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: NBC affiliate
August 8, 2008
hieves have stolen a pair of presidential medals awarded to a Seneca Indian from western New York who wrote the final draft of the surrender terms that ended the Civil War.
The medals were awarded after the war to Union officer Ely Parker, the son of an Iroquois chief who became General Ulysses S. Grant's right-hand man during the war.
Officials at the Niagara County Historical Society say the medals were stolen late Saturday afternoon from a Civil War display in one of
Source: ABC.net.au
August 4, 2006
An ancient temple system on the Hawaiian island of Maui is about 400 years older than previously thought, according to an extensive archaeological study.
The finding contradicts a prior theory that Maui's temples were built within a span of just a few decades around the year 1600.
Some researchers now think the temples were built over the course of 500 years, with construction cycles peaking during periods of significant political change.
"We see const
Source: frontpagemag.com
August 8, 2006
In an article published on the homepage of David Horowitz's frontpagemag.com, Mark D. Tooley, who directs the United Methodist committee at the Institute on Religion and Democracy, blasts Episcopal Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold for managing to find the time during a busy month to apologize for Hiroshima. This is what he says:The outgoing chief bishop of The Episcopal Church, having presided over that 2 million member denomination’s spiraling schism over homosexu
Source: NYT
August 8, 2006
Established history bowed to current correctness at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival yesterday when Mel Smith, an actor portraying Winston Churchill, drew back from his threat to light a Havana cigar onstage in defiance of a new Scottish antismoking law, the BBC reported. The Edinburgh City Council had warned it would shut the theater if the law was broken. William Burdett-Coutts, the artistic director of the theater, said he had been told he would lose his Fringe license permanently and be fined a
Source: NYT
August 8, 2006
An investigation into the theft of 221 objects from the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, has led to the husband and son of a curator who had been responsible for the collection, confirming an initial police theory that the $5 million art theft was an inside job. The curator had been responsible for the Russian enamel and precious metal pieces dating from the middle ages to the 19th century, including delicate masterpieces of Russian Orthodox icon craftsmanship. The items slowly
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 8, 2006
Question: What's the difference between Joan of Arc and a canoe?
Answer: One is Maid of Orleans and the other is made of wood.
It may not have you splitting your sides, but we are assured that it went down extremely well with audiences at Victorian circuses.The joke is one of many stuffed into the pages of a recently discovered joke book that belonged to a Victorian clown.
Packed with 200 gags used to amuse audiences at the
Source: ABC News
August 7, 2006
Just months after archaeologists gleefully clamored over the first tomb to be found in Egypt's Valley of the Kings since 1922, there may be another.
Located just meters from the last tomb — KV-63 excavated earlier this year — Nicholas Reeves of the Amarna Royal Tombs Project, working under the Valley of the Kings Foundation, claims the group has detected what he believes will turn out to be another tomb, and possibly a royal one at that.
"This new discovery is impo
Source: neworleanscitybusiness.com
August 8, 2006
NEW ORLEANS - The National World War II Museum will present a historic International Conference on World War II, Nov. 16-19.
The conference will be one of the largest gatherings of historians, journalists, Medal of Honor recipients and World War II veterans ever assembled since the end of the war more than 60 years ago. It was originally scheduled for October 2005. "The force of Hurricane Katrina may have postponed the museum's first International Conferen
Source: NYT
August 7, 2006
The success or failure of any cease-fire in Lebanon will largely hinge on the opinion of one figure: Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Hezbollah, who has seen his own aura and that of his party enhanced immeasurably by battling the Israeli Army for nearly four weeks. ... the Arab world has a new icon.
Gone are the empty threats made by President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s official radio station during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war to push the Jews into the
Source: AP
August 7, 2006
Four of five oil paintings by Gustav Klimt that were the focus of a restitution battle between the Austrian government and the artworks' Jewish heirs will be heading to Christie's for sale this fall, the auction house announced Monday.
Christie's has not determined whether the works -- three landscapes and a portrait worth an estimated $100 million -- will be auctioned or sold privately, said Steven Thomas, the Los Angeles attorney who represents the heirs.
''The family
Source: LAT
August 8, 2006
Reclaiming a neglected part of California's past, historians Monday unveiled an immense data bank that for the first time chronicles the lives and deaths of more than 100,000 Indians in the Spanish missions of the 18th and 19th centuries.
