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: Deutsche Welle
November 18, 2008
The 700-year-old windows were thought vanished or destroyed until 2005, when they were discovered by a Russian art historian at a cloister outside Moscow, under the jurisdiction of the Pushkin Museum.
The first 111 panels, which had been in the possession of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, were returned by Russia in 2002.
Another three years would pass before the remaining six panels dating back to the 14th century would be restored to their rightful home at the
Source: Deutsche Welle
November 18, 2008
The decision announced by the UN highest court in the Hague on Tuesday, Sept. 18, was a narrow one.
"The court ... by 10 votes to seven finds that ... the court has the jurisdiction to entertain the application by the Republic of Croatia," said presiding judge Rosalyn Higgins.
Croatian Minister of Justice Ivan Simonovic said he was very happy about the judgement.
"We won in round one," Simonovic told a Croatian daily newspaper. "Now
Source: Deutsche Welle
November 18, 2008
A pig's head was found stuck to the entrance gate at a Jewish graveyard in the town of Gotha next to a section of cloth with the words "six million lies" written on it.
Police said a blood-red liquid had also been thrown at the gate and that the ground was covered with broken glass -- perhaps a reference to the Night of Broken Glass, the 1938 Nazi pogrom against German Jews.
In Erfurt itself, police said, a memorial plaque at the entrance to another Jewish ce
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 14, 2008
The Prince of Wales, who is 60 today, is planning a symbolic change when he becomes King by taking the title Defender of Faith to reflect Britain's multicultural society.
The move would mean the monarch, as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, would no longer be known as Defender of the Faith for the first time since the reign of Henry VIII.
The Prince caused controversy within the Anglican church when he floated the idea several years ago of becoming Defender of
Source: NYT
November 17, 2008
STANFORD, Calif. — Not long after he arrived at the Supreme Court in 1972 after three years in the Nixon administration, Justice William H. Rehnquist faced stinging criticism for participating in a decision dismissing a challenge to Army surveillance of domestic political groups in the Vietnam War era.
He had voted with the majority in the 5-to-4 decision, issued that June, after giving Senate testimony as a Justice Department official defending the spying and criticizing the suit.
Source: NYT
November 17, 2008
Fielding questions about its diminished endowment fund, the possibility of charging admission fees and the fate of its fabled yet shuttered Arts and Industries Building, the Smithsonian Institution held the first public board meeting in its 162-year history on Monday as part of its new commitment to openness and accountability. Sitting on the stage of a 565-seat auditorium at the institution’s National Museum of Natural History, members of the governing body, or Board of Regents — including memb
Source: Reuters
November 14, 2008
ATHENS -– "I'll tell you what's wrong with it. It's dead, that's what's wrong with it."
For those who believe the ancient Greeks thought of everything first, proof has been found in a 4th century AD joke book featuring an ancestor of Monty Python's Dead Parrot sketch where a man returns a parrot to a shop, complaining it is dead.
The 1,600-year-old work entitled "Philogelos: The Laugh Addict," one of the world's oldest joke books, features a joke in
Source: NYT lede blog
November 17, 2008
Evidently there will be no Blackberry One in the White House.
Concerns over e-mail security and the disclosure requirements in the Presidential Records Act, as The New York Times reported yesterday, will force Barack Obama to give up his second “addiction” in as many years. (The first may have been the easier one for the hyperconnected president-elect to leave behind.)
It seems Mr. Obama will be the third Internet-era president obliged to toil in an anachronistic bubble
Source: NYT
September 24, 2008
A notable curiosity in the current presidential campaign is an absence of dogs, who have often appeared as supporting cast in previous American elections and sometimes, tails wagging, even helped shift a campaign’s momentum.
The most familiar of these political dogs are Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fala and Richard Nixon’s Checkers. Both of these dogs rescued embattled candidates eight years apart to the day.
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Source: Washington Post
November 17, 2008
How was it that a German priest writing in Latin and living in a French city far from the coast became the first person to tell the world that a vast ocean lay to the west of the American continents?
That is one of the bigger mysteries in the history of the Renaissance.
But it is not the only one involving Martin Waldseemueller, a map-making cleric whose own story is sufficiently obscure that his birth and death dates aren't known for certain.
Waldseemuelle
Source: S.F. Chronicle
November 17, 2008
This country proudly fills plazas and parks with memorials to mark the past. History and those that made it get their due in bronze, granite, and here-lies inscriptions.
