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: AP
Jun 7, 2006
In the heart of the New South near the turn of the 20th century, more than 10,000 people stormed through the city's downtown - the beginning of a four-day melee that left dozens of black residents and two whites dead.It became known as the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, putting U.S. racial tensions on an international stage. A century later, historians are working to educate "the city too busy to hate" about this dark chapter from its past that many living here toda
Source: Deutsche Welle
Jun 7, 2006
Newly released CIA documents show that the US kept mum about Adolf Eichmann's whereabouts to protect a high-ranking German official with a dubious past.The United States learned the location and alias of fugitive Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann two years before Israel captured him but kept the information secret as part of its efforts to combat communism in post-war West Germany, according to a historian who reviewed 27,000 pages of newly declassified documents.
Source: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jun 7, 2006
It is estimated that in the next three years, humanity will generate more data than it has in the past 1,000 years --- nearly all of it digital.
Many of the records that once allowed historians to study a society's history --- from personal correspondence to government documents --- may be slipping, irretrievably, into the digital ether."It's a major historical problem and presents, potentially, a major political problem," says Air Force historia
Source: The Washington Post
Jun 7, 2006
The CIA organized Cold War spy networks that included former Nazis and failed to act on a 1958 report that fugitive Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was living in Argentina, newly released CIA records show.
The records were among 27,000 pages of documents made public yesterday at the National Archives. They shed new light on the secret protection and support given to former Nazi officials and Nazi collaborators by U.S. intelligence agencies as fighting communism became the central a
Source: Editor & Publisher
Jun 6, 2006
Controversy in the press surrounding "Da Vinci Code" author Dan Brown, just beginning to fade, will likely revive later this week when the July issue of Vanity Fair hits the stands. According to an advance copy, the magazine's contributing editor Seth Mnookin alleges -- in a massive article titled "DaVinci Clone?" -- two new instances of possible plagiarism in Brown's past. Two textual analysis experts also tell him they believe Brown borrowed the plot for his book from Lewi
Source: Yahoo
Jun 6, 2006
Egyptologists are holding their breath over the mystery surrounding the first tomb discovered in Luxor's Valley of the Kings since that of the boy king Tutankhamun in 1922. News of the surprise discovery in February by an American team from the University of Memphis has had repercussions far beyond this famous necropolis from the time of the pharaohs.
Could the small tomb, designated KV63, hold a royal mummy, perhaps that of Tutankhamun's widow or ev
Source: BBC
Jun 6, 2006
Scientists have recovered DNA from a Neanderthal that lived 100,000 years ago - the oldest human-type DNA so far.
It was extracted from the tooth of a Neanderthal child found in the Scladina cave in the Meuse Basin, Belgium.
The study, reported in Current Biology, suggests our distant cousins were more genetically diverse than once thought.
Their diversity had declined, perhaps because of climate change or disease, by the time early humans arrived in Eur
Source: cronaca.com
Jun 6, 2006
The "Antikythera Mechanism" was discovered damaged and fragmented on the wreck of a cargo ship off the tiny Greek island of Antikythera in 1900. Now, a joint British-Greek research team has found a hidden ancient Greek inscription on the device, which it thinks could unlock the mystery. The team believes the Antikythera Mechanism may be the world's oldest computer, used by the Greeks to predict the motion of the planets.Related Link
Source: AP
Jun 6, 2006
ASNELLES-SUR-MER, France — Hundreds of relatives and others joined at least two dozen veterans to remember the June 6, 1944, invasion on Normandy's beaches that helped free France — and much of Europe — from Nazi Germany's grip.
Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge laid a wreath along with the U.S. ambassador to France at the American cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer, where thousands of crosses and Stars of David mark soldiers' graves on a finely groomed lawn.
Source: NYT
Jun 6, 2006
After weeks of speculation, Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, has chosen a collaborator for his memoir, to be published by Penguin Press in fall 2007. Peter Petre, a senior editor at large at Fortune magazine and co-author of best sellers by Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf and by Thomas J. Watson Jr., former chairman of I.B.M., will help Mr. Greenspan write his book.
