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: WaPo
Oct 30, 2008
A long-awaited audit of expense reports for Smithsonian museum directors and governing board members is expected to be released later this year, but will not reveal the kinds of excesses found recently among other executives, the institution's inspector general said today.
The review was requested after a series of reports in The Washington Post exposed spending abuses among Smithsonian managers. Inspector General A. Sprightley Ryan found "lavish" and "extravagant&quo
Source: AP
Oct 30, 2008
The Italian government gave Libya early warning of the 1986 U.S. airstrikes launched in response to a deadly attack on a disco in Germany, Libyan and Italian officials said Thursday.
Libya's Foreign Minister Abdel-Rahman Shalgam was quoted by the ANSA and Apcom news agencies as saying the Italians warned him of the raids launched from a NATO base on Italian soil because they were opposed to the action. Shalgam said the Italians informed him personally since, at the time, he was Liby
Source: FoxNews.com
Oct 30, 2008
The ancient Phoenicians may be largely forgotten, but they're not gone.
Rome destroyed the Phoenicians' greatest city — Carthage — centuries ago, but new genetic studies indicate that as many as one in 17 men living in communities around the Mediterranean may be descended from these ancient mariners.
Originating from what is now Lebanon, the Phoenicians were early seafarers and traders who spread their culture, including a love for the color purple, to North Africa, Spa
Source: Harvard Crimson
Oct 30, 2008
Harvard University Library will not take part in Google’s book scanning project for in-copyright works after finding the terms of its landmark $125 million settlement regarding copyrighted materials unsatisfactory, University officials said yesterday.
Harvard had been one of five academic libraries—along with Stanford, Oxford, Michigan, and the New York Public Library—to partner with Google when the book scanning initiative was announced in October 2004. University officials said t
Source: Reuters
Oct 30, 2008
Archaeologists in Israel said on Thursday they had unearthed the oldest Hebrew text ever found, while excavating a fortress city overlooking a valley where the Bible says David slew Goliath.
The dig's uncovering of the past near the ancient battlefield in the Valley of Elah, now home to wineries and a satellite station, could have implications for the emotional debate over the future of Jerusalem, some 20 km (12 miles) away.
Archaeologists from the Hebrew University sai
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Oct 30, 2008
If we are what we read, then the books the presidential candidates claim to hold dear present clues to their character. Or do they?
Among John McCain's favorite books, culled from news reports, are "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway, "All Quiet on the Western Front" by Erich Maria Remarque and Edward Gibbon's "History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire."
According to Barack Obama's Facebook profile, his favorite books in
Source: Times (UK)
Oct 30, 2008
Barack Obama has lived one version of the American Dream that has taken him to the steps of the White House. But a few miles from where the Democratic presidential candidate studied at Harvard, his Kenyan aunt and uncle, immigrants living in modest circumstances in Boston, have a contrasting American story.
Zeituni Onyango, the aunt so affectionately described in Mr Obama’s best-selling memoir Dreams from My Father, lives in a disabled-access flat on a rundown public housing estate
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 30, 2008
Suspected Holocaust denier Dr Gerald Toben has won his fight against extradition to Germany where he is wanted for allegedly publishing anti-Semitic material on his website.
Dr Toben, 64, a prominent Australian academic, is wanted to stand trial for material he published between 2000 and 2004.
The German authorities claim they are 'of an anti-Semitic and/or revisionist nature'.
In the European Arrest Warrant issued in October 2004, he is accused of approvin
Source: International Herald Tribune
Oct 30, 2008
Overlooking the verdant Valley of Elah, where the Bible says David toppled Goliath, archaeologists are unearthing a 3,000-year-old fortified city that could reshape views of the period when David ruled over the Israelites. Five lines on pottery uncovered here appear to be the oldest Hebrew text ever found and are likely to have a major impact on knowledge about the history of literacy and alphabet development.
The five-acre site, with its fortifications, dwellings and multi-chambere
Source: Times (UK)
Oct 30, 2008
It was the great scientific contest of the 18th century – a £20,000 prize promised to anyone who could solve the thorny navigational problem of calculating longitude – and in 1765, John Harrison was convinced that he had won it.
