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: WaPo
Feb 27, 2008
After promising last year to search its computers for tens of thousands of e-mails sent by White House officials, the Republican National Committee has informed a House committee that it no longer plans to retrieve the communications by restoring computer backup tapes, the panel's chairman said yesterday.
The move increases the likelihood that an untold number of RNC e-mails dealing with official White House business during the first term of the Bush administration -- including many
Source: NewsHour (PBS)
Feb 26, 2008
A new study on religion in the United States released Tuesday found that more than a quarter of adult Americans have left the faith of their childhood and a growing number of people are unaffiliated. Analysts examine the role of faith in America.
MARGARET WARNER: Americans' sense of religious affiliation is surprisingly fluid, a broad new study has found.
Among the findings in a survey of 35,000 Americans by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life: 44 percent of Ameri
Source: http://www.newkerala.com
Feb 26, 2008
Women who lived in the major Viking settlement called Birka in the 9th and 10th centuries dressed more provocatively than previously thought, according to a Swedish archaeologist.
Uppsala University archeologist Annika Larsson has suggested that the ancient Vikings enjoyed wearing vivid colors, flowing silk ribbons and glittering bits of mirrors, with the men being especially vain, and the women dressed provocatively.
"They combined oriental features with Nordic st
Source: USA Today
Feb 26, 2008
A Florida legislator wants to see "Confederate Heritage" license plates on his state's highways.
Rep. Donald Brown, a Republican from the Panhandle, introduced HB 1007 last week. It directs state officials to develop and issue tags that "contain an emblem or logo of Florida's historic Confederate flags and facsimiles of the buttons issued to Florida Confederate units."
The $25 surcharge for these "Confederate Heritage" tags would fund educa
Source: Al Jazeera
Feb 26, 2008
Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom has ordered the release of military archives from the country's brutal civil war in a bid to shed light on human rights abuses during the period.Colom ordered the release on Monday during ceremonies held to mark the conflict, which left around 200,000 people dead or "disappeared" from 1960 to 1996.
"We are going to make public all military archives ... so the truth can be known, and so that once and for all we can
Source: http://www.theartnewspaper.com
Feb 26, 2008
The Art Newspaper can reveal that the British Army is to develop a Cultural Heritage Initiative to assist with archaeological sites and museums in southern Iraq. This will be launched with the Iraqi state board of antiquities and heritage, along with the British Museum.
Basra-based Major Tom Holloway told us that the plan is to help at “iconic cultural locations”, and to leave a positive “legacy” after the withdrawal of British forces. The proposal is at an early stage, and is expec
Source: LiveScience
Feb 26, 2008
It was long thought that the ancient stone pyramid temples of the Maya were built by their royalty.
Now it turns out any number of different factions among the Maya - nobles, priests and maybe even commoners - may have built temples, scientists now suggest.
The fact that different groups had the will and the power to build temples suggests "the Maya could choose which temples to worship in and support; they had a voice in who succeeded politically," said resea
Source: Noel Malcolm in the Guardian
Feb 26, 2008
[Noel Malcolm is a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He is the author of Kosovo: A Short History]
"Kosovo is Serbia", "Ask any historian" read the unlikely placards, waved by angry Serb demonstrators in Brussels on Sunday. This is rather flattering for historians: we don't often get asked to adjudicate. It does not, however, follow that any historian would agree, not least because historians do not use this sort of eternal present tense.
Source: Salt Lake Tribune
Feb 26, 2008
The LDS Church announced Monday it has created a new publishing arm to produce early Mormon documents.
It will be known as The Church Historian's Press and its first project will be the Joseph Smith papers, a documentary series eventually made up of 25 to 30 volumes. The first two volumes are due out this year, said Marlin Jensen, official historian for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Source: Time Magazine
Feb 26, 2008
When last we saw the lost Ark of the Covenant in action, it had been dug up by Indiana Jones in Egypt and ark-napped by Nazis, whom the Ark proceeded to incinerate amidst a tempest of terrifying apparitions. But according to Tudor Parfitt, a real-life scholar-adventurer, Raiders of the Lost Ark had it wrong, and the Ark is actually nowhere near Egypt. In fact, Parfitt claims he has traced it (or a replacement container for the original Ark), to a dusty bottom shelf in a museum in Harare, Zimbabw
Source: National Security Archive
Feb 26, 2008
Washington D.C., February 26, 2008 - At a hearing today before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, it was disclosed that the White House has received repeated warnings from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and from information technology experts within the White House about the risk of lost e-mails. Records obtained by the Committee showed that NARA's warnings began as early as January 2004 and that the White House was aware of the danger that e-mails m
Source: WaPo
Feb 26, 2008
The 2008 presidential campaign has witnessed the rise of a whole arsenal of new political weapons, including Internet fundraising and sophisticated microtargeting of voters. For Sen. Barack Obama, however, the most powerful weapon has been one of the oldest.
