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 7, 2007
SAVANNAH, Ga. -- Several Georgia lawmakers have opposed efforts to issue an official state apology for slavery, but they could be swayed knowing their predecessors authorized the state purchase of slaves, a legislator said.
As state lawmakers debate issuing an official apology for slavery similar to those passed by the Virginia Legislature and the North Carolina Senate, an Associated Press review of 19th-century records kept by the Digital Library of Georgia at the University of Geo
Source: Sports Illustrated
April 5, 2007
This picture shouldn't be published [of the all-white football team of Little Rock's Central High]. It belongs in a moldy scrapbook in some old man's attic. Its time is done. Its way of life is finished. Even the school these 42 white boys played for a half century ago did away with it. Took it down one day to paint a hallway in the early '90s, and then....
What became of it? Some said it was stowed beneath the auditorium stage and destroyed in a fire. Some said that a black janitor
Source: AP
April 6, 2007
NAIROBI, Kenya -- Rwanda's first post-genocide leader walked free from prison Friday after a surprise presidential pardon of his convictions that included inciting ethnic tension.
Pasteur Bizimungu was freed after serving two years of a 15-year term as an act of clemency by President Paul Kagame to build national unity, an official said. His release came on the 13th anniversary of the start of the 1994 genocide in which 500,000 were killed.
"It's a good gesture, it
Source: Reuters
April 6, 2007
OTTAWA -- Canada will remove the French-language exhibit at a major military memorial after a reporter discovered it was riddled with grammatical errors, Veterans Affairs Minister Greg Thompson said on Thursday.
Public broadcaster Radio-Canada found numerous mistakes in interpretive panels at Vimy Ridge in France, where more than 10,000 Canadian soldiers were killed or wounded in April 1917 during World War One.
"I have just been made aware of this situation and it
Source: UPI
April 6, 2007
VENICE -- A United Nations climatologist in Brussels says current climate trends indicate Venice could be under water within a few decades.
Venice -- which is built on mud islands in a lagoon at the top of the Adriatic Sea -- "is destined to disappear" if current climate trends continue, said Osvaldo Canziani of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Canziani said rainfall in the northern Mediterranean is expected to increase 10 percent to 20 perc
Source: GSA via PRNewswire
April 6, 2007
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) will soon issue Notices of Availability (NOAs) for 17 historic lighthouses located across the country.
"GSA takes its stewardship responsibilities very seriously," said David L. Winstead, Commissioner of GSA's Public Buildings Service. "We recognize
the cultural, recreational and educational value associated with these historic lighthouses and are committed to working with our federal partners
and o
Source: WaPo
April 5, 2007
In a cramped front bedroom on the second floor of a narrow rowhouse on 30th Street in Georgetown, 80-year-old Timothy Hobson declares, "This is where I was laid up with a broken leg."
It was so long ago, the winter of 1937, when Hobson was 10 years old and had a routine childhood injury that would confine him and make him a witness to history. Though he couldn't have known it then, this was no ordinary home. It was, instead, a place where routine acts of espionage allegedl
Source: BBC
April 4, 2007
Democratic Unionist leader Ian Paisley and the Irish prime minister Bertie Ahern are to visit the historic site of the 1690 Battle of the Boyne.
Mr Paisley said it would show "how far we have come when we can celebrate and learn from the past".
He was speaking after talks with the taoiseach in Dublin when the pair shook hands publicly for the first time.
Mr Paisley said he hoped "old suspicions and discord can be buried forever" through mutual
Source: MSNBC
April 6, 2007
With its stacks of yellowing historical documents and staff of earnest archivists and librarians, the National Archives doesn’t seem like a typical setting for intrigue. So workers at the Philadelphia branch have understandably been shaken by a whodunit that has unfolded in their normally placid corridors during the last few months.The unusual crime began to unravel last September, when Dean Thomas of Gettysburg, Pa., had the sensation of déjà vu while reading an eBay offer
Source: IHT
April 6, 2007
Officials in Paris were guardedly optimistic Friday that Iran will allow a French academic who has been blocked in the country for more than two months to leave soon.Stephane Dudoignon was arrested in southeastern Iran on Jan. 30 and has since been prevented from leaving the Iranian capital, Tehran.
