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This page features brief excerpts of news 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.
Highlights
Breaking News
This page features brief excerpts of news 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. Because most of our readers read the NYT we usually do not include the paper's stories in HIGHLIGHTS.
Name of source: Inside Higher Ed
SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed (5-8-07)
That e-mail could end up costing Kehowski his job, according to documents released Monday by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which is now advising Kehwoski. According to those documents, five employees in the Maricopa Community College District — of which Glendale is a part — filed complaints against him, charging that including a link to Buchanan’s Web site (even citing it as the source for the proclamation) was harassment because of the anti-immigration views expressed by Buchanan on his Web site.
Name of source: UPI
SOURCE: UPI (5-8-07)
That 1987 discovery ultimately resulted in a legal battle between Goldsmith's heirs and the Titanic Historical Society in Springfield, Mass. Goldsmith didn't write a fictional account. He was one of the survivors of the 1912 disaster that claimed 1,500 lives, including that of his own father.
Put on a lifeboat with his mother, nine-year-old Goldsmith watched as his father remained on the ship, calling out, "So long, Frankie. I'll see you later."
The society has filed a federal lawsuit against Goldsmith's three sons, asking a judge to give the organization the legal right to sell a book based on Goldsmith's life.
The society bases the request on permission given by Goldsmith's wife for the sale of copies of her husband's manuscript at a 1988 convention.
Name of source: New York Times
SOURCE: New York Times (5-8-07)
Yet the suspension bridges were familiar and vital links in the vast empire of the Inca, as they had been to Andean cultures for hundreds of years before the arrival of the Spanish in 1532. The people had not developed the stone arch or wheeled vehicles, but they were accomplished in the use of natural fibers for textiles, boats, sling weapons —- even keeping inventories by a prewriting system of knots.
SOURCE: New York Times (5-8-07)
In the latest clash, white parents pack school board meetings to support the embattled superintendent, Roy Brooks, who is black. The blacks among the school board members look on grimly, determined to use their new majority to oust him. Whites insist that test scores and enrollment have improved under the brusque, hard-charging Mr. Brooks; blacks on the board are furious that he has cut the number of office and other non-teaching jobs and closed some schools.
The fight is all the more disturbing to some here because it erupted just as a federal judge declared Little Rock’s schools finally desegregated, 50 years after a jeering white mob massed outside Central High to turn back integration.
SOURCE: New York Times (5-8-07)
Yasukuni Shrine, a Shinto memorial that commemorates Japan’s wartime dead, including Class A war criminals from World War II, has been a focal point of Chinese and South Korean ire over what many in Asia see as Japan’s lack of remorse for its wartime deeds.
Mr. Abe, who has worked to improve relations with booming China, has for months refused to say if he would visit the shrine. On Tuesday, Japanese news reports said Mr. Abe sent a small plant as a type of compromise — a way of paying his respects and playing to his conservative base without making a visit, which the Chinese would surely take as an affront.
SOURCE: New York Times (5-6-07)
There used to be an almost complete scholarly and judicial consensus that the Second Amendment protects only a collective right of the states to maintain militias. That consensus no longer exists — thanks largely to the work over the last 20 years of several leading liberal law professors, who have come to embrace the view that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own guns.
In those two decades, breakneck speed by the standards of constitutional law, they have helped to reshape the debate over gun rights in the United States. Their work culminated in the March decision, Parker v. District of Columbia, and it will doubtless play a major role should the case reach the United States Supreme Court.
Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, said he had come to believe that the Second Amendment protected an individual right.
Name of source: DPA (German Press Agency)
SOURCE: DPA (German Press Agency) (5-8-07)
'We have located the burial site of Herod, at the Herodium,' Netzer told a packed news conference in Jerusalem, describing the find as a 'high point' for research on Herod.
Herod was buried some 2011 years ago in the sarcophagus, which was made of a Jerusalemite reddish limestone and extensively decorated.
The sarcophagus, Netzer said, was rare, with one similar to one found in the Tomb of the Kings in East Jerusalem.
The writings of the Roman-Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, combined with the 'unique' tomb, and a grand stairway six metres wide leading to it, as well as other evidence, such as a large podium, make Nezter believe that he has finally found the spot he has long searched for.
'We just knew,' he said of what he called the 'big moment' when his team found the evidence.
Related Links
BBC News report (video, 1:30) AP photos at Yahoo archaeology (#1-46)
Name of source: Raw Story
SOURCE: Raw Story (5-8-07)
"Nathan Bedford Forrest, successful Confederate general, said it best about winning and victory and the means to do so. He said: 'Get there firstest with the mostest,'" said Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) in a one-minute floor speech at the beginning of Monday's session in the House of Representatives.
