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This page features brief excerpts of news 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.

Highlights

Breaking News


This page features brief excerpts of news 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. Because most of our readers read the NYT we usually do not include the paper's stories in HIGHLIGHTS.

Name of source: Telegraph (UK)

SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (3-10-10)

Following Cabinet approval last week, the sites at Anlong Veng will be protected from destruction by local people and illegal encroachment, provincial Gov. Yim Phana said.

Anlong Veng, about 185 miles (300 kilometres) north of Phnom Penh, fell to government forces in 1998 after nearly 20 years of fighting.

The Khmer Rouge regime, under which an estimated 1.7 million people died from execution, disease and malnutrition, was toppled in 1979 but its guerrillas fought on in the jungles, with Anlong Veng becoming their last stronghold.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010 - 12:14

SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (3-9-10)

Tourists are to be banned from large areas of resorts on the Indian islands because of fears they will bring disease which could wipe out the 350 remaining members of a local tribe.

The Indian government has introduced a buffer zone around a reservation for the threatened Jarawa tribe on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and ordered the closure of an expensive beach resort in an attempt to save the tribe from being driven into extinction.

Its Attorney General has told the Supreme Court there are now only 350 surviving members of the tribe, who are believed to be descendants of migrants from Africa, and that they are highly vulnerable to Western diseases and infections.

The government is determined to save the Jarawas after another of the islands' tribes was wiped out last month when its last surviving member died. Boa Sr, aged 85, was the last Bo-speaking member of the Great Andaman tribe which is believed to have migrated to the islands from Africa 65,000 years ago.

Until now, the Jarawas have fared better than the Bo because they have been protected by an official reservation in around 400 square miles of tropical rainforest. They survive by hunting wild boar and lizards, spear fishing on the blue waters off the island's palm-fringed beaches, and gathering seeds and berries from the forest.


Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 19:39

SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (3-9-10)

The brother of Pope Benedict XVI has admitted that he slapped choirboys at the German choir school that he headed for 30 years, as the Vatican struggled to address burgeoning sex abuse scandals across Europe.

Georg Ratzinger, 86, who ran the choir from 1964 to 1994, said he now regretted using corporal punishment against his charges and asked their forgiveness.

The choir that he ran, the Domspatzen in Regensburg, Bavaria, has become the latest Catholic institution in Germany to be swept up in allegations of boys as young as eight being abused by priests.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 19:27

SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (3-9-10)

A collection of photographs from the Royal Marines' archive that show the Prince of Wales going through his commando training have emerged.

The collection also includes never-before-seen snaps of other well known royals including Diana, Princess of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh.

Other celebrities are also present in the photographs taken through the 1970s and 1980s and among them are The Krankies, Jimmy Saville and Larry Grayson.

The collection was compiled by a former Marine, Graham Sharp who worked in the photography department after being injured in the Falklands war.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 19:22

SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (3-9-10)

David Kimche, the Israeli spy-turned-diplomat who played a key role in the Iran-Contra scandal that rocked President Ronald Reagan's administration, has died. He was 82.

The British-born Kimche began his career with Israel's Mossad spy agency in the 1950s after emigrating to Israel, and rose to deputy director of the agency. He later served as director-general of Israel's Foreign Ministry.

Kimche also is said to have been a key proponent of Israel's failed attempt to set up a pro-Israeli government led by Christians in Lebanon.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 19:17

SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (3-9-10)

The corpse of the former Cyprus president, Tassos Papadopoulos, has been recovered by police three months after it was mysteriously snatched from the grave.

The body was found dumped at a cemetery in a suburb of Nicosia late on Monday following an anonymous telephone tip-off to police on the eastern Mediterranean island.

Mr Papadopoulos's grave was robbed on December 11 – the eve of the first anniversary of his death – in a crime that baffled Greek Cypriots.

His coffin was raided at night during a thunderstorm and was discovered empty the next morning by a member of the former president's personal guard, who went each day to light a candle at his grave.

Papadopoulos, a heavy smoker who died of lung cancer aged 74, was president from 2003 to 2008 during which time Greek Cypriots rejected a plan to reunify the island, and joined the European Union.


Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 19:05

SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (3-9-10)

An alleged al-Qaeda terrorist cell arrested in the North West was within days of launching an attack on Britain a senior officer in MI5 has told a tribunal.

The men, who were arrested in Manchester and Liverpool in April last year, were said to be in direct contact with al-Qaeda in Pakistan, using coded email messages that talked about cars and girls.

They were said to be “operating in a similar manner” to those planning the mass casualty attacks of July 7 2005 and the trans-Atlantic airline plot of 2006.


Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 18:58

SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (3-9-10)

Feminism has been out of fashion but there are signs that women are becoming activists again, says Cassandra Jardine.

Trafalgar Square on Saturday afternoon was filled with marching women carrying feminist placards. “It’s more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier,” said one. “Turn your back on Page 3,” read another. When speakers called out: “Can you hear me, sister?” voices and arms were raised in enthusiastic response.
These weren’t the ageing remnants of Sixties and Seventies feminism enjoying a retro wallow to mark the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day yesterday. These were young women in Ugg boots with amusingly dyed hair; some of them were wearing make-up.

Just when feminism appeared dead, the corpse is showing signs of life. The march, entitled Million Women Rise, is not the only indication of a pulse, faint at the moment but gaining strength. A rash of new books, including Natasha Walter’s Living Dolls and Kat Banyard’s The Equality Illusion, has brought women’s issues back into focus, while the campaigning Fawcett Society reports a threefold increase in membership to 8,500 over the last three years.

Even before BBC Four’s three-part series Women, which began yesterday by revisiting the Libbers of old – and what a sparkling bunch they were – the web has been buzzing with feminist sites, and “FEM” conferences were gathering crowds. This week even sees an all-female audience for Question Time – though why Monty Don has been chosen for the panel is unclear. Are the women going to ask about pruning their roses?
Small though these green shoots may look, they are enough to give heart to the old guard. “This feels like a new wave gathering momentum and the women are bringing young men with them,” says Woman’s Hour’s Jenni Murray. “Feminism is alive and well in important places,” says Joan Bakewell who, at 73, still occasionally wears a T-shirt saying: “This is what a feminist looks like.”

But for many once-proud feminists, recent years have been dismaying. Younger women have not only, understandably, taken for granted their mothers’ and grandmothers’ achievements on equal pay and sex discrimination, contraception and abortion, many have dissociated themselves with feminism altogether.
On the day of the march, for example, Lucy O’Connor, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, was quoted in the Telegraph as saying: “I'm not a feminist by any stretch of the imagination...” Yet she is trying to gain recognition as one of the world’s top female boxers.

The previous day Erin Baker, the Telegraph’s motoring editor, described a quick poll on feminism conducted among her thirtysomething friends. None, herself included, understood the concept. “If it exists,” she concluded, “feminism has nothing to do with reality.”
Sneering at feminism is so much the norm that Ellie Levenson, 31, felt compelled to fight back by writing The Noughtie Girl’s Guide to Feminism. “So many of my contemporaries would say things like: “'I’m not a feminist but…’ and then go on to voice a feminist idea, such as that women should earn as much as men for the same job. I wanted to explain feminism to a new generation.”

Somewhere during the 1980s and 1990s, the women’s movement was driven into the ground by its own success and bossiness. The days when a woman couldn’t take out a mortgage without a man’s signature have gone. Few women who enjoy male company and looking their best wanted to ally themselves with the stereotypical hairy-legged, mannish woman ranting about “patriarchy”.

