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
June 26, 2011
A UN-backed tribunal in Cambodia is due to hold its first hearing in the trial of four former top Khmer Rouge leaders.
The defendants include the "number two" in Pol Pot's regime, Nuon Chea.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 26, 2011
An attempt to have the Mona Lisa return from France for a temporary visit to Italy has been dismissed by gallery chiefs.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 26, 2011
A Royal palace on Corfu where the Duke of Edinburgh was born will this week emerge as the focus point of protests on the Greek islands against the sale of the national heritage to pay off the country's debts.
Mon Repos Palace in Corfu, where a museum records the site as the birthplace of Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, 90 years ago, is one of several state-owned properties included the package. The firesale will beaches, casinos, palaces, airports and marinas auctioned off around Greece.
Source: Huffington Post
June 26, 2011
What is believed to be the only surviving authenticated portrait of Billy the Kid went up for auction in Denver on Saturday and sold for $2.3 million.The tintype on Saturday evening went to private collector William Koch at Brian Lebel's 22nd Annual Old West Show & Auction, where auction spokeswoman Melissa McCracken said the image of the 1800s outlaw was the most expensive piece ever sold at the event.A 15 percent fee was added to the bidding price, making the selling price more than $2.6 million. Organizers had expected it could fetch between $300,000 and $400,000.The tintype is believed to have been taken in 1879 or 1880 in Fort Sumner, N.M. It shows the outlaw dressed in a rumpled hat and layers of clothes, including a bulky sweater. He's standing with one hand resting on a Winchester carbine on his right side and a Colt revolver holstered on his left side.Tintypes were an early form of photography that used metal plates. They are reverse images, and the Billy the Kid tintype led to the mistaken belief that Billy the Kid was a lefty. The myth inspired the 1958 movie "The Left Handed Gun", starring Paul Newman as Billy....
Source: CNN.com
June 24, 2011
(CNN) -- The soldiers came for her at night. They took the girl to a barrack and forced her to watch a woman get raped.The drunken men then set loose a dog to rip off the raped woman's breasts. Blood was everywhere. The woman passed out.The young witness was next. Five soldiers held her down and took turns raping and sodomizing her. They spilled alcohol on her. They laughed. They said they'd kill her. She didn't yet have breasts for the dog to attack.
Source: NYT
June 23, 2011
Solved: the case of the missing moon dust.The United States attorney’s office for eastern Missouri announced Thursday that it had recovered government property stolen more than 40 years ago: a triangular nub of transparent tape an eighth of an inch wide.
Source: NYT
June 23, 2011
BERLIN — Just 20 years ago, German lawmakers hunkered down for a passionate 10-hour debate to make a decision that seemed as momentous as it was a no-brainer: Should the capital of the newly reunified country remain where it was — in Bonn on the Rhine — or move back to its historic, eastern location on the Spree, amid the monuments and mixed memories of Berlin?...
Source: BBC
June 22, 2011
The remains of 17 bodies found at the bottom of a medieval well in England could have been victims of persecution, new evidence has suggested.The most likely explanation is that those down the well were Jewish and were probably murdered or forced to commit suicide, according to scientists who used a combination of DNA analysis, carbon dating and bone chemical studies in their investigation.The skeletons date back to the 12th or 13th Centuries at a time when Jewish people were facing persecution throughout Europe.
Source: CBC
June 22, 2011
An archeological dig in Grand-Pré is digging deeper into the history of the early European occupation of Nova Scotia.Aaron Taylor, a grad student from Saint Mary's University in Halifax, has been working with others to find bits and pieces of clues in a mystery of the Acadian people expelled by the English in 1755.There is now evidence that English immigrants from Connecticut probably built new homes on old Acadian stone foundations just a few years following the expulsion.
Source: Andina
June 22, 2011
The archaeological pieces, taken from Machu Picchu nearly a century ago for research at Yale University, arrived Wednesday morning to Cusco which were received by political, military and religious authorities. These Inca artifacts landed at Alejandro Velasco Astete airport at around 08.20 hours (13.02 GMT) in an airplane of the Peruvian Air force (FAP) along with Peru’s Culture Minister Juan Ossio.