He then called on Congress to fund the war in Iraq.
"Congress needs to send the generals the mostest, Mr. Speaker, needs to send equipment and personnel that is needed. Doing this will help our mission in spite of the Congressional Surrender Group's desire to retreat and quit," he added.
Poe left out Forrest's history as a founder of the Ku Klux Klan in addition to fighting on the side of the Confederacy.
Name of source: Reuters
SOURCE: Reuters (5-8-07)
Gandhi was killed by a suicide bomber while he was on his way to address an election meeting near the southern Indian city of Chennai.
The assassination was blamed on neighboring Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger rebels. It was seen as revenge for Gandhi sending Indian soldiers to the island nation as peacekeepers but who eventually got embroiled in the bloody ethnic conflict there.
"It will be a celluloid investigation of Rajiv Gandhi's assassination, tackling questions that were never asked," director Anubhav Sinha was quoted as saying by the Times of India newspaper.
Name of source: AP
SOURCE: AP (5-8-07)
It will be the queen's first visit to the war memorial, which was dedicated in 2004. The queen, a teenage princess during World War II, won permission in 1945 from her father, King George VI, to join the war effort as a driver in the Women's Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women's branch of the British Army. She became No. 230873 Second Subaltern Elizabeth Windsor...
[Monday] ended with a second visit to the White House for the administration's first white-tie state dinner. It was designed to showcase American culture and cuisine. But the hosts didn't forget to include special touches designed to honor its British ally and make the queen feel welcome.
The centuries-old vermeil flatware and candelabras came from a London silversmith. A made-of-sugar replica of the queen's 1953 coronation rose graced the cake.
In the leaders' toasts at dinner, they took opposite tacks. Bush praised the queen for a reign that has ''deepened our friendship and strengthened our alliance,'' while the British monarch talked of the threat of terror, problems like climate change and the likelihood of occasional disagreement between allies...
The queen's visit is her fifth to the United States in 50 years and her first since 1991.
SOURCE: AP (5-7-07)
Culture Minister Kazimierz Michal Ujazdowski said the Polish legislation was conceived months before the [Estonian] dispute and was intended to deal with the issue in an orderly manner.
''The point of the law is to give the right to local governors to remove those objects that in a drastic manner commemorate the communist dictatorship,'' Ujazdowski said on TVN24 television.
''Wherever our national pride is hurt with praise for the communist dictatorship, the local governor should act,'' he said, adding that he knew of places where memorials with Russian-language inscriptions remained as the chief city monuments.
Ujazdowski said, however, that the law would not target monuments honoring the bravery of Red Army soldiers. ''Under no circumstance can we be accused of a lack of respect for the ordinary soldiers,'' he said.
SOURCE: AP (5-5-07)
The famously salty sea, which lies at Earth's lowest point, is shrinking. It has receded by some three feet a year for the past 25 years. Jordan and Israel warn that if the trend continues, it will vanish by 2050 along with its unique ecosystem, defeated by river diversions, mineral extraction and natural phenomena like evaporation.
A crucial project to boost the water level by piping in water from the Red Sea has long been held up by disputes between Israel and its Palestinian and Jordanian neighbors.
SOURCE: AP (5-7-07)
The deal, first announced in August, was completed April 25, the 60th anniversary of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park, said Valerie Naylor, the park superintendent. Federal Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns announced it in a statement Monday.
The 5,200-acre picturesque ranch in western North Dakota is across a river valley from Roosevelt's 218-acre Elkhorn Ranch site, where the former president lived in the late 1800s...
[As part of the Elkhorn viewshed, the property] becomes part of the Little Missouri Grasslands.
Related Links
Theodore Roosevelt National Park Roosevelt's Dakota writings: Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (1885); Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (1896) (texts at Bartleby)
SOURCE: AP (5-7-07)
The plea by Christian Klar, who has been jailed for 24 years and is not eligible for parole until 2009, has made Germans relive harrowing days in 1977 when a small band of radicals that emerged from the student anti-war movement of the 1960s turned to terror. Fighting what they viewed as U.S. imperialism and capitalist oppression of workers in what was then West Germany, the group killed 34 people before declaring itself disbanded in 1998.
The RAF was also sometimes called the Baader-Meinhof gang after two members, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, both of whom killed themselves in prison.
