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
Feb 21, 2008
KURIM, South Korea — This village was once drenched with blood. Bodies of villagers shot or stabbed to death lined its lanes, and the stench of people burned alive saturated its air.
What makes Kurim remarkable, however, is not the killings of about 300 people in the months surrounding the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. Eruptions of violence among neighbors caught up in the ideological strife of the time were common in South Korea, survivors and historians say.
Rat
Source: US News & World Report
Feb 20, 2008
Barack Obama says he stands for a new kind of politics, and many Americans clearly approve of that message. So many, in fact, that if the junior U.S. senator from Illinois doesn't win the presidency or even prevail in what is now a dead-heat run for his party's nomination, his candidacy will still be seen as what University of New Hampshire historian Harvard Sitkoff calls "an important moment in American political history."
Important is an understatement. That a bl
Source: Reuters
Feb 20, 2008
Two big genetic studies confirm theories that modern humans evolved in Africa and then migrated through Europe and Asia to reach the Pacific and Americas.
The two studies also show that Africans have the most diverse DNA, and the fewest potentially harmful genetic mutations.
One of the studies shows European-Americans have more small mutations, while the others show Native Americans, Polynesians and others who populated Australia and Oceania have more big genetic change
Source: NYT
Feb 20, 2008
KIGALI, Rwanda — Skeletons are still being discovered and buried in mass graves on a terraced hillside in this lush, verdant city, the legacy of the gruesome genocide in which 800,000 Rwandans, many of them children, were slaughtered over 100 days in 1994.
So when President Bush paid his respects to the dead on Tuesday, laying a wreath and touring a museum where the skulls of victims are laid out under glass in haunting, neat white rows, the subject of another conflict that Mr. Bush
Source: Newsday
Feb 20, 2008
History is full of political and corporate voices, mostly educated, generally well-to-do men and women. Christopher Matthews and his team search for the unspoken voices of African slaves who lived and worked on the farms and big estates and are part of Long Island history.
While anti-slavery leaders secretly helped captive Africans flee their Southern masters, other Long Island property owners were still purchasing slaves at open markets, swapping and renting them to each other. Of
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Feb 20, 2008
Thailand's new prime minister, who recently stirred outrage by denying that 46 people had died in a violent crackdown on university students and other pro-democracy protesters in 1976, went before parliament on Monday to swear he had not been involved in the incident.
The prime minister, Samak Sundaravej, was Thailand's deputy interior minister at the time of the bloody assault on Thammasat University.
"If I am not telling the truth, may I face destruction and ill
Source: AFP
Feb 20, 2008
Millions of tourists may have been romancing the wrong stone on a castle battlement in southern Ireland in an effort to get the "gift of the gab", according to a new study.
The authenticity of the Blarney Stone, kissed by about 400,000 tourists a year, has been questioned by Mark Samuel, an archaeologist and architectural historian, and Kate Hamlyn in a new book.
According to legend, kissing the stone at Blarney Castle, near Cork, endows the kisser with the g
Source: Spiegel Online
Feb 20, 2008
Druids belong to the realm of myth -- archaeologists have never been able to prove their existence. But now researchers in England have uncovered the grave of a powerful, ancient healer. Was he a druid?
Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch
Feb 20, 2008
Joy Cabarrus Speakes was among the Robert R. Moton High School students who in 1951 walked out of the Farmville school to protest the facilities to which black students were relegated.
Children such as Speakes manned the front lines in the battle for school desegregation, in many cases unknowingly taking up the torch for a greater civil-rights movement in this country.
It's those youths who will be honored at Virginia's Civil Rights Memorial in Capitol Square, on the gr
Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch
Feb 20, 2008
Sam White's garage left a big impression on Hopewell Mayor Steven D. Taylor.
Taylor remembers the Civil War artifacts that made White's Chesterfield County home what he called a virtual museum. The garage was more like a Civil War ammo dump.
"He had a lot of ordnance in there. . . . I remember leaving his house thinking, 'I wouldn't want to be his neighbor,'" the mayor said yesterday.
