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
June 22, 2009
While serving as President Gerald R. Ford’s chief of staff in the mid-1970s, Donald Rumsfeld started keeping a list of rules and favorite sayings. They included “don’t stay on the job too long,” “if you foul up, tell the president and others fast, and correct it,” “don’t speak ill of another member of the administration,” “read and listen for what is missing” and keep other staff members in the loop because “if they are out of the flow of information, decisions will either be poorly made or not
Source: AP
June 23, 2009
BETHLEHEM, West Bank – Workers renovating a house in the traditional town of Jesus' birth accidentally discovered an untouched ancient tomb containing clay pots, plates, beads and the bones of two humans, a Palestinian antiquities official said Tuesday.
The 4,000-year-old tomb provides a glimpse of the burial customs of the area's inhabitants during the Canaanite period, said Mohammed Ghayyada, director of the Palestinian Authority's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.
Source: AP
June 22, 2009
People were storing grain long before they learned to domesticate crops, a new study indicates. A structure used as a food granary discovered in recent excavations in Jordan dates to about 11,300 years ago, according to a report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
That's as much as a thousand years before people in the Middle East domesticated grain, the research team led by anthropologist Ian Kuijt of the University of Notre Dame said.
Source: http://www.novinite.com
June 23, 2009
A team of Bulgarian archaeologists has uncovered a Thracian settlement close to the southeast town of Nova Zagora.
The team of Konstantin Gospodinov and Veselin Ignatov from the city of Burgas hope that their finding would be the first Thracian settlement to be uncovered in its entirety.
The settlement is located along the Blatnitsa River. It had a moat around it, and include large buildings rising above the ground, news.dir.bg reported.
Source: Irish Times
June 23, 2009
Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Governement John Gormley must resign due to his failure to protect Irish heritage sites, representatives of the Save Tara campaign have said.
Members of TaraWatch, the organisation which runs the campaign, held a protest outside Custom House in Dublin today to voice their dissatisfaction with the minister, who they say has reneged on promises to nominate Irish cultural areas such at the Hill of Tara, the Burren and Clonmacnoise to the
Source: NYT
June 22, 2009
The illiterate Cherokee known as Sequoyah watched in awe as white settlers made marks on paper, convinced that these “talking leaves” were the source of white power and success. This inspired the consuming ambition of his life: to create a Cherokee written language.
Born around 1770 near present-day Knoxville, Tenn., he was given the name George Gist (or Guess) by his father, an English fur trader, and his mother, a daughter of a prominent Cherokee family. But it was as Sequoyah tha
Source: AP
June 23, 2009
Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History signed an agreement with Google Mexico to promote archeological and historical sites in a bid to revive tourism following the swine flu epidemic.
The plan uses several elements of the Google platform, including placing maps of archeological sites and directions to them on Google Earth.
The institute has started a channel on the video-sharing site YouTube at http://www.youtube
Source: BBC
June 23, 2009
As Britain's most famous tennis tournament gets under way, the BBC's Stuart Nicolson examines how the game had deadly consequences for a Scottish king.
A love of tennis proved fatal for Scotland's first king of the court almost 600 years ago....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 23, 2009
A priceless document which led to Henry VIII's divorce from Catherine
of Aragon and the schism with Rome has been reproduced in exquisite
detail by the Vatican and copies put on sale after spending 500 years
shut away in its Secret Archives.
The Vatican announced that 200 copies of the elaborately decorated
parchment from 1530, which bore an appeal by English peers to Pope
Clement VII asking for the annulment of Henry's marriage, would go on
sale for 50,000 euros (£43,000) each.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 23, 2009
A stamp licked by a British soldier now lying in a mass grave in
northern France could be enough to identify his remains 90 years after
he fell in battle.
Armed with the latest forensic techniques used in modern murder
investigations, DNA experts are to try to match around 400 soldiers'
remains to their genetic signatures.
