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
Apr 26, 2007
TALLINN, Estonia -- Police clashed with protesters Thursday at a Soviet war memorial in Estonia's capital as authorities prepared to remove the bodies despite Russia's angry objections.
After largely peaceful rallies throughout the day, a group of protesters tried to break through a line of police officers guarding the grave and the Bronze Soldier statue next to it...
Dozens of police had formed lines to keep some 600 protesters away from the monument after workers erec
Source: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Apr 26, 2007
A court in the Netherlands on April 24 ordered the Dutch Defense Ministry to grant a widow of one of the 8,000 victims of the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica access to confidential files about the events surrounding the slaughter, international media reported the same day.
The report did not provide details of the files requested, but the case could reopen questions and sensitivities about the failure of Dutch peacekeepers to protect Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica, which was designated
Source: BBC News
Apr 26, 2007
Experts are "lost for words" to have found that a medieval prayer book has yielded yet another key ancient text buried within its parchment.
Works by mathematician Archimedes and the politician Hyperides had already been found buried within the book, known as the Archimedes Palimpsest.
But now advanced imaging technology has revealed a third text -- a commentary on the philosopher Aristotle.
Project director William Noel called it a "sensatio
Source: Times (of London)
Apr 26, 2007
BERLIN -- The beautiful women of the ancient world have always had a dangerous streak. The face of Helen of Troy launched a thousand warships, and now the exquisite Queen Nefertiti is at the heart of an imminent museum war between Germany and Egypt.
The 3,400-year-old bust of the wife of the Sun King Akhenaten has been in German hands since it was dug out of the desert by the archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt in 1912. It was smuggled out of Egypt and became a central part of Berlin’s m
Source: Independent
Apr 26, 2007
Religious and artistic similarities between the Jewish, Christian and Islamic faiths are to be shown in a groundbreaking exhibition of some of the world's earliest surviving sacred texts.
"Sacred: Discover What We Share," opening tomorrow at the British Library in London, will feature rare and exquisite examples of early bibles, korans and torahs.
It marks the first time a flagship exhibition will display texts from the major monotheistic faiths side by side i
Source: Guardian
Apr 26, 2007
MADRID -- The chief architect working on the Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona yesterday condemned a plan to build a bullet-train tunnel less than two metres from Gaudi's unfinished masterpiece.
Backed by local civic groups, the advisers to Unesco in Spain, and architects and engineers from 50 universities around the world, Jordi Bonet i Armengol, who has worked on Gaudi's daring cathedral for 40 years, said yesterday: "I am astounded by this brutality. This is an attack o
Source: Washington Post
Apr 26, 2007
MOSCOW -- In the two days since former president Boris Yeltsin died, his official standing here has undergone a strange and unlikely transformation. He has been lionized by a political establishment that spent the last six years demonizing what it views as the anarchy and humiliation of Russia during his rule in the 1990s.
Yeltsin "sincerely tried to do everything possible to make the lives of millions of Russians better," President Vladimir Putin said at a reception after
Source: Stars and Stripes, Mideast edition
Apr 26, 2007
In a rare “opinion piece” issued as a news release by the U.S. command in Afghanistan, a soldier has voiced a complaint against the order to put base flags at half-staff for the Virginia Tech shooting victims, but not for soldiers killed in combat.
Sgt. Jim Wilt, assigned to the Combined Joint Task Force-82 Public Affairs Office, wrote: “I find it ironic that the flags were flown at half-staff for the young men and women who were killed at VT, yet it is never lowered for the death o
Source: Long Beach Press Telegram
Apr 25, 2007
LONG BEACH, Calif. -- A Santa Monica-based development team has bid $41 million to purchase the lease to the Queen Mary and its surrounding property, signalling a strong start to what could become a bidding war for the oceanfront acreage as early as this summer...
QSDI declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March 2005 and has been searching for a developer to take over the lease ever since...
The company has released no detailed plans for the Queen Mary's 40-acre site...[but
Source: Smoky Mountain News (Waynesville and Sylva, N.C.)
Apr 25, 2007
When it comes right down to it, the good will of private landowners is often what stands between saving Indian mounds and losing these pieces of ancient history.
“There are no legal obligations regarding mounds on private property, as long as the owners don’t disturb any burials that might be there,” said Linda Hall, a state archaeologist based in Asheville....
