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: Australian
Aug 4, 2007
CHINA'S chief censors gathered at the conference room of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television several weeks ago to address the Government's leading propaganda concerns. Top of the list: getting history right.
China's communists are relaxed about letting go much of the economy, about the 137 million people with access to the internet, about letting people travel widely. But the Soviet experience has taught them that losing control of the past would be the step too f
Source: Library of Congress
Aug 3, 2007
The only known copy of the 1507 world map by Martin Waldseemüller, the first map to use the name "America," spent nearly 400 years in obscurity in the library of a castle in southern Germany. Rediscovered in 1901 and purchased by the Library of Congress in 2003, this crown jewel of cartography will be secured in a state-of-the-art encasement and placed on permanent display later this year.
Source: AP
Aug 3, 2007
LAKE GEORGE, N.Y. - When Louis-Joseph de Montcalm departed the southern shore of this Adirondack lake in 1757, he left behind the smoldering ruins of a British fort, mutilated bodies and the seeds for the story line of an American literary classic.
This week, a descendant of the famous French general is being given the royal treatment where his ancestor faced enemy gunfire and, afterward, vilification for a bloody episode James Fenimore Cooper fictionalized in his novel, "The
Source: NPR
Aug 3, 2007
The U.S. Coast Guard marks more than a million lives saved in a 217th birthday ceremony Saturday. As part of the announcement, the service has released a "Top 10 Rescue Videos" compilation on YouTube and a "Top Ten Coast Guard Rescues" list dating back to 1888. Coast Guard Chief of Public Affairs Jim McPherson describes some of the highlights.
Source: Newsday
Aug 3, 2007
A prisoner of war in Austria for a year and a half during World War II, Michael Colamonico kept busy drawing in a notebook. He bartered with German soldiers to score crayon pencils and sketched visions of home: fighter jets, the Statue of Liberty, a pin-up girl bedecked in stars and stripes.
"In order to keep a healthy mind, I was active," he said. "I did whatever I could."
But after the war, he stowed the journal, along with newspaper clippings, pho
Source: WaPo
Aug 3, 2007
The climate-controlled room whirrs with electronics. A digital recorder copies a 46-year-old video of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Other machines digitize audio testimonies taped by Holocaust survivors. Microfilmed war documents flash across a digital scanner at two images per second, or 5 million a month.
Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial is getting its huge archive ready to go online.
In Washington, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is reproduc
Source: BBC
Aug 3, 2007
A bottle of champagne believed to have been taken from Hitler's wine cellar by an allied soldier is being auctioned.
The prized bottle of 1937 Moet and Chandon goes under the hammer at Charterhouse auctioneers in Sherborne, Dorset on 17 August.
But the auctioneers say champagne does not age well and the tipple is unlikely to be drinkable.
Source: AP
Aug 3, 2007
Mexican archaeologists using ground-penetrating radar have detected underground chambers they believe contain the remains of Emperor Ahuizotl, who ruled the Aztecs when Columbus landed in the New World. It would be the first tomb of an Aztec ruler ever found.
The find could provide an extraordinary window into Aztec civilization at its apogee. Ahuizotl (ah-WEE-zoh-tuhl), an empire-builder who extended the Aztecs' reach as far as Guatemala, was the last emperor to complete his rule
Source: WaPo
Aug 3, 2007
Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, the outspoken church leader who was killed in 1980 as he celebrated Mass, has become as polarizing in death as he was in life.
The campaign to make him a Roman Catholic saint appears to be languishing, as Vatican officials privately debate whether Romero was a martyr for the faith or for the political left.
Source: AP
Aug 3, 2007
When NASA's newest Mars lander
departs Earth this weekend, it will be carrying the
words and art of visionaries from Voltaire to Carl
Sagan.
The"Visions of Mars" mini-disk secured to the lander
will be the first library on Mars ˜ a gift from past
and present dreamers to possible future settlers.
"I'm glad you're there and I wish I was with you,"
Sagan said in a recording made for the mission before
his 1996 death. An excerpt from his book"Cosmos" is
also on board.
