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)
Sep 30, 2008
Cherie Blair has predicted that history will judge her husband as significant a world figure as Sir Winston Churchill.
Mrs Blair, who also admitted she was not a success in her role as "First Lady", was ridiculed by Tory MPs for comparing her husband to Britain's greatest wartime leader.
In an interview with Vanity Fair she said that Tony Blair would be judged "very well" by history and that "he'll be up there with Churchill".
Source: History Today
Sep 30, 2008
The legal battle over the payment of a finders’ fee to the couple who discovered the Stone Age hunter Oetzi was finally resolved yesterday, when Erika Simon was awarded 150,000 Euros (£119,770) by the provincial government of Bolzano in Northern Italy.
The dispute lasted 14 years following Erika and Helmut Simon’s initial decline of a payment of 10 million lire (£4,122), which fell short of the legal finders’ fee of 25% of the discovery’s value. Helmut Simon died in a hiking accide
Source: Guardian (UK)
Sep 30, 2008
The blaze that caused £10m of damage to the Cutty Sark last year was sparked by an industrial vacuum cleaner on the ship, police said today.
The machine was being used to remove waste during restoration work on the historic tea clipper when the fire broke out in May.
Officials found that the equipment had been left running for a weekend before the fire broke out during the early hours of a Monday morning.
Nick Carey, of the London Fire Brigade, said the ind
Source: Discovery Channel News
Sep 29, 2008
Remains of rotten fish entrails have helped establish the precise dating of Pompeii's destruction, according to Italian researchers who have analyzed the town's last batch of garum, a pungent, fish-based seasoning.
Frozen in time by the catastrophic eruption that covered Pompeii and nearby towns nearly 2,000 years ago with nine to 20 feet of hot ash and pumice, the desiccated remains were found at the bottom of seven jars.
The find revealed that the last Pompeian garum
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 29, 2008
Russia reinforced the popular notion of Western bellicosity by staging the first full military drill in St Petersburg since the end of the Second World War.
Air raid sirens wailed across the country's northern capital and loudspeakers barked official orders as the authorities simulated a full-scale attack on the city.
The exercise caused consternation for many city residents who were unaware that a drill was planned. Some elderly inhabitants who survived the 900-d
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 29, 2008
Britain, in the autumn of 1938, was still something approaching a great power, with an empire on which the sun never set and – despite the ravages of the slump earlier in the decade – more prosperous than almost any other country on the planet. It was 70 years ago this week that we, in the words of our then prime minister Neville Chamberlain, decided that Czechoslovakia was merely a faraway country of which we knew little, and that if a chunk of it full of ethnic Germans was given to Hitler's Re
Sep 29, 2008
A house built for Queen Victoria to stay in - but which she only used as a rain shelter - is to be sold.
The cottage, on the shores of Loch Katrine, was constructed in 1859 for the royal opening of Glasgow's water supply scheme.
Protocol stated that a house be built rather than using mobile accommodation.
However, its windows were shattered by a 21-gun salute during the opening. Instead, the Queen used the property as a shelter from the rain.
Source: Times (UK)
Sep 29, 2008
Upper Heyford A former military airfield in Oxfordshire is at the centre of a battle over how best to preserve Britain’s Cold War heritage.
A planning inquiry opens this week into the details of a 1,000-home development proposed for Upper Heyford, whose two-mile runway was capable of taking huge B52 American bombers and where the US Air Force once had 75 F111 fighters in 56 concrete hangars. English Heritage says the whole landscape should be kept intact, but Cherwell Distict Counc
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 29, 2008
HMS Exeter, used to shoot down Argentina Skyhawk jets in the Falkland War in 1982, sailed back to Portsmouth harbour last month, fuelling fears the Navy is suffering from defence budget cuts.
It has reportedly been downgraded to a "lower state of readiness" several months before it was due to be taken out of service.
Although the Ministry of Defence insists the Type 42 destroyer remains an important part of the fleet, there are fears the move demonstrates th
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 29, 2008
Based on a cast of the Admiral's face taken during his own lifetime, the piece shows Nelson as he would have looked on the even of the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 - including the scar over his right eyebrow from an injury inflicted at the Battle of the Nile in 1798.
The life-size bronze by the sculptor Robert Hornyold-Strickland was commissioned by an anonymous donor.
