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
August 7, 2009
Gen Sir David Richards, who takes over on 28 August, told the Times that "nation-building" would last decades.
Troops will be required for the medium term only, but the UK will continue to play a role in "development, governance [and] security sector reform," he said.
Shadow defence minister Gerald Howarth said the UK had to be there long-term to achieve its objectives.
Gen Richards commanded 35,000 troops from 37 nations when he was
Source: The Daily Star
August 6, 2009
Valuable archaeological ruins recently uncovered in Sidon proved to be the missing link in the city’s historic legacy. This week, the British Museum delegation uncovered this year 13 burial sites, temples and personal items dating to the Canaanite period in the coastal city’s Freres archeological site. “We uncovered the biggest number of ruins this year and this helped complete the cycle of historic periods discovered in the site,” said head of the British Museum delegation Dr. Claude Doumit Ser
Source: Yahoo News
August 8, 2009
Researchers are on a three-week research expedition to study World War II shipwrecks sunk in 1942 in what's called the "Graveyard of the Atlantic."
The region off North Carolina is home to includes vessels from U.S. and British naval fleets, merchant ships and German U-boats, all sunk during the Battle of the Atlantic.
"The information collected during this expedition will help us better understand and document this often lost chapter of America's maritim
Source: NYT
August 8, 2009
As a freshman Democrat, Representative Frank Kratovil Jr. figured he would spend the August recess reconnecting with the folks back home. Perhaps he should have known this would be easier said than done when an opponent of health care reform hanged him in effigy outside his district office on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
Undaunted, Mr. Kratovil tried last week to hold “Congress on Your Corner” sessions intended, he said, to help voters with “casework matters” — Social Security benefits
Source: The Wall Street Journal
August 8, 2009
Regulators seized three banks Friday in Florida and Oregon, increasing the number of 2009 U.S. bank failures to 72.
Stearns Bank of St. Cloud, Minn. agreed to take deposits and most assets from the two Florida institutions, Community National Bank of Sarasota County in Venice, Fla. and First State Bank in Sarasota, Fla. Both Gulf Coast banks collapsed due to risky loans made during the housing boom and were severely undercapitalized near the end...
...The number of U.S.
Source: AP
July 31, 2009
Authorities say they've found discarded burial vaults in a heavily wooded part of a historic black Chicago-area cemetery where workers allegedly dug up bodies and dumped them in a scheme to resell plots.
Cook County Sheriff's office spokesman Steve Patterson says about 10 to 12 cement vaults were found in the same area where hundreds of remains were discovered this month.
Patterson said Friday that officials didn't know how many bodies were buried in the vaults at the B
Source: AP
July 31, 2009
An earthenware vessel from the time of Jesus Christ bearing a rare and mysterious inscription has been found at a dig in Jerusalem, a British archaeologist announced on Friday.
Similar ritual artifacts have been found in the past at the archaeological dig just outside Jerusalem's Old City, but what makes this one rare is the writing engraved on it.
The letters, either ancient Hebrew or Aramaic, are legible though the meaning of the 10 lines of text is yet to be decipher
Source: AP
July 31, 2009
Archaeologists have found the skeleton of a warrior from up to 5,000 years ago floating in a tomb filled with sea water on a beach near Rome, Italy's art squad said Friday.
The bones — believed to date from the 3rd millennium B.C. — were discovered in May as art hunters were carrying out routine checks of the region's archaeological areas, Carabinieri art squad official Raffaele Mancino said.
Archaeologists believe the warrior was likely killed by an arrow, part of whic
Source: AP
August 1, 2009
Harold Lucas was raised with the stories about his grandparents, who rode segregated railroad cars from Missouri to Chicago in the 1930s and worked tirelessly to raise their family into the middle class.
Jeff and Ida Lucas were buried in Burr Oak Cemetery, alongside thousands of black Americans who made up the Great Migration — a movement north during the first half of the 20th century.
Burr Oak, once one of the only burial places for blacks, holds a sacred spot in Afri
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 3, 2009
An antique dealer believes that an ornate piece of wood he picked up at a car boot sale may be a 1,300-year-old artefact from the Crusades.
Christie's auction house in London is analysing the item after experts suggested that it could be the door of a tabernacle – a box used to carry and protect sacred texts – carried by the Knights Templar.
