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: BBC
Mar 17, 2011
Rare manuscripts by the Nottinghamshire writer DH Lawrence are going up for auction.
They include two short stories plus a letter Lawrence wrote to a friend, Henry Savage, in which he expresses regret at not having had any children.
They are being sold by Oxfordshire collector Roy Davids, who hopes for more than £18,500 for the items.
Mr Davids, who is selling 500 other lots, said the stories were subtly different from published versions....
Source: BBC
Mar 17, 2011
The US government has stepped into a row over an ancient Egyptian death mask, ordering the St Louis Art Museum to hand over the artefact.
Egypt claims the 3200-year-old mask of 19th Dynasty noblewoman, Ka-Nefer-Nefer, was stolen.
The museum paid $500,000 (£310,000) for the mask in 1998.
It has already sued the US government to try and block seizure of the object, stating they do not have enough evidence that it was stolen.
However, the federal
Source: Live Science
Mar 16, 2011
In 1845, two ill-fated British ships headed for the Canadian Arctic in the hope of discovering the Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean. More than two decades later, the nearly complete skeleton of one of the explorers was recovered from a shallow, stone-covered grave on King William Island in the Canadian Arctic.
The remains were then identified as those of Henry Le Vesconte, a lieutenant aboard one of the ships, the HMS Erebus. However, a modern analysis points to another identi
Source: Reuters
Mar 16, 2011
A fight between the U.S. government and the St. Louis Art Museum over a death mask from ancient Egypt intensified on Wednesday as the government formally demanded the museum hand over the disputed object.
The 3,200-year-old mask of Ka-Nefer-Nefer, a 19th Dynasty noblewoman, sits on display in the basement of the museum.
The federal complaint contends the mask was stolen from Egypt before the museum obtained it for $500,000 in 1998.
The complaint, which incl
Source: The Local (Germany)
Mar 16, 2011
Hundreds of people met in the Latvian capital of Riga on Wednesday to remember World War II veterans who fought with Nazi Germany in the Waffen SS, after a court overturned a ban on the controversial annual gathering.
On Tuesday, a Riga court removed the city council’s ban on the “Legion Day,” allowing the veterans and their supporters to march through the city centre the next day.
They plan to commemorate the some 140,000 Latvian men who fought against the Russians wit
Source: BBC
Mar 16, 2011
Archaeologists think they may have found evidence that Iron Age Britons were capable of building roads - before the Romans arrived.
Environmental consultants SLR examined a road, thought to be built in the 1st century BC, at Bayston Hill quarry, Shropshire.
Director Tim Malim said the age of the find suggested its construction was not a result of Roman influence....
Source: AP
Mar 16, 2011
Scientists say they have discovered the first fossil of a dinosaur in Angola, and that it's a new creature, heralding a research renaissance in a country slowly emerging from decades of war.
A paper published Wednesday in the Annals of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences describes a long-necked, plant-eating sauropod, among the largest creatures ever to have walked the earth. The international team that found and identified the fossilized forelimb bone say it is from a previously unkn
Source: CNN
Mar 16, 2011
Dutch researchers found the wreck of a World War I German submarine in 2009 but kept the discovery secret until this week, Radio Netherlands Worldwide reported.
The crew of the research ship HNLMS Snellius hoped they'd found a Dutch submarine that disappeared in 1940, but the vessel turned out to be much older. A brass plate indicated the sub was the German U-106, which sank during World War I, the radio report said.
The announcement of the discovery was delayed while G
Source: BBC News
Mar 16, 2011
The disappearance of Rome's Ninth Legion has long baffled historians, but could a brutal ambush have been the event that forged the England-Scotland border, asks archaeologist Dr Miles Russell, of Bournemouth University.
One of the most enduring legends of Roman Britain concerns the disappearance of the Ninth Legion.
The theory that 5,000 of Rome's finest soldiers were lost in the swirling mists of Caledonia, as they marched north to put down a rebellion, forms the basi
Source: BBC News
Mar 16, 2011
Scientists have dusted off X-ray equipment dating from shortly after the discovery of the rays in 1895, in order to put it through its paces.
Researchers from the same Dutch town where the system was originally built used it to produce striking images that belie its simplicity and age.
The team said the images required a radiation dose to the subject some 1,500 times higher than a modern X-ray.
