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: cronaca.com citing the Guardian
Jun 13, 2006
The manager of a Turkish museum's storehouse was arrested Tuesday after 545 ancient coins were switched with fakes on his watch, officials said Tuesday. The Culture Ministry, already embarrassed by the revelation last month that at least two pieces in a separate museum - from the 6th century B.C. treasure of King Croesus - were also fakes, had pressed for the manager's arrest. . .
The 545 silver coins were dated to the 4th century B.C. and were changed with fakes in 1998, Anatolia s
Source: Independent (UK)
Jun 13, 2006
The invention of the world's first bows and arrows may have played a part in the eventual colonisation of much of the world by Homo sapiens.
In a groundbreaking paper published yesterday, Paul Mellars, one of Britain's leading archaeologists and a Cambridge professor, suggests Homo sapiens' dominance of much of the world was triggered by a technological revolution which caused a demographic explosion between 60,000 and 80,000 years ago. As a result, the population of one particular
Source: http://mdn.mainichi-msn.co
Jun 13, 2006
ANKARA, Turkey -- Turkey's Islamic-rooted government has ordered a 500-year old Latin inscription believed to have been carved by the Knights of St. John erased from an old castle, newspaper reports said Tuesday.
In the written order, the Culture Minister told museum officials to scrape away the inscription "Inde deus abest," or "Where God does not exist," carved at the entrance to the dungeon of the Castle of St. Peter in the Aegean resort of Bodrum, Hurriyet, S
Source: NYT
Jun 13, 2006
For the average museumgoer, the wrought-iron balustrade from Federal Hall, where George Washington took the oath of office in 1789, may simply be an ornate piece of Americana. But for the conceptual artist Fred Wilson, it was the starting point for a long riff on battles against oppression around the world.
Gesturing toward the swirls and arrows in the ironwork last week at the New-York Historical Society, Mr. Wilson said the name of the balustrade's creator, Pierre Charles L'Enfant
Source: NYT
Jun 13, 2006
In biblical lore, Edom was the implacable adversary and menacing neighbor of the Israelites. The Edomites lived south of the Dead Sea and east of the desolate rift valley known as Wadi Arabah, and from time to time they had to be dealt with by force, notably by the likes of Kings David and Solomon.
Today, the Edomites are again in the thick of combat — of the scholarly kind. The conflict is heated and protracted, as is often the case with issues related to the reliability of the Bib
Source: Toronto Star
Jun 13, 2006
When it ran in March, Prairie Giant, CBC-TV's two-part miniseries on the life of Tommy Douglas, proved one of the season's top-rated Canadian shows, drawing 905,000 viewers the first night and 751,000 the second night.
But the network has pulled it from circulation, with no plans for reruns, after complaints of historical inaccuracies.
The family of a political rival of Douglas, one-time Saskatchewan premier Jimmy Gardiner, complained that not only was the film's portr
Source: Independent (London)
Jun 13, 2006
When people ask writer Ashley Perry where his family is from, he replies "Britain". If they ask where his grandparents came from, he gives the same reply. When the more persistent ask where his great-grandparents or great-great-grandparents came from, the reply is still "Britain".
"This answer is usually met with incredulity as most assume that Anglo- Jewry is in the main no more than two or three generations long and has its origins in Eastern Europe,"
Source: NYT Editorial
Jun 13, 2006
Recently, researchers using data from Grace (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellite program) announced that they had found the possible remains of an enormous crater a mile below the East Antarctic ice sheet — the result of an impact that may have wiped out 90 percent of life on earth some 250 million years ago.
To look back to that catastrophe — called the Permian-Triassic extinction — you have to imagine all of earth's continents merged in a single great land mass surr
Source: Wa Po
Jun 13, 2006
Robert C. Byrd, a champion of classical oratory in the Senate and pork barrel spending back home, yesterday became the longest-serving senator in U.S. history.
The West Virginia Democrat marked his 17,327th day in the Senate by visiting his wife's grave and then listening to several colleagues praise his career. Uncharacteristically for a man who has rhapsodized about spring, Mother's Day and countless other topics in the Senate chamber, Byrd left the floor without speaking, struggl
Source: aibs.org
Jun 13, 2006
The Mesopotamian marshes of southern Iraq had been all but destroyed by Saddam Hussein’s regime by the year 2000. Earlier assessments suggested that poor water quality, the presence of toxic materials, and high saline soil conditions in the drained marshes would prevent their ecological restoration and doom the reestablishment of the Marsh Arab culture of fishing and agriculture.
