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: CNN
February 22, 2010
Folklore says that George Washington was known for never telling a lie.
But as the United States marks its first president's birthday, a new poll indicates that 74 percent of the public thinks the father of our country did lie to the public while he served as president. It's an indication that Americans think the government has been broken for a very, very long time.
The CNN/Opinion Corporation survey was released Monday on the 278th anniversary of Washington's birth.
Source: BBC
February 19, 2010
The Spanish government says it will formally recognise one of the country's best-known poets as a victim of the dictatorship of Gen Francisco Franco.
It will present the family of the poet, Miguel Hernandez, with an official letter rehabilitating his memory.
Hernandez was imprisoned as a traitor 70 years ago for supporting the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, and died in prison at the age of 31.
The family applied for his rehabilitation under a 2007
Source: BBC
February 21, 2010
King Mohammed of Morocco has ordered structural examinations of all the country's ancient mosques after a minaret collapsed, killing 41 people.
The centuries-old minaret fell as hundreds of worshippers were attending Friday prayers at a mosque in the central city of Meknes.
Rescue workers recovered the last body from the rubble on Saturday.
There has been public criticism of the apparent lack of maintenance of the minaret.
Source: BBC
February 21, 2010
A California peak formerly known as Negrohead Mountain has been officially renamed in honour of the black pioneer who settled there in 1869.
The 619-metre peak near Malibu, became Ballard Mountain after John Ballard, a blacksmith and former slave.
Dozens of Ballard's relatives attended the renaming ceremony on Saturday.
The name originally contained an even more offensive racial slur which appeared on federal maps, but was changed to "negro" in
Source: AP
February 21, 2010
For more than a century, there was no playing of "The Star-Spangled Banner" at Goshen College — a small Christian college with ties to the Mennonite Church.
That's about to change. For the first time in the school's history, Goshen College will play an instrumental version of the U.S. national anthem before many campus sporting events.
The decision to reverse the ban on the anthem is aimed at making students and visitors outside the faith feel more welcome, bu
Source: Irish Times
February 17, 2010
FORMER ATTORNEY general John Rogers SC, who lives in the Boyne valley, will be among the objectors to plans by Meath County Council and the National Roads Authority (NRA) to build a bypass of Slane 500 metres from the Brú na Bóinne archaeological complex.
Today is the last day for making submissions to An Bord Pleanála, which will adjudicate on the scheme under the 2006 Strategic Infrastructure Act.
Depending on the number of objections, the board may decide to hold an
Source: Jakarta Post
February 17, 2010
A megalithic settlement has recently been unearthed at Skendal village, 10 kilometers from the town of Pagaralam in South Sumatra.
Irfan Wintarto, an official at the Lahat Culture and Tourism Agency's Historical and Archeological Preservation Department, said local residents had discovered around 36 types of rocks on a 150-by-300-meter plot in the middle of a 2-hectare coffee plantation. The site is currently being investigated by the Archeological Region Conservation and Heritage C
Source: New Scientist
February 17, 2010
...Until now, the accepted view has been that our ancestors underwent a "creative explosion" around 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, when they suddenly began to think abstractly and create rock art. This idea is supported by the plethora of stunning cave paintings, like those at Chauvet, which started to proliferate across Europe around this time. Writing, on the other hand, appeared to come much later, with the earliest records of a pictographic writing system dating back to just 5000 year
Source: Archaeo News
February 21, 2010
Bricks dating back 5,000 to 7,000 years have been unearthed in northwest China's Shaanxi Province, adding between 1,000 to 2,000 years onto Chinese brick-making history, archaeologists claimed. "The five calcined bricks were unearthed from a site of the Yangshao Culture Period dating 5,000 to 7,000 years ago. Previously, the oldest known bricks in the country were more than 4,000 years old," Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology researcher Yang Yachang said. Only parts of the bri
Source: Salon
February 20, 2010
There was really only one way the weird conservative carnival called CPAC 2010 could end Saturday night: with Glenn Beck stalking around the stage for an hour, scribbling paranoid wordplay on his trademark chalkboard, praising Calvin Coolidge and giving dramatic readings of a poem by a bona fide Socialist to stir an overflowing, anti-government crowd into a frenzy....
