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: BBC
July 21, 2007
President Vladimir Putin has been credited with making Russia either stronger or more aggressive, depending on your point of view, but history has yet to deliver the final verdict as the fluctuating views of past Russian leaders clearly illustrate.
Tsar Nicholas and his family were executed on 17 July 1918
Tsar Nicholas II and his whole family were shot.
Almost 60 years later, the house where they were killed was knocked down.
The communists we
Source: LAT
July 23, 2007
CHANGSHA, China — Someday, a great monument in Washington may bear the name of Lei Yixin. For now, you can find him down a pockmarked road in a grungy industrial suburb of this Chinese provincial capital.
The monument won't be built to honor Lei, who is scarcely famous in his own hometown, much less the United States. It is being built in memory of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and will rise along Washington's Tidal Basin, between the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials.
Source: NYT
July 23, 2007
It was in the Rütli Meadow in 1291 where, according to legend, representatives of the three original Swiss cantons, Schwyz, Uri and Unterwalden, took an oath to protect one another from the great threat of the era, the Austrians. So each Aug. 1, the reputed date of the Rütli oath, the Swiss celebrate their independence and courageous beginnings.
“It’s a bit of Bastille Day and the Fourth of July rolled into one,” said Urs W. Studer, Lucerne’s mayor, seated in his spacious office in
Source: Hal Smith in the Shamokin
July 25, 2007
This July 25th marks the 130th anniversary of the Shamokin Uprising, when desperation and starvation drove railroad workers and miners to join the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, America's first nationwide strike.
Railroad workers and miners had perilous jobs in the late 1800's. More than 200 railroad workers and 1000 miners died in accidents every year. The companies often forced both to buy from company stores at inflated prices and work from sunup to sundown. Companies made engine
Source: Press Release--David Wyman Institute
July 23, 2007
More than 100 Holocaust scholars and Jewish leaders --including top leaders of Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Judaism-- have signed a petition urging the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to change its main exhibit so as to include acknowledgment of the 1940s Holocaust rescue activists known as the Bergson Group.
During the Holocaust years, some American Jewish leaders opposed the Bergson Group for being too forthright in its criticism of the Roosevelt administration’s fa
Source: NYT
July 23, 2007
Taiwan plans to revise school textbooks to drop references that recognize Chinese historical figures, places and artifacts as ''national,'' an official said Sunday.The announcement is the latest in a series of moves by the island in the past few months to assert its sovereignty as President Chen Shui-bian's final term in office winds down.
Pan Wen-chung, an Education Ministry official, said authorities are considering dropping about 5,000 ''inappropriate'' refer
Source: Deutsche Welle
July 23, 2007
For years Flossenbürg has been regarded as one of the "forgotten concentration camps" of World War II. Now, a new exhibition has opened which tells the story of those who were incarcerated and who lost their lives there.A postcard in one of the first display rooms of the new museum reads: "Greetings from Flossenbürg." The friendly greeting is positioned under a picture of the historic castle ruins for which the small town on the German-Czech border is sti
Source: Live Science
July 23, 2007
People living in Europe during early Medieval times (400—1200 A.D.) actually had a progressive view of illness because disease was so common and out in the open, according to the research presented at a recent historical conference.
Instead of being isolated or shunned, the sick were integrated into society and taken care of by the community, the evidence suggests."The Dark Ages weren't so dark," said University of Nottingham historian Christina Lee, c
Source: The Age (Australia)
July 23, 2007
An expert panel in Canberra will consider a report tomorrow that several mass graves have been discovered holding the bodies of about 400 Australian and British soldiers killed in the Battle of Fromelles, in what might have been the most calamitous day in Australian history.The battle, in July 1916, was a bloody introduction for Australians to the horrors of the Western Front. Fred Kelly, one of the last Gallipoli veterans, said Gallipoli was a picnic compared with Fromelles
Source: WCBS
July 23, 2007
A 3-foot-by-10-foot section of brick wall, painstakingly preserved from a 175-year-old building in lower Manhattan, is raising some interesting questions. The brickwork symbol is part of a tantalizing historical whodunit. The setting conjures both New York's mercantile past and its future, and those who may be involved include a prominent, deeply Christian businessman.
