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: NYT
January 31, 2011
Theirs was a partnership built on vision and pride and rooted in a building at the very heart of black America.
In 2002 the National Black Theater, a cultural anchor of Harlem, invited the owners of Nubian Heritage, a growing beauty-care company with an African pedigree, to invest in its sprawling building at Fifth Avenue and 125th Street.
The theater, created in the turmoil of the civil rights movement, had owned the building for 19 years. But now it faced foreclosure
Source: WaPo
January 30, 2011
The first map of the United States, created in 1784, has been purchased for the record price of $1.8 million by Washington philanthropist David M. Rubenstein, who is lending it to the Library of Congress.
The Abel Buell map, named after the Connecticut cartographer who created it, has been a missing link in the library's vast collection of maps.
Rubenstein, the co-founder and managing director of the Carlyle Group, bought the map at an auction at Christie's in December.
Source: Time.com
January 30, 2011
He had just changed his name and undergone plastic surgery to alter his eyes. All he wanted was to be left alone.
On May 30, 1942, Fred Korematsu was waiting for his girlfriend on a street corner in San Leandro, Calif., a small city near San Francisco. That day was just like any other day, except that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor six months earlier, and anti-Japanese sentiment had reached a frenzy in the U.S. Korematsu, an American-born citizen of Japanese descent, was living in
Source: Ria Novosti
January 30, 2011
Ukrainian communists are collecting funds to restore a statue to Josef Stalin, which was blown up in the Ukrainian city of Zaporzhe on New Year's Eve, UNIAN news agency said.
"[The communists] bring voluntary contributions to join the common cause initiated by the communists and veterans of Zaporzhe," the Communist party's regional committee in Bilopillia, in northeastern Ukraine, said....
Source: Slovak Spectator
January 31, 2011
The former dictator of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, lost his honorary citizenship of Nová Baňa in Banská Bystrica region after 64 years, as the newly-elected municipal council took the decision to withdraw the honorary citizenship from Stalin at its first meeting, the TASR newswire wrote....
Source: Oakland Free Press
January 30, 2011
No one has called for a holiday, but this weekend officially marks the birth of the automobile industry.
For the record, it was 125 years ago that an inventive German named Carl Benz applied for a patent from German officials on Jan. 29, 1886, for a vehicle driven by a small engine. “This marked the birth of the automobile. Mercedes-Benz has since had around 80,000 pioneering inventions patented,” the automaker notes on its website.
Moreover, while some historians might
Source: Russia IC
January 31, 2011
Monument to Victims of Holocaust in Palmniken of 1945 was unveiled in Yantarny Settlement on the Kaliningrad coast of Baltic Sea yesterday.
It was here, on ice and in ice-cold water of Baltic Sea, on the outskirts of Settlement Palmniken, where the Nazi shot down several thousand people - Jewish prisoners of concentration camps and ghettos - on the night of February, 1st, 1945....
Source: Polskie Radio
January 31, 2011
Veteran Polish film director Feliks Falk has said that many women were punished unjustly for charges of collaboration with Nazi Germans during World War II.
Falk discussed the theme in Kielce on Saturday at a special screening of his latest film, Joanna. The movie won two of the top awards at last year's Polish Film Festival in Gdynia....
Source: AP
January 31, 2011
PARIS — A delegation of envoys — including many from Muslim countries — plans to visit the former Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz on Tuesday in a trip billed as the first of its kind.
With U.N. backing, the trip has been organized by The Aladdin Project — a group formed in 2009 to raise awareness about the Holocaust and counter racism, Islamophobia and intolerance....
Source: Boston Unversity
January 31, 2011
...Boston’s infamous Big Dig construction project, which rerouted the city’s central artery, unearthed a trove of archaeological treasures in a 19th-century brothel’s outhouse. Buried there were items of importance to the women who made their living outside the margins of polite society: hairbrushes, medicines, and vaginal syringes used for self-medicating and cleaning.