Mr. Greenspan, who sold the book for an $8.5 million advance in March, has been interviewing gho
Source: NYT
Jun 6, 2006
A lost wartime diary by a doctor in which she tells of love, loneliness and death on the Ho Chi Minh Trail has become a best seller in Vietnam, bringing the war alive for a new generation of readers.The journey of the diary itself has given it a special postwar symbolism for people here. It was returned to the doctor's family just last year by a former American soldier who recovered it after she died on the battlefield in 1970.
The writer, Dang Thuy Tram, was ki
Source: Wa Po
Jun 6, 2006
Welcome to the William J. Clinton Presidential Center. Your personal tour guide: President Bill Clinton.
"There were lots of times when Republicans thought I was right about an issue but they were determined not to let anything happen," Clinton says in a new audio tour of his presidential library. "I know that when I got elected president, a lot of those folks just went into denial."The library, along the Arkansas River in downtow
Source: Wa Po
Jun 6, 2006
The Senate Judiciary Committee gave the Bush administration a new lashing Tuesday over its use of executive power, citing the FBI's posthumous probe of columnist Jack Anderson and questioning the notion that espionage laws might allow the prosecution of journalists who publish classified information.
"It's highly doubtful in my mind that that was ever the intent of Congress," Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter said.The World War I-e
Source: AP
Jun 6, 2006
Determined to win the Cold War, the CIA kept quiet about the whereabouts of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in the 1950s for fear he might expose undercover anticommunist efforts in West Germany, according to documents released Tuesday.
The 27,000 pages released by the National Archives are among the largest post-World War II declassifications by the CIA. They offer a window into the shadowy world of U.S. intelligence — and the efforts to use former Nazi war criminals as spies, som
Source: NYT
Jun 6, 2006
He is Thomas R. Robinson, an associate professor of accounting at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla.
Dr. Robinson's descent from Genghis Khan emerged in a roundabout way. The Y chromosome of that Mongol emperor was identified in 2003 by geneticists at the University of Oxford in England. Surveying the chromosomes of Asian men, they noticed a distinctive genetic signature in populations from Mongolia to Central Asia. Their common feature was that all but one lay within the
Source: The Washington Post
Jun 6, 2006
Debra S. Ritt, the Smithsonian Institution's inspector general, resigned last week to take a senior executive position at the Small Business Administration, in part because she feared that shrinking resources for her Smithsonian office would lessen its effectiveness and independence."In the last 10 years, the number of positions in this office went down 30 percent while the federal appropriation has grown 70 percent," Ritt said yesterday in a phone interview.
Source: BBC
Jun 6, 2006
A signed first edition of one of the most famous animal stories ever written has sold at auction for £33,600. The copy of Black Beauty, written in Norfolk by Anna Sewell, had been expected to sell for up to £8,000 at Christie's in London.
It was the only book ever written by Sewell, who was born in 1820 in Great Yarmouth and died in 1878.
The book, which belonged to her mother, is inscribed with the words: "Mary Sewell, from her loving child A.S.".
Source: Press Release -- Thomas B. Fordham Institute
Jun 6, 2006
A new report released today by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute finds that at a time of rapid globalization, most states don’t even try to provide young Americans with a solid grounding in world history.
Renowned historian and foreign policy expert Walter Russell Mead, the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, conducted this first ever review of states’ academic standards for K-12 world history—the blueprints that outline what
Source: PhysOrg
Jun 6, 2006
The size of a shoebox, a mysterious bronze device scooped out of a Roman-era shipwreck at the dawn of the 20th century has baffled scientists for years. Now a British researcher has stunningly established it as the world's oldest surviving astronomy computer. A team of Greek and British scientists probing the secrets of the Antikythera Mechanism has managed to decipher ancient Greek inscriptions unseen for over 2,000 years, members of the project say.
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Source: 17KGET.com
Jun 5, 2006
An aviation archaeologist discovered the lost wreckage of a World War II bomber in the middle of the Mojave Desert.
A military recovery mission is underway with the discovery of decades-old bones.
“It's very, very...it's an emotional experience,” said U.S. Marines Captain George Murphy. “Even though we didn't know these men personally, we share a common experience.” On April 09, 1944, a B-24D Bomber went down during a training mi
