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: WaPo
Jul 18, 2008
There is Jackson, sitting astride his mount, Little Sorrel, surveying vistas of rolling fields, towering signs, high-voltage power lines and trees.
The iconic statue of Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson commemorates the place where he inspired Confederate troops to victory. Federal and Prince William County officials want to preserve views of Manassas National Battlefield Park. There's not much they can do about the signs and power lines. But the trees? They can go.
Source: McGuire Gibson in an email to IraqCrisis
Jul 18, 2008
[McGuire Gibson is Professor of Mesopotamian Archaeology, Oriental Institute, University of Chicago.]
I have just been comparing a satellite image from February 2003, when the Antiqutities organization was excavating at Umma, with one taken within the past month, June 2008. In the 2003 image, it is quite clear that looting that had been done in the 1990s and earlier was restricted to a very small part of the site, mainly on a part of the mound across from the front entrance of the
Source: AP
Jul 18, 2008
Don't chow, bella! At least not on the steps of Roman monuments.
City Hall is banning all those enjoying a Roman holiday this summer from snacking near the sights in Rome's historical center with fines up to $80.
Officials say they want to preserve artistic treasures and decorum in a city that has millions of visitors every year.
The ordinance also bans the homeless from setting up makeshift beds and cracks down on drunks, litterbugs and nighttime revelers
Source: CNN
Jul 18, 2008
Forensic experts say they have
exhumed 66 Srebrenica massacre victims from a mass grave in eastern
Bosnia.
Murat Hurtic, the head of the forensic team, says the last bodies were
taken out Friday. The team exhumed two complete and 64 incomplete
skeletons.
An ID card found in the grave supports initial information that the bodies
were of Muslim men from Srebrenica who were killed in the July 1995
massacre.
Source: NYT
Jul 18, 2008
A 100th birthday party, one would think, is cause for special celebration.
But here in Flint, the honoree is the company that both built the city and left much of it collapsed. And so, like generations of a family recognizing a controversial patriarch, people here are taking note of the centennial of the founding of General Motors with a complicated mixture of respect and anger, pride and hurt.
“It’s still good they’re doing something for Flint,” said Fred Morse, 34, a
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jul 18, 2008
China is abandoning Chairman Mao's dream to make Beijing a workers' paradise, rebuilding it under the cover of a "green" Olympics as a capital for its 21st century empire.
In a display of the city's determination to improve its air quality, officials this week vaunted the closure and relocation to the coast of its biggest polluter, the smoke-stacked mini-state of Capital Steel.
Three of its blast furnaces stand blackened and idle, along with two of its three s
Source: The News Tribune
Jul 18, 2008
Serbia's war crimes prosecutors are preparing a case against an American who allegedly served in a Nazi unit that killed 17,000 civilians here during World War II, an official said Friday.
Bruno Vekaric, a spokesman for the prosecutors' office, told The Associated Press that it has started gathering information about Peter Egner, 86, a native of Yugoslavia now living in U.S., in order to try him in Serbia.
"We have contacted the Americans, various archives, victims
Source: National Post
Jul 18, 2008
Nearly 2,000 years after it was buried and preserved under a volcanic eruption, the ancient Roman town of Pompeii is being steadily worn away by modern woes.
Decades of neglect, millions of trampling visitors and the ravages of sunlight and rain are threatening to wipe out for good one of the world's most famous archaeological sites and Italy's top tourist attraction.
Archaeologists and art historians have long complained about the poor upkeep of the Pompeii treasures,
Source: International Herald Tribune
Jul 18, 2008
There was a time, not all that long ago, when he was the invisible
man whose name was a battle cry, his appearance known to most people only
from an out-of-date photograph, a hidden hero on a prison island off the
coast of Africa.
But as he celebrated his 90th birthday Friday, Nelson Mandela was anything
but invisible, a figure of reverence whose nine decades have been marked
and observed at a huge rock concert in Hyde Park in London, a gala dinner
for his children's charity in the
Source: AP
Jul 18, 2008
Mexican archaeologists have found the remains of what appear
to be four U.S. soldiers who died in 1846 during the Mexican-American war,
the government announced on Thursday.
Experts said skull and bone measurements, as well as two half-dollar coins
and other artifacts found at the site of the Battle of Monterrey in
northern Mexico, indicate the bodies belong to U.S. war casualties.
