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: LAT
Jan 13, 2008
There is a legend at UC Berkeley that human bones are stored in the landmark Campanile tower. But university officials say that's not true.
The human bones are actually stored beneath the Hearst Gymnasium swimming pool.
The remains of about 12,000 Native Americans lie in drawers and cabinets in the gym's basement. Most of them were dug up by university archaeologists and have been stored under the pool since at least the early 1960s.
Now the bones are at th
Source: Haaretz
Jan 13, 2008
The Central Intelligence Agency, backed by bodies including the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Defense Intelligence Agency, determined in August 1974 that Israel had nuclear "weapons in being," a "small number" of which it "produced and stockpiled."
Israel was also suspected of providing nuclear materials, equipment or technology to Iran, South Africa and other then-friendly countries.
This top secret docum
Source: NYT
Jan 13, 2008
BARRING some seismic scandal, unforeseen late entry (“Al Who?”), or unlikely surge by John Edwards, it is wholly inevitable that the race for the Democratic nomination will end next August in an epochal first.
Either Senator Barack Obama will be the first African-American or Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton will be the first woman to win the presidential nomination of a major American political party. One of them will take the stage at Denver’s Pepsi Center, specked with confetti and
Source: NYT
Jan 13, 2008
Something wonderful happened to Martha Nierenberg in October 2000 when a trial court in Hungary said something very obvious. A fortune in artwork had been stolen from her family at the time of the German invasion of Hungary in 1944, which also ushered in one of the most horrific chapters of the Holocaust. Much of the art was hanging in plain view in the country’s two most prominent museums. It should be given back to her, the court said. The ruling was the second in her favor, and it seemed defi
Source: NYT
Jan 13, 2008
LAST month Spain passed a law that doesn’t make much sense, on its face, but says quite a lot about Europe in the new century.
The Parliament, fulfilling a campaign promise from 2004 by Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, ordered that families wanting to unearth bodies of relatives killed during the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s or who suffered as a political consequence of General Francisco Franco’s four-decade-long regime should get full cooperation from the state,
Source: NYT
Jan 13, 2008
IN the end, said Theodore C. Sorensen, the celebrated speechwriter for President John F. Kennedy, what made a great speech in 1940 or 1961 is not much different from what makes a great speech in 2008.
“Speaking from the heart, to the heart, directly, not too complicated, relatively brief sentences, words that are clear to everyone,” he said of the fine art of political rhetoric.
“I’ve always said a model of a statement by a leader were the seven words uttered by Winston
Source: WSJ
Jan 12, 2008
On the night of April 24, 1944, British air force bombers hammered a former Jesuit college here housing the Bavarian Academy of Science. The 16th-century building crumpled in the inferno. Among the treasures lost, later lamented Anton Spitaler, an Arabic scholar at the academy, was a unique photo archive of ancient manuscripts of the Quran.
The 450 rolls of film had been assembled before the war for a bold venture: a study of the evolution of the Quran, the text Muslims view as the
Source: USA Today
Jan 12, 2008
The owner of one of two Erie Canal-era taverns still standing in the city hopes to move the building to the terminus of the canal. A fierce wind storm may have given him a head start.
This week's 60 mph winds tore off part of the roof of McBride's Irish Pub, which dates to roughly the 1850s, and the building was cordoned off because of the threat of falling bricks.
Source: Catholic Online
Jan 12, 2008
President George W. Bush has declared Jan. 16 Religious Freedom Day 2007 to commemorate the passage of the 1786 Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom written by Thomas Jefferson.
Each year, since 1993, the U.S. presidents have acknowledged Religious Freedom Day and asked Americans to "observe this day through appropriate events and activities in homes, schools and places of worship."
The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom stopped the practice of taxing pe
Source: NYT
Jan 12, 2008
INDEPENDENCE, Calif. | What Los Angeles took a century ago — a 62-mile stretch of river here in the parched Owens Valley — it is now giving back.
One of the largest river-restoration projects in the country has sent a gentle current of water meandering through what just a year ago was largely a sandy, rocky bed best used as a horse trail and barely distinguishable from the surrounding high desert scrub.