SOURCE: AP (5-6-07)
Only years later would she discover the full truth: that she was among some 250 children seized from their families as part of a Nazi attempt to improve the Aryan gene pool in pursuit of a mad dream of racial purity.
Her adoptive mother, Luise Dahl, would later say she too had no idea. In a letter written after World War II she said that she knew nothing about snatching children for racial purposes; all she had wanted was to adopt a war orphan. An illness had left her barren, and her husband, a German army officer, was stationed hundreds of miles away, in Paris. She was desperately lonely.
More than 60 years later, the story emerges in part from a rare collection of documents held by the International Tracing Service, or ITS, a unit of the International Committee of the Red Cross, in the small German resort town of Bad Arolsen.
SOURCE: AP (5-7-07)
The odd-looking coins with a bright red flower were so unfamiliar to suspicious U.S. Army contractors traveling in Canada they filed confidential espionage accounts about them. The worried contractors described the coins as "anomalous" and "filled with something man-made that looked like nano-technology," according to once-classified U.S. government reports and e-mails obtained by the AP.
The silver-colored 25-cent piece features the red image of a poppy -- Canada's flower of remembrance -- inlaid over a maple leaf...
The supposed nano-technology actually was a conventional protective coating the Royal Canadian Mint applied to prevent the poppy's red color from rubbing off. The mint produced nearly 30 million such quarters in 2004 commemorating Canada's 117,000 war dead.
"It did not appear to be electronic (analog) in nature or have a power source," wrote one U.S. contractor, who discovered the coin in the cup holder of a rental car. "Under high power microscope, it appeared to be complex consisting of several layers of clear, but different material, with a wire like mesh suspended on top."
The confidential accounts led to a sensational warning from the Defense Security Service, an agency of the Defense Department, that mysterious coins with radio frequency transmitters were found planted on U.S. contractors with classified security clearances on at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006 as the contractors traveled through Canada...
SOURCE: AP (5-5-07)
Flames roared across the surface of the mighty German dirigible only 100 or so feet above him, singeing his hair as he ran for his life.
''It was a piff-puff, just like someone would leave the gas on and not get the flame to it,'' said Buchanan, one of the last living members of the ground crew waiting to help the Hindenburg land.
Seventy years ago Sunday, the hydrogen-filled Hindenburg ignited while easing toward its mooring mast at the U.S. Navy base in Lakehurst. The blaze killed 35 people on board and one person in the ground crew; 62 passengers and crew members survived.
Name of source: Los Angeles Times
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times (5-8-07)
Effortlessly, he rattles off the dates of battles and assassinations, lists the names of obliterated villages and fallen comrades in arms. Then he leads his guests through narrow rooms filled with propaganda posters, Soviet-era surface-to-air missile launchers and dozens of grainy black-and-white photos of the "heroes and martyrs" who died in a brutal conflict that already has slipped into history's shadows...
Under other circumstances, the musty artifacts on display at the museum, a one-story tin-roofed building perched on a muddy hillside, might have been stashed away in private homes or left to rust in some abandoned jungle lair. Perez might have frittered away his days among El Salvador's legions of unemployed.
But today he and a number of his fellow former rebels have a surprising new profession: tour guide.
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times (5-8-07)
"They said they wanted pilots," he recalled. "They didn't say anything about where the flying would be."...
In 14 years working for Air America, Jordan was never formally told who was footing the bill for his often-harrowing flights. But he and the other Air America pilots knew. They called their mystery client "the customer," Jordan said.
"And the CIA was always the customer."
Few Americans know it, but Air America is embedded in some of the most iconic images of the Vietnam War. In the famous photo of the evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, the helicopters lifting stranded diplomats off the rooftop belonged not to the military but to Air America.
The company was shut down after the fall of Saigon in 1975, and the U.S. government subsequently acknowledged that Air America was a wholly owned subsidiary of the CIA.
But more than 30 years later, the government is still grappling with where that leaves Air America's former employees. They worked for Air America, but does that mean they worked for the CIA?
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times (5-6-07)
Since the publication of her enormously popular book on the teachings of Confucius late last year, Yu [Dan] has been racing from college lectures to book signings, TV appearances and speaking engagements. The public can't seem to get enough of this overnight sensation who has turned dusty old Confucian teachings into a Chinese version of "Chicken Soup for the Soul."
"I never expected this," [she said]..."In the 21st century, our value system is changing; people are faced with a lot of confusion and choices. The classics are not just fossils. They are a value system that can help us find answers to modern-day problems."
