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: CNN
Feb 5, 2010
The last member of an ancient tribe that has inhabited an Indian island chain for around 65,000 years has died, a group that campaigns for the protection of indigenous peoples has said.
Boa Sr, who was around 85 years of age, died last week in the Andaman islands, about 750 miles off India's eastern coast, Survival International said in a statement.
The London-based group, which works to protect indigenous peoples, said she was the last member of one of ten distinct Gre
Source: WaPo
Feb 5, 2010
For 50 years now, the faces of the students have been etched in our memories, four young men at a lunch counter, nattily dressed, clean-shaven, looking over their shoulders, serious about their actions, perhaps a little uncertain about its results....
On Wednesday night on a plain stage at the National Museum of American History, a floor below where an eight-foot-long portion of that same lunch counter is on exhibit, stood living history. Now only three remain, Jibreel Khazan (forme
Source: Voice of America
Feb 5, 2010
Afghan-American writer, lecturer, and teacher Tamim Ansary is man ideally placed to help Westerners see the history of our world through another set of eyes. Growing up in Afghanistan as a young history buff, Ansary had an opportunity to read and learn about the world from dual perspectives. A decade ago, when he was working as a textbook editor, a publisher in Texas hired him to develop a new world history textbook for high school students....
Ansary begins with two lists of the
Source: NYT
Feb 5, 2010
Experts at the respected Institute of Contemporary History in Munich say they want to prepare a critical, annotated version of the book for release when the copyright expires 70 years after Hitler’s suicide in his Berlin bunker.
“We hope to prevent neo-Nazi publications by putting out a commented, scholarly edition before that,” said Edith Raim, a historian at the institute. “‘Mein Kampf’ is one of the central texts if you want to explain National Socialism, and it hasn’t been avail
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 5, 2010
A piano that survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945 is to take centre stage in a peace concert in New York.
A group of Japanese musicians have been loaned the piano from its owner Yoko Matsuba, an 84-year-old survivor of the nuclear bombing.
The piano will be used in a concert taking place in the autumn at the United Nations headquarters in New York in order to promote global peace and the abolition of nuclear weapons.
The instrument was in the Hi
Source: Belfast Telegraph (UK)
Feb 5, 2010
The Democratic Unionist Party members last night voted to back a deal with Sinn Fein to save Northern Ireland's power-sharing government.
DUP leader Peter Robinson said his party's elected representatives at the Stormont Assembly had backed a deal with Sinn Fein and can now move forward on devolution of policing and justice.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown and taoiseach Brian Cowen are expected to travel to Belfast this morning to put their seal on the deal.
Th
Source: AP
Feb 5, 2010
Henio Zytomirski's Facebook profile picture stands out from most. The grinning 6-year-old is captured in black and white and poses in an old-fashioned buttoned-up shirt and shorts.
The photograph, shot in 1939, is probably the last taken of him before he was murdered in the Holocaust.
A group in the boy's hometown of Lublin is using the social networking site to breathe virtual life into Henio's stolen childhood and give people around the world the chance to get to know
Source: BBC News
Feb 5, 2010
A 14-year-old boy has been confirmed as the UK's youngest known service member to have been killed in WWII.
Reginald Earnshaw was aged 14 years and 152 days when he died under enemy fire on the SS North Devon on 6 July 1941.
The merchant navy cabin boy had lied about his age, claiming he was 15, so he could join the war effort.
His sister Pauline Harvey, 77, will mark his birthday on Friday by laying flowers at his grave in Comely Bank Cemetery, Edinburgh
Source: BBC News
Feb 5, 2010
The death of the last speaker of an ancient language in India's Andaman Islands highlights the fact that half of the world's 7,000 languages are in danger of disappearing. Linguist K David Harrison argues that we still have much to learn from vanishing languages.
My journey as a scientist exploring the world's vanishing languages has taken me from the Siberian forests to the Bolivian Altiplano, from a McDonald's in Michigan to a trailer park in Utah. In all these places I've listene
Source: BBC News
Feb 5, 2010
Five crates of Scotch whisky and brandy belonging to the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton have been recovered after more than 100 years in the ice.
They were buried beneath Shackleton's Antarctic hut, built in 1908 for a failed expedition to the South Pole.
Some of the crates have cracked and ice has formed inside, which means experts will face a delicate task in trying to extract the contents.
The ice-bound crates were first discovered three years ago.
