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: AP
Jul 5, 2007
They fought together in Vietnam, but recently two veterans groups battled each other over a symbol both respect, the Vietnam wall.
Both have built replicas of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. The replicas consist of two walls constructed more than a decade ago by a Michigan group, and replica a Florida group unveiled last year. In the past few months, both groups have fired off volleys of e-mails over a trademark dispute and threatened each other with legal action.
Source: Reuters
Jul 5, 2007
A former police chaplain accused of involvement in torture, kidnapping and murder during Argentina's "dirty war" declined to testify on Thursday as he went on trial in the first case linking a clergyman to rights abuses.
Roman Catholic priest Christian Von Wernich tended to the notorious Buenos Aires provincial police force at a time when leftist dissidents of the 1976-1983 military dictatorship were routinely abducted, maimed and killed.
Rights activists accu
Source: BBC
Jul 5, 2007
Plans to build a new road over a 4,000-year-old serpent-shaped feature in Herefordshire have been criticised.
Archaeologists have said the ribbon of stones, known as the Rotherwas Ribbon, is of similar importance to Stonehenge.
Herefordshire council said a protective shield will be built over the site to preserve it for future generations. A relief road will then be built over it.
Source: AP
Jul 5, 2007
German court ruled Thursday that a 86-year-old former Nazi convicted of murdering three people during World War II will not serve out a 1949 sentence of life in prison handed down by a Dutch tribunal....
In February, a lower court in Aachen ruled the man, who now lives in a nursing home, could be sent to prison to serve out the sentence. The Cologne court's ruling overturns that decision.
Source: BBC
Jul 5, 2007
The burial of a British soldier 90 years after his death reminds us that World War I remains are still being found, although few are identified, says military historian Peter Caddick-Adams.
"The earth of the Somme and Ypres gives up its dead reluctantly, but every year bones are uncovered by farmers or builders going about their work.
Private Lancaster with son Richard, who later fought in World War II
It is a rare event when the remains can be identified, e
Source: AP
Jul 5, 2007
Recalling his military past may be key to John McCain's political future.
Declining in the polls and struggling with fundraising, the Republican presidential candidate draws an appreciative response from audiences when he recounts his Navy pilot days and the fortitude of some of his fellow POWs during the 6 1/2 years he spent in a North Vietnamese prison.
Vietnam is hardly the centerpiece of McCain's campaign; it's part of his biography and, as such, is an element in a
Source: Times (UK)
Jul 5, 2007
As if raising and waving millions of Stars and Stripes was not patriotic enough at Independence Day celebrations yesterday, the flags now have to be made in the US.
The state of Minnesota has taken the most draconian action, requiring all US flags sold in the state to be of American manufacture. Violations of the law, which comes into force at the end of the year, will be punished by a $1,000 (£495) fine or 90 days in jail.
From this month, schools and colleges in Arizo
Source: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Jul 5, 2007
Historians are criticizing Arkansas' new social studies curriculum, claiming that it will water down the study of Arkansas history at the elementary level and leave high school students studying it with seventh-grade textbooks.
Schools must start using the new curriculum when the 2007-08 school year begins in August.
"I'm just astonished and appalled," said Jeannie Whayne, chairman of the history department at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. "
Source: WaPo
Jul 5, 2007
Archaeologist Jed Levin keeps a hand-held click counter at the ready, even while answering a busy cellphone and addressing the curious crowds that have gathered at the site he is excavating. Since March, when he began digging for historical remains in a small, square pit in this city's historic district, the onlookers have come in steadily increasing numbers. On a good day, his little clicker registers some 4,000 to 5,000 visitors.
Given how little there is to see, those are impress
Source: LAT
Jul 5, 2007
Dan Lowenstein passionately opposes the war in Iraq and recently helped stage an antiwar teach-in at UC San Francisco. "We must listen to our conscience and speak out," he told the hundreds of people who had gathered.
Lowenstein is no student organizer; he's a noted professor and vice chairman of the department of neurology at UCSF.
Four years into the war, student protests at campuses across the country have been rare, but a handful of academics have begun sp
Source: NYT
Jul 5, 2007
In a city with the greatest Gothic cathedral in Germany and no fewer than a dozen Romanesque churches, adding a pair of slender fluted minarets would scarcely alter the skyline. Yet plans for a new mosque are rattling this ancient city to its foundations.
