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: Virginia Gazette
October 24, 2010
JAMES CITY -- The publisher of "Our Virginia: Past and Present" will provide stickers that WJC Schools and other divisions can use to cover a factually incorrect statement about blacks fighting on behalf of the Confederacy during the Civil War.
The book made national news this week after a history professor at the College of William & Mary read the passage in her 9-year-old daughter's fourth grade history book. Carol Sheriff, who was interviewed by the Washington Post
Source: Haaretz
October 22, 2010
Hungarian survivors of the Holocaust and families of the victims sued the Republic of Hungary and its two rail companies in U.S. court on Thursday, accusing them of collaborating with the Nazis to exterminate Jews during World War Two.
The lawsuit accused the Hungarian government and rail companies of confiscating property of Jews and transporting them to ghettos and concentration camps where hundreds of thousands perished in Nazi-occupied Poland and Ukraine.
"The
Source: Virginia Gazette
October 26, 2010
WILLIAMSBURG – The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation has acquired a British military flag that served as the King’s Color for the 96th Regiment of Foot during the era of the French & Indian War.
Measuring 5 1/2 feet by 6 1/2 feet, the silk standard is constructed of 12 white, 8 blue and 3 red pieces, forming a Union flag of the type in use 1707-1800. The center of the flag is embroidered with a Union wreath of roses and thistles, signifying the union of England and Scotland, and
Source: AP
October 24, 2010
TEHRAN, Iran – Iran has imposed new restrictions on 12 university social sciences deemed to be based on Western schools of thought and therefore incompatible with Islamic teachings, state radio reported Sunday.
The list includes law, philosophy, management, psychology, political science and the two subjects that appear to cause the most concern among Iran's conservative leadership — women's studies and human rights.
"The content of the current courses in the 12 sub
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 24, 2010
Thousands of people were evacuated from their homes following the discovery of a series of bombs from the Second World War in the French city centre of Rennes.
Sixty five years after the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany, the city in Brittany was closed as engineers worked to defuse a 550lb RAF device.
It was one of thousands dropped on northern France in 1944 as Allied troops prepared to invade.
All of the work was being coordinated by France's Dé
Source: Fox News
October 24, 2010
Here's a bombshell of a discovery.
Brooklyn commercial divers believe they've uncovered what the Navy missed more than 50 years ago during a frantic search that made national headlines: roughly 1,500 live shells that went overboard into the Narrows and Gravesend Bay.
The Post joined the four-person crew last week searching for artifacts in the murky waters off the former Fort Lafayette -- an island near Bay Ridge destroyed in 1960 to pave the way for the Verrazano-Narro
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 22, 2010
She is the great English novelist renowned for her polished prose, of whom it was once remarked: "Everything came finished from her pen."
Yet Jane Austen couldn't spell, had no grasp of punctuation and her writing betrayed an accent straight out of The Archers, according to an Oxford University academic.
Prof Kathryn Sutherland said analysis of Austen's handwritten letters and manuscripts reveal that her finished novels owed as much to the intervention of her
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 23, 2010
A new trove of secret documents released by the Wikileaks website has revealed that the US military routinely turned a blind eye to torture and abuse committed by its Iraqi allies against suspected insurgents.
The documents also suggested about 600 civilians were killed at US military checkpoints after the invasion in 2003, and raised questions about the death toll.
Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, criticised the leak, which was the largest ever of US docume
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
October 22, 2010
It has been enjoyed by royalty for centuries and is the only brand served at the Queen’s castles and palaces.
But in a few days’ time, the final batch of Malvern Water will be bottled and its production plant in the town shut down.
Coca-Cola, the brand’s owner, said today that output was too low for it to keep the site open and it will be sold off for luxury housing. Seventeen workers face redundancy.
‘This is a great shock,’ said Paul Tuthill, chairman of
Source: Southern Poverty Law Center
October 26, 2010
The Founding Fathers as white racist poster boys?Do a Facebook page search of the name Thomas Jefferson, and the very first listing that will appear is Thomas Jefferson – American. You can click to join 11,753 people who “like” the page.Well, congratulations. You just signed onto fan pages sponsored by the racist National Policy Institute (NPI
Source: CS Monitor
October 22, 2010
Condoleezza Rice, the former US Secretary of State, has just published a memoir, “Extraordinary, Ordinary People,” about growing up in the segregated South. She was interviewed by Olivia Ward of the Toronto Star this week, and this interview was made available to the Global Viewpoint Network....
