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)
July 16, 2008
The bones of Crown Prince Alexei, the only son of Tsar Nicholas II, are to be turned into an object of worship according to a secret proposal being circulated within the Russian Orthodox Church.
The controversial plan emerged as Russia officially confirmed that the charred remains of two corpses found in a pit outside Yekaterinburg last year belonged to Alexei and his older sister, Maria.
The announcement, which follows months of DNA analysis and forensic investigation,
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 16, 2008
A 2500 year old Persian treasure dubbed the world's 'first bill of human rights' has been branded a piece of shameless 'propaganda' by German historians.
The Cyrus cylinder, which is held by the British Museum, is a legacy of Cyrus the Great - the Persian emperor famed for freeing the Jews of ancient Babylon after conquering the city in 539 BC.
A copy of the cylinder, which is covered in cuneiform script supposed to detail the ancient charter of rights, also hangs next
Source: Barack Obama in a specch, "A New Strategy for a New World"
July 15, 2008
Sixty-one years ago, George Marshall announced the plan that would come to bear his name. Much of Europe lay in ruins. The United States faced a powerful and ideological enemy intent on world domination. This menace was magnified by the recently discovered capability to destroy life on an unimaginable scale. The Soviet Union didn't yet have an atomic bomb, but before long it would.
The challenge facing the greatest generation of Americans - the generation that had vanquished fascism
Source: WaPo
June 19, 2008
What expression would an 18th-century woman have donned as her husband left for war? It depends on which government official you ask.
After nearly a decade of lobbying by a group to erect a memorial in Leesburg honoring local Revolutionary War participants, recent debate over whether to approve the monument's proposed design has centered largely on that historical, and somewhat existential, question.
The Patriot Project was proposed by the Loudoun Revolutionary War Memo
Source: AP
July 15, 2008
A janitor whom a university official had accused of racial harassment for reading a historical book about the Ku Klux Klan on his break has gotten an apology — months later — from the school.
Charles Bantz, chancellor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, apologized to Keith John Sampson in a letter dated Friday, saying the school is committed to free expression.
"I can candidly say that we regret this situation took place," Bantz wrote.
Source: AP
July 10, 2008
A former Alabama state trooper is scheduled to go on trial in October for a slaying that occurred on darkened streets during a historic civil rights demonstration in Marion in 1965.
Circuit Judge Tommy Jones declined to dismiss an indictment against former trooper James Bonard Fowler and scheduled his trial for the week of Oct. 20.
"We look forward to having this matter resolved after 43 years," District Attorney Michael Jackson said Thursday.
A P
Source: International Herald Tribune
July 16, 2008
IF feminism means a desire for independence from patriarchal authority,
the beguines — a Roman Catholic laic order that began in the 13th century
and branched across northwest Europe — represented, perhaps, the world's
oldest women's movement.
Unlike sisterhoods that required a life spent apart from society under
vows of chastity, these Catholic women looked for holiness outside
monastic norms. Although they lived and prayed together within an enclave,
partly as a form of mutual pro
Source: Bloomberg News
July 15, 2008
Looking at Talaat Harb Square in central Cairo, it is hard to
imagine that British lords and Egyptian princes once mingled there with
songstresses and movie stars; that ladies strolled in sun dresses and men
in linen suits gambled away nights and fortunes in elegant casinos.
These days, unemployed youths shout vulgar catcalls at female shoppers
walking past crumbling facades. Vendors on potholed sidewalks peddle
Chinese-made T-shirts. Legless beggars grab the ankles of passers-by for
Source: Reuters
July 16, 2008
Russia said on Wednesday that charred
remains found in a pit belonged to Tsar Nicholas II's only son and his
daughter, exactly 90 years after the Bolsheviks shocked the world by
murdering the last Tsar.
Moscow's confirmation that the remains included those of Tsar Nicholas's
13-year-old heir, Prince Alexei, came as hundreds of Russians flocked to a
church built on the site where the family was gunned down by Bolshevik
executioners.
Nicholas II, lampooned by the Soviets as a
Source: Guardian
July 16, 2008
Ambitious plans for a world-class visitor centre for Stonehenge may have
dwindled to a world-class prefab, but yesterday both English Heritage and
the government pledged it would be built in time for the 2012 Olympics.
