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: Chronicle of Higher Education
Jan 11, 2010
The Very Rev. David M. O'Connell went into the bathroom looking for paper towels. He came out with something a little better: an authentic Rembrandt etching.
Father O'Connell, president of the Catholic University of America, noticed a picture frame jutting out from underneath a pile of junk in one of his office building's bathrooms last January, the university says. He pulled out an etching and thought it looked familiar.
An appraiser confirmed that the 4.5-inch-by-5-in
Source: AFP
Jan 11, 2010
Jordan has complained to the United Nations in a bid to acquire the Dead Sea Scrolls from Israel, saying the Jewish state seized the ancient texts during the 1967 Six-Day war, an official said on Monday.
The scrolls, some of which are as old as the third century BC, were part of a display at Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum in Canada that ended on Sunday.
Jordan has asked Canada to seize the scrolls, invoking the 1954 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in
Source: Discovery News
Jan 11, 2010
Alexander's men wore linothorax, a highly effective type of body armor created by laminating together layers of linen, research finds.
A Kevlar-like armor might have helped Alexander the Great (356–323 B.C.) conquer nearly the entirety of the known world in little more than two decades, according to new reconstructive archaeology research.
Presented at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in Anaheim, Calif., the study suggests that Alexander an
Source: Bloomberg News
Jan 11, 2010
The British Museum, which faces demands from Iran to lend an ancient artifact known as the Cyrus Cylinder, said it would delay sending the object there after making a discovery.
On Jan. 5, inscriptions similar to the Cylinder’s were found on two pieces of cuneiform tablets from Babylonia in the museum’s collections. The pieces will be studied to shed light on the Cylinder’s “missing” or “obscure” passages, the museum said, and presented at a London workshop involving Iranian colleag
Source: The Boston Globe
Jan 11, 2010
Trilingual by dint of birth, Ihor Sevcenko grew up in a Ukrainian family that lived in Poland at a time when Russian was often the language of necessity. To his native Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian, he added fluency in many other Slavic and Western languages in their ancient, medieval, and modern forms while establishing himself as an international scholar of Byzantine literature and history.
Dr. Sevcenko, the Dumbarton Oaks professor emeritus of Byzantine history and literature at
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 11, 2010
A controversial painting linked to Leonardo da Vinci is expected to fetch more than £300,000 when it is auctioned 90 years after it prompted one of the 20th century's most feverish debates over a picture's authenticity.
Arguments over the origins of Portrait of a Woman Called La Belle 3 have raged since 1920 when it was given as a wedding gift to a car salesman in Kansas City, Missouri, by a family friend who said it was by Leonardo.
Sotheby's, which is selling the pai
Source: Associated Press
Jan 11, 2010
In newly released papers from his presidency, Richard Nixon directs a purge of Kennedy-era modern art — "these little uglies" — orders hostile journalists to be frozen out and fusses over White House guest lists to make sure political opponents don't make it in.
As his lieutenants built an ambitious political espionage operation that tapped scribes as spies, Nixon is shown preoccupying himself with the finest details of dividing friend and foe.
The Nixon Libra
Source: Associated Press
Jan 11, 2010
Miep Gies, the office secretary who defied the Nazi occupiers to hide Anne Frank and her family for two years and saved the teenager's diary not, has died, the Anne Frank Museum said Tuesday. She was 100.
Gies' Web site reported that she died Monday after a brief illness. The report was confirmed by museum spokeswoman Maatje Mostar, but she gave no details. The British Broadcasting Corp. said she died in a nursing home after suffering a fall last month.
Gies was the las
Source: Associated Press
Jan 11, 2010
North Korea proposed Monday that a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War be signed this year, saying a return to negotiations on its nuclear program depends on better relations with Washington and the lifting of sanctions.
The North has long demanded a peace treaty, but President Barack Obama's special envoy for human rights in North Korea said in Seoul on Monday that the communist regime must improve its "appalling" human rights record before any normalization of re
Source: Washington Post
Jan 10, 2010
Following President Trump’s nationally televised plea to build a border wall, we look at the modern history of the arrest of migrants attempting to enter the United States without authorization.
Source: AP
Jan 10, 2010
They made it through Shiloh, Antietam, and Gettysburg, but many of the Civil War battle flags in the nation's state-owned collections might not survive the budget battles being waged in some statehouses.