His H4 marine chronometer, the fourth version of a “Great Sea Clock” he had designed to keep perfect time in ocean conditions, had been successfully tested on not one but two intercontinental voyages. But still Parliament’s Board of Longitude refused to pay
Source: Guardian (UK)
Oct 30, 2008
It has been described as one of the great acts of cultural desecration of modern times, a rampant pillage that threatens to denude a country of much of its fabulous heritage. But now Afghanistan is stepping up an ambitious campaign to stop the looting of the country's archaeological sites, with a programme to build museums, train archaeologists and repatriate the billions of dollars worth of stolen antiquities that have been spirited through its porous borders during the past seven years.
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Oct 30, 2008
A judge is set to throw out charges against experts accused of faking a stone box that claimed to offer the first physical proof of the existence of Christ - raising the possibility once again that it could be genuine.
The discovery of the 2,000-year-old ossuary, or bone box, bearing the words, 'James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus', was regarded as one of the greatest archaeological discoveries when it emerged nearly a decade ago.
But other experts decided the inscr
Source: Salon
Oct 29, 2008
Political effigies may seem like props better suited to a campaign in the 19th century than a 2008 one, but there's no avoiding it -- symbolic violence is back this year.
Last month, students at George Fox University in Oregon hanged an effigy of Barack Obama. Earlier this week, an effigy of Sarah Palin with a noose around its neck that was hung at a home in West Hollywood, Calif., attracted national attention.
Wednesday morning, another effigy of Obama was found. This
Source: http://ancientworldbloggers.blogspot.com (Click to see pics.)
Oct 29, 2008
Joanne Farchakh Bajjaly responded to my posting on IraqCrisis of a report from AFP entitled "Iraqi antiquities seized in Lebanon: customs".
Her response to me included a set of photographs of some of the objects confiscated from the smugglers. Those photographs are published here with her kind permission.
Source: Yahoo
Oct 29, 2008
A mega-tsunami struck southeast Asia 700 years ago rivaling the deadly one in 2004, two teams of geologists said after finding sedimentary evidence in coastal marshes.
Researchers in Thailand and Indonesia wrote in two articles in Nature magazine that the tsunami hit around 1400, long before historical records of earthquakes in the region began.
"Tsunamis are something we never experienced before and after 2004, people thought it was something we would never experi
Source: BBC
Oct 29, 2008
The last surviving British soldier to fight in the trenches of World War I is to launch the Royal British Legion Poppy Appeal in Somerset.
Harry Patch, 110, who was born in Combe Down, Bath, was a plumber by trade before being called up.
He was a private when he fought at the Battle of Passchendaele.
Mr Patch will be on board HMS Somerset at Avonmouth docks to see a Beaver plane drop hundreds of poppies in remembrance of fallen personnel.
There will also b
Source: http://www.catholicculture.org
Oct 29, 2008
Bishop Robert W. Finn of Kansas City-St. Joseph compared the upcoming presidential election to the Battle of Lepanto, in which Christian forces against overwhelming odds defeated Ottoman Turkish invaders bent on the conquest of Europe. ‘Together with the other Bishops of Missouri I am calling on all the faithful to make this last week before the election a week of prayer for our nation-- a week of prayer for the protection of Human Life,’ Bishop Finn wrote in an October 24 diocesan newspaper col
Source: BBC
Oct 29, 2008
Just after 5 o'clock on the morning of 11 November, 1918, British, French and German officials gathered in a railway carriage to the north of Paris and signed a document which would in effect bring to an end World War I.
Within minutes, news of the Armistice - the cease fire - had been flashed around the world that the war, which was meant to "end all wars", was finally over.
And yet it wasn't, because the cease-fire would not come into effect for a further
Source: Salon (Click here to listen to LBJ audio tape.)
Oct 29, 2008
As the Republican nominee for president this year, John McCain is running as a maverick against Washington, but he and his family have long been part of Washington's military-political culture and benefited professionally from their connections. And now a Salon investigation has revealed that a powerful senator prodded President Lyndon Johnson into promoting John McCain's father to a four-star admiral, despite the defense secretary's concern he wasn't competent for the job.
After y
Source: Common Dreams (liberal website)
Oct 29, 2008
As early voting in the US presidential elections gets underway, ES&S iVotronics touch-screen electronic voting machines have been observed in four separate states flipping the votes - mostly from Barack Obama to John McCain but sometimes to third party candidates too. This has already occurred during early voting in the states of West Virginia, Tennessee, Missouri and Texas.
A county clerk in West Virginia invited a video crew to watch his demonstration of the reliability of the
