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: AP
April 27, 2007
WARSAW -- Ukraine's President Viktor Yushchenko and his Polish counterpart Lech Kaczynski signed a cooperation pact Friday, aiming to improve ties between the two neighbors with a troubled post-World War II history.
Yushchenko was in Warsaw briefly to mark the 60th anniversary of the expulsion of 140,000 Ukrainians, who were ruthlessly removed from their homes in southeastern Poland in 1947 in an attempt by the communist authorities to consolidate control of the region.
Source: Times (of London)
April 29, 2007
Even the scribes of the Chinese state media were moved to a chorus of wistful regret last week at the news that the home of Beijing Opera is to be razed as the city’s redevelopment for the 2008 Olympics reaches a climax.
The demolition of the Guanghe theatre, where opera has been performed since the last years of the Ming emperors four centuries ago, is the latest assault on the ancient fabric of the city.
The theatre stands in the Qian-men district, once a fabulous war
Source: AP
April 20, 2007
NEW YORK -- It started with a clogged dust mask that fell onto the desk of Jan Ramirez on the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001. A friend had used the paper mask to breathe while fleeing downtown Manhattan as the air was filled with grit and smoke from the World Trade Center towers.
"That dust mask is going to be an important artifact some day," Ramirez recalled the friend telling her.
Today, the mask has become a museum piece, one small part of the largest records
Source: Mehr News Agency (Tehran)
April 28, 2007
TEHRAN -- The Louvre Museum has corrected the distorted name of the Persian Gulf on its maps and signs at the sections of Islamic art and Near Eastern antiquities.
[The curator of the National Museum of Iran, Mohammadreza Kargar, said] “I visited the Louvre’s curator and saw the relevant sections, and asked him to take into account Iranians’ sensitivity towards the distortion of the Persian Gulf’s name, and requested that he correct the mistakes. The museum’s officials recently wro
Source: CNN
April 27, 2007
ATLANTA -- When the artists of Florence, Italy, swung open the doors of the Baptistery of the Duomo (cathedral) now known as the "Gates of Paradise" in 1452, a new world was waiting on the other side.
Twenty feet tall and weighing three tons, this single work is considered the gateway to the Italian Renaissance, an upheaval so fundamental to how we see our world and think of ourselves that centuries later no Western culture is left untouched by it...
Legend ha
Source: Long Beach Press Telegram
April 25, 2007
LONG BEACH, Calif. -- A Santa Monica-based development team has bid $41 million to purchase the lease to the Queen Mary and its surrounding property, signalling a strong start to what could become a bidding war for the oceanfront acreage as early as this summer...
QSDI declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March 2005 and has been searching for a developer to take over the lease ever since...
The company has released no detailed plans for the Queen Mary's 40-acre site...[but
Source: Allentown (Pa.) Morning Call
April 17, 2007
BETHLEHEM, Pa. -- Sands BethWorks officials won a gambling license in part because they pledged to preserve Bethlehem Steel's legacy alongside their $600 million casino complex in south Bethlehem.
But before the first brick is laid, hulking remnants of that legacy must come crashing down.
On April 26, demolition will begin on 10 Steel buildings to clear the way for 5,000 slot machines and a 10-story hotel and conference center -- 11 years and several failed plans after
Source: Al-Ahram (Cairo)
April 26, 2007
AL-ARISH, Egypt -- North Sinai's National Day celebration had a different flavour this year. Apart from the inauguration of new urban development projects that usually mark the event, the city's long-awaited [$8.9m] National Museum is at last finished.
[Plans for] the two-storey Al-Arish National Museum (ANM)...were drawn up in 1994 -- shortly after the return of Sinai's archaeological collection taken by Israel during their occupation...
The 2,500-square-metre museum t
Source: Foreign Policy magazine 'Passport' blog
April 28, 2007
Cambodia is finally taking a baby step to address its ugly history. A new book by Khamboly Dy, an expert on Cambodia's genocide, came out on Wednesday. Dy's A History of Democratic Kampuchea is significant because it's the first history book written by a Cambodian on the period from 1975 to 1979, when the Khmer Rouge terrorized the population and caused the deaths of some 1.7 million people. However, it was only approved for use a"reference text" in schools, so Cambodia's government—which
Source: AP
April 28, 2007
LISBON, Portugal -- It was a chilling discovery: a mass grave of human bones -- skulls smashed and scorched by fire, dog bites on a child's thigh bone, a forehead with an apparent bullet hole.
