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: Independent
Feb 24, 2007
His name may not be as recognisable as John Christie, the Krays or Dr Crippen. But the prosecution of Horace Rayner was, for its time, as sensational as any of the cases to have graced the dock of Britain's most famous court.
Rayner's appearance at the Central Criminal Court in May 1907 resulted in him acquiring the dubious honour of being the first defendant to be convicted of murder at the Old Bailey.
Next week Rayner's trial, and the trials of many others, will be re
Source: Donga.com (Dong-A Ilbo) (South Korea)
Feb 24, 2007
The founding of Korea’s ancient kingdom of Gojoseon will be officially written as part of national history in high school history textbooks. In addition, the Bronze Age on the Korean peninsula will be described to date back 1,000 years earlier than was previously thought.
The Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development announced yesterday its plan to deliver the revised history books to schools nationwide for the class of 2007.
Academic and political circles h
Source: The Register (UK)
Feb 23, 2007
Detailed maps of the UK created by the KGB between 1950 and 1990 have gone on sale in digital format for the first time.
The maps show 16,000 square kilometres and 103 UK town and cities in more detail than Ordnance Survey maps. The Russians used satellite images and spies on the ground to create the maps, which include army camps and warehouses that don't appear on other maps.
The maps include other information likely to be useful for an invading army, such as the
Source: CNN
Feb 23, 2007
SWANNANOA, North Carolina (AP) -- There is no monument to Alma Shippy.
No plaque describes how, in 1952, the shy teenager packed a bag of clothes, caught a ride in a friend's pickup truck and walked into history on the campus of Warren Wilson Junior College.
It's an obscure vignette in civil rights history. Shippy not only was Warren Wilson's first black student, but one of the few to attend any segregated college or junior college by invitation -- and not by court orde
Source: Reuters
Feb 23, 2007
BOSTON -- A trove of Kennedy family paraphernalia, including a letter in which former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy appears to counsel her sister-in-law about marital troubles, will be auctioned off in Connecticut this weekend.
The letters, along with a life preserver from President John F. Kennedy's sailboat and other items, were found in a storage unit on the Cape Cod summer resort area of Massachusetts, where the Kennedys still maintain a family home.
"Be a bit
Source: PR Newswire
Feb 23, 2007
PROVO, Utah -— In celebration of Black History Month, Ancestry.com, the world's largest online resource for family history, announced the launch of the largest collection of African-American family history records available and searchable online.
The collection, which represents the 19th and early 20th centuries, features more than 55 million black family history records that collectively dispel the common misconception that very few historical records were kept for African American
Source: Telegraph
Feb 23, 2007
A High Court fight to stop tests on the 100-year-old remains of 17 Tasmanian Aborigines was deferred yesterday.
Lawyers for the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, which was recently made administrator of the estates of the Aborigines, claim that they are "souls in torment" while their remains are subjected to the "sacrilege" of experimentation at the Natural History Museum.
That would stop only when they were buried according to Aboriginal custom.
Source: BBC
Feb 23, 2007
Ninety years after the battle of Passchendaele, officially known as the third battle of Ypres, a group of enthusiasts is attempting to dig up some of the key trenches of World War I.
Across a flat, muddy Flanders landscape, a solitary figure is plodding along the furrows.
Geophysicist Malcolm Weale is a battlefield detective who specialises in uncovering history that has lain hidden for generations.
In this case, the ground beneath his feet shields secrets
Source: Economist
Feb 23, 2007
THE archaeological site in Thonotosassa, which means “land of flint” in the Seminole-Creek language, is nothing much to look at: a few pits dug in the sandy soil among gnarled live oak trees, with cattle grazing round. No one guards it. Yet this place, about 17 miles (27km) north-east of Tampa, is a good spot to find Indian artefacts, on high ground close to fresh water. Robert Austin, an archaeologist who has dug there often, says that some of the remains discovered date back 12,000 years.
Source: AP
Feb 23, 2007
NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- A rare, 184-year-old copy of the Declaration of Independence found by a bargain hunter at a Nashville thrift shop is being valued by experts at about 100,000 times the $2.48 purchase price.
Michael Sparks, a music equipment technician, is selling the document in an auction March 22nd at Raynors' Historical Collectible Auctions in Burlington, North Carolina. The opening bid is $125,000 and appraisers have estimated it could sell for nearly twice that.