However, the high volume of good-quality water entering the marshes from the Tigris and Euphrates River
Source: National Geographic News
Jun 12, 2006
A discovery of ancient jade could shake up old notions of the New World before Columbus. Scientists say they have traced 1,500-year-old axe blades found in the eastern Caribbean to ancient jade mines in Central America 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometers) away, New York's American Museum of Natural History announced late last month.
The blades were excavated in the late 1990s by a Canadian archaeologist on the island of Antigua in the West Indies (see map of Antigua and Barbuda).
Source: Connecticut Post
Jun 12, 2006
A 12-year veteran of the classroom, Barbara Reed is adept at teaching language arts and social studies at the same time. "You probably couldn't come into my classroom and say, 'She's doing social studies now,'" she said.
But the course, funded through a three-year, $982,395 federal grant, has helped her make the most of the shrinking time she has to devote to social studies.
In many elementary classrooms, history seems threatened with extinction. High-stakes
Source: Romenesko
Jun 12, 2006
Cincinnati Enquirer's Carl Weiser says he read Robert Kennedy's Rolling Stone mega-essay "and nothing in there was really new. The folks who know Ohio elections best checked into it and found there was no conspiracy." AP Ohio bureau chief Eva Parziale tells Joe Strupp: "They were things we already reported on and issues we did not see to have substance."
Source: Daily Telegraph (UK)
Jun 12, 2006
THE final push in a long-running fight to save the site of the "other battle of 1066'' will begin tomorrow.
Campaigners will be appealing against a housing development on a water meadow near the scene of the Battle of Fulford, which is on the outskirts of York.
It was seen by some as a crucial factor in Saxon King Harold's defeat less than a month later by William, Duke of Normandy, at Hastings.
Objectors believe that a proposed approach road for the
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Jun 12, 2006
The FBI’s inquiries into the Jack Anderson archive, now held at George Washington University, is a “fishing expedition," according to a University of Utah political science professor, Tim Chambless. The Salt Lake Tribune reports that Mr. Chambless reviewed 85 boxes of the archive years ago -- probably when they were held at Brigham Young University, though the article doesn’t specify. Mr. Chambless says the documents contain facts that "were politically embarrassing to a few people,&qu
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Jun 12, 2006
Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia compiled by a distributed network of volunteers, has often come under attack by academics as being shoddy and full of inaccuracies. Even Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, says he wants to get the message out to college students that they shouldn’t use it for class projects or serious research.
Speaking at a conference at the University of Pennsylvania on Friday called “The Hyperlinked Society,” Mr. Wales said that he gets about 10 e-mail messages a
Source: CNN
Jun 12, 2006
After almost 48 years in the Senate, Robert Byrd is still working. On Monday, the West Virginia Democrat passed the late GOP Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina as the longest serving senator in history.And Byrd is not finished.
Slowed by age and grief-stricken over the recent death of Erma, his wife of almost 69 years, Byrd still is running for an unprecedented ninth term. At 88, he uses two canes as he slowly makes his way around the Capitol. Yet he can thun
Source: CBS
Jun 11, 2006
If flags could talk, these banners would have stories to tell — witnesses to the war that created America.
"They represented the soul of the regiment," says Dave Redden of Sotheby's auction house. "They represented the cause for which they were fighting."
Now, more than two centuries later, the battle flags are up for auction at Sotheby's in New York.British warrior Banastre Tarleton captured them and sent them to his home in E
Source: Sunday Times (London)
Jun 11, 2006
The unprecedented boom in property development and road building in Ireland has unearthed thousands of archeological artefacts but most of them lie gathering dust in warehouses, hidden from public view. With nearly 200 times more excavations being carried out than in the early 1990s, new discoveries are no longer being reported and Ireland's museums no longer have space to house them. As a result, academics claim the country is being denied an opportunity to learn more about its history.
Source: BBC
Jun 11, 2006
Archaeologists working on India's south-west coast believe they may have solved the mystery of the location of a major port which was key to trade between India and the Roman Empire - Muziris, in the modern-day state of Kerala. For many years, people have been in search of the almost mythical port, known as Vanchi to locals.
Much-recorded in Roman times, Muziris was a major centre for trade between Rome and southern India - but appeared to have simply disappear
