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: Ancaster News (Canada)
May 13, 2010
Hamilton historian Robin McKee has had a few ‘eureka’ moments in his historical career. But he didn’t expect one to occur literally in his backyard.
Two years after purchasing a property at 91 John Street, his lawyer found a deed for the land that proves the city’s founder, George Hamilton, bought the property from James Durand on Jan. 25, 1815.
It’s significant, said McKee, because it’s the first time a document has the 1815 date and ties the Hamilton’s to buying land.
Source: Balkan travellers
May 13, 2010
The landfill with coins recently discovered at the Skopje Fortress is the biggest repository of Byzantine gold and silver coins ever discovered on the territory of Macedonia, archaeologists told national media today.
In the chest, archaeologists found 44 gold coins and 76 Venetian coins, dating to the thirteenth century, or the Byzantine Era.
This is the most significant archaeological find at the Skopje Fortress, along with the Medieval lead stamps that were discover
Source: BBC News
May 13, 2010
Young women who left their homes to work the land and feed the nation during World War II are among those being honoured in a new set of stamps.
Royal Mail is paying tribute to the Women's Land Army, dubbed the Land Girls, with a special 1st class stamp.
It is part of a set of eight, entitled Britain Alone, which marks the sacrifices made on the Home Front.
Former land girl, Mona McLeod, 87, launched the new stamps at the National Museum of Rural Life in La
Source: San Jose Mercury
May 13, 2010
Stan Yogi is no stranger to injustice. At an early age, he was aware of his parents' internment during World War II, even though the family did not speak of it.
"We had a few books in our home and I remember looking through them, seeing photos of the World War II incarceration and recognizing that if I had been born 20 years earlier that would have been me," Yogi said. "That injustice has really resonated for me throughout my life and has sparked my passion for justic
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 13, 2010
Veterans of Bomber Command have celebrated after they were given the go ahead to build a memorial to 55,573 of their comrades killed in the Second World War.
Planners at Westminster City Council approved on Thursday the proposed £3.5 million memorial, which will now be built in Green Park, central London.
Readers of The Daily Telegraph helped raised more than £1.8 million towards the cost of the monument, which should be completed by 2011.
After the meetin
Source: WaPo
May 13, 2010
The Thai authorities' latest attempt to bring an end to eight weeks of anti-government rallies turned bloody on Thursday night with one of the protest leaders shot and severely wounded in unclear circumstances and number of clashes between demonstrators and security forces.
In the aftermath of the protest leader's shooting, the Thai government has extended a state of emergency to cover 17 provinces to prevent rural protesters from joining the massive rally in the capital, according
Source: WaPo
May 13, 2010
Hemp needed a hero. Needed one bad.
The gangly plant -- once a favorite of military ropemakers -- couldn't catch a break. Even as legalized medical marijuana has become more and more commonplace, the industrial hemp plant -- with its minuscule levels of the chemical that gives marijuana its kick -- has remained illegal to cultivate in the United States.
Enter the lost hemp diaries.
Found recently at a garage sale outside Buffalo but never publicly released,
Source: I.H.T.
May 13, 2010
When Han Han, China’s 27-year-old superstar blogger, author and literary bad boy, who loves to drive racing cars and thumb his nose at the establishment, announced the title of his hotly anticipated new literary magazine last summer, he immediately had to disappoint fans.
“Renaissance” had been nixed by state censors, blogged Mr. Han, who may be the most popular blogger in the world — his site on Sina.com registers more than 372 million hits, and individual entries regularly top 1 m
Source: NYT
May 13, 2010
Neil A. Armstrong, the most famous man in the history of NASA and the first man to walk on the moon, on Wednesday sharply criticized President Obama’s plan to cancel the space agency’s program to send astronauts back to the moon.
“If the leadership we have acquired through our investment is allowed simply to fade away, other nations will surely step in where we have faltered,” Mr. Armstrong said in testimony before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. “I do
Source: WaPo
May 13, 2010
The Civil War Preservation Trust will announce Thursday morning that Washington's beleaguered Fort Stevens, where Abraham Lincoln came under enemy gunfire in 1864, has again been placed on the trust's annual list of most endangered Civil War battlefields.
The fort, off Georgia Avenue at 13th and Quackenbos streets NW, is one of 10 endangered Civil War sites threatened by development and other factors across the country, the trust said.
The list comes ahead of next year'
Source: People's Daily Online (CN)
May 13, 2010
The old Silk Road with a history of some 2,000 years has long linked China to the Arab world. A new Silk Road featuring close trade and economic cooperation is now being built by the two sides through their joint efforts.
