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: Telegraph (UK)
Dec 29, 2010
Mead, the medieval warrior's choice of alcoholic drink, is making a quiet comeback across the US.
The number of American "meaderies" producing the drink has tripled to about 150 in the past decade.
Vicky Rowe, the owner of Gotmead.com, a website for enthusiasts, said: "They're just popping up all over. And a lot of those are wineries that have decided to add mead to their mainstream product lines." A form of the drink – made by fermenting honey and
Source: Fox News
Dec 29, 2010
Jewish historians are dismissing an apology by Henry Kissinger, offered over the weekend in response to a 1973 recording of him saying that sending Jews to a Soviet gas chamber "is not an American concern."
The 37-year-old comment by the former secretary of state followed immediately after a conversation Kissinger and President Richard Nixon had with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir.
In the meeting, Meir asked the U.S. to pressure the Soviet Union to release
Source: CNN
Dec 29, 2010
The governor of New Mexico has until Friday to decide whether to pardon outlaw Billy the Kid in the killing of a sheriff.
As of last week, Gov. Bill Richardson had received about 400 responses on a special website dedicated to answering a generations-old question: Should outlaw Billy the Kid get a pardon in the killing of a sheriff?
Richardson, a Billy the Kid buff, is looking at an old promise by another governor, and not the Kid's cold-blooded reputation, in deciding
Source: CNN
Dec 29, 2010
Former President Ronald Reagan will be honored in the 2011 Rose Parade with a specially designed float - the first time that the Rose Parade has ever included a presidential-themed float.
The Rose Parade feature is designed to kick off a celebration events to commemorate the centennial of Reagan's birth. He would have been 100 years old on February 6, 2011.
President Reagan's unique honor is 55 feet long and 26 feet high. It features 11 black and white photos of "i
Source: Hurriyet Daily News
Dec 28, 2010
The village of Erdemli in Central Anatolia contains the ruins of a small Byzantine village and is like a museum. An eight-year research project in the village has been completed and the structures in the Byzantine village identified and documented. The research team leader says their goal is to publish a scientific article about the structures in the valley and call for them to be restored.
Dozens of houses and churches carved into the rock faces of a valley in the Central Anatolian
Source: BBC News
Dec 28, 2010
There was an unofficial lull in the Blitz attacks on London, for Christmas in 1940. But by 29 December, the German bomber planes had returned with renewed vigour. St Paul's Cathedral famously survived, but how?
It became known as the Second Great Fire of London - the night 70 years ago that devastating air raids turned the capital into a conflagration.
It had been a Christmas underground for many people, who slept in Underground stations or festively-decorated air raid
Source: Live Science
Dec 28, 2010
Decades after it was excavated, an ancient fortress in the heart of Tel Aviv, Israel, is offering new hints about its past, archaeologists at Tel Aviv University say.
New findings suggest the fortress, Tel Qudadi, was established centuries later than believed, and may have served as an intermediate station for trade ships traveling between Egypt and Phoenicia.
The researchers unearthed an amphora (a large jar used to transport oil or wine) from the Greek isle of Lesbos
Source: Live Science
Dec 28, 2010
Fish may have once swum across the Sahara, a finding that could shed light on how humanity made its way out of Africa, researchers said.
The cradle of humanity lies south of the Sahara, which begs the question as to how our species made its way past it. The Sahara is the largest hot desert in the world, and would seem a major barrier for any humans striving to migrate off the continent.
Scientists have often focused on the Nile Valley as the corridor by which humans lef
Source: Discovery News
Dec 28, 2010
Broken pieces of clay pottery have revealed the names of dozens of Egyptian priests who served at the temple of a crocodile god, Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) announced.
Engraved with text dating back to the Roman period, the small potsherds have been found by Italian archaeologists on the west side of the temple dedicated to the crocodile god Soknopaios in Soknopaiou Nesos, an Egyptian village in the Fayoum oasis.
Called ostraca from the Greek word ostra
Source: LA Times
Dec 28, 2010
Raising their children and several dogs in a converted school bus, the couple toured the country for 15 years, teaching its history through its grass-roots music.
Folk singer Rusty McNeil was willing to take her husband-and-wife act on the road in the early 1970s, but the mother of five had one stipulation: "Family had to come first."
