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 3, 2007
ROME -- One of the world's oldest libraries, at the Vatican, is to close for three years for rebuilding, in an unexpected blow to scholars around the world...
The reason is that some buildings constructed only a quarter of a century ago are now considered unsuitable for the safe storage of ancient books...
During the closure, scholars will still be able to obtain digital copies of ancient manuscripts in the Vatican library that they can study at home.
But t
Source: Telegraph
May 3, 2007
SYDNEY -- One of Britain's most respected Second World War commanders has been accused of sexually assaulting destitute children sent to Australia as part of an imperial settlement scheme.
Field Marshal Viscount Slim [William Slim, 1891-1970], who routed the Japanese in the jungles of Burma, was appointed governor general of Australia [1953-60] after the war.
The war hero...allegedly groped underprivileged British children who had been sent to Australia as part of a now discredited
Source: National Geographic News
May 1, 2007
[On Monday] hundreds of Buddhist monks gathered in Changzhou, China, to celebrate the opening of what local officials say is the world's tallest pagoda. The towering structure [costing about $13m] stands nearly 505 feet (154 meters) tall—reaching 50 feet (15 meters) higher than Egypt's Great Pyramid of Giza.
The wooden tower was recently added to the ancient Tianning Temple, a Buddhist complex dating back to China's Tang Dynasty, which lasted from A.D. 618 to 907. The temple has bee
Source: Press Release -- Historian Stephanie Koontz
May 1, 2007
Is this a "post-feminist" era? Are women opting out of employment to recreate male-breadwinner families? Is the younger generation rejecting the values of the Baby Boomers and returning to more traditional mores? No, no, and no, says a new report to be presented May 4 to the Tenth Anniversary Conference of the Council on Contemporary Families, which will evaluate new trends and research on families over the past decade.
Consider this: 30-40 years ago the rate of men's par
Source: BBC News
May 2, 2007
Scientists believe they have for the first time identified an ancient graveyard for gladiators.
Analysis of their bones and injuries has given new insight into how they lived, fought and died.
The remains were found at Ephesus in Turkey, a major city of the Roman world, BBC Timewatch reports.
Source: Discovery News
May 2, 2007
The woman behind Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa painting was born in an old Florentine house that was no beauty, according to newly discovered archival documents.
Originally used as a workshop by wool artisans, the house stood a few hundred feet from the Medieval bridge Ponte Vecchio, in a dark alley known as Via Sguazza.
According to historian Giuseppe Pallanti, it was right in Via Sguazza, where the woman Leonardo began painting in 1503 was born, on June 15, 1479.
Source: AP
May 1, 2007
JOHANNESBURG -- An eminent South African historian believes he has stumbled on the identity of Jack the Ripper.
Charles van Onselen said at first he wasn't sure he wanted to publicize the conclusions he drew when he noticed parallels in the century-old, unsolved Ripper case and the background of Joseph Silver, who terrorized women as "King of the Pimps" in Johannesburg...
The publicity around van Onselen's The Fox and The Flies: The World of Joseph Silver,
Source: Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch
May 1, 2007
During a remote-sensing survey of the Fort Ancient Earthworks in 2005, Jarrod Burks of Ohio Valley Archaeological Consultants discovered a circular pattern in the soil that stretched nearly 200 feet in diameter.
Fort Ancient is a massive earthwork in Warren County that was built more than 2,000 years ago by the Hopewell culture.
Robert Riordan, an anthropology professor at Wright State University, directed excavations there in 2006 and last month completed a report on h
Source: Reuters
May 2, 2007
TIWANAKU, Bolivia -- Archeologists have uncovered the 1,300-year-old skeleton of a ruler or priest of the ancient Tiwanaku civilization together with precious jewels inside a much-looted pyramid in western Bolivia.
The bones are "in very good condition" and belong to either "a ruler or a priest," Roger Angel Cossio, the Bolivian archeologist who made the discovery, told Reuters on Wednesday.
He said the tomb -- containing a diadem and fist-sized carv
Source: AFP
May 2, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Military authorities who run Washington's Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital have spurned an offer from renowned folk singer Joan Baez to perform for convalescing US troops, she said Wednesday.
John Mellencamp at a concert for ailing soldiers, but US officials declined to sign off on her participation, she wrote in a letter published Wednesday in the Washington Post.
"Four days before the concert, I was not 'approved' by the Army to take part," sh
Source: Reuters
May 2, 2007
DUBLIN -- Documents unearthed by an Irish vicar show ancestors of Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama may have arrived in the United States from a tiny village in central Ireland as early as the 1790s.
