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: NYT
April 21, 2010
Seven years ago, the Havasupai Indians, who live amid the turquoise waterfalls and red cliffs miles deep in the Grand Canyon, issued a “banishment order” to keep Arizona State University employees from setting foot on their reservation — an ancient punishment for what they regarded as a genetic-era betrayal.
Members of the tiny, isolated tribe had given DNA samples to university researchers starting in 1990, in the hope that they might provide genetic clues to the tribe’s devastati
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 22, 2010
Nearly every remaining part of the elaborate structure, excavated near the southern city of Potenza, is inscribed with detailed instructions on how it should be built.
The team believe the building, at Torre Satriano, may have been a temple or palace.
It has been found in a region of southern Italy in which colonists and traders from Ancient Greece settled from the 8th century BC onwards.
They established a number of independent city-states along the coast
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 22, 2010
A Russian poster meant to honour Second World War veterans has sparked outrage after it was mistakenly printed with images of Nazi soldiers instead of Soviet troops.
Veterans in the Ural Mountains city of Perm were furious after designers at a local publishing house illustrated the poster with Nazi propaganda pictures downloaded from the internet.
The committee was especially upset because it paid for the printing of the posters, which were meant to be distributed ahe
Source: CNN
April 22, 2010
It has been 10 years since federal agents raided the Gonzalez family home in Miami's Little Havana neighborhood, seizing 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez.
Today, the house is a museum where visitors can see a virtual shrine to the boy -- now a 16-year-old military student in Cuba -- and his brief time in the United States.
His school uniform still hangs in the closet, along with dozens of outfits that he never got a chance to wear. His toys are on display inside the house, a
Source: WaPo
April 22, 2010
Before Earth Day became what it is -- a national ritual halfway between a street party and a guilt trip -- it was a bunch of 20-somethings working in an office over a diner in Dupont Circle.
It was 1970. They worked 15-hour days. They stuffed a lot of envelopes.
And, at first, they didn't like the name.
"Who in the hell do they think we are, the Grange?" Stephen Cotton recalled about reading the name an advertising agency had proposed for their na
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 21, 2010
Vladimir Lenin's moth-eaten socks have gone on display in Ukraine's capital.
The exhibition is timed to coincide with the 140th anniversary of the birth of the leader of Russia's 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
It is the first time Lenin's socks and other clothes have been exhibited in the former Soviet republic since it became independent almost two decades ago, and was made possible under the country's new Russia-friendly president.
In Soviet times, dozens o
Source: AP
April 21, 2010
Israel reopened a 16th-century gate to Jerusalem's Old City on Wednesday, completing a two-month renovation and cleaning project that drew criticism from Palestinian officials.
Jaffa Gate, one of four main entrances to the Old City, was built by Jerusalem's Ottoman rulers and inaugurated in 1538. It is the most common entrance for tourists entering the walled Old City — home to key holy sites in Christianity, Islam and Judaism, as well as a popular outdoor marketplace.
Source: CNN
April 21, 2010
Benjamin Franklin gets a facelift as the Treasury Department unveils a new $100 bill Wednesday, the first remake of the denomination since 1996.
The new design for the $100 note made its debut during a 10:30 a.m. ceremony at the Department of the Treasury's Cash Room attended by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.
Anti-counterfeiting measures are the main reason the United States has been making changes in currency.
Source: Bloomberg News
April 21, 2010
Berlin’s Free University will today go live with an Internet database documenting the fate of more than 21,000 artworks condemned as “degenerate” by the Nazis and seized from German museums in 1937.
The Web site, the result of eight years of research by art historians at the university, includes works by Franz Marc, Emil Nolde, Otto Dix, Marc Chagall, Max Beckmann, Wassily Kandinsky and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. It gives details of the museums they were seized from and their current l
Source: WHSV
April 21, 2010
Governor Bob McDonnell traveled to Chancellorsville Battlefield to highlight the creation of a permanent state fund to preserve Civil War sites.
In a ceremonial signing, McDonnell added his signature Tuesday to the Virginia Civil War Sites Preservation Fund, which provides matching grants to protect battlefields. The legislation permanently establishes the fund, which already has preserved 2,000 battlefield acres in Virginia....
Source: BBC News
April 21, 2010
Scattered through Vienna are six huge anti-aircraft towers, a grim reminder of the city's Nazi past.
