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: NYT
August 10, 2006
When the Blackfoot Nation approached the Denver Art Museum about borrowing a horse shawl for a ceremony a few years ago, the museum faced a quandary. Curators were eager to oblige, but they worried that the ritual would expose the early-20th-century relic to the damaging effects of horse sweat. After a delicate negotiation, a compromise was reached: The tribe would use the object in the ceremony without actually putting it on the horse.
The story is not unusual. As American Indian a
Source: NYT
August 11, 2006
JAKARTA, Indonesia, Aug. 10 — The plot to blow up several airliners over the Atlantic, uncovered by British authorities, bears a striking, if not eerie, resemblance to a plot hatched 12 years ago to simultaneously blow up a dozen airliners over the Pacific.That scheme was developed in Manila by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was starting his climb to become a top lieutenant to Osama bin Laden, and Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who was a mastermind of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade C
Source: Wa Po
August 11, 2006
Breathing a little easier as their convoy of armored sport-utility vehicles pulled through the gate of Tallil air base at 3:15 p.m., the engineers headed not for the comfort of their air-conditioned bunks but for an enormous mound of mud and brick tucked inside the base.
A few minutes later, they stood at the foot of the 4,100-year-old ziggurat, or temple tower, of Ur. They were no longer two dozen or so tired, sweaty soldiers toiling to rebuild a war-torn country. They were constru
Source: USA Today
August 2, 2006
A 450-year-old piece of Charles V's pinkie lends support to the theory that it was gout that led one of the most powerful rulers of all time to abdicate, Spanish researchers report.
Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, whose empire stretched across Europe and included Spanish America, was diagnosed with gout by his doctors in early adulthood. By the end of his reign in 1556, he was a crippled man who could barely walk at times or ride a horse, said Dr. Pedro Luis Fernandez, a pathologist at the Uni
Source: BBC
August 10, 2006
It's 200 years since Britain's invading army was routed from Buenos Aires - a mere footnote in British history, but, says military historian Peter Caddick-Adams, a historic event in the forging of friendship between the two countries that eclipses the Falklands fall-out.
Source: News Release -- David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
August 11, 2006
Fifty-three leading Holocaust scholars from around the world have sent a letter to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, denouncing his statements comparing Israel to the Nazis.
The signatories include two former senior officials of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Dr. Michael Berenbaum and Dr. Walter Reich; Journal of Genocide Research editor Henry Huttenbach; Genocide Watch president Gregory Stanton; Prof. David S. Wyman, author of the The Abandonment of the Jews; and numerous ot
Source: cronaca
August 8, 2006
A 6-inch-long gold and platinum dagger believed to be 5,000 years-old has been unearthed in central Bulgaria, the archaeologist leading the excavations said Monday.
Archaeologist Martin Hristov said his team discovered more than 500 tiny golden rings that appeared to be pieces of ancient jewelry.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
August 10, 2006
M. Avrum Ehrlich, a 37-year-old professor from Australia, is one of the first foreign academics to teach Hebrew Bible, Talmudic thought, and the Kabbalah in China. His ambitious plan is to put this sleepy provincial university on the map as an international center of Judaic studies.
Part of Mr. Ehrlich's pedagogy is to immerse his students in rituals central to Judaism. Thus he holds this weekly gathering at his apartment — complete with chopsticks.
"It's sort of
Source: Saugus Advertiser
August 10, 2006
A rock that has been propping open doors in the Zapolski household for decades is actually a 4,000-year-old Native American axe.
"My mother used it as a doorstop," said Kathy (Johnston) Zapolski this week.
Zapolski’s 90-year-old aunt, Adele Colby, recalls that some time in the early 1900s her father (Zapolski’s grandfather) was attempting to plant a garden in his backyard on Willis Street when he came across a slightly-rounded, carved rock that resem
Source: AP
August 9, 2006
ROCK HILL, S.C. (AP) ˜ Robert McCullough, who led a group of black students
in a landmark 1961 civil rights protest, choosing to serve jail time on a
chain gang for the crime of sitting at a whites-only lunch counter, has
died. He was 64.
McCullough died Monday, Robinson Funeral Home spokesman Samuel Reid said. He
did not give a cause of death.
McCullough, along with eight other black students from Friendship Junior
College, gained widespread attention when they used the"ja
Source: China.org
August 9, 2006
One of the world's oldest handicraft workshops, dating back more than 3,600 years, may have been discovered by Chinese archaeologists in the country's Henan Province.