Beck spends a lot of his time on his TV show talking about the 1920s; his CPAC speech was no different. It didn't ta
Source: NYT
February 20, 2010
...We’re lucky to have Mr. Simpson, a University of Illinois at Chicago political scientist and former Chicago alderman, who humorlessly chronicles corruption here just as Edward Gibbon, the 18th-century English historian, detailed the Roman Empire’s rise and fall. Mr. Simpson’s latest handiwork is a directory of skulduggery, with the tales of nearly 150 convicted county politicians and officials.
And, yet — as I listened to the presenters talk about documented misdeeds being just t
Source: BBC
February 19, 2010
Plans for a museum in Rudyard Kipling's Mumbai home commemorating the writer have been shelved following concerns that a memorial to the renowned imperialist and chronicler of the British Raj would be politically unpalatable. But is it time for Indians to reappraise him?
Nearly 75 years after his death, the poet and author Rudyard Kipling remains as celebrated and controversial as ever.
And now, plans to turn the house in Mumbai where he was born in 1865 into a museum
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 20, 2010
A major new exhibition is to cast doubt on the inspiration for some of artist Henry Moore's most famous works by suggesting he copied several drawings from magazine photographs rather than coming from his own war time experiences.
They are the images that affirmed Henry Moore as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, inspired, he claimed, by a moving journey on the London Underground during the Blitz.
But a major new exhibition on Moore's work is to cast dou
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 20, 2010
A prehistoric "lost world" ruled by miniature dinosaurs has been discovered by palaeontologists.
The creatures lived on an island – a kind of pigmy Jurassic Park – and were up to eight times smaller than some of their mainland cousins.
One of the island-dwelling dinosaurs, named Magyarosaurus, was little bigger than a horse, but was related to some of the largest creatures to ever walk the Earth – gigantic titanosaurs such as Argentinosaurus, which reached up
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 20, 2010
The man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing is living with his family in a luxury villa in Libya six months after he was released from jail on compassionate grounds because he had less than three months to live.
Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, who is suffering from terminal prostate cancer, no longer receives hospital treatment after ending the course of chemotherapy that he had been given after returning to his homeland last August.
Professor Karol Sikora, the Londo
Source: AP
February 20, 2010
Darfur's most powerful rebel group has initialed a truce with the Sudanese government, officials said Saturday, marking the rebel group's return to peace talks aimed at ending the Darfur conflict.
The truce between the rebel Justice and Equality Movement and the Sudanese government takes effect immediately, said Idriss Deby, Chad's president, in a statement.
The rebel group has been the most significant holdout in efforts to end the seven-year conflict in Darfur, in whi
Source: CNN
February 20, 2010
The murder in a Dubai hotel room of a Hamas leader has grabbed headlines around the world as rumors and speculation swirl about the team that allegedly assassinated him.
Fingers -- in the media and the intelligence community -- point toward Israel's spy agency Mossad as responsible. The agency is keeping quiet but has a history of operations in the Middle East, South America and Europe.
Dubai's police chief told the Dubai newspaper, The National, he was confident that a
Source: CNN
February 20, 2010
Alexander Haig, the former military officer, secretary of state and adviser to presidents, has died, a Johns Hopkins Medical Center spokesman said.
Haig, 85, was admitted to the Baltimore, Maryland, hospital on January 28 and died at 1:30 a.m. Saturday, hospital spokesman Gary Stephenson said.
Haig was a top official in the administrations of three presidents -- Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan.
Alexander Meigs Haig Jr. was born December 2, 1924
Source: The Register
February 19, 2010
EU nuke boffins say that mysterious bits of uranium found last year in a Dutch scrapyard originated in the Nazi nuclear-weapons programme of the 1940s.
Forensic nuke scientists at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) traced the two pieces of metal - described as a cube and a plate - back to their exact origins and dates. Apparently both came from ores extracted at the "Joachimsthal" mine in what is now the Czech Republic, though the two are from different
Source: Science Daily
February 18, 2010
A study led by University of Pittsburgh researchers could finally lay to rest the millennia-old conjecture that the ancient empire of Carthage regularly sacrificed its youngest citizens. An examination of the remains of Carthaginian children revealed that most infants perished prenatally or very shortly after birth and were unlikely to have lived long enough to be sacrificed, according to a Feb. 17 report in PLoS One.
The findings -- based on the first published analysis of the skel
