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: news.telegraph (UK)
Apr 10, 2006
The strange mixture of joy and grief that marks a traditional Irish funeral, with its week-long drink-fuelled wake, is under threat from a European directive.The Irish custom that sees corpses kept in an open coffin so the deceased can be viewed during the wake has been endangered by an edict issued by Stavros Dimas, the EU environment commissioner.
He wants chemicals used by embalmers to preserve the cadaver withdrawn under a new biocides directive.
Source: CNN
Apr 10, 2006
Most cities would be happy to open a multimillion-dollar museum for art, history or science once a decade. Beijing has just unveiled two.The Beijing Capital Museum, in a sleek building with an airy foyer soaring five stories high, features exhibits that include a full-scale copy of one of the city's old residential lanes.
The Museum of Chinese Film, which visitors enter through a star-shaped front door, showcases a century of cinema history from Chin
Source: Albuquerque Journal,
Apr 9, 2006
Years before the vice president accidentally shot a lawyer on a Texas quail hunt, Cheney himself was on the receiving end of an errant shotgun blast during a quail outing in New Mexico, a prominent Carlsbad Republican says.
Carlsbad Mayor Bob Forrest told the Journal he doesn't know for sure who fired the shot that accidentally peppered Cheney with shotgun pellets during the late-1990s hunt that included himself, his twin brother, and Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M.
But the senator
Source: BBC News
Apr 9, 2006
The Indian Air Force (IAF) has announced it will retire its fleet of MiG 25s, Cold War-era spyplanes, previously shrouded in secrecy.
A spokesman said the last of the IAF's four surviving MiG-25s will be phased out of service on 1 May.
The MiGs, capable of flying at over three times the speed of sound, were bought from the USSR in 1981.
Source: NYT
Apr 9, 2006
IN churches around the world today, Christians will hear the familiar story of Christ's Passion that begins Holy Week: the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the betrayal at the hands of Judas Iscariot, the death on the cross.
But in the publication last week of what is described as an ancient text called the Gospel of Judas, Judas is portrayed not as the treacherous apostle but rather as a hero of the Easter story who helps fulfill salvation history by betraying his beloved Jesus at
Source: Reuters
Apr 9, 2006
Pope Benedict XVI will visit the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz next month, the Vatican said Saturday, confirming his trip to Poland from May 25 to 28.
The pope will also visit Wadowice, the birthplace of the late John Paul II, as well as Krakow, the southern Polish city where John Paul served as archbishop before becoming pope in 1978.
Source: NYT
Apr 8, 2006
When Robert Halmi Sr. began developing a new version of the 1956 movie classic "The Ten Commandments" as a mini-series for the ABC network, there was just one source of disagreement. Unfortunately, it concerned the production's pivotal scene: the parting of the Red Sea.
Mr. Halmi, the executive producer, initially considered dropping the sea split altogether. He never cared for the tidy swath Cecil B. DeMille's Moses carved through the water, which he likened to a "pa
Source: BBC
Apr 8, 2006
Next week sees the 61st anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, the first of the Nazi death camps to be reached by British and American troops at the end of World War II.
During the last few months, Andrew Joynes has been piecing together the story of one man who survived the camp and whose story is now being told at the new memorial centre at Belsen.
Source: Guardian (UK)
Apr 7, 2006
The French president Jacques Chirac is about to unveil what he hopes will be his greatest legacy to the nation - a €260m (£180m) riverside monument to himself as the "great defender" of African and Asian indigenous culture.In the shadow of the Eiffel Tower on Paris's left bank, workmen are putting the finishing touches to Mr Chirac's decade-long pet project, the Musée du Quai Branly - Paris's first major new museum since the Pompidou Centre opened in 1977.
Source: CNN
Apr 7, 2006
Welcome to the world of the Beatles, Geoff Emerick.
Emerick managed to fulfill Lennon's request (he ran the Beatle's voice through a Leslie, an amp with two spinning speakers) on what became "Tomorrow Never Knows." Over the next few years, he was Martin's right-hand man for the majority of Beatles recordings, including "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and "Abbey Road."
