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: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 20, 2011
For their new book, 'The Eleventh Day’, Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan trawled through thousands of documents, piecing together a definitive account of the attacks.
On September 11, bereaved family members will mark the 10th anniversary of the cataclysmic terrorist attacks on American cities. They will gather around the pools of remembrance at the newly opened memorial, where the names of the 2,982 known victims who died on the day and in the earlier bombing of 1993 are engraved on parapets of bronze. President Obama and his predecessor, George W Bush will be on hand.
In the months that followed, President Bush and Vice President Cheney – especially Cheney – insinuated publicly that Iraq had been involved in 9/11. Polls showed that by 2003, when the US invaded Iraq, millions of Americans had come to believe that was the case. The US 9/11 Commission, however, would conclude that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks.
Rumsfeld's other suspects after 9/11 had included Libya, Sudan and Iran, all countries associated with terrorism.
Source: Fox News
Aug 20, 2011
Two New Jersey senators are demanding that any new Libyan government agree to extradite to the United States the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing two years after he was released from prison to die of cancer.
The second anniversary of al-Megrahi's release comes as Libyan rebels gain ground in their six-month civil war against Qaddafi's Tripoli-based regime. Some politicians in Britain and the U.S.
Source: AP
Aug 19, 2011
ELMIRA, N.Y. — U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has introduced legislation that would allow a Revolutionary War battlefield currently owned by New York state to become a national park.The measure introduced by the New York Democrat earlier this month would authorize the federal government to conduct a study to evaluate the significance of the Newtown Battlefield State Park, just outside the city of Elmira, and the impact of making it a national park.
Source: Helena Independent Record (MT)
Aug 19, 2011
LITTLE BIGHORN BATTLEFIELD NATIONAL MONUMENT (AP) — On a hot, nearly windless day in early August, Edwin C. Bearss is looking across the Little Bighorn River as he describes an early scene in the battle that would come to be known as Custer’s Last Stand. He is dressed in a ball cap, two T-shirts and a pair of stained khaki pants held up by an ancient leather belt. His hiking boots, by contrast, are sturdy and relatively new. He looks like a man who can’t be bothered by superfluities. A busload of tourists, who have come from around the country to follow Bearss (pronounced “Bars”) on a five-day tour that takes in several of the battles leading up to the climactic fight on the Little Bighorn, are listening carefully to his monologue, some of them taking notes. Bearss recounts details of the Battle of the Little Bighorn with a vivid immediacy, sometimes squeezing his eyes shut, as if imagining himself there on that fateful day of June 25, 1876. He is lean and not much more than average height, but the 88-year-old historian has a gruff, authoritative voice that commands attention. His face is deeply tanned and he is holding a swagger stick that is engraved with the names of Civil War battles and capped with a brass cartridge. He often gestures with it.
Source: MSNBC
Aug 19, 2011
An ancient clay vessel reconstructed from pieces discovered at a Canadian museum is riddled with tiny holes, leaving archaeologists baffled over what it was used for.
The jar, just 16 inches (40 centimeters) tall and dating back about 1,800 years, was found shattered into an unrecognizable 180 pieces in a storage room at the Museum of Ontario Archaeology. But even after it was restored, the scientists were faced with a mystery. So far no one has been able to identify another artifact like it from the Roman world.
Source: BBC
Aug 19, 2011
Plans are afoot to secure a dedicated memorial to an Ulster war hero in his home town.
The possibility is being examined of having a dedicated memorial or sculpture in Bushmills to honour Sergeant Robert Quigg, who was awarded a Victoria Cross for his heroics in the Battle of the Somme.
Discussions have taken place at Moyle Council in Ballycastle and it was agreed to write to the Royal British Legion in Bushmills and the MacNaghten Estate in Bushmills to get their views.
Many would like to see a memorial in place in Bushmills ahead of 2016 which will be the centenary of
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 18, 2011
Archaeologists believe they have found the first pre-Roman planned town in Britain which reveals Iron Age societies were far more sophisticated than previously thought.
