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.
December 31, 2069
ncient Rome's biggest temple reopened to the public on Thursday after 26 years of restoration work.
The massive Temple of Venus and Roma, in the heart of the Roman Forum and a stone's throw from the Colosseum, was designed and commissioned by the Emperor Hadrian in the 2nd century AD.
It was so large that a huge bronze statue of the Emperor Nero – known as the Colossus – had to be moved to another site.
The restoration of the temple was particularly welcom
Source: AP
December 31, 2069
A "hidden" language spoken by only about 1,000 people has been discovered in the remote northeast corner of India by researchers who at first thought they were documenting a dialect of the Aka culture, a tribal community in the foothills of the Himalayas.
They found an entirely different vocabulary and linguistic structure.
Even the speakers of the tongue, called Koro, did not realize they had a distinct language, linguist K. David Harrison said Tuesday.
Source: AP
December 31, 2069
The immense chestnut tree that cheered Anne Frank as she and her family hid from the Nazis in Amsterdam was toppled Monday by wind and heavy rain. The once-mighty tree, now diseased and rotted through the trunk, snapped about three feet above ground, crashed across several gardens and damaged a brick wall and several sheds....
Source: CNN
December 31, 2069
New York's Landmarks Preservation Commission will hold a hearing Tuesday to decide whether a century-old building near ground zero is worth preserving.
The hearing is expected to be contentious because if the commission rules the building is not worth landmarking, it will pave the way for a mosque and community center that has been planned there.
Earlier this month, a community board said the 157-year-old building at the site wasn't architecturally significant enough to
Source: 6-21-10
December 31, 2069
Jerusalem municipality on Monday said it was moving ahead with plans to build a new archaeological park that call for the demolition of 22 Arab homes, raising fears of unrest in the Holy City.
The city's planning and building committee approved the Gan Hamelech (King's Garden) project, a municipal spokesman said, using the Hebrew name for the area outside Jerusalem's Old City known as Al-Bustan to its mostly Arab residents.
In March, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as
Source: 6-10-10
December 31, 2069
The Yukon government has designated the A.J. Goddard, a Gold Rush-era steamboat found on the bottom of a lake last year, a historic site.
This means the shipwrecked sternwheeler, which remains almost intact at the bottom of Lake Laberge, will be protected from damage or harm by people, according to Yukon government officials.
Launched during the Klondike Gold Rush in 1898 to carry miners and supplies, the A.J. Goddard vanished in Lake Laberge, north of Whitehorse, in a
Source: New York Post
December 31, 2069
A sarcophagus sharing space with ancient terra cotta urns, bronze sculptures of Indian deities and a 2,700-year-old drinking vessel may not seem all that unusual in New York City.
But this is not a room at an august museum or fancy Madison Avenue gallery.
These antiquities and art objects — some 2,500 pieces — are wrapped up and tucked away in a nondescript Queens warehouse. In a locked and climate-controlled storage unit, the treasures sit as potential evidence in smu
Source: Australia's Business and World News
December 31, 2069
Francisco Etxeberria's work causes blisters and earns him animosity as well as admiration. He and his team of forensic experts, anthropologists, archaeologists and others have unearthed 200 mass graves, exhuming the remains of 4,800 people in Spain since 2000.
With the passage of the ”law on historical memory” in 2000 and a lawsuit filed by a son who had lost his father, Etxeberria began to excavate in Priaranza del Bierzo in the northern province of León. The bodies of 13 civilians
Source: Telegraph (UK)
December 31, 2069
Osama bin Laden tried and failed to set up a satellite TV link-up on the day of the September 11 attacks from his Afghan hideout to watch the strikes as they happened, according to his former bodyguard.
Nasser al Bahri, 37, who now preaches against the fanaticism of the Islamist network, said his former master had requested a satellite dish to be installed in his hideout in Kandahar. "He asked for satellite TV to be able to follow the bombing," he said.
Howeve
December 31, 2069
The body of Poland's first lady was greeted with tears and tulips after being flown home Tuesday from Russia, and officials announced that she and her husband will be buried Sunday in a state funeral at Krakow's Wawel Cathedral.
President Lech Kaczynski and his wife, Maria Kaczynska, were among 96 people killed Saturday in a plane crash in western Russia. Investigators are pointing at human error as the cause.
