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
February 24, 2007
BOSTON —- Less than a month after highways and bridges were shut down during a bomb scare touched off by an advertising stunt, a new marketing scheme has led angry city officials to shut down a historic site.
A clue in a Dr Pepper promotion suggested a coin that might be worth as much as $1 million was buried in the 347-year-old Granary Burying Ground, the final resting place of John Hancock, Paul Revere, Samuel Adams and other historic figures.
After contestants showed
Source: Newhouse News Service
February 25, 2007
FLINT, Mich. — Accepting an offer to join the Daughters of the American Revolution could be a hard sell for a black woman.
That's why Gail Buckner Odom once declined an invitation to attend a DAR meeting.
As the descendant of a Revolutionary War patriot, though, Odom has changed her mind. Today, the retired Flint teacher is the sole black member of Genesee County's DAR chapter and believes she's among a select few dozen black members in the nation. National organizers s
Source: CNN
February 25, 2007
Brown University on Saturday promised to raise $10 million for local public schools and give free tuition to graduate students who pledge to work there in response to a report that found slave labor played a role in the university's beginnings.
The university will also explore creating an academic center on slavery and justice, strengthen its Africana Studies Department, begin planning for a slavery memorial and revise its official history to provide a more accurate account of the s
Source: Jerusalem Post
February 26, 2007
The Discovery TV Channel has released new details of the"Lost Tomb of Jesus" documentary that is to be officially launched at a New York press conference on Monday, including the claim that Jesus was buried in a Jerusalem tomb alongside Mary Magdalene and, possibly, their son Judah.
The film also suggests that the so-called"James, Brother of Jesus" ossuary, which surfaced in 2002 in the collection of Israeli antiquities collector Oded Golan, may also have come from the tomb. The"J
Source: WaPo
February 25, 2007
In April 1959, just months after a charismatic 32-year-old revolutionary named Fidel Castro seized the reins of power in Cuba, a slim volume of his correspondence, titled "Cartas del Presidio," or "Letters from Prison," was published in Havana. The book contained 21 letters addressed to Castro's inner circle of supporters, including his wife, Mirta Diaz-Balart; his half-sister, Lidia; a future mistress; the father of a fallen comrade; and nine missives to his devoted friend a
Source: Newhouse News Service
February 25, 2007
Christina Wall has traveled back in time, to a place where there is no television, no Internet and no e-mail.
In this pre-1950 land, there are no frozen dinners, no nonstick skillets and no fast-food franchises. She can't use a dishwasher, clothes dryer or microwave; she has no access to ATMs, DVDs or CDs.
Wall, 32, an Eastern Michigan University graduate student, hasn't left her west-side Ann Arbor home for another plane in the space-time continuum. She's simply going
Source: CNN
February 24, 2007
TUSCALOOSA, Alabama (AP) -- With a debate swirling nationwide over the n-word, a historically black college in Alabama has set aside four days to discuss the racial slur.
Participants at the conference, which began Thursday and ends Sunday, discussed topics ranging from the origins of the epithet to whether juggling a few letters makes it socially acceptable at the "N" Surrection Conference at Stillman College.
Organizers said the goal of the event is to chall
Source: CNN
February 23, 2007
SWANNANOA, North Carolina (AP) -- There is no monument to Alma Shippy.
No plaque describes how, in 1952, the shy teenager packed a bag of clothes, caught a ride in a friend's pickup truck and walked into history on the campus of Warren Wilson Junior College.
It's an obscure vignette in civil rights history. Shippy not only was Warren Wilson's first black student, but one of the few to attend any segregated college or junior college by invitation -- and not by court orde
Source: UPI
February 25, 2007
NEW YORK -- U.S. civil rights activist the Rev. Al Sharpton is amused after learning his relatives were once slaves owned by relatives of late Sen. Strom Thurmond,
The New York Daily News said Sharpton was in disbelief when he learned that his great-grandfather's family was once owned by a distant relative of the late South Carolina senator.
"I have always wondered what was the background of my family," Sharpton said. "But nothing -- nothing -- could prep
Source: Jerusalem Post
February 25, 2007
The Israeli-born, Canadian-based filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici is reigniting claims, first made over a decade ago, that a burial cave uncovered 27 years ago in Talpiot, Jerusalem, is the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth and his family.
