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: AP
Aug 1, 2011
CAIRO – Nineteen artifacts taken from the tomb of the famed boy-pharaoh Tutankhamun will be returned to Egypt next week after more than half a century at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Egypt's antiquities authority said Saturday.
Source: NYT
Aug 1, 2011
SEATTLE — He smoked Raleigh cigarettes, wore a black clip-on tie and drank whiskey, and when zero hour came, he was one cool cat.......D. B. Cooper hijacked the plane, later parachuting out of it and into the unknown. His body was never found. Mr. Cooper became a folk hero, and the case remains the only unsolved hijacking in American history....Now, 40 years later, comes what seems like a tantalizing new tip. The Federal Bureau of Investigation says it has a new suspect, one whose name has never surfaced in the ocean of tips that has washed in over four decades.Fred Gutt, a special agent in the Seattle office of the F.B.I., told The New York Times on Monday that the suspect died 10 years ago. He said the tip came from a retired law enforcement officer who knew a witness who “had an association with” the suspect from long ago....
Source: NYT
Aug 1, 2011
If part of the romance of baseball has often been romance, along comes one from another era.This one features Lou Gehrig, a young woman three years his junior he called “Red,” a domineering mother and a surprise ending 80 years later.The woman was Ruth Martin, a vivacious redhead from Elizabeth, N.J., whom Gehrig apparently dated sometime around 1930.It was a different time and Gehrig, whose mastery on the field was equaled by his discomfort, particularly with women, off it, was a different kind of athlete. He lived with his parents until he was 30 and was the ultimate outsider from baseball’s raucous atmosphere in the ’20s and ’30s.
Source: National Security Archive at GWU
Aug 1, 2011
Washington, D.C., August 1, 2011 - Pursuant to a FOIA lawsuit filed by the National Security Archive on the 50th anniversary of the infamous CIA-led invasion of Cuba, the CIA has released four volumes of its Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation. The Archive today posted volume 2, "Participation in the Conduct of Foreign Policy" (Part 1 | Part 2), classified top secret, which contains detailed information on the CIA's negotiations with Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Panama on support for the invasion.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 1, 2011
It is one of the best preserved buildings from the Roman world, a 2,000-year-old testament to the immense power and wealth of the empire.
But mystery has always surrounded what lies behind the unusual design of the Pantheon, a giant temple in the heart of Rome that was built by the Emperor Hadrian.
Now experts have come up with an intriguing theory – that the temple acted as a colossal sun dial, with a beam of light illuminating its enormous entrance at the precise moment that the emperor entered the building.
Constructed on Hadrian's orders and completed in AD128, the Pantheon's hemispherical dome is punctured by a 30ft-wide circular hole known as the 'oculus'.
It provides the interior of the building with its only source of natural light and allows in rain and – on rare occasions – snow....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 1, 2011
Windsor Castle's world-famous round tower has been reopened to the public today for the first time in almost four decades.
Visitors to the landmark, which has dominated the Berkshire skyline for more than 800 years, will be able to walk up its 200 steps to the top of the structure.
The building was underpinned to prevent subsidence and later converted into office space for the Royal Archives.
The tower is part of a complex of buildings that make up the historic Windsor Castle site....
Source: AP
Aug 1, 2011
A court has exempted Poland's last communist leader Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski from two trials due to his ill health.
The Warsaw regional court's press office told The Associated Press on Monday that the 88-year-old retired general has been taken off the lists of defendants on trials over the 1981 imposition of martial law in Poland and over the shooting deaths of shipyard workers in 1970, when he was defense minister.
It means separate trials will have to be opened against him if he is ever to go before the court again...
Source: WaPo
Jul 31, 2011
AMSTERDAM — Russian archivists have published new material from a German officer imprisoned after World War II who shared a cell with Raoul Wallenberg, the missing Swedish diplomat credited with rescuing tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews.Publication of the statements from Willy Roedel came as a surprise since the Russians had previously denied they existed, say two independent scholars who have researched the Wallenberg mystery for decades, in a paper released Monday.
Source: BBC
Jul 31, 2011
Successive British governments have accused Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe of brutal, corrupt and incompetent rule, but new evidence suggests that without British help, he might not have lived long enough to come to power. It was widely suspected that the British had somehow got wind of the raid and warned Nkomo's men.New evidence seen by the BBC's Document programme, suggests they might have been right. The British government, which was opposed to Ian Smith's white minority government, was working hard to find a peaceful end to the war.London believed this could only come about if rebel leaders Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe were part of any solution.So the Foreign Office was desperate to ensure that both men would make it to the Lancaster House peace talks that were due to take place in London later that year....
Source: USA Today
Jul 30, 2011
Battling nomads earned you buckets of trouble around 2,500 B.C., reports an international archeology team. Scars too.
The study team reports on two Bronze Age burials in a tomb from the ancient trade town of Terqa, a Mesopatamian archeological site in modern-day Syria.
The twin-domed tomb was about 16 feet long, 12 feet wide and six feet high, note the authors. Examination of the skeletons showed one belonged to a woman and one belonged to a man. A tough man.
But other skeletons from this period don't show such serious wounds, he adds, which leads to the conclusion that this person might been a notable warrior in the local community.
