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 News
Mar 19, 2010
Nato forces in Kosovo have handed over the task of guarding the Gazimestan monument, a site of great historical significance to Serbs, to local police.
The move is seen as an important step in the transfer of powers to local authorities. It has angered Serbia.
Gazimestan marks the site of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo against the Ottomans.
It is where Slobodan Milosevic rallied Serb activists 600 years later, with a nationalist speech that propelled him to powe
Source: BBC News
Mar 19, 2010
Actor Fess Parker, famous for playing American pioneer Davy Crockett in Walt Disney's classic 1950s TV series, has died in California at the age of 85.
The Texas-born actor launched a craze for coonskin caps and buckskin shirts with his sturdy turn as the US icon.
Parker went on to play Daniel Boone, another real-life frontiersman, in a 1960s TV show before retiring.
Actor turned California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger paid tribute to him as "a true
Source: BBC News
Mar 19, 2010
Scientists have discovered a new species of dinosaur that was closely related to the Velociraptor.
The 1.8m-long predator was a dromaeosaurid - a family of theropod dinosaurs from which modern birds descended.
The researchers discovered its exquisitely well preserved skeleton in sediments dating from the Upper Cretaceous period in Inner Mongolia.
They describe the find in the journal Zootaxa.
The fossilised skeleton was in almost perfect condit
Source: BBC News
Mar 19, 2010
Dutch officials have rejected a retired US general's claim that its forces failed at Srebrenica because of poor morale over openly gay soldiers.
A defence ministry spokesman dismissed as "complete nonsense" the remarks by John Sheehan, a former Nato commander.
Gen Sheehan had been speaking at a US Senate hearing on allowing gay people to serve openly in the US military.
He said Dutch leaders had told him that the presence of gay soldiers had con
Source: Discovery News
Mar 18, 2010
Non-avian dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago, and now researchers have proven that this die-off didn't happen over a long period of time.
A detailed look at dinosaur bones, tracks and eggs located at 29 archaeological sites located in the Catalan Pyrenees reveals that there was a large diversity of dinosaur species living there just before the fatal K-T extinction event, which many scientists believe was caused by several large meteors hitting Earth.
Dinosau
Source: Spiegel
Mar 18, 2010
NASACalifornia has named the remains of the Apollo 11 mission a state historical resource -- to the delight of the young profession of space archaeologists. They fear that the trash and equipment left behind by the United States' journeys to the moon could someday wind up for sale on eBay if they aren't protected.
There is an unwritten law in America's national parks: Carry out what you bring in.
When they visited the moon, though, the Americans weren't nearly as consid
Source: AP
Mar 18, 2010
For 68 years, John E. Love has been haunted by memories of being forced to carry the bodies of fallen comrades to a mass grave hollowed out of a Filipino rice field. Now, at last, a bit of history is being rewritten because of those memories.
After six months of research, The Associated Press this week is correcting the caption on one of the most famous photos in its library, 65 years after the image first moved on the newswire. The image shows defeated Allied soldiers after their
Source: USA Today
Mar 18, 2010
In these dark times, the faithful still come to worship in the chapel of Jesus Malverde, Mexico's patron saint of drug traffickers.
They kneel in front of his statue, dip flowers in water and wipe them tenderly over his face. They leave cryptic notes of thanks on the altar. They slip offerings into a donation box and buy talismans that say: "Malverde, bless my path and permit my return."
Here in Culiacán, where about 20% of the economy depends on the illegal d
Source: Norfolk Life (UK)
Mar 18, 2010
Archaeologists are to team up with police in a bid to crack down on illegal metal detecting in Norfolk.
Norfolk has the highest number of recovered artefacts in the country declared treasure and a successful long-established working relationship with legitimate metal- detecting enthusiasts.
There were 109 cases of items found in Norfolk being declared treasure in 2008-09. Recent finds include a hoard of 24 Henry III short-cross pennies in Breckland, and an early Saxon g
Source: Auckland Stuff (NZ)
Mar 18, 2010
A 200-year-old sword is the last thing Ruben Mita expected to find buried in his back yard.
But that's exactly what the budding archeologist dug up while ferreting around in the garden of his Woodlands Park home.