At a press conference in New York on Monday, the two-time Emmy winner Jacobovici and his team -- including Hollywood director James Cameron -- will detail claims that of 10 ossuaries found in the cave when it was discovered in 1980, six bear inscriptions ident
Source: Washington Post
February 25, 2007
At the center of Baghdad's neglected North Gate War Cemetery, near the edge of the old city walls, stands an imposing grave. Sheltered from the weather by a grandiose red sandstone cupola, it is the final resting place of a man from whom George W. Bush could have learned a great deal about the perils of intervening in Iraq.
Lt. Gen. Sir Frederick Stanley Maude was head of the British army in Mesopotamia when he marched into Baghdad on a hot, dusty day in March 1917...
Source: Observer
February 25, 2007
It has survived the collapse of the sophisticated civilisation that built it, centuries of consumption by the suffocating jungle and the nihilism of the Khmer Rouge, who beheaded its stone Buddhas and used its walls for target practice. Now, Cambodia's awe-inspiring Angkor Wat complex is facing the biggest threat in a millennium - the fastest-growing tourist onslaught of any World Heritage site, which conservationists warn is already damaging its treasures irreparably.
In 1993, afte
Source: Reuters
February 24, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Chimpanzees and humans split from a common ancestor just 4 million years ago -- a much shorter time than current estimates of 5 million to 7 million years ago, according to a study published on Friday.
The researchers compared the DNA of chimpanzees, humans and our next-closest ancestor, the gorilla, as well as orangutans.
They used a well-known type of calculation that had not been previously applied to genetics to come up with their own"molecular clock" estimate of when hum
Source: AP
February 24, 2007
RICHMOND, Va. -- Meeting on the grounds of the former Confederate Capitol, the Virginia General Assembly voted unanimously Saturday to express "profound regret" for the state's role in slavery.
Sponsors of the resolution say they know of no other state that has apologized for slavery, although Missouri lawmakers are considering such a measure. The resolution does not carry the weight of law but sends an important symbolic message, supporters said.
Source: Times (of London)
February 24, 2007
BRUSSELS -- Europe’s 50th birthday is fast approaching but nobody can agree what to write on the card.
A grand statement —- the Berlin declaration — is planned next month to commemorate the founding in 1957 of what is now the EU, but the 27 member states are increasingly divided about what to celebrate.
Luxembourg is pushing for a prominent mention of the euro as one of Europe’s greatest achievements. But this will not go down well in Britain and Denmark, where the sing
Source: Times (of London)
February 24, 2007
DEGANIA, Galilee, Israel -- When Eliezer Gal arrived at Israel’s first kibbutz he had already served in the Red Army as a platoon tank commander at the siege of Leningrad, escaped to West Berlin after being marked down by Stalin for the labour camps and been turned away by the British when he arrived in Palestine aboard the Jewish refugee ship Exodus.
Mr Gal took a lowly job in the cow shed for 18 years and married Michal, a daughter of the kibbutz’s founders, raising his family in
Source: Reuters
February 23, 2007
BOSTON -- A trove of Kennedy family paraphernalia, including a letter in which former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy appears to counsel her sister-in-law about marital troubles, will be auctioned off in Connecticut this weekend.
The letters, along with a life preserver from President John F. Kennedy's sailboat and other items, were found in a storage unit on the Cape Cod summer resort area of Massachusetts, where the Kennedys still maintain a family home.
"Be a bit
Source: Telegraph
February 24, 2007
A little-known Second World War heroine who joined the Belgian resistance at 15, and was later tortured by the Gestapo, was buried near her home in Dorset yesterday.
Code named Lulu, Lucie Bruce, a Belgian national who moved to Britain in 1946, spied on Nazi troops and ammunition dumps, after joining the resistance in 1940 following Belgium's capitulation to German occupation.
She forged papers so she would appear old enough to be recruited, and by the time she was 17,
Source: Independent
February 24, 2007
His name may not be as recognisable as John Christie, the Krays or Dr Crippen. But the prosecution of Horace Rayner was, for its time, as sensational as any of the cases to have graced the dock of Britain's most famous court.
Rayner's appearance at the Central Criminal Court in May 1907 resulted in him acquiring the dubious honour of being the first defendant to be convicted of murder at the Old Bailey.
Next week Rayner's trial, and the trials of many others, will be re
Source: PR Newswire
February 23, 2007
PROVO, Utah -— In celebration of Black History Month, Ancestry.com, the world's largest online resource for family history, announced the launch of the largest collection of African-American family history records available and searchable online.
The collection, which represents the 19th and early 20th centuries, features more than 55 million black family history records that collectively dispel the common misconception that very few historical records were kept for African American
