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: BBC
November 9, 2011
An excavation at the site of a 1941 Spitfire crash in a bog in the Irish Republic uncovered huge, remarkably preserved chunks of plane and six Browning machine guns. After 70 years buried in peat could they be made to fire? They certainly could, writes Dan Snow.It was June in Donegal, when we stood on a windswept hillside in hard hats and high-vis surrounded by a crowd of locals and watched by an Irish army unit while we filmed an archaeological excavation.This was the place where, in 1941, Roland "Bud" Wolfe, an American pilot flying a British RAF Spitfire, paid for by a wealthy Canadian industrialist, had experienced engine failure while flying over the neutral Republic of Ireland....
Source: Discovery News
November 10, 2011
Archaeologists digging in Rome's Palatine Hill have found the remains of a large house that they believe might be the birthplace of Rome's first emperor, Augustus.Announced at the end of a 10-year excavation, the finding was partly uncovered in 2006, when a team led by Clementina Panella, a professor at the University of Rome La Sapienza, unearthed part of a corridor and other fragments of "a very ancient aristocratic house" near the Arch of Titus on the northeastern side of the Palatine.Extensive excavation in the past five years (founded by the Sapienza University and the Banca Nazionale delle Comunicazioni) and historical cross-checks have provided further weight to support the hypothesis that the house belonged to Gaius Octavius, Augustus' father."We have unearthed more than 10 rooms, beautiful mosaic floors and frescoed walls," Panella told Discovery News....
Source: WaPo
November 12, 2011
Of all the places you’d expect to find Bill O’Reilly’s “Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination That Changed America Forever,” Ford’s Theatre, the site of the dreadful act, should rank at the top. But you’d do better to search for the history bestseller on Amazon.com, because you won’t find it at the theater’s store.For a history of the assassination — an “unsanitized and uncompromising . . . no spin American story,” as O’Reilly and coauthor Martin Dugard put it, “Killing Lincoln” suffers from factual errors and a lack of documentation, according to a study conducted by Rae Emerson, the deputy superintendent of Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site, which is a unit of the National Park Service. Emerson’s review recommended that the book not be sold at Ford Theatre’s store.
Source: The Atlantic
November 14, 2011
Many ethnic Armenians who read ex-US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's recently published memoirs ("No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington") are spitting fire over her descriptions of her battles with the US-based Diaspora Armenian lobby. Both in 1991 as a presidential aide (to then US President George Bush) and in 2007 as secretary of state (under then President George W. Bush), Rice worked to defeat the congressional push for recognizing the World-War I-era slaughter of ethnic Armenians by Ottoman Turks as genocide.While acknowledging the brutality and the scale of the bloodshed, Rice writes that US recognition of the act as genocide would have antagonized Turkey, a key strategic ally for the US. She argues that she was guided by the raison d'état that labels are best left to historians....
Source: Guardian (UK)
November 14, 2011
Ian Paisley has retired from ministry in the fundamentalist Protestant church he founded 60 years ago.The 85-year-old has stepped down from his role as a minister in the Free Presbyterian Church.Paisley told the Martyrs Memorial Church he helped build in East Belfast of his decision on Sunday. He intends to devote his time to writing his autobiography.The former first minister of Northern Ireland founded his breakaway church in 1951 after a split with the main Presbyterian church over its embrace of ecumenism and greater links with the Roman Catholic church....
Source: NYT
November 14, 2011
LONDON — Before he died of Lou Gehrig’s disease in 2010, the historian Tony Judt recalled childhood days just after World War II in a debilitated Britain that was slowly ceding its empire and its pre-eminence.“Clothes were rationed until 1949, cheap and simple ‘utility furniture’ until 1952, food until 1954,” he wrote in a memoir, concluding that austerity in “that bare-bones age” was “not just an economic condition: it aspired to a public ethic.”It was not just in Britain.A continent was reeling, its cities and industries ruined. As Soviet Communism threatened to encroach and the cold war loomed, Western Europe awaited the salvation of America’s Marshall Plan. Cars were few and small, vacations modest, belts tight.As it confronts its massive debt problem, though, and a new austerity threatens to become its default setting, Europe seems to have lost sight of the fact that it has been there before; that the baby boom generation found its roots in postwar hardship; that, as Mr. Judt suggested, the huge affluence of more recent years could barely have been imagined as people struggled to shake off the gloom of war....
