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
January 25, 2008
When Atilla Yayla, a maverick political science professor, offered a mild criticism of Turkey’s first years as a country, his remarks unleashed a torrent of abuse.
“Traitor!” a newspaper headline shouted. His college dismissed him. State prosecutors in this western city, where he spoke, opened a criminal case against him. His crime? Violating an obscure law against insulting the legacy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey’s founder.
“I need thoughts to counter my ideas,” Mr
Source: AP
January 24, 2008
NICOSIA, Cyprus - Marine archaeologists will begin work in June to uncover the sand-buried hull of a 2,300-year-old ship thought to have been ferrying wine when it sank off the coast of Cyprus, researchers said Thursday.
The ship, dating from the fourth century B.C., is one of only a few to have been found so well-preserved, and it may shed light on the nautical and economic history of the period in the east Mediterranean, said Stella Demesticha, a University of Cyprus visiting mari
Source: Boston Globe
January 24, 2008
Bill Clinton was already working the crowd with a vociferous appeal to vote for his wife when the dozens of people jostling to get inside the auditorium provoked a campaign worker to cry out, "Adults should not be acting this way!"
Coincidentally, Clinton's sharp-elbowed advocacy leading up to Saturday's South Carolina primary is prompting some pundits and fellow Democrats to ask a similar question: Should a former president be acting this way?...
Clinton fans
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 24, 2008
One of the 20th century’s most abiding mysteries could soon be solved when British scientists carry out DNA tests on recently discovered bone fragments said to belong to the two missing children of Tsar Nicholas II.
Russian forensic experts have been examining the remains, discovered under a mound near Yekaterinburg by amateur archaeologists last August, and say that early findings gave credence to the royal claims.
On Vladimir Lenin's orders, a Bolshevik firing squad
Source: AP
January 24, 2008
Federal agents executed search warrants Thursday at several Southern California museums, looking for stolen antiquities, officials said.
Authorities were searching the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana and the Mingei International Museum in San Diego, said Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
A search warrant was also issued for the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena.
A law enforcement source wh
Source: LiveScience
January 23, 2008
Ancient pottery found at an altar used by ancient Greeks to worship Zeus was actually in use at least a millennium earlier, new archeological data suggest.
The pottery shards were discovered during an excavation last summer near the top of Mt. Lykaion in southern Greece.
The finding, which dates back to 3000 B.C., indicates that the tradition of divinity worship on the site is very ancient and may even pre-date the introduction of Zeus into the Greek world, said David G
Source: USA Today
January 24, 2008
Some visitors to Badlands National Park spot a fossil and take it home as a souvenir. Sometimes college students studying the 244,000-acre park's natural history assume it's OK to take a specimen for further scrutiny.
A bigger problem, though, is the looting of artifacts found in the South Dakota park's rich fossil beds by thieves who plan to sell them online or to galleries or collectors.
Source: AP
January 23, 2008
The monumental chestnut tree that comforted Anne Frank while she was in hiding from the Nazis will be preserved for at least five more years under a plan agreed Wednesday, the museum at the site said.
The tree, which is afflicted with a lethal fungus, was to have been cut down last year, but a judge ordered a reprieve while supporters worked on a plan to preserve it.
Anne Frank House spokeswoman Maatje Mostart said the tree's crown would be trimmed and supported this
Source: AP
January 23, 2008
CUMBERLAND, Maryland — History could have come to life in very much the wrong way at a veterans' museum where a rocket on display for two years was discovered to be live.
After Allegany County authorities were notified Wednesday that the Mark 1 rocket on display in Cumberland might be live, the state fire marshal's office and the FBI confirmed it was. Bomb experts removed the ordnance and rendered it safe.
The 48-inch-by-2.75-inch rocket was similar to those used on h
Source: Reuters
January 23, 2008
An almost complete human skull fossil that could date back 100,000 years has been unearthed in China, state media said on Wednesday, hailing it as the greatest discovery since Peking Man.
Last month's find in Xuchang, in the central province of Henan, was made after two years of excavation just as two archaeologists were leaving for the Lunar New Year break, the China Daily said."We expect more discoveries of importance," Li Zhanyang, archaeologist with the Henan Cultural Relics and Archa
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 24, 2008
Germany's state railway yesterday caved in to pressure to document its role in deporting Jews to Nazi concentration camps, opening an exhibition on the "death trains" in a central Berlin station.
