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: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Mar 15, 2006
The liquid many Pittsburghers associate with March 17 is green beer. But there still are a few folks around who can remember St. Patrick's Day 1936, when the dark brown waters of creeks and rivers fast rose into the region's worst natural disaster. Fed by extraordinary snow melt and rain, the ice-filled three rivers crested at the Point that March 18 at the highest mark since anyone has kept track: Just over 46 feet. (That's 15 feet, or more than a story, higher
Source: BBC News
Mar 14, 2006
A Canadian tribe has recovered a totem pole that was taken from them in the 1920s and was on display in Sweden. The nine-metre (30-foot) high artefact is one of most significant treasures of the Haisla nation of British Columbia.
Source: Ansa.it
Mar 14, 2006
The hunt is on for the 'brothers' of a 2,400-year-old bronze satyr fished out of the sea off Sicily seven years ago ."We are sure there are similar objects down there," said Sicily's maritime culture chief Sebastiano Tusa .
The Sicilian regional government has contacted top Italian fuels group Eni to tap into its experience laying underwater cables .
"They've provided us with special equipment that should enable us to find the s
Source: Ansa.it
Mar 14, 2006
An ancient Phoenician city unearthed in Sicily was inhabited after its supposed destruction, the head of an Italian dig team claims ."Our finds, including cooking pans, Phoenecian-style vases, small altars and pieces of looms, show Motya had a thriving population long after it is commonly believed to have been destroyed by the Ancient Greeks," said Maria Pamela Toti .
The continued life of Motya had been put forward by various archaeologists over
Source: Breitbart.com
Mar 14, 2006
The Great Sphinx of Giza, one of the most famous monuments of Pharaonic Egypt, is to get a facelift, the Egyptian ministry of culture said. Restoration work on the noseless creature undertaken by the High Council for Antiquities is to focus on the beast's neck and chest, rendered fragile by the erosion of desert winds.
Egyptian antiquities boss Zahi Hawas said the last restoration work on the half-man half-lion statue was carried out in 1996.
The
Source: Expatica (Netherlands)
Mar 14, 2006
Political leaders and human rights groups on Tuesday welcomed a decision by Berlin police to ban demonstrations aimed at the Armenian genocide in World War I.Police on Monday banned two protests due to have been held in the German capital this week which supported the official Turkish position that killings of Christian Armenians by Muslim Turks in 1915 did not amount to genocide.
Organizers of one of the protests warned Europe's cities would &
Source: National Security Archive
Mar 14, 2006
The first-ever government-wide audit of the ways that federal agencies mark and protect information that is unclassified but sensitive for security reasons has found 28 different and uncoordinated policies, none of which include effective oversight or monitoring of how many records are marked and withheld, by whom, or for how long.The audit began in February 2005 with Freedom of Information requests from the National Security Archive at George Washington University, to
Source: International Herald Tribune
Mar 14, 2006
Amid a political and intellectual cold war with Japan that revolves to a great extent around the history of China's conquest by its neighbor, China is seizing enthusiastically upon the memory of a man often called China's Oskar Schindler.John Rabe, a German Nazi employee of Siemens, in addition to sheltering people in his own compound, led a score of other foreigners in the city to form an international safety zone that shielded more than 200,000 Chinese from the Japanese.
Source: HNN Homepage
Mar 14, 2006
An article in the Nation by Max Holland has reignited debate over the CIA’s involvement in the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In the article entitled “The JFK Lawyers’ Conspiracy,” Holland contends that a group of lawyers, namely Mark Lane, Jim Garrison, Gary Hart, and G. Robert Blakey, have conspired to overturn the findings of the Warren Commission, which concluded in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating JFK. In a letter to the editor of the magazine, Lane
Source: frontpagemag.com
Mar 14, 2006
In an interview posted on his own website David Horowitz, author of The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, says his publisher dreamed up the title after the text was written.Quote: The dangerous idea is a marketing strategy which my publisher attached to the book after it was written. The only appearance of the word"dangerous" in the text is in the coupling of the words"dangerous sophistry" to describe some writing by Professor Juan Cole. N
Source: Ahistoricality (blog)
Mar 14, 2006
Welcome to the Fifth Bad History Carnival, the best of the worst! In honor of the "award season," this carnival will be highlighting only the very best. Lifetime achievement award goes to: David Irving.
