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: AP
May 1, 2007
NEW YORK -- Arthur Frommer first saw Europe in 1953 from the window of a military transport plane.He'd been drafted and was headed to a U.S. base in Germany. But whenever he had a weekend's leave or a three-day pass, he'd hop a train to Paris or hitch a ride to England on an Air Force flight. Eventually he wrote a guide to Europe for GIs and had 5,000 copies printed. They sold out at 50 cents apiece, and when his Army stint was over, he rewrote the book for civilians, self-publishing "Europ
Source: UPI
May 1, 2007
GRANADA, Spain -- A Spanish study suggests climate changes might have caused the extinction of the Neanderthals on the Iberian Peninsula.
The University of Granada study of Gorham's cave on Gibraltar shows the Neanderthal extinction could have been determined by environmental and climate changes, and not by competitiveness with modern humans.
Professor Miguel Ortega Huertas, who led the research, said the findings of the multi-disciplinary research are an important cont
Source: BBC News
May 1, 2007
If you look at a map in an Israeli school text book you are unlikely to find the Green Line, the ceasefire line which until 1967 separated Israel from the Palestinian territories. Israel stretches to the border with Jordan. It is as if the Palestinians don't exist.
At a girls high school in Ramallah in the West Bank a civics class concentrates on the birth of Palestinian nationalism. Asked what they know about the history of the Jewish people on the other side of the security barrier, few s
Source: Los Angeles Times
May 1, 2007
When Queen Elizabeth II visited Jamestown, Va., in 1957 to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the first British settlement in North America, she was 31 years old and had been on the throne for less than five years.
A lot has happened since, to her and to Jamestown.
On Friday, when the queen returns for the 400th anniversary of the settlement's founding, she will see a much different representation of the colony, complete with Indians and blacks whose fortunes crossed
Source: Telegraph
May 1, 2007
ROME -- A chance discovery by archaeologists has brought to light a mosaic nearly 2,000 years old depicting what may have been a real-life version of the Roman combatant played by Russell Crowe in the film Gladiator.
The mosaic was found as Italian researchers carried out work on the spectacular Villa dei Quintili, south of Rome and home to the sports-loving Emperor Commodus.
Commodus...was known to enjoy gladiatorial combat and had a small amphitheatre in which
Source: Independent
May 1, 2007
A statue of a Red Army Soldier, which has been at the heart of deadly riots in Estonia, gazed somberly over dozens of Russian war graves yesterday in its new location at a military cemetery in Tallinn.
Authorities re-erected the Bronze Soldier at the Defense Forces burial ground -- which also holds remains of British, Estonian and German troops - three days after removing it from a downtown square, provoking protests by ethnic Russians.
In the next step of its contentio
Source: Telegraph
May 1, 2007
Jack Straw [leader of the House of Commons] was accused of "sheer hypocrisy" last night after calling for multi-racial Britain to unite under a new vision of national identity.
Historians said his idea to write a common "British story" that would reflect the major events and themes of the country's past was "too little, too late" following a decade in which the teaching of history in schools had become increasingly marginalised.
The comment
Source: Telegraph
May 1, 2007
An ex-RAF codebreaker and his composer son say they have deciphered a musical score hidden for nearly 600 years in the elaborate carvings on the walls of Rosslyn Chapel [in Scotland]...
Thomas Mitchell, 75, a music teacher, and his son Stuart, 41, a pianist and composer, say they became intrigued by the markings on the chapel's arches more than 20 years ago.
Thomas was particularly struck by the 213 carved cubes in the Lady Chapel...
"After scratching
Source: Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, Armed Forces Journal
May 1, 2007
For the second time in a generation, the United States faces the prospect of defeat at the hands of an insurgency. In April 1975, the U.S. fled the Republic of Vietnam, abandoning our allies to their fate at the hands of North Vietnamese communists. In 2007, Iraq's grave and deteriorating condition offers diminishing hope for an American victory and portends risk of an even wider and more destructive regional war.
These debacles are not attributable to individual failures, but rathe
Source: CBC News
Apr 30, 2007
The dangerous herbicide Agent Orange is still contaminating soil and fish in Vietnam at an alarming rate, a Canadian environmental firm has found.
Vancouver-based Hatfield Consultants studied the contamination levels in the area of Da Nang, a large coastal city in central Vietnam, and found contamination to be 300 to 400 times higher than what is considered acceptable.
