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: WaPo
April 15, 2008
The head of the Smithsonian Latino Center resigned in February after an internal investigation found that she violated a variety of rules and ethics policies by abusing her expense account, trying to steer a contract to a friend and soliciting free tickets for fashion shows, concerts and music award ceremonies, according to records released yesterday by the Smithsonian.
Pilar O'Leary, who was hired in 2005 by then-Secretary Lawrence M. Small to be the institution's key representativ
Source: AP
April 14, 2008
Donald H. Rumsfeld, the powerful defense secretary and architect of the Iraq War who left office two years ago as he faced ever-rising criticism, is working on a memoir to be published by Penguin Group (USA) in 2010.
"This will be a story that will span my lifetime," Rumsfeld, 75, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Monday from his office in Washington, D.C. "It will be something that I will try hard to have be very fair and honest and useful. I hope i
Source: NYT
April 15, 2008
Researchers have discovered that the builder of the Titanic struggled for years to obtain enough good rivets and riveters and ultimately settled on faulty materials that doomed the ship, which sank 96 years ago Tuesday.
The builder’s own archives, two scientists say, harbor evidence of a deadly mix of low quality rivets and lofty ambition as the builder labored to construct the three biggest ships in the world at once — the Titanic and two sisters, the Olympic and the Britannic.
Source: National Geographic News
April 14, 2008
He supposedly preferred to remain behind the scenes, but after 1,800 years one of Rome's most reclusive emperors has been thrust into the limelight.
A statue of Lucius Verus, who ruled ancient Rome alongside his more famous adopted brother Marcus Aurelius, was recently recovered among a cache of looted artifacts, Italian officials say.
Investigators found the intricately carved marble head in a boathouse near Rome, saying the find was particularly significant because Lu
Source: National Geographic News
March 31, 2008
Archaeologists have uncovered a pristinely preserved statue of a powerful Egyptian queen at the sprawling mortuary temple of Amenhotep III on Luxor's West Bank.
A joint European-Egyptian team found the 12-foot-tall (3.6-meter-tall) quartzite figure attached to the broken-off leg of a much larger colossus of Amenhotep III, who ruled from about 1390 to 1350 B.C.
Experts say the newfound statue is of Queen Tiye—Amenhotep III's favorite wife and the most influential woman o
Source: National Geographic
April 9, 2008
An ancient burial site in Mexico contains evidence that Mixtec Indians conducted funerary rituals involving cremation as far back as 3,000 years ago.
The find represents the earliest known hints that Mixtecs used this burial practice, which was later reserved for Mixtec kings and Aztec emperors, according to researchers who excavated the site.
Source: AP
April 13, 2008
Gen. Andrew Jackson's early 19th century hunt for Angola ended with the Florida settlement's destruction. Documentarian Vickie Oldham is now trying to find remains of the town, the Southeast's last major outpost for free blacks and fugitive slaves.
Since 2002, Oldham has worked to bring the story of Angola to life. A former television reporter in Sarasota, she has recruited historians, archaeologists and educators to produce a documentary, Web site and educational materials about An
Source: http://www.int.iol.co.za
April 12, 2008
Beneath the surface of the dry, red sand covering a farm just outside Kimberley, the remains of an untold story have been uncovered, revealing the establishment of a black Boer War concentration camp, dating back more than 100 years.
About 1 200 refugees were moved from locations in Jacobsdal, Boshof and Petrusburg to a farm 30km outside Kimberley in the then Orange Free State, after the British forces had occupied the towns.
Local archaeologists had been searching in
Source: WaPo
April 14, 2008
With the opening today of a new, $103 million visitor center at Gettysburg National Military Park, Cemetery Ridge is undergoing the most radical change to its look and feel in a generation. The new visitor center, hidden in a hollow behind the ridge, has made both the old visitor center and the Cyclorama Building -- designed by the renowned architect Richard Neutra in the 1960s -- obsolete. And so, in an effort to return the battlefield to its original state, the National Park Service is about t
Source: http://www.inrich.com
March 29, 2008
The Civil War ended more than 140 years ago, but there is still ordnance to be unearthed, said Bob Wilcox an amateur historian from Powhatan County.
And the thought, he said, is chilling, especially in light of the February explosion that killed Sam White, who ran a business in which he cleaned and disarmed Civil War-era military ordnance at his Chesterfield County home.
The explosion scattered Civil War shell shrapnel throughout the neighborhood.
