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: AP
January 27, 2009
An 1,800-year-old figurine believed to have originated from the eastern stretches of the Roman Empire has been discovered by archaeologists outside the walls of the old city, the Israeli Antiquities Authority said. The 2-inch marble bust depicts the head of a man with a short curly beard and almond-shaped eyes who may portray a boxer, the authority said.
"The high level of finish on the figurine is extraordinary, while meticulously adhering to the tiniest of details," Doro
Source: LA Watts Times
January 27, 2009
When Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States on January 20, Americans might have concluded that the nation had finally overcome its racist past.
But for retired psychology professor Dr. Terrence Roberts, 67, one of nine black teenagers who integrated Arkansas’ Little Rock Central High School in 1957, the ceremony was another cleared hurdle in the continuing battle for equal rights.
Obama’s election validates what the “Little Rock Nine” tri
Source: NYT
January 26, 2009
The shorthand verdict on Roosevelt, economists and historians say, is that he was an eloquent and skillful politician, and an innovator in jobs programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps and in regulatory steps like the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission to police Wall Street. But Roosevelt, they say, while brilliant in many ways, did not have a sure grasp of how to guide the economy as a whole.
“Roosevelt had some successes, but we hope that Obama is going to do
Source: NYT
January 25, 2009
What F. Scott Fitzgerald called the “fresh, green breast of the New World” that greeted Henry Hudson 400 years ago has been reimagined by a senior ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society.
Drawing on 18th-century British military maps, the ecologist, Eric W. Sanderson, has painstakingly recreated Manhattan’s rolling landscape — Mannahatta in an American Indian dialect meant “island of many hills,” many of which were all but leveled when the street grid was imposed in the 19th
Source: BBC
January 26, 2009
Two experts on Auschwitz argue for and against the idea that the former Nazi death camp should be allowed to crumble away.
Historian Robert Jan Van Pelt says that once the last survivor has died it should be left for nature to reclaim, and eventually forgotten.
But former Polish Foreign Minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, once an inmate, says Auschwitz must be preserved to bear witness to the fate of its victims.
Source: http://www.stonepages.com
January 22, 2009
Cory Holliday almost didn't see the stick figure painted on the sandstone. His first impression was that it was a clever fake. A cave specialist for the Tennessee chapter of The Nature Conservancy, Holliday was searching for caves in a remote part of Fentress County on the Cumberland Plateau (Tennessee, USA) when discovered the foot-long painting of a dancing stick figure. The left leg appeared misshapen, and the right hand resembled a claw.
The rock shelter painting came as a c
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 25, 2009
Salvagers claim to have found the world's richest wreck – a British ship sunk by a Nazi submarine while laden with a £2.6 billion cargo that included gold, platinum and diamonds.
In a project shrouded in secrecy, work is due to start on recovering the cargo, which was being transported to the United States to help pay for the Allied effort in the Second World War.
The scale of the treasure trove is likely to unleash a series of competing claims from interested parties. Salva
Source: Foxnews
January 27, 2009
It survived the French Revolution and a devastating 1999 storm, but strong winds have finally toppled a towering beech tree planted for Marie Antoinette more than two centuries ago at Versailles Palace.
The 82-foot high purple beech, one of the last trees in a hamlet dedicated to the former queen in the vast palace park, was felled Friday by an unusually fierce winter gust, the park's head gardener said.
The 223-year-old tree's collapse, which also exhumed a jumble of r
Source: Foxnews
January 27, 2009
In the depths of the Polish winter, Auschwitz survivors and government officials marked the 64th anniversary of the Nazi death camp's liberation Tuesday as part of worldwide Holocaust remembrance ceremonies.
The yearly commemoration honors the day the advancing Soviet army liberated the camp in 1945. The anniversary has been established as an annual Holocaust remembrance day by the United Nations.
More than 1 million people, mostly Jews, died in the camp's gas chambers
Source: AP
January 26, 2009
The Vatican said Monday that comments by a recently rehabilitated bishop that no Jews were gassed during the Holocaust were unacceptable and violate Church teaching.
