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: Wa Po
Oct 14, 2005
With more than half an acre of stained glass set in 175 windows, Chartres Cathedral is in the midst of the most exhaustive renovation in its modern history as millennial anniversary celebrations next year draw near.16 of the cathedral's windows, including the most famous -- the Blue Virgin window depicting Mary and the child Jesus--have been restored. The artisans are now working on the glass of other churches while awaiting the chance to bid for work on seven wi
Source: Wa Po
Oct 13, 2005
The Smithsonian Institution, accepting a $45 million gift from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, announced yesterday that the two museums and other facilities in the Old Patent Office Building would be called the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture.
The Las Vegas-based foundation, now the second largest donor in the Smithsonian's history with a total contribution of $75 million, directed its new multimillion-dollar support to the renovation and exhibitions at
Source: The Herald (Glasgow)
Oct 13, 2005
An ancient stone circle has been discovered in the Hebrides after being hidden for thousands of years.The significant find is integral to the famous Callanish Stones on Lewis which encompasses around 20 other satellite sites across a wide landscape.
It is also aligned to an extraordinary lunar phenomenon which only occurs around every 20 years and would have terrified the ancients.
The new site, believed to be up to 5000 years old, is the la
Source: Independent (UK)
Oct 13, 2005
Descendants of some of the 1.5 million Armenians killed during the collapse of Ottoman rule in 1915 will share a $17m (£9.7m) payout after a settlement with the French insurance giant AXA. The relatives lodged their legal case in California, home to one of the world's largest Armenian communities, claiming for life insurance benefits that were never paid. The settlement is likely to be approved in November in the US District Court in California.The California settlement will
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Oct 13, 2005
The American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress is working with folklorists at the University of Houston and in Austin, Texas, to create an oralhistory project that will put academic survivors of the hurricane to work collecting survivor stories in Texas. The Library is training historians and other academics in conducting oral histories, and will donate tape recording equipment for this project. In addition, the Library will assist in the development of a database a
Source: NYT
Oct 13, 2005
Heather Carbo, a matter-of-fact librarian at an evangelical seminary outside Philadelphia, was cleaning out an archival cabinet one hot afternoon in July. It was a dirty and routine job. But there, on the bottom shelf, she stumbled across what may be one of the most important musicological finds in years.
It was a working manuscript score for a piano version of Beethoven's "Grosse Fuge," a monument of classical music. And it was in the composer's own hand, according to Sot
Source: NYT
Oct 13, 2005
The nonfiction finalists include works of current and more distant history, biography and memoir, including the much talked about book at the moment, "The Year of Magical Thinking," by Joan Didion. Published by Alfred A. Knopf, Ms. Didion's work explores a year in which her husband dies and her daughter becomes gravely ill.
Also named as finalists were "102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers" (Times Books/Henry Holt), a chron
Source: AP
Oct 13, 2005
Vivian Malone Jones, the first black University of Alabama graduate, has been hospitalized in Atlanta. A woman answering the telephone at Atlanta Medical Center confirmed Thursday that Jones is being treated in the hospital's intensive care unit.
Jones grew up in Mobile, Ala., and had enrolled at historically black Alabama A&M University in Huntsville when she transferred to the University of Alabama in 1963. The move led to former Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace's infamous "
Source: Hartford Courant
Oct 13, 2005
Slamming shut the federal tribal recognition era in Connecticut, the Interior Department yesterday rejected bids by the Schaghticoke and Eastern Pequot Indians and effectively ended the prospects of additional casinos in the state. The long-awaited rulings, after years of research, reversals and rising tensions over the prospect of more mega-casinos in Connecticut, crushed tribal members gathered in Kent and North Stonington. The denials followed an Interior Department appeals panel's reversal i
Source: Guardian (UK)
Oct 13, 2005
Lawrence of Arabia told the cabinet at the end of the first world war that there was no case "for separating Sunni and Shia Arabs", an extraordinary foreshadowing of the issues at stake in this weekend's Iraqi constitutional vote, overseen by US and British occupying forces. TE Lawrence's ideas are shown in a recently unearthed map that is one of many uncanny links between past and present in an new Imperial War Museum exhibition marking the 70th anniversary of his death in 1935.