The fourth Ministerial Conference of the China-Arab Cooperation Forum, which starts in China's northern port city of Tianjin on Thursday, is expected to inject new vigor into bilateral trade and economic cooperation.
PRACTICAL COOPERATION
Source: Westmorland Gazette (UK)
May 13, 2010
A LOCAL historian has unearthed rare film footage of three Lake District events taken more than half a century ago.
Judith Keep, a retired teacher who wants to set up a history group in Hawkshead, was given a surprise when she spotted herself on recordings of the 1953 Grasmere Rushbearing and the Hawkshead May Queen Festival the same year.
The archive was contained on DVDs made by 101-year-old Ellaline Jennings, a former teacher who now lives in St Helens.
Source: BBC News
May 13, 2010
The funeral has taken place of a Scottish grandmother who played a vital role as a schoolgirl resistance fighter in occupied France during World War II.
Family and friends gathered at St Nicholas Parish Church in Lanark to remember Marguerite Garden.
In 2003 she was awarded the Legion d'Honneur for her services to the French resistance.
She married a Scottish doctor and settled in Scotland after the war. She died in hospital last week, aged 84.
Source: Ynet News
May 13, 2010
Daily food intake of Aushchwitz prisoner, original Schindler's list, names of children on Exodus, blood-curdling account of millions of those murdered – and overwhelming response to deniers. Dor Glick takes trip among shelves of largest archive in world of Nazi horrors, and receives chilling greeting from his grandmother who survived and her brother who didn't
Dor Glick
Welcome to Grosse Allee 5 in the town of Bad Arolsen. Here you will find just one thing: documents. Fifty m
Source: Science Daily
May 12, 2010
Human remains are stored in universities and museums all over the world. A recent example of genetic testing on old human remains is the results from Tutankhamon and his family. On May 29, Malin Masterton will defend her doctoral thesis on the moral status of past people and protection for historical persons. The thesis also discusses our duties towards the dead.
We only need tiny amounts of DNA to test for disease or confirm identity, even from people who have been dead for a very
Source: Science Daily
May 12, 2010
More than 150 years ago, Darwin proposed the theory of universal common ancestry (UCA), linking all forms of life by a shared genetic heritage from single-celled microorganisms to humans. Until now, the theory that makes ladybugs, oak trees, champagne yeast and humans distant relatives has remained beyond the scope of a formal test. Now, a Brandeis biochemist reports in Nature the results of the first large scale, quantitative test of the famous theory that underpins modern evolutionary biology.
Source: Packet Times (Canada)
May 12, 2010
Retracing the historical fur-trading route of their ancestors, two Rama First Nation men will embark on the most "meaningful" canoe trip of their lives.
Keesic Douglas, 36, and Kory Snache, 26, will be leaving from the Atherley Narrows on May 28 to follow the watery path of their ancestors, which hasn't been travelled as a fur trade route since the late 1800s.
"It's the most meaningful trip that I've ever done because there's so much history in it and our
Source: NYT
May 12, 2010
In the spring of 1988, Justice Thurgood Marshall assigned a clerk, Elena Kagan, to write a first draft of his opinion in a case considering whether a school district could charge a poor family for busing a child to the nearest school, which was 16 miles away.
A majority on the Supreme Court ruled that the busing fee was constitutional. Justice Marshall, who was 80, was incensed and wanted a fiery dissent. But the 28-year-old Ms. Kagan, now a Supreme Court nominee, thought her boss’s
Source: University of Manchester
May 12, 2010
Archaeologists have disproved the fifty-year-old theory underpinning our understanding of how the famous stone statues were moved around Easter Island.
Fieldwork led by researchers at University College London and The University of Manchester, has shown the remote Pacific island’s ancient road system was primarily ceremonial and not solely built for transportation of the figures.
A complex network of roads up to 800-years-old crisscross the Island between the hat and st
Source: NAture News
May 12, 2010
Discovery that some humans are part-Neanderthal reveals the promise of comparing genomes old and new.
by Rex Dalton
The worlds of ancient and modern DNA exploration have collided in spectacular fashion in the past few months. Last week saw the publication of a long-awaited draft genome of the Neanderthal, an archaic hominin from about 40,000 years ago1. Just three months earlier, researchers in Denmark reported the genome of a 4,000-year-old Saqqaq Palaeo-Eskimo2 that w
