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)
April 29, 2008
Researchers have long been puzzled by the strong rural drawl spoken by the inhabitants of Palmerston Atoll, one of the smallest and most remote of the Cook Islands with a land mass of less than one square mile.
The island is home to 63 people, who are all descended from William Marsters, an English carpenter and barrelmaker who settled there in 1863.
Now linguists have matched their accent to that of their very distant cousins 12,000 miles away in Gloucestershire.
Source: NYT
April 29, 2008
Spain’s National Court has decided against extraditing the former Argentine president María Estela Martínez de Perón, 77, to Argentina, where she is wanted on charges of human rights abuses during her presidency in the 1970s.
Source: Guardian
April 29, 2008
The lawyer for US vice-president Dick Cheney claimed today that the Congress lacks any authority to examine his behaviour on the job.
The exception claimed by Cheney's counsel came in response to requests from congressional Democrats that David Addington, the vice-president's chief of staff, testify about his involvement in the approval of interrogation tactics used at Guantanamo Bay.
Ruling out voluntary cooperation by Addington, Cheney lawyer Kathryn Wheelbarger said
Source: WNYT
April 28, 2008
Community leaders are rallying to preserve Saratoga Battlefield, because they don't want the land around the Saratoga National Park to become another Gettysburg.
The Saratoga-Washington on the Hudson Partnership's goal is to help draw tourists without making the area look like a typical tourist town.
The group doesn't want visitors to the park to see neon signs and billboards.
Armed with state funding, the partnership has now put its leadership team in plac
Source: http://www.pittsburghlive.com
April 28, 2008
The fate of a 2,300-year-old Indian burial mound in McKees Rocks is drawing renewed attention from a recently formed historical society.
"If this was any other cemetery in this country, what an outrage (there would be)," said Eugene Strong of Derry, a member of the McKees Rocks Historical Society. "We're just trying to see the destruction stop. They're slowly chipping away until there won't be a mound."
The group is upset about borough plans to remov
Source: http://news.ninemsn.com.au
April 28, 2008
A Turkish-Australian workshop in Istanbul on options for HMAS AE2 has decided not to recommend raising the wreck, which lies in 73 metres of water in the Sea of Marmara after being scuttled in an April 1915 battle.
Underwater surveys found the submarine's hull to be in sound condition and preserved in an environment where corrosion is inhibited by prevailing conditions, AE2 Commemorative Foundation chairman Peter Briggs said.
The two-day workshop, convened by the Turkis
Source: http://www.expatica.com/de
April 25, 2008
The gate, found complete with 11 meters of wall, was a goods-delivery entrance to the Roman town from its river port outside on the Rhine.
Source: http://www.thelocal.se
April 28, 2008
Nine-year-old Alexander Granhof and his grandfather Jens have made what is believed to be the largest ever find in southern Sweden of silver coins from the Middle Ages.
Alexander and his granddad were out exploring the site of the Battle of Lund (1676) when the boy happened on some silver coins coated in verdigris. The buried treasure had likely come to the surface when the field in which they were wandering was recently ploughed.
A day later, archaeologists from the
Source: Jerusalem Post
April 29, 2008
An old Israeli mortar shell used during the 1948 War of Independence was uncovered Tuesday during an archaeological excavation at the Western Wall plaza, police said.
The homemade Davidka mortar, which was found in one piece, was taken by police sappers to an uninhabited site outside the city to be detonated and destroyed, Jerusalem police spokesman Shmuel Ben-Ruby said.
The mortar was used during the initial stages of the war sixty years ago.
Source: AFP
April 25, 2008
It is painstaking work, almost a labour of love, but help is close for the nine people who have spent years sticking together millions of pieces of paper to decipher the workings of East Germany's once-feared Stasi secret police.
Almost two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the actions of the communist government still fascinates and scares Germans. Who worked with them? And why?
Stasi employees started to destroy their secret files as the Berl
Source: http://www.tfponline.com
April 18, 2008
At a time when many Civil War battlefields and even national parks are squeezed by outside development, Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park is growing.
