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
December 12, 2006
After more than 160 years, the twin masts of the Milan still
stand erect _ all the more remarkable because the commercial
sailing ship sits in the dark depths of Lake Ontario."It almost looks like it could be floated" to the surface, said shipwreck
explorer Dan Scoville on Monday.
Scoville and fellow explorer Jim Kennard located the schooner in the
summer of 2005 off the southern shore of the lake. They videotaped the
93-foot-long, square-stern vessel this year using an unmanned subm
Source: Asian History Carnival
December 12, 2006
The tenth edition of the Asian History Carnival, a monthly roundup of blog posts about the history of Asia -- Near East to Far -- is up at Westminster Wisdom.
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, is published by the Federation of American Scientists
December 12, 2006
The apparent murder of former Russian intelligence officer Alexander
Litvinenko through polonium poisoning seemed like an outlandish
innovation in crime. But it was not the first time that polonium
had been deliberately administered to human subjects.
In 1944 at the University of Rochester in New York,"tracer amounts
of radioactive polonium-210 were injected into four hospitalized
humans and ingested by a fifth," according to a 1995 retrospective
account.
Four men and one wome
Source: NYT
December 10, 2006
IF there is a sacred text in the American legal canon, it is the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. [HNN Editor: Actually, Brown has many critics. See RELATED LINKS below.] It is the court’s one undisputed triumph, and no Supreme Court nominee who expressed doubt about the decision would ever be confirmed. Who can argue, after all, with the wisdom of putting an end to state-sanctioned racial segregation in the public schools?
But, as an extraordinary two-hour Supr
Source: HNN summary of CBS report
December 12, 2006
A new poll by CBS News broadcast Monday night indicates that 62 percent of the American people now believe that it was a mistake to invade Iraq.
At the height of the Vietnam War in 1973 only 60 percent said it was a mistake to send troops to Vietnam, according to a Gallup Poll.Related Links
HNN Staff: Have Americans Usually Supported Their Wars?
Source: AP
December 12, 2006
Scientists hope that a reproduction of the 2,100-year-old Antikythera Mechanism, believed to be the earliest surviving mechanical computing device, will provide clues to a variety of questions: who built the device, and for what purpose? Why did the technology behind it disappear for the next thousand years? What does the device tell us about ancient Greek culture? And does the marvelous construction, and the precise knowledge of the movement of the sun and moon and Earth that it implies, tell u
Source: Deutsche Welle
December 12, 2006
Leading Holocaust historians gathered in Berlin to discuss the current state of Holocaust studies. The meeting has been widely seen as a reaction to a controversial Holocaust conference in Iran.The conference -- organized by the German Federal Agency for Civic Education (BPB) -- is seen by many as a response to a two-day conference on the Holocaust, which started in Teheran on Monday.
US historian Raul Hilberg, the author of "Destruction of the European Jew
Source: Newport News Daily Press
December 10, 2006
JAMES CITY, Va. - The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation's part in the history of Carter's Grove plantation is coming to an end. CW officials said that they're planning to sell the centuries-old plantation that the foundation has owned since 1969.
They said the 400-acre property's view of the James River, its archaeological sites and other treasures would remain protected in any sale. Restrictions will prohibit residential and commercial development, the foundation said.
Source: IHT
December 11, 2006
MEMPHIS, Tennessee -- Elizabeth "Lizzie" Bolden, recognized as the world's oldest person, died early Monday, the administrator of the nursing home where she lived said Monday. She was 116.
Bolden was born Aug. 15, 1890, according to the Gerontology Research Group, a Los Angeles-based organization that tracks the ages of the world's oldest people.
Guinness World Records recognized Bolden as the oldest person in August after the death of Maria Ester de Capovill
Source: Times Online (UK)
December 11, 2006
Dozens of Iranian students burnt pictures of President Ahmadinejad and chanted “Death to the dictator” as he gave a speech at a university in Tehran yesterday.
Never has the hardline leader faced such open hostility at a public event, which came as Iran opened a conference questioning whether Nazi Germany murdered six million Jews.
