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: BBC
September 11, 2008
Local historians in Surrey have confirmed evidence that baseball was played in the UK more than 20 years before American independence.
A diary that documents a game being played in Guildford in 1755 has been verified by Surrey History Centre.
William Bray, a Surrey diarist and historian from Shere, wrote about the game when he was still a teenager.
Major League Baseball, the governing body of the game in the US, has been informed of the discovery.
Source: International Herald Tribune
September 11, 2008
A district court in The Hague on Wednesday turned down a compensation claim by two families who lost relatives in the 1995 massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica by Bosnian Serbs.
The families argued that Dutch United Nations peacekeepers at Srebrenica should have protected their relatives, some of whom worked on base.
The court ruled that the government could not be held responsible because the peacekeepers were under a United Nations mandate.
Source: International Herald Tribune
September 11, 2008
Prince Hans-Adam II of Liechtenstein has dubbed Germany a "fourth" Reich, drawing fire from Jewish groups who accused him of trivializing Nazi crimes, and stoking already-tense relations between the two countries.
The prince, Liechtenstein's head of state, made the comments in a letter to the Jewish Museum in Berlin explaining why he would not make a painting available to an exhibition of artworks stolen by the Nazis.
"I would really have liked to support
Source: Tehran Times
September 11, 2008
The 7000-year-old mound of Pardis in the Qarchak region is currently being bulldozed by a factory for brick production.
The mound is located in an area owned by individuals using the earth from the mound for producing bricks in their nearby factory, an informed source who preferred to remain anonymous told Tehran Times on Wednesday.
The upper strata of the ancient site have been seriously damaged and ruins of artifacts are visible nearby, said the source, who has rece
Source: History Today
September 11, 2008
‘I married and lived happily ever afterwards’ (Winston Churchill)
For the 100th anniversary of Winston Churchill’s marriage, the Churchill Archives Centre at the University of Cambridge has launched an appeal for information on lost photographs from the wedding. Following a brief engagement the previous month, Winston Churchill and Clementine Hozier were married on September 12th, 1908 in St Margaret’s Church, Westminster. According to recent research by the author Tom Norgate, phot
Source: History Today
September 11, 2008
A 19-metre statue of a Buddha believed to date from the third century has recently been discovered in central Afghanistan close to the site of the famous Bamiyan Buddhas. Two other Buddhas carved into the mountainside at Bamiyan were destroyed by the Taleban in 2001. Archaeologists have recently begun work on a decade-long project to restore the largest of the original Buddhas.
Source: Times (UK)
September 11, 2008
New excavations at a rich ancient cemetery in northern Greece have yielded gold jewellery, copper and iron weapons and pottery. Archaeologists digging in part of a vast burial ground near Pella, the ancient capital of Macedonia, have unearthed 43 new graves dating from 650-279BC, a Culture Ministry statement said.
The dead included 20 warriors who had been buried in the Archaic period, between 580 and 480 BC, with copper helmets, left, and iron swords, daggers and spearheads. Ornam
Source: AP
September 10, 2008
New excavations at an ancient cemetery in northern Greece have yielded gold jewelry, copper and iron weapons and pottery.
Archaeologists digging in part of a vast burial ground near Pella, the ancient Macedonians' capital, have unearthed 43 new graves dating from 650-279 B.C., the Greek Culture Ministry said in a statement Wednesday.
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
September 8, 2008
Sarah Palin's unexpected burst onto the national scene has piqued sudden interest in Alaska, but few people know that Northern California and the 49th state have been tied together in hundreds of ways in a relationship going back nearly 200 years.
For much of that time, Alaska, having few people and no industry, was virtually an economic colony of San Francisco.
There was also a literary connection: Alaska and the north country launched the career of Jack London, the author w
Source: http://www.whsv.com
September 9, 2008
Construction workers have made an unusual find inside the wall of a Charles Town home: a live ten-pound Confederate artillery round.
American Public University System, which operates an online college primarily for the military, recently bought the home and construction crews found the ordnance while replacing siding and insulation. American Public facilities director Joseph Sladki says it was sitting on a sill plate.
Sladki says the round was given to the Jefferson Cou
Source: Telegraph
September 10, 2008
Analysis of animal remains found near to Stonehenge has shown that cattle were brought to the area from as far away as Wales or even the Scottish Highlands.
