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: Baltimore Sun
Feb 21, 2011
Del. Sandy Rosenberg reports that the House hearing on the bill he has proposed to require extensive disclosures about the French national railway's World War II activities while under Nazi control if one of its subsidiaries wants to bid for a MARC contract has been postponed from Wednesday until March 3....
Source: BBC
Feb 21, 2011
The Nottinghamshire public are being offered a rare opportunity to handle a 75,000-year-old axe and other ancient artefacts at a local museum.
The University of Nottingham Museum of Archaeology is putting on a Prehistory Day on 23 February 2011, in conjunction with the BBC's Hands On History.
The attraction is the only specialised archaeological museum in the region.
The museum opened in 1933 with artefacts donated by Felix Oswald, including his collection
Source: BBC
Feb 21, 2011
Excavations are beginning at the site of a former medical school in Japan which could yield evidence of war-time experiments on prisoners.
The site in western Tokyo is said to be linked to Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army, which used prisoners for biological warfare experiments.
The excavation was ordered after a former nurse came forward.
Toyo Ishii said workers were made to bury dozens of bodies there after the surrender at the end of World War II
Source: BBC
Feb 21, 2011
Egypt has re-opened many of its museums and historical sites which had been closed since the civil uprising started in January.
Tourists visiting Cairo's Egyptian Museum, which houses Tutankhamun's golden death mask, were welcomed by staff with roses.
The museum stands on Tahrir Square, the focus of the unrest, and some artefacts were stolen or damaged.
The upheaval is said to have cost the tourism industry $800m (£500m).
The usually busy ga
Source: BBC
Feb 21, 2011
Excavation work on the site of a Roman fort near a school has revealed what archaeologists believe are structures never previously seen in the UK.
The dig in the playing fields of Dwr-y-Felin Comprehensive Upper School in Neath has uncovered sections of the defences of the 1st Century building.
These include a defence tower partially set outside its ramparts allowing soldiers to shoot at gate attackers.
A fort was in occupation on the site until at least th
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 21, 2011
A previously unknown painting by Walter Sickert - the artist believed by author Patricia Cornwell to be Jack the Ripper - is set to fetch up to £60,000 when it goes under the hammer next month.
The work, entitled The Blind Sea Captain, has only emerged once before - with no title except a label on the back - at an exhibition 80 years ago.
Sickert, who Patricia Cornwell has investigated at length and named as the serial killer, was notorious for his paintings of nudes.
Source: AP
Feb 21, 2011
A New York man whose wallet disappeared from his jacket pocket has gotten it back -- 40 years later.
Rudolph Resta was working for The New York Times as an art director in 1970 when he left his jacket in a closet at the old Times building in Manhattan just off Times Square. When he went to fetch the jacket, the wallet was gone.
Fast-forward to last fall, when a security guard checking a gap by an unused window came across the wallet -- apparently stashed there by a thi
Source: CNN
Feb 21, 2011
An upcoming tell-all on Sarah Palin authored by a former top aide alleges the Republican firebrand despised her job as governor and broke campaign election laws in 2006.
According to the Anchorage Daily News, a 500-page manuscript authored by Frank Bailey was leaked to several Alaska media organizations over the weekend.
The book reportedly describes a Palin deeply exasperated with her political opponents and the heightened attacks she faced after being tapped to be the
Source: NYT
Feb 21, 2011
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — One hundred and fifty years and one day later, the South did it again.
Before a cheering crowd of several hundred men and women, some in period costume and others in crisp suits, an amateur actor playing Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of the Confederacy on the steps of the Alabama Capitol on Saturday, an event framed by the firing of artillery, the delivery of defiant speeches and the singing of “Dixie.”
The participants far outnumbered the
Source: NYT
Feb 21, 2011
CHICAGO — Locked in a climate-controlled vault at the Newberry Library here, a volume titled “The Pen and the Book” can be studied only under the watch of security cameras.
The book, about making a profit in publishing, scarcely qualifies as a literary masterpiece. It is highly valuable, instead, because a reader has scribbled in the margins of its pages.
The scribbler was Mark Twain, who had penciled, among other observations, a one-way argument with the author, Walter
Source: Baltimore Sun
Feb 20, 2011
GRANTSVILLE — — Bryant Bunch, who came from Prince George's County to attend college here at the far end of the Maryland panhandle, first saw the sign on Interstate 68 while traveling with a carload of friends a few years back.