Stanislaw Kracik, Krakow province governor, said the preside
Source: 2-11-10
December 31, 2069
Mexican researchers are to study the impact of apocalyptic interpretations of the ancient Mayan calendar, as in the recent US blockbuster movie "2012," on modern-day Mayan communities.
Experts will travel in March to southern Mexico and Guatemala to carry out research with priests in Mayan communities, amid fears that sects may capitalize on the theories to sway potential followers.
The recent movie directed by Roland Emmerich refers to Mayans and the Mesoamer
Source: BBC
December 31, 2069
A row has erupted in Rwanda about the genocide memorial not reflecting the plight of Hutus in the 1994 massacres.
During the 100-day genocide, Hutu militias systematically killed about 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
But opposition politician Victoire Ingabire, who has returned to Rwanda for the first time since the genocide, says Hutus were also killed by Tutsis.
Source: Guardain (UK)
December 31, 2069
According to newly translated instructions inscribed in ancient Babylonian on a clay tablet telling the story of the ark, the vessel that saved one virtuous man, his family and the animals from god's watery wrath was not the pointy-prowed craft of popular imagination but rather a giant circular reed raft.
The now battered tablet, aged about 3,700 years, was found somewhere in the Middle East by Leonard Simmons, a largely self-educated Londoner who indulged his passion for history wh
Source: Woai.com (Texas)
December 31, 2069
The Battle of Medina was a massacre in the early 19th century involving the Spanish Army from the south and the Republican Army from the north. It is known as the bloodiest battle on Texas soil. But one very important detail of the battle is still unknown -- where it happened.
This mysterious battle is missing in action, so to speak. Historians have never been able to agree where exactly it took place. Some say near Poteet, others say it was near Pleasanton.
News 4 WOAI
Source: Telegraph (UK)
December 31, 2069
Five years after the Boxing Day tsunami, Aceh's people are still recovering
Keri's smalls hands are clasped tightly together, as she concentrates on remembering the day that a giant tsunami swept her out of her family's home in Banda Aceh, North Sumatra, tearing first her father from her grasp, then her pregnant sister and finally her mother. She was nine years old then.
She cannot remember what happened after the foul water, thick with bodies and other horrors, closed
Source: Reuters
December 31, 2069
An Australian hospital ship torpedoed by the Japanese during World War Two with the loss of 268 lives has been located in waters off the coast of the northern state of Queensland, the government said on Sunday.
The loss of the Centaur in 1943 while sailing to Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea was one of Australia's great wartime disasters. Survivors and their relatives have long pressed for the wreck to be found, fearing salvagers would reach it first.
The government ev
Source: National Parks Traveler
December 31, 2069
Editor’s note: It’s been said that to know where you’re heading, you have to know how you got to your current location. And yet, even when you do know that, it can be hard to move forward with what you’ve learned. For 20+ years Todd Wilkinson has been following land-management decisions in and around Yellowstone National Park. In this essay, he looks back to a seminal moment from 1989 and points out what has, and hasn’t, been learned by those involved in managing the Greater Yellowstone Ecosyste
Source: BBC News
December 31, 2069
A US man has become the longest-serving prisoner to be freed after DNA evidence proved he was innocent of the crime he was convicted of three decades ago.
James Bain spent 35 years in jail after being found guilty of kidnapping and raping a nine-year-old boy in 1974.
On his release from prison in Florida on Thursday, he told the BBC he was not angry and his faith had helped him.
He has always maintained his innocence, but was only allowed a review of his
Source: BBC News
December 31, 2069
The infamous Arbeit Macht Frei sign at the entrance to the Auschwitz Nazi death camp in Poland has been stolen.
The wrought iron sign, whose words mean "Work Sets You Free", was unscrewed and pulled down from its position above the gate in the early hours of Friday.
Polish authorities denounced the theft, while Israel's Holocaust museum branded it an "act of war".
More than a million people - 90% of them Jews - were murdered by the Na
Source: Azzaman (Iraq)
December 31, 2069
Iraq’s Tall Harmal, site of the old Babylonian city of Shadupum, has been left unguarded since the 2003-U.S. invasion of Iraq.
The site, in the outskirts of Baghdad, was fenced and seen as one of the country’s most important ancient landmarks prior to the invasion.
Only recently the Antiquities Department has remember Harmal, where Iraq’s most renowned archaeologist Taha Baqer had unearthed an ancient library of about 300 cuneiform documents in the late 1940s and early
