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: Boston Globe
July 23, 2006
These are the last Shakers, living in the world's last active Shaker community, which has survived for 223 years in this idyllic and isolated hilltop village 35 miles northwest of Portland. Here, the four faithful live a life of ascetic simplicity and abide by the three C's: celibacy, confession of sin, and communalism. "The real misconception about the Shakers is that we're all dead," says one of the four, Brother Arnold Hadd, only half-jokingly.
The 49-year-old Hadd, a S
Source: Wa Po
July 24, 2006
CAIRO, Egypt -- A giant statue of Pharaoh Ramses II will be moved next month from a congested square in downtown Cairo to a more serene home near the Great Pyramids in a bid to save it from corrosive pollution, Egypt's antiquities chief said Monday.
Exhaust fumes from trains, cars and buses, as well as subway vibrations, are damaging the more than 3,200-year-old granite statue at Ramses Square, its home since the early 1950s, when it was taken from a temple at the site of the ancien
Source: Village Voice
July 27, 2006
Parishioners of St. Brigid's on Avenue B held a vigil today, but not inside their Roman Catholic Church that dates to 1848. Instead they were on the sidewalk, watching with dismay as a wrecking crew assembled scaffolding in a first step to taking the historic church down (see slideshow here). This comes two days after the chopping began at nearby P.S. 64, in another sign of the way a sizzling real estate market is remaking the Village landscape.
Source: Times Online (UK)
July 28, 2006
A FORMER policeman provoked panic in Buckingham Palace in 1931 when he insisted that he had a superior claim to the throne than George V.
Anthony Hall argued that he was the 23rd descendent of Henry VIII and tried to convince mass crowds at a series of public meetings in the Birmingham Bull Ring that he was rightful heir to the throne. He started raising eyebrows in Whitehall and Buckingham Palace after making “scurrilous” attacks on the King, including a threat to shoot him.
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, is published by the Federation of American Scientists
July 28, 2006
The Freedom of Information Act" continues to be a valuable tool for
citizens to obtain information about the operation and decisions of
the federal government," the Government Accountability Office
reported at a July 26 House hearing."Since 2002, agencies have received increasing numbers of requests
and have also continued to increase the number of requests that they
process. In addition, agencies continue to grant most requests in
full. However, the rate of increase in pending reques
Source: Times (UK)
July 28, 2006
The Spanish Government is about to introduce a controversial Bill honouring the victims of General Franco, which will probably include a new drive to remove the last symbols of his dictatorship from public spaces.But even before its announcement, expected today, the draft law has come under attack from all sides, which are engaged in a fierce battle over the violent past of the country.
The legislation was an electoral promise by the Government of José Luis Rodr
Source: WaPo
July 28, 2006
A House panel urged representatives of American museums yesterday to continue searching their collections for objects that might have been stolen by Nazis during World War II, after a group that acts as a clearinghouse for Holocaust claims expressed frustration over the slow pace of the process."We've made progress in working together," said Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Financial Services. Sitting at the witness
Source: WaPo
July 26, 2006
Millions of Nazi files detailing the suffering and deaths of inmates at labor and concentration camps during the Holocaust will be opened to researchers under an agreement signed Wednesday by Germany and seven other countries.Historians campaigned for years to overcome privacy concerns that restricted access to the more than 30 million documents in the vast, war-era archive to Holocaust victims and their relatives.
The accord was reached in April by the 11-natio
Source: WaPo
July 26, 2006
A German archive containing millions of documents detailing Nazi crimes during World War Two will be opened to historians and Holocaust scholars for the first time, officials said on Wednesday.n an official ceremony to mark the decision, Germany's junior minister for foreign affairs, Guenter Gloser, welcomed the decision by his own country and the 10 other nations who oversee the archive's administration to open up the files for research.
"With the decision
Source: Salon
July 27, 2006
For most of the past 2,500 years, scholars and aficionados of what we would now call the Western literary tradition had little doubt about its point of origin. At the dawn of Greek civilization, nearly 1,000 years before the birth of Christ, a blind poet named Homer (Homeros, in Greek) had written or composed -- and here we feel the first faint stirrings of an irresolvable ambiguity -- two great epic poems, "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey."
These poems were not the
Source: scotsman.com
July 26, 2006
ARCHAEOLOGISTS have uncovered a rare but perfectly preserved early 17th-century Scottish pistol at the historic former British colony known as the birthplace of the United States, making the firearm one of the oldest artefacts of European origin ever discovered in North America.
