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: Xinhua/ChinaView
March 17, 2007
BEIJING -- China commenced a nearly two-year-long enlargement project of the National Museum at the heart of its capital on Saturday.
The National Museum, standing to the east of the Tian'anmen Square in central Beijing, used to be one of the ten celebrated constructions after the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949...
According to the project plan, south, north and west wings of the existing buildings will be repaired and reinforced. New buildings will be co
Source: AP
March 17, 2007
BOGOTA, Colombia -- Colombia celebrated the 80th birthday of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez on March 6 with a vow to rebuild the author's childhood home in the banana-producing town of Aracataca and convert it into a museum.
The government pledged $500,000 to reconstruct the home where the author drew inspiration for his trademark magical realism literary style.
According to his 2003 autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale, it was on the patio
Source: AP
March 17, 2007
BUTTE, Mont. -- A cannon used in the country's bloodiest war in now at the center of another fight...
Norman DeNeal of Butte wants a Civil War cannon that spent nearly 60 years in the Columbia Gardens returned to [Butte], but an artillery museum at Fort Sill, Okla., won't release the artifact...
In 1903, the cannon was given to Lincoln Post No. 2, a Civil War veterans group, at the behest of copper king and former U.S. Sen. William A. Clark...Clark owned the Columbia Ga
Source: Discovery News
March 16, 2007
Either the ancient Greeks loved grape juice, or they were making wine nearly 6,500 years ago, according to a new study that describes what could be the world’s earliest evidence of crushed grapes.
If the charred 2,460 grape seeds and 300 empty grape skins were used to make wine, as the researchers suspect, the remains might have belonged to the second oldest known grape wine in the world, edged out only by a residue-covered Iranian wine jug dating to the sixth millennium B.C.
Source: BBC
March 16, 2007
Almost two-thirds of people celebrating St Patrick's Day have no idea who the priest was, a survey claims.
Guinness sales rise dramatically every year on 17 March as people across the world mark the event.
But its true meaning has been forgotten - or never learnt - by many, according to the Manchester Irish Festival.
Organisers quizzed 2,000 people taking part in its festival parade but only 40% knew of the Christian missionary, who is the patron saint of Ireland
Source: AP
March 18, 2007
Beatles lovers who seek out Penny Lane imagine it as that magical place "in my ears and in my eyes, there beneath the blue suburban skies." But it has a sinister undertone that still reverberates.
The street in Liverpool, hometown of the Fab Four, is named after James Penny, a slave trader and investor in 11 voyages that took 500 to 600 captives at a time to the New World.
Penny was among the many who enriched themselves and their city on human trafficking unt
Source: http://www.news-record.com
March 12, 2007
They're toiling 8 to 5, trying to rescue history. Occasionally, occupants of cars yell hostile words about the strangers in their midst.
Still, the angry are the exception.
Most New Orleans residents tolerate the presence of two UNCG professors and 12 graduate students in history and interior architecture.
They're devoting their spring break to helping rescue historic buildings damaged by Hurricane Katrina or years of neglect.
Source: NYT
March 18, 2007
... Some of the world’s most prestigious museums have been sullied by accusations of acquiring artwork that was believed to have once been looted or stolen. The J. Paul Getty Museum of Art in Los Angeles agreed to return to Italy nearly two dozen artworks whose provenance was in dispute, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York returned to Italy the Euphronios krater, a 2,500-year-old vessel for mixing water and wine that the Italian government said had been looted by tomb raiders.
Source: NYT
March 18, 2007
In a city this vast, a handful of terrible events acquire the power of parable and mark neighborhoods for decades. The 1964 death of Kitty Genovese, a lone woman tracked and stabbed by a killer on a leafy Kew Gardens street while her neighbors averted their eyes and failed to call the police, became a national symbol of urban anomie. In Bensonhurst in 1989, 16-year-old Yusef Hawkins was shot and killed for the mistake of being black in a white neighborhood. In death he came to personify a city’s
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
March 18, 2007
Using Web sites and pod casts as teaching tools was one of the ideas discussed at a meeting yesterday to start planning Pennsylvania's 150th, or "sesquicentennial," commemoration of the Civil War...
[Sen. John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center President Andrew] led the discussion that looked at how and when events from the Civil War era should be remembered.
