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: Chicoer (California)
Mar 31, 2009
Human remains of an American Indian man dating back thousands of years were discovered early Monday afternoon at an excavation site on the Sacramento River north of Hamilton City.
Lt. Rich Warren of Glenn County Sheriff's Office said in a phone interview late Monday that the bones were discovered around 1:30 p.m. by an archaeologist from Far Western Anthropological Research Group, out of Davis.
The researchers were doing a test dig on the west bank of the river. Digging sto
Source: AP
Mar 31, 2009
On June 12, 1933, more than a thousand of the world's top finance and government officials squeezed into London's stuffy Geological Museum to hear a speech from Britain's King George V - broadcast live by radio to underscore the gravity of the meeting - and set about trying to save the world from the Great Depression.
Six weeks later, the World Economic Conference gave up. Without any major agreements, it adjourned amid squabbling and finger-pointing between the world's democracies.
Source: Deutsche Welle
Mar 31, 2009
The construction of a metro underneath the center of the old city is widely blamed for the disaster of March 3 2009 in which two young men died and a huge collection of irreplaceable historical documents was buried under tons of rubble.
Some 200 police officers swooped on the headquarters of Cologne's local transport company, KVB, and on offices of building firms involved in the underground project.
Chief state prosecutor Guenther Feld said Frankfurt, Berlin, Munich, E
Source: Time Magazine
Mar 31, 2009
For his first major overseas trip as president, Barack Obama has a G-20 meeting, a NATO summit and a roundtable discussion in a Muslim country on the itinerary. But at a morning briefing the day before his departure — as reporters focused on the ouster of General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner — Press Secretary Robert Gibbs didn't field a single question about the President's trip. It was a sign of how ubiquitous and rote presidential foreign travel has become.
Think back to when a Presid
Source: Brisbane Times (France)
Mar 31, 2009
Archaeologists in northern France have stumbled upon two mass graves dating back to the years of civil strife unleashed after the French Revolution of 1789, officials say.
Located in a park in the city of Le Mans, the graves contain the bodies of about 30 people, including several women, two male teenagers and a child, the INRA archaeology institute said on Monday.
All were identified as victims of a massacre on December 12 and 13, 1793, as republican forces repelled ro
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 31, 2009
Massacre survivor Dren Caka, photographed by the Telegraph in 1999, remembers the night his mother and sisters were murdered by Serbian police in one of the most notorious episodes of the war.
A decade on from the Kosovo War, that last great exercise in 20th-century European blood-letting, Dren Caka, 20, is a casualty still.
“I have nightmares a lot,” he says, looking out over Vancouver’s glistening waterfront. “I can’t sleep at night and feel constantly tired; I usual
Source: BBC
Mar 31, 2009
The oldest living person in the UK is celebrating her 113th birthday at a nursing home in Leeds.
Guinness World Record holder Florence Emily Baldwin, known as Florrie, was born in the city on 31 March 1896.
Mrs Baldwin, whose husband Clifford died in 1973, once met Queen Victoria in Leeds, was 16 when the Titanic sank and 73 when man landed on the moon.
Her only contact with the medical world had been a cataract operation when she was in her 80s.
Source: BBC
Mar 31, 2009
The German interior ministry has banned a far-right group for allegedly organising activities promoting racist and Nazi ideology among young children.
The Homeland-Faithful German Youth (HDJ) taught children as young as six that foreigners and Jews were a threat to the "German nation", officials said.
Police have also raided the offices and houses of the group's leaders in four states in connection with the ban.
The HDJ said it was a "youth
Source: BBC
Mar 31, 2009
The man who led Argentina out of the era of military dictatorship, Raul Alfonsin, is said to be very ill and to be having difficulty breathing.
Doctors say Mr Alfonsin, 82, has pneumonia and lung cancer. His son Ricardo says he is "very fragile".
He was the first democratically-elected president after the military regime that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983.
Mr Alfonsin was president from 1983, when the generals lost power after British troops
Source: AP
Mar 31, 2009
The man accused of being the Khmer Rouge's chief torturer put down his prepared speech, removed his eyeglasses and gazed at the courtroom audience as he pleaded for forgiveness from the country he helped terrorize three decades ago.
