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: BBC
Apr 4, 2008
Swedish archaeologists have discovered a rare hoard of Viking-age silver Arab coins near Stockholm's Arlanda airport.
About 470 coins were found on 1 April at an early Iron Age burial site. They date from the 7th to 9th Century, when Viking traders travelled widely.
There has been no similar find in that part of Sweden since the 1880s.
Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Apr 4, 2008
He called himself Galt — Eric Starvo Galt.
He drove in from Alabama on the weekend of March 23, 1968, and paid $10.50 for a week's rent in a seedy rooming house on 14th Street near Peachtree, in Atlanta's hippie district.
Three weeks later, FBI agents discovered he had left something behind in his hurriedly vacated room: a map of Atlanta with the locations of a particular church, office and home circled in pencil. A thumbprint on the map linked the stranger to fingerpri
Source: http://www.kentucky.com
Apr 4, 2008
By a 4-1 vote Thursday night, the Perryville City Council rejected a proposed subdivision that would have been near Kentucky's largest Civil War battlefield."I'm relieved," said Sherry Robinson, a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who had spoken against the proposal."Right now, we're ecstatic."
Marion"Pete" Coyle Jr., the landowner who had wanted to develop a portion of his farm on U.S. 150 just west of downtown Perryville, had little comment after the vote."I'm upset right n
Source: AP
Apr 4, 2008
Nearly four decades after their deaths, four combat photographers received a museum burial Thursday as family, friends and former colleagues recalled how the men gave their lives to show the world "Vietnam as they saw it."
A UH-1 Huey helicopter carrying the four photographers was shot down over a steep mountainside in southern Laos on Feb. 10, 1971. Human remains were recovered years later, in 1998, along with camera parts, film, broken watches and bits of wreckage.
Source: AP
Apr 4, 2008
A leading anti-Semitism watchdog group called Friday for a South Korean cosmetics company to halt an ad campaign with Nazi references.
The Coreana Cosmetics Co. television ad for a skin lotion shows a young woman in a short skirt and military-style trench coat, holding a soldier's cap that appears to have the swastika-gripping eagle Nazi insignia. Background noises of an explosion and crowds cheering in response to a man's unintelligible speech are heard.
A version show
Source: AP
Apr 4, 2008
A remote-controlled submarine scouring the shipwrecked remains of an Australian warship has revealed new clues to a World War II battle that cost more than 700 lives. But the mystery persists: What caused Australia's worst maritime tragedy?
Source: WaPo
Apr 4, 2008
The peace symbol -- three simple lines within a circle -- turns 50 today. It's had a colorful and often turbulent life, which is odd considering that it's supposed to symbolize, you know, peace.
Unveiled at a British ban-the-bomb rally on April 4, 1958, the peace symbol's peak of potency was in the 1960s, when it was the emblem of the anti-Vietnam War movement and all things groovily counterculture. (Said its late creator, British graphic designer Gerald Holtom: "I drew myself
Source: NYT
Apr 4, 2008
ST. HELENA ISLAND, S.C. — In the hour between sunset and nightfall, the view from this slate-blue cabin consists of a steadily darkening palette. The salt marsh silvers into stone gray, the grassy hummocks ash away into soft black. A blue heron, perhaps feeling conspicuously colorful, flies away.
The scene was intended to soothe the sore eyes of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But as evidence of just how much he needed the kind of solace it offered, Dr. King died before the cabi
Source: The Root (webzine published by Henry Louis Gates for the WaPo)
Apr 4, 2008
When masses of dispossessed black people descended on the National Mall during the March on Washington to demand equal rights in the world's most powerful country, King's "I Have a Dream" speech gave disenfranchised people abroad reason to persist in their own battles against injustices at home. He made them believe that fairer political systems where within reach whether their oppressors where white, black, or brown.
King recognized that by speaking to a larger audience h
Source: Press Release
Apr 4, 2008
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum today
launched World is Witness, a new initiative that opens a window into the lives
of people affected by genocide and its long-term consequences.
A project of the Museum's Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative that
documents and maps threats of genocide and related crimes against
humanity, World is Witness brings together testimonies, photographs, videos,
and other first-hand data in Google Earth, situating eyewitness accounts in
Source: International Herald Tribune
Apr 3, 2008
Thieves peeled long strips of lead from the roof of St. Michael and All Angels, until a barking dog sent them fleeing from this tiny Leicestershire village. But by then, they had left a hole of about 100 square feet in the top of the 800-year-old church.
