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: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 15, 2008
For almost 500 years, the sinking of the Mary Rose has been blamed on poor seamanship and the fateful intervention of a freak gust of wind which combined to topple her over.
Now, academics believe the vessel, the pride of Henry VIII's fleet, was actually sunk by a French warship – a fact covered up by the Tudors to save face.
The Mary Rose, which was raised from the seabed in 1982 and remains on public display in Portsmouth, was sunk in 1545, as Henry watched from the s
Source: NYT
Nov 15, 2008
By some logic, there is no earthly reason why bicycles should still exist.
They are a quaint, 19th-century invention, originally designed to get someone from point A to point B. Today there are much faster, far less labor-intensive modes of transportation. And yet hopeful children still beg for them for Christmas, healthful adults still ride them to work, and daring teenagers still vault them down courthouse steps. The bicycle industry has faced its share of disruptive technologies,
Source: Deutsche Welle
Nov 15, 2008
"History is repeating itself" in Italy, Piero Terracina said Friday, Nov. 14, at a conference marking the 70th anniversary of the notorious racial laws targeting Jews, which were approved by the Italian cabinet on Nov. 15, 1938.
"Everything started with the census of the Jews and the terrible consequences to which this led us," said Terracina, reported AFP news agency.
The 80-year-old Holocaust survivor was freed from the Auschwitz concentration ca
Source: AP
Nov 15, 2008
Threats against a new president historically spike right after an election, but from Maine to Idaho law enforcement officials are seeing more against Barack Obama than ever before. The Secret Service would not comment or provide the number of cases they are investigating. But since the Nov. 4 election, law enforcement officials have seen more potentially threatening writings, Internet postings and other activity directed at Obama than has been seen with any past president-elect, said officials a
Source: Reuters
Nov 14, 2008
ATHENS -– "I'll tell you what's wrong with it. It's dead, that's what's wrong with it."
For those who believe the ancient Greeks thought of everything first, proof has been found in a 4th century AD joke book featuring an ancestor of Monty Python's Dead Parrot sketch where a man returns a parrot to a shop, complaining it is dead.
The 1,600-year-old work entitled "Philogelos: The Laugh Addict," one of the world's oldest joke books, features a joke in
Source: CBC
Nov 14, 2008
A rare 2,500-year-old Egyptian sarcophagus shattered in a student protest almost four decades ago is expected to be a whole, new artifact when it returns to its home in Montreal after a sojourn in Gatineau.
The elaborately-painted Hetep-Bastet coffin and the mummy inside are on loan to the Museum of Civilization, which plans to hand the ancient wooden coffin back to its owner, the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM), in far better condition than when it left.
Over t
Source: Liverpool Echo (UK)
Nov 14, 2008
THE heritage of Liverpool’s famous Gladstone family was uncovered in a Time Team-style investigation.
The Gladstone Roots Project was officially opened at Court Hey Park in Huyton this week.
Its unique lottery-funded archaeological inquiry explored the heritage of the Gladstone family in the park by excavating the site of a Victorian mansion house.
The grand mansion belonging to Robertson Gladstone, the elder brother of four-times Victorian prime minister W
Source: BBC
Nov 14, 2008
Lifeboat volunteers in East Sussex are marking the 80th anniversary of one of the worst disasters in the RNLI's history, when a crew of 17 drowned.
Rye Harbour lifeboat was launched in the early hours of 15 November 1928 to rescue a stricken steamer, the Alice.
The crew of the Alice was saved by another vessel, but the lifeboat Mary Stanford capsized in the storm.
A presentation to commemorate the disaster is to be held at St Thomas's Church, Winchelsea, on
Source: History Today
Nov 14, 2008
New research by University College London has revealed that massive amounts of government compensation were paid out to investors when slavery was abolished in the 19th century. Dr Nick Draper has discovered that £20 million worth of payments were made, a figure that equates to a staggering 40% of government expenditure of the day.
Even more surprising are the backgrounds to the recipients. The image many today would hold of slave owners may involve upper class affectations and West
Source: National Security Archive
Nov 14, 2008
Forty-six years ago, a month before the Cuban Missile crisis, Soviet leaders put their strategic forces on their "highest readiness stage since the beginning of the Cold War," according to a newly declassified internal history of the National Security Agency published today for the first time by the National Security Archive. Possibly responding to President Kennedy's call for reserves, perhaps worried that the White House had discovered Moscow's plans to deploy missiles on Cuba, the K
Source: AFP
Nov 14, 2008
An Indian probe landed on the moon on Friday, the Indian Space Research Organisation announced, in a milestone for the country's 45-year-old space programme.
