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: Artdaily.org
January 13, 2010
Historian Dr David Starkey today made a passionate plea for funds to save the Staffordshire Hoard for the West Midlands . He is amongst a host of prominent public figures supporting the campaign, launched today by The Art Fund charity, to raise the £3.3m needed by 17 April to save this awe-inspiring find of Anglo-Saxon treasure for Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery and the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent.
The Art Fund’s new Director, Dr Stephen Deuchar, kick-sta
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 13, 2010
The Communist icon's corpse was buried in a tomb in Berlin where every year thousands of sympathisers have honoured her fight for a workers' paradise.
Or so everyone thought.
It turns out that a previously unidentified body that was found two years ago in a wooden coffin in a basement room at Berlin's Charite hospital, could be Luxemburg, according to the head of the institution's forensic medicine department.
Michael Tsokos says that the body, which is
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 13, 2010
The discovery of the long-lost report has reopened an investigation into the killings which inspired Louis de Bernieres’s book.
The find has raised hopes in Italy that there might finally be some justice for the 6,000 Italian officers and men who were slaughtered by German forces in a savage reprisal for a revolt on the idyllic Greek island of Cephalonia in Sept 1943.
Italian investigators are said to have stumbled across a dispatch allegedly written by a military cha
Source: Times (UK)
January 13, 2010
Jordan has tried to reclaim the Dead Sea Scrolls from Israel, an official said.
In a complaint made to the United Nations Jordan said that the ancient texts were seized from the Palestinian Museum when Israel captured east Jerusalem in the Six Day War.
“The Government has legal documents that prove Jordan owns the scrolls,” Rafea Harahsheh, of the country’s antiquities department, said.
Source: Times (UK)
January 13, 2010
Alastair Campbell demonstrated yesterday that he had lost none of the confrontational style and robust confidence that had made him such a crucial aide to Tony Blair.
He did, however, acknowledge that more could have been done to instil public trust in the process that led to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
As the first political witness before Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry into the Iraq war, Mr Blair’s former communications and strategy director was questioned on his
Source: Times (UK)
January 13, 2010
The guard towers of Auschwitz are splintering, the barracks are waterlogged: the concentration camp where one million Jews were slaughtered is decaying so fast that conservationists have called on Britain to help to save it.
The theft last month of its distinctive, sinister sign, Arbeit macht frei (work sets you free) has underlined the vulnerability of the Nazi death camp, stretching over 20 hectares (50 acres) of southern Poland.
“Nobody could have imagined such a h
Source: Times (UK)
January 13, 2010
Tony Blair may have withheld key information from senior UK Cabinet colleagues by not telling them that he wanted to include the Lockerbie bomber in a deal with Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi, Alex Salmond suggested yesterday.
The Scottish First Minister made the comments during an appearance before the Commons Select Committee on Scottish Affairs, which is examining relations between the UK and Scottish governments after controversy over Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi’s release from life impr
Source: Times (UK)
January 13, 2010
Auschwitz is still largely intact, but it is crumbling. Knowledge of the Holocaust among the young is patchy and getting thinner by the year.
So the question arises: is it better to use resources to prop up the buildings of an evil place in southern Poland — or into education to improve the understanding of the Nazis’ systematic massacre of Jews and other minorities?
A survey found that one in six British 9 to 11-year-olds thought that Auschwitz was a theme park. We hav
Source: Fox News
January 12, 2009
Just when you thought every stone had been unturned in the 2008 presidential race, a late-bloomer of a book comes along that dishes on just about everybody.
The book is written with confidence, describing the drama-packed scenes that filled the race with fly-on-the-wall precision -- though many of the sources are never identified and the bulk of the book is written with no attribution. According to the authors, the accounts were based on more than 300 interviews with more than 200
Source: Civil War Interactive Newswire
January 7, 2010
The Civil War Preservation Trust (CWPT), the nation’s largest nonprofit battlefield preservation group, has announced its land preservation accomplishments for 2009. Despite the difficult economy and challenges facing all charitable organizations, CWPT helped to permanently protect 2,777 acres of hallowed ground at 20 different Civil War battlefields in five states during the last calendar year. Overall, CWPT has protected more than 29,000 acres of battlefield land at 109 sites in 20 states.