Source: NYT
November 10, 2011
For 11 hours of secret grand jury testimony 36 years ago, Richard M. Nixon, a disgraced former president, fenced with prosecutors over his role in the Watergate scandals, bemoaned politics as a dirty business played by both sides and testily — as he described his own demeanor — suggested he was the victim of a special prosecutor’s office loaded with Democrats.The testimony, which Nixon presumably thought would always remain secret, was released by the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, Calif., on Thursday in response to an order by a judge. The transcripts offered a remarkable portrait of Nixon after he left office: bitter at his disgrace and cynical about politics. He presented himself as a victim of governmental abuses by his enemies during his long career in politics, and said that prosecutors, with an eye to ingratiating themselves with the Washington media “and the Georgetown set,” were out to destroy him.“In politics, some pretty rough tactics are used,” he said. “We deplore them all.”
Source: NYT
November 10, 2011
CHÂTEAU-THIERRY, France — The remains of some of the last American doughboys of World War I to be identified were found just a few years ago, buried in a vegetable garden in this little town, wine bottles clasped in their crossed arms. They had died of their wounds in a field hospital set up in an adjoining farmhouse.Because dog tags rusted so quickly, soldiers created their own unofficial method for future identification: They wrote a note identifying the dead, with the date and manner of death, and two comrades of higher rank signed it as witnesses. They then stuck the note in an empty bottle, corked it and buried it in the arms of the corpse, said David Atkinson, superintendent of the sweeping Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, at the foot of the hill where the Battle of Belleau Wood was fought, a site sacred to the Marine Corps.
Source: ABC News
November 10, 2011
Rome is ground zero for what could be a global financial catastrophe.
Italy’s financial mess is massive. The country is $2.5 trillion in debt, bigger than its entire economy. So the Italian government is looking for ways to fund its debts and everything is on the table, including some of the country’s iconic landmarks.
Who can forget Michelangelo’s David or that leaning tower in Pisa. In the past few years, some of these monuments have become billboards. From the Roman Colosseum to the canals of Venice, nothing appears to be off limits.
The money-making deal wrapping the Bridge of Sighs earned more than 2 million dollars from companies like Bulgari. The advertisement was recently removed.
Source: BBC
November 10, 2011
The US National Archives has released the grand jury testimony of former President Richard Nixon, made after the Watergate scandal forced him to resign. Jurors asked about almost 19 missing minutes of a key conversation between Nixon and his chief of staff. The former president swore it was an accident that tapes had been erased, saying "I practically blew my stack." The secret testimony was given in June 1975 and released by order of a US judge following a historian's request....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
October 30, 2011
David Cameron faces fresh humiliation at the hands of Nicolas Sarkozy after the French president stole a march on the British in preparations for the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War.The Prime Minister was last night accused of ‘dragging his feet’ over the important commemorations in 2014 and letting the French race ahead with spectacular anniversary plans.The Mail on Sunday can reveal they will include a £25 million state-of-the-art Museum Of The Great War to be announced by Mr Sarkozy on Remembrance Day next month.The French president, who last week told Mr Cameron to ‘shut up’ and stop interfering in the eurozone crisis talks, is also pledging millions for other events across France.Even Belgium is years ahead, with firm proposals including a memorial garden in London made from soil from the battlefields of Flanders....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
October 9, 2011
It is one of the most decisive and famous battles ever fought on English soil.The Battle of Hastings in 1066 – long accepted as taking place in the fields around Battle Abbey a few miles north of the Sussex seaside town – launched the Norman Conquest.Generations of schoolchildren have been taught the story of how England's King Harold was killed by a Norman arrow through the eye – and thousands of visitors every year walk the famous battlefield.But now the history books may have to be rewritten after a claim that the bloody encounter between the armies of Harold and William the Conqueror did not take place at Battle at all....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
