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: NYT
January 31, 2007
After nearly 10 years of struggling to have a big Italian insurance company pay claims on life insurance policies sold to victims of the Holocaust, lawyers who say they represent most of the victims are giving up the fight.
They say they have struck a deal with the insurer, Assicurazioni Generali, that will give Holocaust victims and their relatives far less money than they had originally hoped. But the lawyers say that their chances of winning a lawsuit seemed increasingly unlikely
Source: The Guardian
January 31, 2007
Bill Gates and the British Library [have] revealed they were reuniting Leonardo's Codex Arundel with the Codex Leicester, online at least. High resolution versions of the notebooks will allow users to turn the pages for themselves.
The British Library-owned Codex Arundel is the world's second-biggest compilation of Leonardo pages and hardly anyone outside high academic circles has seen it. It features everything from treatises on mechanics and bird flight to drawings of underwater b
Source: The Guardian
January 31, 2007
A mere 921 years after William the Conqueror's original stab at working out what his recently won kingdom was worth, cabinet ministers will have known yesterday what it felt like to be an 11th century peasant as Gordon Brown unveiled New Labour's latest updated version of the Domesday Book.
Back in 1086, it was observed that in England and Wales "there was no single hide nor a yard of land, nor indeed one ox nor one pig which was left out". The Treasury...put a value on ev
Source: Times (of London)
January 31, 2007
ROME -- The lost treasure of Maxentius, the last pre-Christian Roman emperor, has been unearthed by archaeologists. Imperial standards, lances and glass spheres, right, were buried on the Palatine Hill by Maxentius before his battle with Constantine the Great in AD 312.
Archaeologists believe that he planned to retrieve the treasure if he won. In the event, he and his closest aides were killed, so that no one knew where it was hidden.
Source: The Guardian
January 31, 2007
The great-great-grandson of Victor Hugo said yesterday he was bitterly disappointed after his six-year battle to ban a modern sequel to Les Misérables was ended by France's highest appeal court.
But he vowed to continue fighting to protect what he described as his family's "moral rights" to the classic work.
"I believed we were fighting the good cause but the court decided otherwise. It is very, very disappointing," Pierre Hugo said. "I am not j
Source: Reuters
January 30, 2007
The U.S. Congress has the power to end the war in Iraq, a former Bush administration attorney and other high-powered legal experts told a Senate hearing on Tuesday.
With many lawmakers poised to confront President George W. Bush by voting disapproval of his war policy in the coming days, four of five experts called before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee said Congress could go further and restrict or stop U.S. involvement if it chose.
"I think the constitutional sch
Source: Christian Science Monitor
January 31, 2007
TURIN, GA. - Its clapboards broken and its roof collapsed, the old "Negro school" had come to the brink of its life. But as renovations on the schoolhouse began recently ˆ a bid to safeguard and honor this tiny railroad town's black history ˆ the project ran into opposition from a surprising source: its former students.
"There's a lot of people who don't want to be involved" because of what the school symbolizes ˆ racial segregation, says Alonzo Penson, who atten
Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch
January 30, 2007
ISLE OF WIGHT, Va. -- Descendants of a prosperous Colonial-era man watched yesterday as archaeologists exhumed his remains from beneath a slab in the floor of historic St. Luke's Church.
The family agreed to have Col. Joseph Bridger's bones dug up and analyzed by experts from the Smithsonian Institution, "because we thought it would be interesting to know more about him," said Jean Tomes of Roanoke Rapids, N.C., Bridger's ninth great-granddaughter.
Bridger, a
Source: Guardian
January 30, 2007
It is an encyclopedia written by nobody but Wikipedia is rapidly becoming prime source material for American judges.
A search of court decisions by the New York Times turned up more than 100 rulings that have cited the online encyclopedia since 2004, including 13 from the circuit court of appeals, one rung beneath the supreme court; America's highest court has yet to succumb to the site's call.
Despite its status among the 20 most popular sites on the internet, its rep
Source: NYT
January 29, 2007
A yearlong scientific analysis by the Harvard University Art Museums of three paintings discovered in 2003 and considered to be possible works by Jackson Pollock has found that some of the pigments used in the paints were not patented or commercially available until long after Pollock died in 1956.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
January 30, 2007
Construction workers at a new high school in Albuquerque inadvertently destroyed a site where important prehistoric artifacts had been found in 2000, according to today’s Albuquerque Journal. The site, which was ripped up when workers excavated for a new water line for the school, provided the first evidence that prehistoric people who were part of the Folsom culture lived in the Albuquerque area some 10,000 years ago.
