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
Sep 10, 2007
Archaeologists exhumed the body of a Viking queen on Monday, hoping to solve a riddle about whether a woman buried with her 1,200 years ago was a servant killed to be a companion into the afterlife.As a less gruesome alternative, the two women in the grass-covered Oseberg mound in south Norway might be a royal mother and daughter who died of the same disease and were buried together in 834.
"We will do DNA tests to try to find out. I don't know of any Vikin
Source: Live Science
Sep 10, 2007
Under threat from Romans ransacking Jerusalem 2,000 years ago, many of the city's Jewish residents crowded into an underground drainage channel to hide and later flee the chaos through Jerusalem's southern end.The ancient tunnel was recently discovered buried beneath rubble, a monument to one of the great dramatic scenes of the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70 A.D.
The channel was dug beneath what would become the main road of Jerusalem, the archa
Source: HNN Staff
Sep 9, 2007
Everett Ellis Briggs, the United States ambassador to Panama from 1982 to 1986, claims in a prominently placed op ed in the NYT that the Justice Department was to blame for the failure to stop Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega when it was still possible to do so. He says that he told Attorney General Edwin Meese in 1985 that Noriega, then just a general, was becoming a menace. Meese promised to stop the general, who was involved in drug trafficking, among other crimes. But the US government
Source: Washington Times
Sep 9, 2007
A Confederate battle flag that hung for decades in Virginia's House of Delegates prior to the Capitol's $105 million makeover will be replaced by a later Civil War-era flag and relocated to a new exhibit gallery near the building's front entrance.
The decision announced yesterday by House Speaker William J. Howell quells a long-running debate with a Confederate heritage group that objected to the 1861 battle flag's omission from the renovated chamber.
In making the deci
Source: Washington Times
Sep 9, 2007
Newport News, VA The swashbuckling sea captain who helped found America's first permanent English settlement lost his right arm in battle nearly two decades before bringing the colonists to Jamestown 400 years ago.
But you wouldn't know it to look at a 24-foot bronze statue of Christopher Newport, with all his limbs intact, that stands at the edge of the campus of the university named for him.
Some annoyed alumni and history buffs want the monument to get the hook — as
Source: NYT
Sep 9, 2007
Already, the testimony about the status of Iraq that General Petraeus will deliver to Congress beginning Monday has become the most anticipated by an Army officer since April 29, 1967, when, under President Johnson, Gen. William C. Westmoreland traveled from Vietnam to address a joint meeting of Congress at a time of deep public doubts about a faraway war....
“Presidents galore have hidden behind the military and tried to use the military in war or national security situations in wh
Source: NYT
Sep 9, 2007
Across the country, shiny new history museums are pushing up like poppies on a battlefield, while the war horses struggle to scrape off their mold. Gone are shelves of crusty artifacts, yellowed text panels stuffed with dates and names and the “excitement” of a stale soda cracker behind glass that some historical figure may have sampled. In their place are Hollywood-produced movies, evocative oral histories and special-effect extravaganzas so spectacular that visitors could be forgiven for think
Source: NYT
Sep 9, 2007
The rise of Barack Obama includes one glaring episode of political miscalculation. Even friends told Mr. Obama it was a bad idea when he decided in 1999 to challenge an incumbent congressman and former Black Panther, Bobby L. Rush, whose stronghold on the South Side of Chicago was overwhelmingly black, Democratic and working class.
Mr. Obama was a 38-year-old state senator and University of Chicago lecturer, unknown in much of Mr. Rush’s Congressional district. He lived in its most
Source: The Age
Sep 8, 2007
AUSTRALIA'S enormous losses on the Western Front in World War I will be recognised with the nation's first Anzac Day dawn service in France next year, to be conducted at the same time as the annual Gallipoli service.
The April 25 service — to be held in Villers-Bretonneux in northern France in the infamous Somme — will mark the 90th anniversary of Australians liberating the village on Anzac Day in 1918. It will also herald the 90th anniversary of the subsequent armistice, which ende
Source: CNN
Sep 8, 2007
Museum-goers gasped at the well-preserved mummy of an Inca maiden that is on display for the first time, a serene gaze etched on her face hundreds of years ago when she was sacrificed and froze to death in the Andes.
Hundreds of people packed a museum in Salta, Argentina, to see "la Doncella" -- Spanish for "the Maiden" -- a 15-year-old girl whose remains were found in 1999 in an icy pit on Llullaillaco volcano, along with a 6-year-old girl and a 7-year-old boy.
