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: Press Release from the National Archives
August 25, 2010
In a transfer ceremony at The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens today, Archivist of the United States David S. Ferriero accepted on behalf of the U.S. Government the original Nuremberg Laws presented by Steven S. Koblik, Huntington president. Gen. George S. Patton Jr. deposited the documents at the Library for safekeeping at the end of World War II. He died in December of 1945 in an automobile crash before he could discuss their final disposition.In pres
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 25, 2010
Archaeologists discovered a Roman "industrial estate" near a ruined fort that may once have been home to a legendary missing legion.
The unearthed site includes the remains of a water-powered flour mill used to grind grain and produce food for the soldiers, clothes, food remains, graves and pottery.
It also contains evidence the Roman occupants might have worn socks, experts who analysed ancient sandals said.
The site was excavated as part of a
Source: AP
August 24, 2010
William Saxbe, a Republican maverick who became the fourth attorney general to serve under President Richard M. Nixon and presided during the Watergate investigation, died Tuesday. He was 94.
Saxbe, who served in the Ohio Legislature and as state attorney general, died at his home in Mechanicsburg, northwest of Columbus, said his son, Charles "Rocky" Saxbe.
Nixon's first two attorneys general were accused of Watergate-related crimes and the third, Elliot Richa
Source: AP
August 25, 2010
For generations, the lore of "One Thousand and One Nights" helped shape Western notions about Muslim culture. The collection of tales described an exotic world of harems and flying carpets, Sinbad and monsters, Aladdin and the jinn, Ali Baba and the 40 thieves.
Now an exhibition about innovation in Muslim civilization seeks to highlight what organizers say is an overshadowed period of history, a "Golden Age" in which advances in engineering, medicine and architec
Source: Sky News
August 25, 2010
white farmer has accused the South African government of genocide in a petition submitted to the United Nations.
The man, who has remained anonymous for fear of reprisals, blamed the African National Congress' (ANC) policies for a wave of murders and criminal attacks against the white community, what he called the "Afrikaner Boer."
At least 3,000 white farmers have been killed in South Africa since the end of apartheid.
The petition was sent to th
Source: AP
August 25, 2010
Egypt's antiquities department announced Wednesday the discovery of a 3,500-year-old settlement in a desert oasis, showing the existence of vibrant desert trade routes that stretched from the Mediterranean down into Sudan from the early days of the Egyptian civilization.
The settlement at Umm el-Mawagir in Egypt's Kharga Oasis, more than 300 miles (500 kilometers) south of Cairo, has been excavated for the past year by a Yale University expedition, whose initial findings suggest it
Source: CNN.com
August 25, 2010
Key West, Florida (CNN) -- For more than 20 years, the bulletproof museum case housed a small piece of yesteryear: a gold bar recovered from a sunken Spanish galleon. Today, its case is broken, littered with black fingerprint dust. The treasure is gone. Stolen. Two thieves were caught in the act by the museum's security cameras.
"This is a special piece," said Melissa Kendrick, executive director of the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum in Key West, Florida.
"Al
Source: Bill Donahue in the Atlantic
September 1, 2010
[Bill Donahue is a writer living in Portland, Oregon.]
When he went marauding about the known world some 800 years ago, Genghis Khan almost certainly never slept on a bed scattered with rose petals. He was a hard guy. So it seems fitting that the journey east from Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia’s capital, toward a 131-foot stainless-steel statue of the infamous Mongol warlord is a stark experience. The roadside is barren of trees and unpeopled, and brown rubbly mountains stretch into the dis
Source: Cleveland Plains-Dealer
August 25, 2010
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The city has condemned the Cleveland house where celebrated 20th century writer Langston Hughes lived during high school.
It's the latest twist for the 120-year-old house on East 86th Street that has been vacant, slated for renovation and nominated for landmark designation.
But city officials don't expect the three-bedroom house to be torn down.
The city's building and housing department condemned the house June 4 -- unaware of its histor
Source: WaPo
August 25, 2010
...It is no secret the residents of these isles like a drink, or three. An inebriated King James I once fell to the royal floor while greeting the King of Denmark, and a room at the Priory - the London rehabilitation clinic - is something of a rite of passage for British celebrities. But even here, the national outcry is reaching a fevered pitch over lager lad hooligans and increasingly, their female counterparts, ladettes, turning British cities and towns into what the new Conservative Prime Mi
Source: NYT
August 24, 2010
Direct medical evidence? None. Autopsy? Not performed. Medical records? Nowhere to be found. Corpse? Disappeared.