Measuring just ten inches by four inches, it is decorated with intricate military and religious images and is thought to date fro
Source: AP
August 2, 2009
Technically demanding and at times furiously paced, two newly identified Mozart works unveiled Sunday are helping scholars complete their assessment of the maestro's very early achievements. The childhood creations — an extensive concerto movement and a fragmentary prelude — provide yet more proof the Salzburg native was a true prodigy. And maybe a bit of a showoff.
Leisinger said Mozart likely wrote the two newly attributed pieces when he was 7 or 8 years old, with his father, Leop
Source: israelnationalnews.com
August 4, 2009
The Chabad Lubavitch Hassidic movement renewed its efforts on Monday to obtain "righteous gentile" status from the Yad VaShem Holocaust Memorial institute for a senior Nazi who saved Rabbi Yitzchak Yosef Schneerson, the movement's leader during World War II.
The effort was based on new information revealed by historian Danny Orbach that Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the commander of German intelligence, smuggled the rabbi and hundreds of other Jews out of the Third Reich withou
Source: AP
August 7, 2009
Top U.S. officials have reached out to a leading Vietnam war scholar to discuss the similarities of that conflict 40 years ago with American involvement in Afghanistan, where the U.S. is seeking ways to isolate an elusive guerrilla force and win over a skeptical local population.
The overture to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Stanley Karnow, who opposes the Afghan war, comes as the U.S. is evaluating its strategy there.
Among the concerns voiced by historians is the c
Source: Associated Press of Pakistan
August 5, 2009
The ministry of culture has decided to hand over 126 archeological sites, except Mohanjo Daro, to the government of Sindh by the end of August this year. In pursuance of the directive of the Prime Minister, the Secretary of the Ministry of Culture, Moeen-ul-Islam Bokhari and the Secretary of Culture Department, Government of Sindh, Shamas Jafarani, met along with Director General, Archeology here.
With the mandate to ensure the smooth transfer of the sites to the Government of Sind
Source: AP
August 3, 2009
The recession is starving the government of tax revenue, just as the president and Congress are piling a major expansion of health care and other programs on the nation's plate and struggling to find money to pay the tab.
The numbers could hardly be more stark: Tax receipts are on pace to drop 18 percent this year, the biggest single-year decline since the Great Depression, while the federal deficit balloons to a record $1.8 trillion.
Other figures in an Associated Pres
Source: AP
August 4, 2009
It seems John Quincy Adams was way ahead of his time.
Starting Wednesday, history will meet modern technology as the Massachusetts Historical Society begins posting Adams' updates from 200 years ago on Twitter. The historical society will include a presidential tracker of sorts, linking maps to show Adam's progress on a diplomatic trek to Russia as U.S. minister.
The tweets will include mentions of his favorite reads, memorable meals, weather updates and the daily drama
Source: AP
August 5, 2009
Officials say Hamburg harbor was closed for several hours after workers doing dredging work unearthed a World War II bomb from the bed of the Elbe river.
Fire department officials say the 500-pound British bomb was found during work Wednesday morning.
World War II-era bombs are still found regularly in Germany, even more than 60 years after the end of the war.
Source: AP
August 5, 2009
If suspected terrorists from Guantanamo Bay end up being held in Kansas, it wouldn't be the first time foreign detainees were imprisoned in the Midwest.
Thousands of Germans and Italians spent the last days of World War II in confinement on the prairie, far from the deserts of North Africa and plains of Western Europe.
As the U.S. weighs what to do with 229 suspected al-Qaida, Taliban and foreign fighters now jailed at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba, one poss
Source: BBC
August 3, 2009
It is one of the best preserved Stone Age villages in Europe, but Skara Brae in Orkney is just a few metres from the sea and it is a constant battle to save it from coastal erosion.
Experts warn as many as 10,000 historic sites around Scotland are at risk of being swept away, many of them unexcavated and unprotected.
Source: NYT
August 7, 2009
Mamadou Tandja, the president of the vast desert nation of Niger, has secured an additional three years in office and unlimited runs at future terms in a referendum that opposition officials have called a coup d'etat in all but name.
Mr. Tandja, a 71-year-old former army colonel who had promised to step down after the second of his two terms expired in December, thanked voters even before the official results were announced Friday by the country’s electoral commission...