The incid
Source: http://fredericksburg.com
April 9, 2008
Private land within the boundaries of some of the nation's most beloved national parks is under growing pressure to be developed or sold.
And, according to a new report by an independent parks watchdog group, other sites--including Fredericksburg-area Civil War battlefields--are looking for funds to acquire important acreage as federal budget cuts have dried up available money.
In its "America's Heritage for Sale" report released yesterday, the National Parks
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 14, 2008
Spanish archaeologists collaborated with the Nazis in their attempts to prove the theory of Aryan supremacy and justify their claims of racial superiority over the Jews, according to a new book.
Spain wanted to promote the idea that the Aryan race could be traced to the Canary Islands, amid claims they were all that remained of the lost continent of Atlantis.
Scientists from the Ahnenerbe, an institute set up by Heinrich Himmler and funded by the SS, planned to travel t
Source: Sunday Herald Sun
April 13, 2008
AN acclaimed Melbourne restaurant has sparked multi-ethnic outrage for paying homage to a fascist warlord and mass murderer.
The plush Katarina Zrinski restaurant attached to Footscray's Croatian Club has been branded "disgusting" for its celebration of genocidal World War II Croatian leader Ante Pavelic.
Pavelic, who historians say was responsible for the deaths of up to 500,000 Jews, Serbs, Muslims and gypsies, has been described as the Heinrich Himmler of t
Source: AP
April 11, 2008
Polish lawmakers honored the memory of the more than 200 young Jewish fighters Friday who led the Warsaw Ghetto uprising against Nazi soldiers in 1943.
In its resolution, the lower house of Poland's parliament said the ghetto fighters were defending human dignity. Lawmakers paid homage to "all the victims and heroes of the uprising, whose sacrifice merits the highest admiration, respect and memory."
Poland will hold national observances of the 65th anniversary
Source: International Herald Tribune
April 3, 2008
Thieves peeled long strips of lead from the roof of St. Michael and All Angels, until a barking dog sent them fleeing from this tiny Leicestershire village. But by then, they had left a hole of about 100 square feet in the top of the 800-year-old church.
For centuries, people have stolen religious artifacts in Europe, including chunks of religious buildings, but Britain is in the midst of an accelerating crime wave that some experts call the most concerted assault on churches since
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 14, 2008
Thousands of Germans have queued for hours to see a mobile exhibition on the Holocaust that was barred from Berlin's central station.
Deutsche Bahn, the German railway company, refused to allow the "Train of Remembrance", which documents deportations by rail during the Second World War, to use the station and instead shunted it to the east of the capital.
Thousands still queued for up to four hours. "These masses demonstrate that they are ready to confron
Source: LAT
April 13, 2008
In Mexico, the story of the country's black population has been largely ignored in favor of an ideology that declares that all Mexicans are "mixed race." But it's the mixture of indigenous and European heritage that most Mexicans embrace; the African legacy is overlooked.
"They are saying we are all the same and therefore there is no reason to distinguish yourself," said Padre Glyn Jemmott, a Roman Catholic priest from Trinidad and Tobago who has had a parish of
Source: NYT
April 13, 2008
In 1662, the colonists of Hartford accused 39-year-old Mary Sanford of witchcraft. Based on evidence — drinking wine and dancing around a bonfire — the court pronounced her guilty “for not having the feare of God before thyne eyes.” Sanford was hanged, leaving behind five children and a shaken husband who was later acquitted of similar charges.
More than three centuries later, Sanford’s descendants, 14-year-old Addie Avery and her mother, Debra, of New Milford, Conn., have petitione
Source: http://www.archaeology.org
April 3, 2008
An unlikely source of information is helping to settle one of the most contentious debates in American archaeology: Who were the first people to colonize the Americas and when did they do it? Were they the mammoth-hunting Clovis people who lived 13,000 years ago, or some earlier group who archaeologists are just beginning to understand? A recent discovery in the Oregon desert announced in the April 4 edition of Science may end the debate once and for all. ARCHAEOLOGY contributing editor Andrew C
Source: http://www.ekathimerini.com
April 3, 2008
Crete’s fabled Minoan civilization was built by people from Anatolia, according to a new study by Greek and foreign scientists that disputes an earlier theory that said the Minoans’ forefathers had come from Africa.
The new study – a collaboration by experts in Greece, the USA, Canada, Russia and Turkey – drew its conclusions from the DNA analysis of 193 men from Crete and another 171 from former neolithic colonies in central and northern Greece.
The results show that t
