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: Middle East Times
April 7, 2006
An Egyptian archaeological team has discovered a series of structures in the southwestern town of Fayoum that could yield vital data as to how a Middle Kingdom temple was built, the culture minister said on Thursday.
Farouk Hosni said that the structures included administrative buildings, granaries and residences believed to have belonged to priests of the temple, which was dedicated to Renenutet, the goddess of harvest, as well as the crocodile-god Sobk and falcon-deity Horus, Hos
Source: Ansa.it
April 6, 2006
Italian archaeologists believe they have found an ancient city where the demi-gods Castor and Pollux fought Aeneas, the Trojan hero whose descendants founded Rome .
Lorenzo and Stefania Quilici of Bologna and Naples universities claim the large, massive-walled settlement dating from the VI to III Century BCE was the city of Amyclae, believed by Renaissance scholars to be somewhere near Lake Fondi between Rome and Naples .
Source: Iraq War & Archaeology site
April 7, 2006
The Nimrud gold is to be shown at the Arthur M.
Sackler Gallery in February next year. The date was set in Copenhagen on 17 March by the Iraqi ministry of culture and United Exhibits Group (UEG), the Danish commercial venture organising the show. ... the first venue for the Nimrud treasures is the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, part of the Smithsonian Institution. Various formalities have to be completed before the exhibition is officially announced, in a few weeks’ time.
Source: myrtlebeachonline.com
April 6, 2006
The California state Senate will consider a bill that would require schools to teach students about the contributions gays and lesbians have made to society - an effort that supporters say is an attempt to battle discrimination and opponents say is designed to use the classroom to get children to embrace homosexuality.
The bill, which was passed by a Senate committee Tuesday, would require schools to buy textbooks "accurately" portraying "the sexual diversity of our s
Source: Boston Globe
April 7, 2006
A limestone memorial to Civil War dead from Company A, 53d Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, lies on its side atop Laurel Hill Cemetery, knocked from its pedestal along with 90 other tombstones in a spree of vandalism.The memorial in the historic graveyard contains the weathered names of Fitchburg men who lost their lives to combat or disease in a bloody campaign near the Mississippi River in 1863. Now, their descendants scattered and their exploits all
Source: Inside Higher Ed
April 7, 2006
Why?
That question lingered above all others for some academics upon learning that David Horowitz, a conservative writer and social activist, would debate Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, on Thursday night in Washington about whether politics belong in the classroom.
And many observers were still asking the same question after the relatively substance-free debate ended. “I think they both would have gotten a failing
Source: NYT
April 7, 2006
An early Christian manuscript, including the only known text of the Gospel of Judas, has surfaced after 1,700 years, and it portrays Judas Iscariot not as a betrayer of Jesus but as his favored disciple and willing collaborator.In this text, scholars reported yesterday, the account of events leading to the Crucifixion differs sharply from the four gospels in the New Testament. Here Jesus is said to entrust Judas with special knowledge and ask him to betray him to
Source: NYT
April 7, 2006
A London judge ruled today that Dan Brown did not steal the idea for his stratospherically successful thriller, "The Da Vinci Code," from an earlier book, and he cleared Mr. Brown's publisher, Random House, of accusations of copyright infringement. In issuing his judgment, Justice Peter Smith said that Mr. Brown did indeed rely on "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" in writing a section of the book, but he said that Michael Baigent and Richard Leig
Source: Boston Globe
April 7, 2006
Nazi Germany planned to expand the extermination of Jews beyond the borders of Europe and into British-controlled Palestine during World War Two, two German historians say.In 1942, the Nazis created a special "Einsatzgruppe," a mobile SS death squad, which was to carry out the mass slaughter of Jews in Palestine similar to the way they operated in eastern Europe, the historians argue in a new study.
The director of the Nazi research center in Ludwigsbu
Source: Independent (London)
April 6, 2006
For 25 years, this exquisitely enamelled medieval casket had been on loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Made in the French city of Limoges in about 1200, it was designed to hold the relics of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury famously murdered in Canterbury Cathedral. It had been on public display until 2000 when it was put into storage while the new Medieval and Renaissance Galleries were prepared.
