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: http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk
April 3, 2008
Ten years to the day after Lord Saville opened his investigation into Bloody Sunday, families today remained in the dark as to when the report would be published.
A spokeswoman for the inquiry - which probed the deaths of 13 men in the Bogside on January 30, 1972 and another man who died later - told the Telegraph that the report was "not imminent".
On the tenth anniversary of the inquiry's start, with unionists again attacking the mounting costs, the families
Source: http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk
April 3, 2008
Isambard Kingdom Brunel is often credited as being the first man to master many of the engineering innovations that fuelled Britain’s industrial revolution. Now, it seems, Portland cement can be added to the list.
Archaeologists working on the site of Brunel’s Great Western Dockyard development next to Brunel’s ss Great Britain, have discovered what is thought to be the first ever substantial use of Portland cement in the construction of a major building.
Source: Independent (UK)
April 3, 2008
The strip's last big show was in AD549. Then the Barbarians arrived and laid it to waste, and for the next millenium and a half it was no more than a very large allotment with a fancy name.
But now, after the centuries of neglect and years of debate and campaigning, Circus Maximus is finally to get some attention. Beginning on 20 June, the city's archeological authorities are to begin a careful and respectful restoration.
Eugenio La Rocca, Superintendent of Rome and lec
Source: http://www.mcall.com
April 3, 2008
Moravian College has decided to buck the recommendation of state historians and dismantle recently discovered root cellars, which may be as old as Bethlehem, to make way for a $25 million dormitory and classroom building.
The root cellars are in the middle of a footprint for the new building that is scheduled to open next year on the Priscilla Payne Hurd Campus.
''We're committed to honoring and documenting history, but at the same time, we are also committed to safe, a
Source: http://www.huliq.com
April 3, 2008
An archaeological dig in Cambridge has uncovered surprising ancient remains and the foundations of the world’s largest telescope of the late Victorian era.
Archaeologists from the University of Cambridge Archaeological Unit, recently working at the site of the new Kavli Institute for Cosmology in the grounds of the University’s observatory in west Cambridge, have unearthed an extraordinary series of deposits.
The Observatory hill-top has long been known as both a locati
Source: Nature News
April 2, 2008
The fate of a fourteenth-century pocket calculator is hanging in the balance between museum ownership and private sale.
The device is a brass astrolabe quadrant that opens a new window on the mathematical and astronomical literacy of the Middle Ages, experts say. It can tell the time from the position of the Sun, calculate the heights of tall objects, and work out the date of Easter.
Source: Reuters
April 3, 2008
Using written symbols such as hearts, arrows and hands, the ancient Aztecs maintained an arithmetic system that was far more complex than previously understood, scientists said on Thursday.
The Aztecs, an empire in central Mexico toppled by Spanish invaders in 1519, has long been recognized for its sophistication in architecture, engineering, astronomy and other fields. And the new research confirms arithmetic can be added to the list.
The researchers examined hundreds
Source: AP
April 3, 2008
The preacher in him would have continued speaking out against injustice, war and maybe even pop culture. He would likely not have run for president. He probably would have endured more harassment from J. Edgar Hoover.
Four decades after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. fell to an assassin's bullet, colleagues and biographers offer many answers to the question: What if he had lived?
For his children, however, the speculation is more personal. They know their lives would h
Source: Boston Globe
April 3, 2008
Fossilized excrement found in an Oregon cave has given scientists the hardest evidence to date that humans roamed the New World at least 1,000 years earlier than previously believed.
The prehistoric poop, deposited in a cave some 14,300 years ago, contains DNA from the forebears of modern-day Native Americans, according to the research.
The discovery reported today by the journal Science added fresh weight to emerging theories that Stone Age people from Asia somehow byp
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 3, 2008
Rome's ancient monuments are so poorly guarded that tourists are taking away mementos of their visit to the Eternal City with impunity.
Archaeologists said yesterday that Trajan's Forum, in the heart of the city's classical ruins, had been stripped of all the fragments of statues and shards of amphorae that adorned the site until recently.
