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: Dallas Morning News
Feb 5, 2007
Archivists and historians are urging Southern Methodist University to reject the Bush presidential library unless the administration reverses an executive order that gives former presidents and their heirs the right to keep White House papers secret in perpetuity.
"If the Bush folks are going to play games with the records, no self-respecting academic institution should cooperate," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American
Source: Guardian
Feb 5, 2007
So this is where world war three would have been waged. And this is the tub in which, in between ordering retaliatory nuclear strikes, the prime minister would have taken a bath. There is his toilet, and here, in the dead centre of a 34-acre underground bunker in Wiltshire, is the reinforced chamber in which preparations for nuclear winter would have been made. As you stand in the torchlit cold, with the doorframes collapsing from dry rot and with water dripping down incipient stalactites, the r
Source: BBC News
Feb 5, 2007
In the summer of 1940, the war with Germany was at a critical stage.
France had recently surrendered and the Luftwaffe was engaged in a concerted bombing campaign against British cities.
The United Kingdom was being cut off from the Continent, and without allies to help her, she would soon be near the limit of her productive capacity - particularly in the all important field of electronics.
On the morning of 29 August, a small team of the country's top scie
Source: AP
Feb 5, 2007
ORLANDO, Fla. -- A briefcase stuffed with letters, notes and newspaper clippings belonging to slain civil rights leader Harry T. Moore was found in an old vacant barn not far from where he was killed in a house bombing, officials said.
Workers for the Brevard County Historical Commission stumbled across the briefcase as they prepared to move the barn to make way for a planned subdivision.
The documents discovered in November were turned over to the state attorney genera
Source: AP
Feb 5, 2007
STOCKHOLM, Sweden -- For centuries, readers thumbed through the crackling pages of Sweden's Post-och Inrikes Tidningar newspaper. No longer. The world's oldest paper still in circulation has dropped its paper edition and now exists only in cyberspace.
The newspaper, founded in 1645 by Sweden's Queen Kristina, became a Web-only publication on Jan. 1. It's a fate, many ink-stained writers and readers fear, that may await many of the world's most venerable journals...
Quee
Source: Telegraph
Feb 5, 2007
TALLINN, Estonia -- A Nazi state has been reborn within the European Union and its "blasphemous" leaders are bent on glorifying the Third Reich and insulting Russia. There is talk of sanctions and even of internal armed resistance.
That, at least, is the view from Moscow, where politicians from President Vladimir Putin on down have condemned the government in the tiny Baltic republic of Estonia.
On a snow swept square outside the medieval walls of Tallinn's ol
Source: Guardian
Feb 5, 2007
British museums have become used to requests that foreign treasures be repatriated. Greece has persistently requested the return of the Parthenon marbles, while some administrators have agreed to return the remains of Australian Aborigines. Now the pressure is coming from closer to home.
British pagan groups are increasingly asking for human remains and grave goods from pre-Christian burials to be returned to them as well. The presence of what they see as their ancestors in dusty dr
Source: Guardian
Feb 5, 2007
Shakespeare, the world wars and algebra are "untouchable" parts of pupils' study, the education secretary will today tell a review of the secondary curriculum.
Alan Johnson will stress the importance of traditional topics as the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority publishes its plans for overhauling the subjects studied by 11- to 14-year-olds.
The proposals will give schools greater flexibility in deciding what to teach pupils, including dropping French an
Source: Telegraph
Feb 5, 2007
More than three decades after British islands in the Indian Ocean were depopulated to make way for an American base, the Government will ask the courts today to ban the inhabitants from ever returning home.
The Chagos Islands, forming the British Indian Ocean Territory, are one of the world's most isolated archipelagos, found some 2,200 miles east of Mombasa on the Kenyan coast.
At America's request, Britain cleared the islands of all 2,000 of their inhabitants –- refer
Source: Telegraph
Feb 5, 2007
British police and troops were prepared for an airport shoot-out with President Idi Amin and 250 supporters if he tried to attend a meeting for Commonwealth heads of government in London, according to files released at the National Archive yesterday.
The secret security plans included snipers in the airport terminal, explosives experts and armoured ambulances to recover the wounded from the tarmac.
The files have been revealed along with a contingency plan in case the U
Source: NPR
Feb 4, 2007
In Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, Kurdish authorities are trying to turn a historic landmark into a United Nations-approved World Heritage Site. According to local historians, the ancient citadel in Irbil has been the site of human habitation for more than 7,000 years.
The Sumerians built a town on the flat Mesopotamian plains here they called "Ur Bilum." Civilizations came and went. Each wave of new inhabitants — including Assyrians, Persians, Greeks and Ottomans - bui
Source: AP
Feb 4, 2007
POTTSTOWN, Pa. - Flooding from storms has been encroaching on the archaeological site at Valley Forge Park, sending historical artifacts tumbling away in the creek, according to park officials.
Standing on the banks of Valley Creek near its confluence with the Schuylkill River, it is possible to see several stone fences and a pipe that were part of the grist mill that used to stand next to George Washingtons headquarters.
Deirdre Gibson, chief of planning and resource m
Source: AP
Feb 4, 2007
JACKSON, Miss. -- In a state long defined by strident racial divisions, there's serious discussion about building a civil rights museum.
It would be a place where scholars and tourists could learn about lynchings, segregation and voting-rights struggles.
A bill that cleared the Mississippi House 117-3 last week would authorize the state to issue $50 million in bonds to develop a museum.
The discussion among elected officials now is not about whether a museu
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Feb 4, 2007
As President Bush and Congress fight over his plan for a military surge in Iraq, they might do well to study the lessons of diplomacy from quagmires past.
Diplomats, historians and activists who have studied the wars in Vietnam and Lebanon say the history of negotiations in those conflicts can be instructive in finding a way out of Iraq.
"It's a silly argument to say you shouldn't talk to Iran and Syria," said Winston Lord, a top aide to U.S. National Security
Source: Independent
Feb 4, 2007
Shipwrecked and abandoned: the story of the slave Crusoes
In 1776, 57 years after Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe, eight people were rescued from a tiny, treeless island in the Indian Ocean. Seven of them, all women, had survived on the island for 15 years. The eighth, a baby boy, was born there.
The women were the remnants of a group of 60 people who were shipwrecked and then marooned on the scrap of coral and sand in 1761. They were abandoned, and then forgo
Source: Independent
Feb 4, 2007
Archaeologists have discovered that what had been thought to be a relatively small, down-market amphitheatre in Britain was in fact a top-of-the-range, though admittedly more intimate, version of Rome's famous gladiatorial arena.
Indeed, this British Colosseum -- in Chester -- may well have been built as a replica of the one in Rome, possibly on the orders of the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus, who was in Britain at the time.
Although it was much smaller than the Colos
Source: Novinite (Sofia News Agency)
Feb 4, 2007
A rightist leader criticized the statements of Bulgarian President trying, in his words, to rehabilitate a shameful page in the history of post-communism socialists.
The events of February 4, 1997 is the "late Prague spring" of Bulgaria, Union of Democratic Forces leader Petar Stoyanov said on the same day ten years later.
"There is nothing heroic in returning a government mandate when the people is ready to kill you with stones," he said.
Source: The Independent
Feb 4, 2007
The Gibraltar chamber had the innocuous name of the "Stay Behind" Cave. But this was no game. This was a top-secret wartime mission, code-named Operation Tracer, in which six men volunteered to be buried alive in the cave if the Rock were captured by the Germans, so they could continue to monitor enemy movements.
More than 60 years after the end of the Second World War, a retired doctor from Preston has been named as the chamber's last survivor, as researchers struggle to
Source: The Observer
Feb 4, 2007
Thousands of old photographs, exam papers, magazines and books unearthed from the cellars of some of the country's leading girls' schools have revealed a remarkable picture of school life in Victorian and Edwardian Britain.
File after file emerged after school heads were encouraged by the Girls' Schools Association to scour their buildings for historic documents. Among them were stories of girls taught to be dutiful housewives who could wash shirt cuffs properly and control househol
Source: The Observer
Feb 4, 2007
'Dr. Livingstone, I presume.' Four words that made the explorer Henry Morton Stanley enduringly famous. They have been repeated in history books and entered into common speech. Unfortunately it looks as if he never said them.
An exhaustive study of Stanley's life to be published next month contains new evidence about the first meeting in Africa between the lost missionary, Dr. David Livingstone, and Stanley, the adventurer who had spent two years looking for him...
They
