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: Guardian (UK)
June 7, 2007
The National Archives on Thursday unveiled a handwritten note by Abraham Lincoln exhorting his generals to pursue Robert E. Lee's army after the battle of Gettysburg, underscoring one of the great missed opportunities for an early end to the Civil War.An archives Civil War specialist discovered the July 7, 1863, note three weeks ago in a batch of military papers stored among the billions of pages of historical documents at the mammoth building on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Source: WaPo
June 7, 2007
The National Archives announced today that it has uncovered in its stacks a hand-written note sent by Abraham Lincoln to one of his top generals four days after the battle of Gettysburg, at the height of the Civil War.
The note, dated July 7, 1863, was sent to Gen. Henry W. Halleck urging that the defeated Confederate Army commanded by Gen. Robert E. Lee be pursued in the hopes of quickly ending the war....
The contents of the note had been known to historians, archives
Source: The Onion is a satirical magazine with a wide audience
June 6, 2007
WASHINGTON, DC—Breaking a 211-year media silence, retired Army Gen. George Washington appeared on NBC's Meet the Press Sunday to speak out against many aspects of the way the Iraq war has been waged.
Washington, whose appearance marked the first time the military leader and statesman had spoken publicly since his 1796 farewell address in Philadelphia, is the latest in a string of retired generals stepping forward to criticize the Iraq war.
"This entire military ven
Source: BBC
June 5, 2007
Suman Purohit has an uphill struggle, and so do her 13 other companions who are searching Pakistani jails for their relatives, missing since 1971.
"I had been married 18 months, and my son, Vipul, was three months old when the India-Pakistan war of 1971 began," she recalls.
Her husband, Flt Lt Manohar Purohit of the Indian Air Force, flew a number of sorties into Bangladesh, which was then called East Pakistan, and came home a couple of times for brief interva
Source: http://www.henryherald.com
June 6, 2007
ANDERSONVILLE, Ga. — Archaeologists, Boy Scouts and volunteers have descended on Andersonville National Historic Site, intent upon gathering details of what life was like both inside and outside of the walls of the infamous Civil War prison.
Andersonville Prison, located north of Americus, was one of the largest Confederate military prisons established during the Civil War. It was built in 1864, and during its 14 months of existence confined more than 45,000 Union soldiers within i
Source: Fox News
June 1, 2007
Residents of Pompeii ate their meals on the run, just like many Americans do today, according to a new archaeological study of how households functioned in the ancient Roman city buried by volcanic ash.
Completely destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D., Pompeii is one of the most famous archaeological sites in the world.
Source: Fox News
June 5, 2007
A rare Old Testament manuscript some 1,300 years old is finally on display for the first time, after making its way from a secret room in a Cairo synagogue to the hands of an American collector.
The manuscript, containing the "Song of the Sea" section of the Old Testament's Book of Exodus and dating to around the 7th century A.D., comes from what scholars call the "silent era" — a span of 600 years between the third and eighth centuries from which almost no Hebre
Source: Fox News
June 7, 2007
Satellites hovering above Egypt have zoomed in on a 1,600-year-old metropolis, archaeologists say.
Images captured from space pinpoint telltale signs of previous habitation in the swatch of land 200 miles south of Cairo, which digging recently confirmed as an ancient settlement dating from about 400 A.D.
The find is part of a larger project aiming to map as much of ancient Egypt's archaeological sites, or "tells," as possible before they are destroyed or cover
Source: BBC
June 7, 2007
The war diaries of a member of the King's Own Scottish Borders have been sold for 30,000 pounds to a mystery buyer.
Peter White's collection of drawings and notes was put together on the battlefields of World War II - a practice prohibited at the time.
A spokesman for auctioneer's Christie's said the material in the diaries was "very, very moving".
Source: NYT
June 7, 2007
President Bush has pardoned 113 people during his presidency, including a Tennessee bootlegger and a Mississippi odometer cheat.
But none has drawn the public scrutiny, nor posed the same political challenge, as the candidate that many conservatives hope will be Bush presidential pardon No. 114: I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, who was convicted of lying to investigators in the C.I.A. leak case and sentenced Tuesday to 30 months in prison.
Source: NYT
June 7, 2007
COLLEVILLE-SUR-MER, France, June 6 — Beside a churning sea and an ocean of white marble crosses, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Wednesday that the United States and its European allies should honor the thousands of Americans buried here by strengthening the alliance that they died defending.