The master blender at whisky c
Source: New York Times
Feb 4, 2010
WHAT is it about New Jersey and buried bodies? While it’s nothing new for mobster corpses to turn up in the Meadowlands, a far more curious set of remains has surfaced here, an hour west of New York City: a car buried in Oklahoma in 1957, dug up there in 2007 and then shipped to — where else? — New Jersey for cosmetic restoration.
The car, a 1957 Plymouth Belvedere, was buried in Tulsa as a vehicular time capsule to commemorate Oklahoma’s 50th birthday. The car was put into the ear
Source: AP
Feb 4, 2010
A top German investigator said Thursday he is skeptical about a new claim by a Sobibor survivor who says he remembers John Demjanjuk as a guard at the Nazi death camp.
Thomas Walther, who led the investigation that prompted Germany to prosecute Demjanjuk, said if survivor Alexej Weizen did remember Demjanjuk, it almost certainly would have come up before in the roughly 30 years the retired U.S. autoworker has faced investigations of his past.
Weizen had given statements
Source: BBC News
Feb 4, 2010
Two art galleries have staked the loan of a painting on the outcome of the US Super Bowl between the New Orleans Saints and the Indianapolis Colts.
John Bullard and Maxwell Anderson, directors of museums in New Orleans and Indianapolis, waged the online betting match on Twitter.
The pair agreed to loan paintings - by JMW Turner and Claude Lorrain - to the other, if their team loses on Sunday.
The Super Bowl painting exchange will last for three months.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 4, 2010
As the last of the Mitford sisters, Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire has known her fair share of tragedy and upheaval.
Yet the redoubtable duchess has hit out at the "sloppy-sentimental" culture of "self-pity and self-esteem" which has overtaken modern society, and lamented the demise of Britain's traditional stiff upper lip.
The duchess, who will celebrate her 90th birthday in March, said she did not see the point of dwelling on misfortune. The wartim
Source: Copenhagen Post (Denmark)
Feb 4, 2010
Body of Denmark’s most famous astronomer will be dug up in Prague to determine true cause of death
The riddle of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe's death in 1601 may now have a good chance of being solved
Prague's cultural department has finally given researchers permission to open the tomb of Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, which lies in the city’s Tyn Cathedral.
A group of Danish and Czech experts will therefore soon be able to carry out detailed analyses
Source: CBS News
Feb 4, 2010
Egypt's antiquities chief on Thursday unveiled the completion of an 8-year, $14.5 million restoration of the world's oldest Christian monastery, touting it as a sign of Christian-Muslim coexistence.
The announcement at the 1,600-year-old St. Anthony's Monastery came a month after Egypt's worst incident of sectarian violence in over a decade, when a shooting on a church on Orthodox Christmas Eve killed seven people.
The attack raised heavy criticism of the Egyptian gover
Source: Scientific American
Feb 4, 2010
In a report in the Journal of Roman Archaeology, researchers announce the discovery of a body of an east Asian man, buried in Italy two millennia ago. Christopher Intagliata reports
Researchers found his body on an imperial Roman estate and took dental samples. Why examine teeth? Well, the water you drink at birth leaves a distinct signature in your teeth. That water signature is in the form of oxygen isotopes, atoms of oxygen with different numbers of neutrons. Isotopes say someth
Source: Guardian (UK)
Feb 4, 2010
Survey of landscape suggests prehistoric monument was surrounded by two circular hedges.
The Monty Python knights who craved a shrubbery were not so far off the historical mark: archaeologists have uncovered startling evidence of The Great Stonehenge Hedge.
Inevitably dubbed Stonehedge, the evidence from a new survey of the Stonehenge landscape suggests that 4,000 years ago the world's most famous prehistoric monument was surrounded by two circular hedges, planted on lo
Source: BBC
Feb 4, 2010
The last speaker of an ancient language in India's Andaman Islands has died at the age of about 85, a leading linguist has told the BBC.
Professor Anvita Abbi said that the death of Boa Sr was highly significant because one of the world's oldest languages - Bo - had come to an end.
She said that India had lost an irreplaceable part of its heritage.
Languages in the Andamans are thought to originate from Africa. Some may be 70,000 years old.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 4, 2010
Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, for years the world's most wanted terrorist, is suing a Parisian production company over a three-part television drama he claims could violate his "biographical image".
With the help of his wife, a French lawyer whom he married in prison, Sánchez has demanded that the producers hand over the master copy of the footage for her to check for errors and potentially make changes before it is broadcast on the French Canal+ channel, the Guardian reports.
