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: NEH (July/Aug. 2006)
Oct 30, 2006
The first known depiction of a human face in stone . . . A vase documenting the daily tasks that defined activity as people built a future in the Fertile Crescent . . . Towering walls that heralded the end of rootless wanderings and the beginning of urban society . . . They have all come from sites in what we now call Iraq, and they are irreplaceable evidence of our species' cultural evolution.
The locations--Uruk and Ur--that gave birth to these treasures are in peril. The cradle o
Source: From an excerpt from Out of Iraq, by George McGovern and William Polk
Oct 30, 2006
Some American facilities have done enormous and irreparable damage. Astonishingly,
one American camp was built on top of the Babylon archaeological site, where American troops
flattened and compressed ancient ruins in order to create a helicopter pad and fueling stations.
Soldiers filled sandbags with archaeological fragments and dug trenches through unexcavated areas
while tanks crushed 2,600-year-old pavements. Babylon was not the only casualty. The 5,000-year-
old site at Kish was a
Source: MSNBC
Oct 30, 2006
Today, it sounds like a spring-break splurge on the order of "Girls Gone Wild": Drink huge quantities of beer, get wasted, indulge in gratuitous sex and pass out — then wake up the next morning with the music blaring and your friends praying that everything will turn out all right.
But back in 1470 B.C., this was the agenda for one of ancient Egypt's most raucous rituals, the "festival of drunkenness," which celebrated nothing less than the salvation of humanity.
Source: Times Online (UK)
Oct 30, 2006
HE WAS awkward, absent-minded and had no head for business, according to his obituary in The Times. But today Adam Smith will have his reputation fixed as the father of modern economics as he becomes the latest historical figure to appear on the £20 note.
Smith, who died in 1790, having lived out his days as a quiet Customs official with his mother, will become the first Scotsman to appear on a Bank of England note when he replaces Edward Elgar next spring.
Source: Yale Daily
Oct 30, 2006
While a Brown University committee recently completed a report detailing the University's historical ties to slavery, Yale has not focused significant attention on its own ties since 2002, when the law school and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition teamed up on a conference entitled "Yale, New Haven and American Slavery." While Yale has no current plans to undertake a report similar to Brown's, some professors and students said they think the Un
Source: Newsweek
Oct 30, 2006
Is Harold Ford Jr. really doing as well as the polls suggest? Is he conceivably on his way to becoming the first black Southern senator since Reconstruction? The answer may well be yes, but Ford can hardly take that for granted. As black candidates reaching out to largely white constituencies have discovered in the past, when it comes to measuring political popularity there are lies, damned lies—and polls, on which they rest their fate at their peril.
The phenomenon was first widely
Source: Stone Pages
Oct 29, 2006
Archaeologists have unearthed an 8,000 year old skeleton of a child in the village of Ohoden, northwestern Bulgaria. Archaeologist Georgi Ganetsovski, the leader of the excavation, said the finding had been made at the southern end of a pre-historical funeral facility in a pre-historical village, which was found just two metres below the current ground level and was completely preserved in its original form.
Source: International Herald Tribune
Oct 29, 2006
Democrats have spent three decades trying to exorcise the ghost of Senator George McGovern, whose unsuccessful 1972 presidential campaign calling for a withdrawal from Vietnam crystallized his party's image as soft on national defense.
But surveying the midterm elections last week, McGovern, 84, said he sees an opportunity for an anti-war campaign in the 2008 presidential race. "I would love to be running again if I were 25 years younger," he said in an interview from his Montan
Source: Reuters
Oct 29, 2006
Thousands of Buddhists gathered in India's western city
of Mumbai on Sunday to lay to rest part of the ashes and bones of Lord
Buddha in a ceremony resurrected after almost 2000 years.
Monks in flowing orange robes chanted hymns from scriptures as the remains
were lowered into a shallow pit on top of a 90-ft (27 metres) high stone
dome, as part of celebrations to mark the 2250th anniversary of the
spiritual leader's enlightenment.
Organisers of the ceremony said this was the fir
Source: monstersandcritics.com
Oct 29, 2006
The West knows it as 'the Suez Crisis' or, more commonly, 'Operation Musketeer'; the Israelis call it 'Operation Kadesh,' and to the Arab states it is simply the 'Tripartite Aggression.'
