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: http://www.space-travel.com
July 28, 2008
NASA and Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library based in San Francisco, made available the most comprehensive compilation ever of NASA's vast collection of photographs, historic film and video Thursday.
The Internet site combines for the first time 21 major NASA imagery collections into a single, searchable online resource. A link to the Web site will appear on the NASA home page.
The Web site launch is the first step in a five-year partnership that will add mil
Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch
July 25, 2008
A review of historic maps, photographs and other resources has confirmed with "reasonable certainty" that part of a burial ground for slaves and other African-Americans rests under a parking lot now owned by Virginia Commonwealth University, officials said today.
The Richmond Slave Trail Commission and VCU said in a joint statement that they will begin to discuss ways to properly memorialize the site, along Interstate 95 in Shockoe Bottom.
"The documentar
Source: NYT
July 28, 2008
SHANKSVILLE, Pa. — It is on just a quarter-acre of land, which everyone agrees is too small, and it has always been called the “temporary” memorial.
But for nearly seven years, this informal site, overlooking the meadow where United Flight 93 crashed on Sept. 11, 2001, has been a place of reflection. Nearly a million people have visited it. They gather on benches made by schoolchildren and study the handmade memorials and smaller tributes left on a 10-foot-tall fence put up for just
Source: Nick Taylor in the NYT
July 28, 2008
THE Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum at Hyde Park, N.Y., the nation’s first presidential library, is literally falling apart. The roof leaks, the basement floods, asbestos is flaking from old steam pipes, an ancient electrical system could send the whole place up in smoke. This sorry situation is an insult to the person the library and museum honor: the founder of the New Deal, the greatest investment in our nation’s modern development....
While the library sits
Source: Moscow Times
July 28, 2008
The European Court of Human Rights has ruled in favor of a Russian World War II partisan contesting a Latvian conviction for war crimes committed under the Nazi occupation, the court said on Thursday.
Vasiliy Kononov, an 85-year-old Latvian who was granted Russian citizenship in 2000, was convicted in April 2004 of murdering Latvian civilians during the war and was sentenced to a year and eight months in jail.
The case outraged many Russians, who saw him as a brave part
Source: LiveScience
July 28, 2008
A solitary chunk of granite, small enough to heft in one hand, is key evidence that Australia and parts of Antarctica were once attached to North America, a new study suggests.
The Earth's continents are thought to have collided to become supercontinents and broken apart again several times in Earth's 4.5 billion year history. The most recent supercontinent was Pangaea, which began to break apart about 200 million years ago; the landmasses that comprised Pangaea eventually wandered
Source: Telegraph
July 28, 2008
The hunt for the elusive creature - said to be 10ft tall, part man, part ape and otherwise known as the Abominable Snowman - has frustrated scientists for decades.
Now tests at Oxford Brookes University on hairs said to be from a Yeti in India have failed to link the strands with any known species.
Ape expert Ian Redmond, who is leading the research, said: "The hairs are the most positive evidence yet that a Yeti might possibly exist.
"It may be t
Source: Telegraph
July 28, 2008
While common acts of desecration have in the past included vandalism and graffiti, indecent photographs and videos are increasingly being shot around the magnificent structures built during the post-war years to remember the fallen.
The latest incident saw a French couple given a four-month suspended prison sentence for making a pornographic video at the Vimy Ridge memorial near Arras.
After being found guilty of exhibitionism, they were fined £400 each and ordered to
Source: Guardian
July 28, 2008
A collection of books bought by the Victorian prime minister William Gladstone while he was an inquisitive Oxford student has been sold for £65,000. Using plentiful family money, the young Gladstone acquired more than 2,000 volumes on everything from military history to the travel exploits of a young Englishman, David Carnegie. The 400 lots auctioned at Montrose included diaries from other Gladstones which were stored at Fasque House in Aberdeenshire. Gladstone's main library is at his former ho
Source: NYT
July 28, 2008
SULLIVAN’S ISLAND, S.C. — Toni Morrison has said that her acclaimed novel “Beloved,” which features the ghost of a baby killed by her enslaved black mother, came out of the need for a literature to commemorate slaves and their history. “There is no suitable memorial, or plaque, or wreath or wall, or park or skyscraper lobby,” Ms. Morrison said in a 1989 magazine interview. “There’s no 300-foot tower, there’s no small bench by the road.”
This weekend, on Sullivan’s Island, off the So
Source: NYT
July 27, 2008
Thousands of people gathered last week in Richmond, Ind., for the centennial celebration of the Ford Model T, the machine that made the automobile a Main Street technology, with 15 million produced from 1908 to 1927.
