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)
September 30, 2008
The previously unseen letters sent to Mary Clarke went for a total of £24,265 – more than double the pre-sale estimate.
They reveal intimate thoughts of the Princess from her experience of married and Palace life to her feelings about pregnancy.
A letter, in which she wrote of being pregnant with Prince William, fetched £9,200.
In it, she said: "I am still feeling and being ill, well into my fourth month and am at total despair".
Source: BBC
October 1, 2008
Former Manchester United goalkeeper Harry Gregg has been honoured at a ceremony for Britain's unsung heroes.
The 76-year-old's actions in the Munich air crash in 1958 were marked with a Special Recognition award at the Daily Mirror's Pride Of Britain ceremony.
Gregg helped pull a pregnant woman and her daughter, and several team-mates, from the wreckage of the aircraft.
Others to receive awards included Richard Taylor, 59, father of murdered 10-year-old
Source: WaPo
October 1, 2008
When the first crowds surge through the doors of the lavish new Capitol Visitor Center this fall, they will be steeped in the saga of American Democracy and greeted with a statue of that pillar of the nation . . . Ephraim McDowell, the pioneering hernia surgeon.
Elsewhere in the glittering tribute to good government, pilgrims will find a bronze of the noted agriculturalist Julius Sterling Morton . . . the founder of Arbor Day!
And what temple to the political life of th
Source: NYT
September 30, 2008
With his signature mustache, medal-encrusted Soviet marshal’s uniform and determination to be addressed as “Comrade,” the Stalin impersonator Jamil Ziyadaliev should perhaps be out of work in Georgia, a country still reeling from a war with Russia.
But Mr. Ziyadaliev, 64, an avuncular father of two who dresses as Stalin even on days off, insists that business has seldom been better. He is a frequent hired guest at weddings, where he dances to Soviet Katyusha music from World War II.
Source: http://www.thesun.co.uk
September 26, 2008
THE Sun has confronted Europe’s most wanted Nazi war criminal at his Hungarian bolthole.
Dr Sandor Kepiro, 94, is accused of aiding the massacre of at least 2,000 innocents during the Second World War.
Now living near a SYNAGOGUE in Budapest, he insisted to us: “I sleep well at night.”
Source: http://www.thesun.co.uk
September 12, 2008
BULLDOG Sir Winston Churchill was secretly a big SOFTIE, love letters from his wife revealed yesterday.
Soppy notes from his beloved Clementine — which emerged for the first time — show the wartime leader who saved us from Hitler was a sucker for romantic drawings of HEARTS.
Source: http://www.tmcnet.com
September 27, 2008
The successful U.S. decrypting of secret Japanese communication messages that led to Imperial Japanese Navy Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto's death during World War II was because one of those messages was written in an old cipher that should have earlier been destroyed, according to declassified U.S. intelligence documents.
Although the U.S. military said after the war that it ambushed him after deciphering related Japanese Navy messages, it has long been unknown how specifically the United
Source: Reuters
September 28, 2008
Hundreds of Kosovar Albanians gather on Sundays to attend religious services in a still unfinished red-brick church in the Kosovo town of Klina.
Turning away from the majority Muslim faith imposed by the Ottoman Turks centuries ago, these worshippers are part of a revival of Catholicism in the newly independent Balkan state....
Around 90 percent of Kosovo's Albanian population is Muslim, with just four percent Roman Catholics. The country is also home to dozens of medie
Source: NYT
September 28, 2008
EATONVILLE, Fla. — Hidden in the theme-park sprawl of greater Orlando, a few miles from the shiny, the loud and the gargantuan, lies a quiet town where the pride and complications of the African-American experience come to life.
Eatonville, the first all-black town to incorporate in the country and the childhood home of Zora Neale Hurston, is no longer as simple as she described it in 1935: “the city of five lakes, three croquet courts, 300 brown skins, 300 good swimmers, plenty gua
Source: Telegraph (UK)
September 30, 2008
Lady Thatcher, who served as prime minister between 1979 and 1990, beat Britain's wartime leader Sir Winston Churchill by 97 votes to 53 in a debate at the party conference in Birmingham.
The two beat Benjamin Disraeli, who was twice prime minister in the 19th century, and Edmund Burke, the 18th century philosopher.
The case for Lady Thatcher was made by John Whittingdale, a current Conservative MP who worked with her in Downing Street.