For more than 2,500 years, the Confucian doctrines of filial piety, moral righteousness and hierarchical relationships were the guiding principles of life and government in China and most of East Asia. Then the Communists came to power and Chairman Mao declared Confucianism counter-revolutionary and his Red Guards ransacked temples dedicated to the philosopher.
Today, China is charging ahead with dizzying economic growth and breathtaking social change. But many believe the world's most populous nation has lost its moral and spiritual anchor. Enter the wisdom of Kong Fuzi, or Master Kong, as Confucius is known in China —- interpreted by a woman.
Name of source: Washington Post
SOURCE: Washington Post (5-8-07)
But even Cheak, a first-year medical student at Phnom Penh's University of Health Sciences, has learned next to nothing in school about the Khmer Rouge, who in a little less than four years in power executed, tortured and starved to death an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians, about a quarter of the population.
"I just heard from my parents that there was mass killing," Cheak said. "It's hard to believe." Her high school history teacher told her the basics -- the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 -- and advised her to read about the rest on her own, she recalled.
Nearly three decades after the Khmer Rouge were overthrown, a battle over history is underway in Cambodia.
SOURCE: Washington Post (5-7-07)
Not long afterward, Tenet moved his office, four floors down. He told friends he wanted to be as far away as possible from Feith.
The tale of the two professors is shaping up as a reproduction in miniature of the Bush administration's titanic struggle over Iraq....
Tenet and Feith are teaching rival versions of recent history and taking their disagreements public.
Name of source: Times (of London)
SOURCE: Times (of London) (5-8-07)
Once there, they apparently evolved in relative isolation, developing genetic characteristics and technology found nowhere else until the arrival of the first European settlers.
The uniqueness of Australia’s ancient Aborigines and archaeological finds on the continent have previously threatened to undermine the ''out of Africa'' hypothesis of human origins favoured by most experts.
But the latest research by geneticists at the University of Cambridge reinforces the theory that all modern human beings belonging to the species Homo sapiens are descended from a small number of Africans who left their home between 55,000 and 60,000 years ago.
SOURCE: Times (of London) (5-8-07)
KLM, Royal Dutch Airlines, has always denied that it had a policy of assisting Nazis to escape justice at the hands of the Allies after the Second World War, when hundreds escaped to Argentina.
But papers revealing the activities of a mysterious Herr Frick in trying to help Germans to cross into Switzerland then to fly to Buenos Aires have raised fresh questions about the behaviour of one of Europe’s best-known airlines in the mid-1940s.
''The documents give the distinct impression that KLM was intensively involved in transporting Nazis,'' said Marc Dierikx, an aviation historian at the Institute for Netherlands History in The Hague.
SOURCE: Times (of London) (5-8-07)
The Play of the Weather was written in the early 1530s by John Heywood, the playwright and poet who was to inspire Shakespeare. Although he was a Roman Catholic who included extremely daring digs at the monarch in his writings, he managed to avoid having his head chopped off.
The play, which uses the British weather to explore how a king can satisfy the contradictory demands of his subjects, contains a number of allusions to highly sensitive political and personal issues of the day.
Heywood not only got away with writing about the King’s religious policy and his recent marriage to Anne Boleyn, which was still a closely guarded secret when the play was produced, but was rewarded with a special gilt cup presented by the King.
Although copies of the first printed edition of 1534 have survived in institutions such as the British Library, the play has languished forgotten until now.
SOURCE: Times (of London) (5-7-07)
Now, 30 years after Maria Callas died alone in Paris at the age of 53, two new discoveries have shed fresh light on the greatest diva of all time.
One is a set of previously unseen photographs from a [1954] scrapbook...
Nineteen years later, with her voice diminished and her confidence in tatters, Callas was persuaded to make one final album: a series of duets with Giuseppe di Stefano, her favourite tenor...a rare bootlegged copy of the sessions in St Giles Church, Cripplegate, London, has come to light.
[Gramophone Editor James] Inverne writes in the magazine that it ''would have been better for Callas’s reputation that [the recording] had never been made''.
''It is worse than anyone could have imagined,'' he said. ''Her voice was in tatters and it is tragic to hear.''
SOURCE: Times (of London) (5-7-07)
He described how he broke out of the hold of a sinking ship and swam 5 miles (8km) through a hail of Japanese bullets and shark-filled waters to scale, exhausted, the cliffs of a small Chinese island where he was helped by kindly fishermen.
What made the tale all the more curious was the fact that, by his own admission, Mr Betts could not swim. ''It was only after his funeral that I thought, ‘Hang on a minute, what on earth happened?’,'' his grandson, Mark Fielding-Smith, 32, told The Times.