He remembers their reaction: Does that say what we think it says?
Maxine Broadwater, born and raised on a farm outside Grantsville, and the town's librarian for three decades, recalls the first time she ever gave the name a second thought. It was
Source: Spokesman Review (ID)
Feb 20, 2011
Lying in a hospital bed, his heart failing, Allan Wood met a priest.
The two were sharing a room at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center when Wood discerned the priest’s Dutch accent. They struck up a conversation, and soon these two men, ages 89 and 88, uncovered a shared experience from decades ago that molded their lives.
They had never met until their chance encounter in the hospital last Nov. 11 – Veterans Day. But they spoke intimately of Sept. 17, 1944, in Nij
Source: NYT
Feb 20, 2011
WASHINGTON — There comes a moment in the life of almost every repressive regime when leaders — and the military forces that have long kept them in power — must make a choice from which there is usually no turning back: Change or start shooting.
Egypt’s military, calculating that it was no longer worth defending an 82-year-old, out-of-touch pharaoh with no palatable successor and no convincing plan for Egypt’s future, ultimately sided with the protesters on the street, at least for A
Source: NYT
Feb 20, 2011
In the Cemetery of the Evergreens on the border of Brooklyn and Queens, there is a haunting stone monument to the garment workers who died in the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire of 1911 but were never identified. It contains the bas-relief figure of a kneeling woman, her head bowed, seemingly mourning not only the deaths, but also the fact that those buried below were so badly charred that relatives could not recognize them.
Almost a century after the fire, the five women and one
Source: AP
Feb 20, 2011
George Washington's name is inseparable from America, and not only from the nation's history. It identifies countless streets, buildings, mountains, bridges, monuments, cities and people.
In a puzzling twist, most of these people are black. The 2000 U.S. census counted 163,036 people with the surname Washington. Ninety percent of them were African American, a far higher black percentage than for any other common surname.
Some historians theorize that large numbers of bl
Source: CNN
Feb 20, 2011
So there is Abraham Lincoln -- Henry Fonda, actually, in a stovepipe hat -- walking toward the horizon as the gorgeous strains of an orchestra swell up behind him. Soon the orchestra is joined by a choir, the strings and the voices blending into a beautiful, almost ethereal, rendition of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Thunder crackles in the cinematic sky.
Monday is Presidents Day, and in anticipation I treated myself to a viewing of "Young Mr. Lincoln," the
Source: Newsweek
Feb 20, 2011
Amid horrific Nazi madness, Wiera Gran sang love songs in the Warsaw Ghetto. Within the walls of that grim urban cage, the 25-year-old petite Jewish beauty drew crowds to the ghetto’s Café Sztuka, crooning standards from happier times in a deep, velvety lilt. She died, many decades later, in 2007, in a Paris at peace, caged in her own filthy, darkened hovel, consumed with hatred, sick with fear. She had scrawled words on every surface in her oppressive 16th-arrondissement flat, crippled by paran
Source: WaPo
Feb 20, 2011
The daunting tower of national, state and local debt in the United States will reach a level this year unmatched just after World War II and already exceeds the size of the entire economy, according to government estimates.
But any similarity between 1946 and now ends there. The U.S. debt levels tumbled in the years after World War II, but today they are still climbing and even deep cuts in spending won't completely change that for several years.
As President Obama and
Source: NYT
Feb 20, 2011
Is it really different this time?
That’s what Republican political strategists are asking as party leaders and presidential prospects keep raising the bar in their quest to curb government deficits. As thrilling as that process feels for Tea Party members and conservative intellectuals, its merit as an electoral formula remains unproven at best.
Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Budget Committee, set the tone when he warned of fiscal catastrop
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Feb 20, 2011
For centuries, historians have puzzled over the disappearance of a legion of 5,000 battle-hardened Roman soldiers in northern Britain around 108 AD.
The ancient riddle, which has captivated storytellers, has just been dramatised by Hollywood in The Eagle, starring Channing Tatum and Jamie Bell.
Now, experts have revealed that the children’s book on which the film is based is more fact than fiction.
Historians were left baffled how thousands of heavy infantr
