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: Daily Yomiuri
September 14, 2007
Primary school students may have to rote-learn more key geographical facts and study more history in a proposal expected soon from a special committee of the Central Council for Education as part of revisions to the education ministry's official curriculum guidelines planned for the next school year, it has been learned.
The current primary school social studies curriculum does not clearly state what should be taught in geography lessons.
However, under the new proposal
Source: IraqCrisis email
September 13, 2007
The Iraqi-Polish Co-operation in Central South Iraq 2003-2006” was organized by Larsa – Human Right Organization, an Iraqi NGO in cooperation with the Polish Embassy on the 10th September. The venue of the event was the Babylon Hotel, located in the so-called Red Zone of Baghdad. The basic aim of this public presentation intended for the inhabitants of the Iraqi capital was to increase awareness of importance of the Iraqi archaeological heritage, to show its present status in Central South part
Source: AP
September 12, 2007
Fidel Castro claims Cuba's government saved the life of President Reagan by giving American officials information about an assassination plot in 1984.
The essay published Wednesday in the Communist Party newspaper Granma appeared to be the first time Cuba has made the claim. It seemed aimed at showing Cuba has cooperated with the United States in the past.
Castro, who has not appeared in public for more than a year, wrote that a Cuban security official stationed at the
Source: NYT
September 13, 2007
A farmer and the State of California reached a deal on Monday that will prevent two large industrial dairy operations from being built near Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park, the site of the state’s only town founded and operated by African-Americans.
The California Department of Parks and Recreation has agreed to pay $3.5 million to the farmer, Samuel Etchegaray, for his guarantee not to establish two large dairies on land he owns near the park in Tulare County.
Source: Scotsman.com/Reuters
September 12, 2007
Concealed in a thicket of brambles in hills southwest of Cologne, out of sight of the nearby motorway, an eerie relic of Germany's Nazi past has been neglected for over 60 years.
Under layers of dead wood and leaves lies part of Hitler's "Westwall" -- the "Siegfried Line" as it is known in English -- a 630 kilometre defensive line of bunkers and anti-aircraft defences that once ran the length of Germany's western border.
The concrete fortifications h
Source: LAT
September 1, 2007
Excavations at a 6,000-year-old archeological mound in northeastern Syria called Tell Brak are providing an alternative explanation for how the first cities may have grown.
Archeologists have thought cities generally began in a single small area and grew outward -- but evidence indicates that the urban area at Tell Brak was a ring of small villages that grew inward to become a city.
The finds, reported Friday in the journal Science, provide insight into political develo
Source: AP
September 12, 2007
Encrusted with tiny shells and smelling strongly of the sea, a 2,400-year-old Greek jar lies in a saltwater bath in Durres Museum, on Albania's Adriatic coast.
Part of a sunken shipment of up to 60 ceramic vessels, the 67-centimeter (26-inch) storage jar, or amphora, was the top find from what organizers say is the first archaeological survey of this small Balkan nation's seabed, conducted by U.S. and Albanian experts.
"Touch it, touch it. It's luck," said mis
Source: County Times (CT)
September 6, 2007
We've all heard the names-Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz-a litany of terror that seems to encompass all that is terrible in human nature. But few realize that there were many more German concentration camps dotted across that fair land and in neighboring countries overrun during the Nazi blitzkrieg.
Perhaps less familiar to the ear is Treblinka, a death camp once located about 60 miles northeast of Warsaw, Poland, and one of the most vicious of the facilities instituted to effect
Source: Telegraph (UK)
September 11, 2007
The only surviving witness to a decades-long conspiracy theory has firmly denied the Catholic Church is hiding details about a predicted apocalypse.
Archbishop Loris Capovilla, 91, said there was no truth in the rumour that the Vatican was suppressing a vision of the end of the world.
The vision said to have been revealed 90 years ago by the Virgin Mary to three shepherd children on a hillside at Fatima in Portugal.
The three "Secrets of Fatima"
Source: Scott McLemee at the website of Inside Higher Education
September 12, 2007
Rarely does a political scandal inspire anyone to discuss sociological research done 40 years earlier. But whatever else Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) may have contributed to public life, he certainly deserves credit for renewing interest in Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places, by Laud Humphreys, first published in 1970.
Humphreys, who was for many years a professor of sociology at Pitzer College, in Claremont, California, died in 1988. But his analysis of the protocols of a
Source: BBC
September 12, 2007
Suspected pro-Taleban militants have tried to blow up an ancient carving of Buddha in north-west Pakistan.
