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: The Star
August 31, 2011
YORK, ENGLAND—Helen Brower is a window cleaner and people pay five pounds ($7.25) an hour to watch her work.Brower is one of a half dozen glaziers hired to clean and restore the world’s largest collection of medieval stained-glass windows. They festoon York Minster, one of Europe’s largest cathedrals and they need to be cleaned every 125 years....On Wednesday and Friday afternoons, tours — with a maximum of 10 people — are conducted into the bowels of the cathedral to watch glaziers work on the medieval window panes. While down there visitors can also see remains of the Roman fortress that once stood on this site before the cathedral was built between 1220 and 1472. Yes, it took 252 years.Another sign of York’s Roman heritage is the high stone wall surrounding the city’s ancient core. Much of it was built by the Romans back in 71 AD, about the same time they were building the colosseum in Rome....
Source: BBC News
September 1, 2011
An ancient church in Beverley that dates back to the 12th Century has given the BBC access to a secret room hidden behind its altar.The room inside St Mary's Church contains some unusual artefacts that would not be normally found inside a parish church including a scold's bridle, which was an iron muzzle used as a form of punishment, and an elaborate maiden's garland from the 17th Century.How and why these objects turned up at the church is still a mystery.
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
August 31, 2011
It is a long journey down into the dark - and back into the depths of history.But it certainly isn't a trip for the claustrophobic. The ancient tunnels of Hirbet Madras near the Sea of Galilee, in Israel, are so tight that they are almost impassable in places.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 26, 2011
Bats have driven out the worshippers from the 1,000-year-old church of St Hilda, Ellerburn, in Ryedale, North Yorkshire. For a decade volunteers have striven to keep the altar and woodwork clean, but the droppings from the bats have proved too powerful.“The smell is appalling,” Liz Cowley, a churchwarden told the BBC, “it’s a combination of ammonia from the urine and a musty smell from the droppings that catches at the back of the throat.” The roosting bats have soiled the interior, damaging the furnishings, including the altar. “You can see the urine marks on the altar, they won’t go away,” Mrs Cowley said.It is an offence for anyone intentionally to kill, injure or handle a bat, to disturb a roosting bat, or to damage, destroy or obstruct access to any place used by bats for shelter, whether they are present or not. It is even illegal to be found in possession of a dead bat....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
September 2, 2011
Australian Christians are furious over changes to the national curriculum that will drop the terms BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini) from text books, replacing them with neutral, non-religious language.Under the new politically correct curriculum BC and AD will be replaced with BCE (Before Common Era), BP (Before Present) and CE (Common Era) .Peter Jensen, the Archbishop of Sydney, said that taking references to the birth of Jesus Christ out of school books was an “intellectually absurd attempt to write Christ out of human history” that he likened it to calling Christmas “the festive season”.“It is absurd because the coming of Christ remains the centre point of dating and because the phrase ‘common era’ is meaningless and misleading,” he told the Sydney Daily Telegraph....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
September 2, 2011
The terms BC, Before Christ and AD, Anno Domini, remain in common usage but have been expunged from the secular language of officialdom and academia.While they may not be the language of everyday life, the new terms BCE, Before Common Era and CE , Common Era (first invented in the sixth century AD) are now the rule in order to express politically correct sensitivity to non-Christians....As the Telegraph’s Christopher Booker noted: “The trouble with this politically-correct effort to spare offence to Muslims, Jews, atheists or other non-Christians from the use of a dating system tied to Jesus, is that it prompts any child to ask ‘So what is this Common Era based on?’, and brings up the very point it seeks to avoid.”...
Source: AP
September 1, 2011
LEXINGTON, Va. – About 100 people rallied Thursday evening in opposition to a proposal to limit the flying of the Confederate flag in the rural Virginia city where Robert E. Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson are buried.The Sons of Confederate Veterans organized the "Save our Flags" gathering before the city, which was considering an ordinance to limit flags on downtown poles to just those of the United States, Virginia and the city of Lexington. The proposal has angered defenders of the divisive Southern symbol. It would not limit the flag's display elsewhere."I am a firm believer in the freedom to express our individual rights, which include flying the flag that we decide to fly," said Philip Way, a Civil War re-enactor who turned out for the late-summer rally clad in a Confederate wool uniform. "That's freedom to me."Mimi Knight, watching from a wrought iron fence at a sea of Confederate flags in a small city park, was not part of the rally. But she said she thought the city ordinance seemed too restrictive.