White, 53, died Monday after a Civil War shell exploded outside
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 20, 2008
Two letters written by Sir Winston Churchill to the dentist who made his false teeth, telling him that he had been nominated for a knighthood, are expected to fetch up to £1,400 at auction.
The letters were written in 1952 and 1954, when Sir Winston was in his third term as prime minister, to Sir Wilfred Fish, one of Britain's most outstanding dentists.
In one letter, Sir Winston, who was then 79, said: "I am very glad it fell to me to recommend you for a well-dese
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 20, 2008
The heroism of millions of Britain's First World War servicemen, from ordinary foot-soldiers to actors and future prime ministers, is disclosed on the internet for the first time from today.
The exploits of famous names such as Harold Macmillan and Anthony Eden, who would both survive the battlefield to lead their country, as well as Noel Coward and Harry Patch, the last remaining "Tommy", are among the stories published online.
The records of 5.5 million troo
Source: AP
Feb 19, 2008
Police in Rome have recovered dozens of looted artifacts, including a fresco believed to have been stripped from an ancient Roman villa.
Police were investigating 31 people who allegedly operated in Italy and France as part of a European art trafficking ring, a police statement said Tuesday. No arrests have been made.
Source: NYT
Feb 19, 2008
The BBC World Service, which started its scratchy shortwave transmissions to listeners cut off by “desert, snow and sea” 75 years ago, ended its last English-language shortwave services in Europe on Monday.
The British public broadcaster has been reducing its shortwave transmissions over the last seven years, eliminating services to North America and Australia in 2001 and South America in 2005. Last March, the BBC started reducing European transmissions, finally cutting off a trans
Source: Spiegel Online
Feb 19, 2008
Has the Amber Room, the 18th-century chamber decoration the Nazis stole from the Soviet Union in World War II, finally been found? German treasure hunters say they may have solved the decades-old mystery.
Treasure hunters in Germany claim they have found hidden gold in an underground cavern that they are almost certain contains the Amber Room treasure, believed by some to have been stashed away by the Nazis in a secret mission in the dying days of World War II.
The disc
Source: AP
Feb 19, 2008
A World War II-era bomb exploded Tuesday at a construction site in the southeastern Czech Republic. One worker was injured, officials said.
The 220-pound bomb was set off by an excavator in the outskirts of Znojmo near the Austrian border, police spokesman Jan Krepela said. The worker operating the machine suffered light injuries, Krepela said.
[One worker received light injuries.]
Source: BBC
Feb 19, 2008
A copy of the warrant for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots has been saved for the UK.
The document has been acquired by the library of the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth Palace for £72,485, with the help of heritage bodies' donations.
It faced being taken overseas by a private buyer until the government put a block on its export last year.
The Catholic Queen was executed on 8 February 1587 at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire.
He
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 19, 2008
France is undergoing a major shift in the perception of the country's wartime collaboration with the Nazis, marked by a new television film focusing on the unsung heroes of the Resistance.
Historians say that after a period of overblown pride in wartime resistance, the French had swung in recent decades to a national sense of guilt over the country's submission to its German occupiers.
The docu-drama, La Résistance, shown on French television, focuses on little known, o
Source: Independent (UK)
Feb 19, 2008
Fresh evidence that the Iraq weapons dossier was "sexed up" emerged as the Government finally published the secret first draft of the document.
As expected, the earliest version of the document did not include the now notorious claim that Saddam Hussein could launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes of an order to do so.
The first draft made a series of lurid claims about the extent and danger of the Iraqi president's weapons arsenal. But those wer
Source: NYT
Feb 19, 2008
The Kennedy assassination — a defining moment in American history and a never-ending topic of debate among conspiracy theorists — re-entered the spotlight for a moment Monday, after the Dallas district attorney unveiled the contents of a safe that had been secret for more than 40 years.
Inside were clothing worn by Lee Harvey Oswald; a small, tooled leather holster belonging to his killer, Jack Ruby; and piles of typed, old crackling documents. But nothing that was likely to settle
