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: Canberra Times
September 23, 2006
The remains of five men, believed to be Australian soldiers killed during World War I, are among the best preserved ever found on the Western Front, two experts familiar with the exhumation have claimed.
A geologist and co-secretary of the All Party War Graves and Battlefield Heritage Group for the British Parliament, Professor Peter Doyle, said the men were wrapped in groundsheets and bound in wire before being buried, probably by their colleagues, who may have hoped to re-inter them at
Source: The State (NC)
September 24, 2006
Government assistance to the poor has evolved as social attitudes toward poverty have changed, social historians say.
The decade-old reform of the U.S. system — and recent reauthorization of the changes — are examples.
In recent years, Americans have embraced more of a take-care-of-yourself attitude. That fueled the work requirements and time limits on payments that are the heart of today’s welfare system.
“There was a period of time when we sort of said, ‘
Source: The Irish Times
September 26, 2006
An expert advisory group has recommended the release of the Department of Justice's historic material covering a 30-year period from the foundation of the State. This means that records relating to national security and Northern Ireland up to the 1950s are to be made available for historians, researchers and the general public.
In its interim report released yesterday, the Justice Archives Advisory Group concluded that the documents should be transferred over the next 12 months to t
Source: The Times (London)
September 26, 2006
A COLLECTION of sacred artefacts looted by the Romans from the Temple of Jerusalem and long suspected of being hidden in the vaults of the Vatican is actually in the Holy Land, according to a British archeologist. Sean Kingsley, a specialist in the Holy Land, claims to have discovered what became of the collection, which includes silver trumpets that would have heralded the coming of the Messiah and is widely regarded as the greatest of biblical treasures.
The trumpets, gold candela
Source: Newport News Daily Press
September 23, 2006
NEWPORT NEWS, Va. - Four years after Navy divers pulled the USS Monitor gun turret from the ocean's grasp, the historic Civil War artifact has compiled a long record of surprising people with its secrets.
But few revelations have been more unexpected than the artifacts that turned up during seemingly routine excavations inside the new conservation facility at the Mariners' Museum this summer.
Probing through some of the last deposits that remain after the removal of ton
Source: Scotsman.com
September 23, 2006
A DOCUMENT containing the earliest known map of Charles Towne, the first permanent European settlement in the Carolinas, has been discovered in the archives at Aberdeen University.
The document was uncovered while staff were carrying out an assessment of historic material ahead of the creation of the university's new library and special collections centre.It was among papers belonging to James Fraser, who was born in Inverness-shire in 1645 and educated at King'
Source: AP
September 23, 2006
Athens, Sept. 23(AP): Police have recovered a revered religious icon, stolen from a monastery in southern Greece, following an intense five-week investigation that involved roadblocks, telephone surveillance and helicopter searches, authorities said on Saturday.
The 700-year-old icon of the Virgin Mary, credited with having healing powers and performing miracles, was stolen on Aug. 18 from a cliff-top convent near the town of Leonidio, some 300 kilometers (185 miles) southwest of At
Source: CNN
September 25, 2006
Watercolors attributed to Adolf Hitler, painted when he was serving in the German army during World War One and then hidden away for more than 60 years, will be auctioned in southwest England on Tuesday.The 21 paintings and sketches, the largest sale of Hitler's artwork for many years, has attracted huge interest and collectors from Russia, the United States and South Africa are expected to bid in the quiet Cornish town of Lostwithiel.
"People have been rin
Source: Reuters
September 22, 2006
A dealer of antique treasures who admitted stealing
more than $3 million in rare maps was resentful of the world's top
libraries and acted to finance his rich tastes and rising debt,
prosecutors said on Thursday.
Shedding light into why Edward Forbes Smiley III stole 98 of the world's
most precious maps over seven years, papers filed in Connecticut's U.S.
District Court said he initially acted because he felt he had been wronged
and slighted."Although he had a large degree of acce
Source: CBS News
September 24, 2006
Veterans Day Came a little early this year for a group of World War II vets from North Carolina, aged 79 to 102. As CBS Sunday Morning contributor Bill Geist reports, they journeyed to see the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C.
They were there because Jeff Miller, a local businessman in Hendersonville, N.C., started a campaign in March to send every World War II veteran in the country who wanted to see it.