The statue, thought to date from the second century BC, sustained only minimal damage in the attack near Manglore in remote Swat district.
The area has seen a rise in attacks on "un-Islamic" targets in recent months.
This is the first such attack in Pakistan and is reminiscent of the Taleban's 2001 destruction of the giant Buddhas at Bamiyan in Afg
Source: History Today
September 11, 2007
Prisoners of War in Stalag Luft III, made famous in the film The Great Escape, dug over 100 tunnels in a bid for freedom, archaeologists have discovered. The film portrays three tunnels at the camp in Zagan, in modern-day Poland, being used for a mass break-out. In March 1944, 76 prisoners escaped but only three made it to Allied and neutral countries and 50 were executed. Radar was used by Keele University and UCL archaeologists to identify the escape routes.
Source: History Today
September 11, 2007
New research by medieval historians has revealed women enjoyed greater freedom and independence in the Middle Ages than previously thought. Dr Sue Niebrzydowski stated: "We found women running priories, commissioning books, taking early package tours to visit the Holy Land.” She added: “Women were often widowed by the age of 30 and it gave them greater freedom. They could be more sexually liberated as there would be no child as evidence of their fornication or adultery.” The evidence from l
Source: Christian Science Monitor
September 11, 2007
Sometimes the reaction is a guffaw, sometimes a snort. Either way, it's the disbelieving sound of people learning that an unassuming suburban school called Jefferson County IBS in Irondale, Ala., about as deep in the South as you can get, ranks in the top five high schools in the United States.
"People still have stereotypes of what ... Alabamians are like, and because we talk slower maybe they think we're not on the ball," says Linda Jones, an administrator at the school.
Source: Tribune Services
September 7, 2007
At the rumbling corner of Delancey and Essex Streets in Manhattan's fabled Lower East Side, a sandal-footed, backpack-wearing Josh Wolff stands before his two-dozen charges and promises a real taste of the neighborhood.
"And since this is July," the tour guide says, "I assume you'll be getting the smells of the neighborhood as well."
On this steamy city afternoon, we find Wolff at the appointed corner, collecting $20 a head from a swarm of folks eage
Source: The Age
September 5, 2007
THEY were lost for 90 years, killed in the slush of the Passchendaele battles of 1917, and forgotten. Now DNA technology has identified the remains of two Australian World War One diggers unearthed last year in the Belgian hamlet of Westhoek, east of Ypres. Sergeant George Calder, of northern Victoria, and Private John Hunter, of Queensland, will be overlooked no more.
Belgium's National Institute for Criminalistics and Criminology has matched the remains with DNA taken from living
Source: The Age
September 8, 2007
AUSTRALIA'S enormous losses on the Western Front in World War I will be recognised with the nation's first Anzac Day dawn service in France next year, to be conducted at the same time as the annual Gallipoli service.
The April 25 service — to be held in Villers-Bretonneux in northern France in the infamous Somme — will mark the 90th anniversary of Australians liberating the village on Anzac Day in 1918. It will also herald the 90th anniversary of the subsequent armistice, which ende
Source: AP
September 10, 2007
From the porch of her mud hut, Vera Filonok saw tens of thousands of Jews shot, thrown in a ravine and set on fire. Many were still alive and they writhed in the flames "like flies and worms."
The memories of what she saw in 1941 have seared her soul for six decades, but until recently she had talked about it with no one except neighbors in her remote Ukrainian village. Then a soft-spoken French priest came to town.
Roman Catholic Rev. Patrick Desbois and his
Source: WaPo
September 7, 2007
The square-toed, goatskin boots that Abraham Lincoln had on that night at Ford's Theatre were worn down at the heels.
His long, black frock coat was unadorned. Its buttons were of plain gray metal.
And most of what he wore as he sat in the private box on Good Friday of 1865 comes down to us still stained with his blood.
Yesterday, under police escort, the National Park Service transported the assassinated president's clothing and other items from the Ford's
Source: AP
September 6, 2007
An ornate gold medal depicting an eagle, commissioned by George Washington as a symbol of the ideals of the Revolutionary War and later presented to the Marquis de Lafayette, is to be sold at auction later this year.
Sotheby's auction house made the announcement Thursday, on the 250th anniversary of the birth of Lafayette. The gold and enamel medal - showing an eagle surrounded by a laurel wreath - is estimated to bring up to $10 million at the Dec. 11 sale, it said.
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