The researchers attempted to study the DNA of both skeletons, taken from tooth samples.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jul 30, 2011
Immortalised by Edward Woodward on the silver screen, the fate of 'Breaker' Morant and his two cohorts is widely known - sentenced to death by firing squad by the British military.
Now descendants of the executed Boer War soldier and his co-accused have added their voices to growing calls for a judicial inquiry in Australia into the trial of the men 109 years ago.
For several years campaigners have been calling for an independent review into the convictions of Harry Morant and fellow soldiers Peter Handcock and George Witton.
The men were convicted in 1902 of shooting 12 Boer prisoners of war.
Source: Huffington Post
Jul 29, 2011
Revised editions of two history textbooks in Virginia that were found to be erroneous last fall will be taken to universities across Virginia for public review.Previous state-approved editions of "Our Virginia: Past and Present" and "Our America to 1865," both Five Ponds Press textbooks, were removed from Virginia elementary schools early this year after errors were found in its texts. The most egregious statement was one that says thousands of African Americans fought for the South during the Civil War, which most historians reject, The Washington Post reported last fall.Dozens more errors were found after historians took a closer look at the texts, including "inaccuracies, inconsistencies, omissions, questionable interpretations, and spelling and grammatical errors," The Post reported in January....
Source: BBC
Jul 29, 2011
A teenager thought to have been the first victim of the Titanic has finally been given a headstone on his grave.
Samuel Scott, 15, fractured his skull whilst working on the ship in 1910. His body has since lain in an unmarked grave in Belfast City Cemetery.
However, a new headstone was unveiled there on Saturday as part of the Feile an Phobail festival....
Source: NYT
Jul 29, 2011
A federal judge in Washington has ordered the release of hundreds of pages of President Richard M. Nixon’s 1975 testimony about Watergate. The judge, Royce C. Lamberth III of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, wrote in a decision issued Friday that “nearly 40 years later, Watergate continues to capture both scholarly and public interest.”...
Source: MSNBC
Jul 29, 2011
As ancient civilizations across the Middle East collapsed, possibly in response to a global drought about 4,200 years ago, archaeologists have discovered that one settlement in Syria not only survived, but expanded.
Their next question is — why did Tell Qarqur, a site in northwest Syria, grow at a time when cities across the Middle East were being abandoned?
Tell Qarqur was occupied for about 10,000 years, between 8,500 B.C. and A.D. 1350. While excavations have taken place off and on for nearly three decades now, only a small portion of the city has been excavated so far. The long history of the site makes digging down to the 4,200-year-old remains difficult.
Source: BBC
Jul 29, 2011
A collection of silver and pewter items, some 350 years old, has been stolen from a Derbyshire church.
St Peter's Church, on Pindale Road in Hope, was broken into between 2 July and 27 July, police said.
About 15 items, dating back to between 1662 and 1970 and including two silver chalices and a 17th Century pewter plate, were taken from a safe.
Police said the items, which are used for special services, were worth thousands of pounds....
Source: BBC
Jul 29, 2011
Human remains have been found in South Korea, which could be those of a Gloucestershire regiment soldier who fought in the Korean War in 1951.
Tests are now being carried out by the UK's Joint Casualty and Compassionate Centre (JCCC) to see if the soldier is British.
Bodies of several British soldiers who fought in Korea have never been found.
The discovery was made in October, but details of the find have only just been released.
Sue Raftree, of the JCCC based at RAF Innsworth in Gloucester, which is part of the MOD's Service Personnel and Veterans Agency (SPVA), said it was too early to say for certain if the soldier was British....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jul 29, 2011
The secret grand jury testimony of President Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal was ordered to be released on Friday by a federal judge because of its significance in American history.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth granted a request by historian Stanley Kutler, who has written several books about Nixon and Watergate, and others to unseal the testimony given June 23 and 24 in 1975.
Nixon was questioned about the political scandal during the 1970s that resulted from the break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington.
The scandal caused Nixon to leave office Aug. 9, 1974, the only resignation of a U.S. president.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jul 29, 2011
George W Bush says his blank reaction to the first news of the Sept 11 attacks while US president was a conscious decision to project an aura of calm in a crisis.
In a rare interview with the National Geographic Channel, Mr Bush reflected on what was going through his mind when he was informed that a second passenger jet had hit New York's World Trade Center.
Mr Bush was visiting a Florida classroom at the time, and the incident - which was caught by television cameras - has often been used by critics to ridicule his apparently dazed response to the attack
Mr Bush said he could see journalists at the back of the classroom getting the news on their own cellphones "and it was like watching a silent movie." ...........
Source: AP
Jul 29, 2011
Long before Rosa Parks was hailed as the "mother of the civil rights movement," she wrote a detailed and harrowing account of nearly being raped by a white neighbor who employed her as a housekeeper in 1931.
The six-page essay, written in her own hand many years after the incident, is among thousands of her personal items currently residing in the Manhattan warehouse and cramped offices of Guernsey's Auctioneers, which has been selected by a Michigan court to find an institution to buy and preserve the complete archive.
It helps explain what triggered Parks' lifelong campaign against the ritualistic rape of black women by white men, said McGuire, whose recent book "At the Dark End of the Street" examines how economic intimidation and sexual violence were used to derail the freedom movement and how it went unpunished during the Jim Crow era...
