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: BBC
May 25, 2006
The burial ground of Queen Boudicca could be next to a burger restaurant in Birmingham, it has been claimed.
An excavation is to take place at the site in Kings Norton after evidence it has Roman remains buried there.
Queen Boudicca, who led ancient tribes in battle against the Romans, died in 62 AD, possibly in the Midlands.
It would be a "world-shattering" find, said Councillor Peter Douglas Osborn. But experts warned there is no evidence the site
Source: Washington Times
May 25, 2006
St. Elizabeths Hospital in Southeast is the most endangered site in the District, according to the D.C. Preservation League's 10th annual list of endangered places, which was released yesterday.
"As anyone knows, it takes a long time in D.C. for things to happen," said Rebecca Miller, executive director of the group. "It takes telling people over and over."
The federal government plans to build 4.5 million square feet of office space and parking on the
Source: BBC
May 25, 2006
A group of Koreans who want their dead relatives' names removed from Japan's controversial Yasukuni war shrine have lost their case in a Tokyo court.
The Koreans, whose relatives were drafted into Japan's army while Korea was a Japanese colony, want the names to be removed and to be paid damages.
But the court ruled that the government had been correct to give the names of war dead to the shrine.
Source: National Post (Canada)
May 19, 2006
EDITOR'S NOTE: THIS STORY HAS BEEN RETRACTED BY THE NATIONAL POST.
Human rights groups are raising alarms over a new law passed by the Iranian parliament that would require the country's Jews and Christians to wear coloured badges to identify them and other religious minorities as non-Muslims.
"This is reminiscent of the Holocaust," said Rabbi Marvin Hier, the dean of the Simon W
Source: Juan Cole at Informed Comment (blog)
May 25, 2006
Antonia Zerbisias follows up on the the bogus National Post story about Iran having passed a law requiring Christians and Jews to wear badges identifying them as such. She notes that
Source: David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
May 25, 2006
A senior U.S. diplomat in Vichy France in 1940 ordered his staff to refrain from giving visas to Jewish refugees or helping British POWs, according to a newly-discovered interview with one of his deputies.
The tape-recorded interview with the deputy, U.S. vice-consul Hiram Bingham IV, was played in public for the first time at a May 24 event on Capitol Hill Capitol Hill honoring Bingham for his work with journalist Varian Fry to rescue Jewish refugees from the Nazis.
Source: NYT
May 24, 2006
Despite years of work aimed at changing Saudi Arabia's public school curriculum, the country's latest textbooks continue to promote intolerance of other religions, a new study said Tuesday.A first-grade student is taught that "Every religion other than Islam is false"; the teacher instructed to "Give examples of false religions, like Judaism, Christianity, paganism, etc." Fifth graders learn "It is forbidden for a Muslim to be a loyal fri
Source: Washington Times
May 24, 2006
Tussauds Group, which owns and operates Madame Tussauds wax museums around the world, is in talks with developers to open a museum in downtown D.C. in the basement of the former Woodies building, D.C. Council member Jack Evans said yesterday. "I'm talking to them, as I am with others," said Norman Jemal, vice president of Douglas Development Corp., which owns the Woodward & Lothrop Building at 1025 F St. NW.
Source: Tennesean
May 24, 2006
A quiet dead-end street a few blocks off Nashville's busy West End Avenue was the scene Tuesday afternoon for a 21st century attempt to solve a 200-year-old puzzle.
A small group of witnesses gathered as ground-penetrating radar was used by State Archaeologist Nick Fielder and others to search for the grave of the only man ever killed in a duel with Andrew Jackson.Charles Dickinson was slain May 30, 1806, almost exactly two centuries ago, and 22 year
Source: Yahoo
May 23, 2006
ALBANY, Ga. - Amateur archeologists will get a chance to search this summer for the lost mission of Santa Isabel de Utinahica, built in the wilderness in the 1600s for a lone friar who was dispatched to evangelize among the Indians on the edge of Spain's colonial empire. "This was on the frontier," said Dennis Blanton, curator of native American archaeology at Atlanta's Fernbank Museum of Natural History. "It was perched on the edge of the known world in this
Source: BBC
May 24, 2006
The history of major league baseball in the United States is about struggle, segregation, racism, achievement. And for African-Americans of John "Buck" O'Neil's generation, it is also largely an untold story. Until now. The grandson of a slave, Buck O'Neil joined the Kansas City Monarchs in 1938.