The flak towers were put up during the Second World War between 1942 and 1945. They were built in pairs in parks in the heart of the city.
Guns to shoot down Allied fighter planes were placed high on the concrete bastions and hundreds of civilians took shelter inside during bombing raids.
But the architectural historian, Ute Bauer, who is taking part in a st
Source: Time.com
April 21, 2010
When the Berlin Wall began to crumble in 1989, East Germany's Ministry for State Security, the Stasi, decided to destroy all the evidence of 40 years of spying on fellow countrymen. But, like something out of a Cold War comedy, the Stasi's cheap shredders broke soon after they started, leaving agents to use their hands to tear the records into 600 million pieces, some as small as a fingernail. The pieces were supposed to be destroyed, but the Stasi never got around to incinerating them. To this
Source: AP
April 21, 2010
A letter penned by the nation's sixth president, John Quincy Adams, has been found in a dusty box in a Massachusetts city hall's basement.
The letter, dated Sept. 8, 1826, outlines the burial wishes of his father, John Adams, the nation's second president. It was recently discovered by a city attorney who was combing through some old records in Quincy City Hall.
John Quincy Adams wrote that his father, who had died two months earlier, and his mother, Abigail Adams, wish
Source: Charleston Post & Courier
April 19, 2010
North Charleston's offer to allow a monument to the signers of South Carolina's 1860 Ordinance of Secession at Riverfront Park has been withdrawn.
Instead, Mayor Keith Summey said the memorial should go to the H.L. Hunley lab, or to the North Charleston site where the sub's museum will eventually be built.
A week after offering the S.C. Sons of Confederate Veterans space at Riverfront Park, Summey on Monday squashed the deal, saying it had become too polar
Source: Biloxi Sun-Herald
April 19, 2010
A statue of Jefferson Davis that seemed as orphaned as one of the little boys whose hand he holds in the bronze sculpture has found a permanent home at Beauvoir, the estate where Davis retired.
The life-sized casting of Davis, his 5-year-old son Joe Davis and the other boy of the same age, Jim Limber, will be dedicated Saturday morning during Beauvoir’s Confederate Memorial Day observance. An old-fashion picnic will be followed by a service at the Tomb of the Unknown Confederate.
Source: BBC News
April 21, 2010
When I listened to my grandfather's stories of his time as governor of the Andaman Islands, it was the first I had heard of the jail where India's most prominent political prisoners suffered at the hands of their British colonial rulers.
It was strange, listening to the voice of my grandfather telling his life story after he had died.
But this was how I came to discover the part he played in Britain's dark history on a group of tropical islands located in the Bay of Ben
Source: BBC
April 10, 2010
The dungeon believed to have housed Robin Hood when he was caught by the Sheriff of Nottingham is to be surveyed using a laser.
It is part of a major project to explore every cave in Nottingham.
Robin Hood is believed to have been held captive in an oubliette (underground dungeon) located at what is now the Galleries of Justice.
The Nottingham Caves Survey is being conducted by archaeologists based at the University of Nottingham.
Source: Discovery News
April 20, 2010
Illiterate Maya people recorded their history by burying their domestic universe under their floors, according to excavations of modest Maya homes in central Belize.
Analysis of objects and human remains embedded beneath these ordinary Maya houses from the Classic period (250-900 A.D.) revealed that farmers and servants cached objects and buried relatives within their residences.
Occupied from about 450 to 1150 A.D., the two homes revealed about a dozen human remains of
Source: BBC
April 20, 2010
A Bronze Age earth ditch has been found in Hereford which archaeologists say may have been used to mark the city's old tax boundary.
It is 5m (16ft) deep in places and was found using aerial, laser scanning equipment to map the land's contours.
The ditch has been filled in with earth over the years and now resembles only a slight depression at ground level.
It runs from Aubrey Street to the River Wye via King Street and may have marked the limit of the ki
Source: BBC
April 20, 2010
Four men have set sail in the South Pacific in their bid to recreate the epic 7,000 km (4,350 mile) voyage of Captain William Bligh.
Captain Bligh was cast adrift after the famous mutiny on the Bounty in 1789.
The crew is sailing in a 25ft (7.6m) open-deck boat with two small sails. They are hoping to sail from Tonga to West Timor in seven weeks.
The expedition has tried hard to recreate the conditions which confronted the Royal Navy captain.
