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: Salon
Jun 12, 2009
According to the Federal Reserve's "Flow of Funds" report, released Thursday, the net worth of households in the United States is $50.4 trillion. That's $1.3 trillion less than the total at the beginning of 2009, and $14 trillion less than at the beginning of the recession in December 2007.Numbers that huge are hard to grapple with, so here's a simple way to think about it. U.S. households are abou
Source: http://www.grd.usace.army.mil
Jun 12, 2009
Baghdad,Iraq – In its continuing commitment to the implementation of the Strategic Framework
Agreement, the Gulf Region Division, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers helped return an Iraqi artifact to
the Government of Iraq earlier this month.
The artifact — a 27-year-old bronze tablet built in the era of Saddam Hussein and dedicated to an
Unknown Soldier — was turned over to the Iraqi High Tribunal for storage in its secure document
storage facility in the Inte
Source: Reuters
Jun 12, 2009
The Bosnian war crimes court jailed a Bosnian Serb wartime commander for 25 years on Friday for ordering a mortar attack in 1995 on a northern town that killed 71 people and wounded more than 150. Novak Djukic was found guilty of war crimes against civilians and of violations of international law and the Geneva Conventions, the court council in Sarajevo said. Darko Samardzic, the court council president, read the verdict. He said, “One missile hit the very center of the town, Kapija, killing 71
Source: CNN
Jun 12, 2009
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin isn't saying what's in her political future.
Asked if she definitely plans to seek re-election in 2010 -- a move unlikely for someone seeking the White House -- Palin told CNN's Wolf Blitzer, "I'm not definitely going to do anything yet."
In the past week alone, the former Republican vice presidential nominee appeared at a GOP fundraiser in Washington, attended a baseball game in New York and led a small-town parade on the East Coast th
Source: Mental Floss
Jun 12, 2009
Perhaps your history teachers failed to alert you to these Civil War facts: Jefferson Davis nearly got mugged by an angry female mob; Abraham Lincoln loved the Confederate anthem "Dixie," and Paul Revere was a Civil War casualty.
The Civil War, in addition to being among the defining moments of U.S. history, is also the source of some bizarre and surprisingly cool trivia.
1. Lincoln's first solution to slavery was a fiasco
2. Hungry ladies effecti
Source: AP
Jun 12, 2009
The spears that John Brown ordered for his abolitionist army were fearsome, primitive things. Nearly seven feet long, the pikes had 10-inch steel blades made for slashing and impaling those who resisted the slave rebellion Brown envisioned.
Instead, after Brown's ill-fated raid on the arsenal on Oct. 16, 1859, many pikes were seized as souvenirs and today command high prices. One bearing the serial number 846 was sold through Dallas-based Heritage Auction Galleries in 2007 for $13,0
Source: BBC
Jun 12, 2009
Greece would not accept a short loan of the Parthenon Marbles from the British Museum as it would "legalise their snatching", the Culture Minister said.
Antonis Samaras said any loan would mean renouncing Greece's claim to the 2,500-year-old sculptures.
The Marbles, also known as the Elgin Marbles, have been in London since they were sold to the museum in 1817.
Greece hopes one day to display the collection in the Acropolis Museum, which opens i
Source: Deutsche Welle
Jun 12, 2009
The airing on Sarajevo-based FTV television, and on the Internet video-sharing website YouTube, may have seriously jeopardized Serbia's chances of joining the European Union.
A subsequent airing on Bosnian television coincided with an official visit by Serbia's foreign and defense ministers on Thursday. On Monday, EU foreign ministers are due to discuss Belgrade's progress in cooperation with the UN war crimes tribunal.
Serbia's minister in charge of cooperation with th
Source: Deutsche Welle
Jun 12, 2009
The Encyclopaedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933-1945 aims to catalogue most of Adolf Hitler's Nazi concentration camps, POW camps, prisons, and other persecution sites used during the Second World War. Project director Geoffrey Megargee of the US Holocaust Museum in Washington DC told Deutsche Welle that the first surprise he encountered in this endeavor was realising how far the network stretched.
"When the project started we thought we were dealing with perhaps 5,000, perhaps 7,0
Source: Peninsula Daily News (Washington)
Jun 11, 2009
The city's archaeologist, Derek Beery, intends to employ specially trained dogs to sniff for human remains at least a century old for his ongoing waterfront archaeological survey.
He is drafting requests for proposals for dogs and handlers schooled in "canine forensics," he said.
