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: Guardian
January 25, 2007
A collection of heirlooms including silverware and paintings that belonged to the Greek royal family has raised more than £7m in a controversial auction which went ahead despite appeals from the Greek government.
The authorities in Athens are concerned about how the treasures, once owned by the Duke of Edinburgh's grandfather, King George I of Greece, came to auction in London and have warned that action would be taken if the artefacts were illegally imported.
Source: Reuters
January 25, 2007
Children in England are to be taught "core British values" amid fears the country risks becoming divided into ghettos of different ethnic and religious groups, the government said on Thursday.
Education Secretary Alan Johnson said he was accepting the recommendations of a report into schools commissioned in the wake of the 2005 London suicide bombings by four British Islamists who killed themselves and 52 others.
The government hopes to reverse a growth in ext
Source: AFP at Yahoo News
January 25, 2007
Desperate letters written by the father of Anne Frank, the teenager whose diary of hiding from Nazis documented the horror of Jews during World War II, have surfaced in the United States and will be released next month.
Otto Frank wrote the letters in 1941 in a despairing effort to get his family out of Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, before finally hiding the family, including Anne, in secret rooms in an Amsterdam office building for two years until they were betrayed, Time magazine said
Source: AP
January 24, 2007
The Smithsonian Institution and Corbis Corp. announced a deal Wednesday to begin selling images from the Smithsonian's collections for editorial and commercial use through the digital media company.
Under the licensing agreement, Corbis will provide hundreds of images from the Smithsonian museums, including archival photos and images of cultural objects, paintings, sculptures, aircraft and space vehicles. A photograph of the 45.52 carat Hope Diamond is among the first images being
Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch
January 24, 2007
Museum of the Confederacy officials are considering moving the world's largest collection of Civil War artifacts to Lexington.
"I don't know if the conversations will go anywhere," said Waite Rawls, the museum's president and CEO, who visited Lexington this month. "But they have started."
Lexington, about 140 miles west of downtown Richmond in Rockbridge County, could be a good fit for the museum's collection of Confederate artifacts, manuscripts and
Source: BBC
January 23, 2007
In the 1960s four US soldiers separately defected to North Korea, and were little heard from again.
Now one -- the last known former American GI left in the country -- has spoken for the first time to British documentary-makers.
James Dresnok is something of a celebrity around the North Korean capital Pyongyang, his home for the last 44 years.
Unmissable thanks to his 6ft 5in height and bulky frame, the 64-year-old has appeared in North Korean films, tau
Source: LAT
January 23, 2007
Eight men were arrested today in connection with the 1971 shotgun murder of a San Francisco police officer in a case that authorities said involved a five-year conspiracy to kill police officers throughout the United States.
A joint task state and federal task force identified seven of the arrested as former members of the Black Liberation Army, a violent group made up mostly of former Black Panthers.
The arrests, which were made in California, New York and Florida, we
Source: Editor & Publisher
January 24, 2007
In an online chat at washingtonpost.com this afternoon, Carl Bernstein, the famed Watergate reporter at that paper and now writing articles for Vanity Fair, took several hard shots at the current Bush administration - almost every time he was asked about the Nixon era. It came just as news of the death of former Watergate ringleader E. Howard Hunt was circulating widely.
After a long explanation of how the American system "worked," eventually, with Watergate, Bernstein
Source: NYT
January 25, 2007
A 71-year-old man was arrested Wednesday in Mississippi on federal kidnapping charges stemming from the 1964 killing of two black teenagers who were tied to trees, whipped and drowned.
The suspect, James F. Seale, a former crop-duster, was indicted in Jackson and taken into custody in the southwestern Mississippi town of Roxie, not far from where the two young men were seized.
The charges against Mr. Seale, some seven years after the Federal Bureau of Investigation reo
Source: NYT
January 25, 2007
ISTANBUL, Jan. 24 — Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul called Wednesday for changes in a controversial law that penalizes insults against Turkish identity.
Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor who was assassinated last week, had been convicted under the law late last year. Many Turks say the conviction labeled Mr. Dink a traitor in the eyes of ultranationalist groups and made him a target.
