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
October 30, 2008
Archaeologists in Israel said on Thursday they had unearthed the oldest Hebrew text ever found, while excavating a fortress city overlooking a valley where the Bible says David slew Goliath.
The dig's uncovering of the past near the ancient battlefield in the Valley of Elah, now home to wineries and a satellite station, could have implications for the emotional debate over the future of Jerusalem, some 20 km (12 miles) away.
Archaeologists from the Hebrew University sai
Source: Yahoo
October 29, 2008
A mega-tsunami struck southeast Asia 700 years ago rivaling the deadly one in 2004, two teams of geologists said after finding sedimentary evidence in coastal marshes.
Researchers in Thailand and Indonesia wrote in two articles in Nature magazine that the tsunami hit around 1400, long before historical records of earthquakes in the region began.
"Tsunamis are something we never experienced before and after 2004, people thought it was something we would never experi
Source: Times (UK)
October 30, 2008
Barack Obama has lived one version of the American Dream that has taken him to the steps of the White House. But a few miles from where the Democratic presidential candidate studied at Harvard, his Kenyan aunt and uncle, immigrants living in modest circumstances in Boston, have a contrasting American story.
Zeituni Onyango, the aunt so affectionately described in Mr Obama’s best-selling memoir Dreams from My Father, lives in a disabled-access flat on a rundown public housing estate
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 30, 2008
Suspected Holocaust denier Dr Gerald Toben has won his fight against extradition to Germany where he is wanted for allegedly publishing anti-Semitic material on his website.
Dr Toben, 64, a prominent Australian academic, is wanted to stand trial for material he published between 2000 and 2004.
The German authorities claim they are 'of an anti-Semitic and/or revisionist nature'.
In the European Arrest Warrant issued in October 2004, he is accused of approvin
Source: BBC
October 29, 2008
The last surviving British soldier to fight in the trenches of World War I is to launch the Royal British Legion Poppy Appeal in Somerset.
Harry Patch, 110, who was born in Combe Down, Bath, was a plumber by trade before being called up.
He was a private when he fought at the Battle of Passchendaele.
Mr Patch will be on board HMS Somerset at Avonmouth docks to see a Beaver plane drop hundreds of poppies in remembrance of fallen personnel.
There will also b
Source: BBC
October 29, 2008
Just after 5 o'clock on the morning of 11 November, 1918, British, French and German officials gathered in a railway carriage to the north of Paris and signed a document which would in effect bring to an end World War I.
Within minutes, news of the Armistice - the cease fire - had been flashed around the world that the war, which was meant to "end all wars", was finally over.
And yet it wasn't, because the cease-fire would not come into effect for a further
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
October 30, 2008
A judge is set to throw out charges against experts accused of faking a stone box that claimed to offer the first physical proof of the existence of Christ - raising the possibility once again that it could be genuine.
The discovery of the 2,000-year-old ossuary, or bone box, bearing the words, 'James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus', was regarded as one of the greatest archaeological discoveries when it emerged nearly a decade ago.
But other experts decided the inscr
Source: http://www.catholicculture.org
October 29, 2008
Bishop Robert W. Finn of Kansas City-St. Joseph compared the upcoming presidential election to the Battle of Lepanto, in which Christian forces against overwhelming odds defeated Ottoman Turkish invaders bent on the conquest of Europe. ‘Together with the other Bishops of Missouri I am calling on all the faithful to make this last week before the election a week of prayer for our nation-- a week of prayer for the protection of Human Life,’ Bishop Finn wrote in an October 24 diocesan newspaper col
Source: International Herald Tribune
October 30, 2008
Overlooking the verdant Valley of Elah, where the Bible says David toppled Goliath, archaeologists are unearthing a 3,000-year-old fortified city that could reshape views of the period when David ruled over the Israelites. Five lines on pottery uncovered here appear to be the oldest Hebrew text ever found and are likely to have a major impact on knowledge about the history of literacy and alphabet development.
The five-acre site, with its fortifications, dwellings and multi-chambere
Source: Times (UK)
October 30, 2008
It was the great scientific contest of the 18th century – a £20,000 prize promised to anyone who could solve the thorny navigational problem of calculating longitude – and in 1765, John Harrison was convinced that he had won it.
