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)
Apr 10, 2008
Britain's historic bridges, buildings and roads are under threat from drivers blithely following satellite navigation directions, a conservation society warned yesterday.
Among those which have been damaged by traffic driving down unsuitable roads is a 200-year-old bridge in Oxfordshire, a 300-year-old cottage in Greater Manchester and Pevensey Castle in East Sussex, according to the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.
Phillip Venning, the society's secreta
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Apr 10, 2008
The University of Oregon awarded honorary degrees on Sunday to 20 Japanese-Americans who were expelled during World War II. The university's president called the ceremony a step in redressing a "tragic legacy."
Source: AP
Apr 9, 2008
State lawmakers will consider a resolution that expresses regret for slavery, but doesn't issue an apology.
Members of a legislative committee struggled on Wednesday with the language of the resolution that they ultimately advanced to the full Legislature for consideration.
The Judiciary Committee finally decided that expressing "profound regret" for the state's role in slavery was more appropriate than issuing an apology.
Source: Tampa Tribune
Apr 9, 2008
A Tampa woman is more than a century too late in her attempt to be repaid $22 million for a $300 loan her ancestors made to the city during the Civil War, Tampa officials say.
In its legal filings, the city says the delay by Joan Kennedy Biddle and her family in asking for the money is "completely unreasonable, inexcusable and unprecedented." The city filed a motion Tuesday to dismiss the lawsuit.
"We don't even know that the note hadn't been paid,"
Source: Amanda Ripley in Time Mag profile
Apr 9, 2008
Each of us lives a life of contradictory truths. We are not one thing or another. Barack Obama's mother was at least a dozen things. S. Ann Soetoro was a teen mother who later got a Ph.D. in anthropology; a white woman from the Midwest who was more comfortable in Indonesia; a natural-born mother obsessed with her work; a romantic pragmatist, if such a thing is possible.
"When I think about my mother," Obama told me recently, "I think that there was a certain combinati
Source: National Geographic
Apr 9, 2008
An ancient burial site in Mexico contains evidence that Mixtec Indians conducted funerary rituals involving cremation as far back as 3,000 years ago.
The find represents the earliest known hints that Mixtecs used this burial practice, which was later reserved for Mixtec kings and Aztec emperors, according to researchers who excavated the site.
Source: http://fredericksburg.com
Apr 9, 2008
Private land within the boundaries of some of the nation's most beloved national parks is under growing pressure to be developed or sold.
And, according to a new report by an independent parks watchdog group, other sites--including Fredericksburg-area Civil War battlefields--are looking for funds to acquire important acreage as federal budget cuts have dried up available money.
In its "America's Heritage for Sale" report released yesterday, the National Parks
Source: Manchester Evening News
Apr 9, 2008
ARCHAEOLOGISTS have unearthed a "mini-Stonehenge"... on the moors of Rochdale.
The two nearby sites - an oval made up of collapsed slabs, and a 30-metre circle of rounded stones - are believed to be ancient burial sites dating back as far as 5,000 years.
They were spotted by archaeologist Stuart Mendelsohn during a walk on the hills in December and could now become a major tourist attraction.
"I suppose you could describe it as Rochdale's ver
Source: Tim Egan in the NYT
Apr 9, 2008
COOLIDGE, Ariz. — A pair of Brits, a Vietnam vet, a sullen teen and a dozen or so retirees gathered under the Sonoran Desert sun to try to decipher some of the clues left behind by people who lived here nearly 1,000 years ago.
Who were these Hohokam people who thrived in a compact urban village built around a Great House? They knew astronomy and irrigation and how to construct a four-story building with little more than mud. They played sports on their ball courts, fermented wine fr
Source: History Today
Apr 9, 2008
A man who lost his sight in the Blitz has had a successful operation to restore his vision. 87-year-old John Gray was blinded in his right eye during a Luftwaffe raid on Clydeside in March 1941. A firewatcher during air raids, he was the only survivor of a direct hit on the building he was in. He stated: ‘We just heard some glass shattering and that was the last thing I heard until I came too in the Victoria Infirmary with my leg stretched out in plaster and a big bandage on my head.’ Over six d
Source: ABC News
Apr 9, 2008
In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.
