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: AP
Jan 30, 2007
JERUSALEM -- At the height of World War II, Khaled Abdelwahhab hid a group of Jews on his farm in a small Tunisian town, saving them from the Nazi troops occupying the North African nation.
Now, Abdelwahhab has become the first Arab nominated for recognition as "Righteous Among the Nations," an honor bestowed on non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews from Nazi persecution.
The nomination of Abdelwahhab, who died in 1997, has reopened a little-known chapt
Source: AP
Jan 30, 2007
BERLIN -- A German-born Turkish man who was held for five years at Guantanamo Bay has written a memoir about his time at the U.S. prison, a publisher said Tuesday.
The case of Murat Kurnaz, 24, has been at the center of a political furor in recent days, amid allegations that the government of former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder spurned an early U.S. offer to free him.
His 256-page book, titled "Five Years of My Life: A Report from Guantanamo," is scheduled for
Source: BBC News
Jan 30, 2007
Greek schoolchildren have demonstrated at the Acropolis in Athens to demand that the UK returns marble sculptures taken [from the Partenon] by Lord Elgin 200 years ago.
Wearing orange jackets bearing campaign logos, about 2,000 pupils formed a human chain around the monument.
Greece has long campaigned for the marbles' return. But the British Museum says they are better off in London, safe from pollution damage in Athens.
Source: BBC News
Jan 30, 2007
French customs officials say they have seized more than 650 ancient artefacts smuggled from Mali in one of the largest such finds at a Paris airport...
The 669 items - 601 stones and 68 bracelets - were confiscated on 19 January at Charles de Gaulle airport and included axe heads, flintstones and stone rings.
Most of the artefacts date from a few thousand years BC. But others are from the Acheulean period, between one million years and 200,000 years old, and from the Mi
Source: New York Times
Jan 30, 2007
New excavations near Stonehenge have uncovered hearths, timbers and other remains of what archaeologists say was probably the village of workers who erected the brooding monoliths on Salisbury Plain in England.
The archaeologists announced today that the 4,600-year-old ruins appear to form the largest Neolithic village ever found in Britain. The houses at the site known as Durrington Walls were constructed in the same period that Stonehenge, less than two miles away, was built as a
Source: New York Times
Jan 30, 2007
ATHENS — A short decade ago, a blink in the centuries of bad blood between Greeks and Turks, there was “no way” a Turkish store could have opened at a fancy mall in Athens. So said Elena Kanellopoulou, 60, as she meandered through Athens’ first megamall, stopping a few steps from an upscale women’s shop with a clock in the display window showing the time in Istanbul.
The clock is a subtle way of showing that the shop is owned by a Turkish chain, like the shoe store next door and two
Source: AP
Jan 30, 2007
BUENOS AIRES -- The extradition of former Argentine President Isabel Peron from Spain in an investigation of 1970s death squad killings will take at least a year if it happens at all, a federal judge said Monday.
Judge Norberto Oyarbide said that if Spain's justice system ultimately rules against extraditing Peron, who is living in Madrid, he would press for a trial in Spain as a final recourse, He cited a bilateral treaty that he said would allow for such prosecution...
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Jan 30, 2007
PITTSBURGH -- The world's last operating stripping shovel will be sold for scrap after a group of citizens and public officials failed to raise enough money to preserve the massive machine for a coal mining heritage museum.
The Silver Spade, taller than a 12-story building, was capable of digging 155 tons in one bite and had a top speed of one-quarter mile per hour.
The 7,000-ton Silver Spade has sat dormant in rural Harrison County near Cadiz since April, after its rot
Source: Times (of London)
Jan 30, 2007
BERLIN -- The German authorities were preparing for criticism from the Jewish community after it was revealed that a Holocaust memorial in Berlin was being used as a public lavatory by tourists and by neo-Nazi sympathisers.
The disclosure, in a Berlin newspaper, will trigger a new debate about how the Holocaust should be remembered in Germany...The managers of the memorial, which attracts 3.5 million visitors a year, have tried to play down the scandal.