Three years after the find by workers digging up the cloisters of a 17th-century Franciscan convent, forensic experts and historians say they have solved the mystery.
They say the estimated 3,000 dead in the grave were victims of the earthquake that devastated Lisbon in 1755, and
Source: AP
April 28, 2007
ATLANTA -- After two decades of waiting, Emory University is unsealing its collection of hundreds of letters between author Flannery O’Connor and one of her longtime friends.
The collection was given to Emory by Elizabeth “Betty” Hester...in 1987 on condition that they remain sealed for 20 years.
Source: BBC News
April 28, 2007
More than 300 people were detained and at least 10 hurt after a second night of riots in Estonia's capital Tallinn.
Police fired tear gas and rubber bullets after new clashes erupted over the removal of a Soviet war memorial.
Police were confronted by mainly ethnic Russian demonstrators, some of whom threw petrol bombs and were involved in looting.
Estonia says the memorial symbolised Soviet occupation. Supporters say it celebrated heroes who fought the Naz
Source: AP
April 28, 2007
BOSTON -— One wall at English High School here holds old black-and-white photographs of young white men in high starched collars and V-neck varsity sweaters. Another wall is covered with a mural spray painted in graffiti like an inner-city overpass.
English High was founded in 1821 as the United States’ first public high school, and its graduates include J. P. Morgan and Maj. Gen. Matthew Ridgway from the Korean War. Today, its student body, dressed mostly in baggy jeans and do-rags
Source: AP
April 27, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO -- The CIA warned the Bush White House seven months before the 2003 Iraq invasion that the U.S. could face a thicket of bad consequences, starting with "anarchy and the territorial breakup" of the country, former CIA Director George Tenet writes in a new book.
CIA analysts wrote the warning at the start of August 2002 and inserted it into a briefing book distributed at an early September meeting of President Bush's national security team at Camp David, he wri
Source: Xinhua/China View
April 27, 2007
SEOUL -- South Korean and Japanese scholars will resume joint research of the history in June after a two-year suspension, South Korea's Yonhap News Agency said on Friday.
According to Yonhap, the second-term South Korea-Japan joint history research committee will convene a meeting on June 23 in Japan to discuss the future path of their activities.
The committee will be composed of 17 historians from each side and decide items for joint history research after plenary me
Source: Gulf Daily News (Bahrain)
April 27, 2007
Bahrain's ancient burial mounds are under threat of being wiped out due to population needs and construction projects, says a local historian.
Bahrain University Islamic History Professor Ali Al Shehab said while Bahrain and other Gulf countries were developing their infrastructure, historical sites were suffering.
"Developing countries need more land, so they demolish historical sites such as the graves in Saar and A'ali," he told the [Gulf Daily News]...
Source: Times (of London)
April 28, 2007
LONDON -- A life jacket worn by a survivor from the Titanic is expected to fetch £50,000-£80,000 when it is auctioned at Christie’s in London on May 16.
The jacket was worn by Mabel Francatelli, secretary to the socialite Lucy Duff-Gordon, who was with her husband, Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon.
All three escaped in a lifeboat, designed to hold 40, with only nine others, seven of them crew. Sir Cosmo was accused of bribing the men to help them escape.
[Story inc
Source: Telegraph
April 28, 2007
A soldier who died more than 60 years after he was wounded in the Second World War may be one of the last direct fatalities to result from the conflict.
Leslie Croft was injured by shrapnel while fighting alongside the Yorkshire and Lancashire Regiment in Italy in 1943.
He died aged 86 on Dec 31 from bronchopneumonia and a coroner has ruled that his illness was contracted because of the 63-year-old injury to his bowel.
Stanley Hooper, the Rotherham coroner,
Source: William Grimes, New York Times
April 27, 2007
...The big book is a new one-volume edition of the complete works, commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company and published by the Modern Library. Two eminent Shakespeareans, Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, have applied modern editing techniques and recent scholarship to correct and update the First Folio, the first collection of the plays, published in 1623.
Unlike the smaller-format editions of individual plays known as quartos, the folio edition is thought to preserve the plays as th
Source: Asian Age (Delhi)
April 28, 2007
SRINAGAR, Jammu & Kashmir, India -- Irate crowds of Muslims protesting over the alleged demolition of an ancient mosque clashed with the riot police along the streets of Srinagar on Friday, leaving at least 15 people injured.
The authorities here, however, strongly refuted the allegation that the mosque had been pulled down by the security forces, and said that it had caved in due to lack of maintenance...
The now almost flattened mosque stood, in conformity with Ka