To revitalise their cause, the new wave of feminists have tried to rebrand themselves as “Shedom-fighters”, “NuFeminists”, “Feministas” and “Womanists”. None of these labels has caught on. Yet the idea that gender heaven has not been achieved has gathered momentum.

Girls may achieve better GCSEs than boys, are pouring into sought-after professions like medicine and are free to act like ladettes, but women are still being paid less, preyed upon by violent men, pressed into forced marriages, and sexualised by commercial forces at a young age. It’s a matter of picking your battle.
Personal experience of violence motivates many of the new activists, who cannot be accused of being “hopelessly middle class”, as Germaine Greer was by a fellow Australian academic last week, in an attack marking the 40th anniversary of The Female Eunuch.

Jobeda Nahar, 27, had to leave home in her teens because her father’s violence was copied by her brother. “I felt I couldn’t be the only woman facing violence at home but there was no information about it at school,” she says. Today she works in a women's centre. She feels strongly about a range of violence-related issues that include the computer game Grand Theft Auto – which not only allows men to go to virtual prostitutes but offers them a range of ways to kill the women – and job centres that advertise positions in lap-dancing clubs.

Sabrina Qureshi, 38, who organised Saturday’s march, was also brought up surrounded by high levels of domestic violence in Whitechapel, and was sexually assaulted at 14. “I thought maybe it was Islamic but I found my white friends were experiencing the same. There are 30 million women in this country; one in three of them has experienced violence. Two women are killed every day. It’s not a woman’s problem, its society’s,” she says.

“Some things have even got worse, like the rape conviction rate,” says Catherine Redfern, founder of The F-word website. Her book, Reclaiming the F-word, comes out later this year. Most rapes don’t even reach the reporting stage, and of those that do, only 7 per cent result in a conviction, according to the Fawcett Society. “That’s unlikely to make a man feel he will be convicted,”

If you want to keep the rights gained from women’s lib, you have to fight or they will be rolled back, ” says Vivienne Hayes, who runs the Women’s Resource Centre, which highlights the fact that women are not equally represented in politics or the boardroom.
Last November, the British Medical Journal published a report that showed that male doctors earned on average £15,000 more than women, with a gender pay gap for both junior doctors and consultants. Jenni Murray thinks feminism’s new focus should be the home, where women still do most of the work and caring, even if they also have a job. “Yes, of course lap-dancing clubs are a pain, and “Come and Get Me” T-shirts being sold to four-year-olds are a pain, and pink clothes sold aggressively to girls, even in M&S, is also a pain. But the really serious stuff is how we balance relationships between men and women. Until we cease to see housework and childcare as women’s work we won’t have true equality. It has to be seen as family work. Until then, employers won’t take women as seriously as men. That’s where the push has to be made.”

“If we want real equality at work we must have equality at home,” agrees Richard Reeves, director of the think tank Demos, who has shared the care of his three children with his wife. “We’ve got to the point where women’s lives have changed profoundly. Now men’s lives have to change. We need equality in maternity and paternity provision. ”

Public sector companies are expected to conduct pay audits to ensure fairness; under the new Equality Bill, and that should extend to large private companies by 2013, but Ceri Goddard of the Fawcett Society believes that women should guard against complacency. “It’s wrong to say younger women don’t care. It’s a question of awareness: 79 per cent of women aged 18-24 whom we polled didn’t realise that public sector cuts would have more impact on women than men because women have 65 per cent of public sector jobs and use the services more because they do 89 per cent of caring.”
“What about women?” is a question she wants all party leaders to address in the run up to the election, looking at the impact of every policy. On Thursday’s Question Time, the interrogation will start.


Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 11:23

SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (3-9-10)

Mr Bush, who left office last year, has directly intervened in the Northern Ireland issue by pleading with David Cameron, the Conservative Leader, to urge Ulster Unionist Party to vote for a crucial policing deal.

The Irish lobby on Capitol Hill are said to be concerned the party will vote on Tuesday against the devolution of policing and criminal justice powers to Belfast.

Despite the international pleas for it to support the deal, party officials said they would not endorse the hard-fought agreement struck last month to transfer sensitive policing and justice powers from Westminster to the British province....


Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 06:33

SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (3-8-10)

Mr Miliband told the Chilcot Inquiry he voted for the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 because Saddam's defiance of the UN posed a danger to global peace and security.

He admitted that the hugely controversial US-led war exposed ''divisions'' in the international community.

But he insisted the UN would have been damaged if the conflict had not gone ahead.


Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 06:30

SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (3-8-10)

The Foreign Secretary told Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry into the war that Britain’s willingness to follow through on threats of military force had made some Arab governments more willing to “do business” with the UK.

Accepting that “a lot of people” strongly opposed the 2003, Mr Miliband said that Britain’s reputation had actually been strengthened in some parts of the Middle East.

“People in the region do respect those who are willing to see through what they say [they will do],” Mr Miliband said.

“Even people who disagreed with it say to me, ‘You’ve sent a message that when you say something, you mean it’.”

He added: “In the Arab world today, I don’t believe that the Iraq decisions have undermined our relationships or our ability to business. Some of our ambassadors say we are in stronger position.”

Mr Miliband also said that Britain is popular with many Iraqis, who voted in a general election on Sunday.


Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 06:29

SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (3-8-10)

Esat Altindagoglu has been inundated with more than 50 visitors a day hoping to see the "miracle" at his house near Paris.

The one-foot high painting was given to his wife Sevin by a Lebanese priest on her birthday in 2006, the Turkish-born salesman said.

It began weeping oil on February 12 this year, and had been "crying" every day since, he claimed.


Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 06:26

SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (3-9-10)

However, only four per cent of them were referred by their GP for specialist treatment, it has been found.

A study, published in the journal Psychological Medicine, conducted in the aftermath of the 2005 bombings traced survivors of the attacks, which killed 52 and injured 700.

They found that many more people required treatment than had been offered it and the researchers from University College London recommended that in future disasters those exposed to atrocities are proactively traced.


Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 06:23

SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (3-8-10)

A far-Right candidate for Austria's presidential election has brought the country's dark past to the surface again, by denouncing a law banning Nazi groups and Holocaust denial.

Barbara Rosenkranz, 51, a regional leader of the Freedom Party (FPOe), looks likely to be the only candidate to run against the incumbent, President Heinz Fischer, on April 25.

But her comments supporting the scrapping of the tough prohibition law have renewed the debate about a heritage with which the country, which was under Nazi rule from 1938 to 1945, has never fully come to terms.


Under the 1947 Verbotsgesetz law, anyone who seeks to set up a Nazi organisation, propagates Nazi ideology or denies Nazi crimes can be jailed for up to 20 years.

But Rosenkranz, a mother of 10 and the wife of an outspoken figure in Austria's far-Right scene, insists the law constitutes "an unnecessary restriction" and that, on the contrary, people should be allowed freedom of opinion.

In 2003, the European Court of Human Rights already allowed a journalist's description of her as a "closet-Nazi", noting that her attitude towards Nazism was ambiguous.


Monday, March 8, 2010 - 14:21

SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (3-8-10)

Frescoes painted by Giotto, the 14th Century Italian master, have been brought to life with the use of ultraviolet technology.

Restorers discovered that under ultraviolet light, long-lost colour and detail was revealed.
The frescoes date from 1320 and decorate the walls of the Peruzzi Chapel in Florence's Santa Croce church.

They were immortalised in EM Forster's Room with a View as the place where the young Englishwoman Lucy Honeychurch, played in the 1985 film by Helena Bonham Carter, meets her future husband.

The frescoes include lavishly illustrated depictions of St John the Evangelist ascending to heaven and the head of St John the Baptist being presented to King Herod on a plate by a Roman soldier.

