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 (UK)
October 24, 2006
For more than 70 years, Australians have been convinced American gangsters murdered their champion racehorse, Phar Lap, who died suddenly and agonisingly at the peak of his career while preparing to take on the US racing scene.
Now their suspicions of foul play appear to have been backed by science, with medical tests suggesting the five-year-old chestnut gelding was poisoned with arsenic.
Phar Lap, who triumphed in 37 of his 51 races, including the 1930 Melbourne C
Source: Reuters
October 25, 2006
Fifty years after Dick Clark first hosted the popular television show that came to be called ''American Bandstand,'' he's ready to let go of some of the rock'n'roll items he's collected.
Thousands of pieces in Clark's memorabilia collection are set to be auctioned on December 5 and 6 by Guernsey's Auction House in New York.
One of the top items is the microphone Clark used for 31 years while hosting the live music and dance show featuring artists from Jerry Lee Lewis t
Source: NYT
October 25, 2006
LONDON, Oct. 24 — For the last week, scores of scholars, museum curators and collectors have been discreetly filing into a well-guarded gallery of the Bonhams auction house here to admire 14 richly decorated silver objects that lay buried for 1,500 years in a forgotten corner of what was once the Roman Empire.
The excitement is palpable. Only once before — for one brief morning in 1990 in New York — has the so-called Sevso Treasure been displayed in public. Now the solid silver plat
Source: WaPo
October 24, 2006
One of the Watergate offices that was burglarized 34 years ago, setting off the scandal that led to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon, is available for lease as new owners plan a renovation of the office building and shops.
The office, Suite 610, was one of four suites occupied by the Democratic National Committee in 1972, which Republican operatives entered to plant eavesdropping equipment.
"It's a very recognizable building," said Andrew T. Felbe
Source: Times Online (UK)
October 25, 2006
THE cultural treasures of Iraq — the birthplace of writing, codified law, mathematics, medicine and astronomy — are being obliterated as looters take advantage of the country’s bloody chaos.
Fourteen of the world’s leading archaeologists have written to the President and Prime Minister of the country demanding immediate action to stem the vandalism after seeing photographs of sites left pockmarked by enormous craters.
Among examples in the letter, seen yesterday by Th
Source: AP
October 23, 2006
The sprightly Frenchwoman wandered around downtown Algiers, looking for the church where she first took communion as a young girl. It had become a mosque. Her old school was gone too.
Joelle Simon's recent trip to Algeria was an emotional, sometimes painful, journey into memories of the life torn from her more than 40 years ago, when France walked away from the north African country after a bitter eight-year war of independence.
The scars, both for many former colonia
Source: Allafrica.com
October 23, 2006
A Catholic priest, Father Jean-Marie Vianney Uwizeyeyezu, head of the parish of Kaduha in southern Rwanda, has been jailed to 12 years for "having downplayed the genocide", his lawyer said.
"He has received a sentence of 12 years in prison plus a fee from the Court of First Instance for having, in their words, downplayed the genocide", Mr Protais Mutembe, told Hirondelle News Agency. The priest was found guilty by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda si
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
October 22, 2006
Seventy-year-old Pacifica resident Les Mohacsy stared at a black-and-white photograph of a barricade built out of cobblestones in Budapest's Moricz Zsigmond Circle during the 1956 revolution. He was looking for the part of the barricade that he built.
"A tank appeared at the top of the street," he recalled of a day early in the uprising, when Soviet tanks were few and unprepared for the resistance they encountered. "They saw a pipe in the cobblestones, and they thoug
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
October 23, 2006
Mar Theodosius, West Bank -- Until today, the main claim to fame of this sleepy monastery on the edge of the Judean wilderness was the tradition that the Three Wise Men slept in the caves here after visiting the infant Jesus in Bethlehem.
But a new book claims that the Greek Orthodox Monastery Mar Theodosius was the last hiding place of one of the greatest treasures of antiquity: the gold and silver vessels of the first century B.C. Temple in Jerusalem, the central shrine of Judaism
Source: WaPo
October 24, 2006
Bill Clinton used to claim that Al Gore was the most influential vice president ever, seemingly for Gore's role in breaking an ashtray on "Late Show With David Letterman." That judgment now looks laughable. Dick Cheney has unarguably eclipsed Gore to become the most powerful vice president in U.S. history. His role in helping to formulate the U.S. response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks will ensure that he survives in history as more than the answer to a trivia question: the
Source: NYT
October 24, 2006
For years, there had been talk of building a civil rights museum in Atlanta, but no decisions had been made as to where it would be, what it would include and how much it would cost.