Source: NYT
September 5, 2011
Consider the case of Ned Kelly’s skull.In Australia, Kelly needs no introduction; for Americans, it may help to think of him as Jesse James, Thomas Paine and John F. Kennedy rolled into one.Born about 1854 to an Irish convict exiled to Australia, Kelly became a folk hero as a very young man. He took up arms against a corrupt British constabulary, robbed banks and wrote an explosive manifesto. He was shot and arrested in a final shootout in which he wore homemade metal armor, and in 1880 he was hanged by the Anglo-Irish establishment he despised.As with any semimythical hero, Kelly’s public has always hungered to get closer to the legend. His armor, cartridge bag, boots and a bloody sash became state treasures....
Source: NYT
September 5, 2011
He donated a plot from his backyard garden for New York’s original City Hall, where George Washington would be inaugurated as president. He presided as mayor over a government that assumed responsibility for paupers and banned slaughterhouses within the city limits. He even covered municipal deficits out of his own pocket.Nonetheless, the crated, larger-than-life bronze likeness of Abraham De Peyster remains in a parks department warehouse on Randalls Island — arguably, another unsung casualty of Sept. 11. The statue was removed from Hanover Square in the financial district seven years ago to make room for a memorial to British victims of the attack.De Peyster’s fate is an object lesson in the fleeting fame of former mayors. At best, they survive as the namesake for an airport or expressway (De Peyster Street in downtown Manhattan was swallowed up in the 1960s by new skyscrapers). At worst, they are forgotten, with no visible legacy.As far as enduring monuments are concerned, De Peyster personifies the limitations of statues....
Source: BBC
September 5, 2011
Archaeologists in Austria say they have discovered a large, well-preserved school for Roman gladiators.
The remains of the school, at a site east of the modern capital, Vienna, were found using radar imagery.
The school was part of a Roman city which was an important military and trade outpost 17 centuries ago.
Though excavations have yet to begin, the radar images show thick walls surrounding the compound which contained 40 small cells for fighters.
There is also a training area and a large bathing area in the Carnuntum ruins.
Outside the walls, radar scans show what archaeologists believe was a cemetery for those killed during training....
Source: BBC
September 5, 2011
A lock of Napoleon's hair has been unearthed during a visit by a TV antiques show to the former home of Sir Walter Scott in the Borders.
The historic item was contained in a small handwritten note at Abbotsford House near Melrose.
The hair was found by the Antiques Road Trip team during studies of a blotter book which had belonged to Napoleon.
Jason Dyer of the Abbotsford Trust said it showed the "importance of preserving this wonderful home and its contents".
The hair was rediscovered as one of the show's antiques experts, Anita Manning, and Mr Dyer examined the blotter book which had been on show in the library.
It contained a small handwritten note dated 8 November 1827, written to Sir Walter Scott from a Mr Dalton.
In the note, Mr Dalton explained that the lock of hair was given to him by Lt Col Elphinstone who served under Wellington, and that he believed it would be of great interest to Scott who was famed for his passion for collecting.
The blotter, which is in an extremely fragile condition, the note and hair have now been removed from Abbotsford and are being examined by a team of conservation experts.
They will go on show again to the public once that work has be
Source: BBC
September 5, 2011
The Frome Hoard, the second largest collection of Roman coins found in the UK, is to be brought back from the British Museum to Somerset later.
The coins will go on display at the new Museum of Somerset, in Taunton, which opens at the end of the month.
The collection of 52,000 Roman coins dates back more than 1,700 years and was found in Frome, Somerset, last April by a metal-detector enthusiast Dave Crisp, from Wiltshire....
Source: BBC
September 4, 2011
Few of the tourists who gaze up to admire one of London's most famous landmarks, Nelson's Column, would realise that its column's topmost point is made from the salvaged remains of an unheralded 18th Century warship.
But the HMS Royal George can lay an even greater claim to posterity than providing the foundations of the world-famous statue in honour of perhaps the most celebrated naval hero in British history.
According to naval historian Dr John Bevan, the largely forgotten flagship, which sank in the Solent at Spithead in August 1782, helped divers to locate the wreckage of the Mary Rose in the 1830s - a full 150 years before the stricken vessel was raised from the seabed.
More than 900 people died when the Royal George sank, including 300 women and 60 children who were visiting the ship which was due to head for Gibraltar with HMS Victory.....
Source: BBC
September 3, 2011
An indigenous Brazilian who celebrates her birthday on Saturday may be the oldest woman in the world - and by some distance.
Maria Lucimar Pereira, a member of the Kaxinawa tribe in the Amazon, is 121 years old, says a tribal rights group.
It says she has a birth certificate showing she was born in 1890.
But the Guinness Book of Records says she has not been registered with them. The verified oldest living woman is 115-year-old American Besse Cooper.