As light rain descended from a gray Normandy sky, Mr. Gates said that the allied invasion on D-Day was founded on “the belief that that blood of free men could wash away the stains of ty
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 7, 2007
Six sites in Britain and Ireland were added to a list of the world's 100 most endangered monuments yesterday.
One of them, Tara Hill, which is considered the ceremonial and mythical capital of Ireland and is threatened by a motorway for Dublin commuters, was described as "the biggest advocacy challenge" on the World Monuments Fund's watch list for 2008.
It is alongside buildings ruined by the conflict in Iraq, the Peruvian Inca city of Machu Picchu, which is t
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 7, 2007
A Spanish court has issued a warrant for the capture and search of two American exploration ships suspected of removing sunken treasure from Spanish waters.
The ships, belonging to Odyssey Marine Exploration, which is based in Florida, are docked in Gibraltar and cannot leave because Spain controls the waters surrounding the British enclave.
A Spanish Culture Ministry spokeswoman said investigations by the Civil Guard, the Defence Ministry and Spanish prosecutors produc
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 7, 2007
He is credited with having coined the phrase "warts and all" while sitting for a portrait.
But yesterday, Oliver Cromwell's pimples did not seem to worry anyone as a four-by-three inch picture of him sold for £535,200.
It makes the Harcourt Miniature, which dates from 1657, the year before Cromwell died, one of the most expensive paintings of its type ever sold at auction.
The oval picture, by Samuel Cooper, Cromwell's favourite artist, is believe
Source: Fox News
June 6, 2007
A document said to be the flawed original version of President John F. Kennedy's death certificate is up for sale, 43 years after a typo helped make it void.
Don McElroy, a funeral home worker who helped load Kennedy's casket into the hearse at Dallas Parkland Hospital, believes he has the first death certificate from the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination.
The document mistakenly lists Kennedy's address as "600 Pennsylvania Ave." _ not 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., bette
Source: Reuters
June 5, 2007
The Vatican tried to enroll Roman Jewish men in its security forces in 1943 in order to save them from the Nazis, the Vatican’s second in command said on Tuesday, rejecting charges that wartime Pope Pius XII was anti-Semitic.
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, who ranks second only to the Pope in the Holy See hierarchy, made his comments at the presentation of a new book about Pius by Italian author Andrea Tornielli.
Bertone called accusations
Source: MSNBC
June 6, 2007
A young clerk with no knowledge of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown allowed a tribute to victims slip into the classified ads page of a newspaper in southwest China, a Hong Kong daily reported on Wednesday.
Officials at the Chengdu Evening News refused to answer questions about an advertisement it ran saluting the mothers of those killed in a bloody military crackdown on democracy activists at Tiananmen Square in 1989.
The one-line ad on Monday night read: “Paying tr
Source: NYT
June 7, 2007
Jim Clark, the former sheriff in Selma, Ala., whose violent, highly public attempts to maintain the status quo there in the Jim Crow era are widely believed to have contributed, however inadvertently, to the success of the voting rights movement, died Monday in Elba, Ala. He was 84 and had been living in a nursing home there.
The death was confirmed by the Hayes Funeral Home in Elba.
From 1955 to 1966, Mr. Clark was the sheriff of Dallas County, Ala., which includes Sel
Source: Bloomberg News
June 6, 2007
Goldman Sachs Group donated $2 million to endow a chair at Morehouse College in Atlanta that will oversee the collected writings of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The chair will supervise the compilation of 10,000 pieces of Dr. King’s writings and manuscripts, Goldman Sachs said. Dr. King was a 1948 graduate of the all-male, historically black college. A group of civic leaders, businesses and philanthropists based in Atlanta bought the collection, which includes a draft of Dr. King’s 1963 “
Source: New York Post
June 6, 2007
FROM beauty queens who marched in heels to politicians who sported fake smiles to win some votes, to the controversial "Seinfeld" episode, the Puerto Rican Parade has made Big Apple history for over half a century.
March 1958 - Leaders from the Puerto Rican community decide to break away from the Hispanic Day Parade and create the Puerto Rican Day Parade. According to an editorial in "El Diario," the main objective of the Hispanic Day Parade, which was mainly ru
