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: NYT
October 16, 2008
MADRID -- The crusading investigative judge Baltasar Garzón opened Spain’s first criminal investigation into Franco-era executions and repression with an order on Thursday to open 19 mass graves, including one believed to contain the remains of the poet Federico García Lorca.
Judge Garzón, who has focused on terrorism cases in recent years, is often lauded for his failed attempt to prosecute Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998 for crimes against humanity. But his Thursday orde
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 15, 2008
Norway is fighting a legal battle to stop a German clothing brand popular with neo-Nazis from using the Norwegian flag to promote its clothes.
The Norwegian Foreign Ministry claims the Thor Steinar brand's association with the far right in Germany goes against the Scandinavian nation's values.
"The clothing is a unifying symbol for people whom the Norwegian Government really does not want to be associated with," said Morten Paulsen, Norway's Counsel General in
Source: Australian
October 13, 2008
OPPOSITION frontbencher Tony Abbott wants school students to study more British history, saying Britain has shaped the world and should get the credit for it.
The National Curriculum Board today will release a draft curriculum which places a greater focus on world events in history classes.
Mr Abbott said he was in favour of world history but said the focus should be on Britain.
"People have got to know where we came from, they've got to know about the
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 15, 2008
The late Pope John Paul was wounded by a knife-wielding priest in 1982, a year after he was shot in St Peter's Square, but the injury was kept secret, his former top aide says in a documentary film.
Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz also discloses that when John Paul II was unable to pronounce words several days before his death in 2005, he told his aides that if he could not speak any more the time had come for him to die.
Dziwisz, who is now cardinal of Krakow, Poland, was John P
Source: FoxNews.com
October 15, 2008
A top lieutenant to Martin Luther King Jr. was sentenced to 15 years in prison for incest.
The Rev. James L. Bevel was a key architect of the 1963 Children's Crusade in Birmingham, Ala., and other pivotal moments of the civil rights movement.
He was convicted earlier this year of having sex 15 years ago with his then-teenage daughter in Virginia.
The prison sentence was the most severe the Virginia circuit judge could impose. Sentencing guidelines called fo
Source: Deutsche Welle
October 16, 2008
German police have uncovered over 2,100 unexploded bombs dating back to World War Two in the largest discovery of its kind this year.
More than 2,100 explosives dating back to the World War II era have been uncovered in a small town in central Germany over the last several days.
The bombs, which were of German origin, were found in the area surrounding Koethen, a town about 70 kilometers (40 miles) northwest of Leipzig in the central German state of Saxony-Anhalt.
Source: Times (UK)
October 15, 2008
The earliest known cases of human tuberculosis have been found in millennia-old bones that were buried off the coast of Haifa, Israel.
New research by scientists from institutions including University College London (UCL) and Tel Aviv University shows that the infection is 3,000 years older than was previously imagined and that TB in people evolved before bovine TB.
Professor Israel Hershkovitz of Tel Aviv University noticed lesions that are a sign of TB in the bones
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 15, 2008
THE confrontation between Thailand and Cambodia over a jungle-clad Hindu temple escalated into bloodshed when two soldiers died in fierce exchanges of rocket and machine-gun fire.
This fighting, heavier than anything seen before, inflicted the first loss of life since the stand-off began. Both of those killed were Cambodian troops, while five of their Thai rivals were wounded. Another 10 Thai soldiers were captured and are now being held by their neighbour.
The clashes,
Source: LiveScience
October 15, 2008
Women had poor dental health compared to men back in the hunter-gatherer era, and it got worse as societies turned to farming.
Now an anthropologist is pointing to an overlooked explanation — hormonal and dietary changes related to higher pregnancy rates.
Anthropologists usually argue that women's poor dental health resulted from culture-driven factors, such as cooking duties and the ongoing nibbling that can go along with that. But that narrow focus may overlook biolog
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
October 16, 2008
Two decades after the Berlin Wall fell, communism's founding father Karl Marx is back in vogue in eastern Germany -- thanks to the global financial crisis.
His 1867 critical analysis of capitalism, "Das Kapital", has risen from the publishing graveyard to become an improbable best-seller for academic publisher Karl-Dietz-Verlag.
"Everyone thought there would never ever again be any demand for 'Das Kapital'," said managing director Joern Schuetrumpf.
