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: Live Science
January 3, 2006
Researchers say their discovery of a 2,000-year-old toilet at one of the world's most important archaeological sites sheds new light on whether the ancient Essene community was home to the authors of many of the Dead Sea Scrolls.In a new study, three researchers say they have discovered the outdoor latrine used by the ancient residents of Qumran, on the barren banks of the Dead Sea. They say the find proves the people living here two millennia ago were Essenes, an ascetic Je
Source: NYT
January 3, 2006
In a soaring tribute to a modest man, Gerald R. Ford was remembered on Tuesday as bringing the ordinary virtues of decency, integrity and humility to mend a broken government after the pain of war and scandal.
“Amid all the turmoil, Gerald Ford was a rock of stability,” President Bush told the gathering of generations of Washington’s powerful at Washington National Cathedral. “And when he put his hand on his family Bible to take the presidential oath of office, he brought grace to a
Source: NYT
January 3, 2007
In a moment of presidential empathy, former President George Bush recalled a skill he had learned from Gerald R. Ford: how to handle being ridiculed on “Saturday Night Live.”
“I remember that lesson well, since being able to laugh at yourself is essential in public life,” Mr. Bush said in his eulogy for Mr. Ford on Tuesday. “I’d tell you more about that, but as Dana Carvey would say: ‘Not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent.’ ”
As the 82-year-old former president imitated
Source: USA Today
January 2, 2007
The war in Iraq has fractured even the fraternity of presidents.
After they exit the Oval Office, presidents generally limit criticism of their successors, at least in public. When President Bush and predecessors Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton gathered Tuesday at the National Cathedral for President Gerald Ford's funeral, it was a show of solidarity and affection for one of the few who knew firsthand how difficult the job can be.
The three former presidents s
Source: Ralph Luker at HNN blog, Cliopatria
January 1, 2007
Hoary myths about slavery in the American South survive, even as the year 2007 dawns across the world....
On H-Slavery, inquiries about the popular notion that slaves made quilts encoded with signals about the"underground railroad" appear with some regularity. In late 2005, a faculty member in Communications at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, inqui
Source: NYT
January 2, 2007
Of all the aging Washington power brokers who have re-emerged in the shadow of the death of former President Gerald R. Ford, there is one, Henry A. Kissinger, for whom the return to the spotlight may be as much curse as blessing.
At 83, Mr. Kissinger, former secretary of state to Presidents Ford and Richard M. Nixon and sometime adviser to the current occupant of the White House, remains a towering figure in international relations. He is expected to be among a select few, including
Source: NYT
January 2, 2007
The Theater Museum in London, Britain’s national museum of the performing arts, is scheduled to close to the public on Sunday after almost 20 years at its Russell Street location in Covent Garden.
The museum, which is a branch of the Victoria and Albert and houses one of the world’s largest collections of documents and artifacts related to theater, dance, opera and other performances, has been unable to secure financing for redevelopment. Though the collection itself is not in dang
Source: AFP at Yahoo News
January 2, 2007
ANACOPIA, Georgia (AFP) - In an ancient land on the lush shores of the Black Sea, archaeology has become a battleground for those who claim this territory as their own.
The history of Abkhazia, which broke away from Georgia in a 1992-1993 war, is no fusty academic debate. For the Abkhaz it is about the province's bid to be recognised as an independent state.
"We have to show people, the whole world, that Abkhazia has been a state for a long time," said Vadim B
Source: Times Online (UK)
January 2, 2007
To the untutored eye, it looks like a lump of mud, but experts say that an 8th-century psalter found in an Irish peat bog is exceptionally significant.
Even though the vellum pages of the early Book of Psalms are a crumpled mass, they are likening it to the Book of Kells, one of the world’s most beautiful illuminated manuscripts.
As the find is thought to date from the late 8th century, the illuminators of both books would have been contemporaries, within ten or twent
Source: LAT
January 1, 2007
ANN ARBOR, MICH. — If David A. Horrocks could point to a favorite historical gem housed inside the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, it would be this: a single sheet of paper, outlining a 1975 senior staff meeting.
Ford had called the aides into the Oval Office to iron out key staff changes.
Donald H. Rumsfeld would become secretary of Defense. Dick Cheney would be named chief of staff. George H.W. Bush would "replace Bill Colby at CIA."
