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: Washington Post
Aug 12, 2008
One of the most infamous examples of what can happen when a nonnative species is introduced into a new environment involves the brown tree snake -- a voracious, semi-venomous species that in less than 50 years all but destroyed bird life on the northern Pacific island of Guam. Introduced inadvertently from the South Pacific just after World War II, apparently on a cargo ship, the snake has killed off 10 bird species on the island and is in the process of wiping out the remaining two.
Source: Knoxville News Sentinel
Aug 12, 2008
The constitutionality of Anderson County school system’s long-standing dress code banning display of the Confederate flag was being tested today in a Knoxville federal courtroom.
It will be up to an all-white jury to decide if the free speech rights of Tom Defoe, then a senior at Anderson County High School, were violated by the ban on a flag that to some symbolize Southern heritage and to others racial hate.
There were no black jurors in the pool summoned to appear tod
Source: AP
Aug 12, 2008
From Abraham Lincoln's boyhood residence to the Mary Todd Lincoln house, visitors this year are flocking to Kentucky sites dedicated to the 16th president.
But Lincoln's Confederate counterpart, Jefferson Davis, is experiencing a similar resurgence. Kentucky, which claims both men as native sons and has statues of both in its Capitol Rotunda, isn't the only place experiencing a Davis boost.
"It'll be hard for anyone to approach the level of attention that Abraham L
Source: LAT
Aug 12, 2008
It was an open-and-shut case. Kuwaiti cops showed up at the dealer's house and seized more than 22 pounds of cocaine and 165 pounds of hashish. The suspect was accused of drug trafficking and, a few months later, sentenced to death.
But the convicted drug dealer, Talal Nasser al Sabah, was no ordinary Kuwaiti -- he was a member of the Persian Gulf kingdom's ruling family.
Now everyone is watching to see whether the authorities will follow through on the ruling by
Source: Independent
Aug 11, 2008
Spain's Defence Minister, Carme Chacon, continues to cut a swathe through Spain's stiff-necked military establishment, with a pioneering proposal made public yesterday to declassify secret documents held in military archives.
In a nation that endured three years of civil war and 40 years of dictatorship, this is a revolutionary move comparable to Germany opening up the Stasi secret police files. Ms Chacon's motive is similar: to provide public access for historians and those w
Source: UPI
Aug 11, 2008
The grave of a Union soldier has finally been correctly marked after 125 years in a North Carolina grave mistakenly identified as belonging to a Confederate.
Pvt. Jacob Pfeiffer of New York has a new tombstone and was honored Saturday by about a dozen Civil War buffs and others in Raleigh's Oakwood cemetery, reported the Raleigh News & Observer Sunday.
Pfeiffer grew up on a farm in east Manhattan and was 21 when he died from wounds incurred during the Battle of Gett
Source: Top News
Aug 11, 2008
He might have led Britain to victory in the Second World War, but the new history seems to have forgotten Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
A team of scholars working for TV’s History Channel compiled the list for a five-part television series called 50 Things You Need To Know About British History, but omitted the likes of Churchill, Queen Victoria, Florence Nightingale, Captain Cook and Sir Walter Raleigh from their list.
Though the list included Shakespeare, Charles
Source: Muskogee Phoenix
Aug 11, 2008
Chad Smith, principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, will be among speakers at a ceremonial kickoff celebrating the beginning of historical renovation of the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court Building on Tuesday.
The building is the oldest municipal building in the state.
The restoration is one of several planned by the Cherokee Nation’s cultural tourism department. The building is to become a museum with pre-statehood photographs and artifacts. Completion is expected in July 2009
Source: NYT
Aug 11, 2008
The invention of agriculture was a pivotal event in human history, but archaeologists studying its origins may have made a simple error in dating the domestication of animals like sheep and goats. The signal of the process, they believed, was the first appearance in the archaeological record of smaller boned animals. But in fact this reflects just a switch to culling females, which are smaller than males, concludes Melinda Zeder, an archaeologist at the Smithsonian Institution.
Usin
Source: Telegraph
Aug 11, 2008
Private Arthur Haines was in a Singapore military hospital with malaria when invading Japanese troops stormed the building and killed more than 200 people.
Although his life was spared, the soldier witnessed the gruesome killings of his comrades, doctors and nurses who were either bayoneted, shot or suffocated to death.
After being taken prisoner, Pte Haines, 24, managed to jot down the bloody episode on a four page letter.
