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)
November 21, 2008
More than 4,000 years after the settlement was eventually abandoned, researchers have unearthed the remains of houses built of wood and unbaked clay, together with pottery vases, ovens and stone tools, the Culture Ministry announced Thursday.
The Neolithic-era finds were discovered during work to lay a gas pipe near the village of Vassili in Thessaly, 170 miles north of Athens.
Thessaly's fertile plains attracted some of Greece's first farmers, and the ruins of more tha
Source: Spiegel Online
November 20, 2008
Germany's national postal service has been forced to stop selling a coin commemorating former East Germany's Communist Party in the face of protests.
The silver disc, included in a new 36-piece collection called 60 German Years, attracted fierce criticism from politicians due to its celebration of the union of two political parties into the grouping that ruled East Germany with an iron grip.
The Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) was formed on April 22, 1946, from t
Source: BBC
November 21, 2008
Dr Gerald Toben was held last month at Heathrow Airport on a European arrest warrant.
The revisionist historian was accused of publishing anti-Semitic material on the internet.
The German authorities have now dropped an appeal to the High Court after Britain refused to hand him over.
The case against him is now closed and Mr Toben is waiting to get his passport back from the British authorities.
Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany and of
Source: BBC
November 21, 2008
In Washington, Kara Weipz of the Victims of Pan Am Flight 103 group told reporters Libya had "finally fulfilled 100% justice" by paying compensation.
Libya paid $1.5bn (£1bn) in October into a fund for victims of the 1988 bombing, which killed 270 people.
It cleared the last hurdle to restoring full diplomatic relations with the US.
"Until today, Libyan officials claimed it had long fulfilled justice to the families," said Ms Weipz, w
Source: BBC
November 21, 2008
HMHS Britannic was completed at Belfast's Harland and Wolff shipyard two years after Titanic was lost in 1912. But she in turn went to the bottom, the victim of enemy action in the First World War.
BBC News correspondent Mike McKimm joined a Greek scientific expedition and dived to the Britannic to bring back dramatic footage of one of the world's biggest wrecks.
And the expedition also set out to try to discover what sank the vessel. Was it a torpedo or a mine?
Source: AP
November 20, 2008
Retired Dallas police detective Jim Leavelle still gets letters from strangers because of that 1963 photo of him standing next to Lee Harvey Oswald.
You know — THAT photo.
"Most just want autographs," Leavelle said."One asked what affect the Kennedy assassination had on my life. The usual."
As the nation marks the 45th anniversary Saturday of the Kennedy assassination, the 88-year-old Leavelle remains one of the investigation's most famous figures.
Source: Rachel's Democracy & Health News
November 17, 2008
In the middle of an abandoned suburban neighborhood, a long grassy mound pokes up a few feet higher than the cracked streets surrounding it. A green chain-link fence surrounds the small hill, which is covered with wildflowers in summer -- lavender chicory and small yellow daisies. The fence has no warning sign -- not anymore -- but this is Love Canal, the toxic waste dump that became synonymous with environmental disaster 30 years ago.
Adeline Levine, a sociologist who wrote a book
Source: McClatchy Newspapers
November 20, 2008
WASHINGTON — The risks of a nuclear weapon being used and wars being fought over dwindling resources will grow during the next 20 years as diminishing U.S. power, a shift of wealth from West to East, the rise of India and China and climate change reshape the world, a new U.S. intelligence study warned Thursday.
"The international system — as constructed following the Second World War — will be almost unrecognizable by 2025 owing to the rise of emerging powers, a globalizing eco
Source: AP
November 20, 2008
WARSAW, Poland – Researchers said Thursday they have identified the remains of Nicolaus Copernicus by comparing DNA from a skeleton and hair retrieved from one of the 16th-century astronomer's books. The findings could put an end to centuries of speculation about the exact resting spot of Copernicus, a priest and astronomer whose theories identified the Sun, not the Earth, as the center of the universe.
Polish archaeologist Jerzy Gassowski told a news conference that forensic facial
Source: Boston Globe
November 20, 2008
Every house has a story, and Marian Pierre-Louis is committed to discovering and preserving it.
"I've always loved old houses - I'm obsessed with them," said Pierre-Louis, vice president of the Medway Historical Society and founder of Fieldstone Historic Research, which tracks genealogical and house histories.
