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: Reuters
January 14, 2008
German academics believe they have solved the centuries-old mystery behind the identity of the "Mona Lisa" in Leonardo da Vinci's famous portrait.Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a wealthy Florentine merchant, Francesco del Giocondo, has long been seen as the most likely model for the sixteenth-century painting.
But art historians have often wondered whether the smiling woman may actually have been da Vinci's lover, his mother or the artist himself.
Source: NYT
January 13, 2008
BARRING some seismic scandal, unforeseen late entry (“Al Who?”), or unlikely surge by John Edwards, it is wholly inevitable that the race for the Democratic nomination will end next August in an epochal first.
Either Senator Barack Obama will be the first African-American or Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton will be the first woman to win the presidential nomination of a major American political party. One of them will take the stage at Denver’s Pepsi Center, specked with confetti and
Source: NYT
January 14, 2008
After staying on the sidelines in the first year of the campaign, race and to a lesser extent gender have burst into the forefront of the Democratic presidential contest, thrusting Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton into the middle of a sharp-edged social and political debate that transcends their candidacies.
In a tense day of exchanges by the candidates and their supporters, Mrs. Clinton suggested on Sunday that Mr. Obama’s campaign, in an effort to inject race into
Source: NYT
January 13, 2008
Something wonderful happened to Martha Nierenberg in October 2000 when a trial court in Hungary said something very obvious. A fortune in artwork had been stolen from her family at the time of the German invasion of Hungary in 1944, which also ushered in one of the most horrific chapters of the Holocaust. Much of the art was hanging in plain view in the country’s two most prominent museums. It should be given back to her, the court said. The ruling was the second in her favor, and it seemed defi
Source: NYT
January 13, 2008
LAST month Spain passed a law that doesn’t make much sense, on its face, but says quite a lot about Europe in the new century.
The Parliament, fulfilling a campaign promise from 2004 by Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, ordered that families wanting to unearth bodies of relatives killed during the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s or who suffered as a political consequence of General Francisco Franco’s four-decade-long regime should get full cooperation from the state,
Source: NYT
January 13, 2008
IN the end, said Theodore C. Sorensen, the celebrated speechwriter for President John F. Kennedy, what made a great speech in 1940 or 1961 is not much different from what makes a great speech in 2008.
“Speaking from the heart, to the heart, directly, not too complicated, relatively brief sentences, words that are clear to everyone,” he said of the fine art of political rhetoric.
“I’ve always said a model of a statement by a leader were the seven words uttered by Winston
Source: NYT
January 12, 2008
PHILADELPHIA — Alongside some of the most historic landmarks in the United States, a building is rising that will tell the story of the national immigration experience through the life of the Jewish people.
The new National Museum of American Jewish History, scheduled to open on July 4, 2010, is an effort to add to the historical narrative traced by the cultural icons of Independence Mall: Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence was signed; the Liberty Bell, which w
Source: News Tribune (Jefferson City, MO)
January 9, 2008
Worried about a push to take the religious references out of time, a state senator has filed a bill that would mandate the use of B.C. (Before Christ) and A.D. (Anno Domini or “Year of our Lord”). Many historians and textbook publishers have switched to B.C.E. (Before Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era) as a nod toward non-Christians.“There is an effort to sort of scrub our public institutions of acknowledgment of God,” said Sen. John Loudon, R-Chesterfield. He said it would b
Source: Reuters
January 11, 2008
Giant glaciers formed about 90 million years ago during a warm period when alligators thrived in the Arctic, researchers said Thursday, calling into question the belief that all ice melts in a “super greenhouse” climate.
The researchers’ study, based on organic molecules in ocean sediments and chemicals in ancient fossil shells, indicated that there were ice sheets in Antarctica in parts of the Turonian period, one of the warmest times in history, when dinosaurs thrived.
Source: AP
January 11, 2008
President George W. Bush, on an emotional tour of Israel's Holocaust memorial, stopped in front of an aerial photo of Auschwitz on Friday and told his secretary of state that the U.S. should have bombed the death camp to stop the extermination of Jews there, the memorial's chairman said.
It was a rare acknowledgment from a U.S. leader on an issue that has stirred deep controversy for decades....
