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: Independent
February 6, 2007
BARCELONA -- Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Nazi SS, made a secret wartime mission to an abbey in Spain in search of what he believed was the Aryan Holy Grail, a new book claims.
Himmler visited the famous Montserrat Abbey near Barcelona where he thought he would find the Grail which Jesus Christ was said to have used to consecrate the Last Supper.
According to The Desecrated Abbey, by Montserrat Rico Góngora, the Reichsführer-SS thought if he could lay claim to the
Source: UPI
February 6, 2007
LONDON -- Private letters between prima ballerina Margot Fonteyn, revealing her doubts as a dancer, and an English painter can be read by the public at a London museum.
The nine handwritten letters from Fonteyn to Robert Furse were bought by the Royal Opera House and were never made public, the Scotsman said Tuesday. They are on display at the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms in London.
The letters offer insight into the Sadlers Wells Ballet -- the future Royal Ba
Source: AP
February 6, 2007
A Big Island genealogist says presidential hopeful U.S. Sen. Barack Obama has some ancestral ties to the White House.
Bruce Harrison, founder of the Waikoloa-based Family Forest Project, said he found links between the Democratic senator from Illinois and Presidents George Washington, James Madison, Harry Truman and Jimmy Carter.
Millisecond Publishing Co., the company that was first to establish the cousin relationship between President Bush and Sen. John Kerry in the
Source: Times (of London)
February 6, 2007
A couple who lost a seven-year legal battle against an ecclesiastical law that required them to pay the cost of repairs to an ancient parish church were ordered to meet the final demand for more than £200,000 yesterday.
The initial bill presented to Andrew and Gail Wallbank for restoration of St John the Baptist Church in Aston Cantlow, Warwickshire, was about £95,000...
The Wallbanks own Glebe Farm, in Aston Cantlow. The site includes a field called Clanacre, which is
Source: UPI
February 5, 2007
ST. PETERSBURG -- The Russian Orthodox Church is outraged after a skull and bone supposedly belonging to St. Phillip showed up for sale online.
The Russian Web site that had the relics up for sale described them as the "remains of an Orthodox saint, in good condition, with an inscription on the cranium confirming the saint's name," the BBC reported.
The church called the advertisement immoral, but did not state whether it thinks the bone and skull are real.
Source: AP
February 6, 2007
ST. JOHN'S, Antigua -- A land-clearing project in southern Antigua is threatening a unique ancient settlement where Arawak Indians lived from roughly 500 B.C. until the arrival of Christopher Columbus, an archaeologist said Monday.
Crews that began removing trees on privately owned property over the weekend risk damaging pottery and other artifacts at Indian Creek, one of the most valuable archaeological sites in the Caribbean, archaeologist Reginald Murphy said.
Source: AP
February 6, 2007
TOKYO -- Japan's highest court ordered Hiroshima's local government to settle medical backpayments to three Japanese citizens who survived the 1945 U.S. atomic bomb attack but were deprived of government benefits because they moved to Brazil, a court official said Tuesday.
Japan's Supreme Court upheld a Hiroshima High Court ruling last February ordering the local government to pay the three more than $24,000 each as compensation for unpaid medical expenses, court spokeswoman Rie Ued
Source: Xinhua (China)
February 6, 2007
The Arab League (AL) denounced on Tuesday the Israeli excavations near the Islamic holy shrine in Jerusalem, the official MENA news agency reported. The denouncement, made by AL Assistant Secretary General for Palestinian and the occupied Arab Lands Affairs Mohammad Sobeih, came after Israel began its digging operations under al-Magharba Gate, which is considered part of the Western Wall of al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest Islamic mosque.
Sobeih said
Source: AP
February 6, 2007
NAIROBI, Kenya - Deep in the dusty, unlit corridors of Kenya's national museum, locked away in a plain-looking cabinet, is one of mankind's oldest relics: Turkana Boy, as he is known, the most complete skeleton of a prehistoric human ever found.
But his first public display later this year is at the heart of a growing storm — one pitting scientists against Kenya's powerful and popular evangelical Christian movement. The debate over evolution vs. creationism — once largely confined t
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, is published by the Federation of American Scientists
February 6, 2007
In an extraordinary internal challenge to the unruly Office of
the Vice President (OVP), the Information Security Oversight
Office (ISOO) has formally petitioned the Attorney General to
direct the OVP to comply with a requirement that executive
branch organizations disclose statistics on their classification
and declassification activity to ISOO.