Now, a team of archaeology students from BU is studying these artifacts to find out what they reveal about how th
Source: Physorg
January 31, 2011
It looked to be a routine excavation of what was thought to be a burial mound. But beneath the mound, archaeologists from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s Museum of Natural History and Archaeology found something more: unusual Bronze Age petroglyphs. 

"We believe these are very special in a Norwegian context," says museum researcher and project manager Anne Haug.
The excavation in Stjordal, just north of Trondheim, was necessitated
Source: Washington Post
January 30, 2011
Archaeologists expressed deep concern on Sunday that many of Egypt's historical treasures were threatened by looters in the wake of the nation's uprising, while Egypt's top antiquities official said that all 24 national museums were now under protection of the Army and that damage to the main Cairo museum that shelters thousands of priceless artifacts appeared limited.
Officials in Egypt and American Egyptologists said they were worried, however, about reports of ongoing looting at
Source: BBC
January 31, 2011
Three of the most senior surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge have appeared in court in Cambodia.
Nuon Chea, Ieng Thirith and Khieu Samphan attended a hearing at the UN-backed war crimes tribunal to request release from pre-trial detention.
They and another senior figure face charges of genocide for their roles in the deaths of about two million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979.
The elderly defendants have all been in detention since 2007....
Source: BBC
January 31, 2011
The body which runs Glasgow's museums and art galleries has mislaid a number of exhibits which were donated to the city's transport collection.
Glasgow Life said it was trying to trace part of a tram which had been donated by an enthusiast in 1975.
Other items which staff are attempting to find include tickets, time boards and film footage.
Last week, Glasgow Life admitted more than 80 paintings had been mislaid or lost from its collection.
The
Source: BBC
January 31, 2011
Families of people killed on Bloody Sunday are to seek the prosecution of soldiers responsible for the deaths.
Thirteen people died when British paratroopers opened fire on a civil rights march in Londonderry in January 1972. A fourteenth died later.
The Saville Report, published last year, found that the dead and injured were innocent.
The 39th and final march took place in Derry on Sunday.
A number of options are now being considered to mark
Source: AP
January 31, 2011
A Washington businessman is loaning the first U.S. map printed in North America to the Library of Congress after buying it for $1.8 million.
The library announced Monday that David Rubenstein bought the 1784 map at auction in December. It had been held by the New Jersey Historical Society since 1862.
The map by Abel Buell is considered the best preserved of the few copies that still exist. It is the first map copyrighted in the United States and was published just six
Source: CNN
January 31, 2011
Former South African president and anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela is "responding to medication and treatment," but doctors are concerned about the number of people visiting him, the nation's acting president said in a statement Monday.
Mandela, 92, was discharged from a Johannesburg hospital on Friday after treatment for an acute respiratory infection, South Africa's surgeon general, Veejay Ramlakan, said.
The team looking after Mandela, headed by Ramlakan
Source: CNN
January 31, 2011
Myanmar convened its first parliament in more than two decades on Monday in the capital, Naypyidaw.
Members are expected to vote for chairman and vice chairman during the session.
November's elections, which were also the first in 20 years, drew fire from critics, who said the voting was aimed at creating a facade of democracy.
The regime refused to allow international monitors to oversee the elections and would not allow international journalists to cover
Source: WSJ
January 31, 2011
KENNESAW, Ga.—When Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman arrived here in June 1864, he wrote to his superiors, "The whole country is one vast fort."
Gen. Sherman and his 100,000 men encountered 65,000 Confederates dug in along 12 miles of earthworks at Kennesaw Mountain. After fierce fighting, the rebels retreated to nearby Atlanta. Several more battles ensued before Union forces took the city, dealing a crippling blow to the South.
The detritus of war—bullets, unifor
Source: BBC News
January 28, 2011
A couple doing DIY have uncovered a 20ft (6m) high medieval mural of King Henry VIII on the wall of their home.
The house in Milverton, Somerset, was once home to Thomas Cranmer, Arch Deacon of Taunton in the 16th Century.
Angie Powell said: "When we saw the eyes appear out of the plaster it was a real moment."
Michael Liversidge, of Bristol University, said the discovery was "enormously significant, stunningly exciting and of national import
