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: LAT
July 20, 2008
ANGKOR, CAMBODIA -- The ancient sandstone temples of Angkor have stood up to endless assaults down the centuries, from medieval raiders armed with clubs and spears to genocidal looters laying land mines.
These days, the onslaught begins in the early morning darkness, when invading columns of buses, taxis and sputtering tuk-tuks converge on a dirt parking lot across from Angkor Wat's broad moat.
They disgorge hundreds of camera-wielding tourists, who march throu
Source: AP
July 19, 2008
Archaeologists will excavate hundreds of fragments of an ancient Egyptian wooden boat entombed in an underground chamber next to Giza's Great Pyramid and try to reassemble the craft, Egyptologists announced Saturday.
The 4,500-year-old vessel is the sister ship of a similar boat removed in pieces from another pit in 1954 and painstakingly reconstructed. Experts believe the boats were meant to ferry the pharaoh who built the Great Pyramid in the afterlife.
Source: Politico.com
July 19, 2008
It could have been a coincidence when Barack Obama gave a major policy speech last week at a building named after former President Ronald Reagan. But it comes from the same campaign that until yesterday had pushed to hold a major foreign policy address at the Brandenburg Gate, where Ronald Reagan in 1987 famously demanded of his Soviet counterpart, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
During his bid for the presidency, Obama has repeatedly praised the political gifts of Reagan, the
Source: NYT
July 19, 2008
Wolfert Van Couwenhoven visited New Amsterdam in 1625 but apparently was unimpressed. He left town and went home to the Netherlands, only to return five years later and purchase a large tract of land on Long Island. He probably never imagined that his odyssey would be immortalized, but there it is, nearly 400 years later, at the New York Public Library.
The library’s extensive genealogical collection has just been enormously enhanced by the gift of 75,000 volumes, 30,000 manuscripts
Source: Chicago Tribune
July 20, 2008
Architects are optimists by nature, as Chicago architect Peter Landon demonstrated last week as he took me on a flashlight-guided tour of an abandoned, derelict Chicago Housing Authority building near the fashionable Taylor Street restaurant strip. Paint was peeling off the walls. Thieves had stripped bathtubs of their hardware. Steel stairs were covered with rust.
Landon thinks the 70-year-old, three-story building, empty since 2002, would make a terrific site for a national public
Source: Times (UK)
July 19, 2008
A pamphlet warning Britons to leave the Middle East or face death has come to light in a stash of illicit propaganda.
The document does not hail from Basra or Baghdad, nor was it penned by the Islamists of al-Qaeda or the al-Mahdi Army. It was found in Haifa, about 60 years ago, and it was issued by the underground group led by Menachem Begin – the future Prime Minister of Israel and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
The document, which surfaced at an auction house thi
Source: NYT
July 17, 2008
Fending off a last-ditch protest from within the church, Southern Methodist University received final approval from its owner, a regional wing of the United Methodist Church, to house the George W. Bush Library complex, which includes a museum and a policy institute. Nearly 300 clergy members from the church’s South Central Jurisdiction dismissed several petitions asserting that the institute endorses President Bush and violates the university’s academic integrity. “The only hurdles are fund-rai
Source: AP
July 17, 2008
A sweeping government audit has revealed that up to 50,000 pieces are missing from Russia's museums -- everything from Pre-Revolutionary medals and weapons to precious works of art -- a member of the survey team said Thursday.
Former Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered the survey after his government was deeply embarrassed in 2006 by hundreds of thefts from the crown jewel of Russia's art world, St. Petersburg's Hermitage gallery.
Over 1,600 museums have been inspected since t
Source: CNN
July 17, 2008
Only one of the nearly 2,000 guests who attended the
FBI's 100th birthday party Thursday was alive when a handful of
investigators formed what was to become the world's premier law
enforcement agency."I'm older than the FBI," said 101-year old Walter Walsh, who fought the
mob as an FBI agent in the 1930s and '40s. The FBI says Walsh is its
oldest living former special agent.
Walsh is among the thousands of special agents who contributed to the
investigations and arrests upon whic
Source: CNN
July 18, 2008
Forensic experts say they have
exhumed 66 Srebrenica massacre victims from a mass grave in eastern
Bosnia.
Murat Hurtic, the head of the forensic team, says the last bodies were
taken out Friday. The team exhumed two complete and 64 incomplete
skeletons.
