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: Reuters
May 29, 2006
Turkish police have detained the head of a museum and eight other people amid a probe into allegations that prized exhibits from the 6th Century B.C. were replaced by fakes, a regional governor said on Monday.
The ancient artefacts from the collection known as the Lydian Hoard were repatriated from the United States 13 years ago after being stolen in the 1960s.
"Nine people including the Usak Archaeology Museum director have been detained in four provinces," s
Source: News8
May 30, 2006
Centuries ago, prehistoric Native Americans built imposing mounds and domelike houses across East Texas.
One of those sites is now the Caddoan Mounds State Historic Park where scientists are uncovering the past. Researchers have found a new way to explore beneath the earth without lifting a shovel.
"Culturally this is an important site. It's important to the people of Texas and it’s important interpreting American culture … The more we know about these folks, the b
Source: Boston Globe
May 30, 2006
To the remorseless beat of a deerskin drum, three Native Americans in tribal regalia chanted a list of battles and wars their ancestors had fought since the ``Praying Indians" settled here in the 1650s.In prayers and song, the tribe paid homage to warriors whose sacrifice had been all but forgotten -- Native Americans who converted to Christianity and were believed to have fought with the Colonists during the Revolutionary War.
On Main Streets a
Source: CNN
May 16, 2006
The death register from the Mauthausen concentration camp contains rows of neatly printed names. The times of execution are each two minutes apart. The date is April 20, 1942 -- Adolf Hitler's 53rd birthday.
"Every second minute there is another prisoner and this goes on for pages," says Udo Jost, an archivist at the International Tracing Service (ITS) which looks after the world's biggest collection of documents from World War Two.
"They shot 300 prisone
Source: AP
May 29, 2005
Henry Kissinger quietly acknowledged to China in 1972 that Washington could accept a communist takeover of South Vietnam if that evolved after a withdrawal of U.S. troops, even as the war to drive back the communists dragged on with mounting deaths.
President Nixon's envoy told Chinese Premier Chou En-lai, "If we can live with a communist government in China, we ought to be able to accept it in Indochina."
Kissinger's remarks surfaced in a collection of papers
Source: BBC
May 30, 2006
The anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta has been chosen as the best date to celebrate Britishness.
The charter imposed on King John on 15 June 1215 by rebel barons limited the power of the monarch and gave ordinary people rights under common law.
Its anniversary was picked by 27% of the 5,002 people polled by BBC History magazine, with VE Day, 8 May, taking 21%, and D-Day, 6 June, attracting 14%.
Source: Timesonline (UK)
May 30, 2006
THEY seem the unlikeliest of relatives. One was a fearsome warlord whose name became a byword for savagery. The other is a mild-mannered accountancy academic from Florida.
Yet Tom Robinson, 48, has become the first man outside Asia to trace his ancestry directly to Genghis Khan, the 13th-century Mongol leader whose empire stretched from the South China Sea to the Persian Gulf.
And, since his paternal great-great-grandfather emigrated to the United States from Windermere, Cu
Source: BBC
May 29, 2006
An English warship thought to have sunk in the Great Storm of 1703 is to be given protected status, Culture Minister David Lammy has announced.
The wreck, lying in Pevensey Bay, off the East Sussex coast, is believed to be that of the 70-gun Resolution.
The ship, now designated under the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973, could provide an insight into the maritime and military history of the period.
Source: NYT
May 30, 2006
A brown fedora rests abandoned in ground zero dust: owner's fate, unknown. In images shot from space, a plume of smoke rises miles above the World Trade Center. Two workers cling to a scaffold that dangles from an office building beneath the inferno. A handheld video camera, pointing at a north tower in flames, shakily veers to show the second hijacked jet striking the other tower.Those images, captured largely by amateurs, are moments from more than 500 hours of
Source: NYT
May 30, 2006
ARLINGTON, Va., May 29 — President Bush paid homage to fallen members of the nation's military on Monday, using his annual Memorial Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery to draw a link between those who fought in an earlier era and those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.Mr. Bush spoke at the cemetery's marble-columned amphitheater after placing a floral wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns, on a hillside overlooking the Potomac. The president vowed to honor those who had die
Source: NYT
May 30, 2006
Britain's biggest association of higher education instructors voted Monday to urge its 67,000 members to consider boycotting Israeli academics who had failed to renounce what it called Israel's "apartheid policies."The resolution by the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education deepened the contest among academics in Britain, the United States and the Middle East that has evoked questions of academic freedom. The debate threatened to f
Source: NYT
May 30, 2006
BEIJING — For months now, Caitrin McKiernan has gone from place to place in this city to ask Chinese people an unlikely question: What does the life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. mean to you?The questions don't end there, either. In most of these gatherings, she gets far more specific, burrowing into the history and tactics of the American civil rights movement.