Ward: Iraq is also a painful subject: 100,000 Iraqis dead, and 4,000 Americans. Do you have any regrets about the invasion?
Rice: I have absolutely no regret that we overthrew S
Source: The Wall Street Journal
October 25, 2010
Archaeologist Bill Kelso and his team were digging this summer in a previously unexplored section of the fort at Jamestown, Va., the country's oldest permanent English colony, when they uncovered a series of deep holes. They believe the holes once anchored heavy, timber columns supporting the fort's first church, known to have been built in 1608 and the place where Pocahontas got married in 1614.
The church's exact location had bedeviled Jamestown scholars for years. Records say it
Source: Fox News
October 25, 2010
Skeletons unearthed in a cemetery may have cleared Christopher Columbus as the original transatlantic vector of syphilis.
It's been popularly theorized among experts in tropical diseases that the explorer brought back one too many treasures from the New World, including the potentially fatal sexually transmitted infection. Soon after his return in the mid-1490s, a pandemic of the disease erupted in Europe.
However, the largest excavation of skeletons undertaken in Brita
Source: Discovery News
October 25, 2010
A modern human fossil dating to more than 100,000 years ago in Asia reveals distinctive Neanderthal features.
Early modern humans mated with Neanderthals and possibly other archaic hominid species from Asia at least 100,000 years ago, according to a new study that describes human remains from that period in South China.
The remains are the oldest modern human fossils in East Asia and predate, by over 60,000 years, the oldest previously known modern human remains in the
Source: Discovery News
October 21, 2010
Days before he was assassinated in Dallas, John F. Kennedy asked his secret service agents to give him space to campaign.
Blaine's revelations, as well as those from JFK's secret service agents in a forthcoming book, "The Kennedy Detail" and in a series of interviews with the Discovery Channel, reveal how challenging this charismatic president could be to protect and how shaken his murder left those whose job it was to keep him safe.
They were well trained and
Source: Discovery News
October 25, 2010
Dating back to the French Revolution, this gourd is thought to contain the blood of Louis XVI, collected shortly after he was executed.
The research, accepted for publication in the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics, shows how genetic analysis can provide new historical evidence independent of other traditional sources of information.
The gourd, originally used to store gunpowder, was extensively decorated on the outside with a flame tool. Burned into its
Source: BBC
October 25, 2010
Removal men clearing the house of a former teacher and real life "Mr Chips" found a haul of gold ingots and sovereigns stored in his oven.
Dr Arthur Stamp, who died last year, spent his life collecting historical objects which fetched more than £20,000 when they were auctioned in Colwyn Bay, Conwy, last month.
Removal men then found a second haul of items when they opened Dr Stamp's oven.
They are expected to fetch more than £2,000 when auctioned
Source: BBC
October 24, 2010
Edinburgh's oldest statue has been removed from its plinth in Parliament Square for conservation work.
Cracks have appeared on the 325-year-old Charles II, thought to be the work of the Dutch sculptor Grinling Gibbons.
The monument, which is made of lead, depicts the King of England, Scotland and Ireland as a Roman general.
The lead will be cleaned and missing parts like the sword and scabbard will be replaced, modelled on a similar statue at Windsor Castle
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 25, 2010
CIA and FBI agents have been sent on a course at a New York museum to "refresh their sense of inquiry" by analysing paintings.
They are among groups of law enforcement officials, also including New York police officers and members of the US Secret Service, who have attended classes at the city's Metropolitan Museum of Art....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 26, 2010
The discovery of a trove of insects preserved in amber raises new questions about whether India was always part of the Asian continent, researchers said in a study published on Monday.
The insects – bees, termites, spiders, and flies – had been entombed in the vast Cambay deposit in western India for some 50 million years.
Scientists had long assumed that India was for a time an isolated island-continent, and consequently expected that the insects found in the amber w