The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of "combined" interrogation techniques -- using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time -
Source: BBC
Apr 9, 2008
Archaeologists carrying out an excavation at Stonehenge say they have broken through to a layer that may finally explain why the site was built.
The team has reached sockets that once held bluestones - smaller stones, most now missing or uprooted, which formed the site's original structure.
The researchers believe that the bluestones could reveal that Stonehenge was once a place of healing.
The dig is the first to take place at Stonehenge for more than 40 y
Source: NYT
Apr 9, 2008
When the government of Israel budgeted about $28 million to observe the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state, it was probably hoping that its fractious citizens would set aside their troubles and come together in an outpouring of national pride.
Instead, a month before Independence Day, Israelis are wrangling over how extravagantly the country should celebrate, and at what cost.
Many acknowledge the state’s outstanding achievements, pointing to the absorption o
Source: National Security Archive
Apr 9, 2008
Previously secret U.S. Air Force official histories of the Vietnam war published today by the National Security Archive disclose for the first time that Central Intelligence Agency contract employees had a direct role in combat air attacks when they flew Laotian government aircraft on strike missions and that the Air Force actively considered nuclear weapons options during the 1959 Laos crisis.The newly declassified histories, which were released through Freedom of Informati
Source: LAT
Apr 9, 2008
Five years ago this week, looters ransacked the Iraqi National Museum, stealing centuries-old artifacts that celebrated Iraq's role as the cradle of civilization. Some headlines at the time exaggerated the size of the damage, erroneously reporting 170,000 items missing. Investigators later discovered that some important artifacts, including gold jewelry from Nimrud, had been hidden at Iraq's Central Bank since the Persian Gulf War in 1991.
Today, investigators say that about 15,000
Source: International Herald Tribune
Apr 9, 2008
Here's an arresting allegation: More slaves are now imported (though the current word for this is trafficked) into the United States annually than were imported in an average year during the American colonial era.
That is one of the talking points used lately by the author of an arresting new book on global slavery, "A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery," by E. Benjamin Skinner.
In fact, of course, at the height of the legal slave trade i
Source: Independent (UK)
Apr 9, 2008
Oliver Stone's new film,W, portrays George Bush as a foul-mouthed, dried-out drunk with a baseball obsession and a difficult relationship with his father.
Filming is expected to begin any day in Louisiana. The movie should be in cinemas before Mr Bush leaves office next January.
Stone says the film won't be an anti-Bush polemic. Rather, as he told Daily Variety, it will be "a fair, true portrait of the man that asks the question: how did Bush go from being an alcoh
Source: http://www.sunherald.com
Apr 8, 2008
BILOXI --Forty visitors showed up for the unannounced soft opening of the grounds of Beauvoir on Monday, and by 10 a.m. this morning there was another dozen waiting to take what the museum staff calls the "disaster tour."
Just the grounds, not the National Landmark 1850s Beauvoir House, is open to the public until the grand reopening of the restored house on the June 3 birthday of Jefferson Davis.
Source: Statesman Journal
Apr 8, 2008
Downtown Salem's history will come alive for residents and visitors under a new program featuring a series of historical markers and a revamped walking tour, city officials said.
A $70,000 federal parks grant announced Monday will help fund the program, for which the city will install as many as 50 markers on downtown buildings and sites detailing their historical significance for passers-by.
"I believe that folks think, 'Oh, these are beautiful old buildings, how
Source: ABC Science
Apr 8, 2008
Aboriginal tools found in Western Australia and dating back 35,000 years are surprisingly sophisticated and varied, archaeologists say.
And they believe the site may yet reveal artefacts up to 45,000 years old, making it older than the internationally famous Mungo Man site found in New South Wales.
Archaeologists hired by one of the traditional owners in the Pilbara region, the Martidja Banyjima people, uncovered the ancient tools at a rock overhang on the site of the A
