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: Haaretz (Tel Aviv)
May 7, 2007
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem announced Monday night that it has uncovered the grave and tomb of King Herod, who ruled Judea for the Roman empire from circa 37 BCE.
According to a press release from the Hebrew University, the news of the archeological find at Herodium was to be announced Tuesday morning at a special news conference, and was to be kept secret until then, but the discovery by Haaretz of the story had led to the premature announcement.The tomb
Source: The Ticker (Baruch College, CUNY)
May 7, 2007
Paul Kagame, a former guerrilla leader who played a crucial role in stopping the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, substituted for Professor Murray Rubenstein in his "In Search of History" class on Wednesday. A surprise visit of Rwandan President was organized by mtvU, MTV's 24-hour college network, which taped Kagame's teaching for one of its Emmy-nominated "Stand-In" series, due on air at noon on May 16. The Rwandan leader spoke about his homeland, its people, economy and the war.
Source: AFP
May 7, 2007
DAVIT GAREJI, Georgia -- Perched high on a cliff side in the remote borderlands of eastern Georgia, the ancient Davit Gareji monastery hardly seems the kind of place that could be at the centre of a modern-day diplomatic dispute.Monks settled on this arid land in the early 600s, less than 200 years after Georgia became one of the first countries to adopt Christianity. They carved their homes into the stone and over the centuries built churches and towers that loom overhead o
Source: Times (of London)
May 7, 2007
She was known as ''the Tigress'', a force of nature whose passionate spirit changed opera forever but left her broken-hearted at the end of a short, tragic and very public life.
Now, 30 years after Maria Callas died alone in Paris at the age of 53, two new discoveries have shed fresh light on the greatest diva of all time.
One is a set of previously unseen photographs from a [1954] scrapbook...
Nineteen years later, with her voice diminished and her confide
Source: Daijiworld (Mangalore, Karnataka, India)
May 7, 2007
PANAJI, Goa, India -- Goan heritage activists are fighting a battle to save [the 16th-century site of] Asia's first gun powder factory at Ribander, a sleepy town, dotting capital city of Panaji in this erstwhile Portuguese colony.
"A huge commercial complex is taking shape on the site where this gun powder factory existed. What's paining is that the site is neglected by state archives and archeology department and nothing is being done to stop it," historian Prajal Sakhard
Source: BBC News
May 7, 2007
BERLIN -- She was rumoured to be the world's most beautiful woman in her time.
Nefertiti, Queen of Egypt, was the co-ruler of her country in the 14th Century BC. Today, the bust of Nefertiti (whose name literally means "a beautiful woman has arrived") has pride of place in the Antiquities collection in Berlin's Altes Museum...
But, once again, the bust of Nefertiti is the subject of a heated debate, as it appears the Egyptians want it back [at least on loan]..
Source: BBC
May 7, 2007
Thousands of Indians have started a march to commemorate the 150th anniversary of a revolt against British colonial rulers.The uprising - known as the first Indian War of Independence - was eventually crushed by the British.
Around 10,000 people retraced the march 150 years ago by dozens of mutinous Indian soldiers from Meerut in a bid to capture Delhi.
Monday's marchers dressed like Indian soldiers and British officers and staged mock fights with
Source: RIA Novosti (Moscow)
May 7, 2007
TALLINN, Estonia -- A monument to Gypsies murdered in a Nazi death camp near Tallinn during WWII has been unveiled in Estonia, local TV said.
Estonian TV said Sunday it took the country's Gypsy community six years to find a site and collect money for the monument to about 2,000 Gypsies, who were executed in Kalevi-Lijva together with 4,000 of German, Czechoslovak and Polish Jews during WWII.
Source: People's Daily Online (Beijing)
May 7, 2007
The salvage of a 800-year-old wooden ship off south China coast may help ravel three prominent puzzles surrounding the sunken boat of Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279), Chinese experts say.
The three puzzles include whether the submerging of the Southern Song Dynasty ship was caused by overloading, where the ill-fated ship departed from, and what was inside the subsistence cabin.
The salvage operation, scheduled to start on Tuesday, is claimed to be first of its kind in
Source: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
May 7, 2007
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has accused the European Union and NATO of "conniving" with nations that disrespect the memory of Soviet soldiers to rewrite history.
