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
Oct 24, 2006
Eager for precision in a field notorious for ambiguity and
frustration, curators at top museums in Europe and the United States
have long reached for the instruments of nuclear science to hit
treasures of art with invisible rays. The resulting clues have helped
answer vexing questions of provenance, age and authenticity.
Now such insights are going global. The International Atomic Energy
Agency, a United Nations unit best known for fighting the spread of
nuclear arms, is
Source: UVA Cavalier
Oct 24, 2006
Monticello has recently created an electronic resource called the Monticello Plantation Database, which contains a searchable catalog of Thomas Jefferson's slave records. The database is available on the Monticello Web site. The project, which began in 1996, was organized by Lucia "Cinder" Stanton, Shannon Senior Historian at Monticello. Stanton said she and a team of University graduate students compiled the information from Thomas Jefferson's "Farm Book"
Source: Times (London)
Oct 24, 2006
From Herodotus and Homer to the warriors of Ancient Greece the mystic utterances from the Oracle of Delphi were regarded as sacrosanct. But now the hugely influential pronouncements of the oracle are said by Greek and Italian archaeologists to have been the result of oxygen deficiencies in the priestesses’ brains.Delphi, which draws tourists by the thousand each year, lies on the almost sheer side of Mount Parnassus in central Greece. Great fissures in the cliff overlooking
Source: Armenian News Network
Oct 24, 2006
Switzerland's justice minister has called on the Swiss government to reverse a law which makes historical revisionism illegal. Minister Christoph Blocher is on a campaign to change the law, according to the Neue Zuercher Zeitung (NZZ) newspaper - even if it will impinge upon the sensitivities of minority groups, including
the country's Jewish communities.Blocher claims that freedom of expression is more important than protecting the sensibilities of minority groups, N
Source: AP
Oct 23, 2006
The sprightly Frenchwoman wandered around downtown Algiers, looking for the church where she first took communion as a young girl. It had become a mosque. Her old school was gone too.
Joelle Simon's recent trip to Algeria was an emotional, sometimes painful, journey into memories of the life torn from her more than 40 years ago, when France walked away from the north African country after a bitter eight-year war of independence.
The scars, both for many former colonia
Source: Allafrica.com
Oct 23, 2006
A Catholic priest, Father Jean-Marie Vianney Uwizeyeyezu, head of the parish of Kaduha in southern Rwanda, has been jailed to 12 years for "having downplayed the genocide", his lawyer said.
"He has received a sentence of 12 years in prison plus a fee from the Court of First Instance for having, in their words, downplayed the genocide", Mr Protais Mutembe, told Hirondelle News Agency. The priest was found guilty by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda si
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Oct 23, 2006
Mar Theodosius, West Bank -- Until today, the main claim to fame of this sleepy monastery on the edge of the Judean wilderness was the tradition that the Three Wise Men slept in the caves here after visiting the infant Jesus in Bethlehem.
But a new book claims that the Greek Orthodox Monastery Mar Theodosius was the last hiding place of one of the greatest treasures of antiquity: the gold and silver vessels of the first century B.C. Temple in Jerusalem, the central shrine of Judaism
Source: Breitbart
Oct 23, 2006
Dozens of world leaders were set to join Hungarians to mark the 50th
anniversary of the anti-Soviet uprising, as bitter domestic political
divisions threatened to overshadow the celebrations.
The main right-wing opposition party, the anti-communist Fidesz, was to
boycott commemorations attended by the governing Socialist party, which
was the successor to the Communist party after transition to democracy in
1989.
The move torpedoed efforts to use the 50th anniversary to unite the
cou
Source: Reuters
Oct 23, 2006
BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Hungarian police fired tear gas and rubber bullets at
thousands of anti-government protesters on Monday, marring commemorations
of the 50th anniversary of the 1956 uprising against Soviet rule.
Police also used water cannon and some protesters lobbed stones and other
missiles at them. The ambulance service said 40 people had been injured
although there were no life-threatening injuries. A policeman was stabbed
in the hand.
Protesters took to the streets more
Source: AP
Oct 23, 2006
PRESCOTT, Ariz. -- Prosecutors won't seek charges against two men who exhumed the remains of a man who claimed to be the outlaw Billy the Kid.
Tom Sullivan, former sheriff of Lincoln County, N.M., and Steve Sederwall, former mayor of Capitan, N.M., dug up the bones of John Miller in May 2005. Miller was buried at the state-owned Pioneers' Home Cemetery in Prescott nearly 70 years ago.
