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: Telegraph (UK)
March 22, 2010
The National Museum of Natural History in Washington is celebrating its 100th anniversary with an exhibition on human origins featuring Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon skulls on show for the first time outside Europe.
The museum's new $20.7 million (£13.8) exhibition hall, dubbed the Hall of Human Origins, provides visitors an "opportunity to connect their personal life to the evidence that human species evolves over million of years," museum director Cristian Samper said as h
Source: BBC News
March 23, 2010
A call for a memorial to the government army that fought at Culloden has been opposed by members of a society which recalls the Jacobite cause.
Historian Trevor Royle has said the soldiers should be "dignified by a memorial" on the battlefield.
But members of A Circle of Gentlemen said a monument was a "step too far".
They were opposed because of atrocities committed by the Duke of Cumberland's government troops in the aftermath of the b
Source: AP
March 23, 2010
Has even the Last Supper been supersized?
The food in famous paintings of the meal has grown by biblical proportions over the last millennium, researchers report in a medical journal Tuesday.
Using a computer, they compared the size of the food to the size of the heads in 52 paintings of Jesus Christ and his disciples at their final meal before his death.
If art imitates life, we're in trouble, the researchers conclude. The size of the main dish grew 69 per
Source: Telegraph (UK)
March 23, 2010
The Blue Mass pills taken as antidepressants by Abraham Lincoln contained dangerously high levels of mercury likely to have caused his notoriously wild temper, scientists have found.
The 16th President of the United States took the pills in the 1850s to alleviate what one contemporary described as the “cave of gloom” in which he lived.
But researchers who analysed a recently unearthed sample of the medicine discovered it contained up to 120 times the acceptable daily i
Source: AP
March 23, 2010
A German court on Tuesday convicted an 88-year-old of murdering three Dutch civilians as part of a Nazi hit squad during World War II, capping six decades of efforts to bring the former Waffen SS man to justice.
Heinrich Boere, number six on the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of most-wanted Nazis, was given the maximum sentence of life in prison for the 1944 killings.
"These were murders that could hardly be outdone in terms of baseness and cowardice — beyond the r
Source: Scientific American
March 20, 2010
A comparison of ancient and contemporary footprints reveals that our ancestors were strolling much like we do some 3.6 million years ago, a time when they were still quite comfortable spending time in trees, according to a study which will be published in the March 22 issue of the journal PLoS ONE.
Anatomical fossils have given scant confirmation about when our ancestors developed a fully modern gait. Although some researchers have argued that the 4.4 million-year-old ancient human
Source: Ventura County News
March 19, 2010
Some of those arrowheads and artifacts you may come across could get you in trouble. In Ventura County, three men were arrested for disturbing an American-Indian burial site.
Beyond the wildflowers of the Santa Monica Mountains, there are treasures in the hills. The most cherished possessions of the Chumash Indians. Ventura County sheriff's deputies seized several items that were taken by suspected looters.
Deputies displayed relics found with three Newbury Park men,
Source: AP
March 22, 2010
Food coupons for some of the notorious Nazi doctors at the Auschwitz death camp — including perhaps the sadistic Dr. Joseph Mengele — have been found in the attic of a nearby house, where they had lain unseen for decades.
Also found in the attic were other documents relating to the lives of Nazi officials, including death certificates and a map.
Some sugar coupons bear the names of Horst Fischer and Fritz Klein, doctors who were executed for their crimes after the war,
Source: Live Science
March 19, 2010
The sensors in your body that make you tear up when you're cutting onions have been around for 500 million years, a new study finds.
Foods like wasabi and onions, as well as substances like tear gas and cigarette smoke, contain tissue-damaging and irritating chemicals. When you get a taste or waft of the substances, a protein found throughout your body is thought to sense these irritating chemicals and send signals to your nervous system. The result is pain, which is why slicing on
Source: AFP
March 21, 2010
Ever paid top dollar for a bottle of wine that says on the label it's from a much-sought-after year, only to find that it tasted like cheap, non-vintage plonk?
Well, a team of researchers in Australia, who think "vintage fraud" is widespread, have come up with a test that uses radioactive carbon isotopes left in the atmosphere by atomic bomb tests last century and a method used to date prehistoric objects to determine what year a wine comes from, or its vintage.
