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: BBC News
Jun 13, 2007
The Elizabethan map, dating back to about 1587, was found at the National Archives at Kew in London.
It was drawn by Ralph Treswell, a renowned surveyor and cartographer, who was among the first in England to produce scaled plans of estates.The document shows evidence of a 12th century church, a water mill and visitor or pilgrims' accommodation.
It also reveals the abbey drew water, not just from the nearby lake as previously thought, but fr
Source: The Independent
Jun 13, 2007
Five hundred pages of files kept by the Polish police on Lech Walesa when he was leader of the striking Gdansk shipyard workers in the early 1980s have just gone up on the internet. Walesa - who went on to become president of Poland - put them there himself to confound those who have spread rumours that he was a police informer in the old days before Communism collapsed in Poland in 1989.
"I got sick and tired of the constant accusations, doubts and insinuations being peddled b
Source: The Telegraph
Jun 13, 2007
Baroness Thatcher drew parallels between the Falklands conflict and British deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan today during an emotional broadcast to mark the 25th anniversary of the conflict.
In the radio message recorded for the British Forces Broadcasting Service, she said the battle to reclaim the Falkland Islands was a "just" cause.
She added that the struggle against "tyranny and violence" continued today, and that serving troops could draw &q
Source: The Telegraph
Jun 13, 2007
A Jewish peer has warned that anti-Semitism is at its worst level in Britain since he fled here from Germany in 1936. Lord Moser said he was particularly concerned about anti-Jewish feeling in Britain's universities.
Addressing a House of Lords debate on anti-Semitism on university campuses, the crossbench peer said: "It is just over 70 years since I came to this country and I have to say that I've never been more concerned about the rising tide of anti-Semitism throughout Euro
Source: The Boston Globe
Jun 13, 2007
It is called the Lodge, and for 105 years it has been the first stop for any school group, tourist, or history buff visiting the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown. Entering the mausoleum-like structure at the base of the famous obelisk, visitors dutifully passed a marble statue of an imposing Revolutionary War general and three dioramas from the 1970s with tiny figurines doing battle on a faux-grass hill. Created as a majestic gateway, the Lodge had become a cramped, overheated choke point, wo
Source: 24 Hour Museum
Jun 13, 2007
Extensive archaeological remains of an old guard house dating to the Tudor and Jacobean periods have been uncovered at the Tower of London.
Staff were relaying a cobblestone path across Tower Green to conform with disability regulations when they found evidence of walls, which turned out to be the remains of a substantial building.“The work we were doing was resurfacing for compliance with the Disability Discrimination Act,” explained Jane Spooner, Histor
Source: Deutsche Welle
Jun 13, 2007
A controversial conference with former top level East German spies has been cancelled in Berlin. Organizer Thomas Wegener Friis said the event was to focus on the so-called HVA, the foreign intelligence branch of the secret police Stasi in the former East Germany (GDR)."Espionage was an important part of the Cold War and we need to understand foreign intelligence in order to understand this period in history," said Friis, an assistant professor at the Center for Co
Source: CBC
Jun 13, 2007
Veterans who claim a display at the Canadian War Museum makes them look like war criminals have misinterpreted it, but the panel should be changed anyway, says a Senate subcommittee on veterans affairs.The panel on the allied bombing raids in Germany during World War II titled Enduring Controversy questions the morality and value of the raids, which it says killed 600,000 Germans and left millions homeless while providing the allies with little strategic advantage.
Source: American Heritage
Jun 12, 2007
American Heritage, the nation’s preeminent magazine of history and the parent of this website, has stopped publication, at least temporarily, with the April/May 2007 issue, now on newsstands. The website will continue to publish.
American Heritage, a bimonthly, was founded in 1954. It was bought by Forbes Inc. in 1986 and has suffered financially in recent years amid hard times for magazines in general. Forbes put it up for sale earlier this year and has not yet found a buyer.
Source: NYT
Jun 12, 2007
When President Bush goes to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to push for revival of a comprehensive immigration bill, he will have to wrestle with the ghost of a 1986 law that promised to solve the problem of illegal immigration.
That law prohibited the hiring of illegal immigrants, provided new resources for enforcement along the Mexican border and offered legal status, or amnesty, to several million illegal immigrants. In the current debate, which stalled last week when the latest legislat
Source: The Guardian
Jun 12, 2007
China has become the land of 1,000 identical cities, a senior government official has warned in an outspoken attack on the country's rush towards modernity.
