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: National Geographic News
Jul 17, 2008
Disemboweled and decorated with scarlet paint, metal eye plates, and a
tattoo, an exquisitely preserved, thousand-year-old mummy has been
discovered in Peru. (See photos.)
As anthropologists gingerly removed the layers of ancient textiles
swaddling the thirtysomething elite male last month at a Lima lab,
offerings both strange and familiar came to light—slingshots, corn, a
figurine in identical dress.
Taken together, the artifacts, the mummy, and the excavation site suggest
t
Source: LAT
Jul 17, 2008
NAIROBI, KENYA -- During an emotion-packed visit to his father's homeland in 2006, Sen. Barack Obama took time from family reunions and official visits to chastise Kenya's government for failing to stem corruption and tribalism, irking his hosts in the process.
It wasn't the first time an Obama had taken Kenya's elite to task. Forty years earlier, a rising star named Barack Obama -- tall, elegant and impeccably dressed -- attacked the nation's post-independence government, accusing
Source: Spiegel Online
Jul 17, 2008
It was a sort of official crack in the Berlin Wall, one of the few places where East Germans could meet West Germans. Now it's doomed to demolition. The Michendorf rest stop on the outskirts of Berlin is to be knocked down next Monday to make way for an expanded highway.
During the Cold War it had been a place where West Berliners driving through East Germany could grab a cheap bite or share a beer with some East Germans before crossing the border into the US sector of the divided c
Source: Deutsche Welle
Jul 17, 2008
A monumental war history in German, which has just been completed after 30 years of work, explores a question that preoccupies modern Germans: why Nazi Germany fought on, defying all military logic, to the bitter end.
The government-funded military historians who researched the series are thoroughly anti-Nazi, but at the same time were curious about the strategy and mindset that drove their grandfathers' generation.
The findings can be set alongside existing histories o
Source: Deutsche Welle
Jul 17, 2008
The French state and a private Franco-German foundation on Thursday signed an agreement paving the way for compensation payments to some 5,800 surviving World War II forced-labor victims from the Alsace-Lorraine region.
A convention was signed by French Minister of State for War Veterans Jean-Marie Bockel and the Foundation for German-French Understanding in Strasbourg on Thursday, July 17. It creates a fund of 4.6 million euros ($2.9 million) from which the compensation payments wi
Source: AP
Jul 17, 2008
Grave robbers, a curse of burial grounds
for centuries, are back for new valuables: metal ornaments that can be
melted down for quick cash as copper and other metal prices climb.
In West Virginia, it was vases bolted to headstones. In Washington State,
it was bronze markers on veterans' graves. In Chicago, Illinois it was
nearly half a million dollars' worth of brass ornaments.
"It's a crisis of the times," said Ruth Shapleigh-Brown, executive
director of the Connecticut Gravesto
Source: BBC
Jul 17, 2008
Cambodia and Thailand moved more troops into an ancient border temple, as
a stand-off triggered by a territorial dispute entered its third day.
Four hundred Thai troops and 800 Cambodian soldiers are now stationed at
Preah Vihear temple, a Cambodian military chief said.
Cambodia's Prime Minister Hun Sen urged his Thai counterpart, Samak
Sundaravej, to withdraw his troops in a letter.
The two sides have agreed to hold talks on the issue early next week.
The Internat
Source: AHA Blog
Jul 16, 2008
Over ten years ago Congress called on the National Park Service to investigate Revolutionary War sites and War of 1812 sites, evaluate their significance, and identify any threats to them. The resulting report, the Revolutionary War and War of 1812 Historic Preservation Study, is now available online ....
Within this report the National Park Service looks at 243 battlefields and 434 historic properties. Of those, 170 are considered threatened (often by development nearby).
Source: Guardian
Jul 16, 2008
The Battle of Hastings is over. More than a century after her death, the
young English woman accused of vandalising the most famous cartoon strip
in the world, the Bayeux tapestry, recording the downfall of Harold and
the triumph of William the Conqueror in 1066, has been cleared.
As a major international conference on the tapestry opens at the British
Museum, archaeologist Michael Lewis has named the real villain who snipped
a souvenir fragment from the border of the priceless texti
Source: Murfreesboro Post
Jul 16, 2008
Some 40-50 artifacts were recovered July 12 near the Stones River
Battlefield on the first day of the Harding House Civil War History
Survey, a geospatial/archaeological project that is being conducted this
month on land slated for development this summer.