However it is called, it divided the West, pitting Britain and France against the United States, and for a moment imperilled the 'special relationship' between London and Washington forged during World War II by Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.
It began at 4.59 p.m. on October
Source: NYT
Oct 29, 2006
N 1947, the county clerk in Los Angeles refused to marry Andrea Perez and Sylvester Davis. They were of different races, and a California law said that “all marriages of white persons with Negroes, Mongolians, members of the Malay race or mulattoes are illegal.” The next year, the California Supreme Court, by a vote of 4 to 3, struck down that law in Perez v. Sharp.
In 2003, in another 4-to-3 decision, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court authorized gay marriages, and it invoked
Source: AP
Oct 28, 2006
Eighty years after his death, the name Harry Houdini remains synonymous with escape under the most dire circumstances. But Houdini, the immigrants' son whose death-defying career made him one of the world's biggest stars, was more than a mere entertainer.
A new biography of the legendary performer suggests that Houdini worked as a spy for Scotland Yard, monitored Russian anarchists and chased counterfeiters for the U.S. Secret Service — all before he was possibly murdered.
Source: Times Online (UK)
Oct 28, 2006
WILLIAM LINDESAY, the Briton who in 1987 became the first foreigner to run the length of the Great Wall of China, is putting the finishing touches to an almost equally ambitious project.
His exhibition of photographs of the Great Wall at the Beijing Capital Museum in January, titled Great Wall Revisited, will show the changes wrought in the past century by Man and Nature.
Source: NYT
Oct 28, 2006
It reads like a typical Victorian melodrama: an impoverished young woman, “strangely, wildly and darkly beautiful,” becomes a governess in a wealthy household, and, behold, a French count falls for her and wants to sweep her away.
But there’s a crucial difference: It is race-torn America; the heroine is mulatto; the book, “The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride,” is believed by some scholars to be the first novel ever published by an African-American woman.
Julia C. Col
Source: BBC
Oct 27, 2006
A Mozart opera cancelled for fears of protests over depicting the beheading of Muhammad is go ahead in Berlin.
The Deutsche Oper in the German capital said the production of Idomeneo will be staged after it received a new security assessment from the police.
Four performances of the opera were dropped in September after the risks of staging it were deemed "incalculable".
The decision, taken in the wake of the Danish Muhammad cartoons row, spa
Source: Monterey Herald
Oct 27, 2006
Monterey Mayor Dan Albert announced Friday morning the city is offering a $5,000 reward for the return of the Dennis the Menace statue.
Albert and other city officials gathered at the site of Dennis the Menace Park on Friday to issue the announcement. Park workers discovered that the statue, which is valued at up to $30,000, was missing Thursday morning.
Source: Reuters
Oct 27, 2006
Thirty years ago Jorge Julio Lopez was kidnapped and tortured under Argentina's dictatorship. Last month he vanished again at the end of a human rights trial in which he was a key witness, and the government's efforts to find him have turned up little.
Lopez testified in the case against former police commissioner Miguel Etchecolatz, who was sentenced to life in prison in September for crimes committed during Argentina's 1976-1983 "dirty war."
His disappearanc
Source: AP
Oct 27, 2006
Records the Freedmen's Bureau used to reconnect families — from battered work contracts to bank forms — will be placed online in part of a new project linking modern-day blacks with their ancestors.
The Virginia Freedmen Project plans to digitize more than 200,000 images collected by the Richmond bureau, one of dozens of offices established throughout the South to help former slaves adjust to free life.
Gov. Timothy M. Kaine on Thursday unveiled the project and a state
Source: Independent (UK)
Oct 27, 2006
Fifteen years after the first Gulf War, and three years after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, a UN commission is still paying out hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation to the victims of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
The latest payments, totalling $417.8m (£220m), were made yesterday to governments and oil companies for losses and damages stemming from the Kuwaiti occupation, bringing the total paid out to more than $21bn (£11bn). The total claims that have been approved
Source: Independent (UK)
Oct 27, 2006
Plans for a major German exhibition documenting the way the Nazis used trains to send thousands of Jewish children to the gas chambers have been blocked by the head of the state-owned rail network. That has provoked a furious row with Chancellor Angela Merkel's government.
The exhibition, "11,000 Jewish children - with the Reichsbahn to death", was conceived by the German Nazi-hunter Beate Klarsfeld. It has already been shown at railway stations through France where its d
