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 11, 2011
Vladimir Putin, Russia's prime minister has added underwater archaeology to his long list of outdoor pursuits, diving beneath the Black Sea to explore the submerged ruins of an ancient Greek city known as Russia's Atlantis. In a carefully co-ordinated publicity stunt designed to show the 58-year-old Russian prime minister as a dynamic figure interested in his country's heritage, Mr Putin went diving off the Taman Peninsula in southern Russia on Wednesday afternoon.The area was the site of an ancient Greek settlement known as Phanagoria that is currently being excavated by Russian archaeologists, and Mr Putin's scuba diving foray into its submerged ruins received top billing on Russian state TV....
Source: CNN
Aug 11, 2011
Vice City. San Andreas. Liberty City. Tehran.Three of these locales are instantly familiar to videogame diehards as settings in the "Grand Theft Auto" series, which has sold more than 100 million copies worldwide. The latter, however, is more commonly linked to news bulletins about the Iranian nuclear program or confrontational statements by the country's hardline Islamist president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.If Navid Khonsari, 41, has his way, Iran's capital city will soon be much more familiar to gamers. A director of the "Grand Theft Auto" series, the Iranian-born Khonsari's next game has a simple working title whose numerals denote a world of significance: "1979." And the game's tagline? "There are no good guys."
Source: BBC
Aug 10, 2011
Germany and Montenegro have signed an agreement on burying the remains of German soldiers killed during World War II.The agreement was reached during a visit to the Balkan state by the German Foreign Minister, Guido Westerwelle.A site containing more than 400 bodies was excavated in Montenegro's capital Podgorica in 2007.The agreement means a new German cemetery will be built in Montenegro to house the remains....
Source: BBC
Aug 10, 2011
An enormous jawbone found in Kazakhstan is further evidence that giant birds roamed - or flew above - the Earth at the same time as the dinosaurs.Writing in Biology Letters, researchers say the new species, Samrukia nessovi, had a skull some 30cm long.If flightless, the bird would have been 2-3m tall; if it flew, it may have had a wingspan of 4m.The find is only the second bird of such a size in the Cretaceous geologic period, and the first in Asia.The only other evidence of a bird of such a size during the period was a fossilised spinal bone found in France and reported in a 1995 paper in Nature....
Source: Chicago Tribune
Aug 10, 2011
For decades, Howard Bergman has clung to the "absolutely atrocious" memories of his boyhood in Poland, when his family was herded into Nazi labor camps and his father and brother were murdered.Susan Nesher and her sisters had spent years wondering about a mystery from their father's past: the family they'd heard he lost in the Holocaust before he married their mother, a part of his history he would not discuss.In recent months, Bergman, 83, of Skokie, has learned details about his father's death that had eluded him for more than 65 years. Nesher, 56, of Highland Park, has been able to fill in some of the blank pages in her family's history, including the names of her two half-siblings.
Source: BBC News
Aug 10, 2011
Sweden's royal family has rejected allegations of links between the German-born queen's late father and the Nazi regime in Germany.Queen Silvia has published a report she commissioned in response to claims her father took over a factory from a Jewish businessman.The report concluded that Walter Sommerlath had in fact helped the Jewish man escape from Germany.But a Holocaust survivors' group dimissed the findings as a "whitewash"....
Source: DNA India
Aug 9, 2011
His journeys across mountain ranges and deserts opened the eyes of medieval Europe to the exotic wonders of China and the Silk Road, establishing him as one of history's greatest explorers.But a team of archaeologists believe Marco Polo never even reached the Middle Kingdom, much less introduced pasta to Italy after bringing it back from his travels, as legend has it.Instead they think it more likely that the Venetian merchant adventurer picked up second-hand stories of China, Japan and the Mongol Empire from Persian merchants he met on the shores of the Black Sea, thousands of miles short of the Orient....
