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
Apr 15, 2009
Millions of old newspaper reports and magazines articles from Wales, dating as far back as the 18th Century, are to be made available online.
Included in the £2m project by the National Library of Wales will be first-hand accounts from the Chartist march on Newport and the Rebecca riots.
Up to 300 titles will be available at the click of a button by 2012.
Last October, the library began digitising its collection of books, historical documents and works o
Source: BBC
Apr 15, 2009
A travel company is to mark the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic with a cruise following the route, it has announced.
The Titanic, built in the Belfast shipyard of Harland and Wolff, sank on its maiden voyage in April 1912, with the loss of more than 1,500 lives.
The Balmoral, operated by Fred Olsen Cruise Lines, whose parent company now owns H&W, will recreate the voyage.
The 97th anniversary of the sinking was marked with a ceremony
Source: BBC
Apr 15, 2009
Archaeologists are to search three sites in Egypt that they say may contain the tomb of doomed lovers Anthony and Cleopatra.
Excavation at the sites, which are near a temple west of the coastal city of Alexandria, is due to begin next week.
Teams working in the area said the recent discovery of tombs containing 10 mummies suggested that Anthony and Cleopatra might be buried close by.
The teams also found a bust of Cleopatra and coins carrying her image.
Source: AP
Apr 15, 2009
North Korea celebrated the birthday of late founding father Kim Il Sung on Wednesday while the isolated regime prepared to restart its nuclear reactor by expelling U.N. inspectors.
There was no official North Korean response to the international criticism Wednesday, which was celebrated nationwide as the "Day of the Sun" — a holiday honoring Kim Il Sung's birth 97 years ago.
Kim Il Sung ruled North Korea for more than four decades until his death from heart fa
Source: AP
Apr 15, 2009
A lawyer for the Cleveland area man accused of being a Nazi death camp guard says the elderly suspect needs chemotherapy and is unfit for trial.
John Demjanjuk was released from federal custody late Tuesday, just hours after immigration officers took him from his Ohio home in a wheelchair. He'd been scheduled for deportation to Germany to face a possible war crimes trial.
An appeals court is giving the 89-year-old another chance to argue that deportation would amount to
Source: CNN
Apr 15, 2009
Armed with signs reading "no taxation without deliberation" and "stop bankrupting America," tens of thousands of people spent national tax day at organized "tea party" demonstrations across the country, protesting what some view as excessive government spending and bailouts.
In Massachusetts, hundreds cheered as people dressed in 18th-century style wigs and clothes tossed crates of tea into Boston Harbor, harkening back to pre-Revolutionary War protests
Source: AP
Apr 15, 2009
AUSTIN, Texas -- Texas Gov. Rick Perry fired up an anti-tax "tea party" Wednesday with his stance against the federal government and for states' rights as some in his U.S. flag-waving audience shouted, "Secede!"...
Perry called his supporters patriots. Later, answering news reporters' questions, Perry suggested Texans might at some point get so fed up they would want to secede from the union, though he said he sees no reason why Texas should do that...
Source: AP
Apr 15, 2009
Washington and Lee University has a missing library book back on its shelves _ nearly 145 years after it was stolen by a Union soldier during the Civil War.
The 1842 book, the first volume of W.F.P. Napier's four-volume "History of the War in the Peninsula and in the South of France From the Year 1807 to the Year 1814," was returned recently by a friend of one of the soldier's descendants to the Lexington school's Leyburn Library.
Mistakenly thinking he was at
Source: WSJ
Apr 15, 2009
The Obama administration is leaning toward keeping secret some graphic details of tactics allowed in Central Intelligence Agency interrogations, despite a push by some top officials to make the information public, according to people familiar with the discussions.
These people cautioned that President Barack Obama is still reviewing internal arguments over the release of Justice Department memorandums related to CIA interrogations, and how much information will be made public is in
Source: AP
Apr 15, 2009
Archaeologists will begin excavating sites in Egypt next week in an attempt to solve a mystery that has stymied historians for hundreds of years: Where is the final resting place of doomed lovers Cleopatra and Mark Antony?
Archaeologists looking for the tombs of the celebrated queen of Egypt and the Roman general, who committed suicide in 31 B.C., will begin excavating three sites at a temple where tombs may be located, Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities said in a statement Wedn
Source: AP
Apr 15, 2009
The University of Texas at Dallas [is holding a symposium that] coincides with the CIA's release of about 10,000 previously classified Air America records, which will become part of the school library's extensive aviation collection. The CIA declassified the documents following a Freedom of Information Act request by UT-Dallas.
