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: Christian Science Monitor
April 4, 2007
ATLANTA -- As he treks across the Dixie roads he traveled as a young FBI agent in the mid-1960s, Jim Ingram gets a similar question from many people about his quest to solve murder cases dating back to the civil rights era.
"We say, 'Look, a law has been broken, and we're committed,'" says Mr. Ingram, who came out of retirement at the FBI's request. "Then they say, 'Why are you doing this now?' Ingram answers: "Because it was not carried to its final conclusion 4
Source: Guardian
April 4, 2007
The love life of the IRA leader Michael Collins will be exposed to fresh scrutiny when letters about his relationship with his fiancée and the wife of a society portrait painter are auctioned. The correspondence is among 600 lots in an Irish independence sale in Dublin on April 17.
Letters and diaries from Moya Llewelyn Davies, a close friend of Collins, record her memories of the IRA commander. In a series of diary entries and letters to a friend, Mrs Llewelyn Davies - who it has b
Source: Kyodo News
April 4, 2007
KASHIHARA, Japan -- The Cultural Affairs Agency began work Tuesday to disassemble the stone chamber of the seventh- to eighth-century Takamatsuzuka tomb in the ancient village of Asuka, Nara Prefecture, for outdoor reassembly in a bid to preserve its colorful wall paintings designated as national treasures.
This is the first time the agency has taken apart a stone chamber containing national treasures.
It plans to take out 16 pieces of stone from the roughly 1,300-year-old chamber ov
Source: Scott McLemee in Inside Higher Education
April 4, 2007
Longtime readers of Intellectual Affairs may recall that this column occasionally indulges in reference-book nerdery. So it was a pleasant but appropriate surprise when the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford provided a copy of its new edition of the very first dictionary of the English language. It has been out of print for almost 400 years, and the Bodleian is now home to the one known copy of it to have survived.
Available [May 1] as The First English Dictionary, 1604 (d
Source: UPI
April 4, 2007
ATLANTA -- U.S. scientists have discovered ancient Greeks unwittingly created a sophisticated acoustic filter while building a fourth century B.C. theater at Epidaurus.
Despite many attempts to replicate the Epidaurus theater's design, the Greeks never achieved the same acoustic effect that allowed people in the back rows to hear music and voices with amazing clarity.
Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have...discovered it's not the slope or the wind -- it's th
Source: Reuters
April 4, 2007
KIGALI -- To much of the outside world, Paul Rusesabagina is a hero who saved 1,200 people from genocide in events depicted in the Oscar-nominated film "Hotel Rwanda".
But as the genocide's 13th anniversary approaches in his native Rwanda, a bitter row has erupted between Rusesabagina and critics, including President Paul Kagame, who say he is profiting from the victims' misery and rewriting Rwanda's history for his own gain...
The 2004 movie depicting Rusesab
Source: Reuters
April 4, 2007
MOSCOW -- Plans to build a memorial to the 333 hostages killed three years ago in the Beslan school siege have sparked a row between Christians and Muslims in Russia.
The local Russian Orthodox diocese says it will build a church in the grounds of Beslan's school No. 1 to commemorate the victims -- half of them children -- killed in a clash between insurgents and Russian troops.
But one of Russia's leading Muslim clerics has accused the Orthodox church of trying to hija
Source: AFP
April 4, 2007
ATHENS -- Greek archaeologists have uncovered an intact tomb and what was likely a Roman theatre on the Ionian Sea island of Cephalonia, the culture ministry announced Wednesday.
The findings include a space of about eight metres long and six metres wide (26 feet by 20 feet) with a vaulted tomb, a stone coffin and two funeral vases, among other items, the ministry said.
The front of the tomb is "particularly interesting," according to the ministry, with a ston
Source: National Geographic News
April 4, 2007
The charred bones that were long believed to be remains of St. Joan of Arc don't belong to the French heroine but are instead the remains of an Egyptian mummy, a new study has shown.
Philippe Charlier, a forensic scientist at the Raymond Poincaré Hospital in Paris, France, obtained permission last year to study the relics from the church in Normandy where they are housed.
The relics were said to have been retrieved from the French site where Joan was burned at the stake
Source: New York Times
April 4, 2007
PARIS -— ...Another previously undiscovered [Irène] Némirovsky novel has been unearthed. A powerful tale of love, betrayal and death in a Burgundy village, “Chaleur du Sang” —- provisionally titled “Fire in the Blood” in English —- was published to warm reviews here in March. [It will be published in the U.S. by Knopf this fall.]
