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: VOA News
Feb 13, 2007
Italian archaeologists say they will not separate the remains of stone age lovers, which they unearthed last week on the outskirts of the northern city of Mantua.
Archaeologists said Tuesday they would scoop out the tightly embraced male and female skeletons and keep them together. The couple was buried between 5,000- and-6,000 years ago. They are believed to have died young because their teeth were found intact.
The discovery during construction work has sparked theori
Source: AP
Feb 13, 2007
A debate over how evolution is taught in Kansas also has become a debate over what students should hear in science classes about the Nazis, forced sterilization and an infamous study of syphilis in black men.A brief passage about history in science standards for the state's public schools became an issue Monday, as the State Board of Education prepared to vote on a new set of guidelines. Seeking to rewrite anti-evolution standards adopted in 2005, the board targeted for dele
Source: MSNBC
Feb 13, 2007
Chemists have solved a 20-year mystery surrounding the date of a Madonna and Child painting, the "de Brecy Tondo," painted by an as-yet unidentified artist. However, a debate continues as to who painted the "de Brecy Tondo," which looks suspiciously similar to the "Sistine Madonna," painted by the renowned Italian Renaissance artist Raphael.Howell Edwards, a specialist in Raman spectroscopy at the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom, us
Source: Pan Armenian Net
Feb 13, 2007
Examination of mass graves discovered on October of 2006 in Turkish district of Nusaybin will be carried out by an international expedition. Swedish historian David Gaunt is sure that the graves belongs to 270 Armenians and Assyrians, who were killed by order of a Young Turks chieftain. Turkish authorities have not carried out any investigation, journalists were not allowed to approach the burial and obtain more information.n this connection Hans Dinden, a deputy from Swedis
Source: Christian Science Monitor
Feb 13, 2007
Using a tiny global-positioning device to measure their location via satellite and a map superimposed on topographical images provided by Google Earth, Daniel Adamson and Mahmoud Twaissi are tracking the route that Abraham might have trod.
The ends, however, are as ancient as can be. The two researchers – one British, one Jordanian – are tracing the footsteps of the ancestral patriarch of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the hope that people today will rediscover the common root
Source: Independent
Feb 13, 2007
The grisly truth about the disappearance of a British woman believed to have been murdered on the orders of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, has been revealed for the first time in secret papers released by the government.
Dora Bloch, a 74-year-old grandmother, was a passenger on an Air France plane from Athens to Paris when it was hijacked by Palestinian terrorists and forced down at Entebbe airport, Uganda, in 1976.
During the hijack, Mrs Bloch was taken ill after choki
Source: AP
Feb 12, 2007
BRIDGETOWN, Barbados -- The newly renovated Barbados home where George Washington lived as a young man in 1751 has attracted hundreds of visitors from the United States and Britain only weeks after opening, officials said.
The George Washington House and Museum, completed in mid-January after an 8-year restoration project costing nearly $3.5 million, honors the first U.S. president and documents his time in the Caribbean.
The site in the Garrison Historic district, just
Source: Kampala (Uganda) Monitor
Feb 12, 2007
KAMPALA, Uganda -- It is exactly one week since the historic unveiling of the [President's] Shs40 million shilling statue at Kabamba military barracks.
It depicts a youthful Popular Resistance Army (PRA) guerrilla leader, Yoweri Museveni [now president of Uganda], directing the attack on the armoury at the beginning of the five year 'bush war' between 1981 and 1986 against the Uganda People's Congress (UPC) government of the late Dr Apollo Milton Obote.
The world over s
Source: International Herald Tribune
Feb 12, 2007
SAMARRA, Iraq -- There is still no gold dome on the Mosque of the Golden Dome.
It has been a year, by the Muslim calendar, since an attack on one of the Shiites most sacred shrines here shattered this ancient mosque, ripping a hole to the heavens in its once glorious dome. Now, it is a hulking shell of its former self, gnarled and twisted metal snaking around the crumbling concrete structure. The blue and gold tiles that adorned the facade of the Al Askariya Shrine, covered with gra
Source: AP
Feb 12, 2007
WASHINGTON -- To honor black history, President Bush on Monday didn't spend much time looking back. He focused instead on people contributing today _ those who are seizing opportunities gained at great price, the president said. "Their stories," Bush said, "speak a lot louder and a lot clearer than I could."