For the last three years, Vice President Cheney's office has
refused to divulge its classificati
Source: BBC
February 6, 2007
Like many aspects of his presidency, George W Bush's plan for his presidential library has been mired in controversy from the start.
Bush representatives appear to be closing in on a post-presidency deal to build the reported half-a-billion dollar library, museum and policy institute at the Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas.
Libraries can play a leading role in shaping a president's legacy. But sometimes it is a legacy that people do not want to be associate
Source: Washington Post
February 6, 2007
STRATFORD-UPON-AVON, England -- At 2:30 on a cold January afternoon, Paul Ruan walked into Holy Trinity Church, stood before William Shakespeare's grave and read the curse engraved on the headstone.
"Blese be ye man yt spares thes stones/And curst be he yt moves my bones."...
At 2:45, a busload of Argentine students crowded around the brass railing and red velvet kneelers at the foot of the grave. Other visitors followed, eager to glimpse the final resting pla
Source: Newsweek
February 12, 2007
A hundred and ninety-eight years after Abraham Lincoln's birth, the White House's Lincoln Bedroom finally looks like a room the great man would recognize.
Until recently, Lincoln furniture and a copy of the Gettysburg Address were displayed against the pale walls, curtains and carpet of a 1950s city hotel—not the vivid golds and purples, heavy fabrics and large patterns of Lincoln's era.
One reason for this mild historical fib was to focus attention on the chamber's his
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
January 27, 2007
Adam Willis was brought to California as a slave in 1846, gained his freedom nine years later, then searched the country using newspaper ads to find his family and build a home for them in Solano County.
The recent discovery of Willis' 152-year-old manumission record in the Solano County Archive has, along with other records from that era, stimulated a new examination of California's past that's been left out of the Gold Rush history books.
The existence of slavery in e
Source: National Geographic News
February 5, 2007
The ancient Egyptians believed themselves superior to their neighboring nations in almost every aspect.
The passages, inscribed on the subterranean walls of the pyramid of King Unas at Saqqara, reveal that the Egyptians enlisted the magical assistance of Semitic Canaanites from the ancient city of Byblos, located in what is now Lebanon. The Canaanite spells were invoked to help protect mummified kings against poisonous snakes, one of ancient Egypt's most dreaded nemeses...
Source: AP
February 5, 2007
MUNICH -- A German court has blocked the extradition to Denmark of a former member of the Nazi SS wanted in the Scandinavian country for the assassination of a journalist in 1943, it said Monday.
A senior Nazi-hunter in Israel criticized the decision, saying time and old age could not erase guilt for Nazi crimes.
Soeren Kam, an 84-year-old German citizen born in Denmark, was detained at his home in Bavaria in September 2006 on a European arrest warrant. He was released
Source: AP
February 5, 2007
JERUSALEM -- In the space of one day, a small archaeological dig in Jerusalem's Old City became a rallying call aimed at uniting Palestinians against Israel.
The dig -- a few waterlogged sandbags and black buckets of earth behind aluminum walls -- is meant to prepare the way for a new pedestrian walkway up to one of the world's most explosive holy sites, the compound known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary.
Though archaeologists insist th
Source: Guardian
February 5, 2007
So this is where world war three would have been waged. And this is the tub in which, in between ordering retaliatory nuclear strikes, the prime minister would have taken a bath. There is his toilet, and here, in the dead centre of a 34-acre underground bunker in Wiltshire, is the reinforced chamber in which preparations for nuclear winter would have been made. As you stand in the torchlit cold, with the doorframes collapsing from dry rot and with water dripping down incipient stalactites, the r
Source: BBC News
February 5, 2007
In the summer of 1940, the war with Germany was at a critical stage.
France had recently surrendered and the Luftwaffe was engaged in a concerted bombing campaign against British cities.
The United Kingdom was being cut off from the Continent, and without allies to help her, she would soon be near the limit of her productive capacity - particularly in the all important field of electronics.
On the morning of 29 August, a small team of the country's top scie
Source: AP
February 5, 2007
ORLANDO, Fla. -- A briefcase stuffed with letters, notes and newspaper clippings belonging to slain civil rights leader Harry T. Moore was found in an old vacant barn not far from where he was killed in a house bombing, officials said.
Workers for the Brevard County Historical Commission stumbled across the briefcase as they prepared to move the barn to make way for a planned subdivision.
The documents discovered in November were turned over to the state attorney genera