What makes this case unusual, as many readers have since learned, is that “Suite Française” was written from 1940 to 1942 and was only published more than
Source: Independent
April 4, 2007
BARCELONA -- It was a spy story with a plot out of James Bond. During the Falklands War, Argentina planned to blow up a British warship in Gibraltar.
The main protagonist was a former left-wing guerrilla turned spy who specialised in mine attacks on warships.
A Spanish film-maker, Jesus Mora, has made a documentary about Operation Algeciras. For many years, no one in authority would admit the plot existed but Mora got the former Spanish prime minister Leopoldo Calvo Sot
Source: AP
April 4, 2007
TOKYO -- China's premier urged his Japanese counterpart not to visit a Tokyo war shrine at the center of tensions over Japan's past military aggression in Asia, a news report said Wednesday.
Speaking to Japanese media in Beijing ahead of a three-day visit to Japan next week, Wen Jiabao said that "individual Japanese leaders have visited (the shrine) numerous times and hurt the feelings of the Chinese people," Kyodo News agency reported.
"I hope this will
Source: Washington Post
April 4, 2007
RICHMOND, Va. -- This is what the Museum of the Confederacy, the onetime "Shrine of the South," has come down to:
Attendance has dropped by nearly half over the past decade. The museum has been losing about $400,000 each year for a decade. Employees have been laid off, hours curtailed. A recent report by a panel of outside experts in museum management concluded that the 117-year-old institution was at a "tipping point" that was going to affect "its very exis
Source: International Herald Tribune
April 3, 2007
AARSCHOT, Belgium -- During the week, Ivonne Janssens, 57, is a hospital cleaner. But come the weekend, she climbs the narrow steps of a three-story medieval tower and turns into a 14th-century duchess with a faux-emerald necklace, a linen headdress, a leather satchel full of fake gold coins, and a retinue of mercenaries to fend off invading French knights...
Across this country of 10 million, a growing number of Belgians are trading in their jeans for suits of armor. They are rubbi
Source: Telegraph
April 4, 2007
STANLEY, Falkland Islands -- William Hague, the [Conservative] Shadow Foreign Secretary, warned Argentina that any future British government would have the patience to defend the Falkland Islands and he said Britain should not be "goaded" by increased rhetoric from Buenos Aires...
Speaking on the 25th anniversary of the [Falklands invasion], he said her resolve had "set the standard" for future British governments and increased international respect for the count
Source: Telegraph
April 4, 2007
A three-bedroom church tower designed by Sir Christopher Wren has gone on sale for £4 million, it emerged last night.
Christchurch Tower, which has views over the City of London and St Paul's Cathedral, has been transformed into an 11-storey home by a former Goldman Sachs investment banker.
Kate Renwick, who has now put the property on the market because she has found another Wren tower in need of restoration, bought the tower soon after her husband died and she gave up
Source: Reuters
April 3, 2007
LONDON -- Shifting sands and a poorly defined maritime border could give Britain and Iran enough room to save face in their 12-day stand-off over a group of detained British sailors and marines, border experts say.
Because the maritime boundaries off the Shatt al-Arab waterway, drawn up in 1975 but not updated since, are open to a certain degree of interpretation, Britain and Iran could "agree to disagree" over exactly who crossed into whose territory...
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Source: NYT
April 3, 2007
Geneticists have added an edge to a 2,500-year-old debate over the origin of the Etruscans, a people whose brilliant and mysterious civilization dominated northwestern Italy for centuries until the rise of the Roman republic in 510 B.C. Several new findings support a view held by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus —- but unpopular among archaeologists —- that the Etruscans originally migrated to Italy from the Near East.
Source: China View
March 30, 2007
SHIJIAZHUANG, March 30 (Xinhua) -- Chinese archaeologists working in Shexian county in north China's Hebei province have discovered a group of 800-year-old tombs from the Song Dynasty (960-1279) and Jin Dynasty (1115-1234).
Archaeologists with the Hebei provincial cultural relic research institute say that the tomb group, which covers an area of 2,600 square meters, comprises 17 tombs.
Source: Slate
March 30, 2007
Welcome to Memoir Week at Slate. Over the next three days, our critics will be weighing in on new memoirs. What has been most striking to us at Slate is how many memoirs these days are anything but coming-of-age stories; instead, they tackle issues and subjects larger than the self. Elizabeth Rubin and Mike Vazquez dissect the story of Ishmael Beah, who became a child soldier in Sierra Leone at the age of 12. Ann Hulbert looks at two memoirs about autism and asks why autism has become a metaphor
