 people killed, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has awarded a series of lucrative oil and gas deals to Guards-owned front companies.
The deal will hugely boost the power of the group, a
Source: Slate
Jun 11, 2010
...It's a hangover trend from the Middle Ages. Standard fashion around 1100 and 1200 A.D. dictated long, flowing robes and hoods for warmth; the greater a person's wealth, the higher the quality of the fabrics. This attire went out of style around the Renaissance. But sumptuary laws, often designed to prevent people from dressing above their class, kept academics (who were relatively low in the social hierarchy) in simple, unostentatious robes through the 16th century. Thereafter, academics and
Source: AP
Jun 11, 2010
Addressing the clerical abuse scandal from the heart of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Benedict XVI begged forgiveness Friday from victims and promised at a Mass to "do everything possible" to protect children.
While symbolic, Benedict's pledge failed to satisfy victims groups who said promises were useless without a clear-cut action plan to root out pedophile priests, expose the bishops who protected them and change the Vatican policies and culture that allowed abuse to
Source: BBC
Jun 11, 2010
Old soldiers who saw action in France after hundreds of thousands of Allied troops were evacuated at Dunkirk were honoured at a civic reception in Inverness this week.
The veterans had served with the 51st Highland Division, which recruited from communities across the Highlands and Islands.
On 12 June 1940, about 10,000 men of the division were captured at St Valery-en-Caux along with thousands of French soldiers.
Historians increasingly concede that the
Source: BBC
Jun 11, 2010
Belfast is proud of having built the Titanic, but the city has lost out on one piece of maritime memorabilia to landlocked Dudley in the West Midlands.
A reproduction of the doomed boat's 16-tonne anchor was built during the making of a television programme, provisionally titled We Built Titanic, at a cost of about £50,000.
Steelworkers at a foundry in Sheffield forged a replica of what was at the time billed as "the biggest anchor in the world", based on th
Source: BBC
Jun 11, 2010
A Finnish court has sentenced a Rwandan preacher to life in jail for his participation in Rwanda's genocide.
Francois Bazaramba, 59, moved in 2003 to the Nordic country, which allows prosecutions for crimes against humanity wherever they are committed.
His lawyers told Reuters news agency that he would appeal against the sentence.
Mr Bazaramba has been held in detention in Finland since 2007, four years after seeking asylum there....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jun 11, 2010
Absinthe, the mind-bending green spirit said to have inspired Vincent van Gogh, could be legalised in France almost a century after being deemed a public menace.
The drink's powers were notorious in late 19th-Century Paris among bohemian artists and writers. Many swore it expanded consciousness and enhanced creativity, dubbing it the Green Fairy.
Van Gogh is said to have created Starry Night under its influence and it has been suggested it played a part in him cutting
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jun 11, 2010
Mark Twain's scandalous relationship with his "filthy-minded and salacious" secretary, Isabel Van Kleek Lyon, is to be revealed in memoirs published 100 years after the author's death.
The unedited 5,000-page autobiography, which Twain refused to make public during his lifetime, will lay bare his feelings for Isabel Van Kleek Lyon.
The book is likely to shatter the myth that America's great writer and humourist was a cheerful old man, instead detailing his pe
Source: National Security Archive at George Washington University
Jun 11, 2010
To mark the first-ever criminal conviction in Colombia's infamous Palace of Justice case, the Archive today posts a selection of key declassified documents pertaining to the episode, including a 1999 U.S. Embassy cable that found that Colombian Army soldiers under the command of Col. Alfonso Plazas Vega had "killed a number of M-19 members and suspected collaborators hors de combat ["outside of combat"], including the Palace's cafeteria staff."
On Wednesday, a C
Source: Jerusalem Post
Jun 11, 2010
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas laid out new requirements for moving to direct talks with Israel Thursday, dropping earlier calls for a settlement freeze in favor of progress on borders and security.
Specifically, he said he was looking for agreement from the Netanyahu government that the basis for borders would be the 1967 lines with agreed land swaps, an arrangement he said was in place during his direct talks with the previous prime minister, Ehud Olmert.
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Jun 11, 2010
Families of victims killed in the Bloody Sunday shootings reacted angrily today to claims the £200million probe has found soldiers were guilty of unlawful killing.