The work was unveiled by the Second Sea Lord, Vice-Admiral Alan Massey, at a ceremony in the wardroom o
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 29, 2008
Britain, in the autumn of 1938, was still something approaching a great power, with an empire on which the sun never set and – despite the ravages of the slump earlier in the decade – more prosperous than almost any other country on the planet. It was 70 years ago this week that we, in the words of our then prime minister Neville Chamberlain, decided that Czechoslovakia was merely a faraway country of which we knew little, and that if a chunk of it full of ethnic Germans was given to Hitler’s Re
Source: AFP
Sep 29, 2008
ORANJEMUND, Namibia -- Archaeologists are racing against the little time left to salvage a fortune in coins and items from a 500-year-old Portuguese shipwreck found recently off Namibia's rough southern coast.
Despite its importance, the project, in a restricted diamond mining area, is itself costing a fortune in sea-walling that cannot be sustained after October 10.
"The vast amounts of gold coins would possibly make this discovery the largest one in Africa outsid
Source: Reuters
Sep 28, 2008
Hundreds of Kosovar Albanians gather on Sundays to attend religious services in a still unfinished red-brick church in the Kosovo town of Klina.
Turning away from the majority Muslim faith imposed by the Ottoman Turks centuries ago, these worshippers are part of a revival of Catholicism in the newly independent Balkan state....
Around 90 percent of Kosovo's Albanian population is Muslim, with just four percent Roman Catholics. The country is also home to dozens of medie
Source: NYT
Sep 28, 2008
EATONVILLE, Fla. — Hidden in the theme-park sprawl of greater Orlando, a few miles from the shiny, the loud and the gargantuan, lies a quiet town where the pride and complications of the African-American experience come to life.
Eatonville, the first all-black town to incorporate in the country and the childhood home of Zora Neale Hurston, is no longer as simple as she described it in 1935: “the city of five lakes, three croquet courts, 300 brown skins, 300 good swimmers, plenty gua
Source: NYT
Sep 28, 2008
LONDON — Early this month, Gibson Square publishers here announced that it would publish “The Jewel of Medina,” a novel about the early life of A’isha, one of the wives of the Prophet Muhammad. It was a bold decision: the book’s United States publisher, Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, had canceled its publication in August amid fears that it would offend and inflame Muslim extremists. (It has since been bought by another American publisher, Beaufort Books.)
For his par
Source: AP
Sep 28, 2008
NEW YORK -- Almost two years after being pried ignominiously from the mud by a phalanx of huffing tugboats and towed off to a shipyard for a major overhaul, the historic aircraft carrier Intrepid is returning home.
Freshly painted in naval "haze gray" and once again shipshape from stem to stern, the fabled survivor of Pacific war battles and five kamikaze suicide attacks will be towed up New York Harbor and slotted into its familiar Hudson River berth on Oct. 2.
Source: AP
Sep 28, 2008
CHICAGO — The faded papers hint at stark details in the lives of Nazi concentration camp inmates.
Letters secretly carried by children through the sewers of Warsaw, Poland, during the 1944 uprising. A 1933 card from a Dachau camp commander outlining strict rules for prisoner mail. A 1943 letter from a young man, who spent time in Auschwitz, to his parents.
The more than 250 World War II postal documents — cards, letters and stamps — have been acquired by an Illinois fou
Source: HNN Staff
Sep 28, 2008
Careful readers of the New York Times may have noticed a change recently that could play havoc with historians for years. The newspaper of record is now dating its online articles with the date the pieces are posted. As most pieces are posted the day before they actually appear in the print edition, this means there will now be two publication dates: an online edition date and a print edition date. From now on historians citing the NYT will have to indicate carefully which edition they are re
Source: http://www.tmcnet.com
Sep 27, 2008
The successful U.S. decrypting of secret Japanese communication messages that led to Imperial Japanese Navy Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto's death during World War II was because one of those messages was written in an old cipher that should have earlier been destroyed, according to declassified U.S. intelligence documents.
Although the U.S. military said after the war that it ambushed him after deciphering related Japanese Navy messages, it has long been unknown how specifically the United
Source: AP
Sep 27, 2008
A quest is under way on four continents to find the missing pages of one of the world's most important holy texts, the 1,000-year-old Hebrew Bible known as the Crown of Aleppo.
Crusaders held it for ransom, fire almost destroyed it and it was reputedly smuggled across Mideast borders hidden in a washing machine. But in 1958, when it finally reached Israel, 196 pages were missing — about 40 percent of the total — and for some Old Testament scholars they have become a kind of holy gr
