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: BBC
Sep 9, 2006
A Japanese legend claims that Jesus escaped Jerusalem and made his way to Aomori in Japan where he became a rice farmer. Christians say the story is nonsense. However, a monument there known as the Grave of Christ attracts curious visitors from all over the world.
Source: NYT
Sep 9, 2006
There is mounting concern among scholars that the appointment of religiously conservative Shiite Muslims throughout Iraq’s traditionally secular archaeological institutions could threaten the preservation of the country’s pre-Islamic history.
Donny George’s recent departure as chairman of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, and his flight to Syria with his family, is among the latest results of a transformation that began in December when a Shiite-dominated government was e
Source: AP
Sep 8, 2006
TREIGNY, France - Once upon a time, deep in the forests of Burgundy, a man was haunted by a vision. He dreamed of building a castle, with turrets, great walls and a moat. Some people wondered if he was mad.
This was, after all, 1996.
And yet Michel Guyot set out to build his castle the hard way - the medieval way. With only hammers and chisels to carve the stones. With only horses to cart the rock. Without power tools.
Ten years later, Guedelon
Source: Staten Island Advance
Sep 8, 2006
Citing what they called a rapidly deteriorating collective memory of
Sept. 11, 2001, a 9/11 family group that includes several Staten
Islanders announced yesterday that it has partnered with educators to
create a nationwide school curriculum on the subject.
The World Trade Center United Family group is seeking to overcome a
dearth of teaching resources on 9/11.
While details of the proposed curriculum were somewhat limited, the plan
centers on an oral history project that calls for i
Source: San Jose Mercury News
Sep 8, 2006
When Stanford University economics professor and Hoover Institution fellow George P. Shultz delivered his prestigious Kissinger Lecture at the Library of Congress, he used entire paragraphs that had been previously published in a Yale University journal.
The former Secretary of State says he had no idea. The man who collaborated on the speech says the passages were lifted from a journal article he had written himself, so what's the problem?
On the Stanford University ca
Source: UNESCO
Sep 8, 2006
The Director-General of UNESCO, Koïchiro Matsuura, today announced that the Organization will send a mission of experts, from September 10 to 16, to assess the potential damage caused to cultural sites in the recent conflict in Lebanon.
The mission will, among other things, visit UNESCO's World Heritage sites of Tyre, Baalbek and Byblos. Tyre and Baalbek, first built by the Phoenicians grew over the centuries and retain, to this day, some of the finest examples of Imperial Roman arc
Source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Sep 8, 2006
On Oct. 27, 1838, Missouri Gov. Lilburn W. Boggs issued Executive Order 44 -- what Mormons now refer to as the "Extermination Order" -- in effect running members of that church out of the state.
For Boggs, the issue was the so-called Mormon Wars -- a decade of conflict between Missouri settlers and members of the fledgling religion.
In his orders to Maj. Gen. John Clark, who was to lead the expulsion, Boggs said Mormons were "in the attitude of an open a
Source: NYT
Sep 8, 2006
Under growing pressure from Democrats and aides to former President Bill Clinton, ABC is re-evaluating and in some cases re-editing crucial scenes in its new mini-series “The Path to 9/11” to soften its portrait of the Clinton administration’s pursuit of Osama bin Laden, according to people involved in the project.Among the changes, ABC is altering one scene in which an actor playing Samuel R. Berger, the former national security adviser, abruptly hangs up on a C.I.A. office
Source: Seattle Times
Sep 8, 2006
Charlize Theron will play a pregnant bystander who loses her baby in Seattle's WTO riots. Susan Sarandon may take the part of a newscaster sympathetic to the protesters.
Former Mayor Paul Schell just hopes the movie re-enacting one of the worst chapters of his political life tells "the whole story about the 21st-century Boston Tea Party."
It's true: Academy Award winner Theron is set to star in a major motion picture about the 1999 anti-globalization protests
Source: Christian Science Monitor
Sep 7, 2006
Mention the name Bangalore, and sprawling high-tech campuses of a saffron-scented Silicon Valley come to mind. In short, "New India." By year's end, however, Bangalore could go the way of Bombay, changing its name from an international totem to a Jeopardy question. What is the city formerly known as Bangalore: Bengaluru. Or perhaps Bengalooru.
