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: Telegraph (UK)
Apr 22, 2010
A Russian poster meant to honour Second World War veterans has sparked outrage after it was mistakenly printed with images of Nazi soldiers instead of Soviet troops.
Veterans in the Ural Mountains city of Perm were furious after designers at a local publishing house illustrated the poster with Nazi propaganda pictures downloaded from the internet.
The committee was especially upset because it paid for the printing of the posters, which were meant to be distributed ahe
Source: CNN
Apr 22, 2010
It has been 10 years since federal agents raided the Gonzalez family home in Miami's Little Havana neighborhood, seizing 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez.
Today, the house is a museum where visitors can see a virtual shrine to the boy -- now a 16-year-old military student in Cuba -- and his brief time in the United States.
His school uniform still hangs in the closet, along with dozens of outfits that he never got a chance to wear. His toys are on display inside the house, a
Source: WaPo
Apr 22, 2010
Before Earth Day became what it is -- a national ritual halfway between a street party and a guilt trip -- it was a bunch of 20-somethings working in an office over a diner in Dupont Circle.
It was 1970. They worked 15-hour days. They stuffed a lot of envelopes.
And, at first, they didn't like the name.
"Who in the hell do they think we are, the Grange?" Stephen Cotton recalled about reading the name an advertising agency had proposed for their na
Source: KFVS 12 (KY)
Apr 21, 2010
What started as a call about a possible live ordnance ended with a piece of history from the Civil War.
The Paducah Police Department Bomb Squad responded to a call from Daniel McKendree about a cannon ball that he moved from his parents' yard on Kentucky Avenue. McKendree moved the ball to his home on Clay Street and thought it might be a live ordnance....
Source: Muskogee Phoenix (OK)
Apr 21, 2010
Work on a $1 million renovation of the Fort Gibson Historic Site should be complete by the spring of 2012, said Dr. Bob Blackburn, executive director of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
Blackburn made the announcement standing beneath the deteriorating canopy in the center of the re-created historic fort of the 1800s.
OHS has been able to parlay a $200,000 appropriation into $1 million with the help of a number of state officials, Blackburn said. The state money was mat
Source: Honolulu Weekly
Apr 21, 2010
As State lawmakers and community members continue to push for a managerial audit of the State Historic Preservation Division, division officials insist that they’re being blamed for a series of potential problems that would first need to be solved by the Legislature.
Dozens of community members turned out for a meeting with SHPD administrators at Wilson Elementary School on April 14 to air grievances about the division’s operations. Community members voiced concerns over whether anc
Source: NYT
Apr 21, 2010
Seven years ago, the Havasupai Indians, who live amid the turquoise waterfalls and red cliffs miles deep in the Grand Canyon, issued a “banishment order” to keep Arizona State University employees from setting foot on their reservation — an ancient punishment for what they regarded as a genetic-era betrayal.
Members of the tiny, isolated tribe had given DNA samples to university researchers starting in 1990, in the hope that they might provide genetic clues to the tribe’s devastati
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Apr 21, 2010
Vladimir Lenin's moth-eaten socks have gone on display in Ukraine's capital.
The exhibition is timed to coincide with the 140th anniversary of the birth of the leader of Russia's 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
It is the first time Lenin's socks and other clothes have been exhibited in the former Soviet republic since it became independent almost two decades ago, and was made possible under the country's new Russia-friendly president.
In Soviet times, dozens o
Source: AP
Apr 21, 2010
Israel reopened a 16th-century gate to Jerusalem's Old City on Wednesday, completing a two-month renovation and cleaning project that drew criticism from Palestinian officials.
Jaffa Gate, one of four main entrances to the Old City, was built by Jerusalem's Ottoman rulers and inaugurated in 1538. It is the most common entrance for tourists entering the walled Old City — home to key holy sites in Christianity, Islam and Judaism, as well as a popular outdoor marketplace.
Source: CNN
Apr 21, 2010
Benjamin Franklin gets a facelift as the Treasury Department unveils a new $100 bill Wednesday, the first remake of the denomination since 1996.
The new design for the $100 note made its debut during a 10:30 a.m. ceremony at the Department of the Treasury's Cash Room attended by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.
Anti-counterfeiting measures are the main reason the United States has been making changes in currency.
