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: Chicago Trib
May 4, 2009
It took some detective work, but a Highland Park synagogue now has photographs -- grainy but dramatic -- to commemorate a visit by Rev. Martin Luther King in 1966.
Unearthed from storage by the Highland Park police, a half-dozen black-and-white photos of King and his entourage -- possibly taken for surveillance purposes -- were recently digitized and presented to Congregation Solel.
"We had pretty much given up hope of ever finding any photos from his visit,"
Source: AFP
May 4, 2009
The tools of his trade range from earthmovers and shovels to the finest brushes, surgical tweezers and dentists' mirrors -- and his job is to uncover secrets from beyond the grave.
Trained on the Srebrenica war crimes investigation in Bosnia and probing atrocities in war-torn Iraq, Roland Wessling is one of a dozen forensic anthropologists brought in to excavate a World War I mass grave.
For the next five months the 39-year-old German will be fine-combing a muddy field
Source: Deutsche Welle
May 5, 2009
Berlin's notorious Stasi detention center is now a memorial site meant to educate visitors about the injustices committed under communism. But many are worried that former East Germans simply aren't interested.
Only 20 percent of visitors to the Hohenschoenhausen Memorial come from the eastern German states that made up the GDR.
Hohenschoenhausen is a unique "living memorial" which includes many of the original prison furnishings, providing a sort of time caps
Source: Reuters
May 4, 2009
Judges at the Special Court for Sierra Leone ruled Monday against a defense request to acquit former Liberian President Charles Taylor on war crimes' charges.
Taylor, 61, has pleaded not guilty to 11 counts involving murder, rape, conscripting child soldiers and sexual slavery during the intertwined wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone in which more than 250,000 people were killed.
Defense lawyers said in April he should be acquitted because there was no evidence he planned
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 5, 2009
A lawyer for John Demjanjuk, an alleged Nazi concentration camp guard, says he has sent the US Supreme Court a request to halt the deportation of the 89-year-old to face charges in Germany.
John Broadley says he sent the motion on Tuesday afternoon from Florida and expects it to be filed with the top US court Wednesday morning.
Source: CNN
May 5, 2009
Dr. John Sotos asked a small Philadelphia museum for blood-stained threads from a scrap of the pillow that cradled Lincoln's head as he lay dying.
On Monday night, the board of the Grand Army of the Republic Museum and Library denied his request but left the door open for a possible DNA test that could shed light on Lincoln's last days.
The museum plans to convene a forum of Lincoln scholars and forensic pathologists to decide how to proceed.
The museum di
Source: http://media.wildcat.arizona.edu
May 5, 2009
One hundred and twenty-three years ago this week, a series of events regarding the burgeoning of the labor movement in the United States culminated into what Howard Zinn, historian and professor emeritus of political science at Boston University, in a phone interview last week, calls "the most dramatic event of that period" and "one of the great judicial scandals in American history." The incident itself, known as the "Haymarket Affair," reads like a macabre drama o
Source: The Daily Beast
May 5, 2009
For the first time in history, federal money has surpassed sales and income tax collections as the largest source of revenue for state governments, USA Today reports. And the shift is just beginning, with tax collections continuing to sink while the bulk of federal stimulus aid is just starting to arrive. As Indiana State Sen. Jim Buck points out, "This money isn't manna from heaven. It comes with a price." He worries that the federal money will leave states under greater federal contr
Source: Press Release--Duke University Press
April 4, 2009
Duke University Press will publish a book by S. Ann Dunham, the
mother of President Barack Obama, in December 2009. Dunham, who died in 1995,
completed the dissertation in anthropology for the University of Hawaii in 1992.
The book is based on Dunham’s research, over a period of 14 years, among the rural
craftsmen of Java. At the request of Dunham’s daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng, two anthro-
pologists — Alice G. Dewey, Dunham’s graduate adviser, and Nancy I. Cooper, a fellow
graduate stu
Source: WFTV (Flordia)
May 5, 2009
A manmade lake project in Brevard County is on hold again, this time after experts say ancient remains were discovered in the lake bed.
Workers on the project found bones and teeth fragments in April in Malabar in an area that was set to be flooded to create Lake Lawton. The human remains have been reburied. Thousands of other items including fish hooks and tools believed to be fashioned by American Indians from bones have been sent to a laboratory.