His H4 marine chronometer, the fourth version of a “Great Sea Clock” he had designed to keep perfect time in ocean conditions, had been successfully tested on not one but two intercontinental voyages. But still Parliament’s Board of Longitude refused to pay
Source: Guardian (UK)
October 30, 2008
It has been described as one of the great acts of cultural desecration of modern times, a rampant pillage that threatens to denude a country of much of its fabulous heritage. But now Afghanistan is stepping up an ambitious campaign to stop the looting of the country's archaeological sites, with a programme to build museums, train archaeologists and repatriate the billions of dollars worth of stolen antiquities that have been spirited through its porous borders during the past seven years.
Source: Science News Daily
October 7, 2008
The connection between geology and the history of the Civil War has fascinated Robert Whisonant since his undergraduate days, and now Whisonant has teamed up with geomorphologist Judy Ehlen, both of Radford University, to take history, military history in particular, a step deeper -- into the geology beneath the soldiers' feet.
Whisonant and Ehlen examined the geomorphology of several battlefields and compared the terrain to known casualties for each day of fighting. The question, s
Source: Salon (Click here to listen to LBJ audio tape.)
October 29, 2008
As the Republican nominee for president this year, John McCain is running as a maverick against Washington, but he and his family have long been part of Washington's military-political culture and benefited professionally from their connections. And now a Salon investigation has revealed that a powerful senator prodded President Lyndon Johnson into promoting John McCain's father to a four-star admiral, despite the defense secretary's concern he wasn't competent for the job.
After y
Source: Christian Science Monitor
October 28, 2008
Washington may well be on the verge of becoming a one-party town, with Democratic Sen. Barack Obama looking strong to capture the presidency next Tuesday and Democrats poised to expand their majorities in both houses of Congress.
The history of one-party rule in America is fraught with triumphs and peril.
Franklin Roosevelt swept into power in 1933 at a time of economic depression, and, with a Democratic congressional majority behind him, was able to enact a raft of leg
Source: MSNBC
October 28, 2008
With less than a week to go before the presidential election, there’s no question the 2008 race to the White House is hinging on the economy. There is a question, however, about how much power the winner will have to turn the troubled economy around.
With the nation facing its worst economic crisis in decades, economists and historians say it is hard to predict how much sway either Barack Obama or John McCain will ultimately have over the nation’s economic woes. That’s partly becaus
Source: Common Dreams (liberal website)
October 29, 2008
As early voting in the US presidential elections gets underway, ES&S iVotronics touch-screen electronic voting machines have been observed in four separate states flipping the votes - mostly from Barack Obama to John McCain but sometimes to third party candidates too. This has already occurred during early voting in the states of West Virginia, Tennessee, Missouri and Texas.
A county clerk in West Virginia invited a video crew to watch his demonstration of the reliability of the
Source: http://www.liveleak.com
October 28, 2008
A French national archive has posted online extended footage of Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain being interviewed as a bedridden prisoner during the Vietnam War.
French reporter Francois Chalais conducted the interview. His widow says the online release this week of 4 minutes, 33 seconds of footage is the fullest distribution of the interview since it first aired four decades ago.
The video shows McCain shirtless and unshaven, smoking a cigarette. Ans
Source: AP
October 28, 2008
The government of Spain has returned 45 allegedly contraband pre-Columbian artifacts to Peru during a visit by King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia, officials said Monday.
Twelve of the artifacts returned Monday are pieces"of high archaeological and artistic value" stolen from the Lords of Sipan tomb site in the 1980s,
said Walter Alva, lead archaeologist on the dig. They include gold necklace pendants in the shape of an owl's head and a toad, and an embossed gold scepter.
Gold masks and j
Source: Yahoo
October 24, 2008
Should Pope Pius XII, the pope who led the Vatican through the Second World War, be considered for sainthood? An Israeli cabinet minister surprised experts when he waded into the increasingly heated debate on the issue this week, saying it would be "unacceptable" to consider canonizing Pius XII, whose reluctance to condemn the Holocaust during World War II has drawn accusations that he turned a blind eye to the fate of the Jews.
"Throughout the period of the Holocaust
Source: AP
October 27, 2008
A leading German economist apologized Monday for drawing a much-criticized parallel between corporate managers today and the Nazi-era persecution of Jews that followed the 1929 financial crisis.
Hans-Werner Sinn, the head of the Munich-based Ifo institute, was quoted as telling the daily Tagesspiegel in an interview about the global economic meltdown that "in every crisis, people look for culprits, for someone to blame."
"No one wanted to believe in an anonymou