"
Source: Indo-Asian News Service
January 1, 2007
The Rajasthan government has sought the help of academicians to rewrite the history of all villages, towns and cities of the state.
Historians will probe and verify the history of all 41,000 villages and 186 cities and towns of the state after talking to the village heads and elders. The project is called "Aapno Dharti, Aapno Log" (our land, our people).
"We have decided to launch the project on Jan 4," State Education Minister Ghanshyam Tiwari told
Source: WaPo
January 1, 2007
On sunny afternoons in the German capital, heads swivel skyward as a throwback DC-3 airplane rumbles overhead on its way to Tempelhof airport, just as it did six decades ago during the military operation that kept half of a divided and broken city alive at the start of the Cold War.
These days, the restored Candy Bomber -- one of the Allied aircraft beloved by West Berlin's children for dropping bags of chocolate and raisins from the skies, as well as delivering hundreds of thousand
Source: Guardian
December 28, 2006
Picking through centuries-old rubbish, masonry and discarded body parts beneath an abandoned Tuscan church, an Italian historian believes she has solved one of history's great crime mysteries.
For more than four centuries, researchers have puzzled over the fact that Francesco I Medici, the son of the first Grand Duke, Cosimo, died within hours of his wife in October 1587. Legend had it they were poisoned by his brother and successor, a cardinal.
Modern historians have
Source: Guardian
December 31, 2006
American and Iraqi government investigators tracing hundreds of millions of pounds missing from Saddam Hussein's illicit fortune are hoping to question members of the former dictator's close family.
Officials from the FBI, the American Treasury and the State Department particularly want to find £2.2bn in illegal profits that Saddam's regime is alleged to have earned from 2000-2003 from an oil-for-trade pact signed with Syria that was outside the official United Nations administered
Source: AP
December 30, 2006
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. -- President Gerald Ford's death is expected to spark renewed interest in his life and draw more visitors to his presidential library and museum in Michigan.
Unlike other presidential centers, Ford's library and museum are divided between sites in Grand Rapids, where he grew up, and Ann Arbor, where he attended the University of Michigan in the 1930s.
A museum holding artifacts from his life sits on a scenic, 20-acre patch of downtown Grand Rapids
Source: AP
December 30, 2006
In a city that lost several beloved institutions in 2006, the sound coming out of Chicago's jazz scene is providing a year-end coda no one wants to hear.
The Jazz Showcase, this jazz-drenched city's oldest club dedicated to the musical form and the second-oldest U.S. jazz venue after New York's Village Vanguard, is closing its doors this weekend after 59 years.
A New Year's Eve "last blast" featuring saxophonist David "Fathead" Newman and Henry Johns
Source: AP
December 31, 2006
ATHENS, Greece -- Unlike its larger, postcard-perfect neighbors in the Aegean Sea, Keros is a tiny rocky dump inhabited by a single goatherd. But the barren islet was of major importance to the mysterious Cycladic people, a sophisticated pre-Greek civilization with no written language that flourished 4,500 years ago and produced strikingly modern-looking artwork.
A few miles from the resorts of Mykonos and Santorini, Keros is a repository of art from the seafaring culture whose fla
Source: AP
December 31, 2006
ANKARA, Turkey -- When political science professor Atilla Yayla questioned the legacy of the revered founder of modern Turkey, nationalists called him a traitor and his university suspended him.
Yayla said he was punished for shattering a taboo: daring to criticize Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a leader so idolized that his portrait hangs in all government offices, life stops for a minute every year on the anniversary of his death 68 years ago, and his ideas are still the republic's most
Source: AP
January 1, 2007
... Americans may question this war for many reasons, but their doubts often find voice in the count of U.S. war deaths. An overwhelming majority — 84 percent — worry that the war is causing too many casualties, according to a September poll by the nonpartisan research group Public Agenda.
The country largely kept the faith during World War II, even as about 400,000 U.S. forces died — 20,000 just in the monthlong Battle of the Bulge. Before turning against the wars in Korea and Viet
Source: AP
December 31, 2006
SCOTIA, California -- Along with the scent of freshly cut redwood, an air of uncertainty hangs over this idyllic Northern California logging town.
Mel Berti feels it from behind the butcher counter at Hoby's Market, where he has greeted lumber mill workers and their families by name for three decades.
Nodding toward the tidy streets and rows of whitewashed bungalows outside, he wonders what the Scotia he knows will look like in another 10 years — now that its days as a