Source: Tribune Services
Sep 7, 2007
At the rumbling corner of Delancey and Essex Streets in Manhattan's fabled Lower East Side, a sandal-footed, backpack-wearing Josh Wolff stands before his two-dozen charges and promises a real taste of the neighborhood.
"And since this is July," the tour guide says, "I assume you'll be getting the smells of the neighborhood as well."
On this steamy city afternoon, we find Wolff at the appointed corner, collecting $20 a head from a swarm of folks eage
Source: WaPo
Sep 7, 2007
The square-toed, goatskin boots that Abraham Lincoln had on that night at Ford's Theatre were worn down at the heels.
His long, black frock coat was unadorned. Its buttons were of plain gray metal.
And most of what he wore as he sat in the private box on Good Friday of 1865 comes down to us still stained with his blood.
Yesterday, under police escort, the National Park Service transported the assassinated president's clothing and other items from the Ford's
Source: NYT
Sep 7, 2007
ON a secluded bluff in Rhinebeck, N.Y., in one of the most beautiful spots overlooking the Hudson River, a 35-room Queen Anne mansion with a five-story turret is getting final touches on its first paint job since 1910. On one side, its rambling porch shines in bright maroon and green. On the other, where the painters and the grant money still haven’t penetrated, it looks like a crumbling wreck.
This is Wilderstein, a stepchild among the Hudson River mansions, one of the last to be r
Source: AP
Sep 7, 2007
Justice David Souter contemplated resigning from the Supreme Court because he was so upset by the decision that sealed the 2000 presidential election for George W. Bush, a new book says.
Souter, one of the four dissenting justices in the case, believed his five colleagues in the majority acted in a "crudely partisan" manner in siding with Bush to shut down the recount of votes in Florida in December 2000, author Jeffrey Toobin writes in "The Nine, Inside the Secret Wo
Source: Time
Sep 7, 2007
In a testy public exchange Friday with South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun, President Bush said the United States would formally end the Korean War only when North Korea halts its nuclear weapons program.
The two leaders met on the sidelines of a 21-nation Pacific Rim summit here, spending much of their roughly one-hour session discussing the international standoff over the communist North's pursuit of atomic arms.
They agreed there had been progress. But then they had a befo
Source: Fox News
Sep 7, 2007
Two experts in historical documents say they doubt the authenticity of a Davy Crockett letter that the Texas Historical Commission bought this week for nearly half a million dollars. Both questioned the handwriting, and one said the grammar was just too good to belong to the Alamo defender.
"The letter has better grammar, better punctuation than Davy Crockett had ever used," said Kevin MacDonnell, a seller of antique books in Austin.
Everett Wilke, a private
Source: NYT
Sep 7, 2007
Fred D. Thompson had one central strategic goal as he formally began his presidential campaign on Thursday: to win over conservatives who are disheartened at their current choice of Republican candidates by positioning himself as the ideological and stylistic heir of Ronald Reagan....
Yet in some notable ways, Mr. Thompson is different from Reagan, and he has at times deviated from the orthodox conservatism that Reagan, after his death and nearly two decades removed from his preside
Source: Economist
Sep 6, 2007
Computing: The German Democratic Republic bequeathed a 600m-piece puzzle to the reunified country. It is about to be solved using software.
WHEN the shredding machines failed and the mob was at the gates, the spooks at East Germany's State Security Service, better known as the Stasi, tried turning their files into mush by dunking them in water. But the number of bathtubs in their headquarters in Normannenstrasse was as unequal to the task as the machines had been. In the end, they r
Source: County Times (CT)
Sep 6, 2007
We've all heard the names-Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz-a litany of terror that seems to encompass all that is terrible in human nature. But few realize that there were many more German concentration camps dotted across that fair land and in neighboring countries overrun during the Nazi blitzkrieg.
Perhaps less familiar to the ear is Treblinka, a death camp once located about 60 miles northeast of Warsaw, Poland, and one of the most vicious of the facilities instituted to effect
Source: AP
Sep 6, 2007
An ornate gold medal depicting an eagle, commissioned by George Washington as a symbol of the ideals of the Revolutionary War and later presented to the Marquis de Lafayette, is to be sold at auction later this year.
Sotheby's auction house made the announcement Thursday, on the 250th anniversary of the birth of Lafayette. The gold and enamel medal - showing an eagle surrounded by a laurel wreath - is estimated to bring up to $10 million at the Dec. 11 sale, it said.
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