The site, unearthed beneath Silchester near Reading, Berks, and will change the history books after originally thought the Romans were the first to bring civilised life to Britain.
After the Roman invasion, the town was used by its military, and there is evidence that Roman buildings were very swiftly built on top of Iron Age structures....
Source: CNN
Aug 18, 2011
The Yankee soldier, who had meager possessions, must have been proud of his ring and its distinctive diamond-shaped centerpiece.Somehow, the size-11 ring was lost, discarded or left behind, only to be swallowed by the earth on a rise near Millen, Georgia.Untouched by human hands for nearly 150 years, the ring recently was discovered by archaeology students who have unearthed more artifacts at the site of Camp Lawton, a Civil War stockade and prison.The Georgia Southern University team is finding personal items that will help tell the desperate story of Union soldiers who tried to stay alive while food was scarce and disease rampant....
Source: BBC
Aug 18, 2011
Mikhail Gorbachev has accused Vladimir Putin of "castrating" Russia's electoral system and said he should not seek re-election as president.
The ex-Soviet leader was interviewed by the BBC's Bridget Kendall on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the failed coup which led to the collapse of the USSR.
The action was aimed at reversing reforms overseen by Mr Gorbachev.
Mr Putin, the current prime minister, radically changed the voting system during his two terms as president.
He is widely tipped to stand again in 2012 and previously won landslide victories in 2000 and 2004.
Mr Gorbachev, 80, the Soviet Union's first and last unelected president, stood for election as Russian president in 1996, when he took less than 1% of the vote against his old foe, Boris Yeltsin....
Source: AP
Aug 18, 2011
Chile officially recognized 9,800 more victims of its dictatorship on Thursday, increasing the total number of people killed, tortured or imprisoned for political reasons to 40,018.
A similar effort in 2004 determined that 27,153 survivors deserve monthly compensation from the government for human rights violations they suffered.
Together with the 3,065 people who were killed by Chile's military or were simply made to disappear and are presumed dead, the official victim list accepted by President Sebastian Pinera on Thursday totals 40,018...
Source: AP
Aug 18, 2011
A letter to President Abraham Lincoln from three military surgeons requesting a chaplain to tend to the wounded and dying soldiers after the Battle of Antietam, accompanied by the president's signed response, were returned to the National Archives on Thursday.
Bill Panagopulos, president of Alexander Historical Auctions, in Stamford, Conn., helped negotiate the return and handed the documents over to David Ferriero, archivist of the United States, at a ceremony at the National Archives.
Investigative archivist Mitchell Yockelson spotted the letters in a New York dealer's catalog of rare items in 2009. The documents may have been taken while still in the custody of the War Department before they ever became part of the Archives' collection of billions of documents, officials said....
Source: Guardian (UK)
Aug 17, 2011
A national theatre of the north is found on summit of Studforth Hill in Aldborough.
The lost amphitheatre of northern England has been found on a Yorkshire hilltop in a discovery with major implications for the study of Roman Britain.
Centuries of speculation have ended with a printout from geomagnetic scanners which reveals a great tiered bank of seats below curving hummocks in a field now frequented only by a herd of cattle.
Crowning the summit of Studforth Hill, the oval arena would have combined spectacles and entertainments with a magnificent 360-degree view, making it the equivalent of a national theatre of the north.
The find by Cambridge University
Source: Guardian (UK)
Aug 17, 2011
Plague of 1348-49 spread so fast in London the carriers had to be humans not black rats, says archaeologist.
Rats weren't the carriers of the plague after all. A study by an archaeologist looking at the ravages of the Black Death in London, in late 1348 and 1349, has exonerated the most famous animal villains in history.
Sloane, who was previously a field archaeologist with the Museum of London, working on many medieval sites, is now attached to English Heritage.
