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: AP
July 20, 2010
Protesters and police scuffled Tuesday at a school board meeting in North Carolina over claims that a new busing system would resegregate schools, roiling racial tensions reminiscent of the 1960s.
Nearly 20 people were arrested, including the head of state NAACP chapter who was banned from the meeting after a trespassing arrest at a June school board gathering.
"We know that our cause is right," Barber said shortly before police put plastic handcuffs on his wr
Source: Deccan Herald
July 20, 2010
It was a long walk through a hilly landscape mottled with green where bristly bushes wormed their way between brown boulders. There was nary a soul in sight but every so often, the clear sound of a goatherd calling to a stray member of his herd came wafting through the air, followed sometimes by a line of goats crossing our path, nosing and grazing their way through the scrub. It was an idyllic scene and I was almost loath to reach our destination. Almost, but not quite, for at our destination l
Source: The Virginian-Pilot
July 20, 2010
After surviving perhaps 400 years in the sand and surf off the North Carolina coast, the 12-ton remains of a shipwreck are making their final port-of-call.
What could be the oldest wreck ever found on the North Carolina coast was loaded onto the back of a truck Monday for a 90-mile trip to the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum in Hatteras.
Salvaged from the pounding surf in April, the wreck has rested under the shade of an oak tree near the Currituck Beach Lighthouse for
Source: BBC
July 19, 2010
Archaeologists are carrying out a virtual excavation of Stonehenge to discover what the area looked like when the monument was built.
The multi-million pound Euro study will map the terrain and its buried archaeological remains with pinpoint accuracy, organisers claim.
The millions of measurements will then be analysed and incorporated into gaming technology to produce 2D and 3D images.
The research will take three years.
Equipment will be spr
Source: BBC
July 20, 2010
A man dubbed the "Tome Raider" after he stole rare books valued at £1m has been sent back to jail for taking 13 antique volumes from a London library.
William Jacques, 41, was found guilty of removing the works from the Lindley Library at the Royal Horticultural Society between 2004 and 2007.
Prosecutors told Southwark Crown Court he stole in a "systemic" manner.
Jacques was jailed for three-and-a-half years. He was previously jailed in
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 20, 2010
Rescue workers have called off a week-long search for three missing treasure hunters in Arizona's forbidding Superstition Mountains.
The local sheriff said that the three men had probably died from dehydration during their trek in the unforgiving landscape.
The adventurers left on July 6 in search of The Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine, telling their families that they would be back in four days. Their vehicle was found on July 11 with no trace of the men, Maricopa County S
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 20, 2010
An exhibition showcasing hundreds of never-before-seen artworks painted by serving US soldiers has been unveiled for the first time in America.
More than 300 paintings created by serving US servicemen and women depict various images of war that were witnessed first hand.
The paintings, most which never have been placed on public display, were selected from about 15,000 artworks collected by the US Army since the 1840s.
The exhibition, which covers every
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 20, 2010
The grave of Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, the man who failed to kill Adolf Hitler, may have been discovered in a wood in Germany.
Stauffenberg and other co-conspirators were summarily executed after a bomb the army officer planted at Hitler's east Prussian HQ failed to kill him on July 20 1944.
Stauffenberg and several others were shot dead in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock, the army HQ in the centre of Berlin, in the hours following the coup attempt. Their
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 20, 2010
David Cameron has asked the UK's top civil servant to review the Government's documentation on the release of the Lockerbie bomber, it has been disclosed.
The Prime Minister has instructed Sir Gus O'Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, to ensure that all material that "should be made public has been made public".
Downing Street signalled the move amid efforts to defuse renewed anger in the US over the compassionate release of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi last y
Source: AP
July 20, 2010
The war in Iraq led to a loss of focus on the threat from al-Qaida, emboldened the group's leader Osama bin Laden, and helped to breed a generation of homegrown terrorists, Britain's former domestic spy chief told an inquiry Tuesday.
Making the sharpest criticism so far aired in Britain's inquiry into mistakes made in the Iraq war, Eliza Manningham-Buller, director of the MI5 agency between 2002 and 2007, said Britain's government paid little attention to warnings that the war would
Source: AP
July 20, 2010
The Senate Judiciary Committee has voted to approve Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court.