Source: NYT News Service
January 10, 2010
Fethiye Cetin recalled the day her identity shattered.
She was a young law student when her beloved maternal grandmother, Seher, took her aside and told her a secret she had hidden for 60 years: that Seher was born a Christian Armenian with the name Heranus and had been saved from a death march by a Turkish officer, who snatched her from her mother’s arms in 1915 and raised her as Turkish and Muslim.
Cetin’s grandmother, whose parents later turned out to have escaped to
Source: Chicago Sun-Times
January 12, 2010
The City Council’s resident historian cracked open the history books for another re-write Tuesday, this time involving some of Chicago’s most notorious characters: mob boss Al Capone; Prohibition Agent Eliot Ness and Edward J. O’Hare, father of the city’s most famous war hero.
Thirteen years after absolving Mrs. O’Leary’s cow of responsibility for the Great Chicago Fire, Ald. Edward M. Burke (14th) wants to set the record straight about the role O’Hare played in Capone’s conviction
Source: AP
January 11, 2009
Yale University says a lawsuit by Peru seeking the return of thousands of Inca artifacts removed from the famed Machu Picchu citadel nearly a century ago should be dismissed because a statue of limitations expired.
Peru rejects the argument, saying Yale never owned the artifacts and that its claim is not subject to a statute of limitations under Peruvian law. Peru also says Yale did not assert ownership of the artifacts until late 2008.
The South American nation filed t
Source: The Boston Globe
January 11, 2009
BU archeologist unearths clues about ancient Egypt’s sea trade.
The archeological digs at Egypt’s Wadi Gawasis have yielded neither mummies nor grand monuments.
But Boston University archeologist Kathryn Bard and her colleagues are uncovering the oldest remnants of seagoing ships and other relics linked to exotic trade with a mysterious Red Sea realm called Punt.
Source: The Seattle Times
January 11, 2009
For more than a century, the Pacific Ocean has clawed away at Washaway Beach, a 2-mile stretch of eroding coastline just south of Grayland.
With nature claiming so much, it seemed only fair that it offer something in return. Now it has — the buried wreckage of an old vessel revealing more of itself with every outgoing tide.
According to maritime experts and others, the wreckage could be part of the Canadian Exporter, a freighter that broke in two in August 1921 while ca
Source: AFP
January 12, 2009
The Hamas-run ministry of tourism and antiquities in Gaza on Monday announced the discovery of ancient artifacts near the Egyptian border town of Rafah.
They also discovered a "mysterious" underground compartment with a blocked entrance that appeared to be a tomb, Agha said.
The Palestinian Authority has been carrying out archaeological excavations since the 1990s, but this was the first major find to be announced by the Hamas-run government.
Source: AP
January 11, 2010
Missing moon rocks from the first and last human lunar landings have been discovered in a locked cabinet in Hawaii.
The rare rocks from the Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 missions were found last week during a routine inventory of gifts to the Hawaii governor's office over the years....
Source: AP
January 12, 2010
The Supreme Court on Tuesday reinstated for a second time the death sentence of a neo-Nazi convicted of murdering three men in Ohio more than a quarter century ago.
Spisak was convicted of three murders at Cleveland State University over a seven-month period in 1982 — crimes he said were motivated by his hatred of gays, blacks and Jews. At the same time, Spisak claimed his crimes were sparked by mental illness related to confusion about his sexual identity. He wants to have surgery
Source: Guardian (UK)
January 12, 2010
Of all the obstacles strewn in Jesus's path, keeping his weight to 51kg (8st) to ride a donkey into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday was not one of them. But health and safety requirements will be uppermost in the minds of a group staging a Passion play in Trafalgar Square, the first to be performed in the central London location.
At a press conference today in the crypt of St Martin-in-the-Fields, director Ashley Herman said: "There are laws regarding the use of animals and children i
Source: Guardian (UK)
January 12, 2010
A rare and luminously beautiful landscape by Gustav Klimt that was crated up by its owners during the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938 and then more or less disappeared for decades is to be auctioned in London, Sotheby's announced today.
The painting – which represents a key turning point for the artist – is being sold in what the auction house says is one of the most eye-catching sales of impressionist and modern art it has ever held. As well as the Klimt, conservatively valued a
