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
October 8, 2009
An ancient document that details the moment when King William the Lion of Scotland granted Royal Burgh status to Perth in 1210 has been restored.
Experts at the National Archive of Scotland repaired and cleaned the historic parchment and reattached its official wax seal.
The work has been completed ahead of next year's Perth 800 celebrations.
The year-long programme of culture and sporting events will mark the 800th anniversary of the honour.
Source: BBC
October 8, 2009
An auction of Churchill memorabilia, including a pair of Sir Winston's customised gloves and a rare marble dining table, are to be auctioned.
The table - valued at more than £60,000 - is being sold by Dominic Winter in Cirencester, Gloucs, on Thursday.
The auction will also feature books and letters from the Churchill family library dating back to the early 1400s.
A document signed by Francis I, the King of France in 1597 is expected to fetch up to £500.
Source: BBC
October 8, 2009
A radio operator from Greater Manchester, who helped unlock German coded messages during World War II, has been recognised for his efforts.
Albert Garforth, 83, of Foxdenton Lane, Middleton Junction, spent the last year of the war helping the code-breakers at Bletchley Park unlock the Enigma code.
Their work meant the Allies gained vital information about German troop movements, securing victory in 1945.
Mr Garforth has received a Bletchley Park Commemora
Source: BBC
October 8, 2009
A holiday company is to retrace the voyage of the Titanic as part of the 100th anniversary of the disaster.
The 12-night cruise, with tickets priced from £2,595, will follow the route of the ill-fated ship which sank in April 1912 killing 1,517 people.
HM Balmoral will depart Southampton on 8 April 2012, bound for New York, and will pass the point where the Titanic sank when it hit an iceberg.
Source: BBC
October 8, 2009
The Australian Federal Court has ruled that an 88-year-old man can be extradited to Hungary to face accusations of murder.
Hungary's government accuses Charles Zentai of killing Jewish teenager Peter Balazs in Budapest in 1944.
At the time, Mr Zentai was a warrant officer in the Hungarian army, then allied to Nazi Germany.
Mr Zentai says he was not in Budapest at the time. He can still appeal to Australia's High Court.
Source: BBC
October 8, 2009
A French tourism company has bought a house in South Africa where Indian independence hero Mahatma Gandhi lived.
Voyageurs du Monde is believed to have paid $377,029 for the house, outbidding many others including Indian bidders.
The Johannesburg house was put up for sale after the owner said she failed to find an institution interested in preserving the building's legacy.
Gandhi lived there for three years from 1907 when he began to formulate his philoso
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 8, 2009
A museum in a Chengdu sidestreet, stuffed to the rafters with Mao memorabilia, has a 75-year-old owner who is seeking to pass it on.
Tucked away on a side-street a few blocks north-west of Chengdu’s central Tianfu square you’ll find Wang Anting’s Little Exhibition. And little it certainly is, as the museum takes up the entirety of Mr Wang’s cluttered and dusty one-room house, with the exhibits piled high on top of each other.
Mr Wang, 75, has been running his exhibiti
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 8, 2009
Michelle Obama’s roots have been traced back to a six-year-old slave girl who was bequeathed to her owner’s heirs along with his household possessions and cattle.
The child, described in the will of David Patterson simply as “the negro girl Melvinia”, was uprooted from her plantation home in South Carolina and shipped to the US state of Georgia in 1852.
There, while still a teenager, she gave birth to the son of a white man – a union of dubious status that would have
Source: NYT
October 7, 2009
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WASHINGTON — In 1850, the elderly master of a South Carolina estate took pen in hand and painstakingly divided up his possessions. Among the spinning wheels, scythes, tablecloths and cattle that he bequeathed to his far-flung heirs was a 6-year-old slave girl valued soon afterward at $475.
In his will, she is described simply
Source: Yahoo News
October 6, 2009
LONDON – The discovery of a small prehistoric circle of stones near Stonehenge may confirm the theory that the mysterious monument in southwest England was part of a massive funeral complex built around a river, researchers said Tuesday.
The new find shows that the second stone circle — dubbed "Bluehenge" because it was built with bluestones — once stood next to the River Avon about 1.75 miles (2.8 kilometers) from Stonehenge, one of Britain's best loved and least understo
Source: Salon
October 7, 2009
For the first time in a generation, Arlington National Cemetery has marked the burial of an unknown on its storied grounds. Only this time, 25 years since the last interment at the Tomb of the Unknowns, the identity of the body remains a mystery not because the ravages of war made identification impossible, but because in a bureaucratic error the cemetery lost the paperwork showing the identity of the remains...