"She will alway
Source: http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk
September 30, 2008
WHEN Matthew McClelland decided to do a spot of gardening at his new house, little did he realise the 2,000 year old mystery which was about to unravel.
Matthew, 28, had just moved into the Chorlton terrace last summer, when he started clearing up the front garden only to find buried deep in the soil ...a skull.
A major police investigation swung into action and when forensic scientists discovered a second jawless cranium the university manager started to worry the fi
Source: Discovery Channel News
September 29, 2008
Remains of rotten fish entrails have helped establish the precise dating of Pompeii's destruction, according to Italian researchers who have analyzed the town's last batch of garum, a pungent, fish-based seasoning.
Frozen in time by the catastrophic eruption that covered Pompeii and nearby towns nearly 2,000 years ago with nine to 20 feet of hot ash and pumice, the desiccated remains were found at the bottom of seven jars.
The find revealed that the last Pompeian garum
Source: http://chronicle.com
September 30, 2008
One of the big news stories in Philadelphia this week has to do with the
fallout from a series of controversial exchanges between a city
councilman’s aide and a local broadcast journalist.
The controversy pivots on the fact that the aide, a black woman, held up a
handwritten sign during a council meeting accusing the journalist and his
station, Fox29, of racism. One of the makeshift signs read “Jeff Cole
KKK.” Cole is the journalist in question, and he’d been targeting the
aide, Lat
Source: Telegraph (UK)
September 29, 2008
Russia reinforced the popular notion of Western bellicosity by staging the first full military drill in St Petersburg since the end of the Second World War.
Air raid sirens wailed across the country's northern capital and loudspeakers barked official orders as the authorities simulated a full-scale attack on the city.
The exercise caused consternation for many city residents who were unaware that a drill was planned. Some elderly inhabitants who survived the 900-d
Source: Telegraph (UK)
September 29, 2008
Britain, in the autumn of 1938, was still something approaching a great power, with an empire on which the sun never set and – despite the ravages of the slump earlier in the decade – more prosperous than almost any other country on the planet. It was 70 years ago this week that we, in the words of our then prime minister Neville Chamberlain, decided that Czechoslovakia was merely a faraway country of which we knew little, and that if a chunk of it full of ethnic Germans was given to Hitler's Re
Source: Canada.com
September 30, 2008
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and billionaire Alexander Lebedev plan to set up a new opposition party in Russia as the Kremlin's monopoly on political life strengthens.
The two men say they want the new party to field candidates in the next parliamentary elections in 2011, Mikhail Kuznetsov, the deputy chairman of Gorbachev's Union of Social Democrats, said in a phone interview on Monday in Moscow.
Gorbachev, 77, whose 1980s policy of glasnost or openness helpe
Source: International Herald Tribune
September 30, 2008
Joshua B. Jeyaretnam, the opposition politician whose outspokenness and persistence made him Singapore's leading dissident, died Tuesday of a heart attack, family members said.
At the age of 82, recently freed from bankruptcy, Jeyaretnam was preparing another run for Parliament, where he had broken the governing party's monopoly by winning the first opposition seat in 1981.
"We were trying to surmount the last hurdle," said a close friend and political partner
Source: BBC
September 30, 2008
A group of retired Gurkhas fighting for the right to settle in Britain have won their immigration test case, their lawyers have said.
Five ex-Gurkhas and the widow of another Gurkha veteran took their case to the High Court in London.
They were challenging immigration rules which said that those who retired from the British Army before 1997 did not have an automatic right to stay.
The judgment could mean some 2,000 Gurkhas being allowed to settle here.
Source: Independent (UK)
September 30, 2008
The outgoing Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, has publicly acknowledged for the first time that "almost all" of the territory seized during the Six-Day War in 1967 will have to be given back in return for peace with the Palestinians.
In an interview with Israel's biggest-selling newspaper, Yedhiot Ahronot, in which he underlined the urgent need for an agreement to be reached while the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas remains in office, Mr Olmert warned that the al
Source: Telegraph (UK)
September 30, 2008
Cherie Blair has predicted that history will judge her husband as significant a world figure as Sir Winston Churchill.
Mrs Blair, who also admitted she was not a success in her role as "First Lady", was ridiculed by Tory MPs for comparing her husband to Britain's greatest wartime leader.
In an interview with Vanity Fair she said that Tony Blair would be judged "very well" by history and that "he'll be up there with Churchill".