"At the beginning I only prayed to ask for forgiveness from my parents, but later I prayed to ask forgiveness from the whole nation," Kaing Guek Eav — better known as Duch — recounted on the second day of his trial before Cambodia's genocide tr
Source: Independent (UK)
Mar 31, 2009
Visitors to the Alhambra fortress-palace in Granada have for centuries fallen into a reverie before its intricately carved medieval walls, wondering at the meaning of the Arabic inscriptions that adorn them from floor to ceiling. The script that winds round the filigree arches and pillared courtyards is so stylised that it's often difficult to disentangle words from images, and few can decipher the classical Arabic in which they are written.
Now, the carvings have been logged and tr
Source: Press Release
Mar 30, 2009
“The Quran in its Historical Context,” an international conference addressing the most recent theories, controversies and discoveries in the field of Quranic studies, will be held April 19 to 21 (Sunday to Tuesday) at the University of Notre Dame. The conference is free and open to the public.
The conference, which will provide a unique forum for discussion of the historical circumstances in which the Quran was formed and of its relationship to the Bible, will open with a lecture titled “
Source: eBay
Mar 30, 2009
Apartment 310 at Watergate West is an important landmark in the Watergate Scandal that ended Richard Nixon’s Presidency. The apartment is now for sale, with historical documentation, through an eBay auction. More information about the apartment can be found on our website at www.nixonwatergatehistory.com. Be sure to click on the "Secret Testimony" button to see how important this apartment was in the Watergate scandal.
Du
Source: Stone Pages Archaeo News
Mar 30, 2009
Humans were dying of anthrax in North America much earlier than thought - perhaps after scavenging the remains of infected animals while migrating from Asia during the Ice Age-a new study says. "We've always thought that anthrax was an Old World disease that was brought to the New World by Europeans" around 1500, said study coauthor Paul Keim of Northern Arizona University. But the new report suggests that ancient humans entering the continent thousands of years earlier imported the di
Source: Stone Pages Archaeo News
Mar 30, 2009
The German city of Speyer, in Rheinland-Palatinate, boasts some macabre relics. A collection of skulls, shin bones and vertebrae might not seem unusual in an archaeology museum, but these particular remains are special. They all show signs of having been cut, scraped or broken, indicating that their owners were cannibalised."These grooves, running from the base of the nose to the back of the neck, or here on the temples, show, beyond all possible doubt, that the flesh was torn off," says Andrea
Source: Virginia Pilot
Mar 30, 2009
Soon after the U.S. Marines seized the ancient Iraqi city of Babylon in 2003, Iraqi treasure hunters were picking through the ruins of a 2,600-year-old palace.
Capt. Emilio Marrero Jr., a Navy chaplain, watched from atop a fortress wall with a few Marines and two Iraqi guides.
An Iraqi host whispered, "Ali Baba." Thieves.
Armed with little more than indignation and the cross on his left collar, Marrero hollered down in his Bronx accent at the loot
Source: NYT
Mar 30, 2009
For those who want instant information, there is no shortage of outlets, from cable news to Twitter posts. For the long view, it was said, try a book.
But as the metabolism of the culture has sped up in the digital age, pockets of the publishing industry are prodding themselves out of their Paleolithic ways and joining the rush, with more books on current events coming out faster than ever before.
For generations the publishing industry has worked on a fairly standard s
Source: Boston Globe
Mar 30, 2009
e National Catholic Reporter says it has obtained documents showing that American bishops and the Vatican were warned of the dangers of clergy sexual abuse in the 1950s, decades before the phenomenon became public. An excerpt from the NCR story:
As early as the mid-1950s, decades before the clergy sexual-abuse crisis broke publicly across the U.S. Catholic landscape, the founder of a religious order that dealt regularly with priest sex abusers was so convinced of their inabili
Source: McClatchy
Mar 30, 2009
Marylena Bustamante traveled 24 hours on a bus from Mexico City for a new chance at finding information about her brother, who disappeared 27 years ago during Guatemala's civil war.
Guatemalan human rights authorities recently opened a vast archive of police records that could contain information about Bustamante's brother, Emil, and thousands of other victims of state repression during the country's 36-year civil war.
"Like every family member of a detained/disapp
Source: National Geograhpic News
Mar 30, 2009
A brass navigational instrument known as a chart divider is among artifacts recently recovered from a shipwreck thought to be the Queen Anne's Revenge, the ship of the infamous 18th-century pirate Blackbeard, archaeologists said in March 2009.
Some of the newfound relics add to evidence that the ship belonged to the pirate. ""We feel pretty comfortable that that's what this is," said Marke Wilde-Ramsing, director of the Queen Anne's Revenge project for the North Carol