"It appears officials in charge of the facility gave permission and the people
Source: Times Online (UK)
Oct 23, 2006
CHRISTIAN and Muslim armies clash in Spain today in a titanic battle for control of the Costa Blanca, just miles from the tourist towers of Benidorm.
After a spectacular Moorish landing on the beaches the Christians will emerge victorious, as they did in Calpe in 1240. But there will be no crowing, and the end of the “battle” will be accompanied by speeches about civilisations living together in harmony.
Welcome to Spain in the era of cultural nervousness.
Source: Hartford Courant
Oct 23, 2006
In Carol and Thomas Kaput's 18th century home, two tombstones - one etched with "In Memory of Isaac Griffin" - lie side-by-side on the basement floor. A small stone that appears to have been carved for an infant rests nearby against the water heater.
"They're all over the place," Carol Kaput said of the tombstones in her house. "We're just waiting for the next one to pop up somewhere."
At least a half-dozen Suffield families have discovered
Source: Inside Bay Area
Oct 23, 2006
The unheralded removal of hundreds of ancient bodies at a Brentwood construction site this year illustrated how secretive — and political — American Indian excavations can be.
When Shea Homes dug up about 500 bodies to make way for a road through its new Trilogy subdivision, the developer set in motion a governmental process steeped in confidentiality.
State policymakers have spent years fine-tuning what must be done after such discoveries, but many tiptoe around volatile que
Source: MSNBC
Oct 23, 2006
Great historical events can spring from small slights. Kaiser Wilhelm never forgave the French for not treating him to a parade in Paris. "The monarchs of Europe have paid no attention to what I have to say," the German emperor whined before setting the Continent aflame in 1914. By many accounts, North Korea's Kim Jong Il also suffers from a tender ego. For one thing the 5-foot-3 dictator is sensitive about his height (hence, one suspects, his bouffant hairstyle and elevator shoes). A
Source: Nation
Oct 23, 2006
John Friedman writes: At a recent hearing before the Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, attorneys for slave descendants asked a three-judge panel to send their slavery reparations suit back for a further hearing to the US district court. A judge there had dismissed it last year, ruling that the statute of limitations had expired and that the plaintiffs had no legal standing. The twenty plaintiffs include Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, the attorney who first uncovered a corporate link to slavery, a
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Oct 22, 2006
Seventy-year-old Pacifica resident Les Mohacsy stared at a black-and-white photograph of a barricade built out of cobblestones in Budapest's Moricz Zsigmond Circle during the 1956 revolution. He was looking for the part of the barricade that he built.
"A tank appeared at the top of the street," he recalled of a day early in the uprising, when Soviet tanks were few and unprepared for the resistance they encountered. "They saw a pipe in the cobblestones, and they thoug
Source: Transcript from This Week (ABC News) with George Stephanopoulos
Oct 22, 2006
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (ABC NEWS)
(Off-camera) You know you said at your press conference last week you joked about all the books being written -
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH (UNITED STATES)
Yeah.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (ABC NEWS)
(Off-camera) - about your Administration. Have you read any of them?
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH (UNITED STATES)
No.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (ABC NEWS)
(Off-camera
Source: AP
Oct 22, 2006
The arrest of tomb robbers led archaeologists to the graves of three royal dentists, protected by a curse and hidden in the desert sands for thousands of years in the shadow of Egypt's most ancient pyramid, officials announced Sunday.
The thieves launched their own dig one summer night two months ago but were apprehended, Zahi Hawass, chief of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, told reporters.
That led archaeologists to the three tombs, one of which included an ins
Source: Independent (UK)
Oct 22, 2006
When the disgraced ex-US president Richard Nixon, conceded he had deceived the nation and "let down" his people, David Frost was assured a place in television history.
Now, for the first time, Sir David has revealed just how much it cost him, financially, to secure the interview. He believes he would now be some £37m richer had he not humbled Nixon on TV, but says he has no regrets.
Writing in a new book, Shooting Stars, Sir David described it as "one of
Source: Independent (UK)
Oct 22, 2006
Forget Orville Wright and his brother Wilbur. Start thinking instead of Alberto Santos Dumont, the Brazilian pioneer aviator and the man who really invented the aeroplane
That is the attitude here in Brazil, as the country prepares to celebrate the centenary tomorrow of the world's first powered flight. On the afternoon of 23 October 1906 in Paris, in front of an expert panel from the Aéroclub de France, the son of a coffee magnate from Sao Paulo took to the air in the 14bis, or 14