The researchers stumbled on the ultraviolet technique by accident, after spending four months mapping the frescoes as preparation for a possible future restoration.

In the course of the project, they found that by shining ultraviolet light on the paintings they were able to see much more than was visible to the naked eye.
The frescoes are thought to have been admired by Michelangelo and are said to have influenced his work nearly 200 years later.

The paintings were covered in whitewash in the 18th century and then underwent a brutal restoration in 1840, when the whitewash was removed with the aid of steel wool scrubbers and solvents. The work left the masterpieces faded, scratched and washed out.
Art lovers, however, are unlikely to see the enhanced paintings because permanently bathing them in ultraviolet would damage them.

Restorers hope instead to use the ultraviolet images to build a computer-generated facsimile of the chapel.

Monday, March 8, 2010 - 13:57

SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (3-8-10)

A French resistance heroine who saved over 100 lives and survived a Nazi firing squad has died at her English care home aged 105.

Andree Peel - known as Agent Rose - helped a string of British and American pilots flee occupied Europe.
Winston Churchill wrote her a personal letter of congratulation, which had to be destroyed once she had read it for security reasons. She was awarded a second Legion d'Honneur last year in recognition of her bravery.

Born Andree Virot, she moved to England after meeting future husband John Peel.

Mrs Peel, who died on Friday, had been living at the Lampton House care home in Long Ashton, Bristol.
Manager Sherry Kitchen said: ''We are all a bit shell-shocked here. She was lovely - an amazing character with such a strong spirit.''

At the time of the Nazi invasion, Ms Virot owned a beauty salon in Brest, France.

She began her involvement with the Resistance modestly, by handing out underground newspapers. Later she tracked troop movements and went on to head an under-section of the famous movement.
As Agent Rose, she guided Allied planes to makeshift landing strips, using torches. Dozens of airmen were then smuggled on to submarines and gunboats across the coast.

She spent three years with the Resistance and recounted her experiences in her autobiography Miracles Do Happen.

She spent time in two concentration camps, saying her harrowing experiences helped her work as a healer.
Mrs Peel recalled coming close to death three times, with the danger persisting right up to her rescue from Buchenwald.

Facing a death squad there, she was spared when they fled from approaching American forces. Agent Rose was arrested a week after D-Day in Paris - having fled there when the Brest operation was targeted by the Gestapo.

At her 105th birthday party in February, her niece Marie Andree said the veteran had no children as she was in her 40s when she married.
Although her husband died some years ago, she later found companionship with Brian Westaway, a fellow Lampton House resident.

She once said: "You don't know what freedom is if you have never lost it. Everybody was ready to contribute to the fight and to risk their lives.
"The only fear we had was of being tortured and of speaking under torture - I rarely thought of my personal safety, I just acted and did what I believed was the right thing."

She added that she still felt 50, and that "time had forgotten her".

Other honours given to her were the Liberation Cross, War Cross with palm, the War Cross with purple star, the American Medal of Freedom and the Medal of the Resistance.


Monday, March 8, 2010 - 13:56

SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (3-6-10)

A new book has claimed that Robin Hood was not as selfless as he is often depicted, suggesting he stole from the rich and lent money to the poor as an early kind of loan shark.

By stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, Robin Hood gained legendary status as a selfless re-distributor of wealth.

But a new book claims that the outlaw of Sherwood Forest was in fact something of a loan shark, who operated a sophisticated lending scheme for those short of cash.

Robin Hood: The Unknown Templar, points to several passages in an old English ballad that depict Robin loaning £400 to an impoverished knight.

The claim threatens to tarnish the image of a hero of English folklore who has been played on screen by actors including Errol Flynn and Kevin Costner, and who even has even has an airport, in Doncaster, named after him....

Sunday, March 7, 2010 - 15:55

Name of source: Times (UK)

SOURCE: Times (UK) (3-10-10)

A former head of MI5 has claimed that US intelligence agencies deliberately concealed their mistreatment of terror suspects.

Baroness Manningham-Buller said she learnt that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, had been waterboarded only after she retired from the Security Service in 2007.

In a speech to the Mile End Group at the House of Lords, Lady Manningham-Buller said: “The Americans were very keen that people like us did not discover what they were doing.”

She said that she had wondered, in 2002 and 2003, how the US had been able to supply her service with intelligence from Mohammed.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010 - 12:11

Name of source: NYT

SOURCE: NYT (3-9-10)

By at least one amusing new metric, Michelangelo’s unofficial 500-year run at the top of the Italian art charts has ended. Caravaggio, who somehow found time to paint when he wasn’t brawling, scandalizing pooh-bahs, chasing women (and men), murdering a tennis opponent with a dagger to the groin, fleeing police assassins or getting his face mutilated by one of his many enemies, has bumped him from his perch.

That’s according to an art historian at the University of Toronto, Philip Sohm. He has studied the number of writings (books, catalogs and scholarly papers) on both of them during the last 50 years. Mr. Sohm has found that Caravaggio has gradually, if unevenly, overtaken Michelangelo.

He has charts to prove it.

The change, most obvious since the mid-1980s, doesn’t exactly mean Michelangelo has dropped down the memory hole. To judge from the throngs still jamming the Sistine Chapel and lining up outside the Accademia in Florence to check out “David,” his popularity hasn’t dwindled much.

But, charts or no charts, Mr. Sohm has touched on something. Caravaggiomania, as he calls it, implies not just that art history doctoral students may finally be struggling to think up anything fresh to say about Michelangelo. It suggests that the whole classical tradition in which Michelangelo was steeped is becoming ever more foreign and therefore seemingly less germane, even to many educated people. His otherworldly muscle men, casting the damned into hell or straining to emerge from thick blocks of veined marble, aspired to an abstract and bygone ideal of the sublime, grounded in Renaissance rhetoric, which, for postwar generations, now belongs with the poetry of Alexander Pope or plays by Corneille as admirable but culturally remote splendors.

Caravaggio, on the other hand, exemplifies the modern antihero, a hyperrealist whose art is instantly accessible. His doe-eyed, tousle-haired boys with puffy lips and bubble buttocks look as if they’ve just tumbled out of bed, not descended from heaven. Coarse not godly, locked into dark, ambiguous spaces by a strict geometry then picked out of deep shadow by an oracular light, his models come straight off the street. Cupid is clearly a hired urchin on whom Caravaggio strapped a pair of fake wings. The angel in his “Annunciation” dangles like Chaplin’s tramp on the high wire in “The Circus,” from what must have been a rope contraption Caravaggio devised....

Wednesday, March 10, 2010 - 11:26

SOURCE: NYT (3-8-10)

Supporters of Berlin-Brandenburg International Airport contend that it might be the salvation of a city that, despite its incredible historical resonance, has become an economic and geographic backwater. Detractors vehemently argue that the airport will be just another misguided drain of money by a local government critics say has failed to help Berlin realize its potential despite the city’s status as one of the hottest destinations on the planet....

The landlocked capital on the eastern fringe of the country will have closed three airports to open one: the budget airport currently at Schönefeld, the main airport, Tegel, and, in an emotionally charged shuttering in 2008, Tempelhof Airport, an architectural monument and symbol of freedom to West Berliners since the days of the Berlin Airlift. Officials placed their bets on the new mega-airport at Schönefeld, the size of 2,000 football fields with a terminal building as big as the Nazi-built Olympic stadium....

Many of Berlin’s problems are not the same as those facing other industrial cities in decline like Detroit, but are a product of its unique history. Beginning in 1945, the Soviets literally carried factories home from their sector in the east as reparations for Nazi crimes.