In an eight-year effort, researchers at the Huntington Library in San Marino used handwritten records of baptisms, marriages and deaths at 21 Catholic missions and two other sites from between 1769 and 1850 and created a cross-referenced computeriz
Source: USA Today
August 8, 2006
In 1986, at least 24 U.S. senators and representatives were closely related to governors or other members of Congress, USA TODAY research shows.
Twenty years later, there are more than 50 -- among them four sets of siblings, four widows, dozens of offspring, the wife of a former Senate majority leader and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, wife of a former president and governor.
No official records are kept, but Senate historian Richard Baker says the concentration of relati
Source: LA Times
August 6, 2006
A once-secret archive, assembled by a Pentagon task force in the early 1970s, that shows that confirmed atrocities by U.S. forces in Vietnam were more extensive than was previously known.The documents detail 320 alleged incidents that were substantiated by Army investigators — not including the most notorious U.S. atrocity, the 1968 My Lai massacre.
Though not a complete accounting of Vietnam war crimes, the archive is the largest such collection to surface to d
Source: The Australian
August 8, 2006
James Cameron, the director of Titanic, is the executive producer of a new documentary that claims to have uncovered evidence confirming one of the most dramatic episodes in the Old Testament: the parting of the Red Sea and the Jewish exodus from Egypt.
In The Exodus Decoded, a 90-minute documentary to be shown in the US this month, Cameron and Canadian producer Simcha Jacobovici claim a volcanic eruption on the Greek island of Santorini triggered a chain of catastrophes recorded in
Source: BBC
August 3, 2006
Geologists have discovered a striking archaeological feature on a hillock in the Kutch district of the western Indian state of Gujarat.
This feature is shaped like the Roman numeral VI. Each arm of this feature is a trench that is about two metres wide, two metres deep and more than 100 metres long.
The feature has evoked the curiosity of archaeologists because such signs have mostly been observed so far in Peru.
The team, led by Dr RV Karanth, a form
Source: orkneyjar.com
August 3, 2006
After four weeks of excavation at the Knowe o' Skea in Westray, archaeologists Graeme Wilson and Hazel Moore can boast a remarkable statistic.
The burials they have unearthed at the Berstness site make of an incredible 90 per cent of the known Iron Age remains found in Scotland to date.
And this year, the bodies are still turning up.
Prior to the start of work in 2000, Iron Age burials were rare - in the whole of Scotland, let alone Orkney.
Source: BBC
August 3, 2006
Evidence of a prehistoric causeway has been uncovered during flood defence work on the marshes of Suffolk.
Contractors working on the Environment Agency's excavation of a new dyke on Beccles town marshes found timber remains which had been hand-sculpted.
Archaeologists said the wooden causeway was used from the Bronze Age in about 1000BC, through the Iron Age to Roman times and the 4th century AD.
The site will now be analysed and dated with the results published
Source: physorg,com
August 1, 2006
The thumbnail-sized bone fragments are engraved with parallel lines and match similar artefacts uncovered in the same area during the 19th century. They were carved by hunter-gatherers as they slowly made their way north in pursuit of moving populations of mammoth and reindeer 25-30,000 years ago.
The unusual find was made by a Cambridge scholar, Becky Farbstein, who has been working at Predmosti in north Moravia, in the Czech Republic. The excavation team comprises archaeologists
Source: Tehran Times
July 31, 2006
TEHRAN -- Road construction and railroad development are threatening the 6000-year-old Yaqut-Tappeh mound near Behshahr in Iran’s northern province of Mazandaran, the Persian service of CHN reported on Sunday.
A team of archaeologists recently began excavations at Yaqut-Tappeh to save artifacts from sections of the site which will be buried under the road being constructed for Amirabad Port.
Railroad construction previously destroyed over 3000 square meters of the site
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
July 16, 2006
Patterson , Stanislaus County -- As nearby hillsides were covered with orange flames and thick black smoke, two archaeologists stared with wonder -- not up at the raging forest fire but down at three prehistoric stone grinding tools they had just discovered on the ground.
"Look at these artifacts -- they are as well preserved as anything you could ever find," archaeologist Richard Jenkins said as he examined a mortar stone with a perfectly rounded indentation. "This w