"Sixteen million served in World War II. Now there
Source: NYT
September 24, 2006
Disarming Hezbollah, the militant Lebanese Shiite group that fought Israel last month, is a major goal in Washington, Jerusalem and even among the political elite in Beirut. But the main stumbling block, at least according to Hezbollah’s current position, is a 10-mile-square area of hilly land known as Shabaa Farms.
Israel and the United Nations say the land belongs to Syria and is part of the Golan Heights that has been occupied by Israel since the 1967 war. But the Lebanese insist
Source: NYT
September 24, 2006
SHORTLY after terrorists attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush’s speechwriters began grappling with a linguistic puzzle: What to call the enemy? In the five years since, Mr. Bush has road-tested an array of terms: evildoers, jihadists, Islamic extremists, even “Al Qaeda suiciders.”
But no phrase has crashed and burned as fast as the president’s most recent entry into the foreign policy lexicon: Islamic fascists, or, Islamo-fascism.
This latest ite
Source: NYT
September 24, 2006
WHEN President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela used his General Assembly appearance to call President Bush a devil who had left a telltale scent of sulfur on the speaker’s podium, he was acting in an old, if not grand, tradition.The General Assembly hall with its green marble rostrum and giant golden screen bearing the United Nations seal was meant to sound with high-minded calls for international understanding. But on more than a few occasions, the cathedral-like space has rung instead with barbs and
Source: NYT
September 24, 2006
Two years ago, Saudia Muwwakkil, the director of communications for the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site, invited community leaders to discuss how to mark the 100th anniversary of a 1906 race riot in which mobs of whites descended on the city’s black residents.
The racial strife shut down Atlanta for four days and ended with the bodies of black men hanging from trees and streetlights. But of those Ms. Muwwakkil called, almost none had heard of it.
The riot,
Source: NYT
September 24, 2006
Eighty-eight years after Pvt. Francis Lupo fell in battle near the Marne River east of Paris, his remains have been recovered and identified by the Pentagon.
Private Lupo, of Cincinnati, was killed on July 21, 1918, while attacking German forces near Soissons, France. His remains were found by a French archaeologist in 2003 and identified by the Pentagon’s Joint P.O.W.-M.I.A. Accounting Command and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory.
He is the first World Wa
Source: NYT
September 23, 2006
In a bitterly worded letter, the Israeli ambassador to the United States on Friday accused the Council on Foreign Relations of making a “terrible mistake” by inviting President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran to a meeting with the group earlier this week.
“Some of those upset with the council’s decision have compared it to hypothetically inviting Hitler to a meeting in the 1930’s,” the ambassador, Daniel Ayalon, wrote to the council’s president, Richard N. Haass. “In fact, meeting with
Source: Reuters
September 21, 2006
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel has opened to the public an underground archaeological exhibit near Jerusalem's most sensitive shrine, drawing fire from Palestinians who say the project endangers the foundations of the holy site.
Israel's opening of an archaeological tunnel near al-Haram al-Sharif, the site of the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque where the biblical Jewish Temples once stood, sparked Palestinian anger in 1996. Sixty-one Arabs and 15 Israeli soldiers were kill
Source: Guardian
September 18, 2006
Three UNESCO World Heritage sites in Lebanon, including some of the Middle East's most significant ancient ruins, are in urgent need of repairs after a month of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, the U.N. agency said Monday.
In one case, frescos in a Roman-era tomb in Tyre were shaken to the ground when a building 500 feet away was bombed, said U.N. experts, who visited Lebanon and reported on their findings. Some of the paintings were destroyed.
In the ancient Ph
Source: NYT
September 23, 2006
Among its oceangoing sisters, the S.S. Stockholm has always been infamous as the ill-fated vessel that struck and sank the Italian liner Andrea Doria in dense fog off Nantucket 50 years ago. The collision — on July 25, 1956 — resulted not only in 51 deaths and the daring rescue of hundreds from the swells of the Atlantic; it also assured a name for the Stockholm as “the death ship” of the high seas.
Nonetheless, on Wednesday morning, there it was: sailing through the narrows, up the
Source: NYT
September 23, 2006
Even 200-year-old political cartoons aren’t immune from the PBS censor’s blurring machine when they depict naked male genitalia. David Grubin, the writer, producer and director of “Marie Antoinette,” a documentary portrait of the French queen, right, to be broadcast on Monday night, was asked this week by PBS stations to blur the images on two phantasmagorical political cartoons shown in the film. The fear was that, unedited, they would violate the Federal Communications Commission’s indecency s
