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
May 25, 2010
The son of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi says the Lockerbie bomber released from a British prison on compassionate grounds is alive but very sick.
Saif al-Islam Gadhafi said following a speech in London on Tuesday that Abdel Baset al-Megrahi has "very serious health troubles."
Al-Megrahi, who has prostate cancer, is the only man convicted in the 1988 bombing of the Pan Am flight over Scotland, which killed 270 people. He was freed from a Scottish prison in Aug
Source: AP
May 25, 2010
As a young lawyer working for Justice Thurgood Marshall, Elena Kagan repeatedly expressed her concern that a conservative Supreme Court was looking for ways to cut back on the rights of women, criminal defendants and prisoners.
Documents from Kagan's year with Marshall show a law clerk who was frequently assessing the politics of the institution. Her memos to the justice are on file in Marshall's papers at the Library of Congress.
Kagan's time with Marshall, the groundb
Source: Reuters
May 25, 2010
A plan to attack Hitler's bunker in 1943 and a 1944 plot involving an assassin who had gained the trust of the Nazi leadership were both cancelled on Stalin's orders, General Anatoly Kulikov told a historical conference in Moscow.
"A plan to assassinate Hitler in his bunker was developed, but Stalin suddenly cancelled it in 1943 over fears that after Hitler's death his associates would conclude a separate peace treaty with Britain and the United States," Russia's RIA news
Source: ANA (Greece)
May 25, 2010
A 24-year-old deacon of the Sidirokastro Metropolis has been arrested by Thessaloniki police for attempting to sell to a 43-year-old Swiss collector items he claimed were relics of Saints, police announced on Monday.
The deacon was arrested on Saturday after the Swiss collector was found at Thessaloniki's Macedonia airport with human bones in his luggage as he was preparing to fly to Germany.
A police investigation turned up approximately 200 bones in a silver r
Source: NYT
May 25, 2010
The United States on Tuesday will unveil the newly restored Hôtel de Talleyrand, the historic Parisian palace on the Place de la Concorde that once served as the headquarters of the Marshall Plan, the postwar American reconstruction plan for Western Europe.
The restoration took nine years and cost about $5 million, financed by more than 100 donors from both sides of the Atlantic and absorbing the efforts of about 150 French artisans.
In 1947 the building’s owners, the R
Source: BBC News
May 25, 2010
Authorities in Greece have arrested a Swiss man and a Greek Orthodox deacon suspected of trafficking hundreds of bones to be sold as religious relics.
The Swiss man was detained at Thessaloniki airport when 197 bones and three skulls were found in his luggage.
He said he had received them from the deacon, who was found to be holding hundreds more bones when he was held north-east of Thessaloniki.
The bones were apparently destined for a Russian Orthodox pri
Source: BBC News
May 25, 2010
The family of the fugitive ex-Bosnian Serb army chief, Ratko Mladic, is seeking to have him declared officially dead, according to Serbian media.
If approved, the declaration would allow Mladic's wife to collect a state pension and sell his property.
Mladic is wanted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia on war crimes charges in connection with the 1992-95 Bosnia war.
Mladic - on the run since 1995 - faces charges including genoci
Source: BBC News
May 25, 2010
The house made famous by the 1970s Amityville Horror film has gone on sale in Long Island, New York, with a price tag of $1.15m (£800,000).
The five-bedroom house at 108 Ocean Avenue, Amityville, gained notoriety through the film based on the story of the Lutz family, who moved in in 1975.
They say they soon discovered that the house was haunted.
Six members of the same family had been shot and killed as they slept in the house several months earlier.
Source: BBC News
May 25, 2010
The Pac-Man game Google put on its home page gobbled up almost five million hours of work time, suggests a study.
The playable version of the classic video game was put on Google's front page on 21 May to celebrate 30 years since the launch of Pac-Man in Japan.
The search giant reworked the game so the layout was arranged around letters forming its name.
The Pac-Man game proved so popular that Google has now made it permanently available on its own page.
Source: Inside Higher Ed
May 25, 2010
What if key elements of science policy are based on patterns of discovery that no longer exist?
