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 11, 2008
Archaeologists have discovered an “astonishingly well-preserved” 2,000-year-old gold earring under a car park next to the walls of the old city, the Israeli Antiquities Authority said. “It must have belonged to someone of the elite,” Doron Ben-Ami, director of excavation, said. “Such a precious item, it couldn’t be one of just ordinary people.” Finds from the Roman period are rare in Jerusalem because the city was destroyed in the 1st century AD. Shimon Gibson, an archaeologist, said the discove
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 10, 2008
Mrs Merkel is said to be furious with the choice of Tuesday's venue by Mr Sarkozy, with Verdun the site of arguably the most controversial battles in military history, with the Germans in particular portrayed as acting like industrialised killers.
British officials have meanwhile been left wondering why an exclusively Franco-German battlefield was chosen, rather than an equally evocative site like the Somme.
Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall are due to be amo
Source: BBC
November 10, 2008
The money is part of the $1.5bn Libya paid into a US bank account in October.
Under a deal reached with the US in August, Libya agreed to compensate the victims but did not accept responsibility for the attacks.
The US has agreed to pay $300m in compensation to families of victims of retaliatory US air strikes in Libya.
The agreement between the US and Libya was seen as part of Tripoli's attempts to improve its diplomatic relations following decades of i
Source: BBC
November 10, 2008
A University of Southampton expert examined Wilson's changing use of language while at the dispatch box.
The findings point to a possible decline in his mental function during his final months in office.
Researcher Dr Peter Garrard suggests this may have contributed to Wilson's decision to resign in April 1976.
The motives behind Wilson's resignation, which came as a surprise to most people, have long been a source of controversy.
Dr Garrar
Source: BBC
November 10, 2008
Gen Wladyslaw Sikorski will be exhumed as part of a inquiry to decide whether his death in a plane crash in Gibraltar in 1943 was an accident or murder.
A British investigation ruled that it was an accident, but some historians in Poland believe Gen Sikorski died as a result of foul play.
Poland's president and prime minister are backing the current inquiry.
The general's body will be exhumed in two weeks from the crypt of Krakow Cathedral, where it lies
Source: Times (UK)
November 10, 2008
He is the most pilloried military leader in British history, caricatured as a butcher and a bungler who sent hundreds of thousands of men over the top to their deaths.
Now a major new biography pins a further damning indictment on Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig: late into the final year of the First World War, it argues, he was agitating for a compromise peace that would have left Germany as the real winner of the war.
According to Dr J. P. Harris, a senior lecturer i
Source: NYT
November 8, 2008
Where will 2008 fit into this collective conceit? Our autumn of disintegrating stock markets, disappearing credit and depressing unemployment numbers can not reasonably be compared to 1929 and its aftermath. Not really. Not yet. But as traders exude panic and worried Americans read their 401(k) statements and wonder when this equities elevator reaches the basement and how much their new president will be able to do about it, popular evocations of that distant year grow louder and more insistent.
Source: BBC
November 7, 2008
The report of the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday has been delayed until the autumn of 2009, causing huge disappointment to relatives.
January 30 1972 - forever Bloody Sunday in the annals of the Troubles in Northern Ireland - was not the bloodiest day, but perhaps the most significant in helping to decide the direction and progress of the bitter conflict in the decades that followed.
Nearly 37 years later and at a cost of £172m and still counting, the most definitiv
Source: BBC
November 9, 2008
Prince Charles may have only recently bought his first home in Wales, but its royal connections go back centuries, an historian has discovered.
The original owner of Llwynywermod in Carmarthenshire was related to the second wife of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn.
Mark Baker, of Prestatyn, Denbighshire, unravelled the history of what was once one of Wales' finest homes.
A Royal Home in Wales - Llwynywermod is being published to coincide with Prince Charles's 60th b
Source: NYT
November 8, 2008
Within days of his inauguration, as Barack Obama and his family begin to feel at home in the White House, Malia and Sasha will perhaps be scampering about the mansion’s staircases, bedrooms and formal public rooms.
As appealing as the prospect of that scene is, it is also a poignant reminder of how long it took for African-Americans to feel they had an equal place in that home.
In a pre-election conference call, Mr. Obama referred to the powerful symbolism of his daught
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 8, 2008
Now, new files released from Broadmoor high security hospital will provide tantalising new evidence that could finally help to solve Britain's most notorious unsolved murder case.
