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: Lee Ruddin
Nov 19, 2009
These were the words of Steven Hurst, Senior Lecturer in Politics at Manchester Metropolitan University, at the launch of his book in London on Thursday evening.
Placing recent events in a broader historical context, The United States and Iraq since 1979: Hegemony, Oil and War (Edinburgh University Press) provides a theoretical framework that places the actions of the various US administrations in a wider process.
Using World Systems Theory, Hurst is the first to analyz
Source: Physorg.com
Nov 18, 2009
Archaeologist Eva Kaptijn has given up digging in favour of gathering. With her colleagues, she has been applying an intensive field exploration technique: 15 metres apart, the researchers would walk forward for 50 metres. On the outward leg, they’d pick up all the earthenware and, on the way back, all of the other material. This resulted in more than 100,000 finds, varying from about 13,000 years to just a few decades old. Based on further research on the finds and where they were located, Kapt
Source: Cornell Daily Sun
Nov 18, 2009
In a strange case of science imitating art, one hobbit has again become the center of a heated and ongoing conflict.
Since its 2003 discovery on the Indonesian island of Flores, the Homo floresiensis (nicknamed hobbit because it only grew to be about three feet tall) has caused scientists across the world to debate whether the find is a new species or simply a variation of the modern human. The difference could signal a major paradigm shift in the study of primitive humans.
Source: Time
Nov 18, 2009
As a teenager, Leonor Marquez led a fleet-footed unit of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) guerrilla fighters through the steep mountain passes of Perkin, El Salvador. "We were young and fast," Marquez, now 37, remembers. She and her comrades, who were known as "Las Samuelitas", were a fierce group of insurgents who might have been giddy junior high girls had they not been in El Salvador in the 1980s.
The civil war ended 17 years ago, but Marqu
Source: Fox
Nov 18, 2009
Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) representative Sebastian Heath indicated during a State Department (DOS) hearing in Washington last Friday, (November 13, 2009) stated that the AIA supports expanding the current import restrictions on cultural property from Italy to include coins. With Roman and Greek coins struck in Italy being the most popular of all ancient coins in the U.S., Heath's statement is a wakeup call for thousands of private collectors, museums and independent scholars. The
Source: The Philadelphia Inquirer
Nov 18, 2009
Under a tent on the grounds of the future SugarHouse Casino, archaeologists sift through buckets of debris, picking out and bagging the choicest broken bits.
Half a teacup. The neck of a blue bottle. A shard of thick brown pottery.
The artifacts come mostly from 18th-century brick privies, the colonial equivalent of Dumpsters.
But the items are practically newfangled compared with what the archaeologists have uncovered in a nearby plot about the size of a t
Source: The Art Newspaper
Nov 18, 2009
A German court has upheld Iraqi claims over a miniature gold vessel that for the past three years has been at the centre of a tangled dispute involving a Munich auction house, German customs, the Iraqi embassy in Berlin, an archaeologist, and a museum of classical antiquities.
The case, which has focused attention on the sale of smuggled Iraqi artifacts in Germany, began late in 2004 when the slightly dented six-centimetre-high gold vessel was included in a sale at Munich auction ho
Source: BBC
Nov 18, 2009
Officials from two museums in Sweden have handed over the remains of five indigenous Maori people to their New Zealand counterparts.
The remains include one almost complete skeleton, a skull, and three other skeleton parts.
The ceremony was held at the Natural History Museum in Gothenburg.
Museums across Europe have been repatriating human remains taken from indigenous burial grounds during colonial times.
The formal handing over involved a tra
Source: Reuters
Nov 18, 2009
BADALING, China (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama took a walk alone on the Great Wall on Wednesday, wrapping up a visit to China with a visit to the ancient fortifications that symbolize the country's history and separateness.
"It's magical. It reminds you of the sweep of history," Obama said, after breaking away from his tour guides to walk alone along the snowy parapets, hands jammed into his pockets against the cold and wind.
"It gives you a good
Source: Dominican Today
Nov 18, 2009
SANTO DOMINGO.- “That’s the mystery of the past, we’ve found doors as small as 20 by 20 centimeters which lead to great chambers,” revealed the Secretary General of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, regarding the search for Cleopatra’s tomb by a Dominican-Egyptian team.