Details of the research were published reported in the journal
Source: BBC News
Mar 15, 2011
Books about the Third Reich throng the British bestseller lists, but is it a matter of genuine historical interest or odd fetish, asks Clive Anderson.
The late Alan Coren famously published a collection of humorous pieces in book form, called Golfing for Cats. And he put a swastika on the front cover. He had noticed the most popular titles in Britain in those days were about cats, golf and Nazis.
That was in 1975. Thirty-six years on - and now more than 60 years since t
Source: Discovery News
Mar 15, 2011
A new internet platform has been launched today to rescue cultural heritage sites on the verge of being irremediably lost, said Global Heritage Fund, a California-based nonprofit organization that focuses on historical preservation.
Called Global Heritage Network (GHN), the platform is the first early warning and threat monitoring system for saving endangered sites in developing countries, where financial resources and expertise are limited.
Combining Google Earth, scie
Source: BBC
Mar 15, 2011
Three decades before the current nuclear crisis in Japan, the eyes of the world were on an unfolding disaster at America's Three Mile Island nuclear plant.
The event that became seared into America's collective memory began at 4am on Wednesday 28 March, 1979.
A relatively routine malfunction in a non-nuclear system at the Three Mile Island (TMI) plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in America's northeast, caused a relief valve to open, releasing coolant from the core.
Source: WaPo
Mar 15, 2011
A lowly corporal of long ago was buried Tuesday at Arlington National Cemetery, ushered to his grave with all the Army’s Old Guard solemn pomp.
In a late-day chill, after hundreds of strangers had paid their respects in public viewings since the weekend, soldiers carried the former doughboy’s flag-draped coffin partway up a knoll and set it on polished rails above his plot, a stone’s toss from the grave of his old supreme commander, Gen. John J. “Blackjack” Pershing.
A
Source: BBC News
Mar 15, 2011
An effort is being made to reunite 19 people who watched The Beatles play in a town hall before the band had their first hit.
Billy Shanks is helping to lead the search for the audience members of the 1963 gig in Dingwall, Ross-shire.
He said others who went to see The Beatles thought their music was rubbish and left to join an audience of 1,200 watching a local band in Strathpeffer.
A reunion event has been planned for 8 April this year.
Membe
Source: BBC News
Mar 15, 2011
A film charting the rise of Bob Marley and The Wailers to international stardom - made from footage shot in the early 1970s and lost for 30 years - is set to get its first public viewing.
It was New York, late 1972, and Esther Anderson was attending an event hosted by Island Records, when Bob Marley walked in.
"He didn't smile but he was very handsome with strong features, he reminded me of Jimi Hendrix," she remembers.
Bob Marley was a guest of r
Source: News.az
Mar 15, 2011
Archaeologists found a medieval settlement in 2 km north of Uzuntepe village of Jalilabad.
According to the news service for the National Academy of Science of Azerbaijan, archaeologists called the settlement Goshatepe, since it is divided in two parts by hills....
Source: Irish Times
Mar 15, 2011
REMNANTS of what appears to have been a medieval mill, including “very well-preserved” timber beams, pottery and leather shoes, have been found underneath Meeting House Square in Temple Bar, Dublin.
The discovery by archaeologists came as part of the mandatory archaeological survey, as work got under way on the construction of a retractable rain-cover over the square. The building works have now been halted.
Temple Bar Cultural Trust is describing the discovery as “very
Source: CNN.com
Mar 15, 2011
(CNN) -- The explosion Tuesday at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has elevated the situation there to a "serious accident" on a level just below Chernobyl, a French nuclear official said, referring to an international scale that rates the severity of such incidents.
The International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale -- or INES -- goes from Level 1, which indicates very little danger to the general population, to Level 7, a "major accident" in which th
Source: The Atlantic
Mar 15, 2011
With the massive quake and tsunami that struck Japan last week, the specter of another devastating event has returned: The 1923 Kanto earthquake, which shook the region around Tokyo, was the country's last"big one." The 7.9-magnitude quake reduced much of Tokyo to rubble, and as refugees tried to leave, firestorms swept through the city. More than 100,000 people died during the Kanto quake and its aftermath. These archival images, drawn from the U.S. Geological Survey, AP, and Brown University'
