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
May 9, 2007
A thief has been sneaking into country churches and stealing ancient bibles from under the noses of worshippers, police said.
Eight antique bibles have been stolen from churches in Hampshire, including a rare example from the 18th Century.
The bible went missing from St Mary The Virgin Church in Church Lane, Twyford, near Winchester, at the end of April.
The original had been displayed in a glass case, but the thief replaced it with a fake.
Source: Chicago Sun-Times
May 6, 2007
More than 200 years after his death, Revolutionary War hero Casimir Pulaski is on the verge of becoming an American citizen.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) announced Saturday that the Senate unanimously passed a resolution he sponsored granting the Polish-born Pulaski posthumous, honorary citizenship. Durbin introduced similar legislation in August 2005, but it never came up for a vote.
"We're all very aware of the contribution he made during our nation's revolution," Du
Source: AP
May 10, 2007
Japan's Supreme Court rejected compensation claims by Chinese victims of atrocities committed by Japan in the 1930s and 40s, which included the use of biological weapons and a massacre in the city of Nanjing, defense lawyers said Thursday.In two separate decisions made Wednesday, the top court upheld rulings by lower courts since 1999 that the current Japanese government was not liable for compensation demands from foreign citizens for wartime actions, according to defense l
Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH)
May 10, 2007
On May 9, First Lady Laura Bush presented the 2007 Preserve America Presidential Awards in a ceremony at the White House. The awards are the highest national honor recognizing historic preservation projects.
Among the winners for the Private Preservation category was National Coalition for History member The History Channel for its “Save Our History” grant program. The History Channel was recognized for its efforts both nationwide and for a special initiative with New York City.
Source: Newsweek
May 14, 2007
Susan Eisenhower is an accomplished professional, the president of an international consulting firm. She also happens to be Ike's granddaughter—and in that role, she's the humble torchbearer for moderate "Eisenhower Republicans." Increasingly, however, she says that the partisanship and free spending of the Bush presidency—and the takeover of the party by single-issue voters, especially pro-lifers—is driving these pragmatic, fiscally conservative voters out of the GOP. Eisenhower says
Source: BBC News
May 10, 2007
Campaigners have hailed a decision to allow traders to continue using pounds and ounces as a "monumental victory".
The move to shelve EU plans to enforce metrication by 2009 comes after a long campaign by pro-imperial groups, including the Metric Martyrs.The European industry commissioner has ruled that imperial weights and measures can be displayed indefinitely alongside metric measurements.
Pro-metric campaigners said keeping the dual la
Source: BBC News
May 10, 2007
Two men have been convicted of breaking the Official Secrets Act by leaking a confidential memo between President Bush and Tony Blair. The content of the memo has never officially been made public...[Ed. note: The BBC is prevented from repeating what was leaked, but the New York Times is not restricted, and says today,"In November 2005, The Daily Mirror...reported that the memorandum quoted a threat in April 2004 by President Bush —- denied in Washington and London —- to bomb the offices
Source: Times (of London)
May 10, 2007
TOKYO -- For half a millennium, the tea ceremony has been a symbol of Japan, a combination of ritual, meditation and aesthetics expressing the refinement of one of the world’s most ancient cultures. But now the ''Way of Tea'' is undergoing a revolution intended to ease one of its less appealing side-effects -– excruciating leg pain.The country’s most famous tea master has risked controversy by unveiling a new style of tea ceremony. It is aimed at young Japanese, old people a
Source: New York Times
May 10, 2007
NEW ORLEANS -— A grand jury in Alabama handed up an indictment on Wednesday in an obscure killing that helped inspire the historic Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965. The case is the latest in a series of belated prosecutions of crimes from the civil rights era.In February 1965, a black farmer, Jimmie Lee Jackson, 26, was shot by Alabama state troopers who were suppressing a voting rights demonstration in Marion in the Black Belt. Historians have said the killing indirectly h
Source: Times (of London)
May 10, 2007
The poet Siegfried Sassoon was on convalescent leave from the Western Front when, out walking one day, he was overwhelmed by a ''paroxysm of frustration'' and hurled his Military Cross into the Mersey. It was a passionate gesture that expressed all the rage and pain welling up inside one of the nation’s greatest war poets after his experiences in the trenches.
Or so it was widely thought, until the long-lost gallantry award turned up in a chest in his son’s attic in the Isle of Mull
Source: AP
May 9, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Michael Dell never imagined his work would end up in a museum when he was sitting in his college dorm room in 1984, dreaming of building and selling his own personal computers.