Among the patients whose files are to be disclosed, as the psychiatric hospital opens its archives to public view for the first time, is Thomas Hayne Cutbush, who was identified at the time as a leading suspect in the killing and mutilation of at least 11 women in the East End of London between 1888 and 18
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
November 9, 2008
A complete set of the original construction plans for the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz have been found in a Berlin flat, according to Germany's Bild newspaper.
It printed three architect's drawings on yellowing paper from the batch of 28 pages of blueprints it obtained.
One has an 11.66 metre by 11.20 metre room marked "Gaskammer" (gas chamber) that was part of a "delousing facility".
No one from the federal government's archives was imm
Source: AP
November 9, 2008
Chancellor Angela Merkel is calling on Germans to stand together against racism and anti-Semitism as the nation marks the 70th anniversary of the Nazi pogrom known as "Kristallnacht" or "Night of Broken Glass."
Merkel has stressed that it is not enough to remember the events of November 9, 1938 through memorials and ceremonies but "we must always think how it was that it could come to this singular event, the Holocaust."
The chancellor is t
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 8, 2008
Sarah Palin's attacks on Barack Obama's patriotism provoked a spike in death threats against the future president, Secret Service agents revealed during the final weeks of the campaign.
The Republican vice presidential candidate attracted criticism for accusing Mr Obama of "palling around with terrorists", citing his association with the sixties radical William Ayers.
The attacks provoked a near lynch mob atmosphere at her rallies, with supporters yelling &quo
Source: http://www.thenational.ae
November 6, 2008
The Turkish minister of culture and tourism, Ertugrul Gunay, examines the excavation work and archaeological finds at the site of the Marmaray project in Yenikapi, Istanbul. Sinan Gul / Anadolu Ajansi
Above ground, the Istanbul suburb of Yenikapi is a normal, modern-day bustling port on the Marmaris Sea. But beneath the waters, its newly discovered treasures are rewriting the history books.
So far, 32 wooden ships, Stone Age skeletons, coins, amphorae and even a basket
Source: LiveScience
November 6, 2008
The modern obsession with celebrity started in 18th-century Britain with obituaries of unusual people published in what served as the gossip sheets of the era, an English literature scholar says.
Some researchers think the phenomenon of celebrity was born with the 19th-century Romantic movement in art, music and literature (think of works by Chopin, J.M.W. Turner and Edgar Allen Poe). Instead, Elizabeth Barry of the University of Warwick in England claims the modern public fascinati
Source: Times (UK)
November 9, 2008
The story of an Anglo-Chinese couple who met at Oxford University and survived purges and imprisonment to become eminent translators of the classics has become a surprise hit among Chinese readers.
It is also the tale of a lifelong love between Gladys Tayler, the first graduate in Chinese from Oxford, and Yang Xianyi, whose wealthy family sent him to study there in the 1930s. The two returned to China and stayed on as admirers of the revolution after most foreigners left in 1949, t
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 8, 2008
Now, for the first time since the soldiers moved out, archaeologists have excavated an extensive network of the tunnels, near the Belgian town of Ypres.
The survey of the dugout, named Vampire, has shed fascinating new light on the experiences of the tens of thousands of soldiers who lived in similar subterranean workings, from the North Sea to the Swiss frontier, with dozens of poignant items of everyday life recovered.
After unearthing the entrance to the original sha
Source: FoxNews.com
November 7, 2008
Switzerland's president expressed regret Friday that his country failed to use diplomatic channels to stop the Nazis from executing a Swiss theology student who tried to assassinate Adolf Hitler 70 years ago.
Student Maurice Bavaud, 25, who was from the western Swiss town of Neuchatel, was executed in Berlin's notorious Ploetzensee prison after failing in his attempt to shoot Hitler at a Nazi parade in Munich on Nov. 9, 1938.
By coincidence, Bavaud made his attempt just
Source: Times (UK)
November 8, 2008
Seventy years on, the memories have not faded. Kitty Suschny was a terrified schoolgirl of 13 when the Nazis unleashed a night of violence against Vienna's Jews on November 9, 1938.
"I saw the brown shirts marching from our window but my mother pulled me inside. I heard them shouting 'Jews go to hell'. There was screaming, shouting, the synagogues were set on fire. Many people committed suicide," recalled Mrs Suschny, who was evacuated to Britain but returned to Vienna whe
