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: The State (South Carolina)
April 19, 2009
Bill Green has supervised exploration of more than 250 potentially historic sites around the Southeast.
And he knew the group working atop a bluff along the lower Saluda River was onto something special.
Over eight months, each shovelful of dirt revealed new finds — arrowheads, spear points, eating tools, pottery shards, dwelling posts, a hearth — with eventually more than 35,000 artifacts recovered.
Some items are estimated to be as much as 13,500 years ol
Source: Latin American Herlad Tribune
April 20, 2009
The first stages of building a Marriott hotel in the Peruvian city of Cuzco brought to light the unforeseen archaeological discovery of several ancient Inca walls, the daily El Comercio said on Saturday.
Though ancient chronicles written during the Spanish conquest say that the place where the construction is taking place, near the Plaza de Armas of what was once the capital of the Inca Empire, was an agricultural area, the discovery makes it necessary to reconsider the city map of
Source: BBC
April 20, 2009
Men are needed for DNA tests to prove their distant ancestors moved from the Mediterranean to north west Wales as migrant workers 4,000 years ago.
Participants will be asked for a cheek swab sample for genetic analysis.
Researchers at the University of Sheffield hope to link the migration of men in the Bronze Age to the discovery of copper.
Source: AP
April 20, 2009
Austrian firefighters are battling a blaze inside Arenberg Castle, a 14th-century chateau in Salzburg.
Officials say about 100 firefighters are at the scene and three people were taken to a hospital for smoke inhalation. Austrian television showed thick smoke pouring from the castle's roof.
Arenberg Castle is one of Salzburg's most important historical buildings. Although it dates to the 1300s, the modern structure was rebuilt after a fire razed it in 1814, and it was r
Source: CNN
April 20, 2009
The last living survivor of the Titanic earned only a small fraction of what auctioneers hoped to raise when she sold her final remaining mementos of the doomed ship to pay nursing home bills.
The 17 items belonging to 97-year-old Millvina Dean sold for about $8,000 on Saturday, according to auctioneer Alan Aldridge -- not enough to pay for two months at her nursing home.
Aldridge had earlier speculated the sale could raise up to $50,000 for her.
Source: Times (UK)
April 20, 2009
The nuclear test grounds in the wastes of the Gobi desert have fallen silent but veterans of those lonely places are speaking out for the first time about the terrible price exacted by China’s zealous pursuit of the atomic bomb.
They talk of picking up radioactive debris with their bare hands, of sluicing down bombers that had flown through mushroom clouds, of soldiers dying before their time of strange and rare diseases, and children born with mysterious cancers.
The
Source: Times (UK)
April 20, 2009
Hundreds of documents relating to the Hillsborough disaster are to be made public for the first time after the Home Secretary asked for the 30-year secrecy rule to be waived.
Medical files, police reports and transcripts of high-level operational meetings could be among the documents released, finally allowing the families of the 96 Liverpool fans who died to discover how events unfolded on April 15, 1989.
The families of fans crushed to death in Britain’s worst footb
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 18, 2009
Now, a new issue of stamps is to be released by the Royal Mail, to mark the 500th anniversary of the accession of the dynasty's most famous son, Henry VIII.
The new issue, which will be released on Tuesday, will feature six contemporary portraits of the Tudor monarchs.
Two of them – portraits of Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch, and Elizabeth I, the last – are exclusively previewed today by The Sunday Telegraph.
The image of Henry VII, who ruled from 1585
Source: NYT
April 20, 2009
JERUSALEM — In the Ukrainian town of Berdichev, Jewish women were forced to swim across a wide river until they drowned. In Telsiai, Lithuania, children were thrown alive into pits filled with their murdered parents. In Liozno, Belarus, Jews were herded into a locked barn where many froze to death.
Holocaust deniers aside, the world is not ignorant of the systematic Nazi slaughter of some six million Jews in World War II. People know of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen; many have heard o
Source: Reuters
April 17, 2009
Thirty-six passionate letters discovered on the Italian island of Lipari have revealed an illicit love affair between the daughter of former Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and a prominent Communist partisan.
Written in French, English and Italian, the secret correspondence has inspired a new book: "Edda Ciano and the Communist. The unspeakable passion of the Duce's Daughter."