Park officials and the Trust for Public Land received federal support to purchase 382 acres in March to add to the western flank of the Lookout Mountain Battlefield.
Source: Haaretz
April 27, 2008
The Commander of the Israel Air Force, Major General Eliezer Shkedi, said in a television interview that "in Nazi Germany, people didn't believe that Hitler meant what he was saying. I suggest that we refrain from repeating that line of reasoning and prepare ourselves for anything."
Shkedi made these remarks in a special interview with "60 Minutes" in honor of Israel's 60th anniversary, excerpts of which aired on Channel 2 television Sunday.
Shkedi
Source: BBC
April 29, 2008
Shipwrecks, gold bullion, and a chance of a share in buried treasure... no, it's not the Caribbean, but Lough Swilly in County Donegal.
The owners of a ship which sank in the lough in 1917 are to sell shares in the 20 gold bars which it is believed are still in the wreck.
The SS Laurentic was a passenger ship but during the First World War it was used by the British government to transport gold to pay for munitions.
The majority of the 43 tons of gold the s
Source: http://www.fortmilltimes.com
April 28, 2008
Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois each lay claim to part of Abraham Lincoln's youth.
Now, a North Carolina county is trying to get in on the act.
A group in Rutherford County, N.C., opened the Bostic (N.C.) Lincoln Center and are petitioning the federal government to run a DNA test of Lincoln's father, Thomas, to see if it matches some of the 16th president's saved genetic material.
Keith Price, president of Bostic Lincoln Center Inc., said Lincoln was born in rural
Source: http://wjz.com
April 28, 2008
The view across the Potomac from George Washington's Mount Vernon estate will remain pristine, as it was more than 200 years ago, thanks in part to a purchase of 63 acres by the National Park Service on the banks of the river.
The purchase, announced Monday, conserves the last major block of shoreline on the Maryland side of the river that can be seen from Mount Vernon, which sits in Virginia just a few miles south of the nation's capital.
Source: AP
April 28, 2008
Paul Strnad and his wife Hedvika desperately wanted to leave Czechoslovakia in 1939, the year Adolf Hitler threatened Jews in his speech to the Nazi Reichstag.
He wrote to his cousin Alvin Strnad in Milwaukee, hoping he could help get his wife a job as a dress designer. He also sent colorful drawings of her designs.
"You may imagine that we have a great interest in leaving Europe as soon as possible because there is no possibility of getting a position in this coun
Source: AP
April 28, 2008
Investigators seeking fabled Nazi plunder said Monday that geophysicists have discovered something unusual buried near a town in eastern Germany — possibly remnants of the long-lost Amber Room.
Treasure hunters speculate that remains of the room — along with gold, paintings and other items stolen from a Russian palace outside St. Petersburg during World War II by the invading Nazis — could be buried near the town of Deutschkatharinenberg.
Source: BBC News
April 29, 2008
A rare portrait, believed to be of Henry Wriothesley, the third Earl of Southampton--Shakespeare's only known patron--has been discovered using X-ray technology. Art historians from Bristol University have found what they believe is a picture of Wriothesley that was painted over in the 16th Century. To the naked eye, it is a portrait of his wife, Elizabeth Vernon, Queen Elizabeth I's maid of honour..
The hidden picture was uncovered when the work was X-rayed in preparation for an ex
Source: Fox News
April 28, 2008
He conceived of the tank, the machine gun and the helicopter, but few of Leonardo da Vinci's sketched designs have truly been tested.
Except one: The prototypical Renaissance man's famous 1485 design for a rudimentary parachute.
On Saturday, in what appeared to be a first, Swiss adventurer Olivier Vietti-Teppa proved that Leonardo's pyramidal-design parachute could carry the weight of a man all the way to the ground.
Source: AP
April 28, 2008
Twenty-two years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, work is under way on a colossal new shelter to cover the ruins and deadly radioactive contents of the exploded Soviet-era power plant.
For years, the original iron and concrete shelter that was hastily constructed over the reactor has been leaking radiation, cracking and threatening to collapse. The new one, an arch of steel, would be big enough to contain the Statue of Liberty.
Once completed, Chernobyl will be saf