Source: Telegraph
Feb 23, 2007
Women may have developed the first weapons to compete with physically stronger males, scientists have claimed.
Researchers studying chimpanzees, which share 98 per cent of their DNA with human beings, found it was mainly females who used crude spears to attack other animals.
They now believe that early human females could also have pioneered hunting with tools to compensate for their inferior size and strength.
“Females will have to come up with creative wa
Source: Telegraph
Feb 23, 2007
Personal details of millions of British soldiers who fought in the First World War are to be revealed online.
In a remarkable development for family-tree researchers and social historians, the records have been put on a genealogy website.
They amount to some 2.5 million names, 28 thousand reels of transcribed microfilm and countless forgotten details about physical appearance, discipline record, regimental movements, postings, next of kin, military career histories and,
Source: BBC
Feb 22, 2007
Survivors and victims' families say more should be done to recognise those who died in one of Britain's biggest World War II disasters.
An estimated 4,000 people died when HMT Lancastria went down
A few miles off the coast of France lays the wreck of HMT Lancastria, sunk 67 years ago by German bombers.
It is a reminder of the afternoon of 17 June 1940, described as Britain's worst maritime disaster in history.
On that day an estimated 4,000 tro
Source: CNN
Feb 22, 2007
Four decades after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, the streets, avenues, boulevards and highways that bear his name remain crossroads of the nation's past and future.
In Atlanta, not far from where King grew up and preached at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Martin Luther King Jr. Drive winds through the heart of the city. For 10 miles, the road dedicated in King's name in 1976 stretches past homes, schools, restaurants, liquor stores, strip malls, churches, barbershops, a
Source: AP
Feb 22, 2007
TALLINN, Estonia -- Estonia's president vetoed legislation Thursday calling for the removal of a Soviet war memorial, averting at least temporarily a confrontation with Russia.
The bill, which had provoked an angry response from Moscow, now goes back to parliament where lawmakers could override the veto.
The measure would prohibit the public display of monuments that glorify the five-decade Soviet occupation of Estonia. It was specifically aimed at the Bronze Soldier, a
Source: AP
Feb 22, 2007
CONCORD, N.H. -- The farm of orator and statesman Daniel Webster will be preserved under a deal announced Thursday after it had been slated to become a housing development.
The Trust for Public Land put together the $2.5 million deal with help from the state and federal governments, private donors and the state's public-private Land and Community Heritage Investment Program...
Webster was born in 1782 in Franklin, although not on the 141-acre farm on the Merrimack Rive
Source: Live Science
Feb 22, 2007
The Clovis People, a prehistoric group of mastodon hunters distinguished by their unique spear points and once thought to be the first Americans, likely populated North America after other humans had already arrived, a new study concludes.
The Clovis and their hunting technologies were not the first inhabitants of the New World, researchers write in the Feb. 23 issue of the journal Science, addressing a longstanding debate on the first New World humans.
Source: Dawn (Karachi, Pakistan)
Feb 22, 2007
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Religious parties in the National Assembly were on Wednesday up in arms against teaching Pakistan’s pre-Islamic history in schools...
Members of the six-party Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal also staged a token protest walkout over the inclusion of chapters about Hinduism, Buddhism and ancient emperor Chandragupta Maurya in the history textbooks for classes VI to VIII after a heated discussion...
Five MMA members had raised the history textbook issue... [
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Feb 22, 2007
The lighthouses of the Golden Gate are going the way of the crow's nest, the sextant and Morse code.
The romantic icons of the sea have been replaced by high-tech buoys, shipboard computers and global positioning satellites. The Coast Guard no longer needs the lighthouses, no longer wants them and is giving them to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
"They're obsolete," Petty Officer Russ Tippets said Wednesday. "They're no longer relevant in today'
Source: HNN Staff summary of op ed in the WSJ
Feb 22, 2007
The writer Edward Jay Epstein claims in an op ed in the Wall Street Journal that the Spanish judge investigating terrorism has found that Ramzi Binalshibh and Mohamed Atta lied when they claimed they had seen no one else but each other on visits to Spain. Epstein says this suggests that it's possible others were involved in the 9/11 plot than has previously been disclosed, including perhaps, people in Spain, Iran, Hezbollah, Malaysia, Iraq, the Czech Republic or Pakistan.