The probe touched down on the moon at 8:34pm (1504 GMT), 25 minutes after it was ejected from an unmanned spacecraft orbiting the moon, spokesman S. Satish said.
"During its descent from Chandrayaan-1 an onboard video camera transmitted lunar pictures to the ISRO command centre," Satish said in the southern In
Source: AP
Nov 14, 2008
Zealous guardians of his words and his likeness, the family of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is demanding a share of the proceeds from the sudden wave of T-shirts, posters, and other merchandise depicting the civil rights leader alongside Barack Obama.
Isaac Newton Farris Jr., King's nephew and head of the nonprofit King Center in Atlanta, said the estate is entitled to hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing fees - maybe even millions.
"Some of this is pro
Source: NYT
Nov 14, 2008
A criminal complaint filed in the Spanish High Court has
revived hopes that those behind the massacre of six Jesuit
priests in El Salvador's civil war could face trial.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 14, 2008
The Archbishop of Canterbury called Auschwitz-Birkenau an "image of hell" as he made his first visit to the Nazi death camp.
Dr Rowan Williams said it was vital that people saw the site where more than 1 million were killed during the Second World War in order to understand how the atrocity had come about.
He and Britain's Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, placed candles on the railway tracks that lead under a watchtower into the vast Birkenau camp. It was from
Source: International Herald Tribune
Nov 14, 2008
On Jan. 20, Barack Obama will inherit a world very different from the one his predecessor found in January 2001. Over the past eight years, the Bush administration has faced great challenges and nurtured grand ambitions; it has tried hard to remake the world. Condoleezza Rice has been a central player in that effort since becoming the chief foreign policy adviser in 2000 to Bush, then a candidate, so we arranged to interview her at the State Department late last month. The interview turned into
Source: AP
Nov 14, 2008
President-elect Barack Obama won one of Nebraska's electoral votes, the first time in history that the state has split its votes and the first time in 44 years that it had given a vote to a Democrat.
After remaining ballots were counted Friday, Obama had a 3,325-vote lead over Republican John McCain in unofficial results for the 2nd Congressional District. Nebraska and Maine are the two states that divide their electoral votes by congressional districts.
Obama, who won the White Hou
Source: International Herald Tribune
Nov 14, 2008
Scottish judges on Friday rejected a request by the only man convicted in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, Britain's bloodiest terror attack, to be released early from jail to spend time with his family while he is treated for prostate cancer.
Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, 56, a former Libyan intelligence officer, was jailed in 2001 after a trial under Scottish law at a special court in the Netherlands. He has always proclaimed his innocence in the explosion on board Pan Am Flight 103 on
Source: Deutsche Welle
Nov 14, 2008
Officials at Charite's Medical History Museum said they are unsure how the human remains made it into their anthropological collection, but added they would work with Australian scientists to determine where the skulls will be sent from Berlin.
Ian Kemish, Australia's ambassador to Germany, said Thursday, Nov. 14, that the move comes from "an impulse for reconciliation."
Apart from scant notes made over a century ago in the museum's archives and on the skulls
Source: Wall Street Journal
Nov 14, 2008
WASHINGTON -- For much of its history, the government's most-secretive intelligence agency sought to conceal its very existence.
So it was a surprise last year when university researchers persuaded the National Security Agency to hand over a top-secret, 1,000-page account of its Cold War spying.
George Washington University plans to release the report today, giving historians a rare look inside the agency that gathers intelligence through eavesdropping. But one thing ap
Source: Washington Post
Nov 14, 2008
In 1762, the Huntsberry family settled the land along Redbud Run, outside Winchester, with a deed from Lord Fairfax. Eight generations later, Bob Huntsberry spent his summers there as a child, finding rusted Minie balls that had been fired from the muskets of Civil War soldiers. He grew up steeped in elders' stories of the day, late in the summer of 1864, when Union Gen. Philip Sheridan and 39,000 troops came marching in.
Now, Huntsberry, 80, has reached a $3.35 million deal with Ci
