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: Reuters
July 23, 2009
team of archaeologists using sonar technology to scan the seabed have discovered a "graveyard" of five pristine ancient Roman shipwrecks off the small Italian island of Ventotene.
The trading vessels, dating from the first century BC to the fifth century AD, lie more than 100 meters underwater and are amongst the deepest wrecks discovered in the Mediterranean in recent years, the researchers said on Thursday.
Part of an archipelago situated halfway between Ro
Source: Nevada Appeal
July 22, 2009
A team of archaeologists is currently continuing excavations that they hope will shed light on life in Virginia City during the time when Mark Twain called the place home.
A summer field school operated by the Anthropology Department of the University of Nevada, Reno has begun excavating the original site of Thomas Maguire's Opera House on D Street. A second excavation is also under way in an area known as the Barbary Coast, a place of vice and crime during the 1860s and 1870s.
Source: BBC
July 22, 2009
Israeli embassies are being instructed to use for public relations purposes an infamous photograph of Adolf Hitler meeting a top Palestinian cleric.
Far-right Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has personally requested that the photo be sent to missions around the world, a senior official said.
The 1941 shot shows the Nazi leader meeting the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.
Source: BBC
July 23, 2009
Dutch officials have handed back to Ghana the head of a king who was executed by colonists in the 1830s.
Tribal elders led a ceremony in The Hague to hand over the head of Badu Bonsu II, stored in formaldehyde in a Dutch museum for 170 years.
The king, who was leader of the Ahanta group, is believed to have been decapitated in retaliation for the killing of two Dutch emissaries. Some believe the king would not be at rest unless his head was r
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 22, 2009
The Israeli government will remove references to what Palestinians call the "catastrophe" of Israel's creation from textbooks for Arab schoolchildren, the education minister said on Wednesday.
The reference to "al-naqba," the Arabic word catastrophe as Palestinians call their defeat and exile in the war over Israel's 1948 creation, was controversially inserted by a dovish education minister for the first time in 2007.
Israeli Arab politician Hana Sw
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 23, 2009
The secret grave of General Emil August Fieldorf, one of Poland's national heroes, may have been found more than 50 years after he was executed by his own country's Stalinist regime.
Scientists and historians intend to examine a plot of land in a Warsaw cemetery to see if it contains a mass grave that might include the body of Gen Emil August Fieldorf, a Polish wartime commander hanged by the communist state in 1953.
If the grave is identified the authorities may carr
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 23, 2009
German prosecutors have decided that displaying a golden garden gnome in a Nuremberg art gallery with its right hand raised in a Hitler salute was not illegal.
After a preliminary inquiry over the past week, prosecutors in the Bavarian city ruled that the 40-centimetre (15-inch) gnome is ridiculing the Nazis rather than promoting a return of the Third Reich.
Hitler salutes and Nazi symbols have been illegal in Germany since the end of World War II, but prosecutors said
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 23, 2009
Drawings of the Moon made 400 years ago can be seen at London's Science Museum as part of a new exhibition on the history of astronomy.
The exhibition spans many cultures from the 10th to 21st centuries and looks at the various ways humankind has studied the heavens.
Early telescopes developed by Galileo and Newton are featured, along with modern space telescopes.
Also on display for the first time is a section of the radio telescope which radio astronomer
Source: AP
June 23, 2009
The International Mozarteum Foundation said Thursday it has discovered two more works composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
The previously unknown works are piano pieces composed by a young Mozart, the Salzburg-based foundation said in a brief e-mail statement.
There have been up to 10 Mozart discoveries of such importance over the past 50 years, Leisinger said at the time.
Source: The Daily Beast
July 23, 2009
Here's news that likely won't inspire a Moment of Zen for the networks: In a poll conducted by Time magazine, Daily Show host Jon Stewart has been voted America's Most Trusted Newscaster, post-Cronkite. Matched up against Brian Williams, Charlie Gibson, and Katie Couric, Stewart won with 44 percent of the vote. Williams came in second, followed by Gibson; Couric finished last. Time has broken down the results state-by-state, for the especially curious. As The Huffington Post points out, "St
Source: McClatchy
July 22, 2009
Sometimes, pork on Capitol Hill has to do with, well, pork.
