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: NYT
Jan 11, 2007
The long saga of U-864 [which sank in 1945 containing 65 tons of mercury] is far from over. Many of the canisters containing the liquid mercury are now corroding. Small amounts have seeped out, and Norwegian government tests around the wreck have detected slightly raised amounts of the metal in crabs and fish — the country’s second biggest export, after oil and gas.
Indeed, Kristian Hall, an environmental consultant with a Norwegian engineering firm, said the corroding canisters cou
Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jan 11, 2007
Fourteen members of a Carter Center advisory board – including a former U.S. ambassador – quit today in protest of Jimmy Carter's latest book, which they view as being critical of Israel.
In a letter to Carter, the members of the Board of Councilors wrote that the former president had "clearly abandoned your historic role of broker, in favor of becoming an advocate for one side."
"I wish the Carter Center continued success, but they they also have to traf
Source: WaPo
Jan 10, 2007
The Justice Department and the National Archives improperly assured the Sept. 11 commission that its members had access to all relevant materials about the Clinton administration's terrorism policies, without knowing if original, uncopied documents had been removed from the archives by former national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, a Republican congressional report said yesterday.
The report, issued by Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), accused both agencies of
Source: http://www.news.com.au
Jan 10, 2007
RUSSIAN archaeologists have uncovered the 2000-year-old remains of a warrior preserved intact in permafrost in the Altai mountains region, the official Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily says.
The warrior was blond had tattoos on his body. He was wearing a felt coat with sable fur trimmings and was buried in a wooden frame containing drawings of mythological creatures with an icepick beside him, the paper said.
Local archaeologists believe the man was part of the ruling elite of
Source: Reuters
Jan 10, 2007
One of the art world's great mysteries may be about to be solved: Did Leonardo Da Vinci paint a masterpiece that was lost in time, and does it still survive today?
Italy's culture minister gave his go-ahead on Wednesday to explore behind a wall in Florence's renaissance town hall to see if it is hiding the 500-year-old "Battle of Anghiari," sometimes known as the "lost Leonardo."
Source: AP
Jan 10, 2007
A private group sued the National Archives on Wednesday, seeking information about the Secret Service’s suspension of its destruction of White House visitor records.
The Secret Service stopped the routine destruction of its White House visitor logs in October 2004 at the request of the National Archives.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington is suing over the National Archives and Records Administration’s refusal to disclose why it asked the Sec
Source: AP
Jan 10, 2007
PLAINS, GA. - Folks in Plains were just delighted -- in a respectfully restrained way -- when former President Jimmy Carter said in a TV interview a few weeks ago that he wants to be buried in his front yard in his hometown.
Many in this little peanut-growing town of 640 people believe his decision to be laid to rest here rather than 120 miles away in Atlanta, home of his presidential library, or Arlington National Cemetery will help maintain the prosperity he brought to Plains.
Source: PRnewswire
Jan 10, 2007
Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein and Footnote, Inc. CEO Russell Wilding today announced an agreement to digitize selected records from the vast holdings of the National Archives. ...
This non-exclusive agreement, beginning with the sizeable collection of materials currently on microfilm, will enable researchers and the general public to access millions of newly-digitized images of the National Archives historic records on a subscription basis from the Footnote website.
Source: Times-Dispatch
Jan 10, 2007
JAMESTOWN, Va. - It was fitting for Virginia to begin its 2007 legislative session at the place where representative democracy in America was born, Vice President Dick Cheney told legislators Wednesday.
In a speech that stressed themes of religious faith, sacrifice and personal courage, Cheney helped open the Virginia General Assembly's winter session on the site where the first English settlement in North America was established 400 years ago.
"It's striking to re
Source: Reuters
Jan 10, 2007
An international quest is being launched for historical heirs to the throne of England.
Advertisements appearing this week in British, U.S., Australian, German and Norwegian newspapers will ask "Can you trace your family tree back to 1066? Might your ancestors have claimed the English throne?"
Edgar Aetheling was named heir apparent by his great-uncle King Edward the Confessor but was not crowned when the King died in 1066 because he was too young. Harold II w
Source: WaPo
Jan 10, 2007
They are little specks no bigger than the period that concludes this sentence, but they represent the germ of something enormous: fortune, empire and a national vice that would visit a slow death on millions of people.
