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: Chicago Tribune
Mar 22, 2007
Four years after the looting of the Iraqi National Museum during the fall of Baghdad, frustrated antiquities experts say untold thousands of Mesopotamian artifacts have been stolen from other vulnerable historical sites across the nation.
Though the museum is now safe--its doors bricked shut and collections entombed behind welded cellar doors--the country's 12,000 archeological sites are mostly unprotected and the Iraqi government is hard-pressed to stop their plunder....
Source: Reuters
Mar 22, 2007
BUNCE ISLAND, Sierra Leone -- The ivy-clad ruins perched on a strip of mud in the Sierra Leone river hide a dark past, but have become an unlikely symbol of hope for many African Americans seeking slave forbears.
As a departure point for thousands of Africans on the perilous crossing to the New World, the once proud castle on Bunce Island is a crumbling monument to the horrors of the Transatlantic slave trade.
"There are probably tens of thousands of African Americ
Source: AP
Mar 22, 2007
TAIPEI -- The white, palacelike Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall with its gleaming, blue-tiled octagonal roof stands out as one of the few examples of classic Chinese architecture in Taiwan's capital, Taipei.
But the legacy of the late Chiang —- who formerly led China's once-dominant Nationalist Party but fled to Taiwan with his followers after his defeat on the mainland by Communist forces —- is under attack by the Taiwanese government, making the massive monument an object of controv
Source: BBC News
Mar 22, 2007
BBC Rome correspondent David Willey covered the signing of the Treaty of Rome as a Reuters trainee. Here he looks back at the Europe of half a century ago.
I was actually there in the huge room frescoed with scenes from ancient Roman battles, when the six frock-coated founders of the Europe of the Six appended their signatures to the Treaty.
Crowded into the room were members of parliament, city authorities and, I seem to remember, a single red-hatted cardinal fr
Source: AP
Mar 22, 2007
CHARLESTON, S.C. -- The story of the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley, the first sub to sink an enemy warship, is leading back to the Old World as researchers plan to spend weeks trying to discover the roots of four European crewmen.
Scientists also said Thursday they have recovered a second coin from the hand-cranked sub — a silver dime to go along with a $20 gold piece recovered in 2001.
With a mint date of 1841, the dime shows Lady Liberty seated in robes, surround
Source: AP
Mar 22, 2007
BELGRADE, Serbia -- Decomposing corpses were dumped into a trash-filled ditch. Blindfolded and hands bound, three Albanian-Americans were led to its edge and shot in the head, their bodies joining the others.
The details, emerging for the first time at the trial of two former Serbian commandos, shed light on how the regime of late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic tried to conceal atrocities against ethnic Albanians in the 1998-99 Kosovo war.
Thousands were killed in
Source: The Statesman (Accra, Ghana)
Mar 22, 2007
Last Friday, at a hotel, thousands of miles away in Bloomsbury, London, Ghana's Minister of Justice, Joe Ghartey said something that perhaps only a classroom of Ghanaians knew.
The young and very promising politician told his audience that Paa Grant, the founder and sponsor of the group that formalised the struggle for independence from 1947, Paa Grant was in fact first to have called for Positive Action, a phrase more associated with the man who did more with other's ideas than the
Source: AP
Mar 22, 2007
NEW YORK -- For all his death-defying stunts, Harry Houdini couldn't escape the Grim Reaper: He died on Halloween 1926, apparently from a punch to the stomach that ruptured his appendix. But rumors that he was murdered have persisted for decades. Eighty-one years after Houdini's death, his great-nephew wants the escape artist's body exhumed to determine if enemies poisoned him for debunking their bogus claims of contact with the dead.
"It needs to be looked at," George Har
Source: AP
Mar 22, 2007
NEW YORK -- A prolonged debate over whether to preserve a 175-ton staircase that still stands at the World Trade Center site is threatening construction schedules for new office towers, rebuilding officials said this week.
The staircase, which several people used to escape the debris-filled complex in the moments after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, has been named one of the nation's most endangered places by a preservation group. It is the only remnant of the complex that is above street
Source: Kyodo News
Mar 22, 2007
TOKYO -— Japanese and Chinese academics in a joint history study committee on March 20 agreed to take up contentious issues such as the 1937 Nanjing Massacre and visits by Japanese premiers to Yasukuni Shrine in their future discussions, Japanese panel members said.
