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: History Today
Aug 26, 2008
A large statue of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius has been unearthed in Turkey. The marble sculpture, which includes a 1metre-tall head, was found at Sagalassos, a city in the south of the country. The emperor, who ruled from AD 161-80 and was depicted by Richard Harris in the film Gladiator, was an advocate of Stoicism and was famous for his philosophical work Meditations. The right arm and legs were also discovered on August 20th in a 13,500 sq ft room at Sagalassos' Roman baths, which was d
Source: McClatchy
Aug 26, 2008
Hanford's B Reactor was named a National Historic Landmark on Monday, recognizing the role it played in shaping 50 years of U.S. and world history.
Not only will that designation help efforts to preserve the reactor as a museum, but the growing interest in the reactor has led the Department of Energy to increase public access to it.
Starting in March, the reactor will be open to the public at least three days a week and no advance registration will be required for "
Source: Independent
Aug 26, 2008
Neanderthals were not as stupid as they have been portrayed, according to a study showing their stone tools were just as good as those made by the early ancestors of modern humans, Homo sapiens.
Scientists who spent years learning how to make replicas of the stone instruments used by Neanderthals and Homo sapiens have found the Neanderthal tools were just as efficient as anything made by Stone Age man.
And researchers believe that the demise of the Neanderthals – which
Source: Independent
Aug 26, 2008
Radical changes to the secondary school timetable will be introduced next week when England's three million secondary school pupils return to the classroom.
Key alterations include more emphasis on the study of black Britons and other ethnic minority groups in the history curriculum.
Youngsters will be told they should study topics such as the abolition of slavery in the British Empire and the work of reformers such as William Wilberforce, the MP who campaigned for its
Source: AP
Aug 25, 2008
An underwater archaeologist who claims he found the
Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley said Monday he will keep fighting for
official credit for the discovery, despite a lawsuit over the matter being
dismissed.
Lee Spence claimed he found the Hunley in 1970 when a fishing net snagged
on the submarine's wreckage and says he has the documents to prove it. But
the state gave shipwreck hunter Clive Cussler credit, saying he located
the sub off Sullivans Island near Charleston in 1995.
Source: AP
Aug 25, 2008
It was a shock to Misha Defonseca's readers this year when she admitted that the best-selling story of her tortured childhood during the Holocaust was false, but her U.S. publisher saw it as an opportunity to undo a stinging, 7-year-old court judgment.
Jane Daniel says she never would have been ordered to pay Defonseca and her ghost writer $32.4 million over her handling of profits from "Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years" had the jury known the book was filled with l
Source: Reuters
Aug 25, 2008
Three vast tunnels were opened under central Berlin this month, giving a glimpse of Adolf Hitler's megalomaniac vision of a new architectural centre for the capital of Nazi Germany.
The 16-metre (50-foot) deep tunnels were constructed in 1938 as part of an underground transport network beneath a series of bombastic buildings designed by Nazi architect Albert Speer, including the biggest domed hall the world had ever seen.
The overground plans, never completed because of
Source: http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com
Aug 25, 2008
Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated. Urban rioters had burned neighborhoods in cities across America. Many young people, angry and disillusioned about the Vietnam War, were in rebellion.
When U.S. Sen. Daniel K. Inouye took the stage to give the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, he was speaking to a nation in turmoil. The Hawai'i Democrat was the choice of the establishment, of President Lyndon B. Johnson and the
Source: Fox News
Aug 25, 2008
A black Hillary Clinton delegate on Sunday accused state Senate President Emil Jones of calling her an "Uncle Tom."
Jones -- Barack Obama's political mentor -- denied using the racially loaded slur against Chicago political consultant Delmarie Cobb, but two aldermen who said they witnessed the Saturday night exchange back up Cobb's account.
"Last night, I was called an 'Uncle Tom' by Emil Jones in the lobby of the hotel, right in front of [Ald.] Freddren
Source: International Herald Tribune
Aug 25, 2008
MOSCOW: Seven human rights activists kneeled on Red Square on Sunday and unfurled a banner reading "For Your Freedom and Ours" and three were briefly detained by the police in a demonstration commemorating a similar action by Soviet dissidents 40 years ago who were protesting the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Four journalists were also detained, according to news reports and information posted on a blog, moscow-river- 25.livejournal.com, that appears to be connected t
Source: WaPo
Aug 25, 2008
The daughter of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher said Britain's "Iron Lady" is suffering from dementia, the family's first public confirmation of what has been widely rumored in Britain for several years.