Or in this case a pig, a dead pig.
With bipartisan support, a resolution has been introduced in the House of Representatives to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Pig War.
The name, age, sex, and size of the pig has long been forgotten but the dispute its death triggered is the reason the border is where it is today between Washington state and Canada.
The pig was part of a herd
Source: Guardian blog
July 22, 2009
The Christian right is making a fresh push to force religion onto the school curriculum in Texas with the state's education board about to consider recommendations that children be taught that there would be no United States if it had not been for God.
Members of a panel of experts appointed by the board to revise the state's history curriculum, who include a Christian fundamentalist preacher who says he is fighting a war for America's moral soul, want lessons to emphasise the part
Source: NBC Nightly News
July 22, 2009
Visit msnbc.com for
Source: NYT
July 22, 2009
Friday is the 50th anniversary of one of the more bizarre clashes of the cold war: the “kitchen debate” between Richard Nixon, then 46 and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice president, and Nikita Khrushchev, the cunning peasant who at 65 had just finished consolidating his position at the pinnacle of Soviet power.
Unscripted and often raw, it was one of the few times Soviet and American leaders publicly vented at each other. After the brash and mercurial Khrushchev was ousted, summit meeti
Source: NYT
July 21, 2009
Dan Rather won significant victories Tuesday in his suit against his former network, CBS. He won access to more than 3,000 documents that his lawyer said were expected to reveal evidence that CBS had tried to influence the outcome of a panel that investigated his much-debated “60 Minutes” report about former President George W. Bush’s military record.
Mr. Rather also won an appeal to restore a fraud charge against CBS that had been dismissed. Martin Gold, the lawyer representing th
Source: LiveScience
July 21, 2009
Newly analyzed remains suggest that a modern human killed a Neanderthal man in what is now Iraq between 50,000 and 75,000 years ago. The finding is scant but tantalizing evidence for a theory that modern humans helped to kill off the Neanderthals.
The probable weapon of choice: A thrown spear.
The evidence: A lethal wound on the remains of a Neanderthal skeleton.
The victim: A 40- to 50-year-old male, now called Shanidar 3, with signs of arthritis and a sharp, de
Source: AP
July 22, 2009
The Israeli government will remove references to what Palestinians
call the ''catastrophe'' of Israel's creation from textbooks for Arab
schoolchildren, the education minister said Wednesday.
The reference to ''al-naqba,'' the Arabic word catastrophe, as
Palestinians call their defeat and exile in the war over Israel's 1948
creation, was inserted by a dovish Israeli education minister in 2007.
The phrase remains contentious six decades later, a symptom of the
continuing divisi
Source: Media Matters (liberal media watchdog group)
July 14, 2009
On July 14, the
nation's five major newspapers reported Sen. Jeff Sessions' (R-AL) opening statement at the confirmation
hearing of Judge Sonia Sotoamyor without reporting in that day's print editions
that, in 1986, the Senate
Source: AP
July 16, 2009
A Virginia newspaper expressed regret Thursday for supporting a systematic campaign by the state's white political leaders to maintain separate public schools for blacks and whites in the 1950s.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch acknowledged in an editorial that it and its now-defunct sister newspaper, The News Leader, played a central role in the "dreadful doctrine" of Massive Resistance. "The record fills us with regret," the newspaper said.
The newspape
Source: AFP
July 16, 2009
US President Barack Obama paid passionate tribute to black civil rights trailblazers on the centennial of the NAACP, but said a "new mindset" was necessary to achieve a post-racial America.
The first black president in US history received a thunderous welcome at a dinner Thursday marking the 100th anniversary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded after the abolition of slavery but when segregation "was a way of life (and) when lync