A team of British-based experts has just been chosen to attempt to
unravel one of the largest-scale genetic conundrums ever They hope to
obtain DNA profile
Source: LAT
June 23, 2009
White House tapes released Tuesday capture Richard Nixon as a pugnacious second-term president who talks of hammering out an end to the Vietnam War even if he has to" cut off the head" of the South Vietnamese leader, remarks that an abortion might be necessary if a pregnancy involved an interracial couple and appears preoccupied with savaging his political foes.
As Nixon was negotiating an end to U.S. military involvement in Vietnam in January 1973, he faced a South Vietnamese president w
Source: Foxnews
June 23, 2009
Materials from the Nixon Presidential Library offer a glimpse into fateful days of the Watergate scandal as well as the waning days of the U.S. war in Vietnam.
When the Watergate scandal grew into a full-bore crisis unraveling Richard Nixon's presidency, aides hatched a "game plan" to save him. The idea: Convince lawmakers that the Watergate prosecutor was a zealot holding a "pistol to the head" of the president.
Some 30,000 pages of documents were
Source: http://www.ohio.com
June 15, 2009
Akron is planning a series of events to commemorate the 150th anniversary of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, Va., in 1859.
The abolitionist had ties to Summit and Portage counties.
Born in Connecticut in 1800, he was 5 when his family moved to Hudson. As a young man, he worked at his father's tannery. He also operated a tannery in Kent in the 1830s.
Source: CNN
June 23, 2009
The Richard Nixon Presidential Library will allow access Tuesday to about 154 hours of Nixon White House tape recordings and 30,000 pages of documents that were formerly classified.
Among the tapes and documents are conversations about the Vietnam War, Nixon's second inauguration, the U.S. Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 and the first Watergate trial, according to a library statement.
The new Nixon tapes and documents will be available on the Internet and i
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 23, 2009
Town authorities now want it cut down and burned to make way for a new roundabout. But some residents have become attached to the 40-foot oak and are lobbying to save it.
"The tree has not hurt anyone and is not guilty of anything," Kazimierz Polak said, adding that his group was appealing to local and regional authorities to preserve the tree.
"It is growing healthy and tall. Let it grow."
But the town's mayor, Maria Kurowska, said it
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 23, 2009
Armed with the latest forensic techniques used in modern murder investigations, DNA experts are to try to match around 400 soldiers' remains to their genetic signatures.
A team of British-based experts has just been chosen to attempt to unravel one of the largest-scale genetic conundrums ever They hope to obtain DNA profiles from bodies that have lain underground for nearly a century on a scale never previously attempted.
The soldiers were buried in woodland shortly a
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 23, 2009
Gen Dannatt, Chief of the General Staff, said the failure of coalition forces to take advantage of the "window of consent" in the immediate aftermath of the invasion had opened the door to the Shia militias.
He said they had not kept enough troops on the ground - particularly as the focus of operations switched to Afghanistan.
His comments, in a keynote address to the Royal United Services Institute think-tank in London, came as Whitehall is gearing up for t
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
June 23, 2009
The UK would have been divided into 12 regions governed by ministers wielding draconian powers in the wake of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, according to a secret War Book released for the first time today.
During the Cold War, civil servants used the book to rehearse what would happen if there was a devastating nuclear exchange.
Drawn up more than 40 years ago - and updated as recently as the early Nineties - it sets out in immense detail how Britain would have b
Source: BBC
June 23, 2009
Three men and two women have launched a compensation claim for alleged human rights abuses in the 1950s and 1960s.
Thousands of people were rounded up and forced into camps by the British during what was known as the Mau Mau uprising.
The UK says the claim is not valid because of the amount of time since the abuses were alleged to have happened.
The five Kenyans - aged in their 70s and 80s - are the lead claimants in the reparations case.
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
June 21, 2009
Beth Guyver never knew her father. For most of her life, the London resident believed he was a British pilot, killed during World War II. She thought he had died just before her birth in 1945.
The truth came out at a family Christmas dinner in 1990. Her mother looked across the table at one of Guyver's sons, then 18, and made a startling observation: He looked just like an American GI she had known in 1944 . . . just like Guyver's father.
The revelation changed Guyver's
