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
May 18, 2007
A burial ground found under the A2 in Kent has marked the area as one of the most important sites of Roman Britain.
Archaeologists say the burial site, near Gravesend [near the Roman town of Springhead], ranks with those found at the most important Roman cities such as Colchester and St Albans.Three graves were found during a routine dig before work started on a £122m road widening scheme.
Archaeologist Tim Allen said one of the bodies, which had b
Source: AP
May 18, 2007
ROME -- An Italian university closed one of its campuses for the day Friday to prevent a planned lecture by a retired French professor who denies gas chambers were used in Nazi concentration camps.
Robert Faurisson, who has been convicted five times in France for denying crimes against humanity, had been expected to speak at a local hotel instead but that conference too was later canceled after scuffles with protesters.
Source: Government Computer News blog
May 18, 2007
Salon has a report by a political scientist who, in his searches through the Coalition Provisional Authority's Consolidated Weekly Reports, found all sorts of additional information buried in the documents. Turns out the CPA wasn't keeping close enough of an eye on the Microsoft Word's track changes capability."Presumably, staffers at the CPA's Information Management Unit, which produced the weekly reports, were cutting and pasting large sections of text into the reports and then eliminating all
Source: LiveScience
May 18, 2007
"This is not my day job." So begins Michel Barsoum [professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Drexel University] as he recounts his foray into the mysteries of the Great Pyramids of Egypt. As a well respected researcher in the field of ceramics, Barsoum never expected his career to take him down a path of history, archaeology, and "political" science, with materials research mixed in...
The widely accepted theory-that the pyramids were c
Source: Reuters
May 18, 2007
NORTH SMITHFIELD, R.I. -- In a thick forest of maple, willow and oak trees where 17th century European settlers fought hundreds of American Indians, algae-covered stones are arranged in mysterious piles.Wilfred Greene, the 70-year-old chief of the Wampanoag Nation's Seaconke Indian tribe, says the stone mounds are part of a massive Indian burial ground, possibly one of the nation's largest, that went unnoticed until a few years ago.
"When I came up here and
Source: Reuters
May 18, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO -- Actress Elizabeth Taylor can keep a Van Gogh painting that might have been illegally seized by the Nazis because the family who once owned it waited too long to ask for it back, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Friday.
Taylor, 75, bought the 1889 painting "View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint-Remy" at a Sotheby's auction in London in 1963 for 92,000 British pounds -- about $257,000 at the time...
The Orkin family, South African and Canadian des
Source: WBIR-TV (Knoxville, Tenn.)
May 18, 2007
CLINTON, Tenn. -- Fifty-one years ago, 12 black students became the first to attend a court-ordered, desegregated school in the South.
On Thursday, 12 life-size statues were unveiled in Clinton to commemorate those students who became known as the "Clinton 12." The bronze statues stand outside the Green McAdoo Cultural Center.
On their first day at Clinton High School on August 27th, 1956, the students walked down the hill from their neighborhood and passed a
Source: AP
May 18, 2007
Last year, Alabama became first state to pass the Rosa Parks Act, which gives people the option of having their records expunged. Tennessee's version won final approval in the legislature Thursday and awaits the governor's signature....
Tennessee's Rosa Parks Act passed the House 88-6 and was approved unanimously in the Senate on Thursday. It now goes to Gov. Phil Bredesen, whose spokeswoman said he had not yet looked at the legislation.
"It's important because it
Source: AP
May 18, 2007
TAMPA, Fla. —- Deep-sea explorers said Friday they have hauled up what could be the richest sunken treasure ever discovered: hundreds of thousands of colonial-era silver and gold coins worth an estimated $500 million from a shipwreck in the Atlantic Ocean.
A chartered cargo jet recently landed in the United States to unload hundreds of plastic containers packed with the 50,000 coins, which are expected to fetch an average of $1,000 each from collectors and investors.
Source: BBC News
May 18, 2007
Sixth formers donned togas to protest at the plans
Ancient history A-level is to be saved from the scrapheap after a high-profile campaign calling for it to continue.
The last exam board in England to offer the subject, OCR, has decided not to abandon the course after pressure from ministers and academics.
Classicists, including shadow education minister Boris Johnson, argued pupils would be denied the chance to study the Roman Empire and ancient Greece.