The 13-6 vote sends Kagan's nomination to the full Senate, where she's expected to be confirmed as early as next week to succeed retiring Justice John Paul Stevens.
Just one Republican, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, joined panel Democrats in supporting President Barack Obama's second Supreme Court nominee. A few more Republicans are likely to back her in the full
Source: CNN
July 20, 2010
British Prime Minister David Cameron has offered to meet with four U.S. senators Tuesday to discuss the 2009 release of a Libyan man convicted of playing a role in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
It was not immediately clear if the four senators from New Jersey and New York -- Robert Menendez, Frank Lautenberg, Kirsten Gillibrand and Charles Schumer -- would be able to accept Cameron's invitation to meet with him at the British ambassador's residence in Wa
Source: Newsweek
July 20, 2010
Faulkner speaks! Fifty years after he spent two years as writer in residence at the University of Virginia, the school has posted online recordings of the two addresses, the dozen readings, and the 1,400 questions that students, faculty, and interested townspeople of Charlottesville, Va., posed to the author. For Faulkner fans, these 28 hours of talking and reading are Christmas in July.
Apart from brief stints in New Orleans, New York City, and Europe, Faulkner lived in only two pl
Source: Guardian (UK)
July 19, 2010
Franz Kafka wanted all his manuscripts to be burned after his death, but his friend Max Brod disregarded the request, seeding a complex legal battle over thousands of manuscripts that has the literary world agog. That legal tussle takes a new twist today as four safety deposit boxes in a Zurich bank containing the manuscripts are opened.
The boxes are believed to contain thousands of manuscripts by Kafka and Brod, including letters, journals, sketches and drawings, some of which hav
Source: WaPo
July 21, 2010
Yards Brewing Co.'s Ales of the Revolution are beers with a history chaser. The Philadelphia microbrewery, which opened in 1995 in a building the size of a toolshed and now occupies a former skateboard rink, has attempted to replicate the brews our Colonial forefathers would have downed while talking sedition in wayside taverns.
General Washington's Tavern Porter takes its cue from a home-brew recipe, preserved in the New York Public Library, that Washington jotted down while he was
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
July 20, 2010
As a young conservator, fresh from graduate school, Mark S. Tucker found himself facing a humbling task.
In 1980, he joined the conservation department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and was thrown into preparations for the large retrospective of Thomas Eakins' work the museum would be mounting in 1982.
That's when he first encountered Eakins' 1875 masterpiece, The Gross Clinic, owned at the time by Jefferson Medical College.
"I did a very, very min
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 18, 2010
The public are being given the chance to design a national memorial in honour of the Spitfire which will be up to three times the size of the original fighter.
The statue – which will be up to 180ft (55m) tall – is to be erected in Southampton, the city where the aircraft was designed and first built.
The Spitfire Tribute Foundation, the organisation behind the scheme, is launching a public competition, backed by The Sunday Telegraph, to select the design.
Source: ANDINA
July 18, 2010
Archaeologists in Peru have unearthed the remains of what is believed to have been a high-ranking official of the Sican culture who lived about 1,200 years ago.
A team co-led by Peruvian archaeologist Carlos del Carpio found the tomb, along with many burial artifacts, about 1,500 meters west of the Lord of Sican's tomb in Huaca Las Ventanas archaeological site, near the Pomac Forest Historical Sanctuary, in the northern Lambayeque region.
According to Peruvian daily El
Source: Live Science
July 19, 2010
A well-preserved tomb believed to be the final resting place of an ancient Mayan king has been discovered in Guatemala, scientists announced last week.
The 1,600-year-old tomb was discovered on May 29 beneath the El Diablo pyramid in the city of El Zotz. It is packed with of carvings, ceramics, textiles, and the bones of six children, who might have been sacrificed at the time of the king's death.
However, much more work is needed before the scientists can piece togethe
Source: Congress.org
July 20, 2010
Abraham Lincoln dwarfed other presidents in tourism to federally run sites in 2009, thanks in part to celebrations tied to the bicentennial of his birth.
According to figures collected by the National Park Service , nearly 6.8 million people visited sites associated with Lincoln last year, including his memorial on the National Mall, Ford's Theatre and childhood homes in Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois.
By contrast, 2.7 million people visited two sites associated with Fr
