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: Discovery News
February 25, 2010
Visitors to Pompeii will be able to experience a live dig next month in the ancient Roman town that was buried in Mount Vesuvius' catastrophic eruption in 79 A.D.
The site of the open-door excavation is the so-called House of the Chaste Lovers, a building that came to light in 1987 but which has always been closed to the public.
Visitors will be allowed to enter several section of the 2,000-year-old house through suspended walkways, while other parts of the excavation
Source: BBC
February 25, 2010
They came to think of themselves as the forgotten army - the men who endured years of suffering in Japanese Prisoner of War Camps during World War II.
Yet many of the survivors, when they came back, never spoke of what they had seen and suffered. Now, one survivor of the camps has broken his 65-year silence.
Alistair Urquhart, then a 22-year-old Gordon Highlander from Aberdeen, became a prisoner of war without firing a shot. He, with hundreds
Source: BBC
February 25, 2010
The 30-year rule for publishing secret government papers is to be reduced to 20 years, the government has announced.
The measure - to be phased in over 10 years - falls short of the 15 years proposed by a government-commissioned review but was welcomed by campaigners.
Papers relating to senior royals will remain exempt from Freedom of Information Act requests and will be kept secret for the person's lifetime.
Ministers have dropped their objection to Cabi
Source: BBC
February 25, 2010
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) has sentenced the former head of legal affairs at the Ministry of Defence to 25 years in prison.
Lieut-Col Eprem Setako was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity.
He was convicted of ordering the killing of at least 30 people at a military camp in 1994.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 24, 2010
The black and white hand-stitched garments with crests are valued at £400.
They are thought to date from 1874, when she was in her mid-50s, and are believed to have been the monarch's favourite design during the 1870s.
The stockings will be auctioned as part of a fine antiques sale at Lyon & Turnbull in Edinburgh on March 24.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 25, 2010
French President Nicolas Sarkozy acknowledged on Thursday that France made mistakes during the 1994 Rwanda genocide, but stopped short of apologising during his landmark visit to the country Thursday.
Marking the first visit to Rwanda by a French president since the 1994 massacres, Mr Sarkozy spoke at a joint press conference with Rwandan President Paul Kagame, who has repeatedly accused Paris of aiding the genocide.
The French president, who did not occupy a key post
Source: Fox News
February 25, 2010
President Obama and Arizona Sen. John McCain revisited their 2008 presidential race in a testy exchange Thursday at the White House-hosted health care summit in which the president told his vanquished Republican challenger to get over his loss.
At the end of extended remarks by McCain about the contentious process that brought 38 of 535 lawmakers to the presidential guest quarters at Blair House to discuss the stalled health care overhaul, McCain noted that both men campaigned in 2
Source: AP
February 25, 2010
A former Ku Klux Klansman convicted in the 1964 slayings of three civil rights workers has sued the FBI, claiming the government used a mafia hit man to pistol-whip and intimidate witnesses for information in the case.
Edgar Ray Killen, an 85-year-old former saw mill operator and one-time Baptist preacher, was convicted in 2005 of manslaughter based in part on testimony from a mistrial 40 years ago in Mississippi.
The lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court seeks milli
Source: AP
February 25, 2010
An American pilot who dismissed initial reports of what turned out to be the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor has died at age 96.
Kermit Tyler was the Army Air Forces' first lieutenant on temporary duty at Ft. Shafter's radar information center in Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941, when two privates reporting seeing an unusually large blip on their radar screen, indicating a large number of aircraft about 132 miles away and fast approaching.
Many questioned his decision for years,
Source: CNN
February 25, 2010
Former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney met Thursday - the first time they two had seen each other since the inauguration of President Barack Obama over a year ago, officials for the two men tell CNN.
Bush and Cheney met Thursday afternoon for about an hour over coffee at Cheney's residence outside Washington, a spokesman for the former vice president tells CNN.