When homeowners learn about the people who lived in their house decades or even centuries before, the landscape of American history becomes all the more
Source: AFP
November 20, 2008
US elected officials scored abysmally on a test measuring their civic knowledge, with an average grade of just 44 percent, the group that organized the exam said Thursday.
Ordinary citizens did not fare much better, scoring just 49 percent correct on the 33 exam questions compiled by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI).
"It is disturbing enough that the general public failed ISI's civic literacy test, but when you consider the even more dismal scores of ele
Source: http://www.pittsburghcitypaper
November 20, 2008
Growing up, I used to think that every house came with a free copy of Stefan Lorant's Pittsburgh: The Story of an American City. It was a fixture on every coffee table, and it provided a lot of intellectual furniture too. Lorant's narrative is one we still take for granted: Big-shot white guys build Pittsburgh, nearly ruin it, and then build it anew.
This is the "great man" approach history, and it dominated scholarship for decades, just as "great men" dominated
Source: AFP
November 20, 2008
It's taken more than a century, but Einstein's celebrated formula e=mc2 has finally been corroborated, thanks to a heroic computational effort by French, German and Hungarian physicists.
A brainpower consortium led by Laurent Lellouch of France's Centre for Theoretical Physics, using some of the world's mightiest supercomputers, have set down the calculations for estimating the mass of protons and neutrons, the particles at the nucleus of atoms.
Source: Guardian (UK)
November 20, 2008
George Bush is working at a breakneck pace to dismantle at least 10 major environmental safeguards protecting America's wildlife, national parks and rivers before he leaves office in January.
With barely 60 days to go until Bush hands over to Barack Obama, his White House is working methodically to weaken or reverse an array of regulations that protect America's wilderness from logging or mining operations, and compel factory farms to clean up dangerous waste.
In the la
Source: CNN (click here to watch videos)
November 20, 2008
For 63 years, Martin Vogel longed for information about how his only brother -- his best friend and a fellow U.S. soldier -- died in World War II.
He knew that Bernard "Jack" Vogel had tried to escape from a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, but the details were sketchy. Martin was so devastated after the war, he didn't ask too many questions. But as time passed, his thoughts often drifted to his brother.
"A month doesn't go by that it doesn't come up in the cou
Source: Reuters
November 19, 2008
It took six decades for the divided Koreas to meet to talk about Japan's colonial past, but it took them just two hours to agree they had common grievances with their Asian neighbour.
Despite the 1950-53 Korean War that killed millions and decades of animosity, there was little dispute between a South Korean group that visited Pyongyang last week and their North Korean hosts, as they agreed Japan's colonial rule still casts a shadow over the peninsula.
The two Koreas h
Source: AFP
November 20, 2008
A 2,200-year-old gold and silver collar valued at more than 350,000 pounds which was unearthed by a metal detector enthusiast in a field in Nottinghamshire has been described as the best find of its kind in 50 years.
The discovery of the ornate Iron Age necklace, or torc, which is made of eight twisted metal strands, is the most valuable single find in Britain in recent history.
"I was only in the field because a customer kept me late," said Maurice Richardson, a 59-year-old tree surg
Source: CNN
November 18, 2008
The similarities are eerie.
Both Abraham Lincoln and President-elect Barack Obama were not from Illinois but became two of the state's top politicians.
They were both criticized for being too inexperienced to become president of the United States.
Both were raised by women other than their mothers (Lincoln by his stepmother and Obama by his grandmother) and later visited the women before their respective inaugurations.
Lincoln, a Republican, a
Source: NYT
November 18, 2008
URUMQI, China — The Loulan Beauty is one of more than 200 remarkably well-preserved mummies discovered in the western deserts here over the last few decades. The ancient bodies have become protagonists in a very contemporary political dispute over who should control the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.
The Chinese authorities here face an intermittent separatist movement of nationalist Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people who number nine million in Xinjiang.
At th
Source: Japan Times
November 19, 2008
Twenty years after the United States offered a national apology and reparations to Japanese-Americans for forcibly relocating them to internment camps during World War II, those who fought against the injustice still bear a stigma.
High school teacher Haruo Kawate, 61, thought he knew everything about his father until the recent discovery of an old leather trunk in a closet in his home in Mitaka, western Tokyo.
Inside were old diaries and photographs of his father that