Not since the days of the whistle-stop tour and the radio addresses that Franklin D. Roosevelt used to hone his message while governor of New York has a presidential candidate been propelled so much by the force of words, accord
Source: NYT
Feb 26, 2008
Fewer than half of American teenagers who were asked basic questions about history and literature during a recent telephone survey knew when the Civil War was fought, and one-quarter thought that Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World sometime after 1750, not in 1492.
The results of the survey, released Tuesday, demonstrate that a significant proportion of American teenagers live in “stunning ignorance” of history and literature, according to the group that commissioned it. Kn
Source: Reuters
Feb 26, 2008
The chief torturer under the Khmer Rouge "Killing Fields" regime wept and prayed on Tuesday as he led the judges who will try him for crimes against humanity around the mass graves for some of its victims.
Duch, also known as Kaing Guek Eav, accompanied 80 judges, lawyers and other officials of a U.N.-backed tribunal to the 129 graves, uncovered after a Vietnamese invasion sent the Khmer Rouge back to the jungles in 1979.
"I saw Duch kneel in front of th
Source: AP
Feb 26, 2008
The storms that have lashed Oregon's scenic coast this winter have dredged up an unusual array of once-buried secrets: old shipwrecks, historic cannons, ghost forests — even strangely shaped iron deposits.
One of the first ships to emerge from the sands was recently identified as the George L. Olson, which ran aground at Coos Bay's North Jetty on June 23, 1944.
The shipwreck has become a tourist attraction on the southern Oregon coast. Interest became so great that auth
Source: AP
Feb 26, 2008
- German treasure hunters began digging Tuesday for what they say may be plunder buried by the Nazis in a man-made cavern near the Czech border.
The area's mayor, Hans-Peter Haustein, and a man who believes he found the coordinates for the buried booty in a notebook among his deceased father's belongings, maintain that a scan of the spot has revealed that a large quantity of metal is about 20 meters below the surface.
They believe it to be either gold or silver, based o
Source: Reuters
Feb 26, 2008
An Australian professional soccer player who attended a club celebration dressed as Adolf Hitler will be disciplined after Jewish groups complained, officials said on Tuesday.
German-born Andre Gumprecht, 33, attended a post-Grand Final ceremony on Monday for his Central Coast Mariners team dressed in a khaki military uniform and moustache to resemble the former German dictator.
"Hitler was such a monster and for a lot of people, it's a very sensitive thing to be confron
Source: NYT
Feb 26, 2008
You couldn’t miss the 100th anniversary of the New York City subway in 2004. There were speeches, banners, slogans, displays, events and a shelf full of books to mark the milestone for posterity: “Subways,” “A Century of Subways,” “Subwayland,” “Subway Memoirs,” “The Subway Pictures,” “Subway Style,” “The Subway and the City.”
But you might easily have missed the centenary of New York’s other subway on Monday.
PATH? One hundred years old?
Source: NYT
Feb 26, 2008
If this city is known for both intellectual heft and political blood sport, the Boston Public Library, one of its proudest institutions, aligns itself strictly with the former. But in recent months, the august library has been at the center of some nasty political tussles.
Its trustees, appointed by Mayor Thomas M. Menino, voted last fall to oust the library’s president, who then complained publicly that Mr. Menino was “anti-intellectual” and had ordered him to hire certain people.
Source: AP
Feb 25, 2008
The Siege and Battle of Corinth Commission and Shiloh National Military Park are working on an agreement for the National Park Service to begin managing 800 acres of Civil War battlefield property even before a formal transfer is completed.
Officials want park rangers to begin maintenance at the properties right away.
The property transferred was provided for by Congress in December in the appropriations bill for the U.S. Department of the Interior.