As he began his investigations, a similar story was emerging in China, thanks to government-sponsored studies and the research of a historian in Hong Kong. The truth, it appeared, was almost exactly as his grandfather had told it...
SOURCE: Times (of London) (5-7-07)
In an unprecedented development, MI6 will have to explain its policy on keeping all its files locked away from the public gaze. Unlike MI5, which has been releasing large batches of its wartime records to the National Archives in Kew, MI6 has kept all its files secret.
A challenge to its policy of secrecy has been made by the nephew of Paul Rosbaud, an Austrian physicist and metallurgist who spied for Britain in the Second World War and provided crucial intelligence on German attempts to build a uranium atomic bomb...
Vincent Frank-Steiner, his nephew, has been trying for years to persuade MI6 to hand over the files on his uncle, and has Cherie Booth [Tony Blair's wife], QC, acting for him. ''I want to know more about the hero in our family,'' he told The Times yesterday.
A breakthrough in his campaign occurred last Friday in the private chambers of Mr Justice Sir Michael Burton, vice-president of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal. He ruled that a public hearing should be held, during which he would listen to arguments about whether secret MI6 files should be released.
SOURCE: Times (of London) (5-6-07)
Within minutes 288 of them were dead, a tragedy that has haunted their parents for more than a decade but was forgotten by many as China began its headlong rush to prosperity.
It is not forgotten any more, thanks to a band of internet campaigners who have exposed the shameful truth: the schoolchildren perished because they were ordered to sit down in their theatre seats so that Communist party officials could leave first.
The revelations have prompted millions of Chinese to discuss the incident in recent weeks and forced the state-controlled media to acknowledge it for the first time.
The facts were suppressed for more than 12 years until Chen Yaowen, a reporter for China Central Television, posted on his website a documentary that he had made about the disaster but which the censors had banned.
Scant details of the fire, which has come to be known among Chinese as the ''12/8/94 incident'', were reported by the state news agency and by a few foreign media outlets at the time.
SOURCE: Times (of London) (5-6-07)
The Soviet dictator was born in 1878 (not 1879 as he later claimed), the only child of a cobbler and a seamstress, Beso and Keke Djugashvili. In her memoirs, Keke reveals that, having lost two babies, she regarded ''Soso'' –- the diminutive of Joseph –- as a religious miracle.
She details the illnesses and accidents that left him partly crippled, and the shadow he lived under as the son of a brutal alcoholic. His father ''could not stop drinking. A good family man was destroyed...his hands began shaking and he couldn’t sew shoes''.
''My Soso was a very sensitive child,'' reports Keke. ''As soon as he heard the sound of his father’s singing balaam-balaam from the street, he’d immediately run to me asking if he could go and wait at our neighbours’ until his father fell asleep.''
Keke’s memoirs were released from a locked archive by the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, at the request of Simon Sebag Montefiore, whose new book, Young Stalin, is serialised in News Review today [to be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25].
Related Links
Stalin in love (book excerpt)
Name of source: Time Magazine
SOURCE: Time Magazine (5-1-07)
Okinawa Prefecture, the subtropical island chain at the southern tip of Japan, was the site of one of the bloodiest battles between the Japanese Imperial Army and the U.S. Even after U.S. forces left mainland Japan in 1952, Okinawa remained in U.S. hands as an important Cold War military hub. Under President Richard Nixon and Japanese Prime Minister Eisaku Sato, Washington agreed to return Okinawa to its rightful owner, in a secret deal that required Tokyo to pay millions of dollars in compensation and costs involved in the handover. Even though there was suspicion that the lump sum of $320 million demanded by the U.S. was inflated, Japan accepted the deal to ensure Okinawa's speedy return.
Nishiyama's story initially instigated publicity, but only for a few weeks. Soon after the story came out, Nishiyama's source, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs clerk, claimed that she and Nishiyama had been conducting an extramarital affair, and that he had forced her to deliver the classified documents. (Nishiyama claims that she volunteered them.) Suddenly the story about the Japanese government's deception transformed into a national sex scandal....
Name of source: Seattle Times
SOURCE: Seattle Times (5-4-07)
For the past five years, on this hillside above Yakima, Friend has been pulling out pieces of rare petrified wood, no two pieces alike. Branches, trunks and slices in sunset colors. Pieces purple and blue as mussel shells. Pieces like winter sky, gray and white and all the tones in between. Pieces that ring like a bell when struck.