Source: WHSV
Apr 21, 2010
Governor Bob McDonnell traveled to Chancellorsville Battlefield to highlight the creation of a permanent state fund to preserve Civil War sites.
In a ceremonial signing, McDonnell added his signature Tuesday to the Virginia Civil War Sites Preservation Fund, which provides matching grants to protect battlefields. The legislation permanently establishes the fund, which already has preserved 2,000 battlefield acres in Virginia....
Source: BBC News
Apr 21, 2010
Scattered through Vienna are six huge anti-aircraft towers, a grim reminder of the city's Nazi past.
The flak towers were put up during the Second World War between 1942 and 1945. They were built in pairs in parks in the heart of the city.
Guns to shoot down Allied fighter planes were placed high on the concrete bastions and hundreds of civilians took shelter inside during bombing raids.
But the architectural historian, Ute Bauer, who is taking part in a st
Source: Bloomberg News
Apr 21, 2010
Berlin’s Free University will today go live with an Internet database documenting the fate of more than 21,000 artworks condemned as “degenerate” by the Nazis and seized from German museums in 1937.
The Web site, the result of eight years of research by art historians at the university, includes works by Franz Marc, Emil Nolde, Otto Dix, Marc Chagall, Max Beckmann, Wassily Kandinsky and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. It gives details of the museums they were seized from and their current l
Source: Time.com
Apr 21, 2010
When the Berlin Wall began to crumble in 1989, East Germany's Ministry for State Security, the Stasi, decided to destroy all the evidence of 40 years of spying on fellow countrymen. But, like something out of a Cold War comedy, the Stasi's cheap shredders broke soon after they started, leaving agents to use their hands to tear the records into 600 million pieces, some as small as a fingernail. The pieces were supposed to be destroyed, but the Stasi never got around to incinerating them. To this
Source: AP
Apr 21, 2010
A letter penned by the nation's sixth president, John Quincy Adams, has been found in a dusty box in a Massachusetts city hall's basement.
The letter, dated Sept. 8, 1826, outlines the burial wishes of his father, John Adams, the nation's second president. It was recently discovered by a city attorney who was combing through some old records in Quincy City Hall.
John Quincy Adams wrote that his father, who had died two months earlier, and his mother, Abigail Adams, wish
Source: BBC News
Apr 21, 2010
When I listened to my grandfather's stories of his time as governor of the Andaman Islands, it was the first I had heard of the jail where India's most prominent political prisoners suffered at the hands of their British colonial rulers.
It was strange, listening to the voice of my grandfather telling his life story after he had died.
But this was how I came to discover the part he played in Britain's dark history on a group of tropical islands located in the Bay of Ben
Source: Scripps News
Apr 20, 2010
Jim Brown grew up in the Civil War's shadow, listening to stories of the fighting from a father who lived it.
"He was in it from the beginning at Manassas to the end at Appomattox," Brown said. "He'd be amazed to see the changes today."
At 98, Brown's part of an exclusive group -- the surviving children of Civil War soldiers, removed by a single generation from the nation's bloodiest conflict. Records show fewer than 100 sons and daughters of the blu
Source: Science Daily
Apr 20, 2010
An international team of scientists led by the paleontologist Steffen Kiel at the University of Kiel, Germany, found the first fossil boreholes of the worm Osedax that consumes whale bones on the deep-sea floor. They conclude that "boneworms" are at least 30 Million years old.
This result was published in the current issue of the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Six years ago Osedax was first described based on specimens livi
Source: Discovery News
Apr 20, 2010
Mysterious lines on the deserts of the Near East are massive ancient hunting tools, made up of low stone walls.
British RAF pilots in the early 20th century were the first to spot the strange kite-like lines on the deserts of Israel, Jordan and Egypt from the air and wonder about their origins. The lines are low, stone walls, usually found as angled pairs, that begin far apart and converge at circular pits. In some places in Jordan the lines formed chains up to 40 miles long.
Source: The Root
Apr 20, 2010
Most African Americans who visit Cape Town around the New Year are initially shocked by what is traditionally known here as The Coon Festival--a weeklong reverie of parties and parades where mixed race or "colored" people dress up in costumes and blackface to perform minstrel shows.
The Coon Festival, more recently renamed the Minstrel Festival, has been an annual affair in Cape Town for over 150 years and may be the most public manifestation of an engagement between Afric
