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: Breitbart
Feb 10, 2007
BUCHENWALD, Germany (AP) -- The hunt begins with a number.
Harry Stein sits nose-to-screen, squinting at the fuzzy digits in column after column on faded microfilm, searching for clues to a mystery: Who was Auschwitz inmate 185403?
The number was tattooed on the left forearm of one of the thousands who were processed through Auschwitz, shipped off to Buchenwald concentration camp, and never seen again.
Male? Female? Old? Young? Jewish? Christian? Reason
Source: AP
Feb 10, 2007
TRENTON, N.J. -- Among the casualties of the Iraq war is a little-known religious faith called Mandaeanism that has survived roughly two millennia and whose adherents believe that John the Baptist was their great teacher.
While there were more than 60,000 Mandaeans in Iraq in the early 1990s, only about 5,000 to 7,000 remain. Many have fled amid targeted killings, rapes, forced conversions and property confiscation by Islamic extremists, according to a report released last week by t
Source: Newsweek
Feb 9, 2007
Suddenly, faith, once an entirely private affair, has infused the [French] president's political discourse. In Riyadh on Jan. 14, [Nicolas] Sarkozy referenced the Lord 13 times in a speech to Saudi Arabia's Consultative Council, evoking a "transcendent God who is in the thoughts and the heart of every man." That was news to France's estimated 15 million atheists and agnostics, a quarter of the country.
The revival has touched a nerve among a large swath of the French popul
Source: International Herald Tribune
Feb 9, 2007
FLORENCE -— Maurizio Seracini claims not to be pleased that he is the only person mentioned by his real name in “The Da Vinci Code.” A scientist turned art detective, he has no need for any manufactured mystery around Leonardo. For 32 years he has chased a real one —- and he seems now, finally, poised to solve it.
It is a long, and satisfyingly complex, story. But it can be summed up with one question: What happened to “The Battle of Anghiari,” a grimacing crunch of men and horses c
Source: http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com
Feb 9, 2007
The calendar boasts plenty of religious holidays, but how many scientific holidays can you name? One of the red-letter days is coming up on Monday, when more than 850 events around the globe will mark Darwin Day, the 198th anniversary of the evolutionary theorist's birth. You can hear about Charles Darwin and the revolution he sparked from hundreds of church pulpits this weekend, as part of a program called Evolution Sunday.
Are those godless secularists trying to take on the trappi
Source: Hampton Roads (Va.) Daily Press
Feb 9, 2007
WILLIAMSBURG -- A skeptical group of archaeologists and historians will meet here Monday with an embattled Army archaeologist who recently identified a site near Cape Henry in Virginia Beach as a previously unknown early Colonial settlement called Henry Towne.
Made up of prominent figures based in the Williamsburg area, the group believes that the documentary evidence on which the identification is partly based actually refers to a Richmond-area settlement known as Henricus.
Source: Los Angeles Times
Feb 9, 2007
JERUSALEM -- Israeli police raided the grounds of Islam's third-holiest shrine Friday, chained the compound's gates behind them, and fired tear gas and stun grenades into a crowd of thousands of Muslim worshippers to quell a rock-throwing protest over Israeli excavation work nearby.
The clash outside the Al Aqsa mosque set off protests across the Muslim world and scattered violence in the West Bank. It came a day after the rival Palestinian movements Hamas and Fatah agreed to end mo
Source: UPI
Feb 9, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO -- Holocaust survivor and chronicler Elie Wiesel escaped unharmed from an attacker who may have been a Holocaust denier, police in San Francisco say.
Wiesel was accosted in the elevator at the Argent Hotel, where he was attending a conference on "Facing Violence: Justice, Religion and Conflict Resolution," police said. A man insisted on interviewing Wiesel, who agreed but said they would talk in the hotel lobby.
Police Sgt. Neville Gittens told t
Source: NPR All Things Considered (includes audio link)
Feb 9, 2007
Twenty-five years ago, a missile silo south of Tucson was one of the most top-secret places in America. At the height of the Cold War, it was part of a network of nuclear warheads designed to avert a nuclear attack. The silo housed the Titan 2 Missile, which could be launched in less than a minute from its position 150 feet beneath the Sonoran Desert.
The missile was never launched. And the site is now a National Historic Landmark that hosts a museum dedicated to the Titan 2 Missile
Source: Chicago Tribune
Feb 9, 2007
By announcing his presidential intentions on Saturday at the Old State Capitol in Springfield, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama is wrapping himself in the mystique of Abraham Lincoln.