Preservation work on deteriorating banners carried in some of the war's bloodiest battles has been eliminated, scaled back, or ignored by state budget planners focused on finding money for basics such as education, health care, and transportation.
In New York, home to t
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 10, 2010
British artist Andy Holden is to reveal how he stole a piece of the Egypt pyramids in a new exhibition at the Tate Britain in London.
Under Egyptian law, it is illegal to remove any item from a cultural heritage site without the Egyptian government's permission. An international Unesco convention also prohibits the removal of cultural artefacts without the country of origin's knowledge and permission.
In 2008, Mr Holden returned to Egypt and attempted to replace the ro
Source: Reuters
Jan 10, 2010
New tombs found in Giza support the view that the Great Pyramids were built by free workers and not slaves, as widely believed, Egypt's chief archaeologist said on Sunday.
Films and media have long depicted slaves toiling away in the desert to build the mammoth pyramids only to meet a miserable death at the end of their efforts.
"These tombs were built beside the king's pyramid, which indicates that these people were not by any means slaves," Zahi Hawass, the
Source: Deutsche Welle
Jan 10, 2010
During the Third Reich, Germany had a small black community, yet relatively little is known about their life in the Nazi era. Deutsche Welle takes a look at survival strategies under Hitler's oppressive regime.
Between 20,000 - 25,000 blacks lived in Nazi Germany under Hitler's rule.When asked about blacks in the Third Reich, Germans are most likely to talk about the Afrika Schau. In his book, "Hitler's Black Victims," American University researcher, Dr. Clarence Lusane wr
Source: Fox News
Jan 10, 2010
To the government's critics, it was a long and shocking act of official stonewalling: Agreements long hidden in Foreign Ministry files allowed nuclear-armed U.S. warships to enter Japanese ports, violating a hallowed principle of postwar Japan. Yet their very existence was officially denied.
Now, in a clear break from the past, a new prime minister has gone where none of his predecessors dared go: He has ordered a panel of ministry officials and academics to investigate the secret a
Source: BBC
Jan 10, 2010
An Australian World War II hospital ship, the Centaur, has been seen for the first time since it sank more than 60 years ago with a loss of 268 lives.
Images of the wreck, more than 2km (1.3 miles) below the sea, were captured by a remote-controlled underwater camera.
The ship's location was discovered last month following a hi-tech search.
Australia says the ship, which went down in May 1943, was torpedoed by the Japanese. Japan says the circumstances su
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 10, 2010
One is an established American biographer who has written about the Kennedy clan, the Clintons and Diana, Princess of Wales. The other is a French writer who, by her own admission, is little known for her work which includes a book on the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall.
But the two women – Sally Bedell Smith and Isabelle Rivère – are going head to head in an attempt to write the definitive biography of the Queen to be published to coincide with her Diamond Jubilee in 2
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Jan 10, 2010
Bill Clinton was at the centre of a race storm last night after he was accused of denigrating Barack Obama.
The former president allegedly claimed during the hard-fought Democratic primary race: ‘A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.’
He is said to have made the racist remark in a phone call entreating Senator Teddy Kennedy, the party’s vastly influential elder statesman, to endorse his wife, Hillary, in the delicately balanced 2008 nomination bat
Source: NYT News Service
Jan 10, 2010
Fethiye Cetin recalled the day her identity shattered.
She was a young law student when her beloved maternal grandmother, Seher, took her aside and told her a secret she had hidden for 60 years: that Seher was born a Christian Armenian with the name Heranus and had been saved from a death march by a Turkish officer, who snatched her from her mother’s arms in 1915 and raised her as Turkish and Muslim.
Cetin’s grandmother, whose parents later turned out to have escaped to
Source: New York Times
Jan 10, 2010
“He put the question to me explicitly — ‘The time is coming when something must be done,’ ” Freya von Moltke said. “ ‘I would like to have a hand in it, but I can only do so if you join in too,’ and I said, ‘Yes, it’s worth it.’ ”
So, with a wife’s assent, began a famous challenge to Hitler. At the height of the Nazi victories, Count Helmuth James von Moltke invited about two dozen foes of Nazism, many of them aristocrats like himself, to imagine a new, better postwar Germany.