Source: BBC
October 16, 2008
Ten years ago, on 16 October, UK police officers marched into a London clinic and arrested Chile's former military leader Augusto Pinochet as he lay convalescing from surgery.
His dramatic detention sent shockwaves around the world, producing both euphoria and condemnation. It is still reverberating today.
Lawyers at Human Rights Watch and at the US-based International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) say it contributed to the establishment in 2002 of the Intern
Source: BBC
October 16, 2008
Chile's supreme court has jailed five retired senior military officers over the killing of dozens of government opponents under military rule.
The officers were all members of a military committee known as the Caravan of Death, which criss-crossed the country killing suspected leftists.
Their crimes date back to shortly after the late Gen Augusto Pinochet took power in a military coup in 1973.
The head of the committee, Gen Sergio Arellano Stark, is now
Source: BBC
October 16, 2008
A policy researcher has beaten nearly 3,000 applicants to join a bid to complete Sir Ernest Shackleton's failed South Pole trek.
Andrew Ledger, 23, from Dronfield, Derbyshire, was chosen to join five descendants of the pioneering explorer and his crew for the journey.
Three of the team will set off on 29 October on the same 900-mile, 80-day route as the 1908-09 Nimrod expedition.
Mr Ledger and the others will join them 97 miles (156km) from the South Pol
Source: BBC
October 16, 2008
The last remaining survivor of the Titanic plans to sell mementoes from the ship to pay her nursing home fees.
Now 96, Millvina Dean was nine weeks old when the liner sank in the North Atlantic in 1912.
She hopes to raise £3,000 by selling items including a suitcase full of clothes given to her by the people of New York after her rescue.
The auction in Wiltshire will also feature compensation letters sent to her mother by the Titanic Relief Fund.
Source: BBC
October 15, 2008
South Africa's Robben Island is to be closed for two weeks while authorities cull rabbits that have overrun the site where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned.
The rabbits are so numerous that they threaten the island's vegetation and historic buildings, an official said.
Mr Mandela, who became South Africa's president after the end of apartheid, was held on Robben Island for 18 years.
The UN World Heritage site has become one of the country's most famous tour
Source: BBC
October 15, 2008
The Lockerbie bomber has won the latest round of his long-running legal battle to overturn his conviction.
Appeal judges refused to put a limit on Abdelbaset al-Megrahi's list of objections to the trial which convicted him of Scotland's worst mass murder.
Al-Megrahi was convicted of the 1988 atrocity, which killed 270 people.
The 56-year-old Libyan has already lost an appeal against his 2001 conviction but the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (S
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
October 15, 2008
A war veteran who survived a terrifying U-boat attack that killed more than 800 has had his dying wish granted as his ashes were laid to rest in the sunken ship.
Royal Navy divers placed the wooden casket containing the remains of Flight Sergeant Fernleigh Judge in the hull of HMS Royal Oak, which lies 90ft beneath the waves of Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands.
The 29,000-tonne dreadnought went down after being struck by a salvo of torpedoes which scored three perfect h
Source: Times (UK)
October 15, 2008
A long-running row over the rights to a rooftop section of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre could bring the entire structure tumbling down, destroying Christendom’s holiest site.
While renovations are needed across the church, the small Deir al-Sultan monastery on its roof has reached an “emergency state”, according to engineers who completed an evaluation this month.
The Times has learnt that in 2004 the two chapels and twenty-six tiny rooms that comprise the monaste
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 15, 2008
Aspiring Blofelds will have to shell out a cool £5 million for the mile-long, James Bond-villain style, warren of tunnels buried 100 feet below High Holborn.
The Kingsway Tunnels have a history that could grace the pages of any Ian Fleming or John le Carré novel.
Built in 1940 as deep air-raid shelters, they have since been used as a "reserve war room", a Public Records Office repository - for 400 tons of secret documents - and the telephone exchange which co
Source: NYT
October 11, 2008
THREE weeks to Election Day and polls project a victory, possibly a big one, for Barack Obama.
Yet everywhere, anxious Democrats wring their hands. They’ve seen this Lucy-and-the-football routine before, and they’re just waiting for their ball to be snatched away, the foiled Charlie Browns again. Remember how the exit polls in 2004 predicted President Kerry?
The anxiety is more acute this year, because Senator Obama is the first African-American major-party presidential
