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: World Press
February 23, 2006
The Xeni Gwet'in First Nations in the western interior region of British Columbia are taking ancient myths into the courtroom as part of a nearly two decade-long battle with the Canadian government over the title to their land."This case is well known and will set a precedent on aboriginal title based on earlier court decisions, as well as establishing the government's role in providing financial support to First Nations for legal costs," said Doug McAr
Source: Guardian (UK)
February 21, 2006
America and Germany are in dispute over the fate of a vast trove of Holocaust archives yet to be seen by historians or the general public.The documents are one of the world's largest collections of Nazi-era papers, and include files on more than 17 million people. The archive is kept at Bad Arolsen in Germany by the International Tracing Service (ITS), a branch of the international committee of the Red Cross established to help families find out what happened to their relati
Source: BBC News
February 23, 2006
A medieval jug is likely to stay in Britain after a David and Goliath struggle between a small museum and the mighty New York Metropolitan Museum. Luton Museums, with £2,500 a year for new exhibits, is getting £590,000 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund.
This will help to match the £750,000 price offered by the world-famous "Met" for the Wenlok Jug.
Luton museum's fund has received £160,000 already from the National Art Collections
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 23, 2006
Our ancestors colonised Europe and wiped out their Neanderthal cousins even faster than we thought, says a study published today.Argument has raged for years about whether our ancestors from Africa outsurvived, killed or bred with the Neanderthals, who were stronger, bulkier and shorter but had equally large brains.
Now developments in radiocarbon dating suggest that many of the dates published over the past 40 years are likely to underestimate the true ages of
Source: Times (UK)
February 21, 2006
A WAR GRAVE found near Chester has helped to locate the earliest firmly identified battlefield site in England. About 120 corpses, many with horrendous wounds, can be attributed by radiocarbon dating and historical records to the Battle of Chester in AD 616, when the Venerable Bede records that King Aethelfrith of Northumbria defeated a scratch army accompanied by many monks from the nearby monastery at Bangor-on-Dee.
Source: Haaretz
February 22, 2006
Holocaust-deniers from the West play a key role in attempts by Iran to cast doubts on the veracity of the Holocaust, according to documents that have appeared on an Internet site.The documents reveal Iranians have consulted with well-known Holocaust-deniers from Western countries as part of the Iranian initiative to hold a conference about the Holocaust.
The documents were published on an Internet site involved in Holocaust denial and reached scholars at t
Source: Middle East Times
February 22, 2006
Spain's interior ministry said on Tuesday that police had recovered 21 Babylonian and Sumerian artifacts stolen in Iraq that had been due to go on auction in Madrid.
Source: BBC News
February 22, 2006
A bomb attack in Iraq has badly damaged one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam, sparking furious protests. Thousands of Iraqis have gathered at the al-Askari shrine in Samarra, north of Baghdad, where two men blew up the famous golden dome in a dawn raid. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the spiritual head of Iraq's Shia Muslims, has called for a week of mourning.
Shias in Baghdad attacked at least five Sunni mosques in reprisal raids, with disturbances re
Source: BBC News
February 22, 2006
The historic home of Sir Walter Scott in the Borders has been set a £10m target in order to survive. Failure to raise the sum could see Abbotsford House - near Melrose - close to visitors within four to five years. Executors of the estate of Dame Jean Maxwell-Scott, the National Trust and Faculty of Advocates, have drawn up a strategy to raise the funds.
Half the money would be used to improve facilities, with the rest put in an endowment fund to co
Source: Yahoo News
February 22, 2006
Gladiators may have fought and died to entertain others in the brutality of the Roman arena but they appear to have abided by a strict code of conduct which avoided savage violence, forensic scientists say.Tests on the remains of 67 gladiators found in tombs at Ephesus in Turkey, center of power for ancient Rome's eastern empire, show they stuck to well defined rules of combat and avoided gory free-for-alls.
Injuries to the front of each skull suggested that ea
Source: Wa Po
February 22, 2006
For 350 years, coal-black ravens have wandered freely around the Tower of London's grassy inner courtyard as cawing barometers of the monarchy's vitality -- if the ravens ever die or leave the tower, the legend goes, the tower and the kingdom will fall.
