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)
October 31, 2008
The Vatican appears to be dragging its feet over releasing secret files which could solve once and for all the question of whether a wartime Pope turned a blind eye to the Holocaust.
Jewish groups and critics of Pope Pius XII, who was pontiff for the duration of the Second World War, have long called for the Vatican archives to be made available so that Pius's record on speaking out against Hitler and the Nazis can be examined.
In an audience with Pope Benedict XVI, Rab
Source: Times (of London)
October 31, 2008
Three hundred years after Alexander Selkirk, the castaway who was the inspiration for the fictional Robinson Crusoe, was marooned on an island off the coast of Chile, archaeologists believe that they have unearthed evidence of his campsite.
Daniel Defoe’s Crusoe spent years on a tropical island, surviving by hunting and foraging, scouring the azure horizon for any sign of a ship to rescue him.
Selkirk, a sailor born in Fife in 1676, was stranded in 1704 on the island of
Source: Gallup
October 27, 2008
There have been only 2 instances in the past 14 elections, from 1952 to 2004, when the presidential candidate ahead in Gallup polling a week or so before the election did not win the national popular vote: in 2000 (George W. Bush) and 1980 (Jimmy Carter). And in only one of these, in 1980, did the candidate who was behind (Ronald Reagan) pull ahead in both the popular vote and the Electoral College and thus win the election.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 31, 2008
They were one of the first groups to suffer under Mao's ruthless purges.
Millions of the 'hated landlord class' were denounced, killed or driven to suicide in the push which paved the way for each peasant to have his own slice of land.
But 60 years on, the Communist Party is preparing to renounce the country's final trace of collectivism.
Each of China's 800 million farmers will be given the right to sell their land to a landlord in a move designed to trans
Source: International Herald Tribune
October 31, 2008
'It is raining Death on earth," Hélène Berr wrote in her journal on November 1, 1943.
She was a young Parisian student, a Jew, whose friends were daily disappearing to the concentration camps and she knew the net was tightening. Rumours had reached her that asphyxiating gas was being administered to convoys of Jewish deportees at the Polish border.
"To think that every person arrested yesterday, today, this very minute," she wrote, "is probably desti
Source: International Herald Tribune
October 31, 2008
Berliners turned out on Thursday to say their goodbyes to historic Tempelhof Airport, to share a few memories and to protest its closing one last time.
Two vintage airplanes, a DC-3 and a Junkers Ju-52, took off shortly before midnight as the final flights from the airport, which had been the focus of a legal battle that went on for several years.
To those who advocated for its closing, like Berlin's mayor, Klaus Wowereit, Tempelhof was an unprofitable drain on the city
Source: CNN
October 31, 2008
Campaigners in London planned to petition the British government Friday for a posthumous pardon for the hundreds of people executed for witchcraft between the 16th and 18th centuries.
They said Halloween is a good time to highlight the "grave miscarriage of justice" suffered by the men and women falsely accused of being witches.
Their petition asks Justice Minister Jack Straw to recommend that Queen Elizabeth II issue a pardon.
"We felt
Source: UPI
October 30, 2008
A Texas A&M University researcher says a veritable "arsenal" has been found on a ship that sank in the Gulf of Mexico between 1808 and 1820.
Texas A&M nautical archaeologist Ben Ford said in a recently released research report that while the so-called Mardi Gras Wreck was found in 2002 off the coast of Louisiana, cannons and other weapons weren't found on board until last summer, the Houston Chronicle said.
Ford said using remotely operated vehicles, r
Source: International Herald Tribune
October 31, 2008
GREENVILLE, South Carolina: The former Buddhist temple sits opposite a waterfall on the campus of Furman University, with vistas of the Blue Ridge Mountains when the trees are bare.
On dark winter mornings, students will be asked to sit on the hinoki wood floors and meditate for 90 minutes. A class called "Realizing Bodymind" will be taught there next semester.
The structure — donated by a Japanese family with roots in Greenville's textile past and connections
Source: Guardian
October 31, 2008
The chief of staff of Japan's air force is to be sacked after he claimed the country had been drawn into the second world war by the US and denied it had been an aggressor during its occupations of the Asian mainland.