The 100th commemoration of the War Between the States gave short shrift to such topics as slaver
Source: David Piper, Fox News
March 18, 2007
It’s just one of many bomb-damaged villas on the outskirts of Kabul. But it is, perhaps, the most important building in Afghanistan, as it houses the rich history of this war-torn country. The museum in Kabul houses what’s left of the artifacts that have survived the fighting...
Afghan and Italian experts have painstakingly put back together hundreds of priceless statues, carvings and other artifacts that had been damaged or even smashed to pieces by thieves and the Taliban...
Source: NYT
March 18, 2007
Mr. DeLay [in his new memoir, “No Retreat, No Surrender” ] credits Mr. Gingrich as having a gift for politics, but the tensions between the two were no secret. He is dismissive of Mr. Gingrich’s tenure as speaker after he led the effort to break the 40-year Democratic grip on the House.
Mr. DeLay, who defeated Mr. Gingrich’s choice for party whip, calls Mr. Gingrich an “ineffective speaker of the House.” “He knew nothing about running meetings and nothing about driving an agenda,” h
Source: NYT
March 18, 2007
Senator Chuck Hagel spent 13 months as a lowly grunt in the Mekong Delta in the deadliest period of the Vietnam War. He saw the horror of war from the bottom up — men sheared in half by explosives, half-decapitated by sniper fire, bleeding to death in the gloomy swelter of the jungle. Thirty years later, he came to believe he had been used.
Senator John McCain was shot down 3,500 feet above Hanoi on a bombing run one month into his tour. He spent five and a half years as a prisoner
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
March 18, 2007
Ernest Hirsch was a scared 9-year-old in a French children's home the last time he heard from his mother...
Shortly after Hirsch got that letter, his parents were forced onto a train headed for death. When they arrived at Auschwitz, "they were marched directly to the gas chambers and killed," he said.
Hirsch, 75, is one of more than 100 Americans who have joined a groundbreaking legal action here against the French railway Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer
Source: New York Times
March 18, 2007
BEIJING -- FOR more than three years, the grinding, often exasperating negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program have been about taking the bomb away from Kim Jong-il. As if that were not complicated enough, the agenda is now becoming more ambitious. One new goal could be loosely described as cleaning up the 20th century...
History can be omnipresent or repressed in northeast Asia, but nearly everyone agrees it is festering and unresolved. Historic resentments and nati
Source: Independent
March 17, 2007
The tomb of the father of the abolitionist movement is to be given listed status in recognition of his pivotal role in outlawing the slave trade.
Granville Sharp, who campaigned tirelessly to see slavery abolished, is to have his tomb protected after David Lammy, the Culture minister, ruled that it was of "special historical interest."
The decision comes on the eve of the bicentenary of the 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, which will be marked by a servi
Source: ABC
March 17, 2007
On St. Patrick's Day, everyone feels a little bit Irish. Officially, 34 million Americans can trace some of their ancestry to Ireland. But did you know how many can claim royal Irish blood? Well, using DNA tests, scientists at Trinity College in Dublin discovered some very regal results.
With its ancient castles and folklore, many in Ireland had long claimed royal descent. Never from an English king, of course. That would be cultural sacrilege. But rather, many traced their line bac
Source: AP
March 18, 2007
ROME -- A waltz. A tango. A piece of jazz. But they weren't composed in Vienna, Buenos Aires or New Orleans. Scribbled on diaries, loose pages or even toilet paper, these are the notes left behind by people who lived and died in the prisons and concentration camps of World War II.
Italian researchers hope thousands of nearly forgotten works will find new life as they assemble a library of music composed or played in those dark places between 1933 and 1945.
"We are
Source: UPI
March 18, 2007
STIRLING, Scotland -- A hill that, tradition has it, played a big role in Scotland's victory over the English at Bannockburn may be lost to quarrying.
Robert the Bruce's servants or gillies supposedly hid behind Gillies Hill during the battle. When they emerged, the English thought they were reinforcements and retreated.
Now, the Cambusbarron Local Council warns that stone quarrying could take most of the hill down. Its profile has been altered by the removal of rock in
Source: Independent
March 16, 2007
This week, a 97-year-old Polish woman was finally honoured for saving thousands of Jewish children from extermination in Nazi death camps. Claire Soares tells her extraordinary tale.
Behind the doors of a Polish nursing home sits a woman who might be described as the female Oskar Schindler. She didn't have his industrial machinery or his financial might, but the one-time health worker rescued twice as many Jews from the horrors of the Holocaust. Nearly 2,500 children were sav