One of those questions was answered today when the chairman and chief executive officer of the Coca-Cola Company, Neville Isdell, said it would donate 2.5 acres of land for the project in the heart of the downtown tourist district.
The land, which Mr. Isdell said was valued at $8 million to
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 20, 2006
President George W Bush last night conceded for the first time that there were parallels between the current fighting in Iraq and the beginning of the end of the Vietnam War.
Mr Bush was asked in a television interview whether he agreed with a newspaper columnist that the current bloodshed in Iraq may be the equivalent to the 1968 Tet Offensive, generally considered a key turning point in the American war in Vietnam.
“He could be right,” Mr Bush said. “There’s certainly
Source: NYT
October 24, 2006
Eager for precision in a field notorious for ambiguity and
frustration, curators at top museums in Europe and the United States
have long reached for the instruments of nuclear science to hit
treasures of art with invisible rays. The resulting clues have helped
answer vexing questions of provenance, age and authenticity.
Now such insights are going global. The International Atomic Energy
Agency, a United Nations unit best known for fighting the spread of
nuclear arms, is
Source: WaPo
October 21, 2006
If 40 percent of Americans refuse to believe that humans evolved from earlier hominids, how many will accept that the book we know as the Bible evolved from earlier texts and was not handed down, in toto, by God in its present form?
The fossil evidence for human evolution is permanently on display at the American Museum of Natural History. Hard evidence that the Bible took its present shape over centuries will be on display for the next 11 weeks, from today through Jan. 7, across th
Source: Indyweek.com
October 18, 2006
n life, Eli Merritt would have never shared a table with William Richardson Davie and Cornelia Phillips Spencer.
Yet on the opening page of the University of North Carolina's new virtual museum, a photograph of Merritt, a college servant in the 1880s and likely a slave before that, sits beside portraits of UNC founder Davie (1756-1820) and Spencer (1826-1908), an ardent university supporter who vehemently opposed giving blacks the vote after the Civil War.
Merritt's inc
Source: Transcript from This Week (ABC News) with George Stephanopoulos
October 22, 2006
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (ABC NEWS)
(Off-camera) You know you said at your press conference last week you joked about all the books being written -
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH (UNITED STATES)
Yeah.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (ABC NEWS)
(Off-camera) - about your Administration. Have you read any of them?
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH (UNITED STATES)
No.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (ABC NEWS)
(Off-camera
Source: Press Release -- Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
October 12, 2006
On Thursday, October 12, at the Academy of American Studies, a public high school in Long Island City, students, educators, and elected officials participated in a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new Gilder Lehrman Research Center, a student-run history research center. The Academy of American Studies, the flagship school of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, is the first history high school in the U.S.
The center, located in a renovated classroom in the school, will
Source: UVA Cavalier
October 24, 2006
Monticello has recently created an electronic resource called the Monticello Plantation Database, which contains a searchable catalog of Thomas Jefferson's slave records. The database is available on the Monticello Web site. The project, which began in 1996, was organized by Lucia "Cinder" Stanton, Shannon Senior Historian at Monticello. Stanton said she and a team of University graduate students compiled the information from Thomas Jefferson's "Farm Book"
Source: Times (London)
October 24, 2006
From Herodotus and Homer to the warriors of Ancient Greece the mystic utterances from the Oracle of Delphi were regarded as sacrosanct. But now the hugely influential pronouncements of the oracle are said by Greek and Italian archaeologists to have been the result of oxygen deficiencies in the priestesses’ brains.Delphi, which draws tourists by the thousand each year, lies on the almost sheer side of Mount Parnassus in central Greece. Great fissures in the cliff overlooking
Source: Armenian News Network
October 24, 2006
Switzerland's justice minister has called on the Swiss government to reverse a law which makes historical revisionism illegal. Minister Christoph Blocher is on a campaign to change the law, according to the Neue Zuercher Zeitung (NZZ) newspaper - even if it will impinge upon the sensitivities of minority groups, including
the country's Jewish communities.Blocher claims that freedom of expression is more important than protecting the sensibilities of minority groups, N