Now, one of his original computers is going to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.The 42-year-old chairman and chief executive of Texas-based Dell Inc. donated a collection of materials Wednesday to the Smithsonian, including his employee badge
Source: International Herald Tribune
May 9, 2007
NEW YORK -- Impressionist and Modern art prices reached dizzying new heights on Tuesday night as Sotheby's sold 51 paintings, drawings and sculptures for $278.5 million. This total was surpassed only once in the past, in May 1990, when a sale of Impressionist and Modern art also held here at Sotheby's realized $286.2 million.The most astonishing of the six world auction records set on Tuesday is the $25.52 million that was paid for Cézanne's watercolor "Nature Morte au
Source: International Herald Tribune
May 9, 2007
BARCELONA -- It has survived the death of its architect, a dearth of funding and the destruction of its prototypes during the Spanish civil war. Now the Cathedral of the Sagrada Familia, Antoni Gaudí's surreal, unfinished opus, faces a new threat: plans to bore a high-speed train tunnel within meters of its foundations.
"What would possess someone to build a tunnel like this next to the heaviest building in Barcelona, the most visited monument in Spain?" said Jordi Bonet,
Source: Fredericksburg (Va.) Free Lance-Star
May 9, 2007
FREDERICKSBURG, Va. -- For the past 26 years, a mysterious piece of history has tugged at Kay McFadden's curiosity.
The 40-pound, 172-year-old edition of "The Devotional Family Bible" entered the McFadden house in the Todds Tavern area of Spotsylvania County by chance [at a yard sale]...
And so began a journey that would lead Kay through history, from the inauguration of America's first president to the world's first trans-Atlantic flight and beyond...
Source: Telegraph
May 10, 2007
Campaigners last night condemned the Government's approval of a £77 million road through a protected part of Hardy Country in Dorset.
Ruth Kelly, the Communities Secretary, told Dorset county council she did not regard its road proposal as being in conflict with the rules on the protection of nationally significant landscapes or wildlife.
The 3.5-mile relief road between Dorchester and Weymouth will speed up traffic to the marina in Portland that will be used for the 20
Source: Independent
May 10, 2007
BERLIN -- The great-great grandson of Otto von Bismarck, Germany's legendary "Iron Chancellor", is facing calls for his resignation as a conservative MP amid claims that he has become the country's "laziest politician".
Count Carl-Eduard von Bismarck, a 46-year-old MP in Chancellor Angela Merkel's ruling conservative party and former New York banker turned manager of the Bismarck family's country estate outside Hamburg, was elected to the German parliament in 200
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
May 9, 2007
Sylvia Mendez was honored Tuesday at the San Francisco federal courthouse where her elementary school -- one reserved for "Mexicans" -- was outlawed 60 years ago in a decision that led California to desegregate all its schools and public facilities.Mendez's parents and four other Latino families in Orange County had sued four school districts, in Mendez vs. Westminster, and the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the decades-old federal doctrine of "
Source: AP
May 9, 2007
ATHENS -- Archaeologists in Greece have discovered a rare 2,700-year-old piece of fabric inside a copper urn from a burial they speculated imitated the elaborate cremation of soldiers described in Homer's "Iliad."
The yellowed, brittle material was found in the urn during excavation in the southern town of Argos, a Culture Ministry announcement said Wednesday...
The cylindrical urn also contained dried pomegranates —- offerings linked with the ancient gods of
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
May 9, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO -- Nobel prize-winning author Elie Wiesel, speaking in San Francisco amid tight security today for the first time since he was assaulted by a Holocaust denier, declared that such people are "not mentally ill but morally ill.''
The 78-year-old professor and Holocaust survivor, who is in town to receive a lifetime achievement award from the Koret Foundation, said he remained "surprised and shocked that there are so many people who deny the Holocaust.''
Source: AP
May 9, 2007
THE HAGUE, Netherlands -- U.N. appeals judges on Wednesday overturned a conviction for complicity in genocide against a Bosnian Serb army colonel whose troops were involved in the 1995 slaughter of more than 8,000 Muslim men in Srebrenica.
Col. Vidoje Blagojevic, 56, was the wartime commander of the Bratunac brigade that took part in the worst post-World War II massacre in Europe by helping separate Muslim men from women and herding them into buses before the men were driven away an