The display follows a two-year campaign by Jewish groups, led by the Nazi-hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, to force Deutsche Bahn to examine its key part in the Holocaust, as Germany continues to wrestle with its wartime record.
Source: Outer Banks Sentinel
January 23, 2008
When doctors want to see a body's organs they use an magnetic resonance imaging machine (MRI) to view beautifully clear images of what's inside.
When archaeologists want to see what's below the surface of the earth they are now beginning to use a similar technology called computer-assisted radar tomography (CART).
An archaeologist with the First Colony Foundation was on site at Fort Raleigh Saturday with CART engineers testing the advanced ground penetrating system. The
Source: NYT
January 23, 2008
TEL AVIV — They are in their 80s now, the last living links to Janusz Korczak, the visionary champion of children’s rights who refused to part with his young charges even as they were herded to the gas chambers.
When they speak of him, the old men are young again: transported to their days in his orphanage, a place they remember as a magical republic for children as the Nazi threat grew closer.
“It was a utopia,” said Shlomo Nadel, 85, one of the surviving orphans who m
Source: boingboing
January 22, 2008
A moving and intriguing Wired feature tells the story of the activists, hackers and engineers who are working to un-shred millions of hand-shredded secret files that the East German Stasi ripped to pieces in the run-up to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The secret police panicked when they realized that they were about to lose their tight rein on power and shredded as much as they could -- but they had collected more files than any other bureaucracy in the history of the world, and they couldn'
Source: AP
January 23, 2008
Archaeologists in northeast Syria have unearthed a 3rd century cemetery in the shape of a cross, the country's official news agency reported Wednesday.
Ten skeletons, along with pottery and coins, were found at the site in Hassaka, 441 miles northeast of the capital Damascus, SANA reported.
Some of the artifacts contained inscriptions in the ancient Aramaic language, it said.
Wednesday's find came a day after SANA reported that archaeologists had found a Ro
Source: Globe and Mail (Canada)
January 23, 2008
Mr. [Gooteleak] Judea was the first Inuk to testify at a historic $2-million truth commission that began travelling around Nunavut's Baffin region this week investigating long-standing allegations the RCMP deliberately slaughtered thousands of sled dogs from the 1950s to the 1970s.
The RCMP have denied the claims. In 2006, they released a report that found that while Mounties sometimes shot dogs for public-health or safety reasons, there was no evidence to support stories that anima
Source: SanDiego.com
January 23, 2008
American Forces Network radio chattered in the background as Pat Kell fed and dressed her four children in Japan the morning of Jan. 23, 1968. A month earlier, her husband – Chief Petty Officer James Kell – volunteered for a secret mission aboard a World War II cargo ship newly refitted with communications gear. The vessel deployed from Yokosuka, Japan, after a voyage from San Diego.
Through the broadcast buzz, Pat Kell thought she heard the name of her husband's ship: Pueblo.
Source: AP
January 23, 2008
At least 40 bodies found in a mass grave in the central German city of Kassel could be the remains of slave laborers from a Nazi armaments factory, a city official said Wednesday.
The first four skeletons were found last week at a construction site at the University of Kassel, said police spokeswoman Sabine Knoell. Twenty-six more were found on Monday and Tuesday, and about 10 more were unearthed Wednesday, she said.
"It could well be that more skeletons will be fo
Source: Wired.com
January 18, 2008
Ulrike Poppe used to be one of the most surveilled women in East Germany. For 15 years, agents of the Stasi (short for Staatssicherheitsdienst, or State Security Service) followed her, bugged her phone and home, and harassed her unremittingly, right up until she and other dissidents helped bring down the Berlin Wall in 1989. Today, the study in Poppe's Berlin apartment is lined floor to 12-foot ceiling with bookshelves full of volumes on art, literature, and political science. But one shelf, jus
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
January 23, 2008
James S. Rollins is called the father of the University of Missouri because he was responsible for gathering support to open the institution and donated the land for the original campus. But he was also a slave owner, and, generations later, one of his descendants has decided to address that through a gift to the black-studies program.
Clay Westfall Mering is Mr. Rollins’s great-great grandson. He has given a $25,000 donation to the university to endow a fund for black studies, offi