After over 20 years of bitter public debate, and an estimated £9m spent on
consultants, designs and planning inquiries, the proposed £57m visitor
centre collapsed last year when the government abandoned, on cost grounds,
the plan to tunnel the A303 where it passes one
Source: Seattle Times
July 16, 2008
Peter Egner talked freely to his friends about his service as a conscript in the German army during World War II, and even showed them the jagged scar on his hip — the wound that Egner said ended his military service.
"He was a [WWII] veteran, like I was a veteran," said Russell Wilson, 81, his longtime neighbor in West Linn, Ore.
But federal Nazi hunters say the 86-year-old Egner, of Bellevue, has lived a lie all these years, and Tuesday moved to revoke his U
Source: Newsweek
July 21, 2008
In 1981 Barack Obama was 20 years old, a Columbia University student in search of the meaning of life. He was torn a million different ways: between youth and maturity, black and white, coasts and continents, wonder and tragedy. He enrolled at Columbia in part to get far away from his past; he'd gone to high school in Hawaii and had just spent two years "enjoying myself," as he puts it, at Occidental College in Los Angeles. In New York City, "I lived an ascetic existence," Ob
Source: AP
July 16, 2008
MAILLE, France - For most of France, Aug. 25, 1944, was the joyous day that Allied troops liberated Paris from the Nazis. For this village in the Loire valley, it was a day of horror.
Retreating German troops massacred 124 of Maille's 500 residents then razed the town, possibly in retaliation for Resistance action in the region, according to local archives. Forty-four children were among the dead, the youngest just 4 months old.
Now a German investigator is drawing new
Source: CNN
July 15, 2008
- There were 56 men who put quill to parchment during the Summer of Independence in 1776.
On July 2, the Continental Congress voted to declare American independence.
On July 4, Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence.
But it wasn't until August 2 that the delegates began to sign the official, inscribed document.
Most of the signers would be unrecognized today, even if they turned up on the TV show "Dancing with the Stars."
Source: CNN
July 15, 2008
Susan Atkins, a terminally ill former Charles Manson follower, has been denied a compassionate release from prison, the California Board of Parole Hearings said Tuesday on its Web site.
Atkins, 60, has been diagnosed with brain cancer and has had a leg amputated, her attorney said. In June, she requested the release, available to terminally ill inmates with less than six months to live.
The board's decision came after a public hearing on Atkins' request. It means the re
Source: NYT
July 15, 2008
In its glory days, the United States Navy destroyer John Rodgers was among the most decorated warships of World War II. Now, hull rusting and big guns whitened by bird droppings, the abandoned destroyer finds itself in what could be its final battle, one that could turn the historic ship into a museum or, alternatively, a heap of scrap.
The John Rodgers was one of the 175 Fletcher-class destroyers, which shepherded aircraft carriers and provided withering cover fire during amphibiou
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 15, 2008
For hundreds of years, citizens of the Roman Empire watched chariots tear around the famous racetrack in what was the Formula One event of its time.
Now the historical society, Vadis Al Maximo (To the Maximum), is in talks with city officials to bring the event back – with perhaps slightly less blood and carnage as depicted in the film, Ben Hur.
Franco Calo, of Vadis Al Maximo, said: "The event would last three days, starting on October 17, at the same period whe
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
July 15, 2008
Palaeontologists have unveiled an extraordinary prehistoric 'flying' reptile which lived 235 million years ago.
The kuehneosaurs glided through the subtropical forests of Europe using scaly 'wings' that could carry it distances of more than 30ft.
Experts say the lizard-like reptile, which grew up to 2ft long, used extensions of their ribs to form large gliding surfaces on the sides of their body.
The scientific community is united in the belief that birds d
Source: WaPo
July 15, 2008
From San Salvador to Budapest to Washington: The tides of memory and forgetting swept into the El Salvador Embassy on 16th Street NW the other day, transporting ghosts.
Mounted on the walls, their faces peer from postcards of a desperate time -- identity papers, manually typed in great haste, accompanied by glued-on family snapshots, all scanned and enlarged like inscrutable posters for our inspection 64 years later.
One incongruity stands out. You can't help wondering
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 15, 2008
The Vatican has asked for the exhumation of the body of the Church of England's most renowned convert to Roman Catholicism as part of his progression towards sainthood.
The Venerable John Henry Cardinal Newman was buried in a small cemetery in August 1890 and Rome now wants his remains to be moved to a marble sarcophagus in the Birmingham Oratory.
The move, which is expected to take place by the end of the year, would enable people to pay tribute to him more easily and
