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: Telegraph (UK)
July 13, 2007
Spain risked a diplomatic incident yesterday when police boarded an American treasure hunter's ship as it sailed from Gibraltar in a tug of war over who profits from the discovery of 250 million pounds of sunken treasure.
The Ocean Alert, a survey vessel, was boarded in international waters as the Spanish civil guard searched for information on the origin of 500,000 silver coins and bars of gold found by Odyssey Marine Exploration. Spain claims that the treasure comes from a Spanish
Source: NYT
July 12, 2007
KRAKOW, Poland — There is a curious thing happening in this old country, scarred by Nazi death camps, raked by pogroms and blanketed by numbing Soviet sterility: Jewish culture is beginning to flourish again.
“Jewish style” restaurants are serving up platters of pirogis, klezmer bands are playing plaintive Oriental melodies, derelict synagogues are gradually being restored. Every June, a festival of Jewish culture here draws thousands of people to sing Jewish songs and dance Jewish
Source: http://abc.net.au
July 12, 2007
Britain's World War II prime minister Winston Churchill has been cut from a list of key historical figures recommended for teaching in English secondary schools, a government agency says.
The radical overhaul of the school curriculum for 11 to 14-year-olds is designed to bring secondary education up to date and allow teachers more flexibility in the subjects they teach, the Government said.
But although Adolf Hitler, Mahatma Gandhi, Joseph Stalin and Martin Luther King
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
July 12, 2007
It set sail, sleek and graceful, from Oakland's Jack London Square and made its way into San Francisco Bay, gliding past Treasure Island. People waved from Pier 39. After all, this wasn't just any yacht but a part of presidential history. From 1936 to 1945, this former U.S. Coast Guard cutter served as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidential yacht, after being renamed the USS Potomac and being recommissioned as a Navy vessel in 1936. During Roosevelt's term, it was a retreat for the p
Source: Boston Globe
July 12, 2007
Behind the Brunswick Zone bowling alley in Lowell, through the grass where a drive-in theater once stood, you can enter the woods through a narrow, brush-filled pathway.
For some, it may just be any woodsy area in Pawtucketville. But for Dracut teacher Rebecca Duda, rejuvenating this spot along Pawtucket Boulevard has become a mission.
Looking closer, past protruding branches and a mossy, leaf-ridden floor, the remnants of smashed headstones clutter the area. Remains of
Source: BBC
July 11, 2007
Plans are taking shape to set up a museum that celebrates Britain's role in the origins of the digital age.
The National Museum of Computing will be based at Bletchley Park where World War II code breakers built the first recognisably modern computers.
The museum's centrepiece is the rebuilt Colossus computer that broke high-level German communications during WWII.
The museum's founders are seeking funds and backers to exhibit more machines from its extensive col
Source: Daily Mail (UK) (Click here to see pictures.)
July 12, 2007
They are the most remarkable pictures of one of the most hellish places on earth.
Never seen before, these astonishing photographs, lovingly hand-touched in colour to bring to life the nightmare of Passchendaele, were released this week to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the battle that, between July and November 1917, claimed a staggering 2,121 lives a day and in total some quarter of a million Allied soldiers.
Source: Deutsche Welle
July 11, 2007
Bunkers built decades ago are costly to maintain and, according to the Interior Ministry, the concrete rooms would no longer protect their inhabitants from terrorist attacks, so the government has decided to sell them.
The German Interior Ministry has announced it will sell 2,000 bunkers and shelters formerly in place to protect civilians. The ministry said such rooms were no longer necessary because threat scenarios had changed.
Source: BBC
July 12, 2007
Ancient coins have been found on a beach in the Western Isles giving new clues to the far reaching influence of the Roman Empire.
Archaeologists believe the pieces of copper alloy date from the middle of the 4th Century.
They were found in a sand dune, but the location in the Uists has been kept secret to protect the site.
Archaeologists said it was a "lucky find" as the coins were at risk of vanishing in a high tide.
Source: AP
July 11, 2007
A 41-foot raft made of reeds and wooden planks set out Wednesday on voyage from New York to Spain, a daring and perhaps foolhardy attempt to prove people in the Stone Age could have crossed the Atlantic.
The fragile-looking craft was towed down the harbor past the Statue of Liberty, to be cut loose once it passed into the open sea. At the helm was Dominique Gorlitz, 41, a German botanist and ex-teacher who has spent years preparing for the expedition."We are trying to retrace the ancient wate
Source: National Geographic News
July 11, 2007
Rock face drawings and etchings recently rediscovered in southern Egypt are similar in age and style to the iconic Stone Age cave paintings in Lascaux, France, and Altamira, Spain, archaeologists say.