Tom Segev, a leading Israeli scholar of the Holocaust, said the Bush comment, whic
Source: Bloomberg News
January 11, 2008
Germany overturned the 1933 verdict against Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutchman convicted at the beginning of the Nazi era for setting fire to the Reichstag parliament building in Berlin.
The Dec. 23, 1933, verdict sentencing van der Lubbe to death for treason and arson was overturned by a 1998 law. The Federal Prosecution Office declared that the law applies to the case, the office said in a statement yesterday. Van der Lubbe was executed in 1934.
"The 1998 law auto
Source: Press Release--David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
January 11, 2008
A leading Holocaust research institute has praised President Bush for his statement that the United States “should have bombed” the Auschwitz death camp in 1944.
“The Roosevelt administration’s refusal to bomb Auschwitz was an appalling moral failure,” said Prof. David S. Wyman and Dr. Rafael Medoff, historians who have written extensively on the bombing issue. “President Bush is right--the United States should have, and could have, bombed the Auschwitz death camp and the railway
Source: AP
January 11, 2008
A T-shirt using a yellow Star of David to liken the treatment of smokers in Germany to that of Jews during Nazi rule has angered German Jews.
Earlier this week, after several German states introduced sweeping bans on smoking in restaurants and bars, an events planner called DMP started offering the T-shirt for sale on its Web site.
Jewish groups responded with outrage.
Source: BBC
January 11, 2008
An aqueduct near Wrexham could soon join the likes of the Taj Mahal and the Great Wall of China as a World Heritage Site.
The Pontcysyllte Aqueduct and Canal has been named as the UK's 2008 nomination for the prestigious status.
The nomination was put forward by Westminster's Culture Secretary James Purnell, who said it was "a masterpiece from the canal age".
Source: AP
January 11, 2008
Squat, homely, dwarfed by stately oaks and poplars, and unnoticed by the tourists passing in horse-drawn carriages, it's a tree that only birds and nut-hungry squirrels could love.
But the 100-year-old European beech on Central Park's Cherry Hill was the center of attention Thursday, chosen by city officials as the first of 25 "historical" trees to be cloned as part of a plan to add a million new trees to public spaces over the next decade.
Agriculture student
Source: MSNBC
January 10, 2008
Lead in your lipstick? Mercury in your mascara? Recent headlines about harmful ingredients hiding in beauty products are enough to make even the vainest among us want to go back to the good old days of rubbing strawberries on our lips to make them red.
But women (and men) have plastered a lot more than berry juice onto their skin in the never-ending quest to look hot (or extremely pallid, as was usually the case back in the day). Some beauty products of yesteryear contained high con
Source: BBC
December 31, 2007
It is not the type of a call that an archaeologist receives every day.
There are bodies, the voice on the end of the line told Anne Jensen; we don't know who they were, or why they are here.
"People started noticing stuff eroding out of the bluff," she recalls, "and I got called out, along with the police, the real estate people and so on.
"It was very clearly an archaeological burial. And the bluff was collapsing quickly, so we just got
Source: Pamela Charshee in the Baltimore Sun
January 10, 2008
What is the price of history?
It's impossible to figure. But we are nagged by that question with news of the impending sale of the President Street station - the sale of Baltimore's Civil War history.
Baltimore is rich in historical structures (it's the "Monumental City," right?) and studded with an array of heritage venues that other cities should envy over their potential for tourism development. Why, in a town steeped in history going back to Colonial times
Source: UPI
January 9, 2008
Newly declassified U.S. documents show there were inaccuracies and errors in intelligence intercepted before and during the Vietnam War.
The National Security Agency had some 10,000 cryptographers and other intelligence gathering and translation personnel in Southeast Asia in 1964, yet NSA historian Robert Hanyok wrote in the agency's history that two key points in the war had intelligence problems....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 10, 2008
The Church of England has signalled that it is prepared to see the abolition of blasphemy offences after the Government announced a review of the ancient law.
The moves follow a cross-party move by MPs to sweep away legal protections for the Anglican faith, first disclosed in The Daily Telegraph this week....
The principle of blasphemy laws dates back to ancient times, but the present common law offence of "blasphemous libel" is based on 19th century court rul
