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: Reuters
Apr 27, 2007
TOKYO -- Chinese slave laborers who were forced to work in Japan during World War II lost their bid for compensation on Friday when the Supreme Court overturned a landmark ruling that had ordered a Japanese company to pay them...
In 2004, the Hiroshima High Court ordered Japanese construction firm Nishimatsu Construction Co. Ltd. to pay a total of 27.5 million yen ($230,000) to a group of five Chinese in compensation for forcing them to work in Japan during World War II.
Source: NPR
Apr 26, 2007
Civil War enthusiasts are fighting over battlefields threatened by the urban sprawl surrounding Atlanta, fearing that history will be lost to real estate development.
Dan Brown is in charge of the Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield, near Atlanta. He controls 3,000 acres of national land. It's the land outside the battlefield preserve that is being eaten up by development.
"This acreage right here across the street is now all condos. These 64 acres...[have] been
Source: Al-Ahram (Cairo)
Apr 26, 2007
AL-ARISH, Egypt -- North Sinai's National Day celebration had a different flavour this year. Apart from the inauguration of new urban development projects that usually mark the event, the city's long-awaited [$8.9m] National Museum is at last finished.
[Plans for] the two-storey Al-Arish National Museum (ANM)...were drawn up in 1994 -- shortly after the return of Sinai's archaeological collection taken by Israel during their occupation...
The 2,500-square-metre museum t
Source: AP
Apr 26, 2007
WASHINGTON -- When CIA Director George Tenet uttered the now-infamous phrase "slam dunk" at a 2002 White House meeting, he says he was referring broadly to the case that could be made against Saddam Hussein -- not his alleged weapons of mass destruction.
"We can put a better case together for a public case. That's what I meant," Tenet said, explaining his remark for the first time in an interview to air Sunday on CBS' "60 Minutes." Short excerpts were r
Source: AP
Apr 26, 2007
DUBLIN -- Prime Minister Bertie Ahern announced Thursday he will meet Northern Ireland Protestant leader Ian Paisley on a hallowed battleground where Catholic and Protestant armies clashed three centuries ago -- an act symbolizing a new mood of reconciliation.
The May 11 event is timed to come three days after the formation of a power-sharing government in Northern Ireland led by Paisley, long a bellicose opponent of cooperation with the north's Catholic minority -- and with Ahern's
Source: AP
Apr 26, 2007
ERFURT, Germany -- Students and teachers at a German high school where a teenager killed 16 people paid tribute Thursday to the victims of the Virginia Tech shooting, weeping and hugging as they marked the fifth anniversary of their own tragedy.
About 1,000 students, teachers and parents observed a moment of silence for those who died in 2002 at the Gutenberg high school in the eastern city of Erfurt, and for victims of the April 16 rampage in Blacksburg, Va."We are also pausing to expr
Source: International Herald Tribune
Apr 26, 2007
HONG KONG -- The Hong Kong government on Thursday closed the pier through which British governors had arrived and departed for decades, as a British diplomat said a few blocks away that although his country remained committed to its former colony, relations with Hong Kong had become "just another foreign relationship."
No senior Hong Kong officials showed up for the speech by Stephen Bradley, the British consul general. Some went instead to the airport to greet the arrival
Source: Reuters
Apr 26, 2007
KANO, Nigeria -- For 500 years the dyers of Kano have crouched over circular pits near the mud city wall, plunging fabrics into water infused with indigo.
The purple cotton of Kano was once famous throughout Africa's arid Sahel belt, in the days when the Nigerian emirate was a center of trans-Saharan trade in salt and gold, rivaling the fabled riches of Timbuktu.
Now more than 100 pits have fallen into disrepair and many of them are clogged with refuse and stones.
Source: Times (of London)
Apr 26, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Tony Blair has felt unable to pick up his US Congressional Gold Medal of Honour for four years partly because the ceremony would reinforce the prejudices of those convinced he was “some sort of poodle”, says Sir David Manning, Britain’s Ambassador in Washington.
The Prime Minister’s 1,351-day delay in collecting the medal from President Bush has long been a source of puzzlement in both Washington and London. Downing Street insists that it is still being designed.
But as
Source: Reuters
Apr 26, 2007
MALA KRUSA, Serbia -- The long grass was freshly cut and the thin trunks of the plum trees painted white in the orchard where Qamil Shehu cheated death in March 1999.
When 15 ambassadors of the United Nations visit this Kosovo village on Saturday, 71-year-old Shehu plans to tell them how he pulled himself unhurt from under the bodies of almost the entire male population of Mala Krusa.