In an essay entitled "Was Japan an Aggressor Nation?" General Toshio Tamogami claimed that Japan had been provoked by the then US president, Franklin D Roosevelt, and that many of Japan's wartime victims took "a positive view" of its actions.
Source: BBC
October 30, 2008
An ancient civic body is to admit women as members for the first time in its 1,000-year history.
The Freemen of the City of Oxford are thought to have formed in Saxon times and were recorded in the Domesday Book.
The price of becoming a freeman was £5. Only Freemen could set up business and vote in council elections.
Source: WaPo
October 30, 2008
Travel and other spending by the Smithsonian's former American Indian Museum director was imprudent and at times "lavish," but most of it conformed with institution rules, the Smithsonian inspector general said in a report distributed to Congress yesterday.
W. Richard West Jr., who retired last year as founding director of the National Museum of the American Indian, has agreed to reimburse the Smithsonian $9,700 for payments that he should not have received, said Inspector
Source: WaPo
October 30, 2008
A long-awaited audit of expense reports for Smithsonian museum directors and governing board members is expected to be released later this year, but will not reveal the kinds of excesses found recently among other executives, the institution's inspector general said today.
The review was requested after a series of reports in The Washington Post exposed spending abuses among Smithsonian managers. Inspector General A. Sprightley Ryan found "lavish" and "extravagant&quo
Source: AP
October 30, 2008
The Italian government gave Libya early warning of the 1986 U.S. airstrikes launched in response to a deadly attack on a disco in Germany, Libyan and Italian officials said Thursday.
Libya's Foreign Minister Abdel-Rahman Shalgam was quoted by the ANSA and Apcom news agencies as saying the Italians warned him of the raids launched from a NATO base on Italian soil because they were opposed to the action. Shalgam said the Italians informed him personally since, at the time, he was Liby
Source: FoxNews.com
October 30, 2008
The ancient Phoenicians may be largely forgotten, but they're not gone.
Rome destroyed the Phoenicians' greatest city — Carthage — centuries ago, but new genetic studies indicate that as many as one in 17 men living in communities around the Mediterranean may be descended from these ancient mariners.
Originating from what is now Lebanon, the Phoenicians were early seafarers and traders who spread their culture, including a love for the color purple, to North Africa, Spa
Source: Harvard Crimson
October 30, 2008
Harvard University Library will not take part in Google’s book scanning project for in-copyright works after finding the terms of its landmark $125 million settlement regarding copyrighted materials unsatisfactory, University officials said yesterday.
Harvard had been one of five academic libraries—along with Stanford, Oxford, Michigan, and the New York Public Library—to partner with Google when the book scanning initiative was announced in October 2004. University officials said t
Source: Salon
October 29, 2008
Political effigies may seem like props better suited to a campaign in the 19th century than a 2008 one, but there's no avoiding it -- symbolic violence is back this year.
Last month, students at George Fox University in Oregon hanged an effigy of Barack Obama. Earlier this week, an effigy of Sarah Palin with a noose around its neck that was hung at a home in West Hollywood, Calif., attracted national attention.
Wednesday morning, another effigy of Obama was found. This
Source: http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com (Click to see pics.)
October 29, 2008
Joanne Farchakh Bajjaly responded to my posting on IraqCrisis of a report from AFP entitled "Iraqi antiquities seized in Lebanon: customs".
Her response to me included a set of photographs of some of the objects confiscated from the smugglers. Those photographs are published here with her kind permission.
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
October 30, 2008
If we are what we read, then the books the presidential candidates claim to hold dear present clues to their character. Or do they?
Among John McCain's favorite books, culled from news reports, are "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway, "All Quiet on the Western Front" by Erich Maria Remarque and Edward Gibbon's "History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire."
According to Barack Obama's Facebook profile, his favorite books in
Source: Spiegel Online
October 28, 2008
Martin Luther sparked the Protestant Reformation in the German city of Wittenberg 500 years ago. But, today, only 10 percent of its population is Protestant. Church leaders have launched a major drive to change that -- but have come up against the city's communist past.
It’s impossible to walk through Wittenberg, also known as "Luther City," without stumbling across reminders of Martin Luther. There’s the "Luther oak," then Luther Street, which leads to the Luthe