But what happens to nearly a thousand Americans who died in a faraway place, nearly all of them poor, idealistic and cut off from the mainstream? For the followers of Jim Jones who died in a failing plantation in Guyana, the answer is nothing. Their faces, names and stories are forgotten. A sorry chapter in human hi
Source: S.F. Chronicle
November 16, 2008
Thirty years ago, two unimaginable tragedies jolted San Francisco in less than a fortnight.
On Nov. 18, 1978, more than 900 men, women and children - many of them poor African Americans from San Francisco - died after drinking a cyanide-laced potion in Peoples Temple founder Jim Jones' compound in the jungles of Guyana.
Then, while San Francisco struggled to grasp the enormity of that tragedy, on Nov. 27 a fiercely conservative ex-supervisor named Dan White assassinated
Source: NYT
November 17, 2008
As President-elect Barack Obama rushes from secret job interviews with onetime rivals in the Democratic primary season to briefings on the financial crisis, to discussions of saving the American auto industry, the postelection period may feel frenetic.
But soon he and his transition team may look back on this phase as luxuriantly languid, a fleeting chance for “deliberate haste,” as Mr. Obama has characterized the pace of his cabinet selection process. Later it will be all haste.
Source: Rep. Jackie Speier in the San Francisco Chronicle
November 17, 2008
"I'm 28 years old, and I am about to die."
I was curled up behind the wheel of an airplane on a jungle airstrip in Guyana, South America. This isn't what I expected when I signed on to work for a United States congressman. Our fact-finding trip to investigate the Peoples Temple in Jonestown had gone horribly wrong. I lay as still as I could, pretending to be dead, as an unknown gunman pumped five bullets into me at close range. Pop-pop. Pop. Pop-pop.
When the
Source: Sydney Morning Herald
November 18, 2008
IN A case of prehistoric paternity testing, the world's oldest known nuclear family has been identified: a mum, dad and two boys who lived 4600 years ago.
Although their deaths were violent, they were buried with care in a single grave: arms entwined, children facing their parents.
"Their unity in death suggests a unity in life," said Wolfgang Haak, of the University of Adelaide, co-leader of an international team that studied ancient DNA from the remains.
Source: CBC
November 14, 2008
A rare 2,500-year-old Egyptian sarcophagus shattered in a student protest almost four decades ago is expected to be a whole, new artifact when it returns to its home in Montreal after a sojourn in Gatineau.
The elaborately-painted Hetep-Bastet coffin and the mummy inside are on loan to the Museum of Civilization, which plans to hand the ancient wooden coffin back to its owner, the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM), in far better condition than when it left.
Over t
Source: National Parks Travel
November 17, 2008
When General Robert E. Lee's troops were battling the Union forces at Fredericksburg, Virginia, on December 13, 1862, his cannons atop Lee's Hill and nearby Howison Hill had clear lines of fire.
Those views were made possible by "pioneers," special troop detachments whose jobs entailed building breastworks and clearing trees to provide open lines of fire for the artillery. So good were they at their tasks, and so brutally effective was the cannonry, that the general was he
Source: Liverpool Echo (UK)
November 14, 2008
THE heritage of Liverpool’s famous Gladstone family was uncovered in a Time Team-style investigation.
The Gladstone Roots Project was officially opened at Court Hey Park in Huyton this week.
Its unique lottery-funded archaeological inquiry explored the heritage of the Gladstone family in the park by excavating the site of a Victorian mansion house.
The grand mansion belonging to Robertson Gladstone, the elder brother of four-times Victorian prime minister W
Source: Time Magazine
November 17, 2008
Sometimes those purported to be the best and the brightest are anything but. In the spirit of not making the same mistakes twice, TIME examines some of modern history's less-than-fabulous Cabinet appointments.
[The list includes:]
A. Mitchell Palmer - Attorney General, 1919-1921
Albert Fall - Secretary of the Interior, 1921-1923
Robert McNamara - Secretary of Defense, 1961-1968
Earl Butz - Secretary of Agriculture, 1971-76
Source: Time Magazine
November 13, 2008
The torch passes on election day; the power follows in January. But in between comes a personal transaction, like the one that just took place at the White House. It's not simply ego that has a way of fouling up this moment. Both parties have an eye on the history books, as the outgoing President airbrushes the epilogue, and the arriving one prepares the prologue.
By historical standards, George W. Bush and Barack Obama were remarkably civil in their Oval Office summit. They had nev
