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)
Jul 28, 2008
While common acts of desecration have in the past included vandalism and graffiti, indecent photographs and videos are increasingly being shot around the magnificent structures built during the post-war years to remember the fallen.
The latest incident saw a French couple given a four-month suspended prison sentence for making a pornographic video at the Vimy Ridge memorial near Arras.
After being found guilty of exhibitionism, they were fined £400 each and ordered to p
Source: http://www.space-travel.com
Jul 28, 2008
NASA and Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library based in San Francisco, made available the most comprehensive compilation ever of NASA's vast collection of photographs, historic film and video Thursday.
The Internet site combines for the first time 21 major NASA imagery collections into a single, searchable online resource. A link to the Web site will appear on the NASA home page.
The Web site launch is the first step in a five-year partnership that will add mil
Source: NPR
Jul 28, 2008
The relationship between Sudan and China is widely believed to be a marriage anointed in oil: China needs it and Sudan has it, and the two have been in business for years. But the Sudanese say their bond with China runs deeper than any oil well and goes back more than 100 years — to a man who proved the adage "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."
Maj. Gen. Charles Gordon was known as "Chinese" Gordon to his fans — none of whom were even a little Chinese. In the 1
Source: NYT
Jul 28, 2008
SHANKSVILLE, Pa. — It is on just a quarter-acre of land, which everyone agrees is too small, and it has always been called the “temporary” memorial.
But for nearly seven years, this informal site, overlooking the meadow where United Flight 93 crashed on Sept. 11, 2001, has been a place of reflection. Nearly a million people have visited it. They gather on benches made by schoolchildren and study the handmade memorials and smaller tributes left on a 10-foot-tall fence put up for just
Source: Nick Taylor in the NYT
Jul 28, 2008
THE Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum at Hyde Park, N.Y., the nation’s first presidential library, is literally falling apart. The roof leaks, the basement floods, asbestos is flaking from old steam pipes, an ancient electrical system could send the whole place up in smoke. This sorry situation is an insult to the person the library and museum honor: the founder of the New Deal, the greatest investment in our nation’s modern development....
While the library sits
Source: Moscow Times
Jul 28, 2008
The European Court of Human Rights has ruled in favor of a Russian World War II partisan contesting a Latvian conviction for war crimes committed under the Nazi occupation, the court said on Thursday.
Vasiliy Kononov, an 85-year-old Latvian who was granted Russian citizenship in 2000, was convicted in April 2004 of murdering Latvian civilians during the war and was sentenced to a year and eight months in jail.
The case outraged many Russians, who saw him as a brave part
Source: LiveScience
Jul 28, 2008
A solitary chunk of granite, small enough to heft in one hand, is key evidence that Australia and parts of Antarctica were once attached to North America, a new study suggests.
The Earth's continents are thought to have collided to become supercontinents and broken apart again several times in Earth's 4.5 billion year history. The most recent supercontinent was Pangaea, which began to break apart about 200 million years ago; the landmasses that comprised Pangaea eventually wandered
Source: Telegraph
Jul 28, 2008
The hunt for the elusive creature - said to be 10ft tall, part man, part ape and otherwise known as the Abominable Snowman - has frustrated scientists for decades.
Now tests at Oxford Brookes University on hairs said to be from a Yeti in India have failed to link the strands with any known species.
Ape expert Ian Redmond, who is leading the research, said: "The hairs are the most positive evidence yet that a Yeti might possibly exist.
"It may be t
Source: Telegraph
Jul 28, 2008
While common acts of desecration have in the past included vandalism and graffiti, indecent photographs and videos are increasingly being shot around the magnificent structures built during the post-war years to remember the fallen.
The latest incident saw a French couple given a four-month suspended prison sentence for making a pornographic video at the Vimy Ridge memorial near Arras.
After being found guilty of exhibitionism, they were fined £400 each and ordered to
Source: Guardian
Jul 28, 2008
A collection of books bought by the Victorian prime minister William Gladstone while he was an inquisitive Oxford student has been sold for £65,000. Using plentiful family money, the young Gladstone acquired more than 2,000 volumes on everything from military history to the travel exploits of a young Englishman, David Carnegie. The 400 lots auctioned at Montrose included diaries from other Gladstones which were stored at Fasque House in Aberdeenshire. Gladstone's main library is at his former ho
Source: NYT
Jul 28, 2008
SULLIVAN’S ISLAND, S.C. — Toni Morrison has said that her acclaimed novel “Beloved,” which features the ghost of a baby killed by her enslaved black mother, came out of the need for a literature to commemorate slaves and their history. “There is no suitable memorial, or plaque, or wreath or wall, or park or skyscraper lobby,” Ms. Morrison said in a 1989 magazine interview. “There’s no 300-foot tower, there’s no small bench by the road.”