The trend that began vexing cartographers a decade ago when Bombay became Mumbai, Madras became Chennai, and Calcutta became Kolka
Source: LAT
Sep 7, 2006
BAGAN, Myanmar - The bricklayers are paid $1.35 a day to rebuild the ancient ruin: a small, 13th century temple reduced by time to little more than its foundation.
But they have no training in repairing aged monuments, and their work has nothing to do with actually restoring one of the world's most important Buddhist sites. Instead, using modern red bricks and mortar, they are building a new temple on top of the old.
They work from a single page of drawings suppli
Source: Guardian
Sep 7, 2006
Archaeologists in Ukraine have unearthed the remains of an ancient pyramidal structure that pre-dates those in Egypt by at least 300 years. The stone foundations of the structure, which probably resembled Aztec and Mayan ziggurats in South America, were discovered near the eastern city of Lugansk.
It is thought they were laid about five millennia ago during the early Bronze Age by animists who worshipped a sun god. The "pyramid" is in fact a complex of temples and sacrifi
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Sep 7, 2006
The National Archives and Records Administration is working to streamline the process of declassifying documents and has allowed few new withdrawals of documents from open shelves since a scandal over reclassified records hit the agency last spring, the United States archivist said on Wednesday.
The archives drew fire last April, when an audit report revealed that it had struck agreements with other federal agencies, such as the Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency, to rem
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, is published by the Federation of American Scientists
Sep 7, 2006
"The President is the sole organ of the nation in its external
relations, and its sole representative with foreign nations,"
according to a statement made in 1800 by John Marshall.
This so-called"sole organ" doctrine has frequently been invoked by
the executive branch"to define presidential power broadly in foreign
relations and national security, including assertions of an inherent
executive power that is not subject to legislative or judicial
constraints," writes constitutional schol
Source: NYT
Sep 7, 2006
Three members of the Clinton administration have written the chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, ABC’s parent, to complain that the network’s coming two-part miniseries “The Path to 9/11” is fraught with factual errors and fabrications.
The letters ask that the five-hour movie, scheduled for broadcast Sunday and Monday, be either edited for accuracy or canceled, and ABC gave a small indication yesterday that some changes might be made.One of the official
Source: NYT
Sep 7, 2006
Felipe Calderón was named the next president of Mexico on Tuesday by a tribunal that confirmed that the vote was basically free and fair. Yet a significant slice of the voting public still believes that the election was marred by fraud and that the country’s electoral institutions are corrupt.
But why do between a quarter and a third of voters, according to recent opinion polls, agree with him? One reason is history. After decades of one-party rule sustained by
Source: Hankyoreh (South Korea)
Sep 7, 2006
The South Korean government said Thursday it has to figure out China's official position on Korea's ancient kingdoms, especially Koguryo and Balhae, before deciding on any diplomatic countermeasures to Beijing's alledged move to incorporate them into its own history. A state-funded Chinese research center, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) has argued that Koguryo (37 B.C.-A.D.668) and its successor Balhae were vassal states of China's ancient central government.
Source: Reuters
Sep 6, 2006
Google News is getting a sense of the past to balance out its relentless focus on the present.
Google Inc. (Charts) has added the ability to search through more than 200 years of historical newspaper archives alongside the latest contemporary information now available on Google News, the market-leading Web search firm said Tuesday."The goal of the service is to allow users to explore history as it unfolded," said Anurag Acharya, a top Google engineer
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Sep 6, 2006
The University of Heidelberg has returned a tiny piece of the Parthenon’s marble frieze to the Greek government, the Associated Press reported. The German university’s relief, which measures 3 inches by 5 inches, depicts a man’s foot. Greece is still trying to regain possession of the so-called Elgin marbles, a large part of the ancient building’s sculptural decor, which were removed in the early 19th century by a British diplomat.
Source: CSM
Sep 6, 2006
Mention the name Bangalore, and sprawling high-tech campuses of a saffron-scented Silicon Valley come to mind. In short, "New India." By year's end, however, Bangalore could go the way of Bombay, changing its name from an international totem to a Jeopardy question. What is the city formerly known as Bangalore: Bengaluru. Or perhaps Bengalooru. The trend that began vexing cartographers a decade ago when Bombay became Mumbai, Madras became Chennai, and Calcutta beca