"I was outside mucking around," he says. "I saw something poking out of the ground and thought it was just a root. Then I started pulling at it. The sword just came straight out – I didn't need to dig or anything." Ruben, 11, and his mother
Source: CS Monitor
Mar 18, 2010
It was early summer, 1982. The Soviet war in Afghanistan was gathering momentum against the mujahideen, the country's disparate but increasingly widespread resistance movement. I'd just trekked for 10 days across rugged mountains from neighboring Pakistan to the beleaguered Panjshir Valley, an assertive thorn against the Red Army's might barely 40 miles north of Kabul.
I was traveling with a half-dozen mujahideen guerrillas accompanying a French medical team being sent to replace a
Source: BBC
Mar 18, 2010
Long before a 'hobbit' species of human lived on Indonesia's Flores island, other human-like creatures colonised the area. That much was clear.
But scientists have now been able to date their presence to at least one million years ago - some 120,000 years earlier than previously recognised.
The team reports the discovery of these humans' tools in the journal Nature.
The group says the finds bring a new dimension to our understanding of the history of Flor
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 18, 2010
A 67-year-old man on Thursday admitted hijacking a plane four decades ago and forcing it to land in Cuba, telling a judge how he threatened to cut a flight attendant's throat to get access to the cockpit, where another man held a gun to the back of the co-pilot.
Luis Armando Pena Soltren revealed the details of the hijacking, highlighting the violence and frightening nature of the encounter.
Pena Soltren, a US resident, returned to the United States in October, somethi
Source: WaPo
Mar 18, 2010
Historians criticized proposed revisions to the Texas social studies curriculum Tuesday, saying that many of the changes are historically inaccurate and that they would affect textbooks and classrooms far beyond the state's borders....
"The books that are altered to fit the standards become the best-selling books, and therefore within the next two years they'll end up in other classrooms," said Fritz Fischer, chairman of the National Council for History Education, a group
Source: BBC News
Mar 18, 2010
A Polish court has convicted three men for stealing the infamous "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign from the former Auschwitz death camp last December.
The trio, two of whom are brothers, were given jail sentences ranging from 18 months to two-and-a-half years.
The court in Krakow said the men had admitted the theft, and so the case did not have to go to trial.
Two other Poles remain in custody over the theft of the 5m (16ft) wrought-iron sign, which was qu
Source: BBC News
Mar 18, 2010
Up to 25,000 people died in the Allied bombing of Dresden during World War II - fewer than often estimated, an official German report has concluded.
The Dresden Historians' Commission published its report after five years of research into the 13-15 February 1945 air raid by Britain and the US.
The study was aimed at ending an ongoing debate on the number of casualties in the German city.
Germany's far-right groups claim that up to 500,000 people died.
Source: Washington Post
Mar 17, 2010
Presidential hanky-panky is as old as the nation itself. But no one can bring it to life quite like Larry Flynt. Now the publisher of Hustler is teaming up with Columbia University lecturer David Eisenbach to write “One Nation Under Sex: How the Private Lives of Presidents and First Ladies Shaped America,” due in 2011 from Palgrave. “It’s not just a book about who slept with whom,” says Flynt’s agent, Andrew Stuart.
“It’s a much larger and sweeping account of how the sex lives of A
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 17, 2010
The brain was found mummified inside a wooden coffin in boggy soil close to Quimper, in Brittany, before being placed in formalin solution.
The boy, who was around 18 months old, appeared to have died of a skull fracture before his head was placed in a leather envelope, and then on a pillow in the 13th Century.
It was exhumed in 1998 and after more than a decade of research scientists have now identified neurons and cerebral cells that are still intact.
Fra
Source: AP
Mar 17, 2010
A Holocaust survivor claims in a new book that Anne Frank distracted younger children from the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp by telling them fairy tales — an account disputed by at least one Frank authority and a childhood friend of the diarist.
The story by Berthe Meijer, now 71, of being a 6-year-old inmate of Bergen Belsen crafts a touching portrait of Anne in the final weeks of her life in the German camp, struggling to keep up her own spirits even as she tried to lift t
Source: News Observer (NC)
Mar 17, 2010
FOUR OAKS -- Confederate Gen. Joseph E. Johnston returned to Bentonville Battlefield on Tuesday, his bronze likeness steeled against modern-day foes: vandals, climbing children and those who believe that erecting memorials to defeated Civil War commanders is a form of racism.
Johnston, politically unpopular during his lifetime, might not be universally welcomed at the state historic site near Four Oaks 145 years hence, either. That's why the Smithfield Light Infantry, a local camp o
