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: Daijiworld (Mangalore, Karnataka, India)
May 7, 2007
PANAJI, Goa, India -- Goan heritage activists are fighting a battle to save [the 16th-century site of] Asia's first gun powder factory at Ribander, a sleepy town, dotting capital city of Panaji in this erstwhile Portuguese colony.
"A huge commercial complex is taking shape on the site where this gun powder factory existed. What's paining is that the site is neglected by state archives and archeology department and nothing is being done to stop it," historian Prajal Sakhard
Source: The Ticker (Baruch College, CUNY)
May 7, 2007
Paul Kagame, a former guerrilla leader who played a crucial role in stopping the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, substituted for Professor Murray Rubenstein in his "In Search of History" class on Wednesday. A surprise visit of Rwandan President was organized by mtvU, MTV's 24-hour college network, which taped Kagame's teaching for one of its Emmy-nominated "Stand-In" series, due on air at noon on May 16. The Rwandan leader spoke about his homeland, its people, economy and the war.
Source: International Herald Tribune
May 4, 2007
LONDON -- There were the colonial invasions, the massacres, the elimination of entire cultures, and in between rare moments of strange encounters. "Between Worlds: Voyagers to Britain 1700-1850," on view at the National Portrait Gallery until June 17, is an unusual exhibition that deals less with art than with the mutual perceptions and misperceptions of humans who were, literally, worlds apart.
It does so through the personal stories of characters that read like short nov
Source: AFP
May 7, 2007
DAVIT GAREJI, Georgia -- Perched high on a cliff side in the remote borderlands of eastern Georgia, the ancient Davit Gareji monastery hardly seems the kind of place that could be at the centre of a modern-day diplomatic dispute.Monks settled on this arid land in the early 600s, less than 200 years after Georgia became one of the first countries to adopt Christianity. They carved their homes into the stone and over the centuries built churches and towers that loom overhead o
Source: Times (of London)
May 7, 2007
She was known as ''the Tigress'', a force of nature whose passionate spirit changed opera forever but left her broken-hearted at the end of a short, tragic and very public life.
Now, 30 years after Maria Callas died alone in Paris at the age of 53, two new discoveries have shed fresh light on the greatest diva of all time.
One is a set of previously unseen photographs from a [1954] scrapbook...
Nineteen years later, with her voice diminished and her confide
Source: People's Daily Online (Beijing)
May 7, 2007
The salvage of a 800-year-old wooden ship off south China coast may help ravel three prominent puzzles surrounding the sunken boat of Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279), Chinese experts say.
The three puzzles include whether the submerging of the Southern Song Dynasty ship was caused by overloading, where the ill-fated ship departed from, and what was inside the subsistence cabin.
The salvage operation, scheduled to start on Tuesday, is claimed to be first of its kind in
Source: New Yorker
May 14, 2007
In October, 2005, a truck pulled up outside the National Archeological Museum in Athens, and workers began unloading an eight-ton X-ray machine that its designer, X-Tek Systems of Great Britain, had dubbed the Bladerunner. Standing just inside the National Museum’s basement was Tony Freeth, a sixty-year-old British mathematician and filmmaker, watching as workers in white T-shirts wrestled the Range Rover-size machine through the door and up the ramp into the museum. Freeth was a member of the A
Source: BBC News
May 7, 2007
BERLIN -- She was rumoured to be the world's most beautiful woman in her time.
Nefertiti, Queen of Egypt, was the co-ruler of her country in the 14th Century BC. Today, the bust of Nefertiti (whose name literally means "a beautiful woman has arrived") has pride of place in the Antiquities collection in Berlin's Altes Museum...
But, once again, the bust of Nefertiti is the subject of a heated debate, as it appears the Egyptians want it back [at least on loan]..
Source: BBC
May 7, 2007
Thousands of Indians have started a march to commemorate the 150th anniversary of a revolt against British colonial rulers.The uprising - known as the first Indian War of Independence - was eventually crushed by the British.
Around 10,000 people retraced the march 150 years ago by dozens of mutinous Indian soldiers from Meerut in a bid to capture Delhi.
Monday's marchers dressed like Indian soldiers and British officers and staged mock fights with
Source: RIA Novosti (Moscow)
May 7, 2007
TALLINN, Estonia -- A monument to Gypsies murdered in a Nazi death camp near Tallinn during WWII has been unveiled in Estonia, local TV said.
