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: LAT
Aug 16, 2008
A federal appeals court Friday threw out the 22-year sentence imposed on Algerian Ahmed Ressam for plotting to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on the eve of the millennium.
The three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals sent the case back to U.S. District Court in Seattle to recalculate a sentence for his conviction on nine felony counts. It was the second time the appellate court has scrapped Ressam's sentence.
The San Francisco-based panel noted tha
Source: Telegraph
Aug 16, 2008
A 3,500-year-old bronze-age skeleton, found beside a beach, could be a tribal chieftain, archaeologists believe.
The discovery of the middle-aged man's remains and burial casket, or cisk, was made by an amateur archaeologist, Trevor Renals, as walked on Constantine Island, North Cornwall.
It was regarded as unusual because cremation rather than burial was popular in the bronze-age period and skeletons are not normally found in such a well preserved state.
A
Source: Telegraph
Aug 16, 2008
The artwork was previously attributed to an anonymous German artist, however after a year long study, experts now believe the Nuptial Portrait of a Young Woman was instead drawn by the Renaissance master.
It is thought that the 500-year-old drawing was commissioned by the woman to send to a prospective husband.
Alessandro Vezzosi, the director of the Da Vinci museum, in the artist's hometown of Vinci near Florence, said: "The intensity, quality and purity of the
Source: Guardian
Aug 16, 2008
A walker stumbled across the remains of what is believed to be a 3,500-year-old tribal chieftain whose burial casket was protruding from a beach in north Cornwall. Trevor Renals, who was walking on Constantine Island, said: "I was actually looking for flint. I found a front tooth and another piece of bone and I looked to see where it had come from." He saw what he took to be a piece of flint jutting out, but found it was a stone casket. Archaeologists carried out an emergency excavatio
Source: Guardian
Aug 16, 2008
Genealogists reacted with anger yesterday after it emerged that a government website, which promised direct access to 171 years of family records, had been delayed indefinitely following the failure of a Whitehall computer project.
An attempt to scan, index and digitise 250m records of births, marriages and deaths in England and Wales from 1837 to the present day was supposed to result in a new public website that would let people trace their ancestors at the touch of a button next
Source: WaPo
Aug 15, 2008
Inside Ford's Theatre, there is nothing original: no hint of the fire that ruined the place in 1862, no trace of the actual box where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, no vestige of the forgotten catastrophe almost three decades later that killed 22 people and injured 60 others.
What's inside now dates from a 1960s renovation, theater officials say, and much of that is being transformed. The "cursed" old theater on 10th Street NW, twice wrecked by disaster and once
Source: NYT
Aug 15, 2008
Writing in The Financial Times last week, Chrystia Freeland
recalled Francis Fukuyama's 1989 essay"The End of History?" - which
trumpeted the definitive triumph of liberal democracy. The great nightmare
tyrannies of last century - the Evil Empire, Red China - had been left
behind by those inseparable twins, freedom and prosperity. Civilization
had chosen, and it chose us.
So much for that thesis. Surveying the Russian military rout of
neighboring Georgia and the spectacle of China's
Source: New Zealand Herald
Aug 15, 2008
Skeletons of a tiny woman and two children laid to rest on a bed of flowers 5000 years ago have been found in what is now the barren Sahara Desert.
The slender arms of the youngsters were still extended to the woman in perpetual embrace when researchers discovered their skeletons in a remarkable cemetery that is providing clues to two civilisations who lived there, a thousand years apart, when the region was moist and green.
Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago and
Source: Telegraph
Aug 15, 2008
Debate is raging on movie message boards over whether a plump, jowly woman who briefly features as a train passenger in North by Northwest was actually the acclaimed film director in drag.
Hitchcock was known for making quirky cameo appearances in his movies, but was never previously thought to have played a woman.
The key scene comes around 44 minutes into North by Northwest, which was released in 1959. The woman, who is wearing a turquoise dress and blue and white h
Source: Brookings Register
Aug 15, 2008
A South Dakota State University historian's study of violence and community life is chipping away at some deeply held myths about the American West.
Assistant professor Charles Vollan is finding that wealthy, respectable people had little to fear from gunslingers and other "roughs," for example it worked the other way around.
