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: Reuters
Oct 16, 2007
It was sensational stuff that riveted a nation: A mild-mannered American doctor poisons then dismembers his unfaithful wife, flees England in disguise with his mistress -- and is caught, tried and hanged.
The problem is that the poisoned corpse that sent Dr Hawley Crippen to the gallows in London in 1910 was not that of his wife, according to new evidence found by U.S. researchers.
A team led by John Trestrail, head of the regional poison centre in Grand Rapids, Michiga
Source: WaPo
Oct 16, 2007
It was just a broken plate found buried in a trash heap. But to researchers at James Madison's estate, Montpelier, fragments of porcelain unearthed last month from the Virginia piedmont tell a story of a first lady, two U.S. presidents, a king and queen and the revolutions that bind their legacies more than 200 years later.
Discovered amid oyster shells, a chamber pot and shards of glass that filled a midden, or trash pile, near Dolley Madison's kitchen, a fractured dessert plate fo
Source: NYT
Oct 16, 2007
Worried about antagonizing Turkish leaders, House members from both parties have begun to withdraw their support from a resolution supported by the Democratic leadership that would condemn as genocide the mass killings of Armenians nearly a century ago.
Almost a dozen lawmakers had shifted against the measure over the last 24 hours, accelerating a sudden exodus that has cast deep doubt over the measure’s prospects. Some representatives made clear that they were heeding warnings fro
Source: NYT
Oct 16, 2007
Nine hundred years before Ho Chi Minh declared Hanoi the capital of a newly independent Vietnam in 1945, the first king of the Ly Dynasty issued a similar decree.
In 1010 King Ly Thai To picked Thang Long (“Ascending Dragon”), situated within present-day Hanoi, as the capital for a country that had defeated the Tang Dynasty less than a century before, ending a millennium of Chinese rule.
“It is situated at the very heart of our country,” the king declared in Edict on th
Source: NYT
Oct 16, 2007
In an area the size of Wales centered on the Greek ruin here, the younger Qaddafi, a group of wealthy Libyans and a bevy of consultants are planning a carbon neutral green-development zone, catering to tourism and serving as a model for environmentally friendly design, they say.
The plan will protect Libya’s fantastic Greek and Roman ruins from haphazard developments as it protects the coastal ecosystem, one of the last remaining natural areas of the Mediterranean. Waters off Libya
Source: The Age
Oct 16, 2007
[Prime Minister Howard's plan to require students in grades 9 and 10 to take 150 hours of Australian history classes has raised practical questions, say some.]
The History Teachers Association of Australia obviously wants the subject accorded a higher status, but warns of the time and resources this plan requires. It estimates 10,000 extra specialist teachers would have to be trained as history goes from a fringe subject to one taught over a mandated 150 hours to every student. To
Source: AP
Oct 16, 2007
A second boat belonging to a Florida company embroiled in a court battle with Spain over a US$500 million (euro350 million) sunken treasure was seized Tuesday, police said.
Spain's Civil Guard said officers approached the vessel, the Odyssey Explorer, as it left the British colony of Gibraltar off Spain's southern tip. Upon entering Spanish waters, the boat was ordered to the nearby Spanish port of Algeciras for inspection, police said.
The Civil Guard said it was actin
Source: http://dsc.discovery.com
Oct 15, 2007
People turned to farming to grow fiber for clothing, and not to provide food, says one researcher who challenges conventional ideas about the origins of agriculture.
Ian Gilligan, a postgraduate researcher from the Australian National University, says his theory also explains why Aboriginal Australians were not generally farmers.
Gilligan says they did not need fiber for clothing, so had no reason to grow crops like cotton.
He argues his case in the current issu
Source: BBC
Oct 15, 2007
They came from across Ireland and fought against fascism in the 1930s as part of the International Brigades.
At the weekend, their role in the fight against Franco on the side of Spain's ousted republican government was marked in Belfast.
A display of memorabilia and photographs relating to the defeated republican side is on display in the Linen Hall Library.
It is thought 78 of the 2,000 left-wing idealists from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth who fo
Source: http://www.citizen-times.com
Oct 15, 2007
State underwater archaeologists plan to raise a cannon Monday from a sunken ship that could have belonged the pirate Blackbeard.
They plan to raise the roughly 8-foot-long cannon weighing about 2,500 pounds as part of an ongoing excavation project at the presumed site of Queen Anne's Revenge.
The cannon would be on display Wednesday for the public at the N.C. Maritime Museum expansion site at Gallants Channel in Beaufort.
