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
April 17, 2008
The phone call was routine, the kind often made before big auctions. Sotheby’s was preparing to sell a striking rust-brown image of a leaf on paper, long thought to have been made by William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography. So the auction house contacted a Baltimore historian considered to be the world’s leading Talbot expert and asked if he could grace the sale’s catalog with any interesting scholarly details about the print — known as a photogenic drawing, a crude precurs
Source: NYT
April 17, 2008
BEIJING — Not far from National Stadium, the city’s mammoth, just-finished Olympic arena, another construction project is still facing an Olympic deadline. The building, sheathed in a green construction tent, will house Beijing’s first museum exclusively dedicated to Tibet.
Inside, curators will display antiquities, dynastic records and reproductions to demonstrate China’s dominion over Tibet as far back as the 13th century. Many experts question China’s historical claims, but few c
Source: http://www.polskieradio.pl
April 13, 2008
Poland today marks the 65th anniversary of the disclosure by the Nazis of the Katyn massacre in which over 20,000 Polish officers were murdered by the Soviets.
The main commemorations will take place in Warsaw. At noon, Sunday, before the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, an official change of the guard and a military parade will take place.
The Katyn Victims Memorial Day was established in 2007.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 16, 2008
Neanderthals have spoken out for the first time since they were wiped out or outcompeted by our ancestors tens of millennia ago.
It may only sound like one small burp, but for scientists the Neanderthal "E" sound marks a 50,000 year step back in time.
Prof Robert McCarthy, an anthropologist at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton has used Neanderthal vocal tracts reconstructed from fossils to simulate the voice with a synthesizer, reports NewScientist.com
Source: LAT
April 16, 2008
FELICITY, CALIF. -- A stiff wind blows grit across Jacques-Andre Istel's latest and greatest undertaking, a History of Humanity etched on hundreds of granite panels a few turns of a tumbleweed from the Arizona border. ...
"You've got to admit, that's interesting," Istel says.
He doesn't mean himself. Istel is talking about his History of Humanity, eight horizontal monuments spread out like spokes of a wheel between the church and the pyramid. When completed, i
Source: AP
April 11, 2008
With the state desperate for cash to balance its budget, one lawmaker has come up with a solution worthy of Blackbeard or Captain Kidd.
Rep. Juan Zapata wants to plunder Florida's booty.
One of the world's largest publicly owned collections of Spanish treasure - doubloons and other coins, some gold and silver ingots and chains - belongs to the state.
"We have some interesting goodies in the closet," said the Miami Republican. "Why not have an inter
Source: AP
April 16, 2008
A German prosecutor has filed murder charges against an 86-year-old former member of the Waffen SS for alleged Nazi-era killings in the Netherlands.
Dortmund prosecutor Ulrich Maass said Wednesday he has charged Heinrich Boere with three counts of murder for the 1944 slayings of Dutch civilians.
Boere was part of a Waffen SS death squad composed mostly of Dutch volunteers tasked with killing compatriots in reprisal for attacks by the anti-Nazi resistance.
Source: AP
April 15, 2008
Marek Edelman, the last surviving commander of the 1943 uprising in the Warsaw ghetto by a handful of scrappy, poorly armed Jews against the Nazi army, becomes emotional when he speaks of the fighters he led.
"I remember them all — boys and girls — 220 altogether, not too many to remember their faces, their names," says the 89-year-old doctor, who still works in a Lodz hospital. Edelman will lay a wreath in their honor at the Monument to the Heroes of the Ghetto on Saturda
Source: Amanda Ripley in Time Mag profile
April 9, 2008
Each of us lives a life of contradictory truths. We are not one thing or another. Barack Obama's mother was at least a dozen things. S. Ann Soetoro was a teen mother who later got a Ph.D. in anthropology; a white woman from the Midwest who was more comfortable in Indonesia; a natural-born mother obsessed with her work; a romantic pragmatist, if such a thing is possible.
"When I think about my mother," Obama told me recently, "I think that there was a certain combinati
Source: NYT Editorial
April 14, 2008
The nonprofit History News Network is reporting that in an informal survey of 109 historians, 98.2 percent considered President George W. Bush’s presidency to be a failure, while 1.8 percent called it a success.