Gradually, remaining factory owners gave up on the capitalist island of West Berlin during the 28 years that the Wall constricted the movement of goods and people. Finally the reunification of city and country brought an end to subsidies pressed by cold war adversaries....


Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 15:58

Name of source: USA Today

SOURCE: USA Today (3-9-10)

Many presidents like to read about their predecessors, and President Obama said yesterday he is studying up on Theodore Roosevelt.

Press Secretary Robert Gibbs tells us the president is reading The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, by Edmund Morris -- a true classic of the presidential genre.

First published in 1979, the beautifully written narrative tells the story of how a privileged yet sickly New York City boy grew up to become the outdoorsman, writer, military man, political leader, and occasional bully whom history remembers as TR.


Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 19:46

SOURCE: USA Today (3-8-10)

The SS United States, America's greatest ocean liner and the fastest ship of its kind ever to cross the Atlantic, is in "imminent danger" of being sold and ripped up for scrap, according to a preservation group.

The SS United States Conservancy says Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL), which owns the mothballed ship, has set a deadline this month for bids from buyers and could sell it soon to a scrapper.

"This is it," says Dan McSweeney, conservancy director. "We could lose this symbol of the United States."

In a statement, NCL says it is looking for "a suitable buyer." Asked whether that definition includes scrappers, AnneMarie Mathews of NCL says it means any "U.S. entity that has the funds to purchase the ship."

Peter Knego, an ocean liner historian, says almost all such vessels eventually are scrapped: "NCL will be vilified for this, but it's the natural order of things." He says a scrapper is the only likely buyer....

Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 10:16

Name of source: BBC

SOURCE: BBC (3-9-10)

An auction of the papers of Giorgio Vasari, the man credited with founding European art history, has been called off at the last moment.

The papers, which include letters to and from Michelangelo, were due to be auctioned to pay off tax debts.

But lawyers for their owners, an aristocratic Italian family, stepped in at the last minute, claiming they were being sold too cheaply.

Giorgio Vasari, himself an acclaimed artist, lived in the 16th Century.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 19:41

SOURCE: BBC (3-9-10)

The son of Rwanda's first President, Dominique Mbonyumutwa, has told the BBC he is protesting against an order to exhume his father's remains.

The mayor of Muhanga district has given the family 60 days to decide where they want the former president re-buried.

He was buried in Gitarama town's sports stadium, which is being redeveloped.

The stadium, called Democracy Stadium, is where Rwanda's Hutu leaders declared that the Tutsi monarchy would be abolished.


Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 19:31

SOURCE: BBC (3-8-10)

A major research project is aiming to mark the influence of the 19th Century copper industry on Swansea.

The Swansea University scheme plans to bring "back to life" the now dilapidated Hafod copper works which were founded exactly 200 years ago.

Computer animations, exhibitions and activities involving local groups to celebrate the site are planned.


Monday, March 8, 2010 - 14:40

SOURCE: BBC (3-8-10)

The Leonardo da Vinci extortion trial has heard one of the accused say that the starting figure for the Madonna of the Yarnwinder's return was £700,000.

Marshall Ronald told a man he believed represented the Duke of Buccleuch that five people wanted a 20% share of any additional payment to bring it back.

Mr Ronald is one of five men accused of conspiring to extort £4.25m for the safe return of the painting.

All of them deny the charges they face at the High Court in Edinburgh.


Monday, March 8, 2010 - 14:37

SOURCE: BBC (3-8-10)

An 18th Century south Devon canal is one step closer to being restored.

The Stover Canal near Newton Abbot was built by James Templer of Stover House to serve the ball clay industry.

In 1999 the Stover Canal Society was formed with the intention of restoring the scrub-filled waterway for fishing, rowing and wildlife.


Monday, March 8, 2010 - 14:35

SOURCE: BBC (3-7-10)

A number of artefacts discovered during work on an £87m road development in Dorset are to go on display.

The Weymouth Relief Road is being built to ease traffic between Dorchester and Weymouth and Portland, where Olympic sailing events will be held in 2012.

The site attracted much interest when archaeologists found an ancient burial pit on Ridgeway Hill last year.

Items including ancient bones, Iron Age pottery and shale jewellery will go on display at Weymouth Pavilion.


Sunday, March 7, 2010 - 15:42

Name of source: AP

SOURCE: AP (3-8-10)

A woman certified as the oldest person living in the United States has died.

Mary Josephine Ray, who was born in Canada, died Sunday at a nursing home in Westmoreland, New Hampshire, at age 114 years and 294 days old.

The Gerontology Research Group says that until her death, Ray was the oldest person in the United States and the second-oldest person in the world.


Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 19:37

SOURCE: AP (3-9-10)

A dozen centuries-old shipwrecks — some of them unusually well-preserved — have been found in the Baltic Sea by a gas company building an underwater pipeline between Russia and Germany.

The oldest wreck probably dates back to medieval times and could be up to 800 years old, while the others are likely from the 17th to 19th centuries, Peter Norman of Sweden's National Heritage Board said Tuesday.

"They could be interesting, but we have only seen pictures of their exterior. Many of them are considered to be fully intact. They look very well-preserved," Norman told The Associated Press.

Thousands of wrecks — from medieval ships to warships sunk during the world wars of the 20th century — have been found in the Baltic Sea, which doesn't have the ship worm that destroys wooden wrecks in saltier oceans.

The latest discovery was made during a search of the seabed east of the Swedish island of Gotland by the Nord Stream consortium, which is building a 750-mile (1,200-kilometer) pipeline in the Baltic Sea.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 15:47

SOURCE: AP (3-7-10)

"You want to see a living hobbit?" a guard at the cave whispered. "I can take you there but it will cost 500,000 rupiah ($55)."

Kornelis Jaman was referring to the dwarf cave-dwellers, whose skeletal remains were discovered in the cave. Scientists believe they went extinct 17,000 years ago, but villagers with an eye for profit insist the hobbits hung around until at least 300 years ago and their descendants are still living in nearby villages.

The discovery of the remains in the Liang Bua cave in 2003 put the Flores excavation on the map. Suddenly, a steady stream of fossil enthusiasts was turning up, and hobbit tours began.


Monday, March 8, 2010 - 14:32

SOURCE: AP (3-8-10)

Most of the 1.5 million condolence letters sent to President John F. Kennedy's widow after his assassination were destroyed, and the 200,000 or so pages that were saved have been hidden away in the archives of his presidential library in Boston.

More than 200 of the letters have now been published for the first time in "Letters to Jackie: Condolences From a Grieving a Nation."

Author Ellen Fitzpatrick, a University of New Hampshire history professor, spent months reading 15,000 letters and then contacting hundreds of the writers and their heirs to get permission to publish them.


Monday, March 8, 2010 - 14:17

Name of source: CBC News

SOURCE: CBC News (3-9-10)

The government of Peru has withdrawn six of the 17 elements of its 2008 lawsuit against Yale University that demands the return of Inca artifacts removed from Machu Picchu.

Yale holds more than 4,000 pieces excavated from the ancient Peruvian city by history professor Hiram Bingham between 1911 and 1915.

Peru recently filed papers in U.S. Federal Court withdrawing its claims that Yale committed fraud and conspiracy in collecting the artifacts, which include silver statues, jewelry, musical instruments and human bones.

It had previously accused Yale of intending to deceive the South American nation by promising to return the artifacts when they were first taken.

The Associated Press reported that the claims were withdrawn after Peru hired new lawyers who believe the move would simplify the case and resolve the dispute.

"Peru has dropped all claims of Yale having intentionally done anything wrong," Jonathan Freiman, Yale's attorney, told The Associated Press. "We're glad they have done so, but we think the rest of the case is equally misguided and should be withdrawn as well."...

Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 17:30

Name of source: New Yorker

SOURCE: New Yorker (3-9-10)

James Traficant, the flamboyant former Democratic congressman from Ohio who recently completed a seven-year stint in jail for bribery and racketeering, has announced that he plans to run for Congress this year as an independent. As I detail in my new book, “The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession,” Traficant’s history is much more sordid and disturbing than many realize, in ways that extend well beyond his conviction in 2002.

Traficant emerged out of perhaps the last truly mobbed-up county in America, a place in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley where people were often murdered or disappeared...In an old box in a courthouse, I found a transcript of a tape recording in which Traficant was caught seemingly scheming with the Carabbia brothers...According to the transcript, Traficant acknowledged receiving bribes, and indicated that, in return, he would use the sheriff’s office to protect the Mafia’s rackets. Charlie told Traficant, “Your uncle Tony was my goombah … and we feel that you’re like a brother to us.” Traficant assured his benefactors that he was a “loyal f----r,” and if any of his sheriff’s deputies betrayed them “they’ll f----n' come up swimming in [the] Mahoning River.”...

Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 15:56

Name of source: Daily Mail (UK)

SOURCE: Daily Mail (UK) (2-24-10)

A sikh fighter pilot's life was saved by the padding in his turban after he was forced to ditch his plane in a WWII dogfight.

Squadron Leader Mohinder Singh Pujji, one of only a handful of Indian ace flyers in the RAF, crashed into the English Channel after his plane was shot down in a mid-air skirmish.

Advised to plant his stricken Hurricane in the sea because he was unable to swim, the 22-year-old nose-dived into the water.

Rescuers boarded boats to help the young flyer, who crashed landed near the White Cliffs of Dover, and pulled him from the wreckage with bad head injuries.
But Sqdn Ldr Singh Pujji, now 91, has told how his specially-adapted headgear, which even had his wings sewn onto it, acted as a cushion for the crash-landing.
He said: 'The padding of my turban saved me, it was full of blood. I was taken to the hospital but after seven days I was back to flying again.'

He added: 'I couldn't swim. I carried on until I saw the white cliffs of Dover and I thought, "I'll make it."
'The aircraft was a total wreck. I was dragged out and I heard voices saying, "He's still alive, he's still alive." Because my eyes were closed I couldn't see.'
Sqdn Ldr Pujji added how his turban was fitted so that the earphones could go over the top and how he carried a spare in his cockpit.

'I had a special strap made to hold my earphones. I used to carry a spare turban with me so I would have one if I got shot down.
'I thought I was a very religious man, I shouldn't take off my turban.'

Sqdn Ldr Singh Pujji surrounds himself with wartime memorabilia at his sheltered accommodation block in Gravesend, Kent.

He relived his daring wartime exploits ahead his memoirs published later this year, called For King and Another Country.

He said he signed up for the RAF after responding to an advert declaring 'Pilots needed for Royal Air Force' in an Indian newspaper.

And after learning to fly in 1937 he was one of only eight pilots from the Empire colony deemed good enough for fighter duties.

Arriving in August 1940, at the height of the Battle of the Britain, the young officer then flew countless missions against Hitler's Luftwaffe.

He said: 'Every day was a question of life and death. Every flight we made we weren't sure we were going to come back.

'It's a job which can't easily be described, escorting convoys over the English Channel, going over occupied countries looking out for enemies, escorting bombers and making interceptions.

'In one minute we would have to be strapped in and up in the air ready to meet enemy fighters. This was three to four times a day, throughout six months.'
He had another lucky escape when he was shot down by Rommel's army in the Western Desert in north Africa.

He said: 'I didn't know what to do. I wasn't on fire, I didn't get hurt. I knew if I carried on north I would get to the Mediterranean, but any other direction I knew nothing.

'I gave up and sat on top of my plane and after a while I saw a cloud of dust. I did not mind who it was picking me up, Germany or Britain.

'I started waving my shirt and luckily it was the British.'
Sqdn Leader Pujji, who was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his bravery, hit the headlines last year after campaigning against the BNP.

He was angered by party leader Nick Griffin's use of the iconic Spitfire to symbolise Britishness.


Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 11:18

SOURCE: Daily Mail (UK) (3-8-10)

A glamorous Nazi spy became amorously entangled with two British secret agents in wartime Cairo, previously classified files show.

Sophie Kukralova - codenamed R 37 49 by her German bosses - developed a 'most undesirable familiarity' with the two intelligence officers.

One already married agent offered to leave his wife and marry the blonde while the second threatened to blow her cover unless she slept with him.

Kukralova's arrival in Cairo in 1941 immediately aroused suspicion due to her inexplicable wealth, expensive taste in clothes, and her claims of high-level links to the Nazi regime.
She was arrested and interned.

While British intelligence said they had no definite proof she was spying for the Nazis, it said: 'With her cosmopolitan and unscrupulous character, her interest in espionage, her unusual knowledge of armaments and military affairs, Sophie would, if released, be a potential menace to security wherever she was.'
The file adds she 'acquired a most undesirable familiarity with British military personnel, including at least one NCO (non-commissioned officer) engaged on most secret work'.

A further note said: 'Her contacts and behaviour were generally suspicious and there seems to have been some scandal in Cairo in connection with a Bob Sewell of the Intelligence Corps and an unexplained individual named Flett who got drunk, tried to seduce her, and then threatened to have her arrested as a spy.'

Under interrogation Kukralova said she met a man in Cairo called Alfred Flett who said he was Norwegian, but she believed he was a German agent because he kept trying to get stories out of her.

One night Flett got very drunk and tried to come into her room at 1am. When she refused to let him, he became very angry and reportedly told her: 'I am a British Intelligence Officer. If you want to stay in Egypt you can, but if you won't do what I want I will have you arrested.'

Kukralova described Bob Sewell as a friend and admitted he asked her to marry him, but added: 'I told him I liked him and he was very nice, but he was married and married men to me were taboo. He said he loved his wife very much.'

Kukralova was born in Litomerice in the former Czechoslovakia in May 1911 to Georgian exiles, her MI5 file released by the National Archives shows.
She married a Czech man called Havel Hama Kukraloff in 1936. They lived in Prague and then London, where she was also employed in an arms factory, before divorcing in 1937.

She was jailed five times by the Germans before turning up in the Hungarian capital Budapest in 1941, where she befriended a London-born British engineer called Maxwell Clapham and his wife Josephine.
Kukralova persuaded the Claphams to adopt her in May 1941, although she did not get British nationality.
Later that year, she and Josephine Clapham left Budapest and travelled via Turkey and Syria to Cairo in Egypt, where they aroused 'considerable suspicion'.

German documents uncovered by UK intelligence after the war suggested that Kukralova was indeed a spy who had planned to get herself adopted by UK citizens to acquire a British passport so she could travel to Bombay to arrange contacts for another Nazi agent.
After she was released in 1946, MI5 expressed no objection when she applied to visit Britain in March 1951.


Monday, March 8, 2010 - 13:54

SOURCE: Daily Mail (UK) (3-7-10)

A bid to change the face of America’s currency has come under fire from US historians and politicians.

Republican Congressman Patrick McHenry has introduced a new law to replace Ulysses S. Grant with Ronald Reagan on the $50 bill.

The change is designed to coincide with next year’s 100th anniversary of Reagan’s birth.

But Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee, which will vote on the measure, complain they aren’t ready to replace the Civil War general and 18th president with a former Hollywood star whose political legacy is still open to question.

Democrat lawmaker Brad Sherman said he will not vote for a note change for someone ‘whose policies are still controversial'.



Sunday, March 7, 2010 - 15:41

Name of source: Prague Monitor (Czech Rep.)