"They're old parish records going back to 1799," Canon Stephen Neill, rector for the parish of Moneygall, told Reuters...
Genealogy Web site www.ancestry.co.uk asked Neill, whose father is Anglican archbishop
Source: Indiana University press release
May 2, 2007
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Bill O'Reilly may proclaim at the beginning of his program that viewers are entering the "No Spin Zone," but a new study by Indiana University media researchers found that the Fox News personality consistently paints certain people and groups as villains and others as victims to present the world, as he sees it, through political rhetoric.
The IU researchers found that O'Reilly called a person or a group a derogatory name once every 6.8 seconds, on ave
Source: New York Times
May 1, 2007
It was the fall of 1996, and Boris N. Yeltsin was running for re-election as Russia’s first president in the post-Soviet era. But he faced a crisis far more threatening than any opponent: he was desperately ill.
Mr. Yeltsin had had a heart attack. He was experiencing chest pain from angina. He needed a coronary bypass operation. But his Russian doctors said he could not survive such surgery.
For independent advice, Mr. Yeltsin reached out to an American doctor
Source: AP
May 2, 2007
SEOUL -- The South Korean government announced Wednesday its first-ever plan to seize assets gained by alleged collaborators during Japanese colonial rule.
South Korea will confiscate $3.9 million worth of land from the descendants of nine alleged collaborators who worked for Japan during its 1910-45 colonial occupation of the Korean peninsula, a presidential committee said in a statement...
Proceeds from the sale of the seized assets will be used to provide assistance to independenc
Source: Los Angeles Times
May 1, 2007
HAMMER, Germany -- The shallow hole widens and a man comes together like a puzzle: hips, fingers, ribs, vertebrae, teeth and crushed skull. A boot surfaces along with a rusted bullet clip. But no dog tags, no wedding ring, nothing to give him a name, so the bones go into a box where they are marked with a number written in white chalk: 1,968...
[Erwin] Kowalke [is] a volunteer who has excavated the remains of 20,000 people, most of them German and Russian soldiers killed in fighting
Source: DPA (German Press Agency)
April 30, 2007
COPENHAGEN -- Danish member of parliament Morten Messerschmidt, 26, of the right-wing Danish Peoples Party (DVP) party has resigned after he was caught singing Nazi songs and engaging in Nazi salutes, the Danish BT newspaper reported Monday.
According to BT, Messerschimdt, who has been previously convicted for racist offences, resigned in order to spare his party any further aggravation...
BT reported the previous week that at a celebration to mark the opening of Copenh
Source: Threat Level blog (Wired)
April 30, 2007
Did the NSA lose a treasure trove of top-secret cryptographic equipment and material to the North at the end of the Vietnam war? Investigative journalist and NSA expert James Bamford has said so. But in 2002, official NSA historians refuted that in an internal essay. Of course, this being NSA, the rebuttal was classified.
Now that essay, SIGINT and the Fall of Saigon, April 1975, has been (mostly) declassified in a Mandatory Declassification Review initiated by attorney and journali
Source: Herald-Sun (Melbourne, Australia)
May 1, 2007
Stone Age humans may have been as randy as some of their modern-day counterparts.
Research shows humans tens of thousands of years ago may have been having sex for fun as well as for procreation...
Bondage, group sex, transvestism and the use of sex toys were common in primitive societies as a way of building up social bonds, says archeologist Timothy Taylor of Bradford University.
A 30,000-year-old statue of a naked woman -- the Venus of Willendorf -- and
Source: BBC News
May 1, 2007
A 19th century document described as Scotland's Domesday Book has been made available online.
The Napier Report was written following a study into the lives of crofters in the Highlands and Islands in the 1880s...
It was a response to demonstrations against high rents, lack of security of tenure on land that had been in families for generations and the forced evictions of crofters.
The report's four volumes and appendices have gone live on
Source: Times (of London)
May 2, 2007
A painting of a naked, reclining woman, long described as being Nell Gwyn, the mistress of Charles II, is now thought to depict the King’s earlier mistress, Barbara Villiers, famed as a great beauty at court.
Considered to be a masterpiece by Peter Lely [1618-1680], official artist to Charles II, the painting is believed to have been concealed behind a secret sliding panel for the monarch’s private enjoyment in the royal bedchamber at the Palace of Whitehall...
Research
