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: KTVN Reno
Jan 13, 2006
Eighty-One members of the so-called Donner Party got trapped in the Sierra Nevada during the brutal winter of 1846. Some of them did resort to cannibalism to stay alive, but new research concludes none of the actual members of the two Donner families ate any human flesh. They were among 21 people who were stuck six miles away because of a broken wagon axle.
A report at a California conference of the Society for Historical Archaeology says no cooked human bones were found at the site
Source: PR Newswire
Jan 13, 2006
The automobile celebrates its 120th birthday on January 29. On this date in 1886, Karl Benz applied for a patent for his "vehicle with gas engine operation." Patent DRP 37435 for the
Benz Patent Motor Car granted in November of the same year is regarded as the birth certificate of the automobile. In later years the Benz organization and the company formed by fellow automotive pioneer Gottlieb Daimler would merge to form Daimler-Benz. Karl Benz is, therefore, credited as co-found
Source: CNN
Jan 13, 2006
They both painted a black, working-class woman named Fanny Eaton, making her one of the most painted black women of the Victorian period. The portraits are all on display at the Manchester Art Gallery where the Black Victorians exhibition explores the presence of people of African descent in 19th century British art, opening a fresh perspective on what it was like to be black at the time. With more than 100 works of art in a wide range of media from paintings to sculpture, p
Source: Dominion Post (New Zealand)
Jan 13, 2006
A decade after nuclear testing ended at Fangataufa and Mururoa atolls, the French cone of silence remains firmly in place, as Polynesian politician Tea Hirshon has found. "They are traditionally non-cooperative, and they are also covering up some stuff."
As head of a commission of inquiry set up to examine the effects of nuclear testing, Ms Hirshon will formally table its report in the Territorial Assembly in Papeete on January 26. She says the report does not make any rad
Source: Camille Jackson at tolerance.org
Jan 12, 2006
This week, as schools prepare to honor one of our country's greatest civil rights heroes, many students will undoubtedly conduct a Google search of Martin Luther King Jr. What they'll find is of the 33.7 million websites related to King, the third listing, martinlutherking.org, is a hate site targeting students and owned by a white supremacist.
Some will not be able to tell the site is full of hateful rhetoric aimed at discrediting King and his legacy, or that one of its goals is t
Source: cronaca.com
Jan 12, 2006
Mexico to pressure Austria over Aztec relic Mexico plans to press Austria once again to return a centuries old bejewelled feather headdress now in an Austrian museum, Foreign Minister Luis Ernesto Derbez said on Thursday.
President Vicente Fox will personally ask for its return at a summit of Latin American and European leaders in Vienna in May if there is no progress before then."If we are still without results at the time of the May meeting in Austria, w
Source: BBC News
Jan 12, 2006
A diplomatic hideaway in the south of England, scene of decades of international deals, is marking its 60th anniversary - quietly. You won't find Wilton Park on a map. It has rarely made media headlines. Yet it can claim to have been a nerve centre for global diplomacy for 60 years.
Some would claim it has changed the course of history.
What is it? A country house in a rambling estate near Brighton on England's south-east coast.
Source: Reuters
Jan 12, 2006
Mehmet Ali Agca, the man who shot and wounded Pope John Paul II in 1981, was released from a Turkish jail on Thursday after serving more than a quarter of a century behind bars. "Agca is now a free man. After 26 years Agca is now getting wet in the rain," his lawyer Mustafa Demirbag told Reuters.But Turkish Justice Minister Cemil Cicek said he would appeal Agca's release and the 48-year-old former right-wing gangster could be jailed again for the 1979 murder of lib
Source: Sports Illustrated
Jan 12, 2006
Having previously laid dubious claims to being the birthplace of soccer and the Japanese martial art of judo, the Chinese have now added golf to their list of inventions.
Scotland has always been considered as the traditional home of golf since the 15th century but now, according to The Scotsman, a Chinese academic has claimed that golf was played among the noble classes in China some 500 years earlier. Professor Ling Hongling of Lanzhou University says he has u
Source: AP
Jan 12, 2006
Lee Marinelli opened her dorm room to find everything just as she left it last August -- the books and school supplies on the shelves, half-unpacked clothes in the closet, her giant stuffed bear Cinnamon lying on the bed.