One student activist said that the protest was against the “shameful” Holocaust conference and the “fact that many activists have not been
Source: NYT
December 10, 2006
A surprisingly recent instance of human evolution has been detected among the peoples of East Africa. It is the ability to digest milk in adulthood, conferred by genetic changes that occurred as recently as 3,000 years ago, a team of geneticists has found.
The finding is a striking example of a cultural practice — the raising of dairy cattle — feeding back into the human genome. It also seems to be one of the first instances of convergent human evolution to be documented at the gene
Source: CNN
December 11, 2006
Iran on Monday opened a two-day conference exploring the validity of the Nazi Holocaust, a move that has sparked outrage among Jewish groups.
One such group, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, planned to counter the event with a teleconference showcasing stories from Holocaust survivors.
Manouchehr Mohammadi, Iran's deputy foreign minister for research, told Iran's state-run news agency, IRNA, that Tehran's leaders would accept that the Holocaust occurred if scholars attendin
Source: AFP
December 10, 2006
Former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who died at a Santiago hospital, was a long-time protege of the United States who backed him in 1973 when he overthrew the Socialist government of Salvador Allende.
Later, he fell out of favor as human rights abuses under his watch got out of hand, including the 1976 assassination in Washington of a former Chilean ambassador, and in 2004 US lawmakers helped build a case of fraud against him.
General Pinochet rose to fame on September
Source: Christian Science Monitor
December 11, 2006
... Choeung Ek is one of Cambodia's handful of memorials of the Khmer Rouge genocide that, between 1975 and 1979, claimed the lives of nearly 2 million citizens - a third of the nation's population then.
Van and Bei - and 396 fellow villagers from across the country - are here on a two-day, all-expense-paid educational trip organized by the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), a leading research institution on the killing fields.
Mention Cambodia, and the first im
Source: Guardian
December 11, 2006
One of the most controversial armed conflicts of the cold war era and one which caused a rift between Britain and the US is to be revisited this week in a British court. The case will re-examine an episode that led to more than 100 deaths on the Caribbean island of Grenada and still has ramifications for the region today.
The 14 Grenadians sentenced to death for the assassination of the former prime minister Maurice Bishop more than 20 years ago are due to have their case for an a
Source: WaPo
December 11, 2006
The device is so famous that an international conference organized in Athens a couple of weeks ago had only one subject: the Antikythera Mechanism.
Every discovery about the device has raised new questions. Who built the device, and for what purpose? Why did the technology behind it disappear for the next thousand years? What does the device tell us about ancient Greek culture? And does the marvelous construction, and the precise knowledge of the movement of the sun and moon and Ear
Source: Ohio.com
December 10, 2006
Fort Ancient remains a mystery.
The extensive earthen mounds and walls in southwest Ohio are unlikely a fortress, although they might have been used for social gatherings and religious ceremonies and astronomical viewings.
The site, atop a wooded bluff 235 feet above the Little Miami River in Warren County, was built 2,000 years ago by ancient Indians that archaeologists call Hopewells.
The intricate mounds stretch nearly 3 ½ miles and enclose about 100 acr
Source: LAT
December 10, 2006
POCATELLO, IDAHO — At a glance, professor D. Jeffrey Meldrum would seem to be a star on the Idaho State University campus here.
A popular instructor, Meldrum has written or edited five books, written dozens of articles in academic journals, and ranged across the American West and Canada for his field research. Famed primatologist Jane Goodall wrote a blurb for his latest book, which she said "brings a much-needed level of scientific analysis" to a raging debate.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
December 10, 2006
When Polish secret police tried to recruit Karol Malcuzynski, a BBC researcher, as a spy in 1979, he flatly rejected them after just 20 minutes' conversation.
Three decades on, however, it has taken him nearly a year of legal battling to clear his name, after he was retrospectively branded a "communist secret agent" by Poland's Right-wing government.
In a move that nearly wrecked his reputation as a respected journalist, Mr Malcuzynski received a letter from P
Source: NYT
December 10, 2006
The National Geographic Society’s multimillion-dollar research project to collect DNA from indigenous groups around the world in the hopes of reconstructing humanity’s ancient migrations has come to a standstill on its home turf in North America.
Billed as the “moon shot of anthropology,” the Genographic Project intends to collect 100,000 indigenous DNA samples. But for four months, the project has been on hold here as it scrambles to address questions raised by a group that oversee