Dr. Tom Nolan, director of MTSU’s Laboratory for Spatial Technology, along
with archaeologist Zada Law, led the all-volunteer team on its first day
of the survey, which yielded Civil War-era artifact finds such as lead
shot, a min
Source: http://www.charleston.net
Jul 16, 2008
Congress appears poised to renew the Civil War Battlefield Preservation Act, a move that could help the Lowcountry secure its historic sites, even if they're not as endangered as some in other states.
U.S. Rep. Henry Brown, R-S.C., has worked toward the bill's approval in the House, which could come this week.
"In just three years, America will commemorate the 150th Anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War," he said. "(The bill) would help in the pre
Source: AP
Jul 16, 2008
The first archaeological dig at one of the nation's oldest cathedrals has turned up a mix of new finds in the heart of the French Quarter. Discoveries behind St. Louis Cathedral include a small silver crucifix from the 1770s or 1780s and traces of previously unknown buildings dating back to around the city's founding in 1718.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jul 16, 2008
The bones of Crown Prince Alexei, the only son of Tsar Nicholas II, are to be turned into an object of worship according to a secret proposal being circulated within the Russian Orthodox Church.
The controversial plan emerged as Russia officially confirmed that the charred remains of two corpses found in a pit outside Yekaterinburg last year belonged to Alexei and his older sister, Maria.
The announcement, which follows months of DNA analysis and forensic investigation,
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jul 16, 2008
A 2500 year old Persian treasure dubbed the world's 'first bill of human rights' has been branded a piece of shameless 'propaganda' by German historians.
The Cyrus cylinder, which is held by the British Museum, is a legacy of Cyrus the Great - the Persian emperor famed for freeing the Jews of ancient Babylon after conquering the city in 539 BC.
A copy of the cylinder, which is covered in cuneiform script supposed to detail the ancient charter of rights, also hangs next
Source: Times (UK)
Jul 16, 2008
He sent millions to their deaths in the gulag, but that has not deterred Russians from voting en masse for Josef Stalin as the face of their nation.
The Soviet tyrant and Second World War leader is battling Tsar Nicholas II for first place in The Name of Russia, a domestic version of the BBC series Great Britons. Stalin had been well ahead in the online vote until the show's producer appealed to members of a popular Russian social networking site to back Nicholas II.
Th
Source: International Herald Tribune
Jul 16, 2008
IF feminism means a desire for independence from patriarchal authority,
the beguines — a Roman Catholic laic order that began in the 13th century
and branched across northwest Europe — represented, perhaps, the world's
oldest women's movement.
Unlike sisterhoods that required a life spent apart from society under
vows of chastity, these Catholic women looked for holiness outside
monastic norms. Although they lived and prayed together within an enclave,
partly as a form of mutual pro
Source: Reuters
Jul 16, 2008
Russia said on Wednesday that charred
remains found in a pit belonged to Tsar Nicholas II's only son and his
daughter, exactly 90 years after the Bolsheviks shocked the world by
murdering the last Tsar.
Moscow's confirmation that the remains included those of Tsar Nicholas's
13-year-old heir, Prince Alexei, came as hundreds of Russians flocked to a
church built on the site where the family was gunned down by Bolshevik
executioners.
Nicholas II, lampooned by the Soviets as a
Source: Guardian
Jul 16, 2008
Ambitious plans for a world-class visitor centre for Stonehenge may have
dwindled to a world-class prefab, but yesterday both English Heritage and
the government pledged it would be built in time for the 2012 Olympics.
After over 20 years of bitter public debate, and an estimated £9m spent on
consultants, designs and planning inquiries, the proposed £57m visitor
centre collapsed last year when the government abandoned, on cost grounds,
the plan to tunnel the A303 where it passes one
Source: Seattle Times
Jul 16, 2008
Peter Egner talked freely to his friends about his service as a conscript in the German army during World War II, and even showed them the jagged scar on his hip — the wound that Egner said ended his military service.
"He was a [WWII] veteran, like I was a veteran," said Russell Wilson, 81, his longtime neighbor in West Linn, Ore.
But federal Nazi hunters say the 86-year-old Egner, of Bellevue, has lived a lie all these years, and Tuesday moved to revoke his U
Source: AP
Jul 16, 2008
MAILLE, France - For most of France, Aug. 25, 1944, was the joyous day that Allied troops liberated Paris from the Nazis. For this village in the Loire valley, it was a day of horror.
Retreating German troops massacred 124 of Maille's 500 residents then razed the town, possibly in retaliation for Resistance action in the region, according to local archives. Forty-four children were among the dead, the youngest just 4 months old.
Now a German investigator is drawing new