Source: Civil War Librarian
Aug 9, 2011
Maintenance workers at the Gettysburg National Military Park cutting through a fallen oak tree have discovered bullets fired during the famed Civil War battle. The crews came across the bullets earlier this month, while working on Culp's Hill, which served as the right flank of the Union Army on July 1st, 2nd and 3rd in 1863. "Culp’s Hill is one of the areas on the Gettysburg battlefield that saw intense fighting in July 1863," says Park Superintendent Bob Kirby. "One hundred years ago it was commonplace to find bullets in Gettysburg trees but this is a rarity today."Two sections of the tree trunk where the bullets were found have been moved to the park's museum collections storage area. They will be treated to remove insects and mold and then added to the park's artifacts collection. According to the National Park Service, a number of witness trees on the battlefield have been frequently pointed out during battlefield tours.Other previously unknown Witness Trees are often identified during preparatory work for battlefield rehabilitation efforts, where the park re-opens historic meadows and farm fields to restore the historic integrity of the 1863 battlefield and to improve the visitors’ understanding of what happened during the clash between Union and Confederate forces.
Source: AP
Aug 9, 2011
TOKYO (AP) — The United States sent a representative for the first time Tuesday to the annual memorial service for victims of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, one of two nuclear attacks that led Japan to surrender in World War II.The U.S. bombing of Nagasaki 66 years ago killed some 80,000 people. Three days earlier, the U.S. had dropped another atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing up to 140,000.U.S. Charge d'Affaires James P. Zumwalt, the first American representative to attend the Nagasaki memorial service, said in a statement that President Barack Obama hoped to work with Japan toward his goal "of realizing a world without nuclear weapons" — a commitment Japan has made repeatedly since the war.Obama last year sent Ambassador John Roos to the 65th anniversary of the bombing in Hiroshima, and Roos visited Nagasaki twice last year on other dates, according to the U.S. Embassy in Japan....
Source: National Geographic
Aug 8, 2011
A hundred years ago in Peru, a tall history professor from Yale University left his camp in a valley northwest of Cusco, and walked through cloud forest to a mountain ridge more than 7,500 feet above sea level. There, high above the roaring Urubamba river, he found an ancient stone citadel; sculpted terraces of temples and tombs, granite buildings and polished walls that were covered in centuries of vines and vegetation.Hiram Bingham had stumbled across the Inca site of Machu Picchu, the site he believed to be the ‘Lost city of the Incas’. ‘Machu Picchu might prove to be the largest and most important ruin discovered in South America since the days of the Spanish conquest,’ he wrote in the 1913 edition of the National Geographic.
Source: WaPo
Aug 8, 2011
The Dow Jones industrial average is one of several market indexes created by Dow Jones Co. co-founder Charles Dow (pictured). It is named after Dow and statistician Edward Jones and includes the stocks of 30 large U.S. companies....The Dow was originally set up to gauge the well-being of the industrial sector, but these days few of the 30 component stocks have to do with heavy industry. When the Dow was created in 1896, it contained only 12 stocks....
Source: Fox News
Aug 8, 2011
In 1979, as the U.S. was reeling from skyrocketing interest rates, high unemployment and an energy crisis, President Jimmy Carter delivered a televised address that would later infamously be labeled, “the malaise speech." He never used the word, but rather blamed the poor economy in part on a "crisis of the American spirit."In hindsight, that speech now seems like a hard lesson on the political liabilities of the blame game -- something critics say President Obama has failed to grasp more than 30 years later. Obama has suggested that blame for the stagnant U.S. economy lies in places other than the Oval Office. The latest example occurred Monday, when the president said, "There will always be economic factors that we can't control, earthquakes, spikes in oil prices, slowdowns in other parts of the world.”
Source: AP
Aug 8, 2011
The F.B.I. says DNA found on the tie of the hijacker D. B. Cooper does not match a new suspect. Special Agent Fred Gutt cautioned that the test did not necessarily rule out the suspect because investigators did not know whether DNA on the tie is that of Cooper’s....
Source: NYT
Aug 8, 2011
NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — Military secrecy was a bit lax during the Civil War, by today’s standards, but contractor deadlines were a lot tighter.The technology that revolutionized naval warfare began with a five-sentence message delivered to The New York Times 150 years ago, on Aug. 9, 1861, and the information was not exactly classified. It was an advertisement placed by the Union Navy, to appear the following six days, under the heading “Iron-Clad Steam Vessels.”“The Navy Department will receive offers from parties who are able to execute work of this kind,” the ad announced, describing its desire for a two-masted ship “either of iron or of wood and iron combined. The plans had to be submitted by early September, giving designers less than a month.Less than six months later, a shipyard in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, launched not merely an ironclad but an entirely new kind of warship. The U.S.S. Monitor had no masts and no line of cannons. It was essentially a submarine beneath a revolving gun turret, something so tiny and bizarre-looking that many experts doubted the “cheese box on a raft” would float, much less fight....