SOURCE: Prague Monitor (Czech Rep.) (3-8-10)

An expedition of Czech archaeologists has found remains of an about 150,000-year-old prehistoric settlement in Arbil, north Iraq, which has been the so far oldest uncovered in this part of northern Mesopotamia, team head Karel Novacek told reporters Friday.

The archaeologists revealed a high number of items, mainly prehistoric stone tools, about nine metres under the ground in Arbil, capital of the Kurdish autonomous region, said archaeologist Novacek, from the University of West Bohemia in Plzen.

The eight-member expedition returned from Iraq at the end of last year. The team comprised experts from the University of West Bohemia, academic and university institutions in Prague and two companies.

Czech experts have succeeded in finding evidence of the oldest human settlement in the locality as all other finds of American expeditions working there 50 years ago are probably younger.

"We have been the first foreign expedition in this area since the second Gulf War in 2006," Novacek added.

The project, supported by the Czech Science Foundation (GACR), has been the first professional Czech expedition to Mesopotamia, a cradle of human civilisation.

"The expedition has mainly focused on the town of Arbil that used to be one of the royal residential centres of ancient Assyria. Its research is a real challenge for the modern 21st century archaeology," Novacek explained.

Unlike other more known ancient centres in this area, Arbil did not cease to exist and it has remained a lively town to date. It is one of the longest permanently populated sites in the world, Novacek added.

In spite of it, it has not attracted many archaeologists so far.

The beginning of this town dates back to the 3rd century BC.

The expedition's research was primarily based on geophysical exploration, historical buildings documentation and the assessment of aerial and satellite photos.

Novacek, in this respect, also praised cooperation with the Prague-based GemaArt Group heritage conservation company, that has worked in Iraq since 2004, without which the thorough research would not be possible.


Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 11:16

Name of source: CNN

SOURCE: CNN (3-9-10)

The magnitude-8.8 earthquake that rocked the west coast of Chile last month was violent enough to move the city of Concepcion at least 10 feet to the west and the capital, Santiago, about 11 inches to the west-southwest, researchers said.

The quake also shifted other parts of South America, as far apart as the Falkland Islands and Fortaleza, Brazil.
The results were reached via global positioning satellite measurements taken before and after the February 27 quake by teams from The Ohio State University, the University of Hawaii, the University of Memphis and the California Institute of Technology, as well as agencies across South America.

NASA scientists have also credited the quake with shifting the Earth's axis enough to create shorter days. The change is negligible, but still worth noting: Each day should be 1.26 microseconds shorter, according to preliminary calculations. A microsecond is one-millionth of a second.

A large quake -- like the one that hit Chile's Maule region -- shifts massive amounts of rock and alters the distribution of mass on the planet.

When that distribution changes, it changes the rate at which the planet rotates. And the rotation rate determines the length of a day.

"Any worldly event that involves the movement of mass affects the Earth's rotation," Benjamin Fong Chao, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said while explaining the phenomenon in 2005.

Despite the tragedy of the earthquake, which killed hundreds of Chileans, scientists see opportunities to gain valuable information in the aftermath.

"The Maule earthquake will arguably become one of the, if not the most important, great earthquakes yet studied," said Ben Brooks of the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at the University of Hawaii.

"We now have modern, precise instruments to evaluate this event."


Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 11:11

SOURCE: CNN (3-9-10)

Before he was a convicted serial killer, Rodney Alcala was a winning bachelor on "The Dating Game."
"Oh yeah, I remember it quite clearly," said Jed Mills, the game-show contestant who sat next to Alcala in 1978. "He was creepy. Definitely creepy."

Found guilty in February of murdering four women and a child, Alcala, 66, is acting as his own attorney in the penalty phase of the trial. He is hoping to persuade the jury in Santa Ana, California, to spare his life.

The crimes Alcala committed date to the late 1970s. Nobody at the time knew the man with the wavy long hair and toothy grin was an apparent psychopath -- an unstable, antisocial personality.

That includes Mills, a veteran television and film actor, whose only encounter with Alcala was when both of them appeared on "The Dating Game."

"That's when I became part of a nightmare, and I didn't realize it was a nightmare until 32 years later," Mills said.

Alcala, who already had been convicted for the 1968 rape of an 8-year-old girl, was the first contestant to be introduced in the game-show episode.

"Bachelor No. 1 is a successful photographer who got his start when his father found him in the dark room at the age of 13, fully developed," host Jim Lange said. "Between takes you might find him skydiving or motor-cycling. Please welcome Rodney Alcala."

After the three bachelors were announced, the young woman who would choose one of them for a date began asking questions. She posed her first one to Alcala.

"What's your best time?" she said.
"The best time is at night," Alcala answered with a wide smile. "Nighttime."

Mills, who was bachelor No. 2, said he had an almost immediate aversion to Alcala. "Something about him, I could not be near him," Mills recalled. "I am kind of bending toward the other guy to get away from him, and I don't know if I did that consciously. But thinking back on that, I probably did."

Alcala was able to charm Cheryl Bradshaw from the other side of the "Dating Game" wall.

"Who will it be?" the host asked her at the end of the show. "I'll take One [bachelor No. 1]," Bradshaw said, and out strolled Alcala.

If Alcala appeared likable to viewers at home, Mills said he was the complete opposite when they sat together in the show's green room, where the show's contestants waited before going on air.
Video: Suspect's game show defense

"He was quiet, but at the same time he would interrupt and impose when he felt like it," Mills said. "And he was very obnoxious and creepy -- he became very unlikable and rude and imposing as though he was trying to intimidate. I wound up not only not liking this guy ... not wanting to be near him ... he got creepier and more negative. He was a standout creepy guy in my life."

Within months of his "Dating Game" appearance, Alcala would become a killer, prosecutors said, abducting and murdering a 12-year-old girl in 1979. Before the decade was over, Alcala would claim four more victims, according to testimony at his trial.

CNN asked noted crime profiler Pat Brown to analyze Alcala's appearance on "The Dating Game."

"He was aware that he could say things that were considered sexy and funny and the girl would like that," Brown told CNN. "He watched the game and he gave those answers and he won, so he learned some tricks. But a psychopath's true nature comes seeping through.
"When you go back and look, what's most fascinating is that he had already committed a crime," Brown said, "Raped a little girl. Here is a man portraying himself as a desirable young man when he is a violent sexual predator of children."

Alcala's real identity revealed itself off the stage when he was with the other bachelors, Brown believes.
"He is showing his psychopathic personality in the green room," she said. "He wasn't acting at that time. Those were his enemies, and he had to beat them to get the girl and he wanted to win.

"This guy probably literally hated them. This guy was going on the show to prove how special and wonderful he was. And his ego was riding on it."

Though Bradshaw chose Alcala as her date, she refused to go out with him, according to published reports. Being rejected can have a profound impact on serial killers, Brown suggested.

"One wonders what that did in his mind," Brown said. "That is something he would not take too well. They don't understand the rejection. They think that something is wrong with that girl: 'She played me. She played hard to get.' "

Mills said he still has a difficult time discussing Alcala.
"The more time has gone by, the creepier it gets," he said, "because it kind of sinks in slowly. What this guy did, it's hard to express. He kind of haunts me a bit.
"Just talking about it, I get a tightness in my stomach."


Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 11:06

SOURCE: CNN (3-8-10)

A team of scientists has agreed that a giant asteroid killed off dinosaurs and a majority of other species on Earth more than 65 million years ago.

The researchers analyzed evidence and agreed it supports a single-impact theory first proposed 30 years ago on the cause of the mass extinction.