“We see that in its present version, it causes some problems,” the foreig
Source: Christian Science Monitor
January 24, 2007
Scientific advances sometimes come as lightning flashes of inspiration. But when scientists sit down to record and take credit for what they've found, they still use much the same method they have for decades – an article published in a scholarly journal.
But science's hidebound traditions are changing. The Internet has opened up new forms of publishing in which anyone in the world can find and read a scientific paper. And papers themselves are becoming more interactive, leading rea
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 24, 2007
White men with an unusual Yorkshire surname have black African roots, according to a study that shows Britain's multiracial society dates back hundreds of years earlier than most people realise.
It underlines how the concept of race has no scientific meaning by revealing that a white "Caucasian" man in Leicester has a significant African genetic ancestry, along with a lot of other men with the same rare surname.
The research is the first genetic evidence of Af
Source: UPI
January 23, 2007
Israeli scientists say an eighth century shipwreck is believed to be the only ship from that period discovered in the Mediterranean region.
The wreckage of the well-preserved small boat was discovered off Israel's Dor Beach, with much of the vessel's contents suggesting it was involved in local commerce and sailed along the Lavant coast between Mediterranean Sea ports.
Source: AP
January 23, 2007
Work on Rome's Palatine Hill has turned up a trove of discoveries, including what might be the underground grotto where ancient Romans believed a wolf nursed the city's legendary founders Romulus and Remus.
Archaeologists gathered Tuesday at a conference to save crumbling monuments on the Palatine discussed findings of studies on the luxurious imperial homes threatened by collapse and poor maintenance that have forced the closure of much of the hill to the public.
Source: AP
January 23, 2007
A magic spell to keep snakes away from the tombs of Egyptian kings, adopted from the Canaanites almost 5,000 years ago, could be the oldest Semitic text yet discovered, experts said Tuesday.
The phrases, interspersed throughout religious texts in Egyptian characters in the underground chambers of a pyramid south of Cairo, stumped Egyptian experts for about a century, until the Semitic connection was found.
In 2002 one of the Egyptologists e-mailed the undeciphered part
Source: Independent (UK)
January 23, 2007
The Troubles may be over, but new horrors continue to emerge from Northern Ireland's dark past. And none is more shocking than the revelation that police let known UVF members get away with brutal murders.
Source: Virginian-Pilot
January 23, 2007
It’s no surprise that Virginians cherish their history. Who knew the love affair extends to our dirt?
Roughly 27,000 tons of the stuff were recently scooped out of the south lawn of the state’s 200-year-old Capitol building. The dig made room for an underground addition, part of a $100 million renovation.
The soil, considered “historic earth,” was trucked to a secret spot in Henrico County and piled into a mountain.
“I can only tell you it was taken to s
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
January 24, 2007
A federal appeals court has ruled against archivists who sought to ease copyright restrictions on old books and films in order to promote archiving them on the Internet, where they would be freely available.
In the case, Kahle v. Gonzales, two groups -- the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library, and Prelinger Associates, which preserves films -- sued the U.S. Justice Department. The archivists said that four copyright laws were thwarting the public from viewing out-of-print
Source: Haaretz
January 24, 2007
A boat that plied the coast of the Holy Land 1,300 years ago carrying fish, carobs and olives is helping researchers better understand a little-known period in the region's history.The boat, discovered in a coastal lagoon near the northern city of Haifa this week, dates from the early 8th century, not long after the rise of Islam and the Arab conquest of the Middle East.
Marine archaeologists studying the craft say it is the only one from this period discovered
Source: International Herald Tribune
January 24, 2007
When Japanese troops conquered the then-capital of China in 1937, historians agree they slaughtered tens of thousands of civilians in an orgy of violence known since then as the Rape of Nanking.
A Japanese nationalist filmmaker announced on Wednesday he is working on a documentary with a very different message: the massacre never happened.The film, to be called "The Truth about Nanking" and completed in August, will be based on testimony from Japanese