He was good - one of the best.
But like others of his colour, he was confined to Negro League Baseball.
The very name jars with the
Source: CNN
May 23, 2006
More than 60 years after it was seized by communists, the Romanian government is to hand back one of the country's most popular tourist sites, the fabled Dracula Castle, to its former owner, the culture minister said Tuesday.
The hand-over ceremony will take place Friday noon in the 14th century castle's museum deep within the fortress in Transylvania, said minister Adrian Iorgulescu at a news conference.The castle, worth an estimated $25 million (19
Source: Common Dreams
May 22, 2006
Prosecution of a politically-connected developer who destroyed irreplaceable Confederate breastworks in a national park has been hampered by the intervention of a powerful U.S. Senator and the Deputy Director of the Park Service who bought a condominium in the development, according to agency documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The case was finally settled, more than four years after the violation, for far less than had been originally assessed a
Source: The Gazette (Montreal)
May 24, 2006
Among the 17 million people named in documents warehoused in a converted hotel in the German town of Bad Arolsen was a man on whom one louse was found. The delousing was done on Jan. 14, 1945, in Gross-Rosen concentration camp, in Nazi-occupied Poland.
The man's name appears on a lined page in neat handwriting. He was one of 13 prisoners on whom 37 lice were found. That one mention in documents means the man was entitled to nearly $10,000 from Germany's $5-billion forced-labour comp
Source: NYT
May 23, 2006
Shir Seniora, 16, returned from a class trip to former concentration camps in Poland haunted by images of fellow Jews herded into gas chambers.
The trips are one way that Israel, 58 years after its establishment in the shadow of the Holocaust, is trying to cope with the fading of history, especially as the number of survivors — and perpetrators — dwindles. Another approach is to bring Israeli youths together with survivors. Teenagers tend to listen to even the smallest details of t
Source: NYT
May 23, 2006
Day in and day out, as the immigration debate boils, the halls of Congress are haunted by the specter of Senate Bill 1200, the failed amnesty legislation of 1986.President Ronald Reagan signed that bill into law with great fanfare amid promises that it would grant legal status to illegal immigrants, crack down on employers who hired illegal workers and secure the border once and for all. Instead, fraudulent applications tainted the process, many employers continued the
Source: Richard Fleming in the Newsletter of the American Revolution Round Table
May 23, 2006
Who's buried in John Paul Jones's crypt at the U.S. Naval Academy? According to Washington College history professor Adam Goodheart, author of an article on the naval hero in Smithsonian Magazine, there is a good chance that it is not the bones of the combative sailor who roared: "We have not yet begun to fight!" Goodheart is calling for a DNA test to make sure they have the right man. A test is within the bounds of possibility. A brother and a sister are buried in the United States an
Source: Columbus Dispatch
May 23, 2006
One of the most vexing problems in archaeology is explaining the shift from societies that made their living by hunting and gathering to those that made their living by growing crops. In the April issue of the journal American Antiquity, Tristram Kidder, an archaeologist with Washington University in St. Louis, has identified a correlation between climate change and the shift to farming. In eastern North America, the change from the hunting and gathering cultures of the Archaic period to the far
Source: Richard Fleming in the Newsletter of the American Revolution Round Table
May 23, 2006
For sixteen years, Benjamin Franklin lived at 36 Craven Street in London, near the Strand and Charing Cross. He moved into the house in 1757, beginning a campaign to oust the descendants of William Penn as the rulers of Pennsylvania. Many think his landlady and owner of the house, widowed Margaret Stevenson, became his second wife when his Philadelphia spouse, Deborah, declined to brave the Atlantic and join him. Now the house has been restored to its 18th Century condition, which Franklin descr
Source: Cultural Heritage News Agency
May 23, 2006
Tehran, 23 May 2006 (CHN) -- Last week it was announced that the remains of a gigantic palace believed to have belonged to Darius the Great, the Achaemenid king who ordered the construction of Palace of Persepolis in Shiraz, was discovered during the archeological excavations in Bolaghi Gorge. This very interesting news attracted the public attention and roused a lot of interest among the people both inside and outside the country. This new discovery disproved some old
