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: ana-mpa (Greece)
January 18, 2011
A 60-year-old man has been arrested in Thessaloniki by the security police's antiquities division, charged with violation of the law on protection of antiquities and cultural heritage, after a trove of antiquities were found hidden in a cafe owned by his wife, police announced on Sunday.
The antiquities were discovered, and seized, during an early morning search on Saturday of the cafe premises in the Hortiatis district.
The oldest of the artifacts date back to
Source: Guardian (UK)
January 17, 2011
Visitors are causing so much damage to the tomb of Tutankhamun that Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities wants to close it and open a replica instead.
What excites us about the past is being there: feeling the heat as we climb a Mexican pyramid; adjusting our eyes to the light in the Pantheon; watching the paint peel off the walls of Tutankhamun's tomb. Peeling paint? If, in the brief, crushed tour of the Egyptian boy-king's rooms at Luxor we don't actually see it happen, we can c
Source: BBC News
January 19, 2011
A collection of previously unseen photographs of Adolf Hitler has sold at auction in Northamptonshire for £30,000.
The group of hundreds of photographs went under the hammer on Tuesday night as part of a 300-lot militaria sale at JP Humbert Auctioneers in Towcester.
Hitler's personal photographer Heinrich Hoffmann took the images during the Nazi party's rise to power.
Hoffmann's work was used for postage stamps, postcards and posters.
Nazi party's ri
Source: The Missoulian (Montana)
January 19, 2011
Ed Chlapowski survived the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and spent the rest of his long life making sure those who died on that infamous day would never be forgotten.
On Sunday, a little more than 69 years after notifying the world that "This is no drill - Pearl Harbor is being bombed by the Japanese - this is no drill," the 88-year-old Navy veteran died at his home in Billings.
He was one of Montana's last survivors of the Dec. 7, 1941, attack that propelle
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 19, 2011
A former Foreign Office official has told the Iraq inquiry how he warned against the publication by Tony Blair's government of the controversial dossier on Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction.
John Williams, who was director of communications at the Foreign Office at the time of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, said he had ''argued strongly'' against publication with then prime minister's communications chief, Alastair Campbell.
In a written statement to
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 19, 2011
The three tunnels known as Tom, Dick and Harry were synonymous with The Great Escape, but British engineers are to excavate their lesser known cousin, George, which was dug by the remaining inmates left behind.
The entrance to George has been discovered in the old theatre of the Nazi prison camp, Stalag Luft III in Zagan, which was in German-occupied Poland.
George was built by men bitter that they did not escape through Harry on the night of March 24, 1944. Only later
Source: AOL News
January 18, 2011
They've been extinct for about 10,000 years, but woolly mammoths could be back on Earth in just five years, according to Japanese scientists who plan to use frozen DNA to resurrect the behemoth.
Last summer, researchers plucked skin and muscle tissue from an ancient mammoth's carcass that was found preserved under permafrost in Siberia. A nearly complete body of one of the animals was found there and has since been kept in a special freezer in a Russian research lab.
Re
Source: AP
January 19, 2011
The Vatican says a letter warning Irish bishops against reporting sexual abuse of children to police has been misunderstood.
The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said that with its 1997 letter, the Vatican wanted to ensure that Irish bishops follow church law precisely so that pedophile priests would not have any technical grounds to escape church punishment.
Lombardi issued the statement Wednesday after The Associated Press reported that the letter from t
Source: BBC News
January 18, 2011
Polish experts have said that Russian air traffic controllers gave their president's jet poor advice in the moments before it crashed in thick fog.
A Russian report last week blamed pilot error for the April 2010 disaster near Smolensk in which President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others died.
But the Polish panel said the controllers were under pressure and told the pilots they were on course.
A senior investigator said the plane was 80 metres off course.
Source: BBC News
January 18, 2011
Sargent Shriver, the first US Peace Corps director, Democratic vice-presidential candidate and brother-in-law to President John F Kennedy, has died.
His son, Anthony Kennedy Shriver, said he had died on Tuesday aged 95 after two days in hospital.
Mr Shriver, who was George McGovern's vice-presidential running mate in 1972, married Eunice Kennedy in 1958.
