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: Fox News
Feb 13, 2011
PERRYVILLE, Ky. – Investigators in central Kentucky are probing the theft of multiple Civil War antiques, including belt buckles, arrowheads and old money, from a store.
Boyle County Sheriff's Chief Deputy Jim Wilcher said whoever broke into Merchants Row Cafe and Antiques in Perryville seemed to know what they were looking for....
Source: Independent Mail (SC)
Feb 13, 2011
ELBERTON — Herbert Booth, known as H.V. in Elberton, tears up when he talks about his father.
Booth’s father, Isham Johnson Booth, died when Booth was only 15. His father was 87.
“He didn’t talk much about the war,” Booth said. “Whenever we asked about it he said ‘Children should be seen not heard.’”
At 92, Booth is one of a handful of men who are living sons of Confederate veterans, and one of only two in Georgia.
Isham Booth served as a guard
Source: Salon
Feb 13, 2011
While most gathered at CPAC this past weekend were busy gobbling up buffet-sized servings of Republican rage, one outsized commentator was left eating a slice of humble pie.
Former USDA official Shirley Sherrod has filed a lawsuit against conservative firebrand and web entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart. The suit stems from the notorious video Breitbart posted online last year, showing an out-of-context excerpt from a speech Sherrod gave to the NAACP Freedom Fund in March 2010. The clip
Source: NYT
Feb 13, 2011
The last living person who had seen Abraham Lincoln when his train stopped at Peekskill on Feb. 19, 1861, was Alida Hicks Hutchinson, who died in 1952.
An African-American child, she was 4 years old when Lincoln stopped and made a three-minute speech here as part of the 12-day, 1,900-mile, seven-state train trip that took him from Springfield, Ill., to Washington for his inauguration on March 4, 1861....
Up here we seem to be opting for a strictly do-it-yourself approac
Source: NYT
Feb 13, 2011
MAOTAI, China — If history is indeed written by the victors, then this isolated mountain hamlet in southern Guizhou Province hit the jackpot when Red Army soldiers sought refuge here in the spring of 1935. Exhausted by their long-distance retreat from Nationalist forces, Mao’s guerrillas used the town’s bracing 144-proof liquor to disinfect wounds, tame diarrhea and take the edge off their jangled nerves.
“The Long March was a success in large part due to Maotai,” the rebel commande
Source: Deutsche Welle
Feb 13, 2011
Thousands of people have formed a human chain around the city of Dresden to protest against a far-right march on the 66th anniversary of the Allied bombing of the city during World War II.
The Allied bombing of the eastern German city of Dresden during World War II has in recent years become an opportunity exploited by far-right groups holding demonstrations.
This year, however, some 17,000 people braved freezing temperatures on Sunday to protest against the neo-Nazis b
Source: BBC
Feb 13, 2011
Bomb disposal experts have carried out a controlled explosion on a World War II mine off the Dorset coast.
The mine, which would have been dropped by air, was discovered about two miles outside Weymouth Harbour.
Royal Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal divers from Portsmouth were called to deal with the mine which was destroyed at about 1100 GMT on Saturday....
Source: CNN
Feb 13, 2011
At least 17 artifacts from the Egyptian Museum of Cairo are missing following a break-in, the country's minister of antiquities said Sunday.
The missing objects include a gilded wood statue of King Tutankhamun being carried by a goddess; parts of a a gilded wood statue of Tutankhamun harpooning; a limestone statue of Akhenaten; a statue of Nefertiti making offerings; a sandstone head of an Amarna princess; a stone statuette of a scribe from Amarna; 11 wooden shabti statuettes of Yuy
Source: NYT
Feb 13, 2011
You’ve been out of public sight for four years, writing your autobiography, “Known and Unknown: A Memoir.” Do you miss the action?
I just really loved serving in government, and I’ve also loved being out of government in business and doing other things, so I looked at it and what’s going on in current events and wish those folks well, but I have a distance from it.
What do you think of President Obama’s strategy in
Source: NYT
Feb 12, 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 m
Source: NYT
Feb 12, 2011
TEL AVIV — When Google, the world’s largest search engine, joined forces with Yad Vashem, keeper of the world’s largest Holocaust archive, the first thing one Google employee here did was search for his grandfather’s name.