Experts believe the
Source: The Canadian Press
May 5, 2009
This year, New York and Vermont are commemorating the 400th anniversary of Champlain's exploration of the region with five months of public events around the lake's shoreline. They range from kid-friendly festivities such as parades and "pirate" festival and to lake tours and concerts.
New York is nearing completion of a more than $2-million refurbishing of the Champlain monument and a nearby pier, both located on the state-owned Crown Point campground. The project is expe
Source: AP
May 5, 2009
The head of a Philadelphia museum says its sample of Abraham Lincoln's blood may get DNA testing, but some questions must be answered first.
Cardiologist John Sotos believes Lincoln had a rare genetic disorder and wants the DNA test to prove his hypothesis. The museum's board met Monday night and rejected Sotos' request to test the pillowcase.
Board President Eric Schmincke says more questions need to be answered about how the artifact will be treated. He says it's poss
Source: AFP
May 5, 2009
The bust of Queen Nefertiti housed in a Berlin museum and believed to be 3,400 years old in fact is a copy dating from 1912 that was made to test pigments used by the ancient Egyptians, according to Swiss art historian Henri Stierlin.
Stierlin, author of a dozen works on Egypt, the Middle East and ancient Islam, says in a just-released book that the bust currently in Berlin's Altes Museum was made at the order of German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt by an artist named Gerardt Marks
Source: Reuters
May 5, 2009
Archaeologists have found a nearly 5,000-year-old tomb near Egypt's mud brick Lahun pyramid, in a sign that the site held religious significance a millennium before previously thought, the site head said Tuesday.
The find, down crumbling steps in sand covered desert rock, debunks a prior understanding by archaeologists that the site dates back only to 12th dynasty pharaoh Senusret II who ruled 4,000 years ago, archaeologist Abdul Rahman Al-Ayedi said.
Egypt, whose econo
Source: China View
May 4, 2009
Chinese scientists will soon launch an excavation at a cave where the first Peking Man skull was found with an aim to find more relics of ape men who were believed to live as early as 770,000 years ago.
The excavation will start in mid May and last two months at the western slope of the Peking Man Site, said Gao Xing, deputy director and a research fellow of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Palaeoanthropology, in an interview with Xinhua on Monday.
Excavat
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 5, 2009
The Swiss Guard is to consider recruiting women into the world's smallest army for the first time in the papal security force's 500-year history.
The new commander of the force, whose distinctive blue, yellow and red uniforms and ceremonial halberds grace the precincts of the Vatican, said that obstacles that had kept the force all-male could be overcome.
Colonel Daniel Anrig, who took over the post last year, told Italy's Mediaset television station that logistical p
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 5, 2009
The family of Ned Kelly, the ruthless Australian outlaw, have asked for DNA tests to be performed on remains exhumed at a prison where he was buried as they seek to reclaim his body.
He is remembered as Australia’s own Robin Hood, a ruthless outlaw who stood up for the impoverished and died for his cause.
But Ned Kelly, who was hanged for his crimes almost 130 years ago, may win one final victory against authority.
Descendants of the notorious bushranger
Source: LA Times
May 4, 2009
The Greek-born fighter survived Auschwitz by participating in win-or-die bouts staged by the Nazis. Decades after the Holocaust, Arouch served as a consultant on a film about his captivity.
Arouch's harrowing series of win-or-die bouts during the final two years of World War II was immortalized in 1989 in "Triumph of the Spirit," the first major motion picture filmed on location at Auschwitz. The film, along with Arouch's inspirational postwar speeches, became part of his
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 5, 2009
Work has begun in France to exhume the remains of up to 400 British and Australian soldiers who died in the Battle of Fromelles during the First World War.
The remains, buried in a cluster of mass graves discovered last year, are to be reintered individually in a cemetery being built near the village of the same name.
Australian, British and French dignitaries gathered in Fromelles for a ceremony marking the launch of the project, which is expected to be completed next
Source: The Canadian Press
May 3, 2009
Like former battlefields all over the world, the southern Japan island of Okinawa - home to more than one million people and the site of some of the Second World War's most savage fighting - is a tinderbox of unexploded bombs, thousands and thousands of tonnes of them, rusted and often half buried.
The bombs are the bane of construction crews, divers and unsuspecting children. Because of their age and the layers of crusty dirt that usually cover them, they often don't seem dangerous
