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: CNN
Jun 19, 2007
Three-century-old manuscripts by Isaac Newton calculating the exact date of the apocalypse, detailing the precise dimensions of the ancient temple in Jerusalem and interpreting passages of the Bible -- exhibited this week for the first time -- lay bare the little-known religious intensity of a man many consider history's greatest scientist.
Newton, who died 280 years ago, is known for laying much of the groundwork for modern physics, astronomy, math and optics. But in a new Jerusale
Source: BBC News
Jun 19, 2007
Members of Italy's Jewish community have been protesting outside a lawyer's office in Rome where a former Nazi officer has begun work.
Shouts of "Murderer!" greeted Erich Priebke, 93, as he arrived for his first day on the back of a scooter.
A court ruled last week that Priebke, who is serving a sentence for multiple murders, could work on day release. Priebke was jailed for life in 1998 for his role in the massacre of 335 Italians in 19
Source: LA Times
Jun 19, 2007
Archeologists have unearthed a 4,000-year-old gold-processing center along the middle Nile in Sudan that suggests the ancient kingdom of Kush was much larger than scholars previously believed and would have rivaled the domain of the Egyptians to the north.
Kush, which was called Nubia by the Greeks, was the first urban civilization in sub-Saharan Africa. The discovery of the gold center and a related graveyard is providing new information about the relationship between rulers in the
Source: Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Jun 19, 2007
A battered old hat, a pair of stained gloves, a child's silly rhyme - hardly the stuff of history. Except that this hat is a stovepipe hat, the gloves are stained with a president's blood and the rhyme was written by a young Abraham Lincoln.
All three items are part of an immense private collection put together by a Lincoln fan over 35 years. Now the collection is about to go public after being purchased for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. The collection contain
Source: Toronto Star
Jun 19, 2007
On Thursday, 160 years on, at the official opening of the memorial site to famine victims at Ireland Park at the foot of Bathurst St., near where the fever sheds on the wharves once stood, there will be a remembering of that unspeakable human suffering - and of the failures and the heroism in dealing with it.
The memorial - a stone monument by architect Jonathan Kearns, four life-sized bronze figures by Rowan Gillespie depicting the Irish in all their misery, a wall carved with the
Source: Reuters
Jun 18, 2007
Algeria, a treasure house of prehistoric Saharan art, has discovered more neolithic rock etchings in the desert from around 8,000 years ago showing cattle herds, a government newspaper reported Monday.
El Moudjahid daily said local tour guide Hadj Brahim found about 40 images near the town of Bechar, about 800 km (500 miles) southwest of the capital Algiers.
Source: Washington Post
Jun 18, 2007
Congress is moving to change the direction of the Bush administration's nuclear weapons program by demanding the development of a comprehensive post-Sept. 11, 2001, nuclear strategy before it approves funding a new generation of warheads.
"Currently there exists no convincing rationale for maintaining the large number of existing Cold War nuclear weapons, much less producing additional warheads," the House Appropriations Committee said in its report, released last week, on
Source: Diverse
Jun 18, 2007
One of the more controversial debates now going on in intellectual circles is over Afrocentrism, a movement that argues that traditional history has undervalued the contributions of Black Africa to ancient Greek and Western thought. At the center of the debate are Afrocentrists and those attacking them, most recently Mary Lefkowitz, who wrote "Not Out of Africa."
Recently Lefkowitz's publisher, New Republic Books, sponsored a debate between her and a leading Afrocentrist,
Source: International Herald Tribune
Jun 18, 2007
The Holocaust has always been marked by numbers. There was the numbering of arms in death camps and the staggering death toll where the words six million became both a body count and a synonym for an unspeakable crime.
After the Holocaust, Germany performed the necessary long division in paying token reparations to survivors. More recently, Swiss banks and European insurance companies have concealed bank account and policy numbers belonging to dead Jews. Only with the Holocaust have
Source: Boston Globe
Jun 18, 2007
Legend has it that Yale University's ultrasecret Skull and Bones society swiped the remains of American Indian leader Geronimo nearly a century ago from an army outpost in Oklahoma, and now Geronimo's great-grandson wants the remains returned.
Harlyn Geronimo, of Mescalero, N.M., wants to prove the skull and bones that were purported spirited from the Indian leader's burial plot in Fort Sill, Okla., to a stone tomb that serves as the club's headquarters are in fact those of his grea
Source: Tahlequah Daily Press
Jun 18, 2007
In a year riddled with history-making tribal events, the Cherokee Nation added yet another first to its roster: a formal, public debate between candidates for principal and deputy chief.