A French Foreign Ministry official said Iran's ambassador to Paris had "quite encouraging comments" about the possibility that Dudoignon would be allowed t
Source: HNN Staff
April 6, 2007
Several historians at Southern Methodist University have signed a new petition to protest the establishment of an institute on the campus in tandem with the proposed Bush presidential library.
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, is published by the Federation of American Scientists
April 6, 2007
Declassified transcripts of dozens of closed hearings of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1967 have now been
published.
The hearings feature testimony by Director of Central
Intelligence Richard Helms and other Johnson Administration
officials on Soviet nuclear weapons policy, anti-ballistic
missiles, Vietnam, the Middle East, and other topics of
contemporary concern.
See "Executive Sessions of the Senate Foreign
Source: AP
April 5, 2007
BELGRADE, Serbia -- Serbia's Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a 13-year prison sentence for a former ethnic Albanian fighter convicted of taking part in the torture and rape of civilians at the end of the 1998-99 war in Kosovo province.
The defense appealed for Anton Lekaj, 26, to be sent back to Kosovo -- a United Nations and NATO protectorate since 1999. But the court confirmed an earlier verdict that found him guilty of war crimes.
Source: Peter Popham in The Independent
April 5, 2007
GIZA, Egypt -- The modern world has not been kind to the pyramids of Giza. Just a generation ago they were out in the desert, which is how they still look in the postcards, shot from carefully selected angles. But rampant development has hemmed them in with the accoutrements of the tourist trade -- cafes, restaurants, souvenir workshops, stables for horses and camels, tacky little establishments of every sort, and slummy accommodation into which tourist hawkers are crammed.
Then com
Source: AP
April 6, 2007
NEW YORK -- Scholars probing anew into the Cold War's most famous espionage case suggested Thursday that another U.S. diplomat, not Alger Hiss, was the Soviet agent code-named Ales.
Meanwhile, a stepson of Hiss said his chief accuser invented the spy allegations after his sexual advances were rejected.
The two claims, presented at the daylong symposium "Alger Hiss & History" at New York University, provided startling new information that, if true, could po
Source: Edward Rothstein in New York Times
April 6, 2007
WILLIAMSBURG, Va. -- Patrick Henry was sitting just to my left in the Virginia House of Burgesses as the debate raged about the events that had been following the Boston Tea Party. Mr. Henry was a brilliant hothead, of course, though not yet moved to pose his famous nonnegotiable alternatives, demanding liberty or death. But when Governor Dunmore of the Virginia colony strode into the room, even Mr. Henry rose, out of respect to the authority of the king, as did we all, even those of us carrying
Source: Novinite/Sofia News Agency
April 5, 2007
Bulgaria's government decided Thursday to open a museum in honour of country's late prophet Vanga, Darik News reported.
The museum will be founded in the town of Petrich as the government announced it donated a municipal property for the cause. The exposition will include many of Vanga's belongings and many photos...
Baba Vanga (Grandma Vanga), a blind peasant whose clairvoyant powers gave her saint-like status across Bulgaria, died at 84. Born in neighbouring Macedonia
Source: Asia Times (Hong Kong)
April 6, 2007
BEIJING -- Standing atop the Jingshan Park hill, just north of the Forbidden City, provides the most commanding view of Beijing, the nerve center of one of the greatest civilizations of the world for most of the past 900 years. This is a city that is saturated in history, haunted by the ghosts of warlords and khans, merchants and scholars, revolutionaries and poets.
Looking around from Jingshan hill, however, it is difficult to conjure up visions of these ghosts. What you do see rad
Source: The Acorn (Agoura Hills, Calif.)
April 5, 2007
Home buyers and history and mystery buffs have the chance to own a bit of Agoura Hills' lore if they buy a house high in the hills above Agoura Road.
The four-bedroom, three-bath home sitting atop a 1.38-acre hilly lot offers some unique amenities- a 14-foot statue of an Indian sculpted by Count Jean de Strelecki, a Polish immigrant and artist; caves once used as an outpost for weary travelers; a stone mask either engraved or embedded in the side of the hill and possibly other artif
Source: National Geographic News
April 5, 2007
The earliest direct ancestors of modern humans may have looked more like apes than previously thought, a new study suggests.
But the findings, based on a reconstructed 1.9-million-year-old skull, are highly controversial among the anthropological community.
New computer-generated reconstructions suggest that the specimen had a smaller brain than scientists had believed as well as a distinctly protruding jaw."We see in this new reconstruction primitive features that are carryovers