A link took the employee, Doron Avni, to a Google-operated page on the Yad Vashem Web site showing a photograph of his grandfather, Yecheskel Fleischer, taken in 1941 just after he was released from a Nazi-run prison in Lithuania.
Under the photograp
Source: Science Magazine
Feb 12, 2011
As Egypt struggles to lay the foundations of a new government in the wake of its revolution, archaeologists around the world are closely watching the fate of the nation's prized antiquities—as well as the fortunes of Zahi Hawass, long the face and voice of the country's ancient monuments. Hawass, who under Hosni Mubarak was recently named minister of antiquities, has been confronting an unusual uprising among his own staff as well as questions about his political future. And today, he reported a
Source: NJ
Feb 12, 2011
A pair of ancient mummies one 4,000 years old will go on display next week at the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology after the museum and the Chinese government on Friday resolved a dispute that led to an exhibit with recreations and life size photos replacing the promised artifacts.
The main attractions will be in place through March 15. The exhibit will continue from March 17 to 28 with some 100 artifacts from the "Silk Road" but without
Source: Canadian Free Press
Feb 12, 2011
DENTON, Texas — Paul Kletzki lost his inspiration to compose music after his sister and parents died in the Holocaust.
The native of Lodz, Poland, who wrote and conducted in Berlin before leaving Germany in the 1930s, went on to achieve international acclaim as a conductor but his own musical compositions faded into obscurity.
Now, one of his pieces from the early 1930s, a piano concerto, has been revived by a project at the University of North Texas, and a performance
Source: Scotsman (UK)
Feb 12, 2011
THE ground where William Wallace won his most famous victory over the English is set to feature in Scotland's "Inventory of Historic Battlefields".
Historic Scotland revealed in December the first 17 nationally important sites for inclusion, including Bannockburn and Culloden.
Now the site of the 1297 Battle of Stirling Bridge is under consideration to join them as part of a second batch set to be revealed.
The battle would become the earliest dat
Source: BBC News
Feb 12, 2011
Yale University has signed an agreement to return to Peru some 5,000 Inca artefacts removed from the famed Machu Picchu citadel nearly a century ago.
The relics - stone tools, ceramics and human and animal bones - will be housed in a new centre in the city of Cuzco.
The deal ends a long dispute over the artefacts, which were taken from Machu Picchu by American explorer Hiram Bingham in 1912.
Machu Picchu, high in the Andes, is Peru's main tourist attraction
Source: NYT
Feb 12, 2011
WASHINGTON — The anniversary will probably be observed in silence.
A week from Tuesday, when the Supreme Court returns from its midwinter break and hears arguments in two criminal cases, it will have been five years since Justice Clarence Thomas has spoken during a court argument.
If he is true to form, Justice Thomas will spend the arguments as he always does: leaning back in his chair, staring at the ceiling, rubbing his eyes, whispering to Justice Stephen G. Breyer,
Source: NYT
Feb 12, 2011
CAIRO — Two Egyptian leaders have been struck down in 30 years: one by an Islamist assassin’s bullets, the other by the demands of hundreds of thousands of protesters in a peaceful uprising. The first event, the death of President Anwar el-Sadat, marked a spectacle of the most militant brand of political Islam. The revolution the world witnessed Friday, the toppling of President Hosni Mubarak, may herald the dawn of something else.
There is a fear in the West, one rarely echoed her
Source: NYT
Feb 12, 2011
How do you tell a dictator to get lost?
The answer, in Egypt, was with poetry, tech lingo, hieroglyphics and more.
For weeks, in Tahrir Square and elsewhere, demonstrators were telling President Hosni Mubarak to leave, playfully using a variety of dialects and languages to get the idea across.
And on Friday, Mr. Mubarak finally got the message and resigned.
In countries under authoritarian rule, “speaking truth to power” typically takes the for
Source: NYT
Feb 12, 2011
WASHINGTON — The cheers of Tahrir Square were heard around the world. But if you listened carefully, you might have heard cheering from another quarter 7,000 miles from Cairo as well, in Dallas.
The revolution in Egypt has reopened a long-simmering debate about the “freedom agenda” that animated George W. Bush’s presidency. Was he right after all, as his supporters have argued? Are they claiming credit he does not deserve? And has President Obama picked up the mantle of democracy a