“This just belon
Source: Stone Pages
Jan 29, 2007
A Swiss-led team of archaeologists has discovered pieces of the oldest African pottery in central Mali, dating back to at least 9,400 BCE. The sensational find by Geneva University's Eric Huysecom and his international research team, at Ounjougou near the Unesco-listed Bandiagara cliffs, reveals important information about man's interaction with nature. The age of the sediment in which they were found suggests that the six ceramic fragments - discovered between 2002 and 2005 - are at least 11,40
Source: Archaeologica News
Jan 29, 2007
On the northern end of Ossabaw Island, three former
slave cabins sit in a perfect row˜remains of a
plantation that predates the Revolutionary War. Dan
Elliott stands next to the cabins one morning, near
palm trees silhouetted against the gray sky. For five
weeks he has been digging inside the cabins. Now he
has set his shovel aside.
Wearing a blue-striped train conductor's cap and
dirt-stained jeans, he holds the handle of a
gr
Source: NYT
Jan 29, 2007
A yearlong scientific analysis by the Harvard University Art Museums of three paintings discovered in 2003 and considered to be possible works by Jackson Pollock has found that some of the pigments used in the paints were not patented or commercially available until long after Pollock died in 1956.
Source: Reuters
Jan 29, 2007
WASHINGTON -- A U.S. Army deserter who defected to North Korea in 1962 said a billion dollars could not entice him to leave the isolated Communist country that is locked in a nuclear standoff with the United States.
James Dresnok, the last American defector still living in North Korea, broke 44 years of silence since he slipped across South Korea's heavily mined border to begin a new life that included appearances in anti-American propaganda films.
"I don't have in
Source: Reuters
Jan 29, 2007
UNITED NATIONS -- The lessons of the Holocaust and the mass killings in Cambodia did not end the threat of genocide as mass slaughter continues in Rwanda and Darfur, a survivor of the Auschwitz death camp said on Monday.
Simone Veil, a French politician, addressed the U.N. General Assembly as part of the body's second commemoration of the Holocaust, timed to the liberation by the Soviet army of Auschwitz, the largest Nazi concentration camp.
"After the massacre in
Source: The Independent
Jan 29, 2007
On 13 July 1823, a young Royal Navy officer called Cheesman Binstead noticed a large number of sharks in the water as his ship patrolled in the seas off west Africa. His superiors left him in no doubt about the cause. To avoid a fine, an intercepted slave ship had thrown its human cargo into the waves and the jaws of the predators.
Amid the barbarity of a trade that brought 11 million Africans to the New World in chains, what Midshipman Binstead witnessed was not rare. But what was
Source: Reuters
Jan 29, 2007
NEW DELHI -- Anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela joined top leaders, Nobel laureates and elder statesmen on Monday calling on the world to reinvent Indian freedom fighter Mahatma Gandhi's non-violent approach to solving conflicts. Mandela, who spent 28 years in prison for fighting white rule before leading South Africa to multi-racial democracy as the country's first black president in 1994, said Gandhi's non-violent approach which won India freedom from British colonial rule 60 years ago was an
Source: BBC News
Jan 29, 2007
The tiny skeletal remains of human "Hobbits" found on an Indonesian island belong to a completely new branch of our family tree, a study has found.
The finds caused a sensation when they were announced to the world in 2004. But some researchers argued the bones belonged to a modern human with a combination of small stature and a brain disorder called microcephaly.
That claim is rejected by the latest study, which compares the tiny people with modern microceph
Source: AP
Jan 29, 2007
GREENSBORO, N.C. —- An amateur historian's research has forced the state to scrap a marker that claimed that the leader of a militia who challenged corrupt tax collectors in the 1700s was later a state lawmaker.
Historian Warren Dixon argued that the marker erected in 1963 recognized the accomplishments of two men, both named James Hunter. One led a band of backwoods men known as the Regulators into the 1771 Battle of Alamance -- one of the first acts of rebellion against British ru
Source: Live Science
Jan 29, 2007
Abraham Lincoln may have suffered from a genetic disorder that literally shattered his nerves, a new study on worms suggests.
Many of the president's descendants have a gene mutation that affects the part of the brain controlling movement and coordination, researchers discovered last year. The mutation prevents nerve cells from "communicating" with each other properly, but scientists weren't sure exactly how or why.
The malformed protein could actually be caus
Source: Canadian Press
Jan 29, 2007
TORONTO -- Driving across Canada has always been something of an adventure. In 1925 when Perry Doolittle attempted the feat, ingenuity was required.
That's because in many places there was no road to drive on. The Toronto physician embarked on his journey in a Ford Model T to promote the idea of a national roadway. But when Doolittle and his partner ran into dead-ends, they replaced the car's wheels with special steel rims and motored along railway tracks.
"Since t
