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: CNN
Mar 11, 2009
After a group of Israeli farmers sought last year to expand their property in the hills near Jerusalem, they discovered an archeological gem beneath the dirt.
A team led by Daniel Ein Mor barely had to scratch the surface before finding the remains of a Byzantine monastery, he told CNN on Wednesday.
"The excavation at Nes-Harim supplements our knowledge about the nature of the Christian-Byzantine settlement in the rural areas between the main cities in this part of
Source: LAT
Mar 11, 2009
With bone fragment analysis, scientists put to rest the rumors that two children might have escaped the royal family's slaying during the Russian Revolution.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 11, 2009
An Australian man has taken a lie detector test as part of his battle against extradition to Hungary where he is alleged to have killed a Jewish teenager during the Second World War.
Charles Zentai, 87, is listed by the US-based Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center as among its 10 most wanted Nazis, but maintains he is innocent.
The Centre claims Zentai "participated in manhunts, persecution, and murder of Jews in Budapest in 1944".
Source: AP
Mar 11, 2009
Retired Ohio auto worker John Demjanjuk was charged Wednesday with 29,000 counts of acting as an accessory to murder while working as a guard at a Nazi death camp in occupied Poland. The arrest warrant could move the 30-year global legal battle over his fate closer to conclusion.
The warrant by a Munich court seeks the deportation or extradition of Demjanjuk, who lives in a Cleveland suburb and denies involvement in the deaths at Sobibor. His family says he is too sick to travel.
Source: AP
Mar 11, 2009
WASHINGTON – A famous early ancestor of humans was able to thrive in glacial weather that would send icy shivers up the spines of most modern people, new research shows.
New dating techniques suggest the remains of so-called Peking Man — a batch of Homo erectus fossils found in the 1920s — are 200,000 years older than previously calculated.
What's important about that date, about 770,000 years ago, is that this was a glacial period on Earth, and Peking Man was found in
Source: Politico
Mar 11, 2009
He’s touted his father’s Kenyan roots and his mother’s Kansas upbringing.
But Irish Americans say they’re still waiting for Barack Obama to embrace another influential figure from his past: his great-great-great-grandfather Falmouth Kearney.
An Irish immigrant who came to America in 1850, Kearney hailed from Moneygall, County Offaly, a tiny Irish village about an hour and a half west of Dublin. And according to Ancestry.com, this link makes Obama about 3.1 percent Irish
Source: LiveScience
Mar 11, 2009
The remains of a medieval "vampire" have been discovered among the corpses of 16th century plague victims in Venice, according to an Italian archaeologist who led the dig.
The body of the woman was found in a mass grave on the Venetian island of Lazzaretto Nuovo. Suspecting that she might be a vampire, a common folk belief at the time, gravediggers shoved a rock into her skull to prevent her from chewing through her shroud and infecting others with the plague, said anthrop
Source: NYT
Mar 11, 2009
Pope Benedict XVI has written an unusually personal letter to bishops worldwide explaining why he revoked the excommunication of a Holocaust-denying bishop and admitting mistakes in how the Vatican handled the case.
The letter, which the Vatican will release Thursday, is a further attempt to calm the waters after Benedict pardoned four schismatic bishops, including Richard Williamson, who in a television interview aired in January said that there were no Nazi gas chambers.
Source: Independent (UK)
Mar 11, 2009
In the early hours of a July day in 1918, one of history's most infamous murders was perpetrated on parents, their five children and their loyal servants in a cellar in the city of Yekaterinburg, central Russia.
The gunshot-and-bayonet murder of the Romanovs – the family of the last Tsar and Tsarina of Russia – spawned countless conspiracy theories, including the belief that at least one child had survived to escape abroad.
Since that fatal dawn, about 200 people have c
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 11, 2009
Charles Zentai, 87, is listed by the US-based Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center as among its 10 most wanted Nazis, but maintains he is innocent.
The Centre claims Zentai "participated in manhunts, persecution, and murder of Jews in Budapest in 1944".
Hungary accuses him of torturing and killing 18-year-old Peter Balazs in a Budapest army barracks on Nov 8, 1944, for failing to wear a star that would identify him as a Jew. Zentai allegedly carried out the
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Mar 11, 2009
The Slovenian and Croatian delegations have laid a wreath at the entrance of the mine near Lasko, where a post-Second World War mass grave was discovered last week.
