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)
March 1, 2010
Mary Eleanor Bowes, the Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne, became known as the 'Unhappy Countess' after being fooled into marriage by the self-styled 'Captain' Andrew Robinson Stoney in the late 18th century.
Bowes, who was said to be the richest heiress in Britain, was an attractive 37-year-old widow with five children when Stony hatched his plan to win her affection.
He arranged to have scurrilous stories about her published in the Morning Post newspaper, and the
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
March 1, 2010
A German woman has become the first of an estimated 2 million victims of rape by Soviet soldiers in the Second World War to break the taboo on talking publicly about the crimes.
Gabriele Koepp's book Why Did I Have To Be A Girl, about the rapes carried out by the Red Army as they marched on Berlin, is the first to be published under a victim's real name.
The soldiers were encouraged by their leader Josef Stalin to regard the crime as a spoil of war after Hitler's inva
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 27, 2010
‘It’s absolutely ridiculous,” bellows Jean Procter. “It’s insulting. It’s very galling. I feel really mutinous about this.” What on earth is making the redoubtable Mrs Procter, aged 91, so angry? Road works through her village? A new appointments system at her surgery?
The subject of her ire is a new book, Once a Land Girl. The sequel to Angela Huth’s best-selling 1994 novel Land Girls, which was turned into an acclaimed film starring Rachel Weisz, Anna Friel and Catherine McCormack
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 26, 2010
[This online supplement is produced and published by Rossiyskaya Gazeta (Russia), which takes sole responsibility for the content.]
Something has changed in Russia. Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the values on which Soviet society was based – and after two decades of hard times – the search is on for a firm footing in values and ideology. Attention has focused on the Second World War, especially the question of what we were fighting for.
It seem
Source: CNN
February 26, 2010
The United Nations' General Assembly on Friday passed an Arab League-backed resolution calling on Israeli and Palestinian leaders to further investigate alleged war crimes during the Israel-Gaza war.
The non-binding resolution calls for "credible and impartial" investigations, with results expected in five months.
Though the resolution cited the Goldstone report, which alleged war crimes on both sides, Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian observer at the United Nati
Source: AP
February 27, 2010
President Barack Obama has signed a one-year extension of several provisions in the nation's main counterterrorism law, the Patriot Act.
Provisions in the measure would have expired on Sunday without Obama's signature Saturday.
Obama's signature comes after the House voted 315 to 97 Thursday to extend the measure.
Source: Times Online (UK)
February 28, 2010
Tony Blair was in such despair over the aftermath of the Iraq war that he told Gordon Brown and John Prescott that he intended to stand down as prime minister, according to a new book.
The claim, which provides a striking contrast with Mr Blair’s appearance before the Chilcot inquiry last month, when he said he had no regrets, appears in the latest instalment of Andrew Rawnsley’s The End of the Party, and confirms in detail widespread reports in recent years that Mr Blair almost re
Source: Fox News
February 27, 2010
An abandoned apartment building in Hollywood, Florida where two of the September 11 hijackers lived for several months before the attack was demolished Friday, MyFox National reported.
A crowd gathered to watch the building in Jackson Street be torn down, MyFox Phoenix reported.
Not long after hijackers flew two planes into New York City's World Trade center towers in 2001, police descended on the Florida property gathering evidence.
Mohamed Atta and Marwan
Source: BBC
February 28, 2010
A memorial has been unveiled to the 222 Chorley Pals who served in World War I, after three years of fundraising.
The 7ft (2m)-high statue of a uniformed soldier on a plinth, overlooking Chorley's main market, was unveiled in an official ceremony on Sunday.
It features the names of the men who served with the company.
The Chorley Pals eventually joined the better-known Accrington Pals and were decimated at the opening of the Battle of the Somme on 1 July
Source: BBC
February 26, 2010
A Bosnian Serb former general, Zdravko Tolimir, has gone on trial in The Hague accused of genocide and other crimes committed during the Bosnian war.
A prosecutor at the UN war crimes tribunal said Mr Tolimir had "assisted, supervised and authorised" killings of Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims).
Genocide is among the charges he faces for his alleged role in the massacre of up to 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica.