As a product, the Model T has long been seen as a classic example of no-frills, mass-produced standardization. It had no gas gauge. Even a windshield was an extra-cost option originally.
Yet the gathering in Indiana showed another facet of the Model T’s his
Source: NYT
July 27, 2008
In the lounge at the top of the 40-story Hyatt Regency hotel, where people sip drinks and gaze at the twinkling skyline, there is no hint of the long-ago horror.
But for people like Brent Wright, it can never be forgotten. On July 17, 1981, Mr. Wright was 17 years old and working the loading docks at Macy’s, saving money for college, when he heard a radio bulletin about the hotel’s skywalk collapsing into a swing dance in the lobby. He tried to call his mother, Karen Jeter, wonderi
Source: AP
July 25, 2008
Strolling beside the Reflecting Pool with the Lincoln Memorial
in the distance, it's easy to overlook a gentle rise in the landscape a
few yards to the north.
The small berm is part of an inconspicuous levee system designed to
protect world-famous museums, the National Archives and federal office
buildings from flooding.
But the nearly 70-year-old levee is at risk of failing during a major
storm — a catastrophe that could swamp portions of downtown in up to 10
feet of water a
Source: US News & World Report
July 24, 2008
After years of spirited debate over how and when people first reached the
Americas, scientists finally seem poised to reach agreement. The emerging
consensus: In contrast to what was long held as conventional wisdom, it
now seems likely that the first Americans did not wait for ice sheets
covering Canada to melt some 13,000 years ago, which would have allowed
them to traipse south over solid ground. Instead, early nomads might well
have traveled by boat or at least along the coast from Sib
Source: Swissinfo
July 26, 2008
A group of Aboriginal elders on Saturday left Australia for the United States to bring home the remains of 33 ancestors from the Smithsonian Institute, the first Aboriginal remains to be returned from the United States.
Aborigines have fought for decades for the return of ancestral remains from overseas universities and museums where they have been taken for scientific and anthropological studies.
Aborigines have inhabited Australia for some 45,000 years and have the wo
Source: The Times (UK)
July 24, 2008
Bletchley Park, the codebreaking centre that helped to win the Second World War and launch the modern computer, is in danger of irreparable decay unless the Government steps in to save it, some of the country’s leading computer scientists caution today.
In a letter to The Times, 97 senior experts, mostly professors and heads of department, say that “the ravages of age and a lack of investment” have left the historic site under threat.
One of the unheated wooden huts w
Source: Tehran Times
July 26, 2008
An addition of the historical book, which has been calligraphed by Master Mir Ali Hervai in 1533 CE, was unveiled during a ceremony at the Imam Ali (AS) Religious Arts Museum in Tehran on Thursday.
The original version of the book, which is also known as “Hervi Devotions”, is keep at the Astan-e Qods Razavi Museum and Library in Mashhad.
Master Gholam-Hossein Amirkhani, who has done the calligraphy for the book’s preface, and Mohammad Jafar Yahaqqi, professor of the F
Source: Reuters
July 26, 2008
Russia said on Saturday that U.S. President George W. Bush had insulted veterans of World War Two by equating the evils of Soviet communism with Nazi fascism.
The Foreign Ministry said Bush had coupled Nazi fascism and Soviet communism as "a single evil" and thus "hurt the hearts" of World War Two veterans in Russia and allied countries, including the United States.
"While condemning the abuse of power and unjustified severity of the Soviet regi
Source: The Nation (Pakistan)
July 25, 2008
Australia’s greatest ancient Aboriginal rock art is at risk of being damaged or destroyed because it sits at the epicentre of the country’s resources boom, experts say.
The etchings of men and animals on the rocks of the Burrup Peninsula, some of which are believed to be up to 30,000 years old, lie in Western Australia’s remote and mineral-laden Pilbara region.
Images carved onto the red rocks scattering the landscape include kangaroos, lizards and emu tracks as well as
Source: The Daily Star (Lebanon)
July 25, 2008
In Gemmayzeh, on the northeast end of the Lebanese capital, it's common to find relatively recent structures looming over late-Ottoman and Mandate-period buildings, like warnings of coming development. The architectural record goes back beyond the Ottomans, as it happens, and for the past several months, the diversity of the quarter's historic architecture has been more obvious.
Just east of the Haddad Street gas station, due south of Gouraud Street, is a large hole - at its largest