"Historical human remains detection dogs" are specially trained to detect buried remains more than 100 years old, said Adela Morris, founder and president of the Institute f
Source: Times Online (UK)
Jun 11, 2009
Historians turn to fiction as advances are slashed.
Authors are seeing advances reduced to a quarter of what they could have expected two years ago as publishers react to the recession by minimising risks.
Among the hardest hit are historians, who have found that books that would previously have earned them an advance of £120,000 are now commanding only £30,000. Some academics have turned from serious history to historical fiction to earn more money.
Tris
Source: BBC
Jun 11, 2009
Men and women from the Irish Free State who fought in World War Two have not been given the respect they deserve, a historian has said.
A new study by the University of Edinburgh has found more than 3,600 soldiers from the south of Ireland died on active service during WWII.
Their names join those of almost 3,900 fallen combatants from Northern Ireland on a roll of honour being unveiled at Trinity College Dublin on Friday.
The study estimates that in the
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jun 11, 2009
A Bosnian television station has broadcast footage it claims show war crimes fugitive Ratko Mladic living freely in Serbia.
The hour-long video purports to show him enjoying the snow in a ski resort and going on family outings, despite being wanted on war crimes charges in connection with the Bosnian civil war.
The previously unseen images, some of them allegedly filmed as recently as a few months ago, appear to confound Serbia's insistence that it is doing all it can
Source: AP
Jun 11, 2009
A New York City lawyer whose father is a scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls has been accused of stealing the identities of academics to discredit his father's rivals.
Prosecutor Elise Roecker said Thursday in a Manhattan court that an indictment has been filed against 49-year-old Raphael Golb.
He is the son of Dr. Norman Golb of the University of Chicago. Prosecutors say the defendant used Internet aliases to falsely accuse Dr. Lawrence Schiffman of New York University of
Source: Independent (UK)
Jun 11, 2009
In Russia it is not only the future that is unpredictable; often the past is equally in doubt. One minute Leon Trotsky was a hero of the Revolution, the father of the Red Army and a strong contender to succeed Lenin; the next minute he never existed. Until the late 1980s, the 1917 Revolution was the pinnacle of human achievement; suddenly in the 1990s it was seen as an utter failure.
And today again history in the region is turning into an ideological battlefield. When the Red Army
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Jun 11, 2009
A 2,000-year-old war grave crammed with up to 50 headless bodies has been uncovered by workers digging a new road for the Olympics.
The Iron Age victims found in the ancient burial site are thought to have been slaughtered by the invading Romans in about AD43.
All of them had been decapitated and some had their limbs hacked off. It has been discovered in the heart of Thomas Hardy country, on Ridgeway Hill near Weymouth, Dorset.
The site is being dug up to
Source: Spiegel Online
Jun 11, 2009
It was a standoff that could easily have erupted into World War III. In late October, 1961, American tanks stood face to face with Soviet tanks at Checkpoint Charlie in the heart of Berlin, a single wrong move could have been enough to start yet another eruption of continent-wide violence -- or worse.
The Soviets, though, had an advantage. Among the West German police on hand at Friedrichstrasse that day was a man named Karl-Heinz Kurras. But in addition to being a highly respected
Source: History Today (UK)
Jun 11, 2009
Following the unveiling of a plaque just a month ago in the Fuencarral Cemetery, in the northern outskirts of Madrid, a further step was taken, yesterday, to honour the British members of the International Brigades who fought on the side of the republican government during the Spanish Civil War.
Seven surviving British veterans who joined the International Brigades were granted dual Spanish citizenship, yesterday, June 10th, at the Spanish embassy in London. The eldest veteran, Lou
Source: The Times (UK)
Jun 11, 2009
Leonardo López Luján’s new find lies only a few yards to the west, in what must have been one of the most important ritual arenas of the ancient capital.
The relief panel portraying the goddess Tlaltecuhtli dwarfs almost all other Aztec art that we know, and would be a fitting marker for a royal tomb. If one exists, what would it be like?
Two elaborately decorated burial urns — those of “outstanding military captains” and thus high in the Aztec hierarchy — were found
Source: Brennan Center
Jun 10, 2009
The United States is one of a few democratic nations that place the entire burden of registering to vote on individual citizens. Today, one-quarter to one-third of all eligible Americans remain unregistered — and thus are unable to cast ballots that will count. Even Americans who are registered risk being blocked from casting a ballot because of problems with our voter registration system — unprocessed registrations, inaccurate purges of names from the voter rolls, and other administrative and h