But the committee members, during their two-day meeting in Tokyo through March 20, failed to discuss this time whether they will deal with the issue of Japan’s forcing women to provide sex for its soldiers before and dur
Source: Press Release -- The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
Mar 22, 2007
“Let her paintings go!”
That’s the Passover eve appeal issued by fifty prominent attorneys and legal scholars to Polish museum authorities, urging the return of seven paintings that California artist Dina Babbitt was forced to paint in Auschwitz in 1943.
Mrs. Babbitt, 83, was forced by the infamous Nazi war criminal, Dr. Josef Mengele, to paint portraits of Gypsy prisoners on whom he was performing sadistic medical experiments. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, in P
Source: AP
Mar 22, 2007
BEIJING -- A $258 million restoration project is planned for an ancient town where the Great Wall meets the sea, state media reported Thursday.
The project will transform Shanhaiguan, built in 1381 during the Ming Dynasty as a strategic military post to help defend Beijing, the Xinhua News Agency said...
Xinhua said the district has already spent $93 million restoring watchtowers, gates and five memorial arches on the wall in Shanhaiguan.
China in recent ye
Source: AP
Mar 22, 2007
A huge column in the garden of an ancient Roman villa at Pompeii was toppled in what officials said Wednesday was an act of vandalism.
"This isn't a simple act of vandalism, which, while bad enough, could be explained by ignorance," superintendent Giovanni Guzzo said, calling it "an act of intimidation."
Spokeswoman Francesca de Lucia said the force needed to topple the large column, which broke into at least five pieces, suggested that the perpetrat
Source: AP
Mar 22, 2007
NEW LONDON, Tex. -- The world's greatest tragedies always have given way to stories of hope, heartache, despair and determination to overcome. The London School explosion that happened 70 years ago is no different.
Walter Cronkite, one of the 20th Century's most well-known reporters, called March 18, 1937, the "day a generation died." It is an apt description of the loss of nearly three-fifths of that school's students and teachers.
"We weren't allowed to
Source: Washington Times
Mar 22, 2007
Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine says he will approve a $400,000 amendment that would fund the cash-strapped Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, ending its recent struggle to secure state assistance.
The cash infusion will help cover the museum's 2007-08 general operating budget, which includes staffing. The annual price tag to run the museum is estimated at $2.1 million.
Museum officials hope that a combination of budget cuts and emergency fundraising effort
Source: AP
Mar 22, 2007
SEOUL, South Korea -- South Korea said Thursday it would build a park in memory of victims of the U.S. Army's mass killing of South Korean refugees at the village of No Gun Ri.
The park will be built at the scene of the 1950 attack during the Korean War, said Choi Jeong-pil, an official with a government commission on the shootings...
The No Gun Ri killings were documented in a Pulitzer Prize-winning story by The Associated Press in 1999, which prompted a 16-month Penta
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, is published by the Federation of American Scientists
Mar 22, 2007
In what is being characterized by subordinates as an act of
"managerial dementia," the Director of the Congressional
Research Service this week prohibited all public distribution of
CRS products without prior approval from senior agency
officials.
"I have concluded that prior approval should now be required at
the division or office level before products are distributed to
members of the public," wrote CRS Director Daniel
Source: Telegraph
Mar 22, 2007
It is curt, undiplomatic and written on a slightly crumpled piece of paper -- but it marked the beginnings of three of the most dramatic months in recent British history.
The note, dictated over the radio and ordering a group of Argentinians to leave the remote island of South Georgia at once, has now gone on show for the first time [at the National Army Museum in central London].
Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the delivery of the note by Rex Hunt, the Governor o
Source: Independent
Mar 22, 2007
During Liz Hurley's glamorous wedding to Arun Nayar this month, the small Cotswolds town of Winchcombe teemed with the world's media.
This spring, the 5,000 residents of this corner of Gloucestershire have another celebration to mark, though it is unlikely to attract a single red-top reporter or autograph hunter.
When the bells ring out in Winchcombe this May, they will be marking the anniversary of a long-forgotten municipal oddity.
One thousand years ago,
Source: Erik Hedegaard in Rolling Stone
Mar 21, 2007
Once, when the old spymaster thought he was dying, his eldest son came to visit him at his home in Miami. The scourges recently had been constant and terrible....It was like something was eating him up. Long past were his years of heroic service to the country. In the CIA, he'd helped mastermind the violent removal of a duly elected leftist president in Guatemala and assisted in subterfuges that led to the murder of Che Guevara. But no longer could you see in him the suave, pipe-smoking, cocktai