Since 1980, scientists have gathered an overwhelming amount of evidence that shows a single asteroid about 6 miles in diameter and traveling at thousands of miles an hour, slammed into the Gulf of Mexico, said Richard Norris, a paleoceanographer at the University of California San Diego.

The impact caused a crater 24 miles deep and 125 miles wide, according to Norris, who was part of the research team.

The crater was discovered in 1991 in Chicxulub, Mexico, on the Yucatan Peninsula, said scientists who called it the "smoking gun" that backed up the asteroid theory.

Norris compared the asteroid's impact with a blast from 100 million tons of TNT.

"It's basically more powerful than all the atomic weapons on the planet going off all at once," he said.
The researchers wanted to settle disputes about what killed off the dinosaurs. Some theories have argued that it would have taken many meteorites to cause such a cataclysmic event. Another rival theory suggested that the mass extinction was a result of a massive volcanic eruption in India that took place around the same time as the impact.

However, evidence now shows that one monster impact caused the ecological catastrophe, Norris said.

Data at the crater's location showed rock with concentrations of iridium and platinum, which are characteristic of the chemical fingerprints of the asteroid, Norris said.

Norris speculates it took about 15 million years before the planet and surviving species started recovering from the impact that also destroyed 70 percent of other species.
"It's believed that the impact actually blew down the forests over most of North America from the pressure wave associated with the explosion," Norris said.

"Then there was this fireball that came after that that fried a lot of vegetation and basically cleaned off the landscape over most of North America."

Scientists say the impact also caused a huge earthquake.
It "jiggled loose a lot of sediment on the eastern seaboard," Norris said.

The conclusion was published in the journal Science on Friday.


Monday, March 8, 2010 - 13:47

SOURCE: CNN (3-7-10)

A narrowly passed committee measure that recommends the United States recognize the 1915 killings of ethnic Armenians in Ottoman Turkey as genocide will likely not get a full vote in the House of Representatives, according to a senior State Department official.

The official said Friday that the State Department has an understanding with House leadership on the issue, and, "We believe it will stop where it is."

The Obama administration had urged the House Foreign Affairs Committee not to pass the resolution, warning it could damage U.S.-Turkish relations and jeopardize efforts to normalize relations between Turkey and its neighbor Armenia. The two do not share formal diplomatic relations.


Sunday, March 7, 2010 - 15:40

Name of source: WaPo

SOURCE: WaPo (3-9-10)

Japan confirmed for the first time Tuesday the existence of once-secret Cold War-era pacts with the U.S. that tacitly allowed nuclear-armed warships to enter Japanese ports in violation of Tokyo's postwar principles.

While declassified U.S. documents have already confirmed such 1960s agreements, Tuesday's revelation broke with decades of official denials.

The investigation by a government-mandated panel is part of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's campaign to rein in the power of bureaucrats and make his government, which was elected to power last year, more open than that of the long-ruling conservatives, who repeatedly denied the existence of such pacts.

"It's regrettable that such facts were not disclosed to the public for such a long time, even after the end of the Cold War era," Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada told a news conference, adding that the investigation was meant to restore public trust in Japan's diplomacy....

Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 10:23

Name of source: Guardian (UK)

SOURCE: Guardian (UK) (3-8-10)

The bibulous Irish playwright Brendan Behan, banned from entering Britain for a solo IRA wartime bombing mission, was monitored by MI5 for several decades.

More than 45 years after his death from excessive drinking and burial with an IRA military salute over his grave, the security service's files, finally released, include a remark from 1956 that one "source considers that as an individual he is too unstable and too drunken to be particularly dangerous".

He had tried to blow up Liverpool Docks during an unauthorised raid, was caught and sent to prison for offences under the Explosive Substances Act.

In October 1941 he was deported back to Ireland and a notice circulated to passport offices that he should be refused entry. Back in Dublin, Behan was soon in trouble. After shooting at several Gardai officers, following a republican commemoration, he was arrested and sent to the city's Mountjoy Prison.

Correspondence with his stepbrother, Sean Furlong, who worked at the Royal Ordnance factory in Sellafield, was monitored by the intelligence services. "It's the futility of it all that's getting me down," Behan admitted from his cell in Mountjoy.

"Personally I think the Irish people are just about browned off with all this bloody game of private armies ... Sean, I am firmly convinced that republicanism (God almighty it's not even republicanism with the half of them) of this particular brand is defunct....

Monday, March 8, 2010 - 16:06

Name of source: ArtDaily.org

SOURCE: ArtDaily.org (3-8-10)

The recent finding of a 19th century silver bracelet in Alamo Mocho, in the desert of Baja California, represents the first material evidence of presence of the Mormon Battalion, which camped at the site before integrating to the 1847 Mexico-United States War (Mexican War).

The discovery took place after a sandstorm uncovered archaeological material. Specialists of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) began exploration at the site afterwards.

The jewel represents a clear testimony for Mexican and American historians that Mormons camped in Alamo Mocho approximately for 3 days, before their integration with the 1847 war, fact only stated in documents until now.

Archaeologist Antonio Porcayo Michelini declared this at the Baja California Archaeology Analysis Table that took place recently in Tijuana, Baja California. He detailed that a bifacial stone knife was found as well, which could be more than 8,000 years old. Other material found consists of Yumana ceramics, fish bones and other mammals’ rests....

Monday, March 8, 2010 - 15:17

Name of source: Asian Tribune

SOURCE: Asian Tribune (3-8-10)

The U.S. foreign affairs committee endorsed the resolution with a 23-22 vote even though the Obama administration had urged Congress not to approve it. The resolution now goes to the full House, where prospects for passage are uncertain.

Turkey has always maintained, and rightly so based on objective investigation of the matter by unbiased historians that the Armenian toll in 1915-16 has been inflated and those killed were victims of civil war and unrest, not genocide. Turkish government has pulled its ambassador home as a protest of the U.S. congressional panel decision.

While the death of those Armenians during World War I has often been dubbed as genocide, perpetrated by the Ottoman Turks, it should be noted that the Ottoman Empire was a distant memory since 1908 after the Young Turks, run by the Freemasons, had taken effective control of the falling Caliphate. It was its Committee of Unity and Progress (CUP) that entered the war on Germany's side in 1914. Those Freemasons had little, if any, love for Islam or the old Ottoman Caliphate. To most Muslims, those secular fundamentalist - Young Turks were traitors.

Yusuf Halacoglu, president the Turkish Historical Society (TTK), estimates that with the deportations (excluding inter-ethnic violence) a total of 56,000 Armenians perished during the period due to war conditions, and less than 10,000 were actually killed.

Almost all Turkish intellectuals, scientists and historians accept that many Armenians died during the conflict, but they do not consider these events to be genocide. A number of Western academics in the field of Ottoman history, including (late) Bernard Lewis (Princeton University), Heath Lowry (Princeton University), Justin McCarthy (University of Louisville), Gilles Veinstein (College de France), and Stanford Shaw (UCLA) have expressed serious doubts as to the genocidal character of the events. They offer the opinion that the weight of evidence instead points to serious inter-communal warfare, perpetrated by both Muslim and Christian irregular forces, aggravated by disease and famine, as the causes of suffering and massacres in Anatolia and adjoining areas during the First World War.


Monday, March 8, 2010 - 14:27

Name of source: BBC Radio 4

SOURCE: BBC Radio 4 (3-8-10)

Summer 1937. What could be more fitting in the cool afternoon of an English country lane than a group of cycling tourists steadily pedalling their way from one historic site to another, stopping to camp overnight in fields along the way.

The only problem was, that summer, some of those groups of teenage boys were Hitler Youth.