Croatian Deputy Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor told the Slovenian news agency, STA, that she was horrified by the sight of the victims in photographs.
The mass grave in eastern Slovenia is believed to hold up to 300 victims killed after the Second World War by the former communist regime, authorities confirm
Source: International Herald Tribune
Mar 11, 2009
A former North Korean agent who confessed to bombing a passenger jet in 1987 met Wednesday with relatives of a Japanese woman abducted to the Communist North in an encounter that shed little new light on the fate of the missing woman but was expected to anger North Korea.
The meeting, sponsored by the Japanese and South Korean governments amid rising tensions with the North, was the first public appearance of Kim Hyon Hui, the former North Korean agent, in almost 20 years, and was i
Source: International Herald Tribune
Mar 11, 2009
When Libya gave up its nuclear and chemical weapons programs in late 2003, President George W. Bush pointed to the decision as a victory in Washington's so-called war on terror and as a potential model for pressing Iran and North Korea to give up their weapons programs, too.
But now Libyan officials say they are dissatisfied with the way the deal worked out, insisting that the United States has done too little to reward Libya's concessions. Officials here say they believe that Libya
Source: Spiegel Online
Mar 11, 2009
There were some who immediately dove into the trenches of old. The tabloid Sun wrote "if the Mafia were handed power in New York, would anyone expect them to go straight?" Then, they added the kicker: "It's the same with the IRA and Northern Ireland."
But the overwhelming reaction to the recent killings in Northern Ireland has been one of solidarity between the country's erstwhile bitter rivals. On Tuesday evening, the leaders of Northern Ireland's coalition, Fir
Source: Deutsche Welle
Mar 11, 2009
The well-preserved footwear dating back to the Stone Age, is of great historical significance, the head of Stuttgart's City Council Johannes Schmalzl said on Tuesday, March 10.
He described the find as a "small sensation," comparing it to fragments of clothing once worn by Oetzi, an Alpine ice man whose 5,000-year-old mummified body was discovered in a melting glacier in the nearby Alps in 1991.
The European size 36 sandal, made of woven wood, was discovered i
Source: Tehran Times
Mar 11, 2009
The classification was carried out by a joint team of Italian-Iranian experts led by Iranian archaeologist Mansur Sajjadi over the 12th season of excavation that began in late December 2008.
This season was more focused on classification of those artifacts discovered in the Burnt City so far, Sajjadi told the Persian service of CHN on Tuesday.
“Classifying the artifacts was very essential for us… so they were categorized as pottery works, metal artifacts, tiny relics,
Source: BBC
Mar 11, 2009
Aziz had denied any role in the summary trials of the men accused in 1992 of profiteering during economic sanctions.
Two of Saddam Hussein's half-brothers were also found guilty and sentenced to death by a court in Baghdad.
Another top official, Ali Hassan al-Majid - commonly known as Chemical Ali - was jailed for 15 years.
Two other Iraqi officials were jailed for six and 15 years, while a former governor of the Iraqi central bank was acquitted, reports
Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com
Mar 11, 2009
How did humans living in the third millennium BCE manage to find sufficient quantities of meat in the arid desert regions? A new study of the "desert kites" that are spread across the expanses of Israel's Negev and Arava desert region, carried out by researchers from the University of Haifa, unearths the answer to this riddle.
Already in the early 20th century, British pilots flying over the Middle Eastern deserts identified strange forms spreading over hundreds of meters,
Source: AFP
Mar 10, 2009
Italian Renaissance painter Caravaggio used revolutionary optical instruments to "photograph" his models more than 200 years before the invention of the camera, according to a researcher in Florence.
The 16th-century artist celebrated for his dramatic chiaroscuro (light and shadow) paintings mastered "a whole set of techniques that are the basis of photography", Roberta Lapucci told AFP.
Caravaggio worked in a "darkroom" and illuminated his
Source: Art Daily
Mar 10, 2009
A fragment of a pottery vessel of Persian provenance that dates to the Middle Ages (12th-13th centuries CE) was discovered in an archaeological excavation directed by Dr. Rina Avner, on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, in the Old City of Jerusalem, prior to construction by a private contractor.
The fragment is treated with a turquoise glaze and is adorned with floral patterns and a black inscription. While studying the artifact prior to publication, Rivka Cohen-Amin of t
