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 News
May 10, 2007
London's Natural History Museum has struck a deal with Australian aboriginal leaders over the remains of 17 indigenous Tasmanians it holds.
The museum had agreed to return the remains to Tasmania, but not until tests were carried out on the bones.
But Tasmanian aborigines viewed the tests as a desecration of their beliefs and took their case to the High Court.
Under the settlement, four DNA samples from the 19th Century specimens will be preserved in Tasman
Source: CBC News
April 30, 2007
The dangerous herbicide Agent Orange is still contaminating soil and fish in Vietnam at an alarming rate, a Canadian environmental firm has found.
Vancouver-based Hatfield Consultants studied the contamination levels in the area of Da Nang, a large coastal city in central Vietnam, and found contamination to be 300 to 400 times higher than what is considered acceptable.
"We were very shocked," Thomas Boivin of Hatfield Consultants told CBC News on [April 30]. &
Source: New York Times
May 11, 2007
PARIS -- Repentance for the sins of the past has come easy to President Jacques Chirac. He will be remembered as the first French leader to recognize the country’s crimes against Jews in World War II and to commemorate formally its complicity in African slavery.
President-elect Nicolas Sarkozy, by contrast, does not believe in saying he is sorry.“I’m going to make the French proud of France again,” Mr. Sarkozy said in his speech after he was elected president on
Source: New York Times
May 10, 2007
MOSCOW -- President Vladimir V. Putin seemed to obliquely compare the foreign policy of the United States to the Third Reich in a speech on Wednesday commemorating the 62nd anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany.
The comments were the latest in a series of sharply worded Russian criticisms of the foreign policy of the United States — on Iraq, missile defense, NATO expansion and, more broadly, United States unilateralism in foreign affairs.“We do not have the
Source: Houston Chronicle
May 9, 2007
HAMILTON, Tex. -- At least two men, including one buried in this Central Texas town, claimed during their lives to be the real William H. Bonney, aka Billy the Kid.
Instead of being shot to death by Sheriff Pat Garrett in Fort Sumner, N.M., on July 14, 1881, as mainstream historians say, these would-be Kids claimed to have escaped to live to old age in Texas, Arizona, or other parts of the Wild West.
A former New Mexico lawman investigating this colorful piece of histor
Source: AP
May 8, 2007
SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- A museum that tells the story of the 1914 assassination that sparked World War I reopened Tuesday after renovations to repair damage to the building from Bosnia's 1992-95 war.
The Museum of Sarajevo 1878-1918 catalogues the period of Austro-Hungarian rule and the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, widely regarded as the act that triggered World War I.
The downtown Sarajevo museum, located at the site of the assassination,
Source: Salisbury (Md.) Daily Times
May 8, 2007
GEORGETOWN, Del. -- The first historical monument to honor Delawareans who fought for the Confederacy will be unveiled Saturday in Georgetown.
The unveiling will be at noon on the grounds of the Nutter B. Marvel Museum on South Bedford Street, with ceremonies at the monument at 1 p.m.The ceremonies will include speeches, a 21-gun salute, cannon salutes, and re-enactors will walk the grounds afterward.
"We've invited quite a few people. We're e
Source: Reuters
May 10, 2007
A U.S.-based group that fights anti-Semitism urged Pope Benedict on Thursday to suspend the sainthood process for Pope Pius XII, whom critics accuse of turning a blind eye to the death of Jews during World War Two.
The Anti-Defamation League said the process should stop until secret World War Two Vatican archives are declassified and fully examined "so that the full record of the Pope's actions during the Holocaust may finally be known."
The Vatican's saint-ma
Source: Press Release -- UCLA
May 9, 2007
A bold new experiment in community-based computing is currently underway in downtown Los Angeles. The project, known
as Remapping LA, is being spearheaded by a group of digital innovators from UCLA's Center for Research in Engineering, Media and Performance (REMAP), a collaboration between the UCLA
School of Theater, Film and Television and the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science.
"The purpose of Remapping LA is to understand what
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
May 11, 2007
The Golden Gate Bridge district issued a formal report on 70 years of stewardship of the famous bridge Thursday -- and decided to right an old wrong by giving major credit for the design of the bridge to an engineer it had ignored.
The engineer was Charles Ellis, a University of Illinois professor of engineering. He did much of the technical and theoretical work that built the bridge but until Thursday got none of the credit.