To highlight the problem, a reporter from Il Messaggero newspaper carried away large boxes full of ancient artefacts during the dayt
Source: NYT
April 3, 2008
About one-third of America’s eighth-grade students, and about one in four high school seniors, are proficient writers, according to results of a nationwide test released on Thursday.
Source: CNN
April 3, 2008
Christine King Farris was sewing an Easter dress for her daughter in their Atlanta home one rainy April evening when the nightly news was interrupted by a special report.
The newscaster announced that Farris' younger brother, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., had been shot in Memphis, Tennessee. Another update came minutes later: King was in critical condition.
"It was a horrible moment," Farris said of that night in 1968. "I tried to call my sister-in-law
Source: AP
April 3, 2008
A history enthusiast has sued the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, claiming it lost several of his World War II-era photographs, including the shot of the flag raising on Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima.
The man, Rodney Hilton Brown, says the photos were part of the World War II memorabilia that he lent to the museum, which is sited on a retired aircraft carrier usually docked in the Hudson River, initially in 1995 and again in 2005.
Mr. Brown, a mortgage broker who coll
Source: AP
April 1, 2008
The secrets of a female spy who posed as a cosmetics saleswoman during World War II and helped lead the resistance inside Nazi-occupied France have been unsealed.
Pearl Cornioley outfoxed the Nazis by, among other tricks, concealing secret messages in the hem of her skirt and helping airmen escape to safety, according to records unsealed at Britain's National Archives on Monday. The release follows Cornioley's death on Feb. 24.
The records shed light on a woman who quic
Source: The Root (webzine published by Henry Louis Gates for the WaPo)
April 2, 2008
D.C. had its riot at last. For years, Negroes in the capital had watched as Watts, Detroit, Newark -- even Rochester, New York -- exploded in racial outrage. And though it shared the frustrations expressed in cities elsewhere, black Washington had held calm, either because its second-class citizens were intimidated by proximity to such concentrated power, or because they were too comfortable in the middle-class advantages of federal jobs.
All the way down 7th Street that night, we w
Source: The Root (webzine published by Henry Louis Gates for the WaPo)
April 2, 2008
Forty years later there are two particularly poignant and enduring images associated with Dr. King's assassination. The first is the circle of men surrounding Martin's body on that Memphis balcony as they point in the direction of the shooter. The second is Coretta Scott King's mournful and resolute face beneath her widow's black veil.
Both images capture the radicalizing power of Dr. King's murder. Together they reveal how responses to racial terrorism are often gendered. Many b
Source: The Root (webzine published by Henry Louis Gates for the WaPo)
April 4, 2008
When masses of dispossessed black people descended on the National Mall during the March on Washington to demand equal rights in the world's most powerful country, King's "I Have a Dream" speech gave disenfranchised people abroad reason to persist in their own battles against injustices at home. He made them believe that fairer political systems where within reach whether their oppressors where white, black, or brown.
King recognized that by speaking to a larger audience h
Source: Press Release
April 4, 2008
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum today
launched World is Witness, a new initiative that opens a window into the lives
of people affected by genocide and its long-term consequences.
A project of the Museum's Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative that
documents and maps threats of genocide and related crimes against
humanity, World is Witness brings together testimonies, photographs, videos,
and other first-hand data in Google Earth, situating eyewitness accounts in
Source: http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk
March 4, 2008
Martin Luther King III was just 10 years old when his father was shot on the balcony outside room 306, at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, on 4 April, 1968. Now 50 years old, he remembers the day vividly.
"My siblings and I were watching the evening news at home in Atlanta and we heard 'Dr Martin Luther King Jr has been shot,'" says King III, who will lead a march tomorrow to that motel, now home to the National Civil Rights Museum.
"We ran to our mother's
Source: Politico
April 3, 2008
Since the public supposedly can’t stand the media, and newspaper circulation keeps dropping, it seems an inauspicious moment to open a $450 million museum dedicated to the news.
However, that’s what happens next week, when the Newseum unlocks its doors along Pennsylvania Avenue, the tourist-friendly strip linking the White House and the U.S. Capitol.
But with journalism being about ideas, not artifacts, how does the Newseum justify a $20 admission fee to inform visitor