Source: BBC
Aug 8, 2011
New research has cast doubt on the theory that 97 infants were killed at a Roman brothel in Buckinghamshire.
In 2008, the remains of the newborn babies were rediscovered packed in cigarette cases in a dusty museum storeroom by Dr Jill Eyers from Chiltern Archaeology.
They were excavated from the remains of a lavish Roman villa complex in Buckinghamshire almost 100 years earlier, but had remained hidden ever since.
She has now carefully plotted the infant burials and the associated artefacts from The Yewden Villa at Hambleden.
This revealed that all those infants that could be dated were buried between 150AD and 200AD, meaning all their deaths look like they took place in a 50-year period.
And she said she now had a whole h
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 8, 2011
Hundreds of folders of historical documents chronicling pivotal moments in British history have gone missing from The National Archives.
Among the 1,600 folders of documents reported missing since 2005 are letters from Sir Winston Churchill to General Franco, the Spanish dictator; minutes of Harold Wilson's meetings with the Queen; and documents from the courts of Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and Charles I.
Dozens of regimental diaries, medal records and squadron and battleship logbooks have also seemingly disappeared.
Some of the files, many of which contain the sole copies of historical documents, have not been seen since the early 1990s and fewer than a half have been recovered, according to a register of missing items released under freedom of information laws.
Historians have accused the National Archives, which is overseen by the Ministry of Justice, of "administrative laxness"....
Source: BBC
Aug 8, 2011
In March 1938, a Church of England chaplain set out to save the lives of hundreds of desperate Austrian Jews facing persecution by the Nazis by baptising them as Christians, to help them flee the country.
The controversial work of the Reverend Hugh Grimes - which began the day after Nazi Germany annexed Austria - is little recognised yet it led to what could be called Britain's own "Schindler's list".
It all began with the Anschluss (annexation), when Hitler made Austria part of the Third Reich just before the start of World War II.
The Reverend Hugh Grimes was chaplain of Christ Church in Vienna, a little piece of England in Austria.
Concerned about what he saw happening around him, he came up with a plan.
Before long, the trickle of baptisms at his church - which mainly catered for British embassy staff and other expatriates in the city - turned into a flood.....
Source: BBC
Aug 8, 2011
Two former US security contractors may sue former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for his role in their alleged torture in Iraq, a court has ruled.
US citizens Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel said they were held for months by US troops under harsh conditions.
They said they were detained in retaliation for efforts to reveal illegal activities by their employer.
A federal appeals court on Monday ruled that former Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld had no immunity in the case....
Source: BBC
Aug 8, 2011
The sole survivor of one of the US Army Black Hawk helicopters shot down by Somali militiamen in Mogadishu in 1993 says the deaths of 18 of his comrades should not have prompted the end of the military mission to restore order.
Pilot Michael Durant told Radio 4's Broadcasting House that today's famine can be traced back to that decision to withdraw.
It was 3 October 1993, and Mr Durant's Black Hawk was taking part in an operation to capture close associates of the local warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid.
Since the fall of Somalia's government in 1991, Mr Aidid had been waging a bloody clan war and hampering United Nations efforts to deliver relief supplies to a civilian population facing starvation....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 8, 2011
The excavation of an ancient drainage tunnel beneath Jerusalem has yielded a sword, oil lamps, pots and coins abandoned during a war here 2,000 years ago, according to archaeologists.
The tunnel was built two millennia ago underneath one of Roman-era Jerusalem's main streets, which today largely lies under an Arab neighbourhood in the city's eastern sector.
After a four-year excavation, the tunnel is part of a growing network of subterranean passages under the politically combustible modern city.
The tunnel was intended to drain rainwater, but is also thought to have been used as a hiding place for the rebels during the time of the Second Temple in Jerusalem.....