This weekend, on Sullivan’s Island, off the So
Source: http://www.charleston.net
Jul 27, 2008
Charleston has long made its fortune by bringing people here. Centuries ago, it was slaves. Today, it's tourists.
Both have been thriving industries, though Charleston promoters have long dressed up or covered up the legacy of human bondage in the Lowcountry.
Two centuries since the importing of human cargo was banned in this country, the long-neglected history is a source of new interest for visitors searching for the antebellum South. The carefully preserved plantatio
Source: Independent (UK)
Jul 27, 2008
Sitting in her little house near Tarbes, in the French Pyrenees, Marie-Pierre Manet-Beauzac is talking about her ancestry.
For most people this would be agreeable, perhaps even pleasurable. For the 40-something mother-of-three, the story of her bloodline is marked with a unique sadness: because she belongs to an extraordinary tribe of hidden pariahs, repressed in France for a thousand years.
Marie-Pierre is a Cagot.
If the word "Cagot" means nothi
Source: Times (UK)
Jul 27, 2008
The possibility of a Palaeolithic human presence in Ireland has once again presented itself. A flaked flint dating to about 200,000 years ago found in Co Down is certainly of human workmanship, but its ultimate origin remains uncertain.
Discovered at Ballycullen, ten miles east of Belfast, the flake is 68mm long and wide and 31mm thick. Its originally dark surface is heavily patinated to a yellowish shade, and the lack of sharpness in its edges suggests that it has been rolled aroun
Source: Tampa Tribune
Jul 27, 2008
TAMPA - They sat at the same tables inside Alessi Italian Bar & Grille on Saturday, but those who support and oppose a giant Confederate battle flag to be flown within view of Interstates 4 and 75 appear as divided as ever.
In April, the Sons of Confederate Veterans plan to fly the 50-foot-by-30-foot flag that inspired rebel soldiers atop a pole half as tall as a football field is long. The flag is part of a Confederate memorial that includes a lighted park and 30 bronze plaques set i
Source: LAT
Jul 27, 2008
It was a crime so improbable that many had trouble believing it could have happened at all: Three black soldiers stood accused of lynching an Italian prisoner of war, found dangling from a wire on an obstacle training course at Ft. Lawton in the middle of World War II.
The subsequent trial of the three men, along with 40 other black enlistees charged with rioting, became the largest and longest Army court-martial of the war, and the only recorded instance in U.S. history in which bl
Source: Nicholas Adell for HNN
Jul 27, 2008
In his speech last Thursday in Berlin, Barack Obama borrowed tropes and imagery from the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, websites and blogs--and now the New York Times--have noted.
In today's Times editors found no fewer than five parallels from Shakespeare to Lincoln to FDR, to JFK and Ronald Reagan. The editors could have included Tom Paine, too, as we'll see.
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Shakespeare:"Friends, Romans, Countrymen."
Obama:"I come to Berlin as so many of my c
Source: NYT
Jul 27, 2008
In the lounge at the top of the 40-story Hyatt Regency hotel, where people sip drinks and gaze at the twinkling skyline, there is no hint of the long-ago horror.
But for people like Brent Wright, it can never be forgotten. On July 17, 1981, Mr. Wright was 17 years old and working the loading docks at Macy’s, saving money for college, when he heard a radio bulletin about the hotel’s skywalk collapsing into a swing dance in the lobby. He tried to call his mother, Karen Jeter, wonderi
Source: NYT
Jul 27, 2008
Thousands of people gathered last week in Richmond, Ind., for the centennial celebration of the Ford Model T, the machine that made the automobile a Main Street technology, with 15 million produced from 1908 to 1927.
As a product, the Model T has long been seen as a classic example of no-frills, mass-produced standardization. It had no gas gauge. Even a windshield was an extra-cost option originally.
Yet the gathering in Indiana showed another facet of the Model T’s his
Source: Swissinfo
Jul 26, 2008
A group of Aboriginal elders on Saturday left Australia for the United States to bring home the remains of 33 ancestors from the Smithsonian Institute, the first Aboriginal remains to be returned from the United States.
Aborigines have fought for decades for the return of ancestral remains from overseas universities and museums where they have been taken for scientific and anthropological studies.
Aborigines have inhabited Australia for some 45,000 years and have the wo