Source: Edward Rothstein in the NYT
Oct 15, 2007
The museum’s founding director, Lonnie G. Bunch, seems to understand the nature of this daunting task.
He doesn’t want to wait until 2015 to begin it, and late last month the museum actually opened — not in the world of bricks and mortar but in the world of hyperlinks and tags. With $1 million in assistance from I.B.M., the Smithsonian Institution created what Mr. Bunch calls a “virtual platform,” a Web museum (nmaahc.si.edu)....
Unfortunately, though, these declared am
Source: BBC
Oct 15, 2007
A Canadian museum has won its fight for a Hawick soldier's war medal which appeared for auction on the internet.
Curator John Robertson said it had been a "bumpy ride" but confirmed it had added Sgt Frederick Shipley's Memorial Cross to the collection in Welland.
The medal appeared on eBay in August prompting the museum to bid for it.
Source: BBC
Oct 15, 2007
Greece has begun moving the ancient sculptures from the Acropolis in Athens to a new home - a museum at the foot of the hilltop citadel. Crowds of bystanders watched the first of the monuments gingerly lifted by cranes at the 2,500-year-old Parthenon.
Thousands of antiquities will be moved, mostly marble sculptures from the fifth and sixth centuries BC.
Greek officials hope the new site will boost the country's long campaign for the return of the Elgin Marbles.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 15, 2007
Aribert Heim, one of the most wanted Nazi war criminals still thought to be at liberty, was hunted down and killed by a Jewish death squad in 1982, a new book claims.
Danny Baz, a retired colonel in the Israeli air force, claims in a book published in France this week that the Austrian death camp doctor was tracked down in the United States by a Jewish search-and-destroy squad called "The Owl" and shot dead. The group's members, which included Mr Baz, are said to have been
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 15, 2007
Wilde, who even on his deathbed remarked, "either those curtains go or I do", was voted number one in the list of comic masters, ahead of comedian Spike Milligan, who had engraved on his tombstone the epitaph "I told you I was ill". ...
Wartime prime minister Sir Winston Churchill, famed for his witty putdowns came in fifth.
Accused of being drunk by the MP Bessie Braddock he is said to have replied: "Madam, you are ugly. And I shall be sober in
Source: NYT
Oct 15, 2007
The house where Abraham Lincoln wrote a draft of the Emancipation Proclamation and retreated often from the bustle of a wartime White House is to open in February after an eight-year, $15 million renovation.
The house, a 34-room Gothic revival mansion on the grounds of the sprawling Armed Forces Retirement Home, is also known as the Soldiers’ Home but will be called President Lincoln’s Cottage. It was here, with his wife and son Tad, that Lincoln spent nearly a quarter of his presi
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 15, 2007
His most famous work has always suggested that his first love was his country. However, previously unseen letters from the First World War poet Rupert Brooke show that his true devotion was to an Edwardian actress whom he bombarded with marriage proposals.
The man whose powerful The Soldier opens with the immortal line "If I should die, think only this of me" was so preoccupied with Cathleen Nesbitt's "divine" beauty that he demanded weekly updates on her health,
Source: Newsweek
Oct 15, 2007
She was born into a profoundly dysfunctional family. Her father married six times—and essentially ordered hits on two of his wives, including her mother (whose major crime may have been giving birth to a daughter instead of a son). Jealous relatives plotted against her. As a teenager, she was locked up in a tower. If she were alive today, she could write a best-selling memoir about her abusive childhood and appear on "Oprah." Instead, Elizabeth I became one of the most powerful and res
Source: WaPo
Oct 14, 2007
The two old sailors stepped side by side toward the Tomb of the Unknowns, carrying a memorial wreath to their shipmates between them. The crowd stood hushed in the autumn sun while the pair, in ball caps and blazers, approached the white marble monument, left their wreath, stepped back and saluted.
A bugler had just played taps, and as the breeze rustled a majestic elm nearby, the moment was almost perfect: Few seemed focused on the jagged crack that zigzagged through the 48-ton sto
Source: AP
Oct 14, 2007
For the first time since World War II, former Ukrainian partisans celebrated their nationalist army's creation Sunday with the full approval of the Ukrainian government, despite efforts by angry socialists and communists to break up their gathering in central Kiev.
The Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA, battled both Soviet and Nazi forces during the war, and for several years after the war continued to carry out raids against the Soviets and to disrupt efforts to collectivize farms.
