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: Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer
May 2, 2007
The painting is the size of a football field. It took a team of artists two years to complete the depiction of the battle of Gettysburg, and when they had finished, the work weighed six tons.
For four decades, the 124-year-old oil painting has been rolled up in cylinders and stored at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem. Now, three unidentified investors from the Triangle have revived hope that people might see the cylindrical panorama again.
The trio paid at least
Source: AP
May 2, 2007
Ronald Reagan was a committed commentator on his own presidency, keeping meticulously maintained diaries that recorded the stress of his work alongside his frustration with trying to keep peace in his own family, according to a newly published compilation of his writings.
Reagan scoffed at the assertions of his one-time chief of staff Don Regan that the president and his wife, Nancy, had relied on astrological advice in connection with Reagan's stewardship of national affairs. And h
Source: New York Times
May 2, 2007
Little, Brown & Company has moved up to June 19 the publication date for Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton, by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr., both reporters for The New York Times.
The new date coincides with the publication of a rival biography of Senator Clinton by Carl Bernstein, the journalist who, with Bob Woodward, uncovered the Watergate scandal for The Washington Post more than three decades ago. Last month Alfred A. Knopf announced that it wo
Source: USA Today
May 2, 2007
ST. LOUIS -- When Clayton David bailed out of his bomber over Nazi-occupied Holland in World War II, he didn't know that beyond the blanket of clouds stretching as far as he could see was a young woman he had never met who would risk everything to save him.
But after a couple of weeks in which some of his crewmates were executed or captured by the Nazis, he was led to freedom by 20-year-old Joke Folmer, a member of the Dutch underground.
On Wednesday, David and others w
Source: Canadian Press
May 2, 2007
WINNIPEG, Manitoba -- The Beaver: Canada's History Magazine is inviting Canadians to name what they consider to be the ''worst Canadian'' in the country's past.
It's all part of an online promotion launched this week by the magazine, the flagship publication of the National History Society, for its August-September issue, according to a release.
In the issue, 10 prominent Canadian writers and historians will state their case for their choice of the worst character from the sea
Source: AP
May 2, 2007
PHILADELPHIA -- Archeologists digging at a site where George Washington and his slaves once lived have unearthed portions of the ''President's House'', a long-shot discovery that is already changing ideas about how the house was built.
Officials from Independence National Historical Park and the city announced Wednesday that a section of the kitchen wall as well the foundation walls from the main house had been unearthed at the site, about a block from Independence Mall.
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
May 2, 2007
The ax-cut timbers arranged vertically along the interior wall of Fort Pitt provided a barrier during frontier battles, but will be little more than a speed bump for the state's ongoing renovation of Point State Park.Workers discovered the posts two weeks ago, while cutting an electrical trench in the area next to the Portal Bridge and reflecting pool on the city side of the park.
Following a course of action recommended by on-site archeologists, and supported b
Source: VOA News
May 2, 2007
The United Nations war crimes tribunal says it will consider a prosecutor's request to lift the confidentiality on some documents linked to the war crimes trial of the late Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic.
The announcement follows a request from chief war crimes prosecutor Carla del Ponte. It is not clear what documents she wants made public.
Del Ponte has denied accusations she made a deal with Belgrade to keep some documents confidential in return for Serbian help i
Source: BBC News
May 2, 2007
Scientists believe they have for the first time identified an ancient graveyard for gladiators.
Analysis of their bones and injuries has given new insight into how they lived, fought and died.
The remains were found at Ephesus in Turkey, a major city of the Roman world, BBC Timewatch reports.
Source: Discovery News
May 2, 2007
The woman behind Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa painting was born in an old Florentine house that was no beauty, according to newly discovered archival documents.
Originally used as a workshop by wool artisans, the house stood a few hundred feet from the Medieval bridge Ponte Vecchio, in a dark alley known as Via Sguazza.
According to historian Giuseppe Pallanti, it was right in Via Sguazza, where the woman Leonardo began painting in 1503 was born, on June 15, 1479.
Source: Reuters
May 2, 2007
TIWANAKU, Bolivia -- Archeologists have uncovered the 1,300-year-old skeleton of a ruler or priest of the ancient Tiwanaku civilization together with precious jewels inside a much-looted pyramid in western Bolivia.
