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 17, 2010
Turkey has threatened to expel 100,000 Armenians from the country in response to the US branding the First World War killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks as "genocide".
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, said the position of the immigrants, many of whom have lived there as refugees for a generation, was being reviewed in the wake of the row.
Armenia claims more than 500,000 of its countrymen died in bitter in-fighting as the Ottoman Empire di
Source: Fox News
March 17, 2010
Tourist attraction that claims to be the world's first-ever leprechaun museum is dedicated to the mythical mischief-maker of Irish folklore.
The National Leprechaun Museum aimed to open up "a magical world full of fascinating folklore and enchanting stories" by providing an interactive experience, it said.
Visitors would enter a world where they would become one of the infamous miniature shoemakers, walking under a replica of the mystical Northern Irish landma
Source: NYT
March 15, 2010
Among the archival material from Salman Rushdie currently on display at Emory University in Atlanta are inked book covers, handwritten journals and four Apple computers (one ruined by a spilled Coke). The 18 gigabytes of data they contain seemed to promise future biographers and literary scholars a digital wonderland: comprehensive, organized and searchable files, quickly accessible with a few clicks.
Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments, sweated ov
Source: Discovery News
March 17, 2010
If you thought the marathon being run by NASA's Mars Expedition Rover Opportunity was impressive (the wheeled explorer has covered over 19 kilometers, or 12 miles, and still roving strong), spare a thought for the Russian Lunokhod 2 rover that explored the moon in 1973. It covered 37 kilometers (23 miles), holding the record for furthest distance traveled by a robot across an alien landscape.
And now, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) -- with the help of a Canada-based resea
Source: GovernmentVideo.com
March 17, 2010
Flip-flopping politicians beware: C-SPAN has made available online its entire programming archive back to 1987, some 160,000 hours, including every program.
Now, everyone can research their favorite politicians and see if they changed their tune on major issues through the years in accordance with political winds.
The database is available now. A formal announcement is due Wednesday (March 17).
The archives continue to record all three C-SPAN networks nonst
Source: NYT
March 15, 2010
In the middle of a terrifying desert north of Tibet, Chinese archaeologists have excavated an extraordinary cemetery. Its inhabitants died almost 4,000 years ago, yet their bodies have been well preserved by the dry air.
The cemetery lies in what is now China’s northwest autonomous region of Xinjiang, yet the people have European features, with brown hair and long noses. Their remains, though lying in one of the world’s largest deserts, are buried in upside-down boats. And where tom
Source: Lee White at the National Coalition for History
March 17, 2010
National History Day (NHD) is asking for your help to gain support from members of Congress for a $1 million National History Day appropriation that will help state programs grow and improve. NHD NEEDS YOUR HELP TODAY! We have two more days left and it is critical that you pick up the phone to contact your members of Congress and ask them to sign the NHD “Dear Colleague” letter.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
March 16, 2010
Twenty years after two thieves walked into a Boston museum and pulled off the biggest art theft in history, investigators are making a renewed effort to recover a haul valued at up to $500 million (£330 million).
The fate of the 13 paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas and Manet has remained a mystery and a topic of feverish speculation in the art world since they were stolen in the early hours of March 18, 1990, from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Exploiting the museum’s li
Source: Telegraph (UK)
March 16, 2010
A man armed with a high-powered gas pistol tried to break into Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin's tomb on Red Square in Moscow, shooting a policeman in the process.
The man, named as Sergey Karpentsov, is quoted as saying he wanted to let loose a volley of bullets at Lenin's carefully embalmed corpse, one of the Russian capital's most popular and ghoulish tourist attractions.
Lenin's waxy presence at the heart of the Russian capital 86 years after his death continues to
Source: Telegraph (UK)
March 16, 2010
Twenty years after two thieves walked into a Boston museum and pulled off the biggest art theft in history, investigators are making a renewed effort to recover a haul valued at up to $500 million (£330 million).
The fate of the 13 paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas and Manet has remained a mystery and a topic of feverish speculation in the art world since they were stolen in the early hours of March 18, 1990, from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Exploiting the museum’s li
Source: Discovery News
March 15, 2010
A newly found bumpy-skinned, terrestrial amphibian lived 70 million years before dinosaurs in what is now Pennsylvania.
An interesting "rock" initially tossed aside at a FedEx site near Pittsburgh International Airport turns out to be the skull of a meat-eating, early terrestrial amphibian that lived 70 million years before the first dinosaurs emerged, according to a paper released today in Annals of Carnegie Museum.
The approximately 300-million-year-old car
Source: Discovery News
March 15, 2010
What killed the dinosaurs? Ok, ok, we know an asteroid did it, roughly, but that made a comparatively small hole in the ground -- what actually killed them? We've heard lots about nuclear winter, global wildfires, all sorts of poisonous gases, and combinations thereof. But what if it was something far more mundane. What if it was ozone?
At the start, it seems hard to make a potent mass