There were calls for the relatives of people who died to be shown more respect after the suggestion ahead of the official publication of the inquiry's report next week.
The claim raised the prospect of prosecutions of British soldiers nearly 40 years after the demonstration in Londonderry that cost the lives
Source: WSJ
Jun 11, 2010
The U.S. Army forced out the top two officials at Arlington National Cemetery Thursday after a seven-month investigation uncovered widespread mismanagement of the military's most hallowed burial ground, including at least 211 graves that were either unmarked or had mismarked headstones.
Only two of the graves involved soldiers killed in the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Lt. Gen. Steven Whitcomb, the Army's inspector general; those two were mismarked and quick
Source: WSJ
Jun 11, 2010
Rudi Coel scowled at the sight of the Thai restaurant advertising "Takeaway."
"We're in Flanders, so that should say 'Meenemengerechten,' " said the 50-year-old social worker, using the proper Dutch word.
The euro zone is in turmoil, and Belgium's heavy government debts are drawing comparisons with those of Greece. But the main issue before Belgians in their general election Sunday speaks to a much deeper concern here: language....
The s
Source: Science Daily
Jun 10, 2010
In the time before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, a cooler central Pacific Ocean has been connected with drought conditions in Europe and North America that may be responsible for famines and the disappearance of cliff dwelling people in the American West.
A new study from the University of Miami (UM) has found a connection between La Niña-like sea surface temperatures in the central Pacific and droughts in western Europe and in what later became the southwestern United States and
Source: Science Daily
Jun 10, 2010
Your mother was right: Fish really is "brain food." And it seems that even pre-humans living as far back as 2 million years ago somehow knew it.
A team of researchers that included Johns Hopkins University geologist Naomi Levin has found that early hominids living in what is now northern Kenya ate a wider variety of foods than previously thought, including fish and aquatic animals such as turtles and crocodiles. Rich in protein and nutrients, these foods may have played a
Source: The Boston Globe
Jun 10, 2010
...Such small victories are occurring nearly every day on the grounds of the Fairbanks House, the oldest wood-frame home in North America, where the day-to-day life of one of the country’s original families is being illuminated with every artifact plucked from the soil off East Street.
The work is dirty and tiring. But the efforts of Boston University archeology students and their volunteer crew are paying off with thousands of artifacts tossed aside by eight generations of a family
Source: Enid News and Eagle
Jun 10, 2010
Remember Mr. Short-Term Memory, played on several occasions by Tom Hanks on “Saturday Night Live” in the late-1980s and early ’90s? He couldn’t remember a thing he had seen just minutes before.
That’s kind of the way we are when it comes to the spilling of crude oil around our globe throughout the relatively short period in history oil has been pumped, spewed, piped or carried around the globe.
I have to include myself in this memory loss, for after researching the subj
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Jun 10, 2010
A letter from wartime Pope Pius XII to American President Franklin Roosevelt asking him to spare Italy and Rome from bombing has emerged from a secret archive.
The letter has been kept hidden away for more than 60 years in the headquarters of the Knights of Columbus, a 128 year old American Catholic organisation.
Pope Pius wrote the letter in English at the end of August 1943 as the Allies surged up from the south of Italy towards Rome which had endured several bombing
Source: MercoPress
Jun 10, 2010
Agustin Blanco Muñoz, PhD in Social Sciences from the Central University of Venezuela said the book is based on testimonies from retired Army Captain Otto Gebauer who by random was sent by the rebellious Army high command to custody Chavez while retained.
“Gebauer was sent to custody the man that had resigned to his post as president of Venezuela. At that moment he went to the room where Chavez was being held and found him crying. When he asks Chavez why the tears, the then former p
Source: New York Daily News
Jun 10, 2010
A revolutionary war is brewing in Crown Heights.
Neighborhood activists hope an archaeological excavation will unearth Revolutionary War artifacts beneath Clove Road, a tiny, crumbling street.
The dig will be launched this summer - despite a study that was lukewarm on whether the street was an American outpost from the 1776 Battle of Brooklyn.The 2002 report by the RBA Group, a private engineering and architectural firm hired by the city, foun