Estonian TV said Sunday it took the country's Gypsy community six years to find a site and collect money for the monument to about 2,000 Gypsies, who were executed in Kalevi-Lijva together with 4,000 of German, Czechoslovak and Polish Jews during WWII.
Source: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
May 7, 2007
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has accused the European Union and NATO of "conniving" with nations that disrespect the memory of Soviet soldiers to rewrite history.
"We cannot but feel indignation at the attempts to blaspheme and desecrate this memory [of Soviet soldiers killed in World War II] and to rewrite history," Lavrov said. "Unfortunately such attempts to scoff at history are becoming an element and an instrument of the foreign policies of ce
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
May 6, 2007
In 1881, an 11-year-old boy in China named Yung Wah Gok begged for a chance to go to the United States like the thousands of other Chinese workers who had already left to seek their fortune on the railroad, in laundries and working other jobs.
A year later, immigration laws swung the door shut by barring Chinese laborers from entering the United States or naturalizing as citizens if they already were here. If Wah Gok had not persuaded his uncle to take him, he might never have emigr
Source: AP
May 7, 2007
BERLIN -- Germany's president has refused a clemency request from a former left-wing terrorist serving life in prison for taking part in killings carried out by the notorious Red Army Faction three decades ago, his office said Monday.
The plea by Christian Klar, who has been jailed for 24 years and is not eligible for parole until 2009, has made Germans relive harrowing days in 1977 when a small band of radicals that emerged from the student anti-war movement of the 1960s turned to
Source: New York Times
May 6, 2007
In March, for the first time in the nation’s history, a federal appeals court struck down a gun control law on Second Amendment grounds. Only a few decades ago, the decision would have been unimaginable.
There used to be an almost complete scholarly and judicial consensus that the Second Amendment protects only a collective right of the states to maintain militias. That consensus no longer exists — thanks largely to the work over the last 20 years of several leading liberal law prof
Source: Los Angeles Times
May 6, 2007
Confucius famously considered a good woman to be an illiterate woman. The ancient sage might want to eat his words: More than 2-1/2 millenniums after his death, he's back in vogue, thanks in no small part to a Chinese woman with a PhD...
Since the publication of her enormously popular book on the teachings of Confucius late last year, Yu [Dan] has been racing from college lectures to book signings, TV appearances and speaking engagements. The public can't seem to get enough of this
Source: AP
May 6, 2007
POZNAN, Poland -- On a sunny April morning in 1944, 6-year-old Alodia Witaszek was combed and scrubbed, sitting in the children's home that had primed her for membership in Hitler's master race....
Only years later would she discover the full truth: that she was among some 250 children seized from their families as part of a Nazi attempt to improve the Aryan gene pool in pursuit of a mad dream of racial purity.Her adoptive mother, Luise Dahl, would later say she
Source: Telegraph
May 5, 2007
BERLIN -- His moustache is the most instantly recognizable -- and sinister -- in history.
Yet, according to new research into Adolf Hitler's early life, the distinctive, toothbrush shape that adorned his scowling face was not his first preference.
A previously unpublished essay by a writer who served alongside Hitler in the First World War trenches reveals that the future Führer was only obeying orders when he shaped his moustache into its tightly-clipped style. He was
Source: AP
May 7, 2007
WASHINGTON -- The surprise explanation behind the U.S. government's sensational but false warnings about mysterious Canadian spy coins is the harmless "poppy quarter," the world's first colorized coin, The Associated Press has learned.
The odd-looking coins with a bright red flower were so unfamiliar to suspicious U.S. Army contractors traveling in Canada they filed confidential espionage accounts about them. The worried contractors described the coins as "anomalous&q
Source: Times (of London)
May 7, 2007
Arthur Betts was a lorry driver for Chiltern District Council and a popular figure in the pubs of Chalfont St Peter. Occasionally he would tell his grandson a farfetched story of how he had survived a tragedy that killed more than a thousand British prisoners of war.
He described how he broke out of the hold of a sinking ship and swam 5 miles (8km) through a hail of Japanese bullets and shark-filled waters to scale, exhausted, the cliffs of a small Chinese island where he was helped
Source: Times (of London)
May 7, 2007
MI6 has been ordered by a judge to appear at a special public hearing over the case of one of its wartime superspies, whose file is buried in the archives of the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service.
In an unprecedented development, MI6 will have to explain its policy on keeping all its files locked away from the public gaze. Unlike MI5, which has been releasing large batches of its wartime records to the National Archives in Kew, MI6 has kept all its files secret.