North Carolina’s Unmarked Human Burial and Human Skeletal Remains Protection Act requires that anybody “knowin
Source: Science Daily
Apr 25, 2007
In the Yellow River valley of northern China, Zhichun Jing digs through the remains of long-ago cities to find insights for modern survival. Over the past 10 years, Jing has been excavating the cities of the late Shang Dynasty. Flourishing between 1,200 and 1,050 BC, the Shang was one of the first literate civilizations in China and East Asia. Its last capital city was Yinxu, where the present-day city of Anyang now stands....
His study will peel away the layers of China’s 6,000-yea
Source: Press Release -- New-York Historical Society
Apr 25, 2007
The New-York Historical Society’s application to make alterations to its Central Park West building has received unanimous approval by the Landmarks Preservation Commission of the City of New York.
Endorsement of the new design, developed by architectural firm Platt Byard Dovell White, came yesterday with a vote by the Landmarks Preservation Commissioners at a meeting led by Chair Robert Tierney. The vote came after a year-long conversation between N-YHS, its neighbors, elected off
Source: AP
Apr 25, 2007
TOKYO -- Japan's abhorrent practice of enslaving women to provide sex for its troops in World War II has a little-known sequel: After its surrender -- with tacit approval from the U.S. occupation authorities -- Japan set up a similar "comfort women" system for American GIs.
An Associated Press review of historical documents and records -- some never before translated into English -- shows American authorities permitted the official brothel system to operate despite interna
Source: AP
Apr 25, 2007
MOSCOW -- Set on a knoll overlooking an oxbow bend in the Moscow River, the hallowed ground of the Novodevichy Cemetery holds the remains of scores of engineers, artists and politicians who helped shape Russia's tormented past century.
They include the loved and the loathed, the tragic and the triumphant.
Boris Yeltsin, who was buried there Wednesday, was all of these.
He was laid to rest far from Lenin's Tomb in Red Square. Yeltsin's burial at the Kremlin
Source: AP
Apr 25, 2007
BUENOS AIRES -- A federal court threw out amnesties Wednesday for two leaders of Argentina's military dictatorship, saying they must serve their life terms in prison for crimes against humanity.
Former military President Jorge Videla and Navy chief Eduardo Massera were leading members of the 1976-1983 military junta that waged a "dirty war" against political opponents, seizing and killing about 9,000 people, according to official records. Human rights groups put the death
Source: Reuters
Apr 25, 2007
YEREVAN, Armenia -- Thousands of Armenians climbed a mountain in the country's capital on Tuesday to lay wreaths of remembrance for 1.5 million victims of what they call a genocide by Ottoman Turkey 92 years ago. Modern Turkey rejects the Armenian claim, though the issue has evolved into a festering source of tension to both Ankara's EU ambitions and its relations with the United States.
Clutching red tulips and carnations, local families mingled with members of Armenia's diaspora w
Source: AP
Apr 25, 2007
BEVERLY, Mass. -- The Beverly Historical Society has long touted the Balch House in the city as the oldest surviving wood-frame house in the nation...
Two scientists concluded in a long-awaited report that the house was built around 1679, and not 1636 as the historical society has claimed.
Beverly Historical Society director Stephen Hall said the organization will probably drop the claim...[but] said he was not disappointed by the revelation. "I’m never disappoint
Source: New York Times
Apr 25, 2007
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will have a hard act to follow when he makes his first trip as Japan’s leader to the United States this week.
President George W. Bush took his predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi, to Graceland in Memphis, where Mr. Koizumi put on Elvis Presley’s shades and played air guitar while mugging for the camera.
By contrast, Mr. Abe is expected to make a low-key visit ...
In his seven months in office, Mr. Abe has reassured Washington by smooth
Source: Christian Science Monitor
Apr 25, 2007
MOSCOW -- To Western eyes, it was the new, democratic Russia. Boris Yeltsin, the man who had wrested the country from the grip of communism two years earlier, was facing what he described as an armed "mutiny" by communist holdovers in the country's elected parliament. So when Mr. Yeltsin sent troops and tanks to disperse the Supreme Soviet legislature and arrest its leaders, Western leaders cheered his actions.
But many Russians were appalled.
"When I hea
Source: AP
Apr 25, 2007
TOKYO -- Prime Minister Shinzo Abe marked the 60th anniversary of Japan's pacifist postwar Constitution on Wednesday by saying that the country's supreme law is outdated and badly in need of reform.
Overhauling the Japanese constitution, which was penned by U.S. occupation forces after World War II in 1947, has been a key push of the nationalistic Abe, who wants to expand the role of the country's military and bolster patriotism at home.
At a tree planting ceremony near