In an era without satellite photography, when detailed ordnance survey maps could be hard to come by and when tension in Europe was rising, MI5 were worried that this innocent cyclo-tourism was a cover for spying.

MI5 had been told that Hitler Youth groups visiting abroad were asked to complete a detailed questionnaire, including questions on terrain, population, and political views of the population.

They were asked to take photographs, especially of industry, and to get lists of names of all those taking part in anti-German movements.

In May 1937, the British "Daily Herald" paper had printed an article about "spyclists" - based on translation of the Nazi Cycling Association's advice to members travelling abroad.

It too asked travellers to try to note carefully the features of the countryside they visited:

"Get into your head all landmarks like steeples and towers and all fords and bridges and acquaint yourself with them in such a way that you will be able to recognise them by night"

And one of the senior figures in the Hitler Youth had moved to London at the start of the year, ostensibly to study. MI5 suspected that Joachim Benemann's real object however was to develop the Hitler Youth in the UK.

On an earlier visit, undertaken in 1934 and 5, he had set up joint Anglo-German youth camps, one at Bryanston School, and he had tried to develop links between the Hitler Youth and the Boy Scouts, without much success.

So the head of MI5, Colonel Sir Vernon Kell, decided to try to track visiting Hitler Youth cycling groups. Chief Constables were asked to monitor them, to try to find out what their planned routes were, without questioning the leaders.

From the file, it appears they identified seven substantial groups, each of about twenty young men. These were generally the older members of the Hitler Youth: in their late teens or early twenties.

Their itineraries were usually built round visits to the great English historic sites - Oxford, Cambridge, London. Though one party was touring Scotland and another finished in Wales.

MI5 did not shadow the cyclists closely, so it is not recorded exactly where they stayed and who they met. There was some reporting in local papers though: the Boston and Spalding Free Press reported that the Spalding Rotary Club laid on a special dinner for one group, who thoroughly enjoyed their sausages and mash, and charmed the local people with their good manners.

'Hitler salute'

The Hitler Youth who travelled to Britain had been specially selected - a number had even had been to training camps before the visit.

Some of them met or shared camps with British Boy Scout groups. The most striking was the Tamworth Scout troop - for whom this was a return visit. They had already been guests of the Hitler Youth in Hamburg earlier in the summer, thanks to their very pro-German Scoutmaster.

They had stayed at a Hitler Youth camp and even taken part in a torchlight rally. One of the boys, Les Fardon, told Radio 4's Document Programme ten years ago: "It was like a Roman legion," he said. "You had these long banners and you were marching to tune... it was very stirring and frightening"

Another of his fellow Scouts remembered it as being a very exciting trip, and he recalled how even the British boys fell into doing the "Heil Hitler" salute. "They liked you to do it," he added. Both boys made friends with some of the Germans.

When the Hitler Youth came to visit them, it proved controversial, and prompted intense debate in the pages of the local paper, the Birmingham Post. The head of MI5 asked to see the letters. The most pro-German was R. Charles Lines who wrote about the farewell supper for the Hitler Youth:

"Many remarks passed to me by Tamworth residents showed very plainly what a wonderful impression these boys have made during their stay. There is no doubt that Tamworth has thoroughly enjoyed entertaining them and I know how splendidly local people have risen to the occasion"

Which prompted a tart response from another correspondent, "WFA", who wrote: "Is it not easily understandable that when one has first hand information of the persecution and cruelty meted out by youthful Nazis at home, one is suspicious of their perfect behaviour abroad. One is bound to ask oneself "is it a confidence trick?"

The charm offensive was being carried out at a far higher level too. In November 1937 Lord Baden Powell met the Chief of Staff of the Hitler Youth at the German Embassy. The elderly Chief Scout had long been an admirer of the Hitler Youth, and was keen to develop closer links.

Baden Powell was asked if he would visit Hitler personally, and did not demur, telling the Germans that he was "fully in favour of anything which would bring about a better understanding between our nations"

The British government stepped in to stop that though. A note on the file shows that Lord Cranbourne, Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, called Lord Baden Powell's chosen successor, Lord Somers, around a fortnight later. He "strongly deprecated" close relations, runs the note.


Monday, March 8, 2010 - 13:39

Name of source: Medieval News

SOURCE: Medieval News (3-8-10)

A used bookstore in Toronto is taking a page from medieval booksellers to create a new model for his industry. It is the daring idea of Jason Rovito, whose store, Of the Swallows, their Deeds and the Winter Below, will be opening next month as an experiment in providing a new way of selling books.

Rovito became interested in starting a used bookstore while working on his PhD dissertation on symbolic spaces within urban places, and noticed how important booksellers were in the Middle Ages. He said in an interview with Medievalists.net that he was "looking back to the origins of bookshops  and how they were integral to schools and monasteries. Books were not commodities but cultural symbols due to their scarcity."

Rovito wants to recreate this experience with his bookstore by creating a space that sells more than just books - it will serve as a a space to circulate ideas and provide an opportunity for conversation and learning.

He is carefully preparing his store by giving it a sense of exclusivity and making it a destination for Toronto's cultural community. Located on the second and third floors of a Victorian building in downtown Toronto, the final look of store will include Persian rugs and tables to facilitate talks and meetings.

The store is already hosting workshops from the Toronto New School of Writing and plans to base an online journal in this location. He also hopes the store will host classes and readings, what Mr. Rovito says is "part of the larger ecology of reading."

The store opens during a period when booksellers are having a difficult time keeping their smaller stores open in the face of competition from online alternatives and large big-box stores. But Rovito hopes that he worked out an economic model which will allow him to succeed, and will be able to tap into an urban community's "desire for there to be something" that preserves its culture and connection with books.

The bookstore is located on the outskirts of the University of Toronto, and Rovito believes he will able to develop connections and networks within the university community. The store will only be keeping between 3000 and 4000 volumes on it shelves, which will "keep the stock dynamic", and will be arranged in an interdisciplinary fashion that also hearkens back to how medieval universities taught their students.

Of the Swallows, their Deeds and the Winter Below officially opens on April 2nd. Click here to go to its website.

Monday, March 8, 2010 - 12:59

Name of source: LA Times

SOURCE: LA Times (3-8-10)

The ceremony takes places on Wednesday at 11 a.m. at Emancipation Hall in the U.S. Capitol. Surrounded by statues of some of the nation's most treasured icons, nearly 200 women who served as military pilots during World War II as part of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) program will be on hand to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Recruited to fill a manpower shortage among male fliers, 25,000 women applied. Nearly 1,100 completed training. This little-known band of female pilots -- the first women in history trained to fly U.S. military aircraft -- did everything the men did except participate in combat. They flew trailers so male soldiers could take practice shots at the targets they pulled along. They flew bombardiers so male pilots could practice dropping bombs. They flew test planes, delivered supplies and piloted every plane the Air Force had in its arsenal. By war's end, 38 had been killed -- their bodies returned home and buried at their families' expense.

In 1977, Congress finally granted them veteran status. This week, they finally get their due in Washington....

Monday, March 8, 2010 - 12:58

Name of source: Discovery News

SOURCE: Discovery News (3-3-10)

Paleontologists have discovered a new dinosaur relative that could completely rewrite the history of these animals, according to a new study which appears in tomorrow's issue of Nature.

Fossil remains of the new species, Asilisaurus kongwe, date back to about 240 million years ago -- around 10 million years before the oldest known dinosaurs first emerged.

Aside from reshaping the dino timeline, Asilisaurus has shed new light on the evolution of dinosaurs. Researchers believe that dinosaurs and their relatives went from being exclusively meat-eaters to including plants in their diet.


Sunday, March 7, 2010 - 15:44