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: WaPo
Jan 31, 2007
As Neil Armstrong prepared to take his "one small step" onto the moon in July 1969, a specially hardened video camera tucked into the lander's door clicked on to capture that first human contact with the lunar surface. The ghostly images of the astronaut's boot touching the soil record what may be the most iconic moment in NASA history, and a major milestone for mankind.
Millions of television viewers around the world saw those fuzzy, moving images and were amazed, even me
Source: BBC
Jan 31, 2007
Taiwan has defended changes to new history textbooks which have been strongly criticised by rival China and some opposition lawmakers in Taiwan. Taiwan's prime minister is the latest official to weigh in on this controversy.Su Tseng Chang has strongly defending changes to the high school history textbooks and backing his education minister.
During the weekly cabinet meeting, he said students should be taught about their own country and their history.
Source: AP
Jan 31, 2007
NORFOLK, Va. -- A cargo tag that traveled 3,000 miles from England to America's first permanent English settlement nearly four centuries ago is about to take a much longer journey: [about 4 million miles] into space.
The tag will fly aboard the space shuttle Atlantis, scheduled for launch March 15, NASA announced Wednesday. After the mission, NASA will return the tag to Historic Jamestowne for display in its new archaeological museum.
The voyage honors one of the first
Source: USA Today
Jan 31, 2007
The discovery of a large, prehistoric settlement 2 miles from Stonehenge suggests that the famous stone rings were an ancient memorial, not a Stone Age observatory, archaeologists said Tuesday.
A community of hundreds of people lived there about 2500 B.C., during the time Stonehenge was erected, say the scientists, led by Mike Parker Pearson of the United Kingdom's Sheffield University. Inhabitants most likely raised Stonehenge as a monument to their dead, who were buried there cere
Source: AP
Jan 31, 2007
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. -- Some of Bill Clinton's friends and family remember the Arkansas native as a charismatic boy destined for greatness, while others recall him as a shy youth who played the clarinet.
Such first impressions are among the text of 28 interviews documenting the former president's early years in Hope and Hot Springs as part of a project that aims to make Clinton the most documented president ever.
The interviews were released Tuesday by the Pryor Center for
Source: NYT
Jan 31, 2007
After nearly 10 years of struggling to have a big Italian insurance company pay claims on life insurance policies sold to victims of the Holocaust, lawyers who say they represent most of the victims are giving up the fight.
They say they have struck a deal with the insurer, Assicurazioni Generali, that will give Holocaust victims and their relatives far less money than they had originally hoped. But the lawyers say that their chances of winning a lawsuit seemed increasingly unlikely
Source: The Guardian
Jan 31, 2007
Bill Gates and the British Library [have] revealed they were reuniting Leonardo's Codex Arundel with the Codex Leicester, online at least. High resolution versions of the notebooks will allow users to turn the pages for themselves.
The British Library-owned Codex Arundel is the world's second-biggest compilation of Leonardo pages and hardly anyone outside high academic circles has seen it. It features everything from treatises on mechanics and bird flight to drawings of underwater b
Source: The Guardian
Jan 31, 2007
A mere 921 years after William the Conqueror's original stab at working out what his recently won kingdom was worth, cabinet ministers will have known yesterday what it felt like to be an 11th century peasant as Gordon Brown unveiled New Labour's latest updated version of the Domesday Book.
Back in 1086, it was observed that in England and Wales "there was no single hide nor a yard of land, nor indeed one ox nor one pig which was left out". The Treasury...put a value on ev
Source: Times (of London)
Jan 31, 2007
ROME -- The lost treasure of Maxentius, the last pre-Christian Roman emperor, has been unearthed by archaeologists. Imperial standards, lances and glass spheres, right, were buried on the Palatine Hill by Maxentius before his battle with Constantine the Great in AD 312.
Archaeologists believe that he planned to retrieve the treasure if he won. In the event, he and his closest aides were killed, so that no one knew where it was hidden.
Source: The Guardian
Jan 31, 2007
The great-great-grandson of Victor Hugo said yesterday he was bitterly disappointed after his six-year battle to ban a modern sequel to Les Misérables was ended by France's highest appeal court.
But he vowed to continue fighting to protect what he described as his family's "moral rights" to the classic work.