That's the question behind a paper (abstract available here) released Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The paper -- by Benjamin Jones, associate professor of management at Northwestern University -- argues that science has changed in key ways. Specifically, it argues that the age at which researchers are able to make breakthroughs has advanced, and that scientists are p
Source: AP
May 24, 2010
In the coffee shop at this farming village on the northern Cyprus coast, the conversation jumps from one hardship to the next: a bad rainy season, a religion weakened by assimilation, and a division of the island that has lasted 36 years with no end in sight.
For Cyprus' Maronites, followers of one of the oldest Catholic faiths, the best news of late has been the announcement that Pope Benedict XVI is coming to Cyprus next week — the first pontiff to visit the island.
K
Source: AZcentral.com
May 24, 2010
Republican Senate challenger J.D. Hayworth recently bungled World War II history by asserting at a recent meeting with Republicans in Phoenix that the United States never declared war on Adolf Hitler's Germany.
In remarks captured on a YouTube video, Hayworth, a former Arizona congressman, flatly says, "We never formally declared war on Hitler's Germany, and yet we fought the war."
That's incorrect. You can read the formal Dec. 11, 1941, U.S. declaration of wa
Source: Connecticut Post
May 24, 2010
A Greenwich woman continuing to fight for the return of two 500-year-old paintings seized by Nazis during World War II, currently on display at a California museum, has received the support of that state's attorney general in an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
California Attorney General Jerry Brown filed a friend-of-the-court brief last week asking the court to consider an appeal by Marei von Saher, who unsuccessfully sued the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena for the paintings in
Source: NYT
May 24, 2010
It is now growing season across the Corn Belt of the United States. Seeds that have just been sown will, with the right mixture of sunshine and rain, be knee-high plants by the Fourth of July and tall stalks with ears ripe for picking by late August.
Corn is much more than great summer picnic food, however. Civilization owes much to this plant, and to the early people who first cultivated it.
For most of human history, our ancestors relied entirely on hunting animals
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 24, 2010
Scientists have developed a system that could shed light on whether dinosaurs were cold or warm-blooded.
California Institute of Technology (Caltech) researchers unveiled what they said was the first method for direct measurement of the body temperatures of large extinct vertebrates using analyses of isotopes in animals' bones, teeth, and eggshells.
The findings were published in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Source: CNN
May 24, 2010
Christopher "Dudus" Coke, who controls the impoverished West Kingston enclaves now blockaded by gang members, is likened by experts to both Robin Hood and Pablo Escobar.
But comparisons to the hero of Sherwood Forest and the one-time Colombian kingpin are not mutually exclusive.
Coke, 41, rules via a combination of violence, corruption and philanthropy, experts say, and the unrest in the Jamaican capital this week is a result of competing interests: those who
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
May 24, 2010
The last time Raymond Atkinson was here, he was nearly killed by a German dive-bomber while his unit almost finished off a certain Erwin Rommel and caused the enemy such jitters that they unnerved Hitler himself.
In the course of just one day, Raymond and his comrades were involved in a bloody, chaotic battle which is often overlooked because of the enormity of the event which followed it - Dunkirk.
But yesterday, the 94-year- old great-grandfather from Dewsbury, Yorksh
Source: BBC News
May 24, 2010
A Welsh academic has revealed how he discovered a Middle East settlement buried under sand for about 125 years.
Dr Andrew Petersen first became aware of a possible settlement after finding masonry and pottery at Ras Al-Sharig in Qatar.
He thought something might be there after reading sources naming a town called Rubayqa.
"But we certainly weren't prepared for the scale of the find," said the expert from the University of Wales, Lampeter.
Source: ABC News
May 24, 2010
A team of Egyptian archaeologists headed by Abdel Rahman El-Aydi unearthed what he told ABC News was "the most important cemetery dating to the second dynasty," calling it an ''astonishing surprise."
The cemetery site is located southwest of Cairo in the oasis and lush city of Fayoum at Lahoun, where the team has spent the past four years digging. They've uncovered 45 ancient Egyptian tombs from varying periods.
Egyptian Culture Minister Farouk Hosni said
Source: FOX News
May 24, 2010
Simkins Residence Hall is the last all-male dormitory at the University of Texas. Tucked into a quiet corner of campus along Waller Creek, it was the first men's dorm with air conditioning.
It is notable for another reason as well: Simkins is named for a UT law professor who was a leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
William Stewart Simkins, who taught at the School of Law for 30 years until his death in 1929, organized the Klan in Florida after the Civil War along with his brot