"There is no novelistic embellishment," said author Marcello Sorgi, who
Source: AP
April 19, 2009
Thousands of people have attended the opening of a new Holocaust museum in suburban Chicago, with videotaped remarks by President Barack Obama kicking off the event.
Obama says that when school children visit the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie, they'll learn there is no greater obligation than to confront acts of inhumanity.
The new museum is considered the largest of its kind in the Midwest. It houses more than 2,000 Holocaust survivor testimo
Source: Time
April 19, 2009
Twenty years ago, a question posed by Italian journalist Riccardo Ehrmann prompted an East German official to say the words that triggered the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now new facts have emerged that shed a different light on that fateful press conference.
The press conference hosted by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) on Nov. 9, 1989, was about to come to an end when Ehrmann, who worked for the Italian news agency ANSA, inquired about the new travel law for East German c
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 19, 2009
Egypt's top archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, has shown off treasures from the site of a tomb which he claims contains the remains of Mark Antony and Cleopatra.
Ahead of the start of excavations on Tuesday, Mr Hawass exhibited 22 coins, 10 mummies, an alabaster head and a fragment of a mask with a cleft chin as evidence that the site, a 2,000-year-old temple to the god Osiris, is likely to hold further treasures.
He believes that the Toposiris Magna temple, 30 miles from Egy
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 19, 2009
Fify years ago, terrorists on Cyprus killed nearly 400 British soldiers. Now, with the help of Telegraph readers, they are at last to get a fitting memorial, reports Gordon Rayner.
In an all but forgotten graveyard in the UN-patrolled no man's land which divides Cyprus, a small group of ageing British veterans will gather today to remember 371 servicemen whose sacrifice remains unrecognised 50 years after they fell.
Wayne's Keep Military Cemetery, near Nicosia, is the
Source: AP
April 19, 2009
As terrified teenagers 65 years ago, Menachem Sholowicz and Anshel Sieradzki stood in line together in Auschwitz, having serial numbers tattooed on their arms. Sholowicz was B-14594; Sieradzki was B-14595.
The two Polish Jews had never met, they never spoke and they were quickly separated. Each survived the Nazi death camp, moved to Israel, married, and became grandfathers. They didn't meet again until a few weeks ago, having stumbled upon each other through the Internet. Late in li
Source: News Scotsman (Scotland)
April 19, 2009
Legal chiefs have ruled that the name of William Wallace – Scotland's medieval matinee idol – can never be cleared.
Scotland on Sunday can reveal that the body that examines potential miscarriages of justice in Scotland was asked to look into the ADVERTISEMENT700-year-old conviction of Wallace but refused to do so.
The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) decided it had no jurisdiction over the London court that found him guilty of treason.
And
Source: New York Times
April 18, 2009
History is what we choose to remember, and there have been many reasons not to remember too much about the Fishkill Encampment and Supply Depot, a sprawling military city that became the most important northern supply center during the Revolutionary War.
No stirring battle was won there. Life was brutish and often short, a place of smallpox, frostbite and mutiny, where wounded soldiers had limbs sawed off and covered with tar, where, as one contemporary account put it, soldiers “pat
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 19, 2009
The earliest known colour picture of King Edward VII is to go on display after it was discovered lying in a cupboard.
The informal portrait of the king was taken by Lionel de Rothschild, the banker and Conservative MP, in September 1909.
He is shown in Highland costume enjoying the autumn grouse season at Tulchan in Strathspey, about 15 miles from Balmoral. He died eight months after the photograph was taken.It lay in a collection of 70
Source: BBC
April 18, 2009
Memorabilia from the Titanic, including a lot from the ship's last living survivor, raised thousands at auction.
The auction in Devizes, Wiltshire, featured memorabilia belonging to 97-year-old Millvina Dean.
Ms Dean faces monthly bills of £3,000 at her Southampton nursing home and sold a canvas bag from her rescue which raised £1,500.
The bag was used to carry her belongings back to England from New York after she, her mother and two-year-old brother we
Source: The Times (UK)
April 18, 2009
In the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate a Soviet soldier issued visa stamps to a short line of people. Until two decades ago the Berlin Wall ran only metres from where he sat, with the famous monument standing forlornly in the no man’s land of border strip between the two Germanys.
The wall is long gone and those in the queue were not nervous East German citizens but tourists. The Soviet soldier was a 29-year-old student in costume offering fake visa stamps as mementoes.