"We were very shocked," Thomas Boivin of Hatfield Consultants told CBC News on [April 30]. &
Source: DPA (German Press Agency)
Apr 30, 2007
COPENHAGEN -- Danish member of parliament Morten Messerschmidt, 26, of the right-wing Danish Peoples Party (DVP) party has resigned after he was caught singing Nazi songs and engaging in Nazi salutes, the Danish BT newspaper reported Monday.
According to BT, Messerschimdt, who has been previously convicted for racist offences, resigned in order to spare his party any further aggravation...
BT reported the previous week that at a celebration to mark the opening of Copenh
Source: Threat Level blog (Wired)
Apr 30, 2007
Did the NSA lose a treasure trove of top-secret cryptographic equipment and material to the North at the end of the Vietnam war? Investigative journalist and NSA expert James Bamford has said so. But in 2002, official NSA historians refuted that in an internal essay. Of course, this being NSA, the rebuttal was classified.
Now that essay, SIGINT and the Fall of Saigon, April 1975, has been (mostly) declassified in a Mandatory Declassification Review initiated by attorney and journali
Source: Toronto Star
Apr 30, 2007
GIZA, EGYPT -– They have survived sandstorms and desert stillness, the fury of kings and the ravages of time, but the legendary Pyramids of Giza are endangered now – and the agent of their peril is a gloomy Egyptian stable-owner by the name of Hesham el-Ghabri.
Or so you might think.
"They forbid us to ride around the pyramids," grouses the owner of the TWA Stable ("Camel and Horse Riding"), one of countless such tourist-dependent operations clustere
Source: BBC
Apr 30, 2007
The Queen's courtiers turned up their noses at souvenir handkerchiefs commemorating her wedding, previously unseen documents have revealed.
But Buckingham Palace officials failed to prevent "tasteless" memorabilia marking her marriage to the Duke of Edinburgh in 1947 going on sale.
The Home Office ruled the hankies were acceptable, since buyers were unlikely to blow their noses on them.
Their correspondence has been released by the National Archives in
Source: UPI
Apr 30, 2007
CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- World War I has been over 88 years but a tank from that era is at the center of a looming battle between opposing forces in West Virginia and Indiana.
The Renault FT-17 tank was displayed in Nitro, W.Va., from 1987 when Jack Moody acquired it from a VFW post in Virginia until his death in 2005, The Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette reported Monday. But his family apparently sold it to the Ropkey Armor Museum near Crawfordsville, Ind., the newspaper said.
N
Source: AP
Apr 30, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Two fires ravaged historic sites in the nation's capital Monday, one gutting part of the 134-year-old Eastern Market and the other destroying irreplaceable documents and art at the Georgetown public library branch.
Fire Chief Dennis L. Rubin said there was absolutely no suspicion that the fires were related.
The first blaze tore through the southern half of the Eastern Market, a Capitol Hill landmark listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The
Source: AP
Apr 30, 2007
UNITED NATIONS -- An exhibit on the 1994 Rwandan genocide opened Monday at U.N. headquarters after organizers recast a section on the killings of 1 million Armenians in Turkey during World War I -- a reference that angered the Turks.
The exhibit, originally set to open April 9, was postponed after a Turkish diplomat complained about the mention of the Armenian killings. The section now uses the term "mass killings" instead of "murders," does not include the numbe
Source: AP
Apr 30, 2007
WASHINGTON —- German Chancellor Angela Merkel officially handed over to the United States on Monday a 500-year-old map that was the first to tell the world of a new land that it called America.
Library of Congress historians say the world map, completed by German-born cleric and cartographer Martin Waldseemueller in 1507, is the first known document to use the name America, the first to depict the Western Hemisphere and the first to show separate Pacific and Atlantic oceans. The New
Source: CNN
Apr 30, 2007
WASHINGTON -- In the period leading up to the Iraq war, the head of the CIA didn't speak out loudly enough about U.S. intelligence that said Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, said a former CIA officer Monday.
Ex-CIA intelligence officer Larry Johnson responded to comments by former CIA Director George Tenet which aired on CBS' "60 Minutes" on Sunday. Tenet said the consensus in the U.S. intelligence community was that Iraq did possess WMD, which the
Source: Virginia Tech press release
Apr 30, 2007
BLACKSBURG, Va. -- Virginia Tech's Center for Digital Discourse and Culture (CDDC) is pleased to announce the launch of the April 16 Archive
(www.april16archive.org). This new online archive assists artists, humanists, social scientists, and all other scholars who seek, today and in the future, to develop a better understanding of the violent events of April 16, 2007 at Virginia Tech.
It is also available to the general public of the
Commonwealth of Virginia, the United States of America