He recalls his adventures with the group -- and his participation
Source: Yahoo News
Apr 7, 2006
Nazi Germany planned to expand the extermination of Jews beyond the borders of Europe and into British-controlled Palestine during World War Two, two German historians say. In 1942, the Nazis created a special "Einsatzgruppe," a mobile SS death squad, which was to carry out the mass slaughter of Jews in Palestine similar to the way they operated in eastern Europe, the historians argue in a new study.
The director of the Nazi research center in L
Source: NYT
Apr 7, 2006
Rudolf Vrba, who as a young man escaped from Auschwitz and provided the first eyewitness evidence not only of the magnitude of the tragedy unfolding at the death camp but also of the exact mechanics of Nazi mass extermination, died on March 27 at a hospital in Vancouver, British Columbia. He was 81.His wife, Robin, said he died of cancer.
After the war Dr. Vrba went on to become a distinguished medical researcher in Israel, Britain, the United States and Canada,
Source: NYT
Apr 7, 2006
Man's first known trip to the dentist occurred as early as 9,000 years ago, when at least nine people living in a Neolithic village in present-day Pakistan had holes drilled into their molars and survived the procedure, anthropologists reported yesterday.
The findings, which appear in the journal Nature, push back the dawn of dentistry by 4,000 years. The drilled molars, 11 in all, come from a sample of 300 individuals buried in graves at the Mehrgarh site in western Pakistan, belie
Source: Middle East Times
Apr 7, 2006
An Egyptian archaeological team has discovered a series of structures in the southwestern town of Fayoum that could yield vital data as to how a Middle Kingdom temple was built, the culture minister said on Thursday.
Farouk Hosni said that the structures included administrative buildings, granaries and residences believed to have belonged to priests of the temple, which was dedicated to Renenutet, the goddess of harvest, as well as the crocodile-god Sobk and falcon-deity Horus, Hos
Source: Iraq War & Archaeology site
Apr 7, 2006
The Nimrud gold is to be shown at the Arthur M.
Sackler Gallery in February next year. The date was set in Copenhagen on 17 March by the Iraqi ministry of culture and United Exhibits Group (UEG), the Danish commercial venture organising the show. ... the first venue for the Nimrud treasures is the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, part of the Smithsonian Institution. Various formalities have to be completed before the exhibition is officially announced, in a few weeks’ time.
Source: Boston Globe
Apr 7, 2006
A limestone memorial to Civil War dead from Company A, 53d Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, lies on its side atop Laurel Hill Cemetery, knocked from its pedestal along with 90 other tombstones in a spree of vandalism.The memorial in the historic graveyard contains the weathered names of Fitchburg men who lost their lives to combat or disease in a bloody campaign near the Mississippi River in 1863. Now, their descendants scattered and their exploits all
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Apr 7, 2006
Why?
That question lingered above all others for some academics upon learning that David Horowitz, a conservative writer and social activist, would debate Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, on Thursday night in Washington about whether politics belong in the classroom.
And many observers were still asking the same question after the relatively substance-free debate ended. “I think they both would have gotten a failing
Source: NYT
Apr 7, 2006
An early Christian manuscript, including the only known text of the Gospel of Judas, has surfaced after 1,700 years, and it portrays Judas Iscariot not as a betrayer of Jesus but as his favored disciple and willing collaborator.In this text, scholars reported yesterday, the account of events leading to the Crucifixion differs sharply from the four gospels in the New Testament. Here Jesus is said to entrust Judas with special knowledge and ask him to betray him to
Source: NYT
Apr 7, 2006
A London judge ruled today that Dan Brown did not steal the idea for his stratospherically successful thriller, "The Da Vinci Code," from an earlier book, and he cleared Mr. Brown's publisher, Random House, of accusations of copyright infringement. In issuing his judgment, Justice Peter Smith said that Mr. Brown did indeed rely on "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" in writing a section of the book, but he said that Michael Baigent and Richard Leig
Source: Boston Globe
Apr 7, 2006
Nazi Germany planned to expand the extermination of Jews beyond the borders of Europe and into British-controlled Palestine during World War Two, two German historians say.In 1942, the Nazis created a special "Einsatzgruppe," a mobile SS death squad, which was to carry out the mass slaughter of Jews in Palestine similar to the way they operated in eastern Europe, the historians argue in a new study.
The director of the Nazi research center in Ludwigsbu