Scientists tested the chemical fingerprint of cattle teeth found at Durrington Walls, a Neolithic monument built 500 years before Stonehenge.
They found that far from being local, the animals could only have been reared in areas of Wales or Scotland, which have high levels of the chemical element strontium in the so
Source: International Herald Tribune
September 10, 2008
It was one of the legends of the Cold War: a Bulgarian dissident writer, Georgi Markov, dying in a London hospital of a mysterious fever after being injected with a poison pellet from a specially adapted umbrella as he walked to work across Waterloo Bridge.
A prominent novelist in his native land when he defected to the West in 1969, Markov had become a journalist at the BBC's Bulgarian service and an unflinching critic of communist rule and Bulgaria's longtime leader Todor Zhivkov.
Source: WaPo
September 10, 2008
From the moment Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin declared that she had opposed the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere," critics, the news media and nonpartisan fact checkers have called it a fabrication or, at best, a half-truth. But yesterday in Lebanon, Ohio, and again in Lancaster, Pa., she crossed that bridge again.
"I told Congress: 'Thanks but no thanks for that Bridge to Nowhere up in Alaska,' " Palin told the crowds at the "McCain Street USA" rallies. "If
Source: Spiegel Online
September 9, 2008
Experts with the United States military expend enormous resources to
search for the bodies of missing soldiers. A team is currently at work in
the northern Eifel Mountains region of western Germany, where tens of
thousands of Americans died during World War II.
"We can make French fries for lunch out of those," jokes archeologist
Denise To, pointing to three rows of potato plants on the edge of a field.
The leaves have shriveled and turned brown, and a few potatoes sticking
out of the
Source: AP
September 8, 2008
DOTHAN, Alabama: Larry Blumberg is looking for a few good Jews to move to
his heavily Christian corner of the U.S. South.
Blumberg is chairman of the Blumberg Family Relocation Fund, which is
offering Jewish families as much as $50,000 to relocate to Dothan, an
overwhelmingly Christian town of 58,000 that calls itself the Peanut
Capital of the World. Get involved at Temple Emanu-El and stay at least
five years, the group's leaders say, and the money doesn't have to be
repaid.
Source: Guardian
September 9, 2008
Archaeologists are creating a permanent digital record of shipwrecks
around European coasts. By recording the precise 3D arrangement of timbers
and cargo from the wrecks the researchers aim to preserve the information
they contain about past civilisations even if the wrecks are damaged or
destroyed.
Scientists and members of the general public would in future be able to
float over the wrecks in a virtual submarine from the comfort of their own
desks. For researchers, this would allo
Source: http://www.thenational.ae
August 14, 2008
On January 31 1949, when the People’s Liberation Army came marching into Beijing – heralding the imminent demise of Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang regime in mainland China – Sidney Shapiro, a bespectacled 33-year-old lawyer from Brooklyn, New York, rode his bicycle up to Xizhimen, the city’s north-west gate, to take a look at the soldiers.
There, he remembered years later, he saw a parade of “clean, smartly stepping, smiling young men” being welcomed by cheering crowds, and a line of
Source: Guardian
September 10, 2008
The UN is threatening to put the Tower of London on its list of world heritage sites in danger after its experts accused the UK of damaging globally significant sites such as Stonehenge, the old town of Edinburgh and the Georgian centre of Bath, the Guardian has learned.
Unesco, the UN's cultural agency, has told ministers in London and Edinburgh that it wants urgent action to protect seven world heritage sites which it claims are in danger from building developments, and said in so
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, is published by the Federation of American Scientists
September 10, 2008
The House of Representatives yesterday passed the Overclassification
Reduction Act, a bill that is intended to help reduce inappropriate
classification of information in government.
The bill would require the National Archivist to develop regulations to
help combat overclassification. The bill would mandate increased
accountability for classification actions, with incentives for challenging
improper classification and penalties for abuse of classification
authority. Importantly, i
Source: Politico.com
September 9, 2008
The candidate is new, a different face on the national scene, with roots outside the continental United States and sudden, massive popularity.
With good reason, Sarah Palin has been touted as the right’s answer to Barack Obama. And in one especially important way, her abrupt rise from obscurity has given her something else in common with the Democratic nominee: she has catalyzed a fevered subculture of forwarded e-mails and viral conspiracy theories.
Now the race is o