On the question of whether he is the worst president in history, there was greater difference of opinion: 61 percent said he was, while others disagreed or are withholding their opinions. (The survey also made clear that James
Source: LAT
April 14, 2008
THE POST-POW YEARS: FIRST OF TWO PARTS -- When John McCain limped home from a Hanoi prison camp in 1973 with a badly injured knee that he could not bend, Navy doctors gave him the bad news: His 15-year career as a jet pilot was over. He would never fly again.
But McCain surprised his doctors by making a dramatic comeback. With a ferocious determination to fly again and a tough physical therapy regimen, he got his wings back and not long after was awarded command of the Navy's larges
Source: Press Release--John William Templeton
April 15, 2008
SAN FRANCISCO -- On April 14, 1858, hundreds of
African-Americans gathered in Zion Methodist Episcopal
Church here to respond to a backlash against their
activism against slavery. Although the almost 5,000
blacks had accumulated $2 million in property during
the Gold Rush, they did not have the right to vote or
to testify in court; their children could not attend
the best public schools and they lived in fear of
being returned to slavery under the fugitive slave
act. They decided their
Source: WaPo
April 15, 2008
Virginia's governor is proposing to spend $5 million to preserve several sites where armies of the North and South clashed nearly 150 years ago, including such renowned battlefields as Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville and Cold Harbor.
Gov. Timothy M. Kaine's proposal would provide funding over the next two years for the endangered Civil War sites.
Kaine (D) included the request Monday among his amendments to the two-year budget that the General Assembly approved last m
Source: LAT
April 15, 2008
Fascination with the pre- Islamic has run in trends since the 1979 revolution. Religious leaders first tried to blot out a past embraced by the man they overthrew, Mohammed Reza Shah. But they soon realized the appeal of Persian identity and now occasionally co-opt the past for tourism and national pride.
Unemployment, high inflation, political oppression and a distrust many Iranians have for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have stoked reflections on bygone centuries. And those who ca
Source: Independent (UK)
April 15, 2008
It looks like a neglected zoo. But the Institute of Experimental Pathology and Therapy has its own macabre chapter in the history of the Soviet Union....
But the years of Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika, then the Georgian-Abkhaz war, took a heavy toll on the centre. Most of its scientists left to set up a new centre in Russia, along with most of the monkeys that were not killed. What is left today is a disturbing shadow of the institute's former glory....
Legend has it that th
Source: http://www.thebostonchannel.com
April 15, 2008
A German baroness living in Providence is appealing a court decision forcing her to give a portrait auctioned by the Nazis to the estate of a late Jewish art dealer.
An attorney for Maria-Luise Bissonnette filed the arguments Monday with the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston.
Among other points, Bissonnette's attorney said the estate of Max Stern may have waited too long before seeking the return of the oil painting "Girl from the Sabine Mountains."
Source: AFP
April 14, 2008
Israel's Polish-born President Shimon Peres on Monday remembered the hundreds of thousands of Jews murdered by occupying Nazi Germans during World War II at Poland's Treblinka death camp.
Peres and his Polish counterpart Lech Kaczynski lit candles at the memorial to the 800,000 people murdered at Treblinka, 100 kilometres (60 miles) northeast of the capital Warsaw.
Source: International Herald Tribune
April 14, 2008
Dr. Johnson declared a tavern seat "the throne of human felicity." The Frenchman Hilaire Belloc, who spent his life in England, said: "When you have lost your inns, drown your empty selves. For you will have lost the last of England."...
Some say the pub is in crisis. A few years ago, The Guardian reported that for the first time since the Norman Conquest fewer than half the villages of England have a pub. Chains of horrendous corporate-owned "vertical drink
Source: AP
April 13, 2008
Mayor Jean-Pierre Leger was married and baptized his children at Saint-Pierre-aux-Liens church in this village in western France. Not without sadness, he is now planning to bulldoze the 19th century building.
The dilemma of what to do with churches that have fallen out of favor — and into disrepair — is facing towns and villages across France and other European countries. Some communities have dynamited churches deemed too expensive to maintain. Others have taken a
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 15, 2008
A hat company has broken a German taboo by advertising its products using an image of Adolf Hitler.
The campaign for the Hut Weber company places the iconic hair and moustache of the Nazi leader next to a bowler-hatted sketch of Charlie Chaplin, star of The Great Dictator, with the caption in English: "It's the hat."
