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: CTK (Czech News Agency)
April 19, 2007
BRATISLAVA, Slovakia -- A touring exhibition on the Holocaust of Romanies and Sintis during World War II and on racism in the present Europe was today opened at Bratislava Castle in the Slovak capital...
"The Romany Holocaust issues were tabooed and concealed for years not only in Slovakia and facts on the extermination of this minority are today unknown for a majority society, and unfortunately also for many Romanies," said Dusan Gabor, manager of the Council of Romany Co
Source: AFP
April 19, 2007
LONDON -- Two Italian Renaissance masterpieces which had been missing since the 19th century fetched 1.7 million pounds ($3.4 million) at an auction in southwest England on Thursday.
The two works of art, painted by an Italian monk known as Fra Angelico in 1439, were only found late last year after the pensioner who bought the pair for 200 pounds in the 1960s, and had little inkling of their significance, showed them to an art historian.
According to Duke's auction hous
Source: AFP
April 19, 2007
NEW YORK -- A collection of more than 30 Old Masters looted from a Dutch dealer by the Nazis during World War II and returned to his heirs last year fetched almost $10 million at auction Thursday.
The 31 lots sold for a total of $9.7 million, Christie's auction house said, with a river landscape by Salomon van Ruysdael the top-selling lot, bought for $2.2 million, well below its estimate of three to five million.
The lots were part of a collection of 200 artworks looted
Source: AP
April 20, 2007
BISMARCK, North Dakota -- Republicans in this northern state want to turn an abandoned nuclear missile silo into a tourist attraction named after former President Ronald Reagan.
Historic preservationists have been pushing the Legislature for $250,000 (€184,000) to acquire the site of the silo and a nearby launch center in east-central North Dakota.
The Air Force will demolish the site by year's end if the state does not want to take it over, said Merl Paaverud, superint
Source: Reuters
April 20, 2007
LONDON -- A bronze statue of Nelson Mandela is to be erected in front of the Houses of Parliament after a five-year row over where it should stand.
The nine-foot high statue of South Africa's first black president will take its place in Parliament Square alongside some of Britain's greatest statesmen like Winston Churchill and Benjamin Disraeli.
London Mayor Ken Livingstone had campaigned for years to have the statue on the north terrace of nearby Trafalgar Square but Westminster Council a
Source: AP
April 19, 2007
It has been nearly 70 years since German and Italian fighter planes backing the fascist forces of Gen. Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War leveled this historic Basque town on April 26, 1937.
Myths and misinformation have shrouded the bombing from the outset, starting with the death toll, which historians have been gradually revising downward for decades. But Guernica has come to be seen as a foretaste of the aerial blitzes of World War II, immortalized in Pablo Picasso's &quo
Source: AP
April 20, 2007
When astronauts return from space, what they talk about isn't the brute force of the rocket launch or the exhilaration of zero gravity -- it's the view. And it's mankind's rarest view of all, Earth from afar.
Only two dozen men -- those who journeyed to the moon -- have seen the full Earth view. Most space travelers, in low orbit, see only a piece of the planet -- a lesser but still impressive glimpse. They have seen the curvature of Earth, its magnificent beauty, its fragility, and
Source: AFP
April 19, 2007
ROME -- The city of Rome has approved plans to create a museum sector encompassing the Colosseum, the Imperial Forums and the Campidoglio to rival Paris's Louvre, press reports said Thursday.
Covering an area of six hectares (15 acres), the "Great Campidoglio" will be achieved by converting several buildings into museums. One of them will house collections currently at the Museum of Roman Civilisation, located far from Rome's historic centre.
"We will fre
Source: Guardian
April 20, 2007
Incitement to racial hatred and xenophobia is to become a crime across the EU, although the long-fought agreement avoids singling out Holocaust denial and was watered down after differences between member states.
Six years of often fractious negotiations ended in Luxembourg yesterday with a compromise that struggled to balance freedom of expression with a tough stance on anti-semitism and other forms of racism and prejudice.
Justice ministers from all 27 EU countries agreed to punish inc
Source: New York Times
April 20, 2007
TIPP CITY, Ohio -— With his attorney general under fire in Washington and his fight with Congressional Democrats over paying for the war at a stalemate, President Bush came here Wednesday before a friendly audience to give his thinking on Iraq, Congress and the massacre at Virginia Polytechnic Institute.
“I’ve been in politics long enough to know that polls just go poof at times,” President Bush said on Thursday.