Three 400-year-old tobacco seeds recovered recently from the ooze of a colonial well in Jamestown appear to be the first and earliest-known evidence of cultivation by English colonists of a plant that would become the cash crop of a New World empire, a form of living
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 10, 2007
An amateur historian produced evidence yesterday to back his claim to have found the island homeland of Homer's legendary Greek king, Odysseus.
Scholars have argued for centuries over the whereabouts of Ithaca, the lost kingdom of the hero of the Trojan war. But Robert Bittlestone, a management consultant from Kingston-on-Thames, Surrey, and two professors of classics and geology have suggested the location is not the Greek island of Ithaki, but Paliki — a peninsula of Kefalonia.
Source: Globe and Mail (Canada)
Jan 10, 2007
The Canadian War Museum in Ottawa has been under attack for months, from an unlikely quarter: veterans who say one text panel in the museum insults the airmen of Royal Air Force Bomber Command in which large numbers of Canadians participated in the Second World War. Yesterday, in a Globe and Mail op-ed article, retired chief of defence staff Paul Manson, who had just stepped down as a member of the board of the Canadian Museum of Civilization Corp. -- which is responsible for the war museum -- j
Source: CBS 4 Boston
Jan 10, 2007
The Atlanta police officer who arrested a Tufts University professor for jaywalking has contradicted the man's account, insisting he was in uniform at the time and saying the professor has no one to blame but himself.Officer Kevin Leonpacher said if anything, "I used an excessive amount of discretion," in the encounter that landed Felipe Fernandez-Armesto in jail.
Fernandez-Armesto, 56, who was arrested Jan. 4, said earlier in an interview that he was
Source: Guardian
Jan 10, 2007
Robin Cook openly defied his prime minister over the war in Iraq, and resigned from his cabinet post in protest on the eve of the invasion. Now his family has made that defiance his epitaph. It emerged yesterday that Mr Cook's gravestone in a cemetery in Edinburgh has been engraved with a quote from his memoirs, which reads: "I may not have succeeded in halting the war. But I did secure the right of Parliament to decide on war."
Mr Cook died suddenly, aged 59, in August 20
Source: NYT
Jan 10, 2007
History classes across the globe serve two purposes — they educate the young and they shape national identity. They also often sidestep controversy to avoid offense.
It is the same here as elsewhere, but the controversy being avoided is the vicious, 15-year civil war that started in 1975 in which Lebanon kidnapped, killed and bombed itself nearly into oblivion.
The bizarre results are evident in any schoolbook here — history seems simply to come to a halt in the early 1
Source: NYT
Jan 10, 2007
Intimates of President Bush have singled out Southern Methodist University as the likely site of his presidential library, but faculty members, complaining of being bypassed, are raising sharp questions about the school’s identification with his presidency.
In a meeting Tuesday, faculty members complained of a lack of consultation over the emerging agreement and all but demanded answers from the university’s president, R. Gerald Turner, on the relationship that would develop betwee
Source: NYT
Jan 10, 2007
A 13th-century Hebrew Bible, stolen from the French National Library in the late 1990s, has been recovered after complex negotiations between French officials, Christie’s and a Brooklyn antiquities dealer, Yosef Goldman, who bought the leatherbound book from the auction house in 2000 for $368,000. Library officials said Mr. Goldman purchased the manuscript in good faith and had already resold it when its theft was discovered.
Source: Yahoo
Jan 9, 2007
People looking to track ancestors who emigrated from British ports will from Wednesday be able to search online passenger lists of the ships that carried them to new lands.
Released by Britain's National Archives, the passenger manifests give an insight into all long-distance trips made by 30 million travelers from the country's ports between 1890 and 1960, including that of the Titanic which sank in 1912.
Source: AP
Jan 9, 2007
Since the 16th century, when they ferried King Henry VIII between his riverside palaces, Thames boatmen have plied the waters, fathers passing detailed knowledge of the river to their sons.
Now, a new licensing system designed by the European Union threatens to sweep away centuries of tradition and, the boatmen say, undermine safety.
The system abolishes apprenticeships -- completed by generations of London boatmen -- which last as long as seven years. In its place co