Source: BBC
March 22, 2010
An exhibition of objects found during archaeological studies on the site of the Weymouth relief road has attracted 3,000 visitors on its first day.
The exhibition at Weymouth Pavilion includes a rare collection of human bones discovered in a mass burial pit.
Tests on the bones revealed them to be young Viking men, who were killed by decapitation and then dumped.
Dorset County Council senior archaeologist Steve Wallis said public interest in the finds have
Source: BBC
March 20, 2010
The battle of El Alamein was a turning point in World War II but the unexploded munitions it left behind continue to kill and maim the local population, as Christian Fraser reports from Egypt.
As spectators of desert warfare, Arab Bedouins have always had the front-row seats.
Today however, Egyptian Bedouin are not merely onlookers but reluctant combatants in a battle against death and injury in their ancestral lands.
The Allied and Axis forces are long g
Source: Telegraph (UK)
March 22, 2010
Former President Bill Clinton has poked fun at Republicans, Democrats and his own health at the Gridiron Club's annual dinner, saying he was only there because "I really didn't have anything much better to do tonight."
The dinner marked the 125th annual gathering of the Gridiron Club, whose members include Washington based reporters.
The dinner marked the 125th annual gathering of the Gridiron Club, whose members include Washington based reporters.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
March 22, 2010
The only privately held copy of a list that Oskar Schindler drew up of Jews to be saved from Nazi concentration camps is on sale for $2.2 million (£1.5m)
The list compiled by Schindler and the accountant Itzhak Stern – and made famous in the Hollywood movie "Schindler's List" by Steven Spielberg – is dated April 18, 1945, and 13 pages long, Mr Zimet said.
Zimet, who runs the collector's website MomentsInTime.com, said he is selling the document on a "fir
Source: Times Online (UK)
March 20, 2010
The German spy service has admitted that it employed about 200 former Nazi criminals for at least 15 years after the end of the Second World War.
Some had been involved in massacres in Poland and Russia, others were Ges-tapo torturers; all found a berth in the West German intelligence service. The cases have been brought to light because the Federal German Intelligence Service (BND) is compiling a history of its espionage activities since 1956 — and so polishing up its image, in the
Source: NYT
March 21, 2010
Down a winding alley, deep in a quiet neighborhood of rutted roads and donkey carts, where food vendors sold cheap sandwiches and children chased after a soccer ball, an extraordinary moment passed here with little notice: Jews and Muslims, Israelis and Egyptians sat together and celebrated their shared heritage.
But no one outside the small group of invited guests was allowed to see.
Egypt spent $1.8 million to restore a part of its historic past, the synagogue and off
Source: WaPo
March 21, 2010
As the final round of the battle over health-care reform begins Sunday, President Obama and the Democrats are in reach of a historic legislative achievement that has eluded presidents dating back a century. The question is at what cost.
By almost any measure, enactment of comprehensive health-care legislation would rank as one of the most significant pieces of social welfare legislation in the country's history, a goal set as far back as the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt and purs
Source: Los Angeles Times
March 21, 2010
A Getty Villa exhibit explores how Europeans looked to ancient Rome to understand the Mexican empire.
A 1,200-pound stone head of an Aztec moon goddess has moved into the Getty Villa. So have life-size statues of a warrior adorned with eagle feathers, a duck-billed wind god and a demon known as the Lord of Death.
Made between 1440 and 1521 and on loan from Mexico City's National Museum of Anthropology and the Templo Mayor Museum, the massive artworks are among 64 sculpt
Source: BBC
June 21, 2010
Cyprus police have arrested a Romanian man suspected of vandalising the tombs of three archbishops in a cemetery in the capital city of Nicosia.
The 34-year old man confessed to removing the marble slabs covering the graves of the churchmen, police said.
The remains of two of the bishops first appeared to have been stolen, but the bones of one of them were in fact buried elsewhere years ago, police say.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
March 19, 2010
The retired general who captured legendary revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara was summoned on Friday by Bolivian authorities investigating an alleged plot against President Evo Morales.
Former Gen Gary Prado allegedly exchanged "ultrasecret" encrypted email with Eduardo Rozsa, a Bolivian-born Hungarian who was slain in an April 2009 raid by an elite police unit.
Authorities allege that Rozsa and two other men killed – an Irishman and an ethnic Hung