His will be one of many stories of loss when a delegation from the Security Council to
Source: Independent
Apr 26, 2007
It is the closest point on the Italian peninsula to Albania and, until efforts by the coastguard some years ago, was the destination of choice for Albanians fleeing poverty for the glamour and prosperity of their wealthy neighbour. But suddenly, the little town of Castro in the province of Lecce has something much more exciting o shout about.
Archaeologists at the University of Lecce have discovered that the modern town, with its 15th-century walls, sits on the ruins of the port tha
Source: BBC News
Apr 26, 2007
An archaeological dig to unveil the full history of the 2012 Olympics site has begun in east London.
Experts from the Museum of London have begun researching the Roman, Viking, medieval and recent industrial history of the 500-acre site...
"Work will be carried out by experts and hopefully more clues to the Lea Valley's past will be found," [David Higgins, of the Olympic Delivery Authority] said.
"We are starting well ahead of the planned sta
Source: AFP
Apr 26, 2007
TEHRAN -- Iran has overruled critics and started filling a new dam in the parched south of the country that will drown an ancient archaeological site and could threaten the tomb of Cyrus the Great.
Thousands of activists have rallied and petitioned the government not to flood the dam, which is only seven kilometres (four miles) from Pasargadae -- the first capital of the Persian Empire...
It will also drown parts of the Tange Bolaghi area, a mountain pass with ancient s
Source: Francis Gary Powers Jr., Cold War Museum press release
Apr 26, 2007
Over the past ten years, the Cold War Museum has made great strides in honoring Cold War Veterans and preserving Cold War history. I am writing to provide you with a brief update on the Museum's activities. The museum is at a critical stage in its development. Fairfax County Park Authority has accepted the Museum's proposal and has begun the negotiation process necessary for our use of the former Nike Missile Base in Lorton, Virginia. We will be negotiating the terms of the lease over the next f
Source: Daily Star (Dhaka, Bangladesh)
Apr 26, 2007
Panamnagar, a township set up by Hindu merchants in the colonial era in Sonargaon [the ancient capital of Isa Khan's kingdom in Bengal], is virtually losing its originality and uniqueness as an architectural heritage site, in the name of restoration and conservation.
The Department of Archaeology (DoA) has not involved any historian, archaeologist or an architect in the conservation work, rather hired masons are carrying out the job, distorting and defacing a proud heritage of the c
Source: National Geographic News
Apr 26, 2007
Tribes in Southeast Asia are being kept from using the latest high-tech gadgets to help them win land rights.
That's the outcry from activist groups that have been helping indigenous communities mix computers and handheld navigation devices with paints, yarn, and cardboard to make simple but accurate three-dimensional terrain models.
Several tribes have already used such models, based on data from geographic information systems (GIS), to defend their territories from de
Source: Times (of London)
Apr 26, 2007
A passionate defense of gay rights written more than two centuries before homosexuality became legal has been discovered.
Homosexuality was illegal in Britain until 1967, but a University of Manchester academic has unearthed a scroll written by a pioneering gay activist that dates back to the 18th century.
The handwritten parchment indicting the printer of Thomas Cannon’s 1749 book, Ancient And Modern Pederasty Investigated And Exemplified, was found at the Natio
Source: Xinhua/China View
Apr 26, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Visiting Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said here on Thursday that he feels "deeply sorry" for the so-called "comfort women" who were forced to serve as sex slaves for Japanese forces during World War II.
"As a person and as prime minister, I feel sympathy from the bottom of my heart to former comfort women, who experienced hardships," Abe, who arrived for talks with President George W. Bush, told some members of the U.S. Congress.
Source: Times (of London)
Apr 26, 2007
LONDON -- A tiny specimen of penicillin from Alexander Fleming’s laboratory sold for £11,400 at Sotheby’s in London.
The culture was mounted in a glass dish just under two inches in diameter. On the back of the case was written: “The mould which makes penicillin. A. Fleming, 1948.”
Sir Alexander Fleming discovered the germ-killing properties of Penicillium notatum in 1928, but it was not put into general use until 1940.
It was mass-produced during the Secon
Source: AP
Apr 26, 2007
MADRID -- Representatives from cities that have suffered bombardment joined survivors from Guernica Thursday to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Basque town's destruction by German and Italian planes during the Spanish Civil War...
"That event is a mirror in which the injustice of today's bombardments are reflected, allowing us to sympathize with the 30 wars still raging on our planet," said Juan Jose Ibarrtexe, president of the Basque regional government, who met w