In the process, this 50-year-old heavy-equipment operator, who lives in a motor home on his property among the sagebrush and the chukars, may have uncovered something scientists say would be very rare: a glimpse of an upright ancient forest of hickory, elm, maple and sweet gum from the Miocene Epoch, a time of mastodons and saber-toothed tigers.
Name of source: China Daily
SOURCE: China Daily (5-4-07)
Excavations at the Dahe Stone Age site, in southwest China's Yunnan Province, had revealed elaborate stone tools and instruments that rivaled those of the Mousterian culture that existed at that time in Europe, said Ji Xueping, chief archaeologist at the site.
Dated as 36,000 to 44,000 years old, the Dahe site has since 1998 yielded cores -- stones or flints from which flakes had been removed -- including Levalloisian tortoiseshell-shaped and cylindrical blade cores,semicircular scrapers,end scrapers, denticulations (evenly spaced rectangular blocks set in a row), Mousterian-type points and beak-shaped stones.
Name of source: KQED, "California Report" (audio links)
SOURCE: KQED, "California Report" (audio links) (5-4-07)
Name of source: Haaretz (Tel Aviv)
SOURCE: Haaretz (Tel Aviv) (5-7-07)
According to a press release from the Hebrew University, the news of the archeological find at Herodium was to be announced Tuesday morning at a special news conference, and was to be kept secret until then, but the discovery by Haaretz of the story had led to the premature announcement.
The tomb was discovered by Hebrew University Professor Ehud Netzer, who is considered one of the leading experts on King Herod. Netzer has conducted archaeological digs at Herodium since 1972 in an attempt to locate the grave and tomb.
The discovery solves one of Israel's greatest archaeological mysteries. Additional details will be made available at the Tuesday press conference.
The majority of researchers had believed that Herod was in fact buried at Herodium, based on the writings of the ancient Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, but multiple excavations at the site failed to locate the grave.
Netzer's successful dig focused on a different part of the site than previous excavations, between the upper part of Herodium and the site's two palaces.
Herodium, a fortified palace built by Herod some 12 kilometers south of Jerusalem, was destroyed by the Romans in 71 CE.
Herod, whose father and grandfather converted to Judaism, was appointed governor of Galilee at the age of 25 and was made "King of the Jews" by the Roman senate in approximately 40 BCE. He remained king for around 34 years.
Herod, also known as Herod the Great, is credited with expanding the Second Temple and building Caesarea, Masada, and many other monumental construction projects. He died in the year 4 BCE in Jericho after a long illness...
At Herodium, Herod built one of the largest monarchical complexes in the Roman Empire, which served as a residential palace, a sanctuary, an administrative center and a mausoleum.
Name of source: San Francisco Chronicle
SOURCE: San Francisco Chronicle (5-6-07)
In a country where more than a million people died in the fight that ended 132 years of French rule in 1962, and more than 150,000 were slaughtered in a brutal decadelong campaign by Islamist extremists, shifting rubble and restoring old buildings is not simply an exercise in archaeology. It's an effort to educate and reconcile future generations with their tortured past, in the hope they may steer this oil-rich North African nation out of its troubled present.
"Our young people do not receive an Algerian education. In school they learn about Arab history. On television they watch Western films," said Kamel Bereksi, head of Sante Sidi el Houri, a nongovernmental organization that is working to restore heritage sites in the western port city of Oran. "We work in the poorest suburbs, where the Islamists think they can have their way. We aim to give young people a sense of national pride, to ground them in this country so they can see a future in Algeria."...
"Algeria has oil and gas, so the government has traditionally not been very interested in developing tourism, but we are working to change that," said Abdeslem Abdelhak, a former journalist who is now one of Algeria's first tour guides. "We want to develop cultural tourism to oppose the narrow view of history being pushed by the Islamists."
Youssef Boualassel is a tour guide at Bastion 23, a military fort on the edge of Algiers' Kasbah, the Old City founded in medieval times by Spanish invaders. He says many tourists, including Algerians themselves, share that narrow view.
"Security was a problem in the early '90s, but now it is more under control," said Boualassel. "There is a huge potential here, but mentalities about Algeria have to change. Foreigners believe they should never set foot in the Kasbah, but now the only reason you need a guide for the Kasbah is so you don't get lost, not for security."
SOURCE: San Francisco Chronicle (5-6-07)
A year later, immigration laws swung the door shut by barring Chinese laborers from entering the United States or naturalizing as citizens if they already were here. If Wah Gok had not persuaded his uncle to take him, he might never have emigrated.