Four-and-a-half months ago, the Hurricane Katrina evacuation canceled Tulane University's freshman orientation after just a few hours. But on Thursday, the school finally came back to life.Students moved in on a day called "Orientation Dej
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation of American Scientists.
Jan 12, 2006
Among the mistakes and misrepresentations that led to the U.S. war in Iraq, one of the most shocking is the failure to correctly assess the financial costs of the war.
Never mind the low comedy of AID Administrator Andrew Natsios, who told Americans in 2003 that Iraqi reconstruction would cost taxpayers no more than $1.7 billion (Secrecy News, 12/08/05).
Now it appears that even estimates in the hundreds of billions of dollars may "underestimate the War's true cost
Source: San Jose Mercury News
Jan 12, 2006
One hundred years after the San Francisco earthquake, the state's top historic libraries are unveiling a massive $1 million online archive that chronicles in amazing detail what happened on that fateful April 18.
Thanks to the digital age, the project brings the quake of '06 alive in ways never possible before. You can read scribbled recollections as aftershocks hit, hear voices of San Franciscans screaming as the big temblor relentlessly shakes, and view photos of what your neighbo
Source: BBC News
Jan 12, 2006
Charles Darwin's former home in Bromley, south-east London, has been nominated as a World Heritage Site. Down House at Downe was Darwin's home for 40 years and where he developed his revolutionary theory of evolution.
The property also includes the scientist's experimental garden where he studied plants and animals.
Announcing the UK's 2006 nomination, Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell said: "Darwin was one of the greatest scientists of the modern age."
Source: People's Daily (China)
Jan 12, 2006
Archaeologists have discovered a new site of human activity in remote antiquity in Sai Kung, Hong Kong.
Zhang Shenshui, researcher of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told Xinhua here Wednesday that the important archaeological discovery not only rewrites the history when Hong Kong began having human activity, but also puts forward new topics of research for archaeologists. More than 6,000 artifacts have been unearthed at the site, which is located at the Wong Tei Tu
Source: Macedonian Information Agency
Jan 12, 2006
The history lesson on what happened in the armed conflict in Macedonia in 2001 is the result of project "Understanding Recent History", implemented by the Macedonian Helsinki Committee and Center for Human Rights and Conflict Resolution within the Institute for Sociological and Political-Legal Institutions.The project included 25 history teachers from 14 high schools with Macedonian and Albanian instruction, who have prepared a joint version on the 2001 conflict fo
Source: cronaca.com
Jan 12, 2006
A routine clean-up of an Irish country graveyard in County Meath has turned up a dozen stone artefacts dating back more than a thousand years.
Experts say they are astonished that the discovery, centring on monastic sculptures, should have been made by accident rather than through planned excavation.
Source: cronaca.com
Jan 11, 2006
Greece announced yesterday that a German university intended to return a piece of the Parthenon, increasing pressure on the British Museum to do the same with the Elgin marbles.
According to the Greek culture ministry, Heidelberg University was "disposed" to give back the heel of a male depicted in the frieze which originally adorned the Parthenon.It said the assurance had been given to the Greek prime minister, Kostas Karamanlis, by the un
Source: Newsday
Jan 11, 2006
Although the Raynham Hall Museum in Oyster Bay wasn't able to bid on a letter by Gen. George Washington about Revolutionary War spy Robert Townsend in a November auction, it has received a consolation prize.
An Oyster Bay Cove couple who are supporters of the museum situated in the Townsend house recently donated two letters written by Townsend enclosed in a signed first-edition copy of a book about Washington's spies written by Long Island historian Morton Pennypacker. The letters
Source: The Guardian (London)
Jan 11, 2006
The soldiers of Benito Mussolini's Nazi puppet republic should be accorded the same status as wartime resistance fighters and regular combatants, the Italian government will argue in a bill to be placed before parliament today.The bill would recognise the 200,000 soldiers of the Italian Social Republic as "military combatants", but would make no difference to the state benefits enjoyed by several thousand of the former members still alive.
But the cont
Source: Chicago Sun Times
Jan 11, 2006
Charred beams, gaping holes in the outside walls and the stench of burned rubble are all that's left of a 90-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright home that preservationists hoped to see restored.
A blaze that started at the rear of the vacant house late Monday all but destroyed the building at 600 Fillmore in Gary, known to local historians as the Wynant House.Investigators late Tuesday still had not determined what caused the fire but said the blaze is suspicious becaus