Source: scotsman.com
Oct 13, 2005
A 90-MILLION-year-old dinosaur with striking bird-like features may force scientists to rewrite part of the family tree of the extinct reptiles, suggesting that flight evolved in two separate evolutionary paths. The creature found in Argentina is the earliest known dromaeosaur - a group of predator dinosaurs which includes the velociraptor, one of the stars of the movie Jurassic Park.The discovery of an almost complete fossil skeleton at La Buitrera in Neuguen province in Pa
Source: BBC
Oct 13, 2005
The remains of the world's oldest noodles have been unearthed in China. The 50cm-long, yellow strands were found in a pot that had probably been buried during a catastrophic flood. Radiocarbon dating of the material taken from the Lajia archaeological site on the Yellow River indicates the food was about 4,000 years old. The discovery goes a long way to settling the old argument over who first created the string-like food.Scientists tell the journal Nature that the noodles w
Source: The Independent (London)
Oct 12, 2005
Italy is about relive two of its most shocking episodes of alleged police brutality as the trial of officers accused of illegal behaviour over attacks on anti- globalisation protesters proceed in Genoa.The attacks occurred as the G8 summit of July 2001 in the port city was winding down after days of peaceful mass demonstrations by 200,000 people from all over the world, and violently anarchic protests by a small group known as the Black Block.
Today the trial be
Source: The Independent (London)
Oct 12, 2005
One of the enduring mysteries of British naval history moved a step closer to being solved as archaeologists raised remaining parts of the Mary Rose.Historians have been baffled as to why Henry VIII's flagship foundered and sank in the Solent off Portsmouth in 1545, watched by the monarch, as it set sail to repel a French invasion force. But after a painstaking two-year project to recover the central part of the ship's bow, which also resulted in the raising of its massive a
Source: NYT
Oct 12, 2005
New discoveries in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, notably another jawbone, appear to give additional support to the idea that a separate species of little people new to science and now extinct lived there as recently as 12,000 years ago.
But a vigorous minority of skeptical scientists were unmoved by the new findings. They contend that the skeletal remains are more likely to be deformed modern human beings, not a distinct species.Th
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Oct 12, 2005
The Haworth Press has announced that it will proceed with publishing Same-Sex Desire and Love in Greco-Roman Antiquity and in the Classical Tradition of the West, but without one essay that had been planned. Haworth had called off publication because of criticism of that an essay, “Pederasty: An Integration of Cross-Cultural, Cross-Species, and Empirical Data,” could be viewed as endorsing sex between adults and adolescents. The Haworth announcement said that a future volume would deal with the
Source: Daily Pennsylvanian
Oct 12, 2005
he NCAA's effort to rid college sports of the Sioux, the Savages and the Indians, raises another question ...
When the NCAA passed new rules regulating the use of Native American mascots in collegiate championship events this past summer, there was a mild outcry over whether other ethnic or religious groups should be similarly considered. For now, though, the Quaker has been spared as the subject of any such debate.Representatives of the Penn athletic department
Source: USA Today
Oct 12, 2005
If Australian forklift operator Mike Hastings is, as genealogists contend, the rightful heir to the British throne, then he really needs to brush up on his tea-making skills. A documentary team from Britain's Channel Four conducted extensive research and concluded Hastings' ancestors were cheated out of the crown in the 15th century, meaning he should rightfully be the British head of state.The documentary's historian Michael Jones found documents in
Source: The Australian
Oct 12, 2005
Lawrence of Arabia's vision for the Middle East has been revealed in a map he created after World War I. T.E.Lawrence, the British colonel whose wartime collaboration with the Arabs against the Turks was immortalised in the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia, attempted to reward Britain's Arab allies by dividing territory between them. His sympathy for the cause of Arab self-determination is well known, but the details contained in the map eluded historians because it was filed at Britain's archives u
Source: Wa Po
Oct 12, 2005
This much is clear: One of the former Supreme Court justices most admired by nominee Harriet Miers is Warren E. Burger. But just how quickly Miers recalled his full name and whether she ever referred to him simply as "Warren" is now a matter of dispute.
Miers noted her admiration of Burger during a meeting last Wednesday morning with Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. No staff members were present during the session, which took pl