The bridge district always considered chief
Source: AP
May 11, 2007
WASHINGTON -- The commander of the USS Constitution was relieved of duty because of a ''loss of trust and confidence in his ability to command,'' a Navy spokesman said Thursday.
The Navy declined to provide specifics about why Commander Thomas C. Graves was removed [two months early] as senior officer of the historic warship, known as ''Old Ironsides.''...
Graves was the 69th commander of the oldest commissioned ship afloat in the world...
The Constitution
Source: AP
May 10, 2007
CAIRO -- Egypt's antiquities chief says if persuasion doesn't work, he will fight for an ancient bust of Nefertiti that a Berlin museum maintains is too fragile to ever travel.
Zahi Hawass rattled world museums last week with requests to hand over ancient Egyptian masterpieces, including the Rosetta Stone -- some as loans, others permanently...But the bombastic archaeologist -- known for wearing an Indiana Jones-style hat -- has met resistance from museums reluc
Source: Telegraph
May 11, 2007
NEW DELHI -- Concerns are mounting in India for the well-being of [the descendant of] a sacred tree under which Lord Buddha first attained enlightenment more than 2,500 years ago.
The "Bodhi tree" in Bihar state, eastern India, has been afflicted with a mystery ailment, causing it to shed its leaves.The giant peepal, or ficus religiosa, situated outside the Mahabodhi shrine is sacred to Buddhists who make pilgrimages from all around the world to worshi
Source: Times (of London)
May 10, 2007
ROME -- An ''Unknown Englishman'' murdered outside Rome by fleeing Nazis was a secret agent who had been landed by submarine to organise anti-Fascist resistance on Sardinia, a historian claimed yesterday.
The officer, whose anonymous grave lay in a wood dedicated to victims of a 1943 massacre, was named last month by Second World War veterans as ''Captain John Armstrong''. But they cautioned that this could have been an alias and appealed for those who might know the truth to come f
Source: AP
May 10, 2007
MARION, Ala. -- A former state trooper surrendered Thursday on a murder charge in the 1965 shooting death of a black man during a civil rights protest, a killing that led to the ''Bloody Sunday'' march and the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
Former trooper James Bonard Fowler, who contends he fired in self-defense in a struggle over a gun, was charged with first-degree and second-degree murder in the fatal shooting of 26-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson.
Source: BBC News
May 10, 2007
BARRACKPORE, Kolkata, India -- As India celebrates the 150th anniversary of the first uprising against the British, the town where the first shot was fired by sepoy (soldier) Mangal Pandey is witnessing the gradual obliteration of its historical heritage.
Mangal Pandey fired the famous shot at a British officer on 29 March 1857 at the Barrackpore parade ground -- now on the outskirts of Calcutta [Kolkata].
It was an action that stirred up a wave of rebellion in north In
Source: AP
May 9, 2007
Marc Edgerly and his father, Carl, both joined the Army as young men, served during wartime and eventually decided that college, not a full-time military career, was what they wanted. But the cost they shouldered for that education is dramatically different.
The GI Bill covered all of Carl Edgerly's college expenses in the mid-1970s. His son, however, expects that even with the maximum $1,075 in monthly GI Bill benefits, he will be saddled with $50,000 in student loans when he graduates from
Source: AFP
May 9, 2007
Chinese archaeologists have discovered a section of the Great Wall straddling the Mongolian border that is the northernmost remnant of the landmark yet found, state media reported Wednesday.
The remnants of the wall, found in the Bayannur district of China's Inner Mongolia region, measures 2.3 metres (7.5 feet) wide and about 1.15 metres high, the Beijing News reported.
Source: Honolulu Advertiser
May 10, 2007
HILO, Hawaii —- A portion of a North Kona archaeological site apparently has been bulldozed, possibly destroying a suspected heiau, agricultural terraces and other features on a site where ancient Hawaiians were living about 1,000 years ago, according to two archaeologists familiar with the incident.Thomas Dye, president of the Society for Hawaiian Archaeology, said the damage to the five-acre Pua'a 2 Agricultural Fields Archaeological District site is a particular concern s
Source: AP
May 9, 2007
State and federal officials are working to document...the submerged remains of the Gold Rush era steamship Clara Nevada. The vessel was destroyed in an explosion 20 miles south of Haines [in the sea inlet in the Alaska Panhandle] in 1898.Before being purchased by speculators and renamed, the steamer had spent more than 20 years charting southeast coastal waters as the U.S. Coast Survey vessel Hassler. The cause of the explosion that sank the vessel is a mystery...