Covering about 1,000 square meters the workshop used turquoise to make elaborate and ornate works of art. The workshop was found in the village of Erlitou of Yanshi City and is part of the ruins of the imperial city belonging to the Xia dynasty (2100 BC-1600 BC), China's earliest. The imperial city was discovered two y
Source: Washington Times
August 9, 2006
At least 125 persons died at the Berlin Wall in the three decades before the great symbol of divided Cold War Europe was finally torn down in 1989, German researchers said yesterday.
But the latest findings of a government-backed project hoping to close this chapter of German history suggest that fewer people died at the barrier between formerly communist East Berlin and free West Berlin than previously thought.
Although there are still 81 cases under investigation, the f
Source: Newsletter of Secrecy News, which is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the
August 9, 2006
The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) said this week that it
will not administer a grant to a San Antonio, Texas law school to
study state freedom of information laws. In a story that prompted new concerns about official secrecy, USA
Today reported last month that the government was going to pay St. Mary's University School of Law $1 million to reevaluate state
freedom of information laws in light of the threat of terrorism.But the proposed freedom of information stud
Source: Independent (UK)
August 9, 2006
A spectacular discovery of Stone Age menhirs in Brittany could unlock the code to one of the most puzzling chapters of human development, and transform our knowledge of mankind's early history.Some months ago builders were clearing a piece of wasteland in southern Brittany when they struck an enormous hunk of granite. The developer was no historian but he knew instantly what the obstacle must be: the remains of a buried "menhir" or neolithic standing st
Source: Independent (UK)
August 9, 2006
Russia has suffered its second major art theft in as many weeks, with the plundering of hundreds of drawings worth at least £1.5m from the State Archive of Literature and Art in Moscow.
The drawings were the work of the late Yakov Chernikhov, a leading artist and architect of the Soviet era who specialised in "constructivist" socialist design. The thief or thieves emptied hundreds of folders containing drawings, replacing them with worthless "dummy" sketches to d
Source: NYT
August 9, 2006
PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 7 — Hands off our Liberty. That is what Philadelphia officials are saying to a plan by the National Park Service to erect a seven-foot-tall fence behind Independence Hall. One effect of the project would be to bisect the historic square where the Declaration of Independence was publicly read for the first time, on July 8, 1776.
The plan calls for a wrought-iron fence about 130 feet behind the building, the original home of the Liberty Bell. The Park Service, which
Source: The Age (Australia)
August 6, 2006
It's not quite the rumble in the jungle of Muhammad Ali fame, but the Australian History Summit set down for next week is shaping up as an academic prize fight of seemingly immense proportions.
With 23 of the biggest names in history (Geoffrey Blainey, Inge Clendinnen and Geoffrey Bolton, former NSW premier Bob Carr and social commentator Gerard Henderson are just some on the guest list) in the same room to settle once and for all what version of our nation's past schoolchildren sho
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
August 7, 2006
An institute in Germany has unearthed a Nazi bible ordered by Adolf Hitler to replace the old and new testaments expunged of all references to Jews.
Hitler's race theorists even rewrote the 10 commandments and added two more for good measure in the book called ’German with God’ which was – alongside Hitler’ s autobiography – meant to be required reading in every home in his Third Reich.
Thou shalt not kill, coveting one's neighbour's wife, thou shalt not steal and all o
Source: NYT
August 6, 2006
A JAPANESE pagoda sits perpendicular to a Swiss chalet, and they share a 32-acre historic campus with a Dutch windmill, a Spanish mission-style home, an American bungalow and an Italian villa. In all, there are 12 architecturally distinct homes placed randomly around the historic National Park Seminary in this city just outside Washington.
Nestled at the tip of Rock Creek Park, the bucolic if overgrown campus in the neighborhood of Forest Glen has been the victim of neglect and vand
Source: Business Wire
August 8, 2008
CHARLESTON, S.C.--Aug. 2, 2006--Before great Americans of our times like Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King made their mark on America's racial divide, there were men and women who dedicated their lives to ensuring liberty and justice for all Americans. When the Civil War battlefields fell silent these individuals struggled onward to reconstruct a better America. These men and women are true American heroes who over time have had little, if any, recognition.
One influential grou