"When we tend to think about violence in any sort of historic western boomtown, whether it be Cheyenne or, for that matter, Deadw
Source: BBC
Aug 15, 2008
A court in Chad has sentenced to death former President Hissen Habre for planning to overthrow the government.
Mr Habre was sentenced in absentia along with several rebel leaders, who launched an assault on the Chadian capital, N'Djamena, earlier this year.
Mr Habre, sometimes dubbed "Africa's Pinochet", was deposed in 1990 and lives in exile in Senegal...
Source: BBC
Aug 15, 2008
A Canadian team is to search for two ships lost in an 1845 expedition to find the Northwest Passage.
The British ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were trapped in the Arctic ice as Sir John Franklin sought a northern route from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
He and his 128 crew died - although their exact fate remains a mystery - and the ships were never found.
Canadian environment minister John Baird says the search has "the allure of an Indiana Jones
Source: Washington Post
Aug 15, 2008
Inside Ford's Theatre, there is nothing original: no hint of the fire that ruined the place in 1862, no trace of the actual box where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, no vestige of the forgotten catastrophe almost three decades later that killed 22 people and injured 60 others.
This Story
The History Will Linger At Remade Ford's Theatre
Ford's Theatre Tour: Investigate A Historic Murder Case
What's inside now dates from a 1960s renovation, theater offi
Source: Telegraph
Aug 15, 2008
The video posted on the US site and its French rival Dailymotion shows a slideshow of more than 150 French politicians, TV stars, journalists, writers, philosophers, actors, singers and comedians.
It is set to the sound of a song recorded before World War II, called "Rebecca's wedding," which describes the guests at a Jewish wedding as dirty, rude and dishonest.
"We consider this video, though it names no-one, to be a photographic list of an anti-Semiti
Source: MSNBC
Aug 15, 2008
Mexican archeologists have discovered a maze of stone temples in underground caves, some submerged in water and containing human bones, which ancient Mayans believed was a portal where dead souls entered the underworld.
Clad in scuba gear and edging through narrow tunnels, researchers discovered the stone ruins of eleven sacred temples and what could be the remains of human sacrifices at the site in the Yucatan Peninsula.
Archeologists say Mayans believed the undergroun
Source: The Age
Aug 15, 2008
It is possible that cricket, a game venerated all over the Commonwealth, is older than currently thought. In fact, Jesus may very well have played the game (or a similar bat and ball contraption) as a child himself, according to an ancient Armenian manuscript.
Long before the English launched cricket some 300 years ago, similar games were being played as early as the 8th century in the Punjab region, Derek Birley writes in his Social History of English Cricket.
But an A
Source: LAT
Aug 15, 2008
At a conference dedicated to finding new ways to help Marines recover from post-traumatic stress and other disorders after serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, the Marines are looking to an ancient source: the plays of Sophocles.
An audience of 250-plus Marines, sailors and healthcare professionals Wednesday night watched a dramatic reading by four New York actors from two plays that center on the physical and psychological wounds inflicted on the warrior.
When it was over, Sgt. M
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/spain/2557793/Architects-betray-Antoni-Gaudi-plans-for-Barcelona-church.html
Aug 15, 2008
The visionary architect began work on the monumental basilica 125 years ago but his untimely death beneath the wheels of a tram in the northeastern city in 1926 meant completion of his opus was entrusted to future generations.
But as construction of the bizarre structure nears the final stages - latest estimates put completion within two decades - an influential group from the artistic world claim the end result will bear little resemblance to Gaudí's vision.
More tha
Source: LAT
Aug 15, 2008
The tiny skeletal hand jutted from the sand as if beckoning the living to the long dead.
For thousands of years, it had lain unheeded in the most desolate section of the Sahara, surrounded by the bones of hippos, giraffes and other creatures typically found in the jungle.
A chance discovery by a team of American scientists has led to the unearthing of a Stone Age cemetery that is providing the first glimpses of what life was like during the still-mysterious period
Source: LAT
Aug 15, 2008
A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that Cuban militant Luis Posada Carriles should stand trial for an alleged immigration violation in the United States. The decision is likely to inflame Cuba and Venezuela, which want to prosecute him for terrorism in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban jetliner.
The decision by a three-judge panel of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans was expected to take the pressure off the Bush administration to respond to Venezuela's demands that