So the McNeils converted a retired 1949 school bus into a home on wheels that they called Amazing Grace because it was "am
Source: BBC
Dec 28, 2010
It was December 1939, Britain had declared war on Germany weeks before, and a baby girl was found abandoned in the doorway of a city centre hotel.
Pat Fitzgerald was three months old when she was found wrapped in blankets on the steps of the Royal Hotel in Cardiff.
Now 71 and a grandmother, she is appealing for help to find the relatives she has never known.
She was adopted by loving parents, but would love to trace her "lost family".
Source: BBC
Dec 28, 2010
A chance find during the building of a by-pass in County Donegal led to the discovery of an ancient church and graveyard. As BBC NI's Dublin correspondent Shane Harrison now reports, an analysis of human remains has given us some extraordinary insights into the lives of our ancestors in early medieval times.
The remains of 1,300 men, women and children dating from the 8th to the 16th century were taken to the Institute of Technology in Sligo for initial examination.
Dr
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Dec 28, 2010
The Bomber Command Memorial to 55,573 airmen who died in the Second World War could be hit by a £250,000 VAT bill because of a change in the law.
A Government scheme which exempts memorials from VAT expires on Jan 4, and with work on the £4.9m monument now scheduled to begin in May, tax will be payable on labour costs and professional fees.
Unless the Treasury agrees to waive the fee, it means the Bomber Command Association, which had met its fundraising target thanks
Source: BBC News
Dec 28, 2010
Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back is to be preserved by the US Library of Congress as part of its National Film Registry.
Also included is Star Wars director George Lucas's student film Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB, made in 1967.
Spike Lee's Malcolm X, about the black political revolutionary and Saturday Night Fever also make the list.
Each year, 25 "culturally" significant films are added to the registry, which was founded in 1989.
Source: Hurriyet Daily News
Dec 27, 2010
The ancient city of Germenicia, which has been underground for 1,500 years, is being unearthed thanks to mosaics found during an illegal excavation in 2007 under a house in Southeast Turkey. Excavations are ongoing in the area, with authorities aiming to completely reveal the mosaics and the city, and then turn the site into an open-air museum.
Mosaics found during an illegal excavation in the southeastern province of Kahramanmaraş have led to the unearthing of an ancient c
Source: Balitmore Sun
Dec 27, 2010
This bombardment was led by one man — a crane operator who ripped into the brick building at Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine at dawn's early light.
"He's doing what the British couldn't do," park ranger Scott Sheads said jokingly about the contractor hired to demolish the structure at the fort, which defended Baltimore's harbor against the invaders during the War of 1812 and inspired Francis Scott Key to pen the poem that would become the national anthem
Source: Kathimerini
Dec 27, 2010
The government has condemned televised remarks by a Greek orthodox bishop last week who blamed the country’s financial woes on a worldwide Jewish conspiracy while claiming that the Holocaust was orchestrated by Zionist organizations.
Interviewed last week on Mega TV, Seraphim of Piraeus also claimed there is a plan to enslave Greece and Orthodox Christians, while describing Adolf Hitler as “an instrument of world Zionism.”...
Source: Dallas Morning News
Dec 27, 2010
George Cone is among the legions of people urgently gathering the oral histories of World War II veterans before they die.
But Cone has taken his campaign a step further: He's also interviewing the Germans who once tried to kill his dad on the battlefields of Italy.
He realized that he would never learn the complete story of what his father and his buddies faced at Anzio and Salerno without talking to German veterans who opposed them.
Cone estimates he has
Source: NYT
Dec 27, 2010
BERLIN — It’s eerily quiet in the depths of the German Foreign Ministry, where tens of thousands of documents are filed away in narrow drawers. The documents consist of telegrams and reports filed by German ambassadors from all over the world as well as from diplomats based in Berlin.
One document on display tells of the Wannsee Conference in 1942. There, in a villa in southern Berlin, a group of top Nazi officials drew up plans for the “final solution of the Jewish question.”
Source: AFP
Dec 27, 2010
A US study on Monday found that Neanderthals, prehistoric cousins of humans, ate grains and vegetables as well as meat, cooking them over fire in the same way homo sapiens did.
The new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) challenges a prevailing theory that Neanderthals' over reliance on meat contributed to their extinction around 30,000 years ago.
Researchers found grains from numerous plants, including a type of wild grass,