Now the fear of bird flu has done what Luftwaffe bombings, blizzards, assassinations and abdications could not, forcing the ravens to be moved inside in isolation for their own safety and to hedge Britain's bets on the future of the
Source: NYT
February 22, 2006
It isn't often that Washington generates a memorial structure simultaneously with the era it happens to exemplify. But the dollar-devouring construction pit known as the Capitol Visitors Center deserves a more candid title. The Big Debt Dig, perhaps, as the center's cost overruns mount apace with the egregious mass of deficit, debt and interest run-ups that will mark the larger budget folly of the Bush era for generations to come. The latest word on the center, t
Source: The Australian
February 21, 2006
A 17TH-CENTURY death mask claimed to be that of British playwright William Shakespeare could be genuine, according to new research. The mask, discovered in a ragpicker's shop in 1842 and now owned by the German city of Darmstadt, has long been a subject of controversy.
It bears the high forehead and prominent nose and beard associated with the Bard and bears the inscription "+ Ao Dm 1616", apparently meaning "Died Anno Domini 1616", the year
Source: BBC
February 21, 2006
An Israeli lawyer, Ervin Shahar, says he has asked Germany to charge Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with denying the Holocaust.Mr Ahmadinejad was widely criticised when he said last year that the Holocaust was a "myth" and that Israel should be "wiped off the map".
Germany passed a law in 1993 forbidding Holocaust denial. It is punishable by up to five years in prison.
Six million Jews were killed by the Nazis during World
Source: AP
February 21, 2006
Three former makers of lead paint created a public nuisance that continues to poison children, a jury decided Wednesday in the state's landmark lawsuit against the companies.The verdict means the companies that once made lead paint and pigment could be held responsible for millions of dollars in cleanup and mitigation costs, though the state never put a dollar value on its lawsuit.
Superior Court Judge Michael Silverstein will decide later how much, if anything,
Source: The Post (New Zealand)
February 22, 2006
Nazi war criminals could be hiding out in New Zealand, says a leading war crime researcher with the Simon Wiesenthal Centre.
Dr Efraim Zuroff, director of the centre's Israeli office, is disappointed New Zealand authorities did so little to prosecute suspects he had named in 1990."New Zealand set up a police unit to investigate the problem and decided not to proceed with any form of legal action.
"Unlike the other Anglo-Saxon Western demo
Source: The Daily Telegraph
February 22, 2006
Russia's struggle to confront one of the most controversial episodes of its Communist past took a fresh twist yesterday after prosecutors rejected an application to formally exonerate Nicholas II, the country's last czar.The refusal to issue an official rehabilitation decree for the czar and his family, executed by a Bolshevik firing squad in 1918, comes after a two-month investigation by prosecutors who said they did not find evidence that the killings were officially
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
February 21, 2006
Since the 1970s, Mr. Miller, 48, of Laurel, Md., has pored over books, soldiers' letters and regimental histories for insect references. He found that mosquitoes, body lice and flies were a constant nuisance to Union and Confederate soldiers. Roughly 60,000 soldiers died from malaria on the Union side alone, he said."I think the beauty of looking at the insects is it's a topic that we all can relate to," he said. "Few of us can relate to combat."
Source: Der Spiegel
February 21, 2006
Tucked in a small town in central Germany is the world's biggest archive on the fate of millions of Holocaust victims and Nazi era slave laborers. The United States and historians are calling for it to be opened up for research, but claim Germany is refusing to do just that.Germany has vigorously denied that it is obstructing efforts to give historians access to the world's largest archive on the Nazi concentration camp network and the victims of the Holocaust. A spokeswoman
Source: Baltimore Jewish Times
February 21, 2006
Schalva Chaimovich Mamistvalov is one of those proud older Soviet men -- and, sometimes, women -- who for big occasions will don the dark blazer upon which they've pinned a chestful of medals for World War II heroics. Mamistvalov is one of a rare breed: a Jew apologetic, even nostalgic, for the iron-fisted ways of Stalin. This sentiment is particularly strong among the Jews of Gori, where worship of the man born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili permeates the entire city.At
