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: LiveScience
Nov 19, 2008
Our ape-like ancestors might have walked like today's gibbons, whose super bendy feet give them a floppy strut.
The modern human foot first evolved in our ancestors around 1.8 million years ago, said Evie Vereecke of the University of Liverpool in England. But studies suggest that even before our advanced feet emerged, our mostly tree-climbing ancestors were walking upright for short stints.
Vereecke wanted to find out how they would have done that without specialized w
Source: International Herald Tribune
Nov 19, 2008
On Aug. 2, 1949, with the Communists about to seize power in Beijing, the United States recalled its ambassador to China, John Leighton Stuart, a respected missionary, educator and diplomat.
Mao Zedong, the insurgent Communist leader who would take power two months later, quickly denounced Stuart as a symbol of failed American imperialism. Stuart's departure effectively ended diplomatic ties between the United States and China for a quarter century.
Stuart died in Washi
Source: CNN
Nov 19, 2008
As the economy continues to look grim, the word "bankruptcy" is on the tips of more and more tongues. While being unable to pay one's creditors is never a good situation for a company or an individual, it may not be the financial kiss of death that you might think. (Just ask Donald Trump, whose casinos have gone bankrupt twice.)
A number of successful people have found themselves overextended and ended up filing for bankruptcy, only to successfully stick it out and f
Source: Spiegel Online
Nov 19, 2008
On Tuesday Germany and Italy's foreign ministers announced a joint historical commission that will investigate Germany's treatment of Italian prisoners during World War II.
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and his Italian counterpart, Franco Frattini said that historians from both countries would meet next year to discuss the countries' "collective history."
The two men visited La Risiera di San Sabba, the site of the only Nazi concentration cam
Source: Deutsche Welle
Nov 19, 2008
Authorities in the capital had approached the Jewish community to see if it wanted to host exhibitions at the woodland property on the outskirts of the city.
Its members inspected the site at Bogensee during the summer. After that, there had been no further contact with city officials, said Maya Zehden, a spokeswoman for the Jewish community.
"For this reason the Jewish community is no longer interested in the idea, whatever form it might take," she said.
Source: Deutsche Welle
Nov 19, 2008
Rose Kabuye is wanted for questioning in connection with a 1994 assassination. German federal police said she left on a flight from Frankfurt to Paris in the early afternoon.
Since arresting her on Nov. 9 when she arrived by plane, Germany had been waiting for French police to pick her up. She was wanted under a European arrest warrant issued by the French.
Last week, Kabuye agreed to fast-track extradition and German judges approved her being handed over to France. A f
Source: Washington Post
Nov 19, 2008
Saluting the National Museum of American History as "one of the country's great civic institutions," President Bush this morning helped rededicate the revamped museum and the new home for the Star-Spangled Banner.
"This building is home to many of our national treasures. It is a reminder of our country's proud heritage," Bush said, standing before the museum's shimmering architectural representation of a waving flag. The centerpiece of American History's renovati
Source: Reuters
Nov 19, 2008
BEIT SAHOUR, West Bank -- An Israeli archaeologist said on Wednesday he had unearthed what he believed were the 2,000-year-old remains of two tombs which had held a wife and daughter-in-law of the biblical King Herod.
Other findings announced by Ehud Netzer of Jerusalem's Hebrew University provided new evidence of the lavish lifestyle of the Roman-era monarch also known as the "King of the Jews."..
Netzer, an authority on Herodian excavations, showed reporters
Source: Reuters
Nov 19, 2008
ROME -- The Cleveland Museum of Art agreed on Wednesday to return looted art to Italy, including an ancient vase and a 14th-century cross, as museums worldwide face pressure to ensure their collections were acquired legally.
The Cleveland said it would return 14 artifacts within three months. Among them are an Apulian Volute Krater vase from 33O BC and a rare gold processional cross from 1375, which was stolen from a Siena church and acquired by the museum in 1977.
Source: Independent
Nov 19, 2008
After years of secrecy, the Broadmoor authorities have released the medical records of a Victorian madman who was suspected of being the serial killer known as Jack the Ripper. [Broadmoor is a high-security psychiatric hospital at Crowthorne in Berkshire.]