The crimson-domed Old State Capitol, just east of the present Illinois capitol, is where Lincoln served his fourth and final term as a state representative in 1840-41. And it's where, in 1858, in a debate with Stephen Douglas during their campaign battle for the U.S. Senate, Lincoln gave his "House Divided
Source: Lee White in the newsletter of the National Coalition for History
Feb 9, 2007
The "Teaching American History" grants program at the Department of Education would be substantially cut under the Bush proposal. In FY ‘06 the program received $120 million and the administration would slash that by over $70 million to $50 million in fiscal year 2008. The administration’s rationale is “the number of quality applications for assistance under this program in recent years does not justify the current level of funding.” Senator Robert C. Byrd, the original sponsor of the
Source: AP
Feb 9, 2007
An Army archaeologist who recently identified a Virginia Beach site as a previously unknown early Colonial settlement called Henry Towne is to meet Monday with a group of dubious archaeologists and historians.The Williamsburg-area group thinks the documentary evidence on which the identification is partly based actually refers to a Richmond-area settlement known as Henricus. They also have questions about the date of a group of artifacts originally recovered at the Virginia
Source: AP
Feb 9, 2007
EDISON, N.J. -- One of the inventions that put this central New Jersey town on the map could go the way of the typewriter and the horse and buggy if some lawmakers have their way.
The incandescent light bulb, perfected for mass use by Thomas A. Edison in the late 19th century, is being supplanted by fluorescent lighting that is more efficient and longer lasting.
Last month, California Assemblyman Lloyd Levine announced he would propose a bill to ban the use of incandesc
Source: BBC News
Feb 9, 2007
The very stones of Jerusalem are political weapons in the age-old struggle for possession of the Holy Land.
And nowhere is more sensitive than the great platform built by King Herod, known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to the Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary.
To understand the current row over excavation and repair work just outside one of the gates onto the compound, it is important to know that here history, religion and politics meet. Nothing in Jerusalem can be und
Source: AP
Feb 9, 2007
Shanghai has started restoration work on one of its two remaining synagogues as part of China's effort to revive Jewish heritage in a city that provided refuge to tens of thousands of Jews during World War II.
In another sign of the new interest, a rabbi ministering to the city's Jewish community said Thursday he believes officials will eventually turn over the other synagogue for regular worship services.
The restoration of the Ohel Moishe synagogue, now a Jewish histo
Source: BBC News
Feb 9, 2007
There are warnings of a shortage of history teachers in England -- weeks after the subject was made central to plans to promote social cohesion.
History teacher training places have been cut by 40% since 2004, according to data obtained by Liberal Democrat education spokeswoman Sarah Teather...Ms Teather said many schools were struggling to fill history posts and that a third of teachers were over 50.
The figures emerged shortly after Education Secretary Alan Johnson sa
Source: Guardian
Feb 9, 2007
The US is to help fund efforts in Vietnam to clean up soil contaminated by the defoliant Agent Orange in a move hailed today as the first step in healing a long-running rift between the two former enemies.Washington's ambassador to Vietnam said that the US would contribute $400,000 (£210,000) to a $1m study to find ways to removed the highly toxic chemical, dioxin, from earth at the war-era air force base at Danang.
It is one of three hotspots at air bases ident
Source: German Press Agency
Feb 9, 2007
Michelangelo lived in a small room inside Rome's
Basilica of St Peter's during the last 17 years of his life, according to a report Friday in daily La Repubblica. The report cites a recently discovered receipt dating back to March 1557, in which an engraver was paid "10 scudi" for making a key
for a chest "in the room in St Peter's where Master Michelangelo retires to." Historians had always suspected that the great Renaissance artist spent
Source: Independent
Feb 9, 2007
The First World War poet Rupert Brooke would have been horrified. His poem, "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester", written in 1912, was a loving homage to his Cambridgeshire home, which he thought epitomised idyllic, rural England.
But now the area eulogised by Brooke for its "peace and Holy quiet" has been hit by a crime wave, with the Old Vicarage itself -- home of disgraced author and Conservative peer Jeffrey Archer -- the scene of the latest outbreak.
Source: International Herald Tribune
Feb 9, 2007
ISTANBUL -- A group of civic organizations submitted suggestions Thursday for rewording a section of the Turkish penal code under which noted intellectuals and writers have been charged with the crime of insulting the Turkish identity and state.
But some groups broke with the main umbrella organization and said the law need to be revoked, not amended...
Many in Turkey consider the law, known as Article 301, to be at the root of the murder of the Armenian-Turkish journal