Source: BBC
June 23, 2011
Experts are planning to record and protect exposed Roman masonry at a fort in south Cumbria.The work on Ambleside Roman fort at Waterhead, is being undertaken by the National Trust, with the help of volunteer archaeologists.Masons will remove the turf capping from the low walls of the fort, rake out earth, then mix and apply lime mortar to create a hard wearing cap.The work is part of a wider scheme called "Romans by the River"....
Source: BBC
June 23, 2011
Celebrations are due to be held in Stirling to mark the 150th anniversary of the start of work on the Wallace Monument.On this day in 1861 more than 100,000 people thronged Stirling and the Abbey Craig as a ceremony took place to lay the foundation stone.Paid for by public subscription, the monument went over budget and it was eight years before it was opened.More recently, the Wallace monument has attracted over 130,000 visitors a year....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 23, 2011
An amateur model-maker has been banned from selling tiny figures of Hitler on eBay after the online auction site decided it could be classed as Nazi propaganda.Philip Fursman has been buying plain models from a UK company, painting them and then selling them on the eBay website for a number of years for a small profit.But Mr Fursman from Card, Somerset, fell foul of the site's policies when he tried to sell a model of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.However, similar models of Osama bin Laden used in war games are allowed.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 23, 2011
The painting of Farrah Fawcett seen hanging over Ryan O'Neal's bed in a reality television show was, for most viewers, a sign of his enduring love for the late actress.But to beneficiaries of her will it was evidence that O'Neal was in possession of a $30million (£18.8million) Andy Warhol portrait that has not been seen since her death two years ago.Warhol made two portraits of the actress in 1980, both of which were shown in the documentary Farrah's Story, which charted the Charlie's Angels star's courageous battle with cancer.
Source: Think Progress
June 21, 2011
According to a national test released last week, “just 13 percent of high schools seniors” demonstrated proficiency in U.S. history. Speaking to the Story County GOP Central Committee in Ames, Iowa, presidential candidate Rick Santorum attributed the poor scores to a leftist plot to keep students in the dark about U.S. history so they don’t learn American values:
Source: NYT
June 22, 2011
ON April 29, 1945, Allied captives at Stalag Luft VII A, a prisoner-of-war camp in southeast Germany, heard the rumbling of artillery in the distance. Lt. Charles B. Woehrle, 28, of the United States Army Air Forces, peered though the barbed wire fence to the town of Moosburg in the Isar River valley below. Plumes of white smoke rose above the village.Gaunt, unwashed and lice-ridden, Lieutenant Woehrle checked the new Patek Philippe watch on his wrist and noted the time. The watch was stainless steel — an uncommon luxury at the time — with a hand-stitched alligator strap....
Source: Jewish Daily Forward
June 22, 2011
The mystery surrounding President Washington’s famous 1790 letter guaranteeing religious liberty in America continues.As the Forward revealed last week, Washington’s letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, R.I., disappeared from public view almost a decade ago, after the B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum, where the letter had been displayed for half a century, moved to a smaller location and put the document into an art storage facility in suburban Maryland.
Source: AP
June 22, 2011
Some of the earliest Americans turn out to have been artists.
A bone fragment at least 13,000 years old, with the carved image of a mammoth or mastodon, has been discovered in Florida, a new study reports.
While prehistoric art depicting animals with trunks has been found in Europe, this may be the first in the Western Hemisphere, researchers report Wednesday in the Journal of Archaeological Science....
Source: BBC
June 22, 2011
Off the track beaten by most Holy Land tourists lies one of the richest archaeological sites in a country full of them: the walled port of Acre, where the busy alleys of an Ottoman-era town cover a uniquely intact Crusader city now being rediscovered.
Preparing to open a new subterranean section to the public, workers cleaned stones this week in an arched passageway underground.
All were last used by residents in 1291, the year a Muslim army from Egypt defeated Acre's Christian garrison and leveled its remains....
Source: BBC
June 22, 2011
US First Lady Michelle Obama has paid tribute to apartheid victims on a visit to South Africa's township of Soweto.
She was speaking to young women from across Africa in a church that became a landmark in the 1976 Soweto uprising.
Mrs Obama said the successful fight against apartheid as well as the US civil rights movement should inspire them to overcome the problems of today, such as HIV or violence against women.
On Monday, Mrs Obama met the former South African President Nelson Mandela....
