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: Daijiworld (Mangalore, India)
March 30, 2007
PANAJI, Goa, India -- Scientists from Goa-based National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) have found stunning artifacts off the Gujarat coast, near Dwarka island, which development focuses on Indian civilization's ties with Roman civilization more than two thousand years back.
"During the excavation, we found artefacts which are dating 3,500 years back which indicates that India's maritime history is much-much older and Indians used to travel by sea even before Vasco da Gama tou
Source: AP
March 31, 2007
CHICAGO -- A [new] 464-page FBI report released Friday contains gruesome details from the autopsy of Emmett Till, but it is so highly redacted that it doesn't shed much light on the teen's killing, which helped galvanize the civil rights movement.
The report found that Till, killed in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman, died of a gunshot wound to the head and that he had broken wrist bones and skull and leg fractures...
The FBI report is part of an 8,000-page file investigators ama
Source: Los Angeles Times
March 31, 2007
The Census Bureau turned over confidential information, including names and addresses, to help the U.S. government identify individual Japanese Americans during World War II, according to government documents released by two scholars Friday...
In 2000, the Census Bureau acknowledged and apologized for its role in sharing aggregate data with the U.S. military to help relocate Japanese Americans from the West Coast to inland camps after Japan's 1941 Pearl Harbor attack.
B
Source: Times (of London)
March 31, 2007
NANJING, China -- Lei Guiying is slight and stooped with age. She is poor and illiterate. But the 79-year-old Chinese peasant says she knows that Shinzo Abe, the Japanese Prime Minister, was wrong this month to deny that the Imperial Army coerced women into army-run brothels during the Second World War.
She was barely 13 when she was raped by a Japanese soldier and, for the next two years, forced to work in a Japanese-run brothel on the edge of the southern city of Nanjing.
Source: Times (of London)
March 31, 2007
HEATHROW -- A landmark image for millions of travellers disappeared when the British Airways Concorde model was removed from the gateway to Heathrow Airport.
BA decided not to renew the £1.5 million annual rent to advertise at the airport’s entrance.
Emirates Airlines has signed a six-year deal for the site. The Concorde will be replaced by a model of a double-deck Airbus A380 superjumbo.
Source: AP
March 31, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Hispanic groups unhappy with an upcoming Ken Burns documentary on World War II are stepping up pressure on PBS because they say the series omits mention of the role Latinos played in the war.
The latest group to take their grievance to PBS is the American GI Forum, [which] is appealing to Hispanic veterans and other Latino groups to write members of Congress and their local PBS affiliates about the documentary,"The War," which has been six years in the making...the 14-hour Burns
Source: Chicago Tribune
March 29, 2007
Barack Obama packed his few belongings into his newly purchased but creaky old Honda and headed west from New York into a political and social battle zone.
When the raw 23-year-old community organizer hit Chicago in early 1985, the racially charged fighting between Harold Washington, the city's first black mayor, and white ethnic aldermen led by Ed Vrdolyak had earned the city a bitter nickname: Beirut on the Lake.
Obama learned just how bitter on his first trip to a Hy
Source: BBC
March 29, 2007
Between the 15th and 19th Centuries, it is estimated that up to 12m Africans were forced onto European slave ships and taken across the Atlantic.
Two hundred years after the British parliament voted to abolish the trade, the effects on Africa are still being felt.
Head to a village in northern Ghana or indeed many villages in West Africa and at times you might wonder what century you are in.
Even though Ghana has achieved impressive growth rates in recent y
Source: Telegraph (UK)
March 17, 2007
Felix Hoppe was 13 when he fled his home, one of an estimated 12 million Germans forced to abandon Eastern Europe as the Third Reich collapsed in 1945.
Then his house was on Adolf Hitler Strasse in a town called Heilsberg.
Today that has become number six Bartoszycka street, a green stucco house in the small town of Lidzbark-Warminski in north-eastern Poland.
Nonetheless, Felix Hoppe, 75, now wants his childhood home back.
His claims for repara
Source: AP
March 30, 2007
MEXICO CITY -- Archaeologists in Mexico City announced plans Friday to hold tours of inaccessible buried ruins via glass-covered shafts looking down on the sites.
Two daylong guided tours of the sites, known as "archaeological windows," are scheduled for April, and will take visitors to about 20 sites currently open to the public, as well as 20 more "windows" hidden beneath stairwells, floors and patios of buildings normally not open to the public.