In a front-page article, the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano reaffirmed that Pope Benedict XVI deplored all forms of anti-Semitism and that all Roman Catholics must do the same.
The article was issued amid an outcry from Jewish groups that Benedict last week lifted the excommunication of a tradition
Source: AP
January 23, 2009
Impeached Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich tells The Associated Press that his Dec. 9 arrest on corruption charges "is what Pearl Harbor Day was to the United States."
"It was a complete surprise, completely unexpected. And just like the United States prevailed in that, we'll prevail in this," he said in an interview today in Chicago, outside the office of one of his attorneys.
Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
Blagojevich is acc
Source: NYT
January 26, 2009
Simple-to-use digital technology will make it more difficult to distort history in the future.
On Tuesday a group of researchers at the University of Washington are releasing the initial component of a public system to provide authentication for an archive of video interviews with the prosecutors and other members of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Rwandan genocide. The group will also release the first portion of the Rwandan archive.
This system is intended
Source: CNN
January 27, 2009
Two former presidents reflected on their greatest regrets in office Monday, each looking back to issues that continue to plague the nation years later.
Former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton appeared together at a question-and-answer forum before the National Automobile Dealers Association in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Asked his biggest regret after leaving office, Bush said he now wonders whether he should have tried to get Saddam Hussein to leave office at t
Source: BBC
January 27, 2009
The war crimes trial against former Congolese militia leader Thomas Lubanga is "prejudicial", his lawyer has told day two of the case at The Hague.
She claimed the prosecution's use of anonymous witnesses and secrecy clauses for the International Criminal Court (ICC) trial would hamper the defence.
Mr Lubanga, 48, denies using hundreds of child soldiers in DR Congo's five-year conflict, which ended in 2003.
Source: IHT
January 27, 2009
But as a United Nations-backed tribunal prepares to hold its first trial session next month, it is embroiled in a wrangle over numbers that goes to the heart of longstanding concerns about the tribunal's fairness and independence.
The Cambodian government, critics say, is attempting to limit the scope of the trials for its own political reasons, a limit that the critics say would compromise justice and could discredit the entire process.
The first defendant is the man
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 27, 2009
Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip were the victims of an alleged assassination attempt on an official tour of Australia almost 40 years ago, it has emerged.
A retired senior detective has claimed that unidentified conspirators put a wooden log on a railway track to try to derail the official train transporting the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh from Sydney across Australia's Great Dividing Range of mountains.
The so-called Republican plot came to light when retired De
Source: Spiegel Online
January 26, 2009
Almost 20 years after the fall fo the Berlin Wall an architect has come across an abandoned apartment in the eastern German city of Leipzig where time has stood still since the communist era.
It evidently hasn't been touched since early 1989, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the place is filled with East German furniture, fittings and grocery brands that give a glimpse of everyday life in the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) 20 years ago.
Mark Aretz, a
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 27, 2009
The size of a postage stamp, the note indicates that the doomed Army officer expected troops to liberate him from the Sudanese capital.
General Charles George Gordon was part-way through the 10-month siege that led to his death when he sent the note, dated June 1884, back to friendly forces outside the city.
It was hidden in the hair of runner Mahamed Ahmed who smuggled it past the surrounding enemy.
General Gordon asked for news of his rescue and detail
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 27, 2009
More than 440 hours of testimonies - representing the library's entire audio collection - is being made available over the internet as part of a publicly funded project to digitise important cultural archives.
The recordings explore the lives of 66 Jewish people before, during and after the Second World War.
Subjects covered include anti-Semitism in the build-up to the war, the ghettos and concentration camps of the war period itself, survival in hiding, and making a ne
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 27, 2009
The, cards written by a British soldier to his sweetheart back home, are to be auctioned after being quietly kept for almost 100 years.
They were sent to Edith Dunn, then aged 22, from the love of her life, a soldier called Will who she met when he served in the same regiment as her brother, Tom.
The war started seven months after he sent the card in 1914 and Tom was killed. To this day no-one knows where his body lies.