"Who knows what the Birmingham bus boycott was?" she asked a group of
Source: Yahoo News
May 29, 2006
More than a half-century after hostilities ended in Korea, a document from the war's chaotic early days has come to light — a letter from the U.S. ambassador to Seoul, informing the State Department that American soldiers would shoot refugees approaching their lines.The letter — dated the day of the Army's mass killing of South Korean refugees at No Gun Ri in 1950 — is the strongest indication yet that such a policy existed for all U.S. forces in Korea, and the first evidenc
Source: NYT
May 28, 2006
FEW images created in the last century are as recognizable as the official portrait of Mao that looms over Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
For decades, the 15-by-20-foot oil painting has served as a national icon. This is the same image that, in the 1960's and 70's, was widely reproduced and hung near the entrances to millions of homes, schools, factories and government buildings. During the Cultural Revolution, when Mao was raised to cult status, it seemed as if the entire nation had
Source: NYT
May 27, 2006
THEY have been called mystical, awe-inspiring, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. But it is safe to say that in the 45 centuries the great pyramids of Giza have cast their formidable shadow over the desert, they have never before been described as a cuckoo clock.
But that is what Jean-Pierre Houdin said as he lifted his tall lanky body up the steps into the pyramid of Cheops, the largest of the three pyramids high up on the Giza plateau overlooking this teeming, ancient
Source: NYT
May 28, 2006
Two days before British academics were to vote on a possible boycott of their Israeli colleagues, the lines sharpened on Saturday as 600 university teachers from Britain, Canada, the United States and Israel came out in opposition to the move while Palestinian and other academics supported it.The National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education, Britain's biggest union of college teachers, is to vote Monday on a resolution asking its 67,000 members to b
Source: NYT
May 27, 2006
Charlotte Brontë offered to rewrite parts of "Jane Eyre" after a legal threat from the headmaster of the school on which she based the infamous Lowood, where pupils were half-starved, according to newly discovered letters. The letters, written by the headmaster's grandson in 1912, were found a month ago and will be put up for sale in June by the auction house Mullock Madeley in Shropshire, England, Reuters reported. The letters recount how the description of the sc
Source: Washington Times
May 28, 2006
President Bush yesterday told members of the U.S. Military Academy's graduating class that they are fighting a generation-long war against Islamic radicalism and said he has prepared them the same way President Truman prepared for the long Cold War.
The 861 men and women belong to the first class to have entered West Point after the September 11 terrorist attacks, and Mr. Bush told them the fight is "still in the early stages."
"The war began on my watch --
Source: MSNBC
May 28, 2006
Calling himself “a son of Germany,” Pope Benedict XVI prayed at the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz on Sunday and asked why God was silent when 1.5 million victims, mostly Jews, died in this “valley of darkness.”
Ending a four-day pilgrimage to Poland, Benedict said humans could not fathom “this endless slaughter” but only seek reconciliation for those who suffered “in this place of horror.”
As on the rest of his trip, he walked in the footsteps of his Polish-bor
Source: Rocky Mountain News
May 27, 2006
On the treacherous, frostbitten face of the remote Alaskan volcano, a wildlife biologist saw the ragged but distinctive metal wing of an old airplane and scrambled toward the wreckage.
It was an unusually clear day in 2001 on Kiska Island, and Ian Jones and his colleague took the chance to climb the active volcano, searching for signs of rats that had begun attacking the island's native bird population. Then he saw the airplane.
Jones scurried across the rocky s
