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: Philadelphia Inquirer
Jun 14, 2011
Behind the "staff only" door at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, student interns are wheeling around carts of human skulls from nearly every corner of the globe.The collection contains 2,000 of them, many with carefully printed labels across the foreheads - Icelandic, Peruvian, Mexican Aztec. They form part of a famous - and infamous - collection amassed by Philadelphia physician/scientist Samuel Morton.
Source: BBC
Jun 14, 2011
The medieval secrets of Northumberland Park could be revealed in the next few weeks during an archaeological dig.
Up to seven trenches will be dug within the park, which lies between Tynemouth and North Shields.
The dig is part of work to rediscover the medieval hospital of St Leonard's as part of North Tyneside Council's restoration plans.
The council is applying for £2.2m from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) to improve the park.
Northumberland Park opened in 1885 and comprised woodland areas, formal flowerbeds, a pond
Source: BBC
Jun 14, 2011
A US salvage diver says he will scour the bottom of the north Arabian Sea to hunt for the body of Osama Bin Laden.
Bill Warren says that he wants to establish once and for all whether the al-Qaeda leader was killed by US forces in May, and then buried out at sea.
Mr Warren, 59, says his search will begin in about four weeks time, and will cost around $400,000 (£245,000).
He admits it will be like looking for a needle in a haystack, but maintains it is not an impossible mission....
Source: BBC
Jun 14, 2011
A 94-year-old man who guarded Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler's deputy, during his days as a prisoner of war in south Wales has died.
Joe Clifford, who had lived in Abergavenny since 1942, Monmouthshire, died after a short illness.
He guarded Hess in Surrey in 1941 and moved with him in June 1942 to Maindiff Court in Abergavenny, where he said the deputy fuhrer led a comfortable life.
In interviews given after the war Mr Clifford, who guarded Hess for three-and-a-half years,
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jun 14, 2011
Legend has it that Herculaneum was founded by Hercules while he was returning from Iberia on one of his travels.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jun 14, 2011
A pair of round-framed spectacles belonging to Mahatma Gandhi have gone missing from a museum in western India, officials said. Staff at the Sevagram Ashram, a religious retreat some 47 miles from the city of Nagpur, noticed that the glasses had disappeared as they made preparations to mark the anniversary of its founding.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jun 14, 2011
Dormice, sea urchins and fresh figs were among the delicacies enjoyed by ordinary Romans, British archaeologists have revealed after discovering a giant septic tank at one of the ancient cities destroyed by the eruption of Mt Vesuvius.
Source: U.S. Army
Jun 14, 2011
The following is a description of the birth of the U.S. Army taken from Robert Wright, The Continental Army
Source: NYT
Jun 14, 2011
American students are less proficient in their nation’s history than in any other subject, according to results of a nationwide test released on Tuesday, with most fourth graders unable to say why Abraham Lincoln was an important figure and few high school seniors able to identify China as the North Korean ally that fought American troops during the Korean War.
Source: CNN
Jun 14, 2011
NATO refused to say Tuesday whether or not it would bomb ancient [Leptis Magna] Roman ruins in Libya if it knew Moammar Gadhafi was hiding military equipment there."We will strike military vehicles, military forces, military equipment or military infrastructure that threaten Libyan civilians as necessary," a NATO official in Naples told CNN, declining to give his name in discussing internal NATO deliberations.
Source: BBC News
Jun 14, 2011
New research into accidental deaths in Tudor England reveals the strange way people died, writes Sean Coughlan.Oxford University historian, Dr Steven Gunn, has been scouring 16th Century coroners' reports and researching accidental deaths in Tudor England.These reports revealed an intriguing possible link with William Shakespeare's tragic character Ophelia. But they also revealed examples of some strange and sometimes stupid deaths.
Source: Huffington Post
Jun 13, 2011
The next time someone argues that the New Deal failed, and only the Second World War ended the Depression, as 'proof' that government spending does not work, one can respond with the details of economic growth and unemployment reduction up to 1940, or one can ignore the claim and thank them for making your case for massive government spending in a deep, broad recession.
Source: BBC News
Jun 13, 2011
More than 60,000 Americans were sterilised, many against their will, as part of a eugenics movement that finished in 1979, aimed at keeping the poor and mentally ill from having children. Now, decades on, one state is considering compensation.In 1968, Elaine Riddick was raped by a neighbour who threatened to kill her if she told what happened.She was 13, the daughter of violent and abusive parents in the desperately poor country town of Winfall, in the US state of North Carolina.
Source: MyFoxDC
Jun 13, 2011
RICHMOND, Va. - Sens. Jim Webb of Virginia and Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia teamed up Monday with two fellow Democrats to seek Senate approval of $10 million for Civil War battlefield preservation in the fiscal year 2012 budget."With the sesquicentennial commemoration of the Civil War having begun in April, this is an opportune time to recommit our energies to the protection of these hallowed grounds," the four wrote in a letter to the Senate Committee on Appropriations and a subcommittee on the interior and environment....
Source: BBC
Jun 13, 2011
A team of amateur archaeologists has won lottery cash to fund an underwater excavation in Northumberland.
The £9,500 from the Heritage Lottery Fund will allow Coquetdale Community Archaeology group to search the River Coquet for a 13th Century cloth mill.
Evidence of the submerged remains are already visible in a stretch of the river near Barrowburn.
Work on the project, which has also received backing from English Heritage, is due to get under way next month.
Experts believe the mediaeval fulling mill was operated by l
Source: AP
Jun 13, 2011
Forty years after the explosive leak of the Pentagon Papers, a secret government study chronicling deception and misadventure in U.S. conduct of the Vietnam War, the report is coming out in its entirety on Monday.
The 7,000-page report was the WikiLeaks disclosure of its time, a sensational breach of government confidentiality that shook Richard Nixon's presidency and prompted a Supreme Court fight that advanced press freedom.
Source: AP
Jun 13, 2011
A B-17 bomber that dates to World War II crashed and burned Monday morning in a cornfield outside Chicago, aviation officials said.
The Federal Aviation Administration believes the seven people on board the plane escaped uninjured, spokeswoman Elizabeth Isham Cory said.
Source: Bearsden Herald (UK)
Jun 13, 2011
A glassware set purported to originate from Adolf Hitler's Berlin bunker is to go under the hammer at a sale of militaria in Towcester, Northamptonshire, later this month.The monogrammed drinking glasses, estimated to be worth up to £8,000, will be up for grabs alongside a 12-tonne mobile gun at the auction on June 21.JP Humbert Auctioneers said the glassware, which has no written provenance, would take centre stage at the sale after being shipped from the United States.
Source: BBC News
Jun 13, 2011
Peru's President-elect Ollanta Humala says he would pardon former President Alberto Fujimori on humanitarian grounds if his health worsens.Mr Humala told Peru's El Comercio newspaper that "nobody should die in prison, except people serving life sentences for abusing children".Fujimori is serving a 25-year sentence for corruption and ordering killings by the security forces.He has been taken to hospital, suffering bleeding in his mouth.Doctors fear this might be linked to a recurrence of his tongue cancer.
Source: BBC News
Jun 13, 2011
Sotheby's London is to auction a portrait of a monk, credited to Anthony van Dyck, that was previously thought to have been painted by Rubens.The work, owned by the same French family for at least 200 years, was known as Confesseur de Rubens.Sotheby's says experts noticed brushwork more characteristic of Rubens' pupil Van Dyck.Meanwhile, a dealer who rediscovered Van Dyck's A Portrait of a Young Girl, in 2010, has spoken of his find.Thick paint