His son-in-law is former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Mr Shriver also ran Pre
Source: BBC News
January 18, 2011
President John F Kennedy would have been delighted to know that his inaugural address is still remembered and admired 50 years later.
Like other great communicators - including Winston Churchill before him and Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama since then - he was someone who took word-craft very seriously indeed.
He had delegated his aide Ted Sorensen to read all the previous presidential inaugurals, with the additional brief of trying to crack the code that had made Abrah
Source: BBC News
January 19, 2011
A Vatican department advised Ireland's Catholic bishops in 1997 not to report priests suspected of child abuse to the police, a newly revealed letter shows.
Obtained by Irish broadcaster RTE, the letter shows Vatican officials rejected an initiative to begin the "mandatory reporting" of abuse claims.
The proposed policy "gives rise to serious reservations", it says.
The Vatican has persistently said it never instructed bishops to withhol
Source: BBC News
January 18, 2011
Haiti's former leader Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier has been charged with corruption and embezzlement during his 1971-1986 rule, prosecutors say.
Mr Duvalier was allowed to go free after questioning, but a judge will decide whether his case goes to trial.
The ex-leader, who denies wrongdoing, made a surprise return to Haiti on Sunday after 24 years in exile.
He was regarded as a playboy during his time in office, when he used a brutal militia to
Source: Moving Image Archive News
January 17, 2011
Thanks to a small band of advocates, the fields of medical and public-health history have been paying increasing attention to the visual – to the vast assortment of still and moving images that illustrate and in many cases constitute those histories. In a new book, Imagining Illness: Public Health and Visual Culture (University of Minnesota Press), editor David Serlin gathers contributions about many compelling areas of the latest research on the visual history of illness.
Among man
Source: Your4State (MD)
January 5, 2011
FREDERICK, MD - Thousands of people visit historic sites in the our area each year, but few people know about the important roles African Americans played, especially when it comes to the Civil War and medicine. This is why the National Library of Medicine is teaming up with museums across the country to educate the public using a traveling exhibit.
Robert Hartman volunteers at the National Museums of Civil War Medicine on East Patrick Street in Frederick. He believes the contribut
Source: BBC
January 18, 2011
late 19th Century town-house in central France that was sealed up for more than 100 years has finally been opened to the public in accordance with its owner's last wishes.
Louis Mantin was an aesthete and gentleman of leisure who bequeathed his opulent home to the town of Moulins on condition that a century later it be a museum.
After he died in 1905, the mansion was closed up and fell into dilapidation. Now thanks to a 3.5m euro ($4.7m; £2.9m) refit funded by local au
Source: BBC
January 18, 2011
Ancient sculptures from China which have never been seen outside of the country are set to go on display in Wales.
The ancient rock carvings from Dazu, China, will be exhibited at National Museum Cardiff from the end of January.
The carvings come from the Dazu World Heritage site and date back to the middle of the 7th Century.
The free exhibition will contain examples of the carvings that have become detached from their original setting, along with accurate
Source: CHE
January 18, 2011
Rutgers University at New Brunswick has returned a Renaissance painting to the heirs of a Dutch couple who tried to trade the artwork and six others for safe passage out of Nazi-occupied Europe but instead were shipped to death camps, where they died....
Source: BBC
January 18, 2011
A businessman has been accused of making a corrupt payment to Saddam Hussein's regime for a "shady deal".
Southwark Crown Court heard millionaire David Mabey inflated the price of a bridge building project so the Iraqi government would receive a "kickback" of hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Peter Blair QC said Mr Mabey and ex-colleague Richard Forsyth, 62, from Hampshire, bypassed UN sanctions.
Mr Mabey, 49, from Berkshire, and Mr Forsy
Source: BBC
January 18, 2011
What do you do with a nasty old Nazi? Let him stew in exile in South America or use him for the value he might still have?
The latter is what the secret services of post-war West Germany chose to do, according to Spiegel magazine.
The normally reliable news magazine reports that Klaus Barbie became an agent of the West German foreign intelligence agency when he was apparently in hiding in South America.
It has seen documents of the Bundesnachrichtendienst