For centuries, people have stolen religious artifacts in Europe, including chunks of religious buildings, but Britain is in the midst of an accelerating crime wave that some experts call the most concerted assault on churches since
Source: http://www.archaeology.org
Apr 3, 2008
An unlikely source of information is helping to settle one of the most contentious debates in American archaeology: Who were the first people to colonize the Americas and when did they do it? Were they the mammoth-hunting Clovis people who lived 13,000 years ago, or some earlier group who archaeologists are just beginning to understand? A recent discovery in the Oregon desert announced in the April 4 edition of Science may end the debate once and for all. ARCHAEOLOGY contributing editor Andrew C
Source: http://www.ekathimerini.com
Apr 3, 2008
Crete’s fabled Minoan civilization was built by people from Anatolia, according to a new study by Greek and foreign scientists that disputes an earlier theory that said the Minoans’ forefathers had come from Africa.
The new study – a collaboration by experts in Greece, the USA, Canada, Russia and Turkey – drew its conclusions from the DNA analysis of 193 men from Crete and another 171 from former neolithic colonies in central and northern Greece.
The results show that t
Source: AP
Apr 3, 2008
Answers to the mystery of what befell the heirs of the last czar of Russia nearly a century ago may rest behind locked laboratory doors in Moscow and New England.
DNA test results to be announced within months on bone fragments found in Russia last year could prove that none of Czar Nicholas II's family escaped execution in the Bolshevik Revolution — not even Anastasia, the teenage princess whose identity various women have claimed over the decades.
Evgeny Rogaev, who h
Source: PRweb
Apr 3, 2008
Bob Skilnik, author of "Beer & Food: An American History" (ISBN 0977808610, Jefferson Press, Hardcover, $24.95), argues that industry embellishments and poor research have distorted the true date of Repeal on December 5, 1933, which signified the revocation of the 18th Amendment and the enactment of the 21st Amendment and brought back the manufacture and sale of all alcoholic beverages.
"Congressional events leading up to April 7, 1933 allowed only the resumption
Source: AP
Apr 3, 2008
A lawyer for one of three white teens accused of defacing a Confederate monument at the state Capitol says his client will admit to the vandalism, which he says was done as a statement against slavery.
The three males, who were all 17 at the time of the crime, are scheduled to go to trial in juvenile court on April 10. They were charged with first-degree criminal mischief and their names have not been released because of their age.
Source: http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk
Apr 3, 2008
Ten years to the day after Lord Saville opened his investigation into Bloody Sunday, families today remained in the dark as to when the report would be published.
A spokeswoman for the inquiry - which probed the deaths of 13 men in the Bogside on January 30, 1972 and another man who died later - told the Telegraph that the report was "not imminent".
On the tenth anniversary of the inquiry's start, with unionists again attacking the mounting costs, the families
Source: http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk
Apr 3, 2008
Isambard Kingdom Brunel is often credited as being the first man to master many of the engineering innovations that fuelled Britain’s industrial revolution. Now, it seems, Portland cement can be added to the list.
Archaeologists working on the site of Brunel’s Great Western Dockyard development next to Brunel’s ss Great Britain, have discovered what is thought to be the first ever substantial use of Portland cement in the construction of a major building.
Source: Independent (UK)
Apr 3, 2008
The strip's last big show was in AD549. Then the Barbarians arrived and laid it to waste, and for the next millenium and a half it was no more than a very large allotment with a fancy name.
But now, after the centuries of neglect and years of debate and campaigning, Circus Maximus is finally to get some attention. Beginning on 20 June, the city's archeological authorities are to begin a careful and respectful restoration.
Eugenio La Rocca, Superintendent of Rome and lec
Source: http://www.mcall.com
Apr 3, 2008
Moravian College has decided to buck the recommendation of state historians and dismantle recently discovered root cellars, which may be as old as Bethlehem, to make way for a $25 million dormitory and classroom building.
The root cellars are in the middle of a footprint for the new building that is scheduled to open next year on the Priscilla Payne Hurd Campus.
''We're committed to honoring and documenting history, but at the same time, we are also committed to safe, a