Thatcher's condition has deteriorated so much that she forgets that her husband, Denis Thatcher, died in 2003, her daughter said in a memoir that is to be published next month and was serialized over the weekend in the Mail on Sunday newspaper.
"I
Source: Independent
Aug 25, 2008
The Catholic Church is under growing pressure to abandon the "homophobic" exhumation and reburial of the body of one its most famous cardinals, in defiance of his wish to lie for eternity next to the man he loved.
Gay rights campaigners have accused the Vatican – which has ordered the disinterment in the first step towards beatification – of attempting to cover up the sexuality of Cardinal John Henry Newman, who died in 1890.
Opposition to the reburial among s
Source: AP
Aug 25, 2008
A son of notorious Nazi doctor Aribert Heim was quoted as saying Sunday that he wants his father declared legally dead so he can take control of his money and donate some of it to help document the suffering that occurred at a former concentration camp.
Ruediger Heim told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper that his father -- dubbed "Dr. Death" and atop the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of most-wanted suspected Nazi war criminals -- should officially be declared missing and the
Source: Times
Aug 25, 2008
The campaign of John McCain went head-to-head with Madonna today after the 50-year-old pop diva appeared to compare the Republican candidate to Hitler and Robert Mugabe.
Madonna, who kicked off her “Sticky and Sweet” world tour at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff yesterday, made the swipe during a performance of Get Stupid, when Mr McCain’s image was flashed up alongside images of the Führer and Zimbabwean dictator, as well as destruction and global warming.
In a non
Source: Humberto Fontova (Click here to download his article.)
Aug 25, 2008
On Sept 20, 2001 the FBI arrested the enemy spy that had managed the deepest penetration of the U.S. Department of Defense in U.S. history. The spy's name is Ana Montes and during her fifteen years in the Defense Intelligence Agency she operated as an agent for Fidel Castro. At the time of her arrest she had moled her way to the head of the DIA's Latin America division. From here, she greatly influenced (if not actually directed) the Clinton administration's Cuba policy. Today she serves a 25 ye
Source: AP
Aug 24, 2008
Soldiers have defused an unexploded World War II bomb after authorities cleared 15,000 people from their homes in northern Italy.
Authorities in the city of Ravenna say everyone was moved who lived within 800 meters (2,600 feet) of the bomb that resurfaced during construction work more than sixty years after it was dropped by a British plane.
Army engineers defused the bomb Sunday and took it to a nearby military shooting range for detonation.
Source: NYT
Aug 24, 2008
That an air of the enigmatic attends Barack Obama is a commonplace; he is a man of fractured geography and family and wanderings.
He came of age in far corners, Indonesia and Hawaii, went to schools on both coasts and landed in Chicago, where he had no blood tie. With talent and ambition, he has leapt for the presidency at a tender age and will go to Denver to claim his Democratic nomination for the office.
There is to Mr. Obama’s story a Steinbeck quality, like so many
Source: The Age (Australia)
Aug 24, 2008
LANCEY who? The name of Melbourne's founding father doesn't exactly skip to the lips of most Victorians. A survey to mark the capital's 173rd birthday this Saturday found that not one of 300 Melburnians aged 16 and over knew that master mariner Captain John Lancey first moored the Enterprize on the north bank of the Yarra River on August 30, 1835. It's a contentious debate, as shown by the numbers who suggested two other likely suspects — John Batman and publican John Pascoe Fawkner. Others veer
Source: BBC
Aug 24, 2008
Melting alpine glaciers are revealing fascinating clues to Neolithic life in the high mountains.
And, as a conference of archaeologists and climatologists meeting in the Swiss capital Berne has been discussing, the finds are also providing key indicators to climate change.
Everyone knows the story of Oetzi the Ice Man, found in an Austrian glacier in 1991. Oetzi was discovered at an altitude of over 3,000m.
He lived in about 3,300 BC, leading to speculation
Source: Telegraph
Aug 24, 2008
Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson, both 28, had spent this spring travelling across the United States correcting errors on government signposts.
The pair set up the Typo Eradication Advancement League and were interviewed by National Public Radio and the Chicago Tribune, which referred to them as "a pair of Kerouacs armed with Sharpies and erasers and righteous indignation".
Their brush with fame brought about their downfall, however, after investigators looked u