Could the design be a cryptic marker of mystical beliefs? A tradesman's signature? A bit of architectural shorthand
Source: Boston Globe
July 22, 2007
W hen the First National Bank of Ipswich closed a branch office in Rowley several months ago, staff members made quite a find in the vault. The stamp on a canvas money bag, dated 1966, indicated that the bag contained $1,000 in dimes. Its actual contents turned out to be worth a pretty penny more.
Inside the bag was a fragile leather-bound book stuffed with hundreds of pages of cramped handwritten notes. To all appearances, the book contained records of the First Congregational Chur
Source: Baltimore Sun
July 22, 2007
Five years ago, Stanford Makashule Gana quit the African National Congress, the storied anti-apartheid movement of Nelson Mandela that has come to dominate politics and government in South Africa.
It was a brave move. But then the 18-year-old college student did something even bolder for a poor, black villager: He joined the Democratic Alliance, the small but vociferous opposition often dismissed as the "white party."
"Coconut," he vividly recalls pa
Source: http://www.bridgwatermercury.co.uk
July 21, 2007
ALMOST exactly 65 years after a World War Two plane crashed at Pawlett, killing its crew, the aircraft has been recovered - thanks to a ten-year labour of love by a Somerset man.
Plane enthusiast Tim Hake confesses to being "obsessed" with aviation archaeology, finding, researching and sometimes recovering aircraft from war-time crash sites.
Source: Daily Mail
July 21, 2007
A young German soldier poses proudly with his parents in a crumpled and torn old photograph.
It is typical of the type of photo thousands of soldiers would have had taken during the early days of Second World War to remind them of family and home.
But this particular snapshot holds a secret that could unlock a 60-year-old mystery – the whereabouts of a fabled hoard of looted Nazi gold worth 20 million pounds.
For scrawled in fading blue ink on the back of t
Source: http://vietnamnews.vnagency.com
July 21, 2007
Archaeologists have confirmed that artefacts found in Buon Rau village, Hoa Tien Commune, in Krong Pak (Dac Lac) are as much as 3,000 years old.
Local farmers first unearthed what they thought to be antique ceramics and stone tools in 2001 while planting coffee and pepper. They passed them to Dac Lac museum and archaeologists began excavating a 1.5ha site in Buon Rau in 2003.
Source: Times (UK)
July 22, 2007
THE government is set to reject a 500m pounds road scheme which is seen as vital to preserving the status of Stonehenge as a World Heritage site.
A tunnel more than a mile long would have taken the A303 trunk road under the extensive prehistoric landscape in which the stone circle stands. A new visitor centre had also been planned.
Despite 20 years of work by English Heritage, which manages Stonehenge, and several planning inquiries costing 25m pounds, a senior governme
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 23, 2007
They made the ultimate sacrifice for their country, hurling themselves from the trenches before vanishing in a hail of German bullets so thick that it was described by one witness as a "crisscrossed lattice of death".
Now, more than 90 years after hundreds of British and Commonwealth soldiers died and disappeared in the First World War killing fields of northern France, historians believe they have found several mass graves containing the remains of the "lost army&quo
Source: Announcement posted on Iraq Crisis list
July 21, 2007
We are planning an exhibit on the ongoing looting of sites in Iraq that will
open in the Oriental Institute next April 10, the 5th anniversary of the
looting of the Iraq Museum. Although the special exhibit gallery at the OI
is of modest size, we hope that the exhibit will significantly increase
public awareness of the issue. We have contacted a number of interested
scholars, and wanted to make sure this announcement went out to a broad
audience to invite your suggestion and commment.
Source: AP
July 20, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO -- The site of a World War II explosion that killed 320 people -- more than 200 of them black sailors -- and sparked enough outrage about the treatment of the black survivors to fuel a movement to desegregate the military could become part of the National Park System under a new bill.
The measure, announced by U.S. Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., on Friday, would make Port Chicago Naval Magazine in the eastern San Francisco Bay eligible for federal funding to operate a v
Source: Andrew Roberts in the Daily Mail
July 21, 2007
During the latter half of World War II, the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) undertook a massive clandestine operation of which the full, extraordinary details are only now coming to light.
Between 1942 and 1945, a section of SIS - known as MI19 - secretly recorded no fewer than 64,427 conversations between captured German generals and other senior officers, all without their knowledge or even suspicion. The 167 most significant of these are about to be published for the fi