Other awards....
Holocaust Denial
New Zombie Error
Told You So
Accidental Historical Fictions
Deliberate Historical Fictions
Presentism: Religion
Presentism: Po
Source: NYT
Mar 14, 2006
The Electoral College is an antidemocratic relic. Everyone who remembers 2000 knows that it can lead to the election of the candidate who loses the popular vote as president. But the Electoral College's other serious flaws are perhaps even more debilitating for a democracy. It focuses presidential elections on just a handful of battleground states, and pushes the rest of the nation's voters to the sidelines.
The answer to all of these problems is direct election of the president. P
Source: scotsman.com
Mar 14, 2006
AN IRANIAN newspaper's contest for cartoons about the Holocaust has received 200 entries, including submissions that criticise Israeli treatment of Palestinians and United States foreign policy. While the contest entrants are mostly Iranian, at least six Americans have submitted cartoons, as have other artists from Indonesia and Brazil, Hamshahri newspaper said.
Hamshahri, one of Iran's top five newspapers, began the contest last month as a test of the Western
Source: scotsman.com
Mar 14, 2006
HE GAVE Japan its national anthem and its first brass band, playing a key part in the country's modernisation.
But for more than a century, John William Fenton's role in westernising the country has gone unrecognised in Scotland, where many believe he died. Now, after years of searching, the Japanese are soliciting the help of Scots in trying to track down the brass band leader's final resting place.
In Japan, Fenton is seen as one of
Source: scotsman.com
Mar 13, 2006
A LITTLE-known fact about Mary, Queen of Scots was that she enjoyed sport. Mary would swing a golf club or tennis racket from time to time and she was a spectator at sporting competitions. But did she also play football – Scotland's national sport?During an excavation project inside Stirling Castle in the mid-1970s, workers came upon a small round object tucked behind the thick oak-panelled walls of the bed chamber once used by Mary. What they found was a leather
Source: Weekly Standard
Mar 13, 2006
The Bush administration has decided to release most of the documents captured in post-war Afghanistan and Iraq. The details of the document release are still being worked out, according to officials with knowledge of the discussions. Those details are critical. At issue are things like the timeframe for releasing the documents, the mechanism for scrubbing documents for sensitive information, and most important, the criteria for withholding documents from the public. But some of the captured file
Source: Yahoo News
Mar 13, 2006
A chamber discovered last month in the Valley of the Kings was a room used by the ancient Egyptians for mummifying pharaohs buried in the area, rather than a tomb, Egypt's top archaeologist said on Monday. Zahi Hawass said five sarcophagi found in the chamber contained remnants of pottery, shrouds and materials used in mummification.
The team from the University of Memphis which discovered the chamber had also opened 10 sealed jars found there to discover
Source: asahi.com
Mar 13, 2006
Everybody at some time has tossed a coin into a fountain, or elsewhere, for good luck. It turns out the practice has been around for well over 1,000 years, probably longer.
That, archaeologists say, may explain the recent discovery of rare copper coins from the Nara (710-784) and early Heian (794-1185) periods at a dried-up riverbed here. The coins are special because they are what are known as Kocho-Junisen, a term used for 12 types of copper coins
Source: breitbart.com
Mar 13, 2006
Underground chambers and tunnels used during a Jewish revolt against the Romans nearly 2,000 years ago have been uncovered in northern Israel, archaeologists said Monday.
The Jews laid in supplies and were preparing to hide from the Romans during their revolt in A.D. 66-70, the experts said. The pits, which are linked by short tunnels, would have served as a concealed subterranean home. Yardenna Alexandre of the Israel Antiquities Authority said the
Source: CBS News
Mar 13, 2006
Dan Brown took the stand Monday to rebut accusations that he copied from other writers' work to produce his huge best seller "The Da Vinci Code." Authors Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh are suing "Da Vinci Code" publisher Random House for copyright infringement, claiming Brown "appropriated the architecture" of their 1982 nonfiction book "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail."
Answering a question by the accusers' la