November 6, 2011
They are a hidden maze of tunnels where a bloody underground war was played out in terrifying darkness and where the bodies of 28 heroes lie entombed forever. Now, after lying practically undisturbed since troops laid down their arms in 1918 and just days before Remembrance Sunday, the secrets and tragedies of the labyrinth are finally being revealed thanks to work by archaeologists.Since January, the Anglo-French La Boiselle Study Group has been working with historians to open up and explore the tunnels to discover more about the lives of the men lost in them....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
November 9, 2011
The mysterious deaths gripped the nation back in the 1920s and 30s.More than 20 people linked to the opening of Tutankhamun's burial chamber in Luxor in 1923 died in bizarre circumstances, six of them in London.A frenzied public blamed the 'Curse of Tutankhamun' and speculated on the supernatural powers of the ancient Egyptians.But a historian now claims the deaths in Britain were the work of a notorious satanist, Aleister Crowley....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
November 9, 2011
An unpublished story by Charlotte Bronte is expected to sell for £300,000 at auction next month.The 4,000-word piece is handwritten on 19 pages each barely larger than a credit card and needs a magnifying glass to be read properly.Written in 1830 when she was only 14, Bronte's story contains scenes which bear a striking resemblance to Jane Eyre, her novel published 17 years later....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
November 10, 2011
In her heyday she helped destroy a German battleship, supported the D-Day landings and survived a blast from an enemy mine. But HMS Belfast sank without trace this week when she was airbrushed out of official London Olympic posters because she ‘got in the way’.Veterans expressed their disgust at the step yesterday, saying it insulted the memory of those who died in the war in the run-up to Remembrance Sunday and reflected embarrassment at our military past....
Source: The History of the Ancient World
November 8, 2011
Satellite imagery has uncovered new evidence of a lost civilisation of the Sahara in Libya’s south-western desert wastes that will help re-write the history of the country.The fall of Gaddafi has opened the way for archaeologists to explore the country’s pre-Islamic heritage, so long ignored under his regime.Using satellites and air-photographs to identify the remains in one of the most inhospitable parts of the desert, a British team has discovered more than 100 fortified farms and villages with castle-like structures and several towns, most dating between AD 1-500.These “lost cities” were built by a little-known ancient civilisation called the Garamantes, whose lifestyle and culture was far more advanced and historically significant than the ancient sources suggested....
Source: AFP
November 10, 2011
Infamous Australian outlaw Ned Kelly has had his final wish granted 131 years after being executed, with officials agreeing to release his remains so he can be buried with his family.Anthony Griffiths, a grandson of Kelly's sister, said Wednesday that Victorian state attorney general Robert Clark had decided to return his bullet-ridden bones to his descendants so they could meet his last request."That's very welcome news indeed," Griffiths told reporters."Our family, like every family, likes to be able to bury their own family members. Our aim is to give him a dignified funeral, like any family would."...
Source: History.com
November 9, 2011
Recently, the famed astronomer Edwin Hubble has been accused of strong-arming a translator into trimming key findings from a competitor’s paper more than 80 years ago. Did he really use censorship to secure all the credit for discovering that the universe is expanding? Not according to astrophysicist Mario Livio, who describes the detective work he undertook to exonerate Hubble in the current issue of Nature.Who first determined that the universe is expanding? Traditionally, the credit goes to the American astronomer Edwin P. Hubble, who in 1929 reported that other galaxies appeared to be speeding away from us. He also described a correlation between their distances from Earth and the velocities at which they were moving, which is determined by a cosmic expansion rate now known as the Hubble constant (H). Hubble, who died in 1953, never received a Nobel Prize for one of history’s most significant astronomical discoveries, but he remains a legend in his field and in 1983 was honored with a namesake telescope.
Source: LiveScience
November 7, 2011
LAS VEGAS — A famous trail of footprints once thought to have been left beh