Mud hens dive for food. A blue heron sweeps overhead. Bass, carp an
Source: NYT
Jan 12, 2008
PHILADELPHIA — Alongside some of the most historic landmarks in the United States, a building is rising that will tell the story of the national immigration experience through the life of the Jewish people.
The new National Museum of American Jewish History, scheduled to open on July 4, 2010, is an effort to add to the historical narrative traced by the cultural icons of Independence Mall: Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence was signed; the Liberty Bell, which w
Source: BBC
Jan 11, 2008
It's taken Terry Lightfoot a long time to come to terms with his son's death. He thinks of Paul all the time, lays a wreath at a memorial to him on his birthday and on the day he died - but still something was missing.
It wasn't until Terry travelled to the Falkland Islands that he found it. That's where 21-year-old Paul died.
He was serving in the SAS in the 1982 conflict when the helicopter he and 17 other men were in crashed into the sea.
Their bodies were nev
Source: Bloomberg News
Jan 11, 2008
Germany overturned the 1933 verdict against Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutchman convicted at the beginning of the Nazi era for setting fire to the Reichstag parliament building in Berlin.
The Dec. 23, 1933, verdict sentencing van der Lubbe to death for treason and arson was overturned by a 1998 law. The Federal Prosecution Office declared that the law applies to the case, the office said in a statement yesterday. Van der Lubbe was executed in 1934.
"The 1998 law auto
Source: Press Release--David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
Jan 11, 2008
A leading Holocaust research institute has praised President Bush for his statement that the United States “should have bombed” the Auschwitz death camp in 1944.
“The Roosevelt administration’s refusal to bomb Auschwitz was an appalling moral failure,” said Prof. David S. Wyman and Dr. Rafael Medoff, historians who have written extensively on the bombing issue. “President Bush is right--the United States should have, and could have, bombed the Auschwitz death camp and the railway
Source: AP
Jan 11, 2008
A T-shirt using a yellow Star of David to liken the treatment of smokers in Germany to that of Jews during Nazi rule has angered German Jews.
Earlier this week, after several German states introduced sweeping bans on smoking in restaurants and bars, an events planner called DMP started offering the T-shirt for sale on its Web site.
Jewish groups responded with outrage.
Source: AP
Jan 11, 2008
Squat, homely, dwarfed by stately oaks and poplars, and unnoticed by the tourists passing in horse-drawn carriages, it's a tree that only birds and nut-hungry squirrels could love.
But the 100-year-old European beech on Central Park's Cherry Hill was the center of attention Thursday, chosen by city officials as the first of 25 "historical" trees to be cloned as part of a plan to add a million new trees to public spaces over the next decade.
Agriculture student
Source: BBC
Jan 11, 2008
An aqueduct near Wrexham could soon join the likes of the Taj Mahal and the Great Wall of China as a World Heritage Site.
The Pontcysyllte Aqueduct and Canal has been named as the UK's 2008 nomination for the prestigious status.
The nomination was put forward by Westminster's Culture Secretary James Purnell, who said it was "a masterpiece from the canal age".
Source: AP
Jan 11, 2008
President George W. Bush, on an emotional tour of Israel's Holocaust memorial, stopped in front of an aerial photo of Auschwitz on Friday and told his secretary of state that the U.S. should have bombed the death camp to stop the extermination of Jews there, the memorial's chairman said.
It was a rare acknowledgment from a U.S. leader on an issue that has stirred deep controversy for decades....
Tom Segev, a leading Israeli scholar of the Holocaust, said the Bush comment, whic
Source: Reuters
Jan 11, 2008
Giant glaciers formed about 90 million years ago during a warm period when alligators thrived in the Arctic, researchers said Thursday, calling into question the belief that all ice melts in a “super greenhouse” climate.
The researchers’ study, based on organic molecules in ocean sediments and chemicals in ancient fossil shells, indicated that there were ice sheets in Antarctica in parts of the Turonian period, one of the warmest times in history, when dinosaurs thrived.
Source: http://commercial-archive.com
Jan 10, 2008
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