Candidates included incumbent Principal Chief Chad Smith and Stacy Leeds, and incumbent Deputy Chief Joe Grayson Jr. and Raymond Vann. The event, sponsored by the Cherokee Phoenix, was held at the Tahlequah Armory Municipal Center, with over 300 people in attendance...
Source: CNN
Jun 18, 2007
Cambodia offers plenty of Khmer Rouge "killing fields" attractions. There is a grisly genocide museum complete with torture instruments and former mass graves that draw camera-toting tourists.
But for the country's school children, the Khmer Rouge remain off the curriculum, leaving students virtually clueless about how the now-defunct communist group became a killing machine in late 1970s.
Now that knowledge gap may at least be partially filled through the new
Source: Scotsman
Jun 18, 2007
IT IS known by superstitious actors as "the Scottish play", but a pair of historians are now questioning how much William Shakespeare's Macbeth actually belonged to England's most famous playwright.
In a radio programme to be aired today, Scots historian Fiona Watson and literary expert Molly Rourke claim the story of Macbeth was penned by a Scottish monk on St Serf's Island in the middle of Loch Leven 400 years before William Shakespeare even drew breath.
Source: The Guardian
Jun 18, 2007
Experts in Berlin's wartime bunkers have announced the discovery of a forgotten Nazi military school buried under a man-made hill on the western edge of the city.
The army academy, designed by Nazi architect Albert Speer, is encased in the Teufelsberg (Devil's Mountain), a 116-metre (380ft)-high mound in Berlin which was constructed from the 26m cubic metres of the capital's wartime rubble.
The unfinished building, for which Nazi leader Adolf Hitler laid the foundation
Source: Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
Jun 18, 2007
The Oversight Committee has been investigating whether White House officials violated the Presidential Records Act by using e-mail accounts maintained by the Republican National Committee and the Bush Cheney ‘04 campaign for official White House communications. This interim staff report provides a summary of the evidence the Committee has received to date, along with recommendations for next steps in the investigation...
Source: Letter to the editor of the NYT Book Review signed by Norman Mailer et al.
Jun 17, 2007
Bryan Burrough's laudatory review of Vincent Bugliosi's book on the Kennedy assassination (May 20) is superficial and gratuitously insulting. ''Conspiracy theorists'' -- blithe generalization -- should according to Burroughs be ''ridiculed, even shunned ... marginalized the way we've marginalized smokers.'' Let's see now. The following people to one degree or another suspected that President Kennedy was killed as the result of a conspiracy, and said so either publicly or privately: Presidents Ly
Source: New Jersey Star-Ledger
Jun 17, 2007
Newly released files from the lynching of two black couples more than 60 years ago contain a disturbing revelation: The FBI investigated suspicions that a three-term governor of Georgia sanctioned the murders to sway rural white voters during a tough election campaign.
The 3,725 pages obtained by the Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act do not make conclusions about the still-unsolved killings at Moore's Ford Bridge. But they raise the possibility that Eugene Talmad
Source: The Guardian
Jun 17, 2007
They gave us the word "person" and invented a symbol of iron rule later adopted by the fascists. Some even argue it was they who really moulded Roman civilisation.
Yet the Etruscans, whose descendants today live in central Italy, have long been among the great enigmas of antiquity. Their language, which has never properly been deciphered, was unlike any other in classical Italy. Their origins have been hotly debated by scholars for centuries.
Genetic research
Source: Washington Post
Jun 17, 2007
Up on the surface, the signs of the trouble at the Jefferson Memorial are small: A few blacktop patches over uneven seams in some concrete. A cordoned-off section where the sea wall has slipped below the front plaza. The "tilt meter" boxes that visitors can't see unless they know where to look.
Underground, though, the problems may be huge: Slowly, almost imperceptibly, parts of the complex seem to be sinking into the mud.
It's probably not endangering the maj
Source: Washington Post
Jun 17, 2007
Japan's Supreme Court has rejected appeals by dozens of Chinese seeking compensation for being forced into slave labor during World War II, their lawyer said Saturday. It was the second such decision in days by Japan's top court.
The 42 former Chinese laborers had sought $6.89 million in damages from the Japanese government and 10 companies they worked for, including major contractors and mining operators. The lawsuit was originally filed in 1997, and only half the laborers are st