This first attempt at regulating immigration to the United States tore apart families, cut the Chinese population in the United States in half, and forced many Chinese Americans to perpetuate secrets and even lies well into the 20th century.
"It created total exclusion from American life," said Wah Gok's granddaughter Connie Young Yu, 65, a Bay Area native. "If they could never be citizens, how could they participate?"
Today is the 125th anniversary of the signing of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, and the Chinese Historical Society of America in San Francisco is hosting commemorative events all month.
Growing up, Young Yu heard many stories about how the act affected her family. To find a wife, her grandfather had to return to China because of laws that prevented him from marrying here. And he waited 14 years to bring his wife home; he had to prove he had become a merchant, a loophole that admitted very few.
Name of source: Daijiworld (Mangalore, Karnataka, India)
SOURCE: Daijiworld (Mangalore, Karnataka, India) (5-7-07)
"A huge commercial complex is taking shape on the site where this gun powder factory existed. What's paining is that the site is neglected by state archives and archeology department and nothing is being done to stop it," historian Prajal Sakhardande, a member of Goa Heritage Action Group, stated...
Much like many firsts associated with Goa, the gun powder factory too is the first one which according to the historians used to supply gun powder to Malacca (now part of Malaysia), Muscat, Mozambique, the East African Coast besides various forts in Goa and Diu during Portuguese rule.
"The factory, just 3 km away from heritage monuments of Old Goa, had negro slaves and buffaloes being used to work as its machinery," Sakhardande stated.
Called Casa de Polvora, the factory was brought to Goa during early 16th century in Adil Shah regime, Sakhardande said. After shifting to few places, finally it was placed at Ribander in 1630 by Portuguese government, he adds. [It was closed in 1869.]
Name of source: The Ticker (Baruch College, CUNY)
SOURCE: The Ticker (Baruch College, CUNY) (5-7-07)
"Genocide has a long history," said Kagame. During the first half of the twentieth century, the territory of Rwanda was a protectorate of Belgium. The colonialists favored the minority Tutsis over the majority Hutus, introducing in 1926 a system of identification cards that separated the two groups.
Kagame, who is Tutsi, was born in 1957 in the western region of Gitarama, Rwanda. In 1959, the revolt led by frustrated Hutus ousted Rwandan's last monarch, a Tutsi King Kigeli V Ndahindurwa. Thousands were killed in the revolt. Fearing persecution, over 150,000 ethnic Tutsis fled to neighboring countries, Kagame's family being of them. Like many other refugees, they settled in Uganda.
Kagame recalled that when he was about three and a half years old, he asked his father: "How can we be refugees forever?" As a grown up, Kagame played an instrumental role in founding the Rwandan Patriotic Front, first a guerrilla group determined to oust the Hutu-led government of Rwanda, now the country's ruling political party.
Name of source: International Herald Tribune
SOURCE: International Herald Tribune (5-4-07)
It does so through the personal stories of characters that read like short novels made gripping by the backdrop of history in the brilliant little exhibition book.
Name of source: AFP
SOURCE: AFP (5-7-07)
Monks settled on this arid land in the early 600s, less than 200 years after Georgia became one of the first countries to adopt Christianity. They carved their homes into the stone and over the centuries built churches and towers that loom overhead on the long road to the monastery.
A handful of black-robed Georgian Orthodox monks still live here much as their forebears did, maintaining long-held traditions of seclusion and reflection. The modern world intrudes only in the form of occasional tourists on day-trips from the Georgian capital Tbilisi, about 85 kilometres (55 miles) away...
From one side of the ridge, eastern Georgia spreads out below at the foot of the snow-capped Caucasus Mountains. On the other, a steep drop leads down to the western steppes of Muslim Azerbaijan.
But neither country can agree on exactly where the border lies and tempers have flared in recent weeks with both sides claiming the land Davit Gareji sits on as their own.
SOURCE: AFP (5-3-07)
The iconic black bowler, so often used as a pantomime prop by the comedy duo, was expected to fetch up to $15,000 in the sale, which also features three of the funnyman's bow ties and a binder full of gags.
Name of source: People's Daily Online (Beijing)
SOURCE: People's Daily Online (Beijing) (5-7-07)
The three puzzles include whether the submerging of the Southern Song Dynasty ship was caused by overloading, where the ill-fated ship departed from, and what was inside the subsistence cabin.
The salvage operation, scheduled to start on Tuesday, is claimed to be first of its kind in the world. The sunken ship will be hoisted out of the seawater in July, according to Wu Jiancheng, who is in charge of the salvage operation.