The former president is in town for a reunion breakfast of the Bush Cheney Alu
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 23, 2010
The Conservatives will today revive one of the most devastating election slogans of recent history by echoing Ronald Reagan’s question to voters: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”
George Osborne will seize on data which shows Britons are worse off than when they last went to the polls as part of what he hopes will be a clinching argument with floating voters.
It comes in a speech in which the shadow chancellor will promise to put the record debt b
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 24, 2010
The son of one of the founders of Hamas spied from inside the movement for Israel for more than a decade, providing intelligence that helped prevent dozens of suicide bombings, according to a report.
Mosab Hassan Yousef, 32, was one of the most valuable sources for Shin Bet, Israel's internal intelligence agency, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on Wednesday.
His reports led to the arrests of Ibrahim Hamid, once the Islamic militant group's military chief in the
Source: MSNBC
February 25, 2010
A renegade former member of Germany's World War Two navy, who thwarted plans to wreck the French port of Bordeaux by retreating Nazi forces, has died at the age of 91, officials said.
Heinz Stahlschmidt was serving as a petty officer in the Kriegsmarine when he was ordered to help prepare the destruction of the southwestern city's port facilities as the Germans pulled out ahead of advancing allied troops.
Instead, he set off an explosion in the bunker holding detonators
Source: Times Online (UK)
February 26, 2010
The banquets offered by high priests to appease the gods of Ancient Egypt may have been welcomed as a perk of the job but they also increased their chances of cardiovascular disease and early death, research suggests.
The priests, a powerful bureaucracy under the pharaohs, would place vast plates of roast fowl and copious quantities of wine and beer before a god’s statue in a rite repeated three times each day. Then the food was divided up among the priesthood and taken home from th
Source: Guardian (UK)
February 23, 2010
A new biography of Anne Boleyn is set to claim that, far from being framed for adultery, Henry VIII's second queen may not have been innocent of the affairs for which she was sentenced to death.
The widely held view among contemporary historians is that the charges brought against Anne – that she committed adultery with five lovers, including her brother – are too preposterous to be true, and were either trumped up by one political faction to do down another, or invented by Henry as
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
February 25, 2010
A long-lost letter by René Descartes has come to light at Haverford College, where it had lain buried in the archives for more than a century, and the discovery could revolutionize our view of one of the 17th-century French philosopher's major works.
The find, made last month by a Dutch researcher, Erik-Jan Bos of Utrecht University, prompted Mr. Bos to quote another great thinker.
"Eureka," he said he yelled on opening a digital image of the letter that Haver
Source: NYT
February 25, 2010
Nicolas Sarkozy flew to Rwanda on Thursday for a brief visit — the first by a French president since the 1994 genocide here, seeking to improve the fraught relations between the countries.
“We want to turn the page,” Mr. Sarkozy said during a three-hour stay, during which he met with the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame.
Mr. Kagame also acknowledged that “Rwanda and France have had a difficult past. We’re here today to found a new partnership.”...
France once
Source: WaPo
February 24, 2010
When Dirk Hannema declared he had discovered a previously unknown Van Gogh painting in 1975, he became the laughing stock of the art world.
The museum curator was well-known for his tall tales in the Dutch art community and was widely mocked for filling his personal collection with forgeries.
"This discovery is not an attribution but an absolute certainty," he assured his peers to guffaws.
But 25 years after his death, Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum
Source: WaPo
February 25, 2010
Facing high unemployment and a difficult economy, most Americans think the United States will have a smaller role in the world economy in the coming years, and many believe that while the 20th century may have been the "American Century," the 21st century will belong to China....
"China's on the rise," said Wayne Nunnery, 56, a retired U.S. Air Force employee from Bexar, Tex., who was one of 1,004 randomly selected adults polled. "I don't worry about a Chine
Source: IPS
February 24, 2010
Hajj Khodari lifts a defiant fist at the demolition machinery now just meters away from his front door.
"I will not be forced out of my home without fair compensation," the village elder vows as a hydraulic hammer reduces his neighbor’s brick home to rubble. "If they try to destroy my house I will lock myself inside it."
Khodari is the patriarch of an extended family of 14 who live in the two-storey house, its exterior walls adorned with paintings o
