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: Telegraph (UK)
April 4, 2009
They are the bloody fields on which the nation's history was forged.
But, over the centuries, many of England's battlefields have faded into obscurity, often lost under concrete.
Now, a major new project is under way to find the country's "lost" battlefields, from the Roman invasion to the Jacobite Rebellion in the eighteenth century, in order to preserve what is left of them.
Source: NYT
April 4, 2009
ONE hot June morning in 1953, a retired couple from western Missouri packed their Chrysler New Yorker with 11 suitcases and started driving east. A few hours later, they stopped at a diner in Hannibal, Mo., and ordered fruit plates and iced tea.
“We thought we were getting by big as an unknown traveling couple until we went to the counter to pay the bill,” Harry Truman later wrote of that lunch. “Just as we arose from the table some county judges came in and the incog was off.”
Source: NYT
April 4, 2009
In the past week, Egypt marked the historic 30-year anniversary of its peace treaty with Israel without any public celebration and only the barest public mention.
It is not surprising, really, that there was no cheering here. The timing could hardly have been worse, with memories still fresh of the Israeli offensive in Gaza.
But mention of the anniversary also served as a reminder of promises unfulfilled. Egyptians were told that the treaty would lead to a comprehensive
Source: AFP
April 4, 2009
A Nazi death camp guard accused of helping to kill some 29,000 Jews during World War II has won the right to remain in the United States for now, an immigration judge has ruled.
A Virginia judge said late Friday that John Demjanjuk, 89, who faces expulsion to Germany on war crimes charges, can remain at his Ohio home while the case is further examined.
Source: http://www.todayszaman.com
April 4, 2009
One of the most senior politicians in Europe, Javier Solana, said history is history and should be analyzed by historians when asked if some European national parliaments' resolutions on the Armenian "genocide" had helped the reconciliation between Turkey and Armenia.
Secretary-General of the Council of the European Union and High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy Javier Solana gave one of his rare interviews to Today's Zaman hours before the crucia
Source: NYT
April 3, 2009
At the end of 2008, according to the Federal Reserve Board, total debt in the financial sector came to $17.2 trillion, or 121 percent of the size of the gross domestic product of the United States. That was $1 trillion more than a year earlier, when the total came to 115 percent of G.D.P.
Half a century earlier, the financial sector debt was $21 billion, which came to just 6 percent of G.D.P.
Household debt, by contrast, stood at $13.8 trillion at the end of both 2007 a
Source: NYT Week in Review
April 4, 2009
The astronomical metrics of Shmuel are by now considered inexact, but close enough so that the religious tradition persists, so that Jews like Rabbi Bleich believe that the sun next Wednesday occupies the same location in the firmament as it did when it was formed on the fourth day of Creation, which would have been Wednesday, March 26, of the Hebrew year 1, otherwise known as 3760 B.C.
While Birchat HaChammah is intermittent, Rabbi Bleich’s interest in it is constant. He stands as
Source: Stone Pages Archaeo News
March 30, 2009
Humans were dying of anthrax in North America much earlier than thought - perhaps after scavenging the remains of infected animals while migrating from Asia during the Ice Age-a new study says. "We've always thought that anthrax was an Old World disease that was brought to the New World by Europeans" around 1500, said study coauthor Paul Keim of Northern Arizona University. But the new report suggests that ancient humans entering the continent thousands of years earlier imported the di
Source: Slate
April 2, 2009
Heads of state have been exchanging gifts since the beginning of
recorded time. The pharaohs of ancient Egypt presented stone vessels
emblazoned with the royal cartouche, a kind of monogram, to the
neighboring Hittites in the second millennium BC. Gift exchange had
become a ritualized part of diplomatic contact by the Middle Ages:
During the Third Crusade, an emissary of Richard the Lionheart
presented a flock of birds to the representative of Saladin by
formally noting,"It is the custom
Source: Newsweek
March 28, 2009
In the world of international diplomacy, small missteps can cause big problems. When George W. Bush gave German Chancellor Angela Merkel a quick shoulder rub—in what he thought was a friendly gesture—he was mercilessly pilloried for weeks. Hillary Clinton's embrace of Suha Arafat dogged her for years. One of the most important tests of a globe-trotting president: picking out just the right gift for your foreign counterpart. Barack Obama is learning this the hard way.