Thomas Hayne Cutbush was a strange, disturbed and violent youth who was diagnosed as insane in 1891 and remained in Broadmoor until his death in 1903. During the period when the Ripper was on the rampage in Whitechapel, east Lond
Source: Wall Street Journal
Nov 19, 2008
BROOKLYN, N.Y. -- John F. Kennedy was assassinated 45 years ago -- the anniversary is Nov. 22, Saturday. And now that the country has a new first family evoking something of the Kennedy mystique, Neil Estern has been thinking it's high time his sculpture of JFK is put back where it belongs.
It belongs in Grand Army Plaza, a traffic maelstrom in the heart of Brooklyn. The plaza's arch marks the Union's triumph in the Civil War. Set around it are statues of such notables as...Alexande
Source: NYT
Nov 19, 2008
URUMQI, China — An exhibit on the first floor of the museum here gives the government’s unambiguous take on the history of this border region: “Xinjiang has been an inalienable part of the territory of China,” says one prominent sign.
But walk upstairs to the second floor, and the ancient corpses on display seem to tell a different story.
One called the Loulan Beauty lies on her back with her shoulder-length hair matted down, her lips pursed in death, her high cheekbone
Source: CNN
Nov 18, 2008
The similarities are eerie.
Both Abraham Lincoln and President-elect Barack Obama were not from Illinois but became two of the state's top politicians.
They were both criticized for being too inexperienced to become president of the United States.
Both were raised by women other than their mothers (Lincoln by his stepmother and Obama by his grandmother) and later visited the women before their respective inaugurations.
Lincoln, a Republican, a
Source: NYT
Nov 18, 2008
URUMQI, China — The Loulan Beauty is one of more than 200 remarkably well-preserved mummies discovered in the western deserts here over the last few decades. The ancient bodies have become protagonists in a very contemporary political dispute over who should control the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.
The Chinese authorities here face an intermittent separatist movement of nationalist Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people who number nine million in Xinjiang.
At th
Source: Spiegel Online
Nov 18, 2008
John Demjanjuk has been living in the United States for more than 50 years. Now a German court is considering prosecuting him for his alleged crimes as a Nazi prison guard. It would be a coup for Nazi hunters, but legal details stand in the way of a trial.
In his first appearance before the global public, Ivan "John" Demjanjuk chose to be provocative. After arriving in Tel Aviv on a flight from New York, he tried to kneel down and kiss the ground of the Holy Land, but his
Source: History Today
Nov 18, 2008
The first part of the State Papers Online project has now been completed and 200 volumes of the papers are available online. The aim of the project is to create an online database of the State Papers Domestic and Foreign, the Registers of the Privy Council and the State Papers in the British Library from 1509 to 1714, making them accessible to academics and the general public and providing a new resource for the study of early modern Britain and Europe.
Source: CNN
Nov 18, 2008
A man who was detained during Chile's "dirty war" in 1973 and declared dead in 1995 showed up in his old hometown very much alive last week, a human rights group in Santiago has announced.
German Rene Cofre Martinez had been living in Argentina for the past 35 years before he returned to his home in La Cisterna in Chile, said La Agrupacion de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos (The Group of Relatives of Those who Disappeared While Being Detained).
The group
Source: NYT
Nov 18, 2008
SEOUL, South Korea — To conservative critics, a widely used textbook’s version of how American and Soviet forces took control of Korea from Japanese colonialists in 1945 shows all that is wrong with the way South Korean history is taught to young people today.
The fact no one disputes is that, at the end of World War II, the Soviet military swept into northern Korea and installed a friendly Communist government while an American military administration assumed control in the south.
Source: http://www.foxreno.com
Nov 18, 2008
Famed Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward met with his “Deep Throat” source over the weekend and this time it wasn’t in a darkened parking lot in Washington, D.C.
Woodward visited with retired high-ranking FBI official Mark Felt in Santa Rosa on Sunday and took the opportunity to introduce the source that was key to the Watergate probe to his reporting partner – Carl Bernstein. It was the first time ever Bernstein had met Felt.
Source: http://www.tillsonburgnews.com (Ontario, Canada)
Nov 18, 2008
Excavation of the largest Native village in North America, dating from the 1300s to 1400s, was recently completed in Tillsonburg.
The area excavated was on Quarterline Road, in front of the Tillsonburg soccer park. The property is owned by Bamford Homes and Bethel Temple. Bamford Homes' plans are to erect a 25-unit condominium building there, similar to King Richard's Court.
Taking earlier findings at the soccer park in 2001 into consideration, the area once held 15 lon