Maria puts her longevity down to a healthy lifestyle, Survival International said - with regular dishes including grilled meat, monkey, fish, the root vegetable manioc and banana porridge, and no salt, sugar or processed foods.....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
September 5, 2011
President George W Bush’s most senior aide was forced to drastically increase his security soon after the September 11 attacks because Tony Blair joked that he was an al-Qaeda target, he has disclosed.
Andrew Card became internationally renowned when he was photographed in a Florida classroom whispering into the president’s ear that United Flight 175 had struck the World Trade Centre in New York.
But thanks to Mr Blair, the photograph also had a less well-known impact nine days after the attacks, which Mr Card described publicly for the first time during in an interview with The Daily Telegraph.
“He said: ’Andy, it’s so good to see you. You’re a marked man. You’re a target for every terrorist out there. They use that picture of you whispering to the president as target practice’.” Mr Card said Mr Blair appeared to be joking that he had received this information from British security officials. But it was taken absolutely seriously by their American counterparts.....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
9-5-111
A Dutch historian has used a unique 1,700 year old map of Roman roads to create an online journey planner giving the destinations, distances and timings of routes used by ancient travellers in the days of empire.
Routes are based on the Tabula Peutingeriana, a one of a kind chart, which shows an imperial Roman road network, or curses public's, that stretches from Britain to the river Ganges that flows through India and Bangladesh.
The huge map, last updated in the third or fourth century, shows 2,760 towns with lists of distances and destinations on the Roman roads connecting them, all set out on a scroll of parchment almost 23 feet long.
The original version of the Roman route tables was prepared two thousand years ago under the direction of Marcus Agrippa, the statesman, general and son-in-law of Augustus, the first Roman Emperor.
Placed on the Unesco
Source: AP
September 5, 2011
A new video shows a cloud of gray smoke rising in the sky minutes after United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in western Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001.
The Tribune-Democrat newspaper of Johnstown says the video was filmed and narrated by Somerset County resident Dave Berkebile, who died this year.
Berkebile calmly reports a plane has crashed a few miles from his Berlin home and assumes a link to the other terror attacks that day....
Source: CNN
September 5, 2011
Some families of 9/11 victims say they are confused, anxious and surprised as the 10th anniversary approaches because they have not received invitations to the Sunday ceremony opening the ground zero memorial.
Gillian Joseph, who lost her husband Stephen in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, said she is thinking of canceling her plans to attend the memorial because the whole thing seems so disorganized.
So did Ansu Philip, who said the mayor's office finally told her after several days of calling that she would be receiving the invitation last week but she still has not received it. It's been 10 days since she spoke to the mayor's office, and she is anxious to make sure she and her relatives can attend the memorial to honor her daughter, Sneha Anne Philip.
The confusion and anxieties surround official invitations -- or lack of them -- for the Sunday morning service that will mark the opening of the National September 11 Memorial at ground zero. The ceremony starting at 8:30 a.m. will include the reading of the names of victims and two moments of silence to mark the times the towers were hit.
Source: CNN
September 5, 2011
Former President George W. Bush says he experienced no pleasure when he heard about the death of Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader responsible for orchestrating the deadly terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Schnall interviewed the former president as part of a documentary airing on National Geographic on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The interview covers a broad range of topics tied to Bush's response to the attacks -- a response that remains a source of deep political division both within the United States and overseas.
Bush told Schnall that initially he thought a small plane had hit one of the towers at New York's World Trade Center.
Among other things, Bush ordered the military to shoot down commercial planes that failed to respond to a Federal Aviation Administration demand to land as quickly as possible.
For a time, the president was unsure if that order was responsible for the crash of United Airlines flight 93 near Shanksville, Pennsylvania....
Source: HNN Staff
September 2, 2011
The annual meeting of the American Political Science Association was briefly interrupted this afternoon when a woman protesting the appearance of Bush administration official John Yoo loudly denounced him from the floor when he began to speak. She continued remonstrating against him for three minutes and fifty-four seconds to the catcalls of the audience, who demanded she "shut-up" and leave. Eventually security escorted her out. She was allowed to leave before the police arrived.Yoo, a professor of law at Berkeley, has been the subject of protests for authoring memos in the Bush administration in defense of enhanced interrogation techniques denounced by critics as torture.He was speaking on a panel discussing "The 150th Anniversary of Fort Sumter: Lessons for Presidential Power Today."Yoo refused to be drawn into a debate with the woman, who charged him with defending torture. She demanded that audience members leave to signal their censure of his memos. None left.After she was physically forced to leave he proceeded with a shortened version of his talk. He said he didn't want to take up more time than he was allotted in the program.