"It is not at all an exaggeration to call it 'Lascaux on the Nile,'" said expedition leader Dirk Huyge, curator of the Egyptian Collection at the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels, Belgium.
"The style is riveting," added Salima Ikram of the A
Source: Baltimore Sun
July 3, 2007
The Maryland Historical Society - which laid off 20 percent of its staff last year and saw a new director leave within four months of arriving - will close two satellite museums in Baltimore to reduce costs.
The Maritime Museum in Fells Point and the Baltimore Civil War Museum in Harbor East will close Sept 1. The closures will save about $50,000 a year and allow the 163-year- old historical society to eliminate its deficit by mid-2008, said society Director Rob Rogers.
Source: NYT
July 12, 2007
The National Archives made available on Wednesday more than 11 hours of tape recordings that show President Richard M. Nixon maneuvering in 1972 to remake the Republican Party in his image, crush South Vietnamese opposition to his efforts to end the Vietnam War and dole out patronage to ethnic groups based on how much they supported his re-election.
The release of the tapes along with 78,000 pages of newly disclosed documents should be a trove of fascinating detail and context for
Source: BBC
July 11, 2007
Campaigners fighting to preserve a 4,000-year-old archaeological find in Herefordshire say they are facing a race against time.
Experts have said the newly-uncovered Rotherwas Ribbon could be as important as Stonehenge.
The Ribbon [of stones] is thought to be about 4,000 years old
However, the site is in the path of a controversial planned relief road.
Herefordshire Council said a protective shield will be built over the site to save it for future ge
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 12, 2007
Between the open sewers and bullet-scarred walls of Kabul's old city a perpetually hurrying Englishman in a battered but impeccably cut Savile Row suit is a familiar yet incongruous site.
Many Westerners in the city choose to travel in armoured four-wheel-drive vehicles surrounded by armed guards. Rory Stewart eschews such caution.
A 33-year-old Eton and Oxford-educated former diplomat, affectionately known as "Lawrence of Belgravia", Mr Stewart arrived in Kab
Source: Montgomery Advertiser
July 12, 2007
Medical negligence, not a bullet, caused the death of a black civil rights worker in 1965, according to the attorney for a former state trooper indicted in his death.
James Bonard Fowler, 73, of Black, a town in Geneva County, admits he shot Jimmie Lee Jackson on Feb. 18, 1965, but said it was in self-defense. He has pleaded "not guilty" and remains free on a $250,000 bond. Historians say that Jackson's death was the catalyst for the historic Selma-to-Montgomery march.
Source: Live Science
July 12, 2007
Fierce warriors once occupied the famous complex where the Dead Sea Scrolls were written, new research suggests. Ruins of the Qumran site—in the present-day West Bank—resemble a monastery, but scholars have argued over its uses before the religious sect who penned the scrolls moved in somewhere between 130 and 100 B.C. Using the world's first virtual 3-D reconstruction of the site, historians recently found evidence of a fortress that was later converted into its more peacef
Source: Bloomberg
July 12, 2007
Bruno Lohse, a German art dealer appointed by Hermann Goering to acquire looted art in occupied France, dispersed his private collection of Dutch 17th-century masterpieces and expressionist paintings among friends and relatives in his will, the lawyer handling his estate said. Lohse died on March 19, aged 95, and has since become the focus of a three-nation investigation into a looted Camille Pissarro painting discovered in a Swiss bank safe that was seized by Zurich prosecu
Source: NYT
July 11, 2007
After two decades of fear and silence, an architect has come forward to say that at least three bodies that may belong to student protesters killed in a 1968 massacre are buried under a hospital near the massacre site.
The architect, Rosa María Alvarado Martínez, said late Monday that she was forced to keep quiet about the grisly discovery after men identifying themselves as police officers said they would kidnap and kill her son if she went public.
The three bodies wer
Source: AP
July 11, 2007
President Nixon and his 1972 re-election campaign tried to tie Democrats to the mob, gay liberation and even slavery, according to newly released papers and tapes betraying bare-knuckle tactics from the dawn of the Watergate scandal.
Still, even as Nixon's lieutenants explored every avenue for defeating Democrat George McGovern and nullifying critics of all stripes — "hit them" was a favorite phrase — the president brooded over his reputation as a hard man whose gentle si