In it he wrote of the moment a pr
Source: History Today
Aug 11, 2008
An exhibition to mark the centenary of the discovery of a 25,000-year-old sculpture has opened in Vienna. The four-inch tall Venus of Willendorf, which was found along the River Danube in 1908, features alongside other female statuettes in a special display which opened on August 9th at the Naturhistorisches Museum. Austria’s post office has also commissioned a stamp featuring the Palaeolithic period stone figurine, which could have been a symbol of fertility or a goddess.
Source: Salon
Aug 10, 2008
The southern Vermont town of Cavendish is planning a memorial service for famed Russian writer and one-time resident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
The Nobel Prize-winning author had settled in Cavendish when he sought refuge in the West and was looking for a place whose forests and harsh winters reminded him of his homeland.
He wound up spending 18 years in Cavendish before returning to Russia.
The former exile who had exposed the horrors of Soviet slave labor ca
Source: Salon
Aug 10, 2008
Fort Ticonderoga, one of the nation's oldest and most significant historic sites, is so financially strapped that its trustees are considering selling off some of the fort's vast collection of artifacts, including artwork believed to be worth millions.
The move comes after the fort lost the support of billionaire Forrest E. Mars Jr. amid disagreements with Fort Ticonderoga's longtime executive director, Nicholas Westbrook.
Besides being a privately owned tourist attract
Source: Salon
Aug 10, 2008
Former President Ford secretly advised the FBI that two of his fellow members on the Warren Commission doubted the FBI's conclusion that John F. Kennedy was shot from the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository in Dallas, according to newly released records from Ford's FBI files.
Ford, still a congressman at the time, also told a senior FBI official about internal panel disputes over hiring staff, Chief Justice Earl Warren's timetable for completing the final report on the assassin
Source: Mephis Commercial Appeal
Aug 10, 2008
Lab technicians were playing Elvis music in the background. From somewhere outside the lab, people could be heard crying.
"People were just sobbing. It was a sad, sad moment," says Dr. Noel Florendo, a pathology intern assigned to help perform the autopsy of the 42-year-old man on the table at Baptist Memorial Hospital.
Florendo says he and another intern followed instructions from his former professor, Dr. Jerry Francisco, as they began the postmortem on the
Source: The Grand Rapids Press
Aug 10, 2008
Our nation's third president likely was enamored with grass around his Virginia estate because he didn't have to mow it.
Even if he had, Jefferson wouldn't have been cramming clippings into plastic bags destined for a landfill.
Jefferson was "green" well before the term was popular. Today, his 5,000-acre estate in Charlottesville, Va., remains eco-friendly.
Healthy soil, proper plant selection and preservation of natural resources were just
Source: Victorian Times-Colonist
Aug 10, 2008
So, should we believe a learned judge turned historian or a former Speaker of the B.C. legislature with imaginative writing style when it comes to colourful B.C. history?
Both Judge F.W. Howay and a former Speaker D.W. Higgins tell the story of Victoria's only documented duel resulting in death on an 1858 afternoon, but with different gunmen in the lead roles -- and different backdrops to the event.
Howay, in his scholarly history British Columbia, tells the story of th
Source: Independent
Aug 10, 2008
Exactly 100 years since the British polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton travelled further south than any human being, his and his team's descendants are to follow in his footsteps and undertake the gruelling 900-mile trek to the South Pole – on foot.
On 29 October 1908, Shackleton set out to become the first man to reach the South Pole. Two months later, after travelling south in severe weather conditions with temperatures dropping below -30C, the group, running perilously lo
Source: Telegraph
Aug 10, 2008
Letters uncovered as part of a major project to compile Darwin's correspondence have revealed that the great Victorian naturalist devoted part of his time to examining whether hair colour affects a woman's ability to find a mate.
He set out to investigate a theory that the prevalence of dark hair in the general population was increasing because brunettes were more likely to get married and have dark-haired offspring, while blondes tended to stay single and childless.
Source: Tehran Times
Aug 10, 2008
Tehran Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Handicrafts Department (TCHTHO) lacks adequate funding to finance any new excavations on the 9000-year-old Ozbaki Tepe in Nazarabad, near Savojbolagh in Tehran Province.
The first season of excavations was carried out on the site in 1997, during which several architectural ruins and artifacts dating back to ancient times and the early Islamic era were discovered.
A team of archaeologists led by Yusef Majidzadeh excavated the