... This is the first time the cemetery has marked an unknown since 198
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 7, 2009
Amateur French fossil hunters have unearthed the largest dinosaur footprints in the world, belonging to a cousin of the diplodocus, it was announced on Tuesday.
The "colossal" prints, left by giant sauropods weighing up to 50 tons, were found in the tiny French village of Plagne in the Jura plateau, near the southeastern city of Lyon.
The trail of craters the giant herbivores left stretches for hundreds of yards. They were found in April this year but only re
Source: CNN
October 6, 2009
It was a moment vividly depicted in the movie about her life: 7-year-old Helen Keller, holding one hand under a water pump as her teacher spelled "W-A-T-E-R" into her other hand.
On Wednesday, a statue commemorating her 1887 breakthrough will be unveiled in the U.S. Capitol's National Statuary Hall, the first statue in the Capitol of a person with a disability, as well as the first of a child, according to the Alabama governor's office.
In 1997, a Franklin Del
Source: BBC
October 7, 2009
It's eight years to the day since the first shots were fired in America's War on Terror. But can the terrorism tactics it sought to crush be traced back to a single attack on a Parisian cafe more than 100 years ago, asks Professor John Merriman.
On February 12, 1894, a young intellectual anarchist named Emile Henry went out to kill. And, in doing so, he arguably ignited the age of modern terrorism.
As he had looked down on Paris from near his miserable lodgings in the
Source: BBC
October 7, 2009
France's Louvre Museum says it is open to the idea of returning ancient Egyptian fresco fragments at the centre of a row with Egyptian officials.
Earlier, Egypt's head of antiquities Zahi Hawass told the AFP news agency that the Louvre had bought the fragments knowing they were stolen.
Egypt had severed co-operation with the Louvre, pending their return, he said.
The Pharaonic steles, on display in the Louvre, are reported to be from a tomb in the Valley
Source: Jerusalem Post
October 6, 2009
The remains of an ancient synagogue have been revealed in an archeological dig in Turkey.
The ruins, estimated to be at least 1,500 years old, were unearthed by a team of archeologists from Akdeniz University in September and new artifacts are being discovered daily.
Among those discovered on the site is a marble tablet featuring a menorah flanked by a shofar and a bugle on one side and a palm tree and lemon tree on the other.
Site chief Dr. Nevzat Cevik,
Source: The Globe and Mail
October 6, 2009
Willard S. Boyle, a McGill University graduate born in Nova Scotia, was a joint recipient of the 2009 Nobel Physics Prize Tuesday morning in Stockholm, Sweden.
Mr. Boyle, a dual citizen of Canada and the U.S., shared the award with two Americans - George E. Smith and Charles K. Kao. In 1966, Mr. Kao figured out how to transmit light over long distances through optical glass fibers, a discovery that made it possible for people to exchange text, music and images around the world withi
Source: NYT
October 7, 2009
PARIS — The Hôtel Lambert, in a corner of the Île Saint-Louis overlooking the Seine, was once one of Paris’s best-kept secrets. But when a high-rolling Qatari prince bought the crumbling 17th-century palace in 2007 for $88 million, the Lambert became the center of attention, not all of it so attractive.
The Lambert was built as a private residence (a “hôtel particulier”) for the Lambert family and was finished in 1644, when it bordered Parisian fields and cows. But it has been throu
Source: USA Today
October 7, 2009
When German Chancellor Angela Merkel earlier this week accepted an invitation to address a joint session of the Senate and U.S. House on Nov. 3. Her spokesman, Thomas Steg, called it a "rare honor for foreign guests of state to be able to speak before the Senate and the House of Representatives.”
He added, "Of Germany's chancellors only Konrad Adenauer, who spoke to both houses in May 1957, has had this privilege."
That got us thinking: how many heads of
Source: WSJ
October 8, 2009
Turkey has dropped a key condition to signing an agreement Saturday that would reopen its border with Armenia and establish diplomatic relations between the two nations, which have been divided for generations by a dispute over genocide.
"The agreement will be signed on Oct. 10," Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told The Wall Street Journal -- provided, he said, that Armenia doesn't ask for changes to the text.
Supporters of the pact -- which includ
