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: BBC
Oct 25, 2008
A three-year project to discover and showcase rural history in Wrexham is being launched.
An archaeology dig and medieval re-enactments are being put on in Brymbo to encourage people to think about their local heritage.
Ideas for history projects for the next three years are being sought.
Neil Oliver, the Scottish historian and archaeologist who also presents the BBC TV series Coast, is launching the event.
Karen Harris from organiser Northern Marches Cymru said:"We want people's i
Source: AP
Oct 25, 2008
RICHMOND, Va. – In the passionate world of Civil War re-enactors, authenticity is everything — from uniforms with historically correct stitching to hardtack made from scratch.
A battle re-enactment last month pushed realism to the limits: a retired New York City police officer portraying a Union soldier for a documentary film was shot in the shoulder, possibly by a Confederate re-enactor.
The shooting sent the 73-year-old to the hospital and left the Isle of Wight Sheri
Source: Belfast Telegraph
Oct 25, 2008
Iraqi secret police believed that the notorious Palestinian assassin Abu Nidal was working for the Americans as well as Egypt and Kuwait when they interrogated him in Baghdad only months before the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.
Hitherto secret documents which are now in the hands of The Independent – written by Saddam Hussein's brutal security services for Saddam's eyes only – state that he had been "colluding" with the Americans and, with the help of the Egyptians and
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 25, 2008
Alf Heywood, 88, picked the flower in Tunisia in 1942 while engaged in combat with German forces.
He preserved the poppy for 66 years, pressed between the pages of his Army pay book, under a note which read: "Poppy picked by Alf Heywood, while in action, with the 2nd Bln Lanc's Fus, 78th Div, 1st Army, North Africa 1942."
The great-grandfather, from Middleton, Greater Manchester, showed the poppy to visiting soldiers from the 207 Field Hospital, Greater Manche
Source: Times (of London)
Oct 25, 2008
On one bank of the Truc Bach lake a small electricity sub-station is plastered with flyers touting a local plumber. Along the road is an aerobics studio where youngsters lazily sip coffee and browse the papers. Thirty yards out across the water – rancid and bobbing with dead fish – is moored a handful of pedal boats shaped like swans.
It was within this unlikely triangle of landmarks – exactly 41 years ago this Sunday – that John McCain crash-landed and, say his captors, began his r
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Oct 24, 2008
A graveyard of former Nazis bent on creating a 'foreign Fatherland' in the Amazonian rainforests from which to spread Hitler's maniacal beliefs has been discovered in Brazil.
The relics betray a madcap plan back in the 1930s to create a master race thousands of miles from Germany.
The graveyard and other ruins that fanatical Nazis left behind are chronicled in a new book.
Entitled ’The Guayana-Projekt. A German Adventure on the Amazon’ it says die-hard Nazi
Source: Yahoo
Oct 24, 2008
Should Pope Pius XII, the pope who led the Vatican through the Second World War, be considered for sainthood? An Israeli cabinet minister surprised experts when he waded into the increasingly heated debate on the issue this week, saying it would be "unacceptable" to consider canonizing Pius XII, whose reluctance to condemn the Holocaust during World War II has drawn accusations that he turned a blind eye to the fate of the Jews.
"Throughout the period of the Holocaust
Source: CNN
Oct 24, 2008
The great paddlewheel turned the Ohio River water to a froth as the Delta Queen steamboat, a floating National Historic Landmark, departed Cincinnati, Ohio, on its final schedule.
The boat is a throwback to the 1800s and the era of Mark Twain, when thousands of steam-driven paddlewheelers plied the Mississippi River system.
The Delta Queen is the last of those operating as overnight passenger boats on U.S. waterways, giving riders a 19th-century experience on cruises c
Source: Discovery Channel News
Oct 24, 2008
European diners around 8,000 years ago could enjoy a bowl of instant wheat cereal that, aside from uneven cooking and maybe a few extra lumps, wasn't very different from hot wheat cereals served today, suggests a new study that describes the world's oldest known cooked cereal.
Dating from between 5920 to 5730 B.C., the ancient cereal consisted of parboiled bulgur wheat that Early Neolithic Bulgarians could refresh in minutes with hot water.
"People boiled the grain
Source: National Security Archive
Oct 24, 2008
Washington, DC, October 24, 2008 - Today, in response to a petition filed by the National Security Archive and several historical associations, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) released the previously secret grand jury transcripts of eight witnesses related to Cold War espionage prosecutions. The nearly 300 pages of transcripts from the Brothman/Moskowitz grand jury reveal important new details about the testimony of Elizabeth Bentley, the so-called "Red Spy Queen,&qu
Source: AP
Oct 24, 2008
New guidelines for history education have been endorsed by a Nevada panel despite criticism from a conservative education activist that the standards are too vague.