Like its sister work, a slightly earlier Becket casket whi
Source: BBC
April 6, 2006
A replica of the first European ship to visit Australia 400 years ago has set off on a year-long voyage in the footsteps of 17th Century sailors.
The Dutch ship Duyfken, or Little Dove, first mapped Australia's coastline in 1606, and a Fremantle-built replica is to retrace its journey.
The ship's builders say the project aims to help dispel the myth that Captain Cook "discovered" Australia.
Source: BBC
April 6, 2006
More than 6,000 artworks looted by the Nazis during World War II should be returned to their rightful owners, an Austrian panel has recommended.
Culture Minister Elisabeth Gehrer said a total of 6,292 works were earmarked for return to their rightful owners or heirs - most of whom were Jewish.
Austria has been returning works to their rightful owners under the 1998 culture property restitution law.
Source: CBS News
April 6, 2006
For 2,000 years, Judas has been reviled for betraying Jesus. Now a newly translated ancient document seeks to tell his side of the story.
The "Gospel of Judas" tells a far different tale from the four gospels in the New Testament. It portrays Judas as a favored disciple who was given special knowledge by Jesus — and who turned him in at Jesus' request. "You will be cursed by the other generations — and you will come to rule over them,
Source: National Geographic News
April 6, 2006
After 1,700 years, the Gospel of Judas is lost no more. And the twisting tale of the document itself is nearly as surprising as the story it tells.
"We can consider it a real miracle that [such an ancient literary work]—especially one threatened by the hatred of the great majority of its contemporary readers, who saw it as a shame and a scandal, destined to be lost … would suddenly appear and be brought to light," said scholar Rodolphe Kasser.
Source: Gettsyburg Times
April 6, 2006
Three hundred citizens gathered in the Gettysburg College Student Union ballroom Wednesday to express their joy or displeasure at the idea of a casino near Gettysburg. At the receiving end of the comments were members of the state Gaming Control Board, which later this year will decide who receives two available casino resort licenses.LeVan, president and CEO of the investment group behind the proposed Crossroads Gaming Resort and Spa, told the board his 3,000-ma
Source: wric.com
April 6, 2006
FREDERICK, Md. The Civil War "battle that saved Washington" is getting a fresh interpretation.
The National Park Service is breaking ground today for a new visitor center at the Monocacy (mah-NAH'-kah-see) National Battlefield just south of Frederick, Maryland.
The three-point-five (m) million-dollar structure on state Route 355 will house a museum shop and exhibits designed to better explain the clash to the 17-hundred people who visit the site on the banks o
Source: NewsObserver.com
April 6, 2006
Former UNC-Chapel Hill Provost Richard Richardson had heard bits and pieces about Chapel Hill's slave poet -- the man who charged students 25 to 75 cents for acrostics to give to their sweethearts.
But it wasn't until Richardson was doing research for the university's bicentennial celebration that he really came to know the work of George Moses Horton, the Chatham County slave who published his first book of poetry before he could write."For a m
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation of American Scientists
April 6, 2006
One of the lacunae in the history of defense policy and science advice to government concerns the role of the JASON advisory panel. A fascinating new book on the JASONs helps to fill in that mysterious gap.
Established in 1960, the JASONs first gained unwelcome public attention as the result of a reference in the leaked Pentagon Papers. They have only rarely since been heard from in public.Their membership is not publicized. Their meetings are closed.
Source: NYT
April 6, 2006
For most of the last 60 years, Maria Altmann did not know that the celebrated Klimt paintings hanging in the Austrian Gallery in Vienna actually belonged to her. And when she learned that they most likely did, she also knew that recovering them was probably an impossible quest.
But in an unexpected turn of events, the endless ripples of World War II history have washed up on the shore of a California museum, where this week the 90-year-old Mrs. Altmann came face to face with the su
Source: NYT
April 6, 2006
For several years, museum curators and American painting experts had been troubled by discrepancies between Norman Rockwell's 1954 canvas "Breaking Home Ties" and tear sheets of the legendary Saturday Evening Post cover for which he painted it.
Last month — more than three decades after the owner divorced, and nearly a year after his death — his son Dave, 54, noticed a strange gap in a wood-paneled wall in his father's house. When he and his brother Don Jr., 59, gave it a
