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
July 29, 2011
A teenager thought to have been the first victim of the Titanic has finally been given a headstone on his grave.
Samuel Scott, 15, fractured his skull whilst working on the ship in 1910. His body has since lain in an unmarked grave in Belfast City Cemetery.
However, a new headstone was unveiled there on Saturday as part of the Feile an Phobail festival....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 1, 2011
Windsor Castle's world-famous round tower has been reopened to the public today for the first time in almost four decades.
Visitors to the landmark, which has dominated the Berkshire skyline for more than 800 years, will be able to walk up its 200 steps to the top of the structure.
The building was underpinned to prevent subsidence and later converted into office space for the Royal Archives.
The tower is part of a complex of buildings that make up the historic Windsor Castle site....
Source: AP
August 1, 2011
A court has exempted Poland's last communist leader Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski from two trials due to his ill health.
The Warsaw regional court's press office told The Associated Press on Monday that the 88-year-old retired general has been taken off the lists of defendants on trials over the 1981 imposition of martial law in Poland and over the shooting deaths of shipyard workers in 1970, when he was defense minister.
It means separate trials will have to be opened against him if he is ever to go before the court again...
Source: NYT
July 29, 2011
A federal judge in Washington has ordered the release of hundreds of pages of President Richard M. Nixon’s 1975 testimony about Watergate. The judge, Royce C. Lamberth III of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, wrote in a decision issued Friday that “nearly 40 years later, Watergate continues to capture both scholarly and public interest.”...
Source: BBC
July 28, 2011
Maritime archaeologists have investigated ways for World War II tanks at the bottom of the sea near the Isle of Wight to be protected.
The tanks and other equipment were being carried on a landing craft which capsized and lost its cargo as it was heading for the D-Day landings in 1944.
They sit on the seabed between the east of the island and Selsey, West Sussex.
Hampshire and Wight Trust for Maritime Archaeology is looking at how land legislation can be applied to the sea.
The project has been funded by English Heritage.... .....
Source: MSNBC
July 29, 2011
As ancient civilizations across the Middle East collapsed, possibly in response to a global drought about 4,200 years ago, archaeologists have discovered that one settlement in Syria not only survived, but expanded.
Their next question is — why did Tell Qarqur, a site in northwest Syria, grow at a time when cities across the Middle East were being abandoned?
Tell Qarqur was occupied for about 10,000 years, between 8,500 B.C. and A.D. 1350. While excavations have taken place off and on for nearly three decades now, only a small portion of the city has been excavated so far. The long history of the site makes digging down to the 4,200-year-old remains difficult.
Source: BBC
July 29, 2011
A collection of silver and pewter items, some 350 years old, has been stolen from a Derbyshire church.
St Peter's Church, on Pindale Road in Hope, was broken into between 2 July and 27 July, police said.
About 15 items, dating back to between 1662 and 1970 and including two silver chalices and a 17th Century pewter plate, were taken from a safe.
Police said the items, which are used for special services, were worth thousands of pounds....
Source: BBC
July 29, 2011
Human remains have been found in South Korea, which could be those of a Gloucestershire regiment soldier who fought in the Korean War in 1951.
Tests are now being carried out by the UK's Joint Casualty and Compassionate Centre (JCCC) to see if the soldier is British.
Bodies of several British soldiers who fought in Korea have never been found.
The discovery was made in October, but details of the find have only just been released.
Sue Raftree, of the JCCC based at RAF Innsworth in Gloucester, which is part of the MOD's Service Personnel and Veterans Agency (SPVA), said it was too early to say for certain if the soldier was British....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 29, 2011
The secret grand jury testimony of President Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal was ordered to be released on Friday by a federal judge because of its significance in American history.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth granted a request by historian Stanley Kutler, who has written several books about Nixon and Watergate, and others to unseal the testimony given June 23 and 24 in 1975.
Nixon was questioned about the political scandal during the 1970s that resulted from the break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington.
The scandal caused Nixon to leave office Aug. 9, 1974, the only resignation of a U.S. president.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 29, 2011
George W Bush says his blank reaction to the first news of the Sept 11 attacks while US president was a conscious decision to project an aura of calm in a crisis.
In a rare interview with the National Geographic Channel, Mr Bush reflected on what was going through his mind when he was informed that a second passenger jet had hit New York's World Trade Center.
Mr Bush was visiting a Florida classroom at the time, and the incident - which was caught by television cameras - has often been used by critics to ridicule his apparently dazed response to the attack
Mr Bush said he could see journalists at the back of the classroom getting the news on their own cellphones "and it was like watching a silent movie." ...........
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 30, 2011
Immortalised by Edward Woodward on the silver screen, the fate of 'Breaker' Morant and his two cohorts is widely known - sentenced to death by firing squad by the British military.
Now descendants of the executed Boer War soldier and his co-accused have added their voices to growing calls for a judicial inquiry in Australia into the trial of the men 109 years ago.
For several years campaigners have been calling for an independent review into the convictions of Harry Morant and fellow soldiers Peter Handcock and George Witton.
The men were convicted in 1902 of shooting 12 Boer prisoners of war.
Source: AP
July 29, 2011
Long before Rosa Parks was hailed as the "mother of the civil rights movement," she wrote a detailed and harrowing account of nearly being raped by a white neighbor who employed her as a housekeeper in 1931.
The six-page essay, written in her own hand many years after the incident, is among thousands of her personal items currently residing in the Manhattan warehouse and cramped offices of Guernsey's Auctioneers, which has been selected by a Michigan court to find an institution to buy and preserve the complete archive.