The guidelines adopted Thursday by the state Council to Establish Academic Standards now go to the state Board of Education, which has final say.
Joe Enge, a former history teacher and Carson City school board member, argued that the new standards favor a thematic, big-ideas approach to history rather than teachin
Source: Barry Goldwater Jr. at Huffington Post
Oct 24, 2008
[As a guide and interpreter of the complexities of government and public affairs, Barry Goldwater is skilled and knowledgeable. As a former member of Congress from California, many of the current Congressional Committee Chairmen served with Goldwater. He has a first name relationship with most. His family name is familiar to many in Washington, California and Arizona.]
The Goldwater name carries with it the standard of modern conservatism and has shaped the Republican Party for deca
Source: International Herald Tribune
Oct 24, 2008
Crammed into a dozen buses and escorted by the Israeli military, the Jewish pilgrims slid quietly along deserted streets throughout the early hours of a recent morning while the residents of this Palestinian city, a militant stronghold ruled until recently by armed gangs, slept in their beds.
The destination was the holy place known as Joseph's Tomb, a tiny half-derelict stone compound in the heart of a residential district that many Jews believe is the final burial place of the son
Source: Times (UK)
Oct 24, 2008
Seventy years ago they marched out of Barcelona for the last time, proud heroes who had risked their lives to fight General Franco's Fascist-backed rebels.
Yesterday, a small band of veterans of the International Brigades returned to mark the anniversary in Sitges, near Barcelona.
Frail, some in wheelchairs, they joined in a chorus of La Bandera Roja, or The Red Flag, an Italian song popular with anti-Fascist forces during the war.
Now the eight British and
Source: AP
Oct 24, 2008
BUCHAREST, Romania — Vandals rampaged through a sprawling Jewish cemetery in Romania's capital, toppling tombstones and smashing markers for as many as 200 graves, authorities said Friday.
Jewish leaders condemned the vandalism
and said the scale of the destruction suggested the activity was organized — rather than random acts by wayward youths. Other graves have been vandalized in Jewish cemeteries in recent years, but those attacks occurred in the provinces, and wer
Source: Economist
Oct 23, 2008
EVERY German schoolchild learns to revile Hitler, but what about Erich Honecker, boss of communist East Germany? He was not a dictator, or so most teenagers from eastern Germany seem to think. And the dreaded Stasi, which jailed and tortured citizens who stepped out of line? Just an intelligence service, say young easterners. These findings, from a survey of 5,200 schoolchildren by Berlin’s Free University, dismayed those who think national identity and democratic values rest on shared judgments
Source: Yahoo
Oct 23, 2008
A 6,000 year-old set of household gear, including crockery and two wood-fired ovens, has been found in the buried ruins of a prehistoric farmhouse in northern Greece, officials said Thursday.
A Culture Ministry statement said the discovery"provides invaluable, unique information" on late Neolithic domestic architecture and household organization."This is a very rare case where the remains have stayed undisturbed by farming or other external intervention for about 6,000 years," the ministry
Source: USA Today
Oct 23, 2008
The United States finally is making amends five years after two notorious stumbles in public relations during the early days of the Iraq war.
The U.S. announced this week a $14 million program to help refurbish the Iraqi National Museum. The museum wasn't guarded after the fall of Saddam Hussein, which allowed looters to steal precious antiquities.
And in August, two Bengal tigers were shipped to the Iraqi zoo in Baghdad to replace an endangered tiger that was shot and killed
Source: Yahoo
Oct 23, 2008
When Philippine police confiscated 22 bags of broken pottery from antiquity smugglers near an area where Muslim rebels operated, little did they know that they may have uncovered the remnants of a long-lost tribe.
Now, experts at the National Museum in the capital
Manila are studying the burial urns from a tribe that lived in the Philippines over 2,000 years ago, in what could be a major archaeological discovery."The pottery has human faces that show emotions," Eusebio Dizon, head of the a
Source: NYT
Oct 23, 2008
Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. has worked with titans of the Senate and met countless heads of state. None of them have left as deep an impression on him as his father, Joseph Robinette Biden Sr., a prideful man.
Though life had dealt Joe Sr. a tough hand early in life in drunken, faithless bosses and a thieving partner, he never bemoaned his fate.
Joe Sr. had it all in his 20s, sailing yachts off the New England coast, riding to the hounds, driving fast cars, flying airpl