Source: WaPo
Aug 17, 2011
It was around this point in August 1963, in the sweltering days before the March on Washington, that Eleanor Holmes Norton was waiting for someone to say something really nasty about her boss.She was a march volunteer. The boss was Bayard Rustin, the march’s chief organizer and the man widely viewed as the only civil rights activist capable of pulling off a protest of such unprecedented scale.And he was gay. Openly gay. That year again? 1963.“I was sure the attacks would come because I knew what they could attack Bayard for,” says Norton, now the District’s nonvoting delegate to Congress.The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom will be forever known as the day that ensured the success of the civil rights movement and launched the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. into the highest pantheon of American champions. Next week, on the 48th anniversary of the march, King will be anointed into that ultra-selective fraternity of national leaders memorialized on the Mall....
Source: Spiegel
Aug 17, 2011
...Hardly anyone is familiar with the name of the sculptor, Thutmose, but the bust is of the famous Nefertiti, Queen of the Nile, Great Royal Wife of the Pharaoh Akhenaten. And thanks to a coincidence, a minor detour of history, her likeness is not on display in a museum in her native Egypt, but in Berlin. Or was it not a coincidence at all, but rather fraud?
For the Germans, Nefertiti is their perceived property, a national cultural treasure, their entry in the canon of the sublime. The bust represents many things, but most of all it stands for both the splendid epoch of ancient Egypt and the age of spectacular digs around the beginning of the last century, when Europe's archeologists set out for the Nile.
Source: BBC
Aug 17, 2011
An estate agent in Sweden is offering a house with the remains of a medieval resident included in the price.
The property, built in 1750 in Visby, on the Baltic Sea island of Gotland, has a tomb and skeleton in the cellar.
The starting price for the three-bedroomed house, where the skeleton is visible through glass in the cellar, is 4.1m Kronor ($640,000; £390,780).
The property was built on the foundations of a Russian church, abandoned during the Middle Ages....
Source: BBC
Aug 17, 2011
Three medieval walls, thought to be nearly 700 years old, have been found in the grounds of a Conwy hotel.
Drainage work at the Maenan Abbey Hotel, near Llanrwst, unearthed two walls - one thought to be the original abbey's cloister wall - underground.
On Monday, a third wall was discovered and ancient monuments agency Cadw are due to visit the site on Wednesday to decide how to proceed.
The abbey is believed to have been built in about 1282, to relocate monks after King Edward I ordered the removal of their Cistercian monastery from Conwy town, so he could build a castle there.
The abbey was destroyed in the 16th Century during Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, and the current property was built in the 19th Century....
Source: WaPo
Aug 16, 2011
Within weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Smithsonian Institution began collecting a wide range of artifacts recovered from the three sites where the hijacked planes went down.In an exhibit opening Sept. 3, the National Museum of American History will let visitors get much closer for a more intimate experience. The museum plans to depart from the usual glass-covered displays and assemble the objects on open, uncovered tables.“September 11: Remembrance and Reflection” contains about 60 objects from the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pa.“The objects come from collectors and donors and, more importantly, people who were there,” said Cedric Yeh, curator of the Sept. 11 collections. In 2002, the museum was designated as the official archives for Sept. 11 materials....
Source: Daily Caller
Aug 16, 2011
President Barack Obama said yesterday in Decorah, Iowa, that he absorbs more political criticism than Abraham Lincoln, the assassinated 16th U.S. president, attracted from his Civil War critics....“Democracy is always a messy business in a big country like this,” Obama [said]. “When you listen to what the federalists said about the anti-federalists … those guys were tough. Lincoln, they used to talk about him almost as bad as they talk about me.”
Source: Live Science
Aug 16, 2011
This mummy seems to be missing a brain and other vital organs, new images reveal, and the finding suggests the man held a high status when alive 2,500 years ago in ancient Egypt.
The images indicate that embalmers removed the man's brain and major organs and replaced them with rolls of linen, a superior embalming method used only for those of high status, researchers at the Smithsonian
