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: Times (of London)
Mar 12, 2007
Life for the first people to settle down to farm in Britain was far more violent than previously supposed, research suggests.
Far from a peaceful expansion into empty and fertile lands, the transformation from hunter-gatherer to farming society was riven with conflict and change. New techniques have allowed archaeologists to pinpoint ages of Early Neolithic, long-barrow burial mounds more accurately, forcing them to revise virtually every assumption about Britain’s first farmers.
Source: Times (of London)
Mar 12, 2007
BERLIN -- Adolf Hitler should be stripped of German citizenship, according to MPs from the state that awarded it to him 75 years ago, aiding his rise to power.
The MPs hope such a move will bring redemption for the city of Braunschweig which, they claim, has been wrongly blamed for appointing Hitler as a civil servant on February 26, 1932. The appointment made Hitler, who was born in Austria, a German national, meaning he could run in the presidential election a few weeks later.
Source: Newsweek
Mar 12, 2007
American museums are returning some of the world's great antiquities to their original homes. Should they? A new debate over who owns the past is underway.
In 1972, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art paid a record-smashing $1 million for an ancient Greek vase known as the Euphronios Krater. It was worth every penny. The krater—a 12-gallon pot for mixing wine and water—was one of only two dozen surviving examples by the great painter Euphronios, and it even had his signature. Thom
Source: AP
Mar 11, 2007
PITTSBURGH -- Adolf Hitler used the theory of eugenics in his quest to create a master race, legitimizing the murder of thousands deemed unfit for the German race and culminating in the genocide of 6 million Jews.
But the idea behind eugenics —- improving a population's health through genetics — was hardly unique to Germany, as shown by a traveling exhibit developed by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and on display at The Andy Warhol Museum.
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Mar 11, 2007
Wind, rain and the reverent touches of 2.5 million annual visitors are taking their toll on the Alamo's limestone walls, slowly eroding the landmark where one of the most important battles for Texas independence took place 171 years ago today.
It's nothing at least $1 million in research and repairs couldn't begin to fix, caretakers said.
Yet, that estimate is "probably a small amount compared to what really needs to be done to adequately handle the site," sai
Source: Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, N.J.)
Mar 11, 2007
A rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike near Exit 8A in Middlesex County is named Molly Pitcher, but did she really exist?
Historical interpreter Stacy Roth of Burlington City answered that question in a re-creation of Molly's life based on historical research, story-telling, imagination and what she calls "plausible conjecture."
Roth sorted fact from fiction during "Over Here, Molly Pitcher," a Women's History Month event last week in Westampton at P
Source: Minneapolis Star Tribune
Mar 11, 2007
Tucked away amid basement boxes and bookshelves in a handsome St. Paul house is a treasure trove that scholars say is rapidly becoming the world's largest repository of Hmong books, artifacts, photographs and recordings. There's a valuable qeej, a traditional Hmong instrument that looks like a wooden trombone and sounds like an accordion. There's a book written by a Chinese emperor in 1810, exploring the history of the oppressed people known in China as the Miao.
There are chipped p
Source: Live Science
Mar 11, 2007
Great fiction, impossible science
The urge to hug a departed loved one again or prevent atrocities are among the compelling reasons that keep the notion of time travel alive in the minds of many.
While the idea makes for great fiction, some scientists now say traveling to the past is impossible.
There are a handful of scenarios that theorists have suggested for how one might travel to the past, said Brian Greene, author of the bestseller, “The Elegan
Source: International Herald Tribune
Mar 11, 2007
LONDON -- An article from 1937 under the name of Winston Churchill that blamed Jews for their own persecution has ruffled a long-held view among Britons of their wartime leader's pro-Jewish sentiments.
Some experts on the history of British Jews dismissed the article, saying its existence has been well-known and it had never been published because Churchill rejected the views of the ghost-writer who composed it...Accounts of the article were reported Sunday in several British newspa
Source: CBC (Canada)
Mar 11, 2007
The Hamas education minister has reversed an order to remove and destroy copies of an anthology of Palestinian folk tales in school libraries because it contains a few references to sexual body parts.
Nasser Shaer said Saturday that he had not been informed of the ban, which was implemented earlier this week.
"I have decided to correct the illegal measures that were taken regarding disposing the book," Shaer told the Associated Press.