The sunken ship was found accidentally in 1987 by Guangzhou Salvage Bureau and an underwater salvage company of Britain. It was the first ancient vessel discovered on the "Marine Silk Road" in the South China Sea and was named "Nanhai No.1", meaning South China Sea No.1...
With a length of more than 25 meters, the ship is the largest cargo ship from the Song Dynasty so far discovered...
Archaeologists estimate that there are probably 50,000 to 70,000 relics on the sunken ship.
Experts spent three years making a plan for the salvage, considered to be the first for underwater archaeology both at home and abroad. In accordance with the plan, a huge, double-box steel structure has been envisioned in order to salvage the ship together with its silt.
Name of source: New Yorker
SOURCE: New Yorker (5-14-07)
Name of source: BBC News
SOURCE: BBC News (5-7-07)
Nefertiti, Queen of Egypt, was the co-ruler of her country in the 14th Century BC. Today, the bust of Nefertiti (whose name literally means "a beautiful woman has arrived") has pride of place in the Antiquities collection in Berlin's Altes Museum...
But, once again, the bust of Nefertiti is the subject of a heated debate, as it appears the Egyptians want it back [at least on loan]...
This latest announcement has opened a can of worms as the German government has refused to give it back...
Bizarrely enough, a campaign has now been launched in Germany called "Nefertiti Travels"...
"For the last 95 years, Berlin has insisted that the ownership of Nefertiti's bust is legally perfectly clear," says CulturCooperation's Lena Blosat.
"The Germans claim that Nefertiti has become an integral part of our cultural identity here in Germany, which we are not prepared to part with. And the Egyptians say she is our Egyptian Queen and thus part of our culture.
"Today, even allowing the bust to be exhibited in Egypt for three months is an issue which museum directors are obviously not willing to discuss," she said.
Name of source: BBC
SOURCE: BBC (5-7-07)
The uprising - known as the first Indian War of Independence - was eventually crushed by the British.
Around 10,000 people retraced the march 150 years ago by dozens of mutinous Indian soldiers from Meerut in a bid to capture Delhi.
Monday's marchers dressed like Indian soldiers and British officers and staged mock fights with swords and muskets on top of colourful floats.
They carried huge banners and posters with messages referring to the revolt, which left hundreds of British and Indians dead.
Name of source: RIA Novosti (Moscow)
SOURCE: RIA Novosti (Moscow) (5-7-07)
Estonian TV said Sunday it took the country's Gypsy community six years to find a site and collect money for the monument to about 2,000 Gypsies, who were executed in Kalevi-Lijva together with 4,000 of German, Czechoslovak and Polish Jews during WWII.
Name of source: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
SOURCE: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (5-7-07)
"We cannot but feel indignation at the attempts to blaspheme and desecrate this memory [of Soviet soldiers killed in World War II] and to rewrite history," Lavrov said. "Unfortunately such attempts to scoff at history are becoming an element and an instrument of the foreign policies of certain countries. And unfortunately organizations such as the European Union and NATO are conniving at such attempts."...
Russia has reacted angrily to Estonia's relocation of a Soviet World War II monument in the Estonian capital Tallinn last month.
Name of source: Telegraph
SOURCE: Telegraph (5-5-07)
Yet, according to new research into Adolf Hitler's early life, the distinctive, toothbrush shape that adorned his scowling face was not his first preference.
A previously unpublished essay by a writer who served alongside Hitler in the First World War trenches reveals that the future Führer was only obeying orders when he shaped his moustache into its tightly-clipped style. He was instructed to do so in order that it would fit under the respirator masks, introduced in response to British mustard gas attacks.
Had that order never been issued, the tyrant who brought most of Europe to its knees would be remembered as a man with a large Prussian moustache.
The prosaic explanation comes in a new biography of the writer Alexander Moritz Frey, who came to know him when both were lowly privates in a Bavarian infantry division.
Name of source: Kenneth T. Walsh, U.S. News & World Report
SOURCE: Kenneth T. Walsh, U.S. News & World Report (5-6-07)
To many Americans, George W. Bush's standards for making war have changed dramatically since he first campaigned for the White House. Clearly, he believes the Iraq conflict is just, but most people are by no means convinced the goal is clear or that victory is assured, much less that it will be overwhelming.
As Bush knows, these are some of the same objections that the public expressed about Vietnam three decades ago. And the echoes of that faraway conflict got even stronger last week in the most serious confrontation between the commander in chief and Congress in a generation.