Cologne’s Muslim population, largely Turkish, is pushing for approval to build what would be one of Germany’s largest mosques, in a working-class district across town from the cathedral’s mighty spires.
Predictably, a
Source: The Age
Jul 4, 2007
ACCORDING to popular belief, Nazi-era Germans flooded opera houses to be enthralled by Rhinemaidens and Valkyries.
But Richard Wagner, far from being the Third Reich's "house composer", actually became much less popular during Adolf Hitler's rule, according to new research.
Germans were much more keen on Carmen, Bizet's tale of a soldier's scandalous obsession with a Gypsy, and on Madama Butterfly, Puccini's opera about an officer's doomed liaison with a Japan
Source: AP
Jul 4, 2007
Jamestown's 400th anniversary helped revive interest in Virginia's Indian tribes and their role in America's founding. Now, the Virginia Indian Heritage Trail is enriching that education with an 80-page interpretive guide.
Part of the trail leads to the Monacan Ancestral Museum in Amherst County, where visitors can learn about Virginia's "lost" tribe. Monacans say they were only able to survive as a nation hundreds of years after colonists thought they'd died out because t
Source: Boston Globe
Jul 4, 2007
The day before Senate Watergate Committee minority counsel Fred Thompson made the inquiry that launched him into the national spotlight -- asking an aide to President Nixon whether there was a White House taping system -- he telephoned Nixon's lawyer.
Thompson tipped off the White House that the committee knew about the taping system and would be making the information public. In his all-but-forgotten Watergate memoir, "At That Point in Time," Thompson said he acted with &
Source: NYT
Jul 4, 2007
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to honor the grave sites of Declaration of Independence signers, don't count New Jersey in. It says it can't afford it.
Five Declaration signers are buried in the Garden State: four New Jerseyans and a Pennsylvanian. An effort to preserve their graves, promote their lives and honor them with graveside plaques has stalled in a state that was home to several key Revolutionary War battles and dubs itself the ''Crossroads of the Am
Source: NYT
Jul 4, 2007
AIDONE, Sicily — The star attraction of the archaeological museum in this sleepy backwater in central Sicily actually isn’t here.
Instead, this ancient treasure, a giant statue from the fifth century B.C. usually identified as the goddess Aphrodite, holds court thousands of miles away, at the J. Paul Getty Museum’s antiquities villa in California.
In the Aidone Archaeological Museum, which houses artifacts from a nearby dig at an ancient Greek settlement called Morganti
Source: NYT
Jul 4, 2007
On the stretch of land where the Declaration of Independence was signed, the Constitution drafted and the Liberty Bell first tolled, pre-Independence Day crowds peered from a wooden platform into a 10-foot-deep dirt hole that is revealing more complex notions of the nation’s history.
Digging through layers of soil, brick and mortar, archaeologists for the city and the National Park Service have exposed remains of a four-story brick and stone mansion that was home to George Washingto
Source: Telegraph
Jul 4, 2007
Victims of the Khmer Rouge's genocide in Cambodia are recording their accounts on video in the hope of being able to give evidence at the trials of their alleged persecutors, even if their testimony eventually is heard from beyond the grave.
Foot-dragging by the Cambodian government and legal wrangling pushed back the start of the UN-sponsored trials, which were agreed in 2003 but are now not expected to start until later this year. They are expected to last years, raising fears tha
Source: Baltimore Sun
Jul 3, 2007
The Maryland Historical Society - which laid off 20 percent of its staff last year and saw a new director leave within four months of arriving - will close two satellite museums in Baltimore to reduce costs.
The Maritime Museum in Fells Point and the Baltimore Civil War Museum in Harbor East will close Sept 1. The closures will save about $50,000 a year and allow the 163-year- old historical society to eliminate its deficit by mid-2008, said society Director Rob Rogers.
Source: WaPo
Jul 3, 2007
Certain things are immediately apparent about the six human skulls lined up on the metal cabinet in a back room of Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
First, there is the graffiti scrawled across them, abrasive as wartime expressions can be: "Today's pigs are tomorrow's bacon" on one, "Stay high stay alive" on another, trippy thick stripes of bright blue, red and yellow on a third. Two eye sockets are filled with red candle wax, as though the skull had been used to