Speaking at a 90-minute, town-hall-style meeting in a hig
Source: Times (of London)
April 20, 2007
Russia has unveiled an ambitious plan to build the world’s longest tunnel under the Bering Strait as part of a transport corridor linking Europe and America via Siberia and Alaska.
The 64-mile (103km) tunnel would connect the far east of Russia with Alaska, opening up the prospect of the ultimate rail trip across three quarters of the globe from London to New York. The link would be twice as long as the Channel Tunnel connecting Britain and France.
The $65 billion (£33
Source: Reuters
April 20, 2007
LONDON -- An early Victoria Cross awarded for a daring raid on Russian enemy couriers during the Crimean War was sold for $312,000 (155,350 pounds) at auction in London on Thursday...
The buyer was...the Conservative Party's millionaire chairman Lord Ashcroft. He owns the world's largest collection of Victoria Crosses.
The medal sold on Thursday was awarded to Lieutenant John Bythesea who volunteered with William Johnstone in 1854 to intercept a crucial dispatch from the Tsar to the
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
April 19, 2007
SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- A bill that would prohibit construction of a pair of large dairy farms next to one of the state's most historic monuments in black history cleared the first legislative hurdle Wednesday.
The measure, AB576, would create a 2.5-mile buffer zone around Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park, a site of a Tulare County town founded by African Americans nearly 100 years ago.
Supported by Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez, D-Los Angeles, and the California L
Source: Ariella Budick, Newsday
April 22, 2007
With the opening of the gleaming new galleries for ancient Greek and Roman art, the Metropolitan Museum has definitively established itself as a wonder of the modern world. This is the contemporary museum at its best: a place for pleasure and scholarship, where ravishing products of the past can be studied and savored.
The centerpiece of the new galleries is a soaring, glass-covered court with a fountain gurgling at its center. Torsos and heads perch on gray basalt plinths, all beau
Source: Times (of London)
April 20, 2007
A First World War bomber found in a maharajah’s elephant stable in India finally returned to its Cambridgeshire base yesterday.
The rare DH9 was originally based at the airfield, now part of the Imperial War Museum, and widely used over the Western Front.
A total of 2,000 were built by Warings of Hammersmith, West London, a furniture manufacturer, but only six are known to survive worldwide and the aircraft is the only one in a British national collection. It was sent t
Source: BBC News
April 19, 2007
TEHRAN -- A new dam is due to open in southern Iran amid criticism it will flood an ancient site holding archaeological relics dating back 7,000 years.
The government says the Sivand dam in the Bolaghi gorge is needed by farmers in an area that has become desert.
Heritage activists have appealed to the president to postpone the flooding by some years so excavation can continue.
Archaeologists have discovered ancient wine making vessels, clay kilns and prehi
Source: BBC News
April 18, 2007
It started out as an enterprising school project and ended up as a living history lesson. When pupils in Tamworth [Staffordshire], wrote a series of letters to war veterans, Britain's oldest man Henry Allingham offered to answer their questions about World War I face-to-face. [Rajesh Mirchandani of] the BBC observed how the generation gap was bridged and two of the pupils reveal what they learned.
...What Henry does care about is trying to give young people a flavour of his i
Source: AP
April 19, 2007
MIAMI -- Anti-Castro militant Luis Posada Carriles, an aging ex-CIA operative suspected in a decades-old Cuban airliner bombing, was released from U.S. custody Thursday and flew to Miami as he awaits trial on immigration fraud charges.
Posada was released from a New Mexico jail after posting bond and will stay at his wife's house in Miami...There, he will receive an electronic monitoring device...
The 79-year-old former CIA operative is awaiting a May 11 trial on allega
Source: Reuters
April 19, 2007
DUBLIN -- A letter written by a leader of Ireland's ill-fated 1916 uprising against British rule shortly before his execution will stay in Dublin after an anonymous benefactor stepped in ahead of its auction.
The previously unseen letter from Padraig Pearse listing his final requests to the commander of the British forces in Ireland had been expected to fetch 80,000 to 120,000 euros ($162,500) when it went under the hammer in Dublin earlier this week.
"The National
Source: Daily Kent Stater
April 19, 2007
Karl Rove, senior political adviser to President George W. Bush, took a crowd of more than 500 through a virtual tour of the White House yesterday at Mount Union College.
Rove spoke for about 45 minutes about the rich presidential history of the White House.
"I'm really here to talk about presidential leadership," Rove said. Slides behind Rove showed images of the Oval Office, Abraham Lincoln's bedroom and the East Room. Rove described the impact that former
