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
Apr 23, 2008
An ancient Greek tomb thought to have held the body of Alexander the Great's father is actually that of Alexander's half brother, researchers say.
This may mean that some of the artifacts found in the tomb—including a helmet, shield, and silver "crown"—originally belonged to Alexander the Great himself. Alexander's half brother is thought to have claimed these royal trappings after Alexander's death.
Source: Dallas Morning News
Apr 23, 2008
A federal judge has dismissed a case by current and former Burleson High School students who were forbidden from carrying purses bearing the Confederate battle flag on campus.
The ruling released Tuesday by Judge David C. Godbey ends the more than year-long lawsuit about the place of Confederate symbols in public life. School district officials said the symbols could be disruptive because of the racial overtones. The defendants and the Southern Legal Resource Center, which represent
Source: AP
Apr 23, 2008
Envoys from the U.S. and several nations walked out of a U.N. Security Council meeting Wednesday after Libya compared the situation in Gaza to Nazi concentration camps, council diplomats said.
The walkout was a rare protest by diplomats on the U.N.'s most powerful body against one of their own members. Libya is the only Arab representative on the council.
Council members held a closed meeting to discuss the possibility of issuing a press statement following a briefing o
Source: http://www.witntv.com
Apr 23, 2008
A team from East Carolina University is working to authenticate a possible Wright Brothers' artifact found in Kitty Hawk.
A crate that was shipped to "W. Wright, Elizabeth City, North Carolina” at the turn of the century looks like it became the tabletop for the Wright Brothers' kitchen table. That crate resurfaced in March in Kitty Hawk.
Dr. Larry Tise of ECU is a leading Wright Brothers authority. Tise and some of his students from ECU are working to confirm the
Source: http://www.nwanews.com
Apr 23, 2008
The exhumation of Parley Parker Pratt ended Tuesday when archaeologists couldn’t find the Mormon church leader’s remains.
Robert J. Grow, Pratt’s greatgreat-great-grandson, said there were no signs of Pratt, and the digging ended around 4 p.m....
Pratt was an original member of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and his dying wish was to be buried in Utah.
Source: http://sundaygazettemail.com
Apr 23, 2008
An archeologist on Tuesday criticized Putnam County commissioners for their efforts to return the skeletal remains of about 600 American Indians to West Virginia, saying they had left the scientific community in the dark.
"We have been cut out of the process entirely," said Bob Maslowski, president of the Council for West Virginia Archaeology.
Last month, commissioners received legal control of the skeletal remains, which had been stored at Ohio State Universi
Source: AP
Apr 23, 2008
An appeals court has ruled that the U.S. government should have authority for now over a Lake Michigan shipwreck that could be The Griffin, a 17th century vessel built by the French explorer La Salle.
A three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati reversed a ruling by District Judge Robert Holmes Bell in a dispute between the state of Michigan and the private underwater exploration company that found the wreckage seven years ago.
Source: Samuel G. Freedman in the NYT
Apr 23, 2008
In 1993, when Travis Hofmann was a freshman of 15, he had traveled little beyond the sand hills that surrounded his hometown, Alliance, Neb. He was the son of a railroad engineer, a trumpeter in the high school band, with a part-time job changing the marquee and running the projector at the local movie theater.
In Travis’s class in global geography at Alliance High School, however, the teacher introduced the outside world with the word and concept of genocide. The teacher, Tim Walz,
Source: AP
Apr 23, 2008
A Dutch school director preparing an exhibition on Anne Frank has found a holiday postcard signed by the Jewish teenage diarist, a museum said Wednesday.
The card, sent in 1937, was addressed to one of Frank's best friends, Samme Ledermann, and postmarked from just across the Dutch border in Aachen, Germany, said Maatje Mostard, of the Anne Frank Museum.
Decorated with a clover-covered bell atop a snowy field and wishing "good luck for the new year" in German,
Source: Times (UK)
Apr 23, 2008
In the public imagination, a “summit” is a meeting between the political leaders of two states, with those between the United States and the Soviet Union seen as the most important. Yet one of the most interesting conclusions of David Reynolds’s compellingly written book is that these “personal” summits do not succeed. In a work of great originality, Reynolds sets out an analytical structure, considers six important summit meetings between 1938 and 1985, and concludes that only one of them had t
Source: http://www.observer.com
Apr 23, 2008
“This is not your father’s Watergate,” said James Rosen.