Yet according to a recent article in an academic journal, researchers have posited at least 118 causes of death for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
A modest industry of medical speculation has grown up around the subject, evidence of our fascination with what cut down great creative artists in history. In Mozart’s case published speculation began within a month of
Source: NYT
August 24, 2010
The field of archaeology and the timeworn Middle East would not seem the obvious places to look for a wiki revolution. But next month in Jordan, officials who oversee that country’s vast store of antiquities will begin an experiment aimed at bringing 21st-century tools to the task of protecting ancient sites, which is an especially pressing need in neighboring Iraq, where looting is once again on the rise.
Over the last four years the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles, wit
Source: NYT
August 24, 2010
Conjure, for a moment, a place just steps from City Hall but a world apart. Salaam.
Yes, that is the fragrance of strong coffee in the air, of sweet figs and tart lemons, of pastries that remind buyers of childhoods in Damascus and Beirut. Bazaars abound with handmade rugs and brass lamps and water pipes. Men wear fezzes. A few women retire behind veils. Al-Hoda is the leading newspaper. Business signs — at least those legible to a non-Arabic speaker — proclaim “Rahaim & Malhami
Source: NYT
August 25, 2010
Two dozen members of an association to abolish the monarchy were settled around a table in a spacious apartment in the north end of the capital when someone in the back of the room muttered, “Two hundred years since the French Revolution, and still we have a king.”
In other times and in other places, these would-be regicides might have been hounded by the king’s agents. But here in liberal Sweden, they are thriving.
Indeed, so fast has membership in the Swedish Republic
Source: The Epoch Times
August 24, 2010
Adolf Hitler was found to be descended from the Jews and Africans he despised, after numerous DNA tests, according to reports on Tuesday.
Journalist Jean-Paul Mulders and historian Marc Vermeeren took saliva samples from 39 of the former German dictator's relatives, including a cousin who was an Austrian farmer named "Norbert H," and a grand nephew named Alexander Stuart-Houston, who is an American, according to the UK Newspaper the Daily Mail..
Mulders and V
Source: BBC
August 24, 2010
A Bath historian is hoping to give an admiral's wife - who tended to a wounded Lord Nelson - "her rightful place in history".
Dr Elaine Chalus has won a major research grant of more than £100,000 to investigate diaries kept by Elizabeth Wynne.
Elizabeth married one of Nelson's famous 'band of brothers', Captain Thomas Francis Fremantle, during the Napoleonic Wars.
Dr Chalus will use her funding from the British Academy to bring to light more tha
Source: AP
August 23, 2010
The International Spy Museum in Washington has recruited an ex-spy as its new historian.
The museum said Monday that Mark Stout would become historian after spending 13 years in intelligence. He is the museum's first research chief with an intelligence background.
Stout worked at the CIA and the State Department in intelligence and at the Defense Department. He is earning a doctorate in history and holds degrees in political science, mathematics and public policy....
Source: BBC
August 24, 2010
South Sudan is preparing to repatriate some 1.5 million southerners from the north and Egypt, ahead of a referendum due next January on whether the south should secede.
The proposals suggest returnees will travel on trains and buses, as well as boats down the River Nile.
Some two million people have already returned to the south since the end of a two-decade conflict in 2005.
However, some aid workers have questioned the plan's feasibility....
Source: BBC
August 23, 2010
The Egyptian government's head of fine arts has been remanded in custody pending an investigation into the theft of a Van Gogh painting at the weekend.
Muhsin Sha'lan, first under-secretary at the culture ministry, was accused of "negligence", according to the state news agency Mena.
Several other officials were believed to have been detained at the same time.
The theft of the $50m (£32m) painting from a Cairo museum on Saturday has been blamed on
Source: BBC
August 24, 2010
The Isle of Wight is home to the richest source of "pick 'n' mix" dinosaur remains anywhere in the world, a study has suggested.
Weather conditions 130 million years ago have been suggested as one reason why thousands of small teeth and bones lie buried alongside bigger fossils.
Portsmouth University palaeontologist Dr Steve Sweetman and Dr Allan Insole from Bristol University led the study....