T
Source: Telegraph (UK)
March 25, 2007
The desert battlefield of El-Alamein, where Field Marshal Montgomery's Desert Rats famously defeated Rommel's Afrika Korps in the Second World War, is being developed into a golf resort by Egyptian businessmen.
British war veterans reacted angrily yesterday after hearing of the plans to turn the historic site into a complex including luxury villas.
Source: CNN
March 28, 2007
The arrest of two women teachers on charges of having sex with their male students has brought cries of lingering racism in one of South Carolina's most conservative counties and evoked some of the South's oldest and deepest-seated racial taboos.
Both women are white. The boys -- six in all -- are black....
In the town of Laurens, where one of the teachers taught, an old movie theater has been converted into a Ku Klux Klan museum and paraphernalia store called The Redne
Source: AP
March 30, 2007
LIMA, Peru -- A village near Peru's famed Machu Picchu ruins has built a bridge over the turbulent Vilcanota River, opening a cheap backdoor route for adventurous, cash-strapped backpackers.
The bridge was inaugurated Saturday in the village of Santa Teresa despite the objections of government cultural experts, who fear increased tourism could threaten the UNESCO World Heritage site as hostels and restaurants spring up to serve travelers.
They also say increased tourism
Source: Guardian
March 30, 2007
Ancient history will disappear as an A-level [in the UK education system] if recommendations from an examination board are approved later this year.
The OCR board announced today it proposed to abolish the qualification as part of its plans to reorganise its four classics A-levels.
The exam board wants to replace its four existing classics subjects -- ancient history, classical civilisation, Greek and Latin -- with new models.
Ancient history will disappear
Source: AP
March 30, 2007
BERLIN -- A leading retailer said Friday that it will pay $117.5 million to compensate a Jewish family for real estate that was taken by the Nazis and eventually resold to the German firm.
The Jewish Claims Conference said it will use an unspecified amount of the money from KarstadtQuelle AG to fund programs for Holocaust victims, and give the rest to heirs of the Wertheim family, which was been seeking compensation for 15 years.
The Wertheims once ran a grand departmen
Source: AP
March 30, 2007
BUENOS AIRES -- Twenty-five years after hostilities ceased, Argentina is opening a new front in the Falklands War.
Rather than jets and mortar rounds, however, this salvo involves diplomats appealing for help at the United Nations and the government reasserting long-standing claims to the island chain where far more sheep than people huddle against the forbidding South Atlantic winds.
London, however, maintains its hold on the island, which Argentina invaded 25 years ag
Source: Reuters
March 30, 2007
CAIRO -- Egypt sent an archaeological team to France on Thursday to retrieve 3,200-year-old strands of hair from the mummy of Pharaoh Ramses II, who presided over an era of great military expansion in Egypt, state media said.
The existence of the hair came to light last year when some of the strands were offered for sale on the Internet for between 2,000 and 2,500 euros ($2,668 and $3,336), in addition to tiny pieces of resin and embalmed cloth taken from the mummy.
The
Source: AP
March 30, 2007
PHILADELPHIA -- Paid tour guides on public property would have to pass history tests and be certified under a new bill introduced in City Council, drawing objections from some tourism groups and praise from history buffs.
Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds Brown said the bill she introduced Thursday, like measures in Williamsburg, Va., and Savannah, Ga., would require certification and require the city to offer a study guide or class.
Source: USA Today
March 30, 2007
The news that no national ceremonies are planned once the last of three World War I veterans has died prompted the National World War I Museum on Thursday to make plans for a national tribute.
“It would really be a shame if we didn’t do something,” said retired Marine Gen. Steve Berkheiser, who heads the museum in Kansas City, Mo. Two of the remaining five U.S. veterans of that war died this week...
[Charlotte Winters, 109, of Boonsboro, Md., died Tuesday and Lloyd Brow
Source: Discovery News
March 30, 2007
The Vatican is expected to announce its decision to keep some fragments of the Parthenon housed in the Vatican Museums, dashing Greek hopes that the artifacts would be returned to their homeland, according to the Italian press...
The horsemen, deities and other creatures — carved by Phidias in the 5th century B.C. -— are scattered throughout several European museums, including the Louvre in Paris. But most of the marbles are kept in London's British Museum.
Greece has