Mr. Rosen, an on-air D.C.-based correspondent for Fox News was speaking to NYTV on Monday afternoon. Next month, Doubleday will publish Mr. Rosen’s first book—a revisionist history of Richard Nixon’s downfall, called The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate.
As NYTV’s overcrowded bookshelf can attest, TV newsmen are constantly cranking out books that are heavy on the self-promotion and light on,
Source: Christian Science Monitor
Apr 23, 2008
GETTYSBURG, PA. - Even though he spends his time guiding tourists through the nooks and crannies of a Civil War-era house, retired librarian Harry Conay believes that nature can trump history.
He's watched in horror as the National Park Service has tried to make the Gettysburg National Military Park look more like it did on three July days in 1863. Officials are nearly a third of the way through cutting down 576 acres of trees that didn't exist back then.
Another 275 ac
Source: http://www.strategypage.com
Apr 22, 2008
Russia is reversing its population decline, which began before the Cold War ended, and accelerated after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Births were up 14 percent last year (to 1.6 million), over 2006. At its worst, a few years ago, the Russian population was declining 750,000 a year. A growing economy, more health consciousness and more pro-family laws have all contributed to this. Still, it will be another decade or two before the decline will halt. By then, the Russian population wi
Source: International Herald Tribune
Apr 22, 2008
OUESSANT, France: From this farthest edge of France, where the rain comes horizontally off the ocean, there is nothing on the horizon except waves and lighthouses, marking the lines between land and sea, sea and sky.
Built as a technical aid to sailors, their architects often unknown, France's lighthouses have increasingly become a symbol of the nature of the country, of its "patrimoine," or patrimony - a word that in France carries a spiritual quality of patriotism and na
Source: Reuters
Apr 22, 2008
At the age of 7, Mercedes Wild waved excitedly at each U.S. plane that circled over her Berlin home and landed at Tempelhof airport, packed with supplies to feed Berliners during the Soviets' Cold War blockade.
Today, the 67-year-old Wild is fighting against city plans to shut down the giant airport site in the center of Berlin.
After years of debate, Berliners are to vote Sunday on the closing of the Nazi-built complex.
Source: Nixon Blog
Apr 22, 2008
If everyone knows that William Ayers and his comrades in the Weather Underground were planning to set bombs to murder innocent people, why didn’t they do time?
Because the investigation against them was muffed thanks to the illegal activities of the Washington Post’s favorite Watergate answer man himself, Mark Felt — aka Deep Throat.
In 1972-73, FBI official Felt and his colleague Edward S. Miller authorized nine illegal break-ins at the homes of Weather Underground mem
Source: NYT
Apr 22, 2008
According to the authors of “Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics,” change is indeed on its way, and the magnitude of that change will be monumental — a tectonic realignment of the sort that occurs about every four decades, leading to a fundamental shift in policy priorities and voter coalitions.
Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais also write in this fascinating but not always persuasive volume that the party capturing the White House in 2008 ha
Source: LiveScience
Apr 22, 2008
Oil paintings have been found in caves behind the two ancient colossal Buddha statues destroyed in 2001 by the Taliban, suggesting that Asians — not Europeans — were the first to invent oil painting.
Many people worldwide were in shock when the Taliban destroyed the Buddha statues in the Afghan region of Bamiyan.
Behind those statues are caves decorated with paintings from the fifth to ninth centuries.
New experiments performed at the European Synchrotron R
Source: NYT
Apr 22, 2008
Imagine President Barack Obama is preparing his first State of the Union message. Would he want Vice President Hillary Rodham Clinton tut-tutting with edits or suggesting how she could write it better? Would he want to hear Second Spouse Bill Clinton wax on and on about favorite lines from his own speeches?
Alternatively, would the poll-obsessed Clintons want to wake up in the White House residence in 2009 and read about Vice President Obama’s sky-high popularity ratings, and how th
Source: International Herald Tribune
Apr 22, 2008
Elias Khoury can still remember the days when old people in this cliffside village spoke only Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Back then the village, linked to the capital, Damascus, only by a long and bumpy bus ride over the mountains, was almost entirely Christian, a vestige of an older and more diverse Middle East that existed before the arrival of Islam.
Now Khoury, 65, gray-haired and bedridden, admits ruefully that he has largely forgotten the language he spoke with his own mot