Some 1,500 c
Source: NYT
Mar 11, 2007
ALREADY in this pre-presidential year, the question is out and about: How judgmental will the public be of candidates, how demanding of idealized personal lives and vintage family values?
It’s old news that divorce is no longer disqualifying for a candidate, hasn’t been since 1980, when the country elected Ronald Reagan, the divorced and remarried family-values candidate. As national divorce rates skyrocketed, divorce lost its wounding political impact. The end.
Or was
Source: Newsweek
Mar 11, 2007
Newsweek has prepared a slide show featuring pictures of past presidents in Latin America.
[Scroll to Bush in Latin America.]
Source: NYT
Mar 11, 2007
Former political prisoners are coming forward with accounts of witch hunts and torture that can sound unreal to young South Koreans today. Large-scale antigovernment demonstrations, tear gas and firebombs have long since receded from the streets. North Korea stirs more sympathy for its economic plight than it does fear.
The Korea of three decades ago was a very different place.
Source: Sunday Times (of London)
Mar 11, 2007
MILAN -- Pope Benedict XVI plans to bring back the celebration of mass in Latin, overriding a rare show of protest from senior cardinals.
With a papal decree said to be imminent, Catholic publishers in Rome are preparing new editions of the Latin missal. They have sent proofs to Vatican authorities for approval, the Rome newspaper La Repubblica reported yesterday.
Vatican sources said Benedict, who is fluent in Latin, is considering publication of a papal “motu proprio”
Source: Telegraph
Mar 11, 2007
CARAVAGGIO, Italy -- Each year, the sleepy northern Italian town of Caravaggio throws a week-long festival to honour its most famous citizen, the fiery Renaissance artist who took his home town's name.
This year, however, the celebrations are likely to be muted. An art historian in Milan has discovered that Michelangelo Merisi -- the artist's original name -- was not born in Caravaggio. He was born in Milan, on September 29, 1571, and baptised at the church of Santa Maria della Pass
Source: Observer
Mar 11, 2007
When the mutilated bodies of Henry Dee and Charles Moore were dragged up from the waters of the Mississippi in 1964, they were tied to the engine block of a Jeep. The Ku Klux Klansmen who killed the black teenagers had intended their bodies never to be found.
In the Fifties and Sixties, black men, women and children were often killed with impunity by southern whites who believed they would get away with murder. But they were wrong in the case of Dee and Moore, who were both 19.
Source: New York Times
Mar 11, 2007
SALINAS, Calif. -- The National Steinbeck Center, at the top of Main Street in this farming community, exhibits an array of artifacts from John Steinbeck's life and works...Downstairs, in a climate-controlled vault, is the original manuscript of "The Pearl," his novella published in 1947...
Steinbeck aficionados wishing to examine the manuscript of "The Pearl"...have to travel here -— after making an appointment with a part-time archivist, who is in on Mondays, W
Source: Observer
Mar 11, 2007
Winston Churchill's views on anti-Semitism were at the centre of a row last night after Cambridge University claimed to have discovered a 70-year-old document in which the future Prime Minister wrote that Jews may 'have been partly responsible for the antagonism from which they suffer', inviting terms of abuse such as 'Hebrew bloodsucker'.
Dr Richard Toye, a Cambridge historian, said he chanced on a typed article, written by Churchill in 1937 but unpublished, among proofs and press
Source: AFP
Mar 11, 2007
LONDON -- The Second World War prime minister Winston Churchill argued that Jews were "partly responsible for the antagonism from which they suffer" in an article publicised for the first time Sunday.
Churchill made the claim in [a never-published] article entitled "How The Jews Can Combat Persecution" written in 1937, three years before he started leading the country.
He outlined a new wave of anti-Semitism sweeping across Europe and the United Sta
Source: The Hindu (Chennai, India)
Mar 11, 2007
FEROKE, Kerala, India -- [Kerala] Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan has said that India is sliding into the grip of neo-imperialism because of the economic and cultural regime that globalisation has brought about.
Inaugurating the 67th Session of the Indian History Congress at Farook College here on Saturday, Mr. Achuthanandan said the celebration this year of the 150th anniversary of the revolt of 1857 had a special significance in the prevailing situation in India because it gave
