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: Reuters
November 19, 2008
ROME -- The Cleveland Museum of Art agreed on Wednesday to return looted art to Italy, including an ancient vase and a 14th-century cross, as museums worldwide face pressure to ensure their collections were acquired legally.
The Cleveland said it would return 14 artifacts within three months. Among them are an Apulian Volute Krater vase from 33O BC and a rare gold processional cross from 1375, which was stolen from a Siena church and acquired by the museum in 1977.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
November 21, 2008
The Battle of Antietam left 23,100 soldiers wounded or killed in the bloodiest single-day conflict in American history. Rifles downed most of the soldiers, but a pair of geologists say they have found an unexpected accomplice: limestone.
A survey of the 25 bloodiest battles of the Civil War by Robert C. Whisonant and Judy Ehlen, both geologists at Radford University, has found a correlation between high casualties and the Civil War's terra firma.
"Military people h
Source: Independent
November 19, 2008
After years of secrecy, the Broadmoor authorities have released the medical records of a Victorian madman who was suspected of being the serial killer known as Jack the Ripper. [Broadmoor is a high-security psychiatric hospital at Crowthorne in Berkshire.]
Thomas Hayne Cutbush was a strange, disturbed and violent youth who was diagnosed as insane in 1891 and remained in Broadmoor until his death in 1903. During the period when the Ripper was on the rampage in Whitechapel, east Lond
Source: Wall Street Journal
November 19, 2008
BROOKLYN, N.Y. -- John F. Kennedy was assassinated 45 years ago -- the anniversary is Nov. 22, Saturday. And now that the country has a new first family evoking something of the Kennedy mystique, Neil Estern has been thinking it's high time his sculpture of JFK is put back where it belongs.
It belongs in Grand Army Plaza, a traffic maelstrom in the heart of Brooklyn. The plaza's arch marks the Union's triumph in the Civil War. Set around it are statues of such notables as...Alexande
Source: NYT
November 18, 2008
SEOUL, South Korea — To conservative critics, a widely used textbook’s version of how American and Soviet forces took control of Korea from Japanese colonialists in 1945 shows all that is wrong with the way South Korean history is taught to young people today.
The fact no one disputes is that, at the end of World War II, the Soviet military swept into northern Korea and installed a friendly Communist government while an American military administration assumed control in the south.
Source: NYT
November 19, 2008
URUMQI, China — An exhibit on the first floor of the museum here gives the government’s unambiguous take on the history of this border region: “Xinjiang has been an inalienable part of the territory of China,” says one prominent sign.
But walk upstairs to the second floor, and the ancient corpses on display seem to tell a different story.
One called the Loulan Beauty lies on her back with her shoulder-length hair matted down, her lips pursed in death, her high cheekbone
Source: http://www.foxreno.com
November 18, 2008
Famed Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward met with his “Deep Throat” source over the weekend and this time it wasn’t in a darkened parking lot in Washington, D.C.
Woodward visited with retired high-ranking FBI official Mark Felt in Santa Rosa on Sunday and took the opportunity to introduce the source that was key to the Watergate probe to his reporting partner – Carl Bernstein. It was the first time ever Bernstein had met Felt.
Source: International Herald Tribune
November 17, 2008
When the English monarch in Alan Bennett's novella "The Uncommon Reader" decides to write her memoirs, she takes the prudent step of abdicating first. Queen Sofia of Spain may be wondering whether she, too, should have waited for her husband, King Juan Carlos, to leave office before granting a Spanish journalist a series of uncharacteristically candid interviews.
The resulting book, "The Queen Up Close," has provided Spaniards an uncomfortably close look at their
Source: http://www.tillsonburgnews.com (Ontario, Canada)
November 18, 2008
Excavation of the largest Native village in North America, dating from the 1300s to 1400s, was recently completed in Tillsonburg.
The area excavated was on Quarterline Road, in front of the Tillsonburg soccer park. The property is owned by Bamford Homes and Bethel Temple. Bamford Homes' plans are to erect a 25-unit condominium building there, similar to King Richard's Court.
Taking earlier findings at the soccer park in 2001 into consideration, the area once held 15 lon
Source: Science News Daily
November 18, 2008
Archaeologists in southeastern Turkey have discovered an Iron Age chiseled stone slab that provides the first written evidence in the region that people believed the soul was separate from the body.
University of Chicago researchers will describe the discovery, a testimony created by an Iron Age official that includes an incised image of the man, on Nov. 22-23 at conferences of biblical and Middle Eastern archaeological scholars in Boston.