"These Air America documents are essential to understanding a large untold history of America's involvement in Southeast Asia," said Paul Oelkrug,
Source: Reuters
Apr 15, 2009
Rare inherited genetic disorders worsened by repeated inbreeding may have brought down the powerful Spanish Habsburg dynasty, Spanish researchers said Tuesday.
Checks of genealogical charts and analysis of King Charles II's reported health problems suggest he may have had two rare conditions called combined pituitary hormone deficiency and distal renal tubular acidosis, the researchers speculated in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE.
While the occasional ma
Source: Press Release
Apr 14, 2009
The constitutionality of the War in Iraq will be the subject of a hearing in Newark’s Federal District Court on Tuesday, April 21, at 11 am. The suit brought by the Constitutional Litigation Clinic at Rutgers School of Law–Newark challenges the legality of the invasion of Iraq without a Congressional Declaration of War. The plaintiffs are New Jersey Peace Action, a non-profit anti-war group; an Iraq war veteran; and two New Jersey mothers, members of Military Families Speak Out, whose sons were
Source: Christian Science Monitor
Apr 14, 2009
Iraqis are book lovers. So much so that there’s a saying in the Arab world: Cairo writes, Beirut
publishes, Iraq reads. But lately it’s been hard for Iraqis to lay their hands on the books that
they crave.
Reporting from Iraq for McClatchy Newspapers, Corinne Reilly writes that throughout Iraq, “Libraries
and schools are understocked, and many bookstores are closed…. College-level texts, books on
specialized subjects and recent editions are the hardest to come by. Most elementary and
Source: Spiegel
Apr 14, 2009
John Demjanjuk is not an isolated case. German investigators have set their sights on other presumed Nazi war criminals, raising the question of how the law should deal with the aged accessories of the Holocaust.
The Central Office for the Prosecution of National Socialist Crimes (ZSTL) in Ludwigsburg, near Stuttgart, already has its sights set on four other men who may have committed murder or been accessories to murder on behalf of the Germans, and who, like Demjanjuk, subsequentl
Source: National Parks Traveler website
Apr 14, 2009
Quite often we hear about tree removal projects to clear sight lines and recreate appearances at Civil War units of the National Park System. At Gettysburg National Military Park, they're planting trees to return the landscape to 1860s appearances.
Park crews last week started replanting four more historic orchards in major battle action areas on the battlefield. The goal is to replant 30 acres of orchards with hardy varieties of apple so visitors can better understand the fighting
Source: Stone Pages Archaeo News
Apr 14, 2009
A team of archaeologists from the Deccan College Post Graduate and Research Institute is back from Haryana (India) where they stumbled upon a record 70 Harappan graves at a site in Farmana, discovering the largest burial site of this civilisation in India so far.
The excavation proved one of the biggest breakthroughs in South Asian history and is now listed for World Heritage status conferred by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). It is an extrao
Source: CNN
Apr 14, 2009
Roughly 70,000 beads said to provide clues to the social structure and wealth of people from the 17th century Spanish empire have been excavated by a team of scientists, an archaeologist said Tuesday.
Since 1974, scientists at the American Museum of Natural History have been digging beneath the Santa Catalina de Guale Mission, a remote outpost of the Spanish empire on St. Catherines Island off the coast of Georgia and "the largest repository ever from Spanish Florida," mus
Source: AFP
Apr 14, 2009
An obsessive passion to revive a nearly forgotten music enjoyed by China's elite more than a thousand years ago has cost Li Kai his wife, his job and most of his savings.
Li said that 60 years ago, when the People's Republic was founded following decades of civil war and revolution, there were 50 groups practising this music in Shaanxi.
Now, after the ravages of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s which sought to wipe out China's ancient traditions, only 12 g
Source: UCA News
Apr 14, 2009
Dr. Reinaldo (Dito) Morales Jr., assistant professor of art history at UCA, has confirmed a major discovery in the world of rock art: an ancient rock painting at a burial site from the Inca site of Machu Picchu in Peru.
Morales announced his discovery today at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Atlanta and plans to submit a manuscript about his discovery, New Rock Art at Old Machu Picchu, to a scholarly journal.
Dr. Jeff Young, chair of the D