"I believed we were fighting the good cause but the court decided otherwise. It is very, very disappointing," Pierre Hugo said. "I am not j
Source: Christian Science Monitor
Jan 31, 2007
TURIN, GA. - Its clapboards broken and its roof collapsed, the old "Negro school" had come to the brink of its life. But as renovations on the schoolhouse began recently ˆ a bid to safeguard and honor this tiny railroad town's black history ˆ the project ran into opposition from a surprising source: its former students.
"There's a lot of people who don't want to be involved" because of what the school symbolizes ˆ racial segregation, says Alonzo Penson, who atten
Source: Dayton Daily News
Jan 30, 2007
DAYTON, Ohio -— Under draft legislation being proposed for consideration by Congress, Hawthorn Hill —- the longtime home of aviation pioneer Orville Wright —- and the Wright brothers' airplane factory —- now part of Delphi Corp.'s Home Avenue auto parts plant —- would become part of the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park.
The Dayton-based Aviation Heritage Foundation, created at the direction of Congress, collectively promotes nine regional sites that Congress recogni
Source: Reuters
Jan 30, 2007
The U.S. Congress has the power to end the war in Iraq, a former Bush administration attorney and other high-powered legal experts told a Senate hearing on Tuesday.
With many lawmakers poised to confront President George W. Bush by voting disapproval of his war policy in the coming days, four of five experts called before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee said Congress could go further and restrict or stop U.S. involvement if it chose.
"I think the constitutional sch
Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch
Jan 30, 2007
ISLE OF WIGHT, Va. -- Descendants of a prosperous Colonial-era man watched yesterday as archaeologists exhumed his remains from beneath a slab in the floor of historic St. Luke's Church.
The family agreed to have Col. Joseph Bridger's bones dug up and analyzed by experts from the Smithsonian Institution, "because we thought it would be interesting to know more about him," said Jean Tomes of Roanoke Rapids, N.C., Bridger's ninth great-granddaughter.
Bridger, a
Source: Guardian
Jan 30, 2007
It is an encyclopedia written by nobody but Wikipedia is rapidly becoming prime source material for American judges.
A search of court decisions by the New York Times turned up more than 100 rulings that have cited the online encyclopedia since 2004, including 13 from the circuit court of appeals, one rung beneath the supreme court; America's highest court has yet to succumb to the site's call.
Despite its status among the 20 most popular sites on the internet, its rep
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Jan 30, 2007
Construction workers at a new high school in Albuquerque inadvertently destroyed a site where important prehistoric artifacts had been found in 2000, according to today’s Albuquerque Journal. The site, which was ripped up when workers excavated for a new water line for the school, provided the first evidence that prehistoric people who were part of the Folsom culture lived in the Albuquerque area some 10,000 years ago.
Source: TV3 (New Zealand)
Jan 30, 2007
A row between Scotland and New Zealand over a group of tattooed Maori heads appears to be over.
The Marischal Museum at the University of Aberdeen handed over the nine toi moko from its huge collection of Maori exhibits to a Kiwi delegation.
The heads will be stored at Te Papa while researchers try to identify their source communities.
They were handed over at a ceremony in Aberdeen after almost 200 years in northeast Scotland.
Source: Reuters
Jan 30, 2007
FLORENCE -- After 32 years on the trail of Leonardo da Vinci's lost masterpiece "The Battle of Anghiari", Maurizio Seracini thinks he is on the verge of solving one of the art world's greatest mysteries.
The Italian engineer and art expert reckons he knows where the fresco, which disappeared nearly five centuries ago, might be hidden -- behind a wall right where it was painted, in Florence's Renaissance town hall [the Palazzo Vecchio].
Now that the Italian gov
Source: AP
Jan 30, 2007
The Nazis were about to arrest his family in 1944, and Alex Moskovic remembers his father burying family documents in a 3-foot-deep hole under the shed behind their home in Czechoslovakia.
When he returned after the Holocaust -- the only survivor in his family -- Moskovic found the house in Sobrance had been pillaged and the shed torn down. The buried cache, probably including insurance policies, was never found.
On Wednesday, a U.S. District Court in New York will hold
Source: AP
Jan 30, 2007
TOKYO -- A court rejected a compensation suit filed against the Japanese government by 40 Japanese who were abandoned in China as children after Tokyo's defeat in World War II, officials said Tuesday.
Many were children of Japanese farmers sent to China's remote northwest to develop land seized by Tokyo. They were left behind by their fleeing parents as Soviet troops closed in at the end of the war in 1945, returning only a decade ago.