Other
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
Aug 3, 2007
A federal court has ruled against a group of academics who challenged restrictions imposed by the Bush administration in 2004 that virtually ended academic travel to Cuba.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 3, 2007
A British prisoner of war has died from injuries he received when he was tortured by his Nazi captors more than 60 years ago.
Peter Vernon-Ward had been warned by doctors that he must have his leg amputated or face being slowly poisoned from ruptured wounds sustained when rifle butts were smashed into his legs in a German prison camp during World War Two.
But Mr Vernon-Ward refused the operation three years ago "because he saw it as giving in to the Nazis".
Source: NYT
Aug 3, 2007
Valerie Wilson may be the best known former intelligence operative in recent history, but a federal judge in New York ruled Wednesday that she was not allowed to say how long she worked for the Central Intelligence Agency in the memoir she plans to publish this fall.
Although the fact that Ms. Wilson worked for the C.I.A. from 1985 to 2006 has been published in the Congressional Record and elsewhere, the judge, Barbara S. Jones of Federal District Court in Manhattan, said Ms. Wilson
Source: NYT
Aug 3, 2007
AWJA, Iraq — The grave site has a forlorn, even jumbled air. There are filigreed inscriptions hailing him as a martyr, as a hero of the insurgency and as “the eagle of the Arabs,” his favorite sobriquet. But alongside these there is the mundane bric-a-brac of his life — a carved wooden eagle hung with his personal prayer beads, and a gallery of informal photographs, one showing him with a cigar.
Saddam Hussein’s burial place, in his native village on the banks of the Tigris, may be
Source: WaPo
Aug 2, 2007
After years of shoveling his way through archaeological digs so intense that they injured his L5 vertebra, John Rutherford made his biggest discovery sitting in a cubicle west of Seven Corners in Fairfax County.
He was scouring 1937 photographs of Centreville on his computer screen when the star-shaped outline of a Civil War fort came into view, like an intricate painting on the landscape.
The fort is invisible in contemporary aerial photos. But those early images -- 21
Source: http://www.echoroukonline.com
Aug 2, 2007
An important archaeological discovery has been made recently in the region of Batna (east of Algeria) which consists in prehistoric frescos that date back to some 3500 years.
Local experts are asking for the immediate intervention of the minister of culture to send international searchers to probe in the matter, because of the importance this unprecedented historical discovery. The province of Batna is famously known by its outdoor historical sites such as Timgad, Ouazana and Imedg
Source: Chicago Tribune
Aug 2, 2007
In front of us is the entrance to Chicago's unique 46-mile freight tunnel system.
And we can't go in.
From 1906 to 1959, this underground world was filled with small-scale locomotive trains on narrow-gauge tracks, hauling freight between buildings in and near the Loop and carrying away ashes from coal-burning furnaces. At one point, there were 59 miles of tunnels extending nearly to Chicago Avenue on the north, out past Halsted Street on the west, to 16th Street along t
Source: Bloomberg News
Aug 2, 2007
Billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad will give $1 million to the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia to help pay for the construction of its new home and future exhibitions.
The gift will be paid in five installments by 2012, Broad said in a telephone interview. His contribution helps push the museum's $150 million fund-raising goal to about $102 million, said Gwen Goodman, the museum's executive director.
Source: AP
Aug 2, 2007
Greece's Education Ministry announced changes Thursday to a sixth-grade history book following complaints by Greece's Orthodox Church and academics regarding Greece's historic rivalry with Turkey.
Greece's conservative government, likely to call general elections this fall, had faced criticism from right-wing supporters who argued the book minimized the suffering of Greeks following its defeat by Turkey in a 1919-1922 war.
And the church complained the book downplayed i
Source: Salt Lake Tribune
Aug 2, 2007
StoryCorps, the national oral-history project, began recording interviews between friends and family members this morning in this northern Utah city.
In a Gulf Airstream trailer customized into a recording booth and parked next to the LDS Tabernacle on Main Street, Logan Mayor Randy Watts interviewed his father, Cal Watts, the first of 130 conversations to be recorded here through Aug. 25.
Jose Camilo, an economics and finance student at Utah State University