It helps explain what triggered Parks' lifelong campaign against the ritualistic rape of black women by white men, said McGuire, whose recent book "At the Dark End of the Street" examines how economic intimidation and sexual violence were used to derail the freedom movement and how it went unpunished during the Jim Crow era...
Source: Boston Globe
July 27, 2011
WASHINGTON - The Army long ago presented the nation’s most hallowed award, the Medal of Honor, to a Civil War soldier from New York for capturing Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s eldest son. But sometimes history calls for a bit of revision.Now, 146 years after the capture, the Army has agreed to take another look at whether it made a mistake and whether a young private from the Berkshires deserved the honor instead. Regiment accounts provide reason to think Private David D. White, of Cheshire, nabbed Lee during a barbaric battle in the wilds of Virginia in the war’s waning days.The Army’s unusual reconsideration is a victory for White’s descendants, particularly his great-great-grandson, Frank E. White Jr., who has worked for decades to set the record straight. He recently enlisted the aid of Massachusetts lawmakers in the effort.In reviewing the case, the Army also casts a light on a key battle that is largely unknown, except among historians and Civil War buffs who note its frenzied viciousness, even in the context of a war known for its brutality....
Source: Steven Aftergood
July 27, 2011
Last month the National Security Agency announced the declassification of various historic records as evidence of its “commitment to meeting the requirements” of President Obama’s policy on openness and transparency. Among the newly declassified records was a 200 year old publication on cryptology. (“NSA Declassifies 200 Year Old Report,” Secrecy News, June 9, 2011.)NSA listed the 1809 study as a “highlight” of the new releases in a press statement, and the National Archives featured it in a promotional blog posting. But upon inspection, it turns out that the newly released document was already in the public domain and freely available online.Instead of providing cause for celebration or congratulation, the NSA “release” is a disturbing sign of futility and irrelevance in the nation’s declassification program.
Source: WaPo
July 26, 2011
Investigators are probing whether a prominent historian and an associate accused of stealing valuable documents from the Maryland Historical Society also took papers from the National Archives and a handful of other libraries, a prosecutor said in court Tuesday.The revelation came as a Baltimore City Circuit Judge set bail for Barry H. Landau, 63, at $500,000 and Jason Savedoff, 24, at $750,000. The pair were charged earlier this month with taking 60 historic documents. The papers included some signed by Abraham Lincoln, inaugural ball invitations and a commemoration of the Washington Monument, according to court documents.On July 9, Landau and Savedoff were arrested after an employee at the Baltimore archive saw Savedoff slip a document in a portfolio and walk out of the library, according to court documents. Police later found 60 documents stashed in Savedoff’s laptop bag in a locker, according to court documents. Landau had signed the documents out, authorities said....
Source: ArmeniaDiaspora.com
July 25, 2011
A Turkish ultranationalist was sentenced to 23 years in prison on Monday after being convicted of assassinating prominent ethnic Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in Istanbul in 2007. A juvenile court in Turkey initially handed a life sentence to Ogun Samast, 21, but then reduced it because he was a minor at the time of the crime committed in broad daylight.Ever since his arrest in January 2007, Samast has admitted shooting and killing Dink outside the Istanbul offices of the latter’s bilingual newspaper “Agos.
Source: BBC
July 25, 2011
An archaeologist believes a wall carving in a south Wales cave could be Britain's oldest example of rock art.
The faint scratchings of a speared reindeer are believed to have been carved by a hunter-gatherer in the Ice Age more than 14,000 years ago.
The archaeologist who found the carving on the Gower peninsula, Dr George Nash, called it "very, very exciting."
Experts are working to verify the discovery, although its exact location is being kept secret for now.
Dr Nash, a part-time academic for Bristol University, made the discovery while at the caves in September 2010...
Source: Discovery News
July 25, 2011
A mysterious stone statue, possibly the portrait of the great Inca emperor Pachacuti, once stood in Machu Picchu, according to archival research.
Likely placed against a round stone wall on one of Machu Picchu's terraces, the statue had already disappeared by the time American explorer Hiram Bingham climbed the steep jungle slope to be faced with an archaeological wonder exactly a century ago on July 24, 1911.
Bingham, who has been credited as one possible inspiration for the "Indiana Jones" character, saw "a remarkably large and well-preserved abandoned city " perched some 8,000 feet in the clouds "in a wonderfully picturesque position," he wrote in the March 26, 1914, issue of Nature.
Source: Live Science
July 25, 2011
A war and inferno that apparently destroyed one ancient society while dramatically elevating another in Peru is now shedding light on how states emerge in the world.
Scientists investigated ruins in the Titicaca basin in southern Peru, home to a number of thriving ancient societies more than 2 millennia ago. They focused on two prominent states in the region — Taraco, based along the Ramis River, and Pukara, in the grassland pampas.
Source: BBC
July 25, 2011
Parts of a German bomber shot down in the Battle of Britain have been found in a bungalow's garden in Somerset.
Engine parts of the Heinkel were left 5ft (1.5m) underground in Puriton for over 70 years archaeologists have said.
The site is being excavated after original photographs were used to discover the plane's exact whereabouts.
At the time, the main body of the bomber was recovered by the RAF but the impact of the crash meant some of the parts broke off as it was pulled out of the ground.
It is these parts which are now being excavated by the enthusiasts who hope theY will eventually be displayed in a museum to give a fresh insight into the Battle of Britain...