An ID card found in the grave supports initial information that the bodies
were of Muslim men from Srebrenica who were killed in the July 1995
massacre.
Source: AP
July 19, 2008
Australians may finally be about to get their first saint.
During a visit to a chapel devoted to Mary MacKillop, who is celebrated
for her work caring for children in rural towns across the country last
century, nuns said Pope Benedict XVI indicated MacKillop was approaching
final judgment on her canonization.
MacKillop was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1995 after the Vatican
determined she miraculously cured a woman suffering from leukemia. But the
Vatican needs confirm
Source: NYT
July 20, 2008
The black-and-white photographs are ordinary enough: Czar Nicholas II, his wife and their five children relax in the countryside. His wife, Alexandra, mingles with patients in a hospital. Their son, Crown Prince Aleksei, poses in a traditional Russian sailor suit.
But to many of the Russians who visited the new “Crown of the Czar” exhibition in Moscow last week, these pictures of the royal family were breathtaking. Older people who grew up versed in the canon of Marx and Lenin seeme
Source: NYT
July 18, 2008
A 100th birthday party, one would think, is cause for special celebration.
But here in Flint, the honoree is the company that both built the city and left much of it collapsed. And so, like generations of a family recognizing a controversial patriarch, people here are taking note of the centennial of the founding of General Motors with a complicated mixture of respect and anger, pride and hurt.
“It’s still good they’re doing something for Flint,” said Fred Morse, 34, a
Source: AP
July 17, 2008
FRAZEYSBURG: A man who owns a hillside park with giant sandstone sculptures of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and other famous Americans said he's selling the property so the artwork can be better preserved.
The sculptures in Baughman Memorial Park need to be restored and repainted, said Kevin Morehouse, 35, who bought the park for $310,000 in February. A statue of Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman is missing its head, and other statues show varying degrees of wear and
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 18, 2008
China is abandoning Chairman Mao's dream to make Beijing a workers' paradise, rebuilding it under the cover of a "green" Olympics as a capital for its 21st century empire.
In a display of the city's determination to improve its air quality, officials this week vaunted the closure and relocation to the coast of its biggest polluter, the smoke-stacked mini-state of Capital Steel.
Three of its blast furnaces stand blackened and idle, along with two of its three s
Source: The News Tribune
July 18, 2008
Serbia's war crimes prosecutors are preparing a case against an American who allegedly served in a Nazi unit that killed 17,000 civilians here during World War II, an official said Friday.
Bruno Vekaric, a spokesman for the prosecutors' office, told The Associated Press that it has started gathering information about Peter Egner, 86, a native of Yugoslavia now living in U.S., in order to try him in Serbia.
"We have contacted the Americans, various archives, victims
Source: cbs news
July 10, 2008
Ukraine plans to open a formal investigation into a Soviet-era famine that killed millions of people to see if it can prove the famine was an act of genocide.
The 1932-33 famine was engineered by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to force peasants to give up their private plots of land and join collective farms.
Ukraine, which has rich farmland, suffered the most of all Soviet regions and President Viktor Yushchenko has led efforts to win international recognition of the tra
Source: National Post
July 18, 2008
Nearly 2,000 years after it was buried and preserved under a volcanic eruption, the ancient Roman town of Pompeii is being steadily worn away by modern woes.
Decades of neglect, millions of trampling visitors and the ravages of sunlight and rain are threatening to wipe out for good one of the world's most famous archaeological sites and Italy's top tourist attraction.
Archaeologists and art historians have long complained about the poor upkeep of the Pompeii treasures,
Source: International Herald Tribune
July 18, 2008
There was a time, not all that long ago, when he was the invisible
man whose name was a battle cry, his appearance known to most people only
from an out-of-date photograph, a hidden hero on a prison island off the
coast of Africa.
But as he celebrated his 90th birthday Friday, Nelson Mandela was anything
but invisible, a figure of reverence whose nine decades have been marked
and observed at a huge rock concert in Hyde Park in London, a gala dinner
for his children's charity in the
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 17, 2008
Germany would have accepted surrender in the Second World War as early as
1943 if it were not for Adolf Hitler's fanaticism, the country's new
definitive history of the conflict has suggested.
The work, which comprises 12,000 pages in 13 tomes, has taken academics
from the military history centre of the German armed forces 30 years to
finish. It says that the conflict was lost as early as 1942. However, the
Führer's"suicidal urge" to enforce a final confrontation helped prolong
the
