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: NYT
Jul 14, 2008
For decades, the proud seal of New York City, with its depiction of a sailor and a Manhattan Indian, of beavers and flour barrels and the sails of a windmill, has celebrated 1625 as the year the city was founded.
There’s just one problem: Most historians say the year has hardly any historical significance.
The first settlers arrived in what would become part of New York City on a Dutch ship as early as 1623; some say 1624. The Dutch “purchased” Manhattan in 1626. The fi
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, is published by the Federation of American Scientists
Jul 14, 2008
The"Foreign Relations of the United States" (FRUS) series, which is
the official documentary history of U.S. foreign policy, remains
unlikely to meet the legal requirement that it be published no later
than 30 years after the events that it describes, an official advisory
committee has told the Secretary of State."Despite many and repeated assurances that this problem would be
addressed by 2010, the committee is now very skeptical that the Office
of the Historian will succeed in meeting
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jul 14, 2008
Archaeologists are to open a long-sealed cave under a Mexican pyramid in the hope that it will unlock the mystery of one of ancient civilisation's greatest cities.
With its soaring stone pyramids and geometric temples, Teotihuacan was once the biggest city in the Americas and possibly the world.
However, experts have never been able to say with certainty who built it and why it was suddenly abandoned.
An international team of experts believes the answer may
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jul 14, 2008
A British pensioner claims to have produced to world's biggest family tree after tracing nearly 10,000 relatives and ancestors including Alfred the Great and William the Conqueror.
Roy Blackmore, 76, was orphaned as a child and became determined to find out more about the family he never knew.
He has spent around £20,000 and five hours a day for the past 28 years scouring archives, cemetery records and census registers to trace his roots back 1,500 years.
G
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jul 14, 2008
With its soaring stone pyramids and geometric temples, Teotihuacan was once the biggest city in the Americas and possibly the world.
However, experts have never been able to say with certainty who built it and why it was suddenly abandoned.
An international team of experts believes the answer may lie under the Pyramid of the Sun, the centre point of the vast ruined city 25 miles outside Mexico City.
Source: http://www.scoop.co.nz
Jul 14, 2008
On Wednesday, just as the Senate passed sweeping new legislation to modernize a 30 year old federal surveillance law, President Bush signaled that he would swiftly veto a bill approved by the House earlier in the day that would overhaul the Presidential and Federal Records Act to ensure emails and other government documents are preserved in the age of the Internet.
The measure was passed by a vote of 286-137, more than a year after several Senate and House investigations discovered
Source: Chicago Tribune
Jul 13, 2008
Stephen Payne, a significant fundraiser for President Bush's election and reelection campaigns, certainly didn't know he was being videotaped when he suggested that he could arrange some meetings with Vice President Dick Cheney and others in the Bush administration with a big donation to the Bush presidential library.
And Payne, a Houston-based lobbyist and longtime Bush-backer who has served as a volunteer travel-advance planner for White House trips abroad, later told the Sunday T
Source: AP
Jul 13, 2008
Nearly six and a half decades after a gunner's B-24 bomber was shot down over France during World War II, a twisted dog tag and a ring found last year at the crash site have been handed over to the his family in Vermont.
They are items Felix Shostak was believed to have been wearing when he flew his last mission on Aug. 18, 1944, to attack a German fighter base in northern France.
On July 5, a member of the Vermont Army National Guard delivered the artifacts to the fami
Source: Politico.com
Jul 13, 2008
The Obama campaign is condemning as “tasteless and offensive” a New Yorker magazine cover that depicts Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) in a turban, fist-bumping his gun-slinging wife.
An American flag burns in their fireplace.
The New Yorker says it's satire. It certainly will be candy for cable news.
The Obama campaign quickly condemned the rendering. Spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement: “The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us,
Source: LAT
Jul 13, 2008
Justices rely more than ever on the idea of constitutional 'original intent' in ruling on cases this year -- yet their decisions are still split.
###
In 1985, President Reagan's attorney general, Edwin Meese III, criticized the Supreme Court's decisions and called on the justices to decide cases based on the "original intent" of the Constitution. The justices were wrong to rely on contemporary views of liberty and equality, Meese said; instead, they should rel
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jul 13, 2008
Maps showing the likely locations of thousands of unexploded bombs dropped during World War Two have been created for the first time.