Like the breakthrough by Lovie Smith and Tony Dungy, who this month became the first black coaches to take their teams to the Super Bowl. Or the work of astr
Source: AP
Feb 12, 2007
ALBANY, Ga. -- Two civil rights groups plan to ask federal officials to investigate the 60-year-old unsolved killing of a World War II veteran who was shot after becoming the first registered black voter in a rural Georgia county.
Maceo Snipes, who served most of his two-year Army hitch in the Pacific, was shot in the back by four white men in 1946 -- a day after the 37-year-old voted for the first time, relatives say. He collapsed in the doorway of his farm house in Taylor County,
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Feb 12, 2007
It's been nearly 80 years since Sam Spade wandered the streets of San Francisco in search of the Maltese Falcon. Now, the statue is missing again.
John Konstin, the owner of San Francisco's John's Grill on Ellis Street, said someone broke into a locked cabinet on the second floor of his establishment and took a signed reproduction of the Maltese Falcon -- one used for publicity stills for the movie -- along with several vintage and signed books by and about Maltese Falcon author Das
Source: NYT
Feb 12, 2007
If he testifies as expected, Dick Cheney would be the first sitting vice president, at least in modern times, to appear as a witness in a criminal trial. And if he testifies in court, he may also be the first to give live testimony in defense of a subordinate’s actions on his behalf, legal historians said.
Mr. Cheney’s testimony as a courtroom witness for his former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., would break with one of the closest historical parallels, when former President Ro
Source: NYT
Feb 12, 2007
Survivors of the Holocaust and their relatives, who have been fighting to compel European insurance companies to pay death benefits for victims of the Nazis, are getting a break from a big Italian insurance company, lawyers for the insurer and policyholders said yesterday.
As part of a proposed class-action settlement, the company, Assicurazoni Generali, has agreed to give heirs of Holocaust victims another 18 months to uncover documentation on unpaid life insurance policies at long
Source: Baltimore Sun
Feb 12, 2007
Abraham Lincoln was born 198 years ago today, but his melancholy visage has perhaps never been as popular. He's the star of television commercials -- including one in which a beaver is his co-star -- and is the subject of at least eight recent books, with more on the way. A motion picture directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Liam Neeson is in the works.
Politicians, too, are getting in on the act. Officials ranging from Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, who launched his presidential
Source: http://www.sun-sentinel.com
Feb 12, 2007
Subdivisions. Strip malls. Roadside motels.
The Baby Boomers of buildings have hit a milestone this decade: They're turning 50, the benchmark age for historic designation.
Mid-century modern architecture -- think Brady Bunch houses and drive-in restaurants -- is eligible to join the ranks of its architectural ancestors, such as Queen Anne, Art Deco and Classic Revival.
"We're the new kids on the block for historic preservation," said Virginia Cour
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Feb 12, 2007
There is no place for polygamy in Mormon life -- not even on a Web site.
That's the message a Brigham Young University assistant dean got when administrators ordered him to take down a Web page from the university's server that discussed the history of polygamy and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Within a day, though, he had moved all the content to an independent Web site called Mormon-Polygamy.org, according to The Salt Lake Tribune.
Jim Engebretsen,
Source: AP
Feb 12, 2007
ROME -- Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel said in an interview published Monday that an attack on him earlier this month in San Francisco shows that Holocaust deniers are increasing worldwide and getting bolder by the day.
The Holocaust scholar was dragged from an elevator and roughed up during a peace conference at a San Francisco hotel on Feb. 1, according to police. The author was not injured.
"Until today they used words; now they have switched to violence," Wies
Source: AFP
Feb 12, 2007
JERUSALEM -- Israel has frozen contested building work near Jerusalem's most volatile holy site but pressed with archaeological excavations, triggering further Muslim outcry.
Jerusalem mayor Uri Lupolianski decided to suspend the work to allow public discussion of Israel's plans to replace a damaged wooden bridge leading to the Al-Aqsa mosque compound with a stone ramp.
Protests by Palestinian worshippers descended into several days of violence in Jerusalem and parts of
Source: Telegraph (Calcutta, India)
Feb 12, 2007
CALCUTTA -- Raj Bhavan’s move to dig out pre and post Independence history may redefine happenings under British rule.
Birendra Singh, a history professor, has gifted Raj Bhavan [the former viceroys' mansion, built by the Marquis Wellesley in 1799-1803] a rare history book penned by Sundar Lal, 'Bharat Mein Angrezi Raj', which the British [suppressed] in 1938.
In response to an open invitation from the Raj Bhavan to gift manuscripts, documents, photographs and diaries r