Mexico's national archaeological agency said the skeletal remains were
uncovered in digs between
Source: msnbc
Jul 18, 2008
Thursday night, a moving monument to the Vietnam war comes home to Indiana. The Moving Wall is a scaled-down replica of the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington.
Over 58,000 names have come to represent one of America's most costly and divisive wars. Those are the names of the military men and women who fought and died in Vietnam. The Vietnam Veterans memorial in Washington is the permanent monument.
There is also the Moving Wall - a half-size replica that has bee
Source: Moscow Times
Jul 18, 2008
A sweeping government audit has revealed that up to 50,000 pieces are missing from Russia's museums — everything from pre-Revolutionary medals and weapons to precious works of art, a member of the survey team said Thursday.
Former President Vladimir Putin ordered the survey after his government was deeply embarrassed in 2006 by hundreds of thefts from St. Petersburg's Hermitage museum.
More than 1,600 museums have been inspected since then, and most of them have items m
Source: Moscow Times
Jul 18, 2008
Tens of thousands of Russians commemorated the 90th anniversary of the slaying of the country's royal family with a religious procession Thursday, starting out before dawn from the site where the last tsar and his wife and children were gunned down in a basement room.
Pilgrims from across the country have flocked to the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg to commemorate the death of the Tsar Nicholas II and his family, whose murder months after the Bolshevik Revolution helped ushe
Source: Jordan Times
Jul 18, 2008
Tucked away into the lush hillsides in the north of the Kingdom, Tal Ziraa is quietly becoming one of the most important archaeological sites in the Kingdom.
The hill is located in Wadi Al Arab, an archaeologically rich area some 5km southwest of Um Qais where the borders of Jordan, Syria and Israel meet and where over 100 sites boast a treasure trove of diverse artefacts, telling a complex story mirroring the rise and decline of different cultures and rulers in the region.
Source: Evening Sun
Jul 17, 2008
The man whose plan to build a casino near Gettysburg drew national attention and significant local opposition in 2005 and 2006 said Wednesday he has the financial backing he needs to take a second shot at securing a slots license for Adams County.
LeVan said he intends to do exactly that if a license becomes available - something that seems increasingly likely....
This time around, LeVan's proposal will include plans for a horse-racing facility and be located somewhere
Source: NYT
Jul 17, 2008
Fending off a last-ditch protest from within the church, Southern Methodist University received final approval from its owner, a regional wing of the United Methodist Church, to house the George W. Bush Library complex, which includes a museum and a policy institute. Nearly 300 clergy members from the church’s South Central Jurisdiction dismissed several petitions asserting that the institute endorses President Bush and violates the university’s academic integrity. “The only hurdles are fund-rai
Source: AP
Jul 17, 2008
A sweeping government audit has revealed that up to 50,000 pieces are missing from Russia's museums -- everything from Pre-Revolutionary medals and weapons to precious works of art -- a member of the survey team said Thursday.
Former Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered the survey after his government was deeply embarrassed in 2006 by hundreds of thefts from the crown jewel of Russia's art world, St. Petersburg's Hermitage gallery.
Over 1,600 museums have been inspected since t
Source: CNN
Jul 17, 2008
Only one of the nearly 2,000 guests who attended the
FBI's 100th birthday party Thursday was alive when a handful of
investigators formed what was to become the world's premier law
enforcement agency."I'm older than the FBI," said 101-year old Walter Walsh, who fought the
mob as an FBI agent in the 1930s and '40s. The FBI says Walsh is its
oldest living former special agent.
Walsh is among the thousands of special agents who contributed to the
investigations and arrests upon whic
Source: AP
Jul 17, 2008
FRAZEYSBURG: A man who owns a hillside park with giant sandstone sculptures of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and other famous Americans said he's selling the property so the artwork can be better preserved.
The sculptures in Baughman Memorial Park need to be restored and repainted, said Kevin Morehouse, 35, who bought the park for $310,000 in February. A statue of Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman is missing its head, and other statues show varying degrees of wear and
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jul 17, 2008
Germany would have accepted surrender in the Second World War as early as
1943 if it were not for Adolf Hitler's fanaticism, the country's new
definitive history of the conflict has suggested.
The work, which comprises 12,000 pages in 13 tomes, has taken academics
from the military history centre of the German armed forces 30 years to
finish. It says that the conflict was lost as early as 1942. However, the
Führer's"suicidal urge" to enforce a final confrontation helped prolong
the