Up to one in ten bombs dropped by the German Luftwaffe failed to detonate leaving a deadly legacy which still lies under the nation's streets and fields.
The new map will be used by builders to tell them the risks from unexploded bombs where they are working. Members of the public will also be able to access the map, which identifies 21,0
Source: AP
Jul 13, 2008
About 5,400 residents were evacuated in Osaka in western Japan and flights at nearby airports were rerouted Sunday as army experts disposed of a large unexploded bomb believed to have been dropped by the U.S. military during World War II, authorities said.
An explosives disposal unit from Japan's Ground Self-Defense Force safely defused the rusty one-ton bomb in the crowded residential area during a 50-minute operation, local army spokesman Shoji Matsumoto said.
Nearby
Source: AP
Jul 13, 2008
An Israeli lifeguard taking his regular morning swim off the Mediterranean coast in southern Israel discovered a 2,500-year-old marble talisman to ward off the evil eye, the Israel Antiquities Authority said Sunday.
The lifeguard turned over the ancient disc that once adorned the bow of an ancient warship or cargo ship to keep evil away, the Israeli archaeology body said.
Experts say the relic, discovered off the coast Palmahim beach where the ancient Yavne-Yam port cit
Source: NYT
Jul 13, 2008
It is a nice bit of historic symmetry for the long-awaited opening of the new Capitol Visitor Center.
The $621 million underground center will be opened to the public on Dec. 2, the 145th anniversary of the placement of the final sections of the Statue of Freedom atop the inspiring Capitol dome in 1863, during the Civil War.
“The connection between the Capitol building and the new Capitol Visitor Center is natural and powerful,” said Stephen T. Ayers, the acting archite
Source: Juan Cole at his blog Informed Comment
Jul 13, 2008
Greg Mitchell points out that the media continue to give little coverage to non-combat-related deaths among American troops in Iraq. Actually, they seldom mention the number of those wounded in combat, much less putting them and their stories on the screen. (It happens. It is rare.)Even as much press as the elect
Source: Guardian
Jul 13, 2008
Ancient bones from the city of Jericho are to be used by British scientists to develop treatments for tuberculosis. The project is part of a new scientific discipline in which archaeologists and medical researchers are cooperating to gain insights into modern ailments.
Other diseases being tackled this way include syphilis, malaria, arthritis and influenza. Ancient history holds vital clues in seeking out treatments for modern diseases, according to these real-life counterparts of T
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jul 13, 2008
A ghostly figure, supposedly the spirit of a dead soldier from a key battle in the English Civil War, has been captured on film by a group of paranormal enthusiasts.
The Northampton Paranormal Group caught the figure on camera during a visit to the site of the Battle of Naseby, a field between the villages of Clipston and Naseby in Northamptonshire, last month.
The visit coincided with the 363rd Anniversary of the Battle of Naseby. Members said they heard clunking noise
Source: Independent (UK)
Jul 12, 2008
Unesco, the world cultural body, has threatened to humiliate France by placing the Lascaux caves – known as the "Sistine Chapel of prehistory" – on its list of endangered sites of universal importance.
The Unesco world heritage committee, meeting this week in Quebec, has given the French government six months to report on the success of its efforts to save the Lascaux cave paintings in Dordogne from an ugly, and potentially destructive, invasion of grey and black fungi.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jul 12, 2008
A mild-mannered Chinese professor is being hailed as the world's greatest palaeontologist for his part in the discovery of 30 new species of dinosaurs over the past 15 years.
Prof Xu inspects a feathered, four-winged dinosaur fossil
Now China hopes Xu Xing's work will help attract a new kind of tourist to China - one for whom a fossilised raptor holds more appeal than the country's millennia of history and culture.
He specialises in the winged and feathered dinos
Source: AP
Jul 12, 2008
For more than six decades, the family of U.S. Army 1st Lt. Archibald Kelly had no way of being certain he was killed when his bomber smashed into a rocky cliff in Croatia in World War II.
They didn't know his bones lay under a makeshift cairn cobbled together by villagers. Without a body or a proper burial they could never completely convince themselves he was dead.
"We didn't have anything confirmed," the navigator's brother, Samuel Kelly, 85, recalled. "