Only a few week
Source: AP
April 4, 2009
Elwin Hope Wilson leans back in his recliner, a sad, sickly man haunted by time....
Wilson doesn't have answers for much of how he has lived his life — not for all the black people he beat up, not for all the venom he spewed, not for all the time wasted in hate.
Now 72 and ailing, his body swollen by diabetes, his eyes degenerating, Wilson is spending as many hours pondering his past as he is his mortality.
The former Ku Klux Klan supporter says he wants t
Source: NYT Week in Review
June 4, 2009
The country of Mother Jones, John L. Lewis and Walter Reuther certainly has had a rich and sometimes militant history of labor protest — from the Homestead Steel Works strike against Andrew Carnegie in 1892 to the auto workers’ sit-down strikes of the 1930s and the 67-day walkout by 400,000 G.M. workers in 1970.
But in recent decades, American workers have increasingly steered clear of such militancy, for reasons that range from fear of having their jobs shipped overseas to their se
Source: Times (of London)
April 5, 2009
Medieval knights hid and secretly venerated the Shroud of Turin for more than 100 years after the Crusades, the Vatican said today in an announcement that appeared to solve the mystery of the relic’s missing years.
The Knights Templar, an order which was suppressed and disbanded for alleged heresy, took care of the linen cloth, which bears the image of a man with a beard, long hair and the wounds of crucifixion, according to Vatican researchers.
The Shroud, which is kep
Source: The Sunday Times (London)
April 5, 2009
The former Iraqi dictator's palatial boudoir is being offered to newlyweds for £150 a night.
Some might think it macabre but Iraq is offering honeymooners the chance to spend their wedding night in Saddam Hussein’s bed.
As the country gingerly begins to revive a war-ravaged tourism industry, the former dictator’s bedroom is on offer for £150 a night in a presidential palace that is undergoing renovation in the town of Hillah, some 60 miles south of Baghdad.
Source: IHT
April 4, 2009
In the past week, Egypt marked the historic 30-year anniversary of its peace treaty with Israel without any public celebration and only the barest public mention.
It is not surprising, really, that there was no cheering here. The timing could hardly have been worse, with memories still fresh of the Israeli offensive in Gaza.
But mention of the anniversary also served as a reminder of promises unfulfilled. Egyptians were told that the treaty would lead to a comprehensiv
Source: AP
April 3, 2009
AMSTERDAM – To see some of the most important documents in the early history of New York, you need to go to Amsterdam.
The Rijksmuseum, the Netherland's national museum, put those documents on display Friday, including early maps and the only report of the purchase of Manhattan by Europeans.
The exhibit marks the 400th anniversary of the departure of Henry Hudson in April 1609 on the expedition that would lead to colonization of the New York area...
The exh
Source: AP
April 4, 2009
Elwin Hope Wilson leans back in his recliner, a sad, sickly man haunted by time.
Wilson doesn't have answers for much of how he has lived his life — not for all the black people he beat up, not for all the venom he spewed, not for all the time wasted in hate.
Now 72 and ailing, his body swollen by diabetes, his eyes degenerating, Wilson is spending as many hours pondering his past as he is his mortality.
The former Ku Klux Klan supporter says he wants to at
Source: Times Daily (AL)
April 3, 2009
It's been 147 years since the sounds of cannon and rifles echoed through the woodlands surrounding a little whitewashed church in southern Tennessee in what would become one of the bloodiest battles during the Civil War.
This weekend, visitors to Shiloh National Military Park can get a glimpse of what life was like for soldiers in the Battle of Shiloh.
Park ranger Joe Davis said about 150 re-enactors dressed in Civil War attire will help the living history programs.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 4, 2009
A close aide to Ronald Reagan has claimed that the former US president tried to convert the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to Christianity.
A new biography that draws on recently declassified documents discloses a secret exchange between the two leaders that left at least one official present convinced that Reagan had tried to persuade his counterpart of God's existence.
The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan, by the former Los Angeles Times reporter James Mann, provides fres
Source: NYT
April 3, 2009
This week competing theories about the Depression and the New Deal were once again on display at a conference at the Council on Foreign Relations’ New York headquarters, co-hosted by the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University, and partly organized by Ms. [Amity] Shlaes [author of “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression”].
She and other critics of the New Deal credit Roosevelt with some important innovations, like restoring confidence in banks an