Source: Boston Globe
January 3, 2007
Dover-Sherborn -- A divisive book about the aftermath of war will remain in sixth-grade classrooms because the Dover-Sherborn Regional School Committee voted ... to revamp the English lesson to better reflect the story's historical context. "So Far from the Bamboo Grove" by Massachusetts author Yoko Kawashima Watkins was challenged by a group of 13 parents who said it was racist against Koreans and too graphic for sixth-graders. The award-winning book is Watkins's story, told through
Source: TV3 (New Zealand)
January 30, 2007
A row between Scotland and New Zealand over a group of tattooed Maori heads appears to be over.
The Marischal Museum at the University of Aberdeen handed over the nine toi moko from its huge collection of Maori exhibits to a Kiwi delegation.
The heads will be stored at Te Papa while researchers try to identify their source communities.
They were handed over at a ceremony in Aberdeen after almost 200 years in northeast Scotland.
Source: Reuters
January 30, 2007
FLORENCE -- After 32 years on the trail of Leonardo da Vinci's lost masterpiece "The Battle of Anghiari", Maurizio Seracini thinks he is on the verge of solving one of the art world's greatest mysteries.
The Italian engineer and art expert reckons he knows where the fresco, which disappeared nearly five centuries ago, might be hidden -- behind a wall right where it was painted, in Florence's Renaissance town hall [the Palazzo Vecchio].
Now that the Italian gov
Source: AP
January 30, 2007
The Nazis were about to arrest his family in 1944, and Alex Moskovic remembers his father burying family documents in a 3-foot-deep hole under the shed behind their home in Czechoslovakia.
When he returned after the Holocaust -- the only survivor in his family -- Moskovic found the house in Sobrance had been pillaged and the shed torn down. The buried cache, probably including insurance policies, was never found.
On Wednesday, a U.S. District Court in New York will hold
Source: AP
January 30, 2007
TOKYO -- A court rejected a compensation suit filed against the Japanese government by 40 Japanese who were abandoned in China as children after Tokyo's defeat in World War II, officials said Tuesday.
Many were children of Japanese farmers sent to China's remote northwest to develop land seized by Tokyo. They were left behind by their fleeing parents as Soviet troops closed in at the end of the war in 1945, returning only a decade ago.
Source: AP
January 30, 2007
JERUSALEM -- At the height of World War II, Khaled Abdelwahhab hid a group of Jews on his farm in a small Tunisian town, saving them from the Nazi troops occupying the North African nation.
Now, Abdelwahhab has become the first Arab nominated for recognition as "Righteous Among the Nations," an honor bestowed on non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews from Nazi persecution.
The nomination of Abdelwahhab, who died in 1997, has reopened a little-known chapt
Source: AP
January 30, 2007
BERLIN -- A German-born Turkish man who was held for five years at Guantanamo Bay has written a memoir about his time at the U.S. prison, a publisher said Tuesday.
The case of Murat Kurnaz, 24, has been at the center of a political furor in recent days, amid allegations that the government of former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder spurned an early U.S. offer to free him.
His 256-page book, titled "Five Years of My Life: A Report from Guantanamo," is scheduled for
Source: New York Times
January 29, 2007
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. -- More times than he remembers, La’Markus Cook has traveled south on Interstate 65 from Nashville, where he attends American Baptist College, to his home outside Montgomery, Ala. But never, he said, as he did this weekend.
Air brakes hissing and motors rumbling, four buses retraced segments of the 1961 Freedom Rides on Saturday and Sunday, giving students aboard a front-seat view of a pivotal moment in civil rights history. On the rides 46 years ago, activists arme
Source: Live Science
January 29, 2007
Abraham Lincoln may have suffered from a genetic disorder that literally shattered his nerves, a new study on worms suggests.
Many of the president's descendants have a gene mutation that affects the part of the brain controlling movement and coordination, researchers discovered last year. The mutation prevents nerve cells from "communicating" with each other properly, but scientists weren't sure exactly how or why.
The malformed protein could actually be caus