Qiu Baoxing, the vice-minister of construction, said the damage to the country's heritage was similar to that wrought during the cultural revolution of 1966-76.
In the early stages of that period, Red Guards ransacked temples and burned ancient scripts in the name of revolutionary politics. Today, the damage is mor
Source: VNUNet
Jun 12, 2007
Newly released documents have shown that the US military was considering the development of a chemical weapon to turn enemy soldiers gay.
Edward Hammond, of Berkeley's Sunshine Project, used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a copy of the proposal from the Air Force's Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio and passed it to CBS 5.
According to the document the Air Force requested $7.5m for the development of such a weapon, but the proposal was rejected.
Source: Hindustan Times
Jun 12, 2007
China on Tuesday claimed to have unearthed a large cache of explosives, abandoned by Japanese troops during World War II, from the base of a hill in Dunhua City in northeast China's Jilin Province.
The 3,500 bombs, still lethal and weighing more than 40 tonnes, were found buried in a rectangular pit at the foot of the hill in Dunhua's Shaheyan Township, which was once the site of a Japanese military airport, police said.
The bombs were discovered by three local farmers
Source: AP
Jun 12, 2007
Iran will publish the speeches and writings of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for Israel's destruction and once wrote President Bush a letter criticizing his handling of the Sept. 11 attacks, newspapers reported Tuesday.
Ahmadinejad reportedly has appointed a 15-member panel—dubbed the Council of Policy-Making and Supervision over Publication of President's Works and Thoughts—and made up of his closest allies, to compile and publish the works.
The move provok
Source: The Telegraph
Jun 12, 2007
A blunder by MI5 has blown the cover on some of its top wartime agents - 60 years after they carried out secret operations.
The identities of operatives from the intelligence services are normally closely guarded, even after long periods of time have passed since their retirement.
However, an apparently innocuous file released by MI5 to the National Archives earlier this year has allowed a number of agents who operated during World War Two to be identified.
Source: Deutsche Welle
Jun 12, 2007
A fund set up by the German government to compensate Nazi-era forced laborers has finished its last payments to victims. The remaining money in the fund will be used for reconciliation projects.
The Remembrance, Responsibility and Future foundation to compensate Nazi-era forced laborers paid 1.7 million people more than 4.4 billion euros ($5.8 billion) in recent years.The money has been paid and everything has run its course without a problem,"
Source: BBC News
Jun 12, 2007
Instructions on how to build a nuclear reactor have been revealed from five sealed envelopes that have lain hidden for almost 70 years.
The documents were sent to the UK's Royal Society for safekeeping by James Chadwick, discoverer of the neutron, during World War II.
He felt their contents, which described cutting-edge science, were far too sensitive to publish at the time. The envelopes were recently discovered in the science academy's archives.
Source: The Age
Jun 12, 2007
AN ANCIENT training manual for Roman athletes — carved in marble almost 2000 years ago — prescribes far worse punishments than a sending off or a week's docked pay if they performed badly in the Colosseum.
The manual recommends a flogging to get them to perform better. And the same went if they drank too much mead or behaved disgracefully with the local maidens.The marble tablet was found in 2003 in the town of Alexandria Troas in Turkey, and deciphe
Source: The Virginian-Pilot
Jun 12, 2007
A DNA testing company and a genealogy enthusiast say they're trying to achieve what archaeologists have so far failed to do: find out what happened to the Lost Colony, the 1587 settlement on Roanoke Island that disappeared without a wisp of evidence.
"The Lost Colony story is the biggest unsolved mystery in the history of America," said Roberta Estes, owner of DNA Explain, a private DNA analysis company based in Brighton, Mich. "I don't know what we'll find in the end
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education
Jun 12, 2007
For nine months, Riyadh Lafta, an Iraqi professor of medicine, tried to get a visa to visit the University of Washington, where he had been invited to share his research on the unusually high rates of cancer among children in southern Iraq.
But by last March, with no visa forthcoming, the American institution came up with an alternative plan. Mr. Lafta would deliver his lecture at Simon Fraser University, in Vancouver, British Columbia, and it would be broadcast by video to a public