He was a top aide to commander Ratko Ml
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 27, 2010
President Jacob Zuma is to be given a fascinating "history lesson" this week when the Queen shows him a special, private exhibition of memorabilia revealing Britain's ties to South Africa.
Scores of gifts, photographs, letters, speeches and other artefacts – previewed exclusively by The Sunday Telegraph – will be on eight tables in the first-floor Picture Gallery at Buckingham Palace, where the President of South Africa and one of his three wives are staying as guests of
Source: Telegraph(UK)
February 28, 2010
Israel's president Shimon Peres is among the many who owe their lives to the son of a founder of Hamas, according to a dramatic account to be published this week.
The full story of how Mosab Hassan Yousef became an informant for Shin Bet, the Israeli domestic security service, will reveal the heroic risks he took during a decade as a spy for Israel - and the extraordinary impact he has had on the course of history in the Middle East.
He describes his remarkable double
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 28, 2010
An 80-year-old German woman has broken an old taboo of silence over the rapes she endured at the hands of Soviet soldiers in the second world war with a searing book about the crimes of the Red Army as it marched towards Berlin.
"Why Did I Have To Be A Girl" by Gabriele Koepp is the first book published about the rapes under a victim's real name. Mrs Koepp was one of an estimated two million German girls and women raped by Soviet soldiers, encouraged by their leader Josef
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 27, 2010
Falkland Islanders have criticised the Government's official history of the 1982 war, claiming that it contains a series of "serious" errors which make it too sympathetic to Argentina's claims to the territory.
The critics say that several apparent statements of fact in the book are "nonsense" and "seriously defective", making Buenos Aires's historical claim to the South Atlantic archipelago "appear stronger than it actually is".
Source: NYT
February 26, 2010
The box that arrived in Philadelphia that day was the plain-looking sort typically used to transport dry goods. Just over 3 feet long, it was 2 feet 8 inches deep and not quite 2 feet wide. Written on the side were the words “this side up with care.’’
Safe to say, the recipient of the box was not fully prepared for what was inside: a 200-pound man named Henry Brown.
As an African-American living in the South, Mr. Brown was a slave when he left Virginia on March 23, 1849
Source: WaPo
February 25, 2010
Jeanne M. Holm, 88, who opened doors for women in the military as the first female general in the Air Force and the first woman in any military branch to reach the rank of two-star general, died Feb. 15 of cardiovascular disease at Anne Arundel Medical Center. She lived in Edgewater.
From 1965 to 1975, Gen. Holm was the highest-ranking woman in the Air Force, which had been resistant to accepting women in its ranks. Women were not allowed to fly and, except for nurses, were not perm
Source: The Age (AU)
February 27, 2010
AUSTRALIA'S national school curriculum will return history, grammar, literature and phonetics to the classroom, in what Prime Minister Kevin Rudd describes as a ''back to basics'' approach to education.
However, it will also place Aboriginal and Asian ways of seeing the world into almost every subject....
The draft puts a new emphasis on Australia's geography, by introducing Asian texts and Aboriginal examples into the classroom across all subjects.
Profess
Source: FOX News
February 27, 2010
President Obama is in a bind as a House committee prepares to vote on a resolution that would recognize the World War I-era killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks as genocide.
While a White House candidate, then-Sen. Obama said he believed the killings were genocide. A congressional resolution to that effect could alienate Turkey, a NATO ally and traditional friend of the United States that is crucial to America's foreign policy goals.
Past administrations have defeated
Source: Times (UK)
February 27, 2010
Two parts of an ancient biblical manuscript separated across centuries and continents were reunited for the first time in a joint display yesterday, thanks to an accidental discovery that is helping to illuminate a dark period in the history of the Hebrew Bible.
The 1,300-year-old fragments, which are among a handful of Hebrew biblical manuscripts known to have survived the era in which they were written, existed separately and with their relationship unknown, until a news photograp
Source: BBC
February 26, 2010
Many in the UK have never heard of SS Mendi, yet in South Africa's Easten Cape Province she is as famous as RMS Titanic.
In February 1917, she was lost off the south coast of the Isle of Wight with, 600 troops on board.
Diver Martin Woodward was the first person to find and identify the wreck of SS Mendi in 1974.
It was not until later he discovered the tragic story behind the artefacts that he brought to the surface. Dr Andrew Fitzpa