The weapon probably belonged to one of the first settlers to arrive at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, and was recovered from a well at the site with several other "hugely significant" artefacts.
Source: NYT
July 27, 2006
In 1886, the Buffalo Bisons, a top minor league baseball team, signed a versatile infielder from Massachusetts named Frank Grant. The next day, a local newspaper announced Grant’s arrival by describing him as “a Spaniard.”
Grant was in fact one of five African-Americans playing in the otherwise all-white minor leagues that year, on teams from Kansas to Connecticut. Their presence was accepted if not widely acknowledged in the 1880’s, passed off with a wink and a nod, a dodge that la
Source: AP
July 27, 2006
President Bush on Thursday signed legislation extending for 25 years the Voting Rights Act, the historic 1965 law which opened polls to millions of black Americans by outlawing racist voting practices in the South. "Congress has reaffirmed its belief that all men are created equal," he declared."The right of ordinary men and women to determine their own political future lies at the heart of the American experiment," Bush said. He said the Voting Rights Ac
Source: Toronto Star
July 27, 2006
Poland's navy said today that it identified a sunken ship in the Baltic Sea as almost certainly being Nazi Germany's only aircraft carrier, the Graf Zeppelin — a find that promises to shed light on a 59-year-old mystery surrounding the ship's fate. The Polish oil company Petrobaltic discovered the wreck on July 12 on the sea floor at a depth of 86 metres some 60 kilometres north of the port city of Gdansk.
Suspecting it could be the wreckage of the Graf Zeppelin
Source: The Guardian
July 27, 2006
You may be aware that grisly things happened in the Tower of London in the Olden Days. But do you care? Thousands of visitors pass Traitor's Gate and watch the fat ravens waddle about, look at the simulacrum of Sir Walter Raleigh's room in the Bloody Tower and shudder at the story of the young princes murdered, tradition has it, by Richard III. There's plenty of violent and macabre history here, all of which makes it a great gothic place to visit. But some sensitive souls believe it's time we ac
Source: ICBS
July 26, 2006
The International Committee of the Blue Shield (ICBS) deplores the unacceptable loss of human
lives, the considerable suffering, the rapid displacement of entire communities, and the
destruction that are currently taking place in areas administered by Israel, the Lebanon and the
Palestinian Authority. It is also extremely concerned by the threat that the present conflict
could escalate still further.
ICBS, founded in 1996 'to work to protect the world's cultural heritage threatened
Source: Peninsula (Qatar)
July 26, 2006
AMSTERDAM • Dutch police have handed to Iraq three archaeological pieces that had been stolen in post-war looting, Iraq's ambassador to the Netherlands said yesterday.
Siamand Banaa said the stolen pieces-three ancient clay tablets-were probably taken from a museum in Iraq. Known as cuneiforms, the tablets belong to one of the earliest known forms of written expression.
They were among many valuable pieces stolen from the country before and after the war in 2003. "
Source: Willie Dry in National Georgraphic News
July 25, 2006
An unsealed hatch on the U.S. Civil War submarine H.L. Hunley could have been a factor in the Confederate vessel's sinking, says a team of archaeologists in Charleston, South Carolina.
The Hunley was the first submarine to successfully down an enemy ship, during an attack in Charleston Harbor in 1864. But it sank while still in the harbor, a mystery that remains unsolved to this day.
The researchers, working for the Hunley Commission, found that a locking mechanism had
Source: NYT
July 26, 2006
One of the most important treasures looted in the ransacking of Iraq’s national museum three years ago has been recovered in a clandestine operation involving the United States government and was turned over to Iraqi officials in Washington yesterday.
The piece, a headless stone statue of the Sumerian king Entemena of Lagash, was stolen in the days after the fall of Baghdad. In the wake of the looting, American officials came under sharp criticism from archaeologists and others for
Source: NYT
July 26, 2006
“Walter Cronkite: Witness to History,” an American Masters special on PBS tonight, tries to recapture that early sense of awe and skates serenely across the surface. Mr. Cronkite, 89, interviewed at the helm of his sailboat, still looks hale and disarmingly good-humored, and his many colleagues and friends make the point that he was a real newsman schooled in radio and wire-service work during World War II who became the kindly “Uncle Walter” of unconditional trust.
“He never let hi