Zahi Hawas is in the country to receive a decoration in the National Palace and a Doctorate degree from the Catholic University of Santo Domingo in the company of Dominican archaeologist Kathleen Martinez, who
Source: Stroud News and Journal
Nov 18, 2009
HIDDEN Victorian railway lines have been found beside the Thames and Severn Canal at Thrupp.
The rails, unearthed during work to repair a leak in the watercourse, were probably used to transport coal to a nearby mill.
Dr Ray Wilson, honorary secretary of the Gloucestershire Society for Industrial Archaeology, said: "It is really exciting.
"We are seeing the physical remains of something which we imagined existed elsewhere but never knew existed a
Source: ABC News
Nov 18, 2009
A dark chapter in the history of the Watergate scandal surrounding former President Richard M. Nixon might soon be uncovered.
The National Archives announced today it will use forensic documentation technology to try and uncover the contents of two pages of handwritten notes taken by Nixon's chief of staff, H.R. "Bob" Haldeman.
Source: The National Security Archive
Nov 18, 2009
Secret messages from senior Soviet officials to West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl after the fall of the Berlin Wall led directly to Kohl's famous "10 Points" speech on German unification, but the speech produced shock in both Moscow and Washington, according to documents from Soviet, German and American files posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive.
Published for the first time in English in the Archive's forthcoming book, "Masterpieces of History,&q
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education
Nov 18, 2009
The George W. Bush Presidential Library at Southern Methodist University will be a fairly contemporary structure whose clean lines call to mind the shapes of Georgian architecture without replicating its ornament and details, according to drawings that the former president and his wife, Laura Bush, are scheduled to release at a press conference this afternoon.
But USA Today had the drawings online Tuesday evening, along with an article that described "a lantern-shaped roof that
Source: CNSNews
Nov 18, 2009
The Obama administration has done more on the Israeli-Palestinian issue during its ten months in office than its predecessor did in eight years, a State Department spokesman claimed on Tuesday...
... Kelly contested the assertion that President Obama’s Mideast envoy George Mitchell had made little progress during his months on the job. “We are less than a year into this administration, and I think we’ve accomplished more over the last year than the previous administration did in eig
Source: CNSNews
Nov 18, 2009
When President Barack Obama landed in Beijing on Monday on his first state visit to China, his first order of business was family business.
Before he headed to a formal dinner with China's President Hu Jintao, he set aside time to see his half brother, Mark Ndesandjo, and Ndesandjo's wife, who had flown up from the southern boomtown of Shenzhen where they live.
Describing the meeting Monday as "overwhelming" and "intense," Ndesandjo told The Associat
Source: BBC
Nov 18, 2009
All the most senior ministers were at the Afghan strategy meeting.
They knew things were not going well, but from their leader there was a whiff of panic."We just need to be sure that the final result does not look like a humiliating defeat: to have lost so many men and now abandoned it all... in short, we have to get out of there."
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev - the speaker of those words - was understandably alarmed.
It was June 1986, almos
Source: Yahoo News
Nov 18, 2009
LONDON – A toll bridge built in 1769 across the River Thames will be auctioned next month, offering buyers a tax-free investment with a bit of historic charm.
The Swinford bridge brings in about 190,000 pounds (US$320,000) in toll payments from about 4 million vehicle crossings a year, and the bridge's owner can pocket all the income without paying tax.
The picturesque bridge in Oxfordshire, about 65 miles (105 kilometers) northwest of London, has a suggested price of 1
Source: Google News
Nov 18, 2009
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama predicted that professed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be convicted, as Attorney General Eric Holder defended putting him through the U.S. civilian legal system.
In one of a series of TV interviews during his trip to Asia, Obama said those offended by the legal privileges given to Mohammed by virtue of getting a civilian trial rather than a military tribunal won't find it "offensive at all when he's convicted and when the de
Source: BBC
Nov 18, 2009
A 13th Century ruined castle is to be sold, with a starting price of £80,000.
Ewloe Castle, built by Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, is to to be auctioned with four other lots which are expected to fetch more than £500,000 in total.
Although privately owned, the castle is under the custodianship of Welsh historic monuments agency Cadw, and its character "must be preserved".
It stands close to the site where 200 Welshmen, led by the king of north Wales Owa