Source: AP
May 18, 2007
BALTIMORE -- Abraham Lincoln might have survived being shot if today's medical technology had existed in 1865.
Given that scenario, the question is whether Lincoln would have recovered well enough to return to office, says a doctor and historian who planned to speak Friday at an annual University of Maryland School of Medicine conference on the deaths of historic figures.While the conference has traditionally re-examined the deaths of historic figures to determi
Source: Independent (South Africa)
May 18, 2007
Mistakes about Bangalore in an Oxford dictionary have stirred anger in the hi-tech Indian hub where the government has joined historians in demanding an apology, reports said on Friday.The 2005 edition of the Oxford Concise Dictionary of World Place Names says Bangalore is a land of Bengalis who took their name from a local chief called Banga, the New Indian Express and Times of India reported on Friday.
Bengali is in fact the language spoken mainly in Banglades
Source: BBC
May 18, 2007
Chinese archaeologists studying ancient rock carvings say they have evidence that modern Chinese script is thousands of years older than previously thought.State media say researchers identified more than 2,000 pictorial symbols dating back 8,000 years, on cliff faces in the north-west of the country.
They say many of these symbols bear a strong resemblance to later forms of ancient Chinese characters.
Scholars had thought Chinese symbols came into
Source: Telegraph
May 18, 2007
BEIJING -- The Hong Kong and central Chinese governments have turned down requests for Britain to take part in major celebrations planned to mark the 10th anniversary of the return of the former colony to the mainland.
Officials have made clear that there is to be no role for Hong Kong's former rulers in the ceremonies, which include a flag-raising event on the morning of July 1 and the swearing-in of its chief executive, Donald Tsang, for a new five-year term.
The Communist Party le
Source: Times (of London)
May 18, 2007
ATHENS -- Police combed the wooded hills of the Mount Athos monastic community in Northern Greece yesterday after a militant band of monks barged their way in to join an Ascension Day service.
The action by hundreds of bearded and black-clad monks belonging to the Old Calendarists, a sect that refuses to follow the modern Western calendar, brought turmoil to the 1,000-year-old community on the rocky peninsula...For years the Calendarist monks of [the Esphigmenou
Source: Washington Post
May 18, 2007
Here, in a study that faces the garden [in Silver Spring, Md.], is where Rachel Carson would sit and write on days when she felt well. Here, in a bedroom with a dogwood outside the window, is where she would lie down and write on days when she felt worse...
Carson's book Silent Spring, published in 1962, led to the banning of the pesticide DDT, the launch of modern environmentalism and her enshrinement as a kind of patron saint of nature. In this region, Carson's name has been given
Source: UPI
May 18, 2007
COPENHAGEN -- A new book about Denmark's so-called bog people suggests the Iron Age sacrifice victims were not brutally beaten as previously thought.
The bog people are a collection of well-preserved remains found in Danish peat bogs. Christian Fischer, director of the Silkeborg Museum, has written Trollund Man -- A Gift to the Gods, a compilation of more than 30 years of studies into the remains.
Because the skulls of many of the remains are crushed, researchers previously belie
Source: The Australian (Sydney)
May 18, 2007
High school students resent being made to feel guilty during their study of Australia's indigenous past and dislike studying national history in general.
The History Teachers Association called yesterday for a rethink of the type of Australian history being taught in schools and the way in which it is taught.History Teachers Association of [New South Wales] executive officer Louise Zarmati said..."This is a somewhat delicate subject but they don't like the
Source: National Geographic News
May 17, 2007
Archaeologists working in Honduras have discovered an entombed human skeleton of an elite member of the ancient Maya Empire that may help unravel some longstanding mysteries of the vanished culture.
The remains, seated in an upright position in an unusual tomb and flanked by shells, pottery, vessels, and jade adornments, suggest a surprisingly diverse culture and complex political system in the influential Maya city of Copán around A.D. 650.
Located at the western edge
Source: New York Times
May 17, 2007
Google said on Wednesday that it was changing its approach to Internet searches by combining results from its established Web search service with offerings that help users find videos, images, maps and other content....
Until now, a Google search for “I have a dream” would have returned links to the text of the 1963 speech by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and to other historical and informational Web sites about him. But those looking for video clips or photographs of Dr. King