"We cannot but feel indignation at the attempts to blaspheme and desecrate this memory [of Soviet soldiers killed in World War II] and to rewrite history," Lavrov said. "Unfortunately such attempts to scoff at history are becoming an element and an instrument of the foreign policies of ce
Source: AP
May 7, 2007
BERLIN -- Germany's president has refused a clemency request from a former left-wing terrorist serving life in prison for taking part in killings carried out by the notorious Red Army Faction three decades ago, his office said Monday.
The plea by Christian Klar, who has been jailed for 24 years and is not eligible for parole until 2009, has made Germans relive harrowing days in 1977 when a small band of radicals that emerged from the student anti-war movement of the 1960s turned to
Source: AP
May 7, 2007
WASHINGTON -- The surprise explanation behind the U.S. government's sensational but false warnings about mysterious Canadian spy coins is the harmless "poppy quarter," the world's first colorized coin, The Associated Press has learned.
The odd-looking coins with a bright red flower were so unfamiliar to suspicious U.S. Army contractors traveling in Canada they filed confidential espionage accounts about them. The worried contractors described the coins as "anomalous&q
Source: Times (of London)
May 7, 2007
Arthur Betts was a lorry driver for Chiltern District Council and a popular figure in the pubs of Chalfont St Peter. Occasionally he would tell his grandson a farfetched story of how he had survived a tragedy that killed more than a thousand British prisoners of war.
He described how he broke out of the hold of a sinking ship and swam 5 miles (8km) through a hail of Japanese bullets and shark-filled waters to scale, exhausted, the cliffs of a small Chinese island where he was helped
Source: Times (of London)
May 7, 2007
MI6 has been ordered by a judge to appear at a special public hearing over the case of one of its wartime superspies, whose file is buried in the archives of the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service.
In an unprecedented development, MI6 will have to explain its policy on keeping all its files locked away from the public gaze. Unlike MI5, which has been releasing large batches of its wartime records to the National Archives in Kew, MI6 has kept all its files secret.
Source: Newsweek (excerpt)
May 7, 2007
In his forthcoming biography of Condoleezza Rice, Newsweek's Marcus Mabry explains the roots -- and the consequences -- of her loyalty to the President.
Source: Chicago Sun-Times
May 6, 2007
More than 200 years after his death, Revolutionary War hero Casimir Pulaski is on the verge of becoming an American citizen.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) announced Saturday that the Senate unanimously passed a resolution he sponsored granting the Polish-born Pulaski posthumous, honorary citizenship. Durbin introduced similar legislation in August 2005, but it never came up for a vote.
"We're all very aware of the contribution he made during our nation's revolution," Du
Source: AP
May 6, 2007
When it comes to Abraham Lincoln, apparently there's no such thing as enough. After countless books about his boyhood, his presidency, the hunt for his killer and yes, even his feet, maybe it was time for a new book devoted to what happened to Lincoln's body after he was done using it.
As its title implies, Stealing Lincoln's Body by Thomas J. Craughwell (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) is devoted to Lincoln after, as Craughwell writes in the first sentence, &
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
May 6, 2007
ORAN, Algeria -- An Ottoman-era bathhouse is an unlikely symbol of Algeria's future, yet that is how the young people who have spent four painstaking years restoring the old building's intricate brickwork regard it.
In a country where more than a million people died in the fight that ended 132 years of French rule in 1962, and more than 150,000 were slaughtered in a brutal decadelong campaign by Islamist extremists, shifting rubble and restoring old buildings is not simply an exerci
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
May 6, 2007
In 1881, an 11-year-old boy in China named Yung Wah Gok begged for a chance to go to the United States like the thousands of other Chinese workers who had already left to seek their fortune on the railroad, in laundries and working other jobs.
A year later, immigration laws swung the door shut by barring Chinese laborers from entering the United States or naturalizing as citizens if they already were here. If Wah Gok had not persuaded his uncle to take him, he might never have emigr
Source: New York Times
May 6, 2007
In March, for the first time in the nation’s history, a federal appeals court struck down a gun control law on Second Amendment grounds. Only a few decades ago, the decision would have been unimaginable.
There used to be an almost complete scholarly and judicial consensus that the Second Amendment protects only a collective right of the states to maintain militias. That consensus no longer exists — thanks largely to the work over the last 20 years of several leading liberal law prof