The bones are "in very good condition" and belong to either "a ruler or a priest," Roger Angel Cossio, the Bolivian archeologist who made the discovery, told Reuters on Wednesday.
He said the tomb -- containing a diadem and fist-sized carv
Source: AFP
May 2, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Military authorities who run Washington's Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital have spurned an offer from renowned folk singer Joan Baez to perform for convalescing US troops, she said Wednesday.
John Mellencamp at a concert for ailing soldiers, but US officials declined to sign off on her participation, she wrote in a letter published Wednesday in the Washington Post.
"Four days before the concert, I was not 'approved' by the Army to take part," sh
Source: Reuters
May 2, 2007
DUBLIN -- Documents unearthed by an Irish vicar show ancestors of Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama may have arrived in the United States from a tiny village in central Ireland as early as the 1790s.
"They're old parish records going back to 1799," Canon Stephen Neill, rector for the parish of Moneygall, told Reuters...
Genealogy Web site www.ancestry.co.uk asked Neill, whose father is Anglican archbishop
Source: Indiana University press release
May 2, 2007
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Bill O'Reilly may proclaim at the beginning of his program that viewers are entering the "No Spin Zone," but a new study by Indiana University media researchers found that the Fox News personality consistently paints certain people and groups as villains and others as victims to present the world, as he sees it, through political rhetoric.
The IU researchers found that O'Reilly called a person or a group a derogatory name once every 6.8 seconds, on ave
Source: Times (of London)
May 2, 2007
A painting of a naked, reclining woman, long described as being Nell Gwyn, the mistress of Charles II, is now thought to depict the King’s earlier mistress, Barbara Villiers, famed as a great beauty at court.
Considered to be a masterpiece by Peter Lely [1618-1680], official artist to Charles II, the painting is believed to have been concealed behind a secret sliding panel for the monarch’s private enjoyment in the royal bedchamber at the Palace of Whitehall...
Research
Source: AP
May 2, 2007
SEOUL -- The South Korean government announced Wednesday its first-ever plan to seize assets gained by alleged collaborators during Japanese colonial rule.
South Korea will confiscate $3.9 million worth of land from the descendants of nine alleged collaborators who worked for Japan during its 1910-45 colonial occupation of the Korean peninsula, a presidential committee said in a statement...
Proceeds from the sale of the seized assets will be used to provide assistance to independenc
Source: Telegraph
May 2, 2007
He was one of the great blackguards of pre-First World War British society: Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon, the man who not only was said to have bought his way off the sinking Titanic, but then stopped his half-empty lifeboat from returning to pick up drowning passengers.
However, the history books might have to be rewritten. A letter discovered in a London attic appears to exonerate the Old Etonian baronet and fencing champion of either cowardice or callousness.
Travelling wit
Source: Arab News (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia)
May 2, 2007
JEDDAH -— Saudi Arabia is replete with archaeological sites dating back to thousands of years, according to Dr. Mohammed Al-Ruwaished, deputy minister of education for antiquities and museums.
''There are nearly 100,000 historical sites in the Kingdom and we have already identified and registered 3,700 main sites. Some of these have 80 to 100 related sites in different localities,'' Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper quoted Ruwaished as saying.
Source: Time Magazine
May 1, 2007
Freedom of the press is a constitutionally guaranteed right in Japan — as long as you stick to what the authorities want you to write. How does a developed democratic country manage to rank lower in last year's Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom index than Ghana or Bosnia? Just ask Takichi Nishiyama, whose promising career as a star political journalist at a national daily ended in 1971, when he came across what should have been a career-making scoop —- official documents revealing that the
Source: Redditch (Worcestershire) Advertiser
May 1, 2007
A British National Party candidate standing in Thursday's local elections dresses in Nazi uniforms and has driven a military vehicle with a swastika on the bonnet.
Karl Newman, 47, hit the national headlines at the weekend after posting pictures that could be seen to glorify Nazism on his website.
As a military re-enactor, he says he dresses up in the spirit of Dad's Army and always asks event organisers if they would prefer him not to.
"Everything's d