The Neubauer Expedition of the
Source: Time Magazine
November 13, 2008
In America, political majorities live or die at the intersection of two public yearnings: for freedom and for order. A century ago, in the Progressive Era, modern American liberalism was born, in historian Robert Wiebe's words, as a"search for order." America's giant industrial monopolies, the progressives believed, were turning capitalism into a jungle, a wild and la
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 11, 2008
• He collects Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comics
• He was known as "O'Bomber" at high school for his skill at basketball
• His name means "one who is blessed" in Swahili
• His favourite meal is wife Michelle's shrimp linguini
• He won a Grammy in 2006 for the audio version of his memoir, Dreams From My Father
• He is left-handed – the sixth post-war president to be left-handed
• He has read every Harry Potter book...
Source: Time Magazine
November 13, 2008
It's possibly the most recognizable workspace in the world, but the office
that President-elect Barack Obama, its next occupant, visited on Nov. 10
hasn't always been the enduring symbol of the U.S. presidency. Before the
1930s, the Oval Office was in a different part of the White House. And
before that, it wasn't even oval.
In 1902, Theodore Roosevelt built a rectangular room on the ground floor
of the new West Wing, replacing offices on the second floor of the White
House. William
Source: http://fredericksburg.com
November 18, 2008
Virginia stepped forward yesterday to help save portions of 15 Civil War battlefields from encroaching development.
The commonwealth will provide up to $5.2 million to front-line private groups defending Civil War battlefields--including Chancellorsville and Brandy Station. Preservationists must come up with $10.4 million to get the 21 matching grants awarded by the state Department of Historic Resources.
The resulting total, $15.57 million, would be one of the largest
Source: Times (UK)
November 18, 2008
Spain’s best known judge has today reversed his decision to investigate the disappearance of thousands of people during the Civil War and the dictatorship of General Franco.
Judge Baltasar Garzón complied with a demand from public prosecutors that the case be handled by regional courts.
The judge, who is best known in Britain for his unsuccessful attempt to arrest the late Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet in 1998, last month opened an investigation into the d
Source: International Herald Tribune
November 17, 2008
To conservative critics, a popular textbook's version of how U.S. and Soviet forces took control of Korea from Japanese colonialists in 1945 exemplifies all that's wrong with how South Korean history is taught to young people today.
The facts no one disputes are that, at the end of World War II, the Soviet military swept into northern Korea and installed a friendly Communist government while a U.S. military administration assumed control in the south.
But then the high
Source: AP
November 18, 2008
Spain's most famous judge abandoned a drive for a symbolic indictment of the late Gen. Francisco Franco and his regime, dropping a probe Tuesday into atrocities committed during and after the country's ruinous civil war.
Judge Baltasar Garzon reluctantly yielded in a dispute over jurisdiction, and transferred the case to lower courts.
Garzon, a human rights and terrorism crusader known for going after Osama bin Laden and Chile's late Augusto Pinochet, launched a probe l
Source: AP
November 17, 2008
Dozens of Poles were awarded medals Monday for risking their lives during World War II to save Jews from the Holocaust.
President Lech Kaczynski awarded state medals — many posthumously — to around 70 people from across Poland. First lady Maria Kaczynska presented them to the people or their relatives in a gala ceremony at Warsaw's National Theater.
Among those awarded was Zofia Brusikiewicz, 81, whose parents hid 13 Jews in an apartment in Warsaw and Irena Gut-Opdyke,
Source: Deborah Lipstadt blog
November 18, 2008
Last Friday an unquestionably antisemitic cartoon appeared in Emory's student newspaper, The Wheel. I was sent the cartoon and the cartoonist's accompanying explanation.
The cartoon was split into two sides. One side showed the wall/fence between the West Bank and Israel with Israeli soldiers in front of it and on the other side were Jews in a ghetto with a Nazi guard in front of it. Underneath in caps was the following sentence: EXPERIENCE IS THE BEST TEACHER.
The acc
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
November 18, 2008
Archeologists digging in northern Israel have discovered the 12,000-year-old skeleton of what they say was a witch doctor.
They said the skeleton was that of a deformed woman of around 45 years of age from the Natufian culture, which ranged from Syria to the Sinai peninsula at the time.
Leore Grosman, in charge of the excavation in the Galilee, said the bones were found in a carefully-carved oval grave with the skull resting on a tortoise shell.
The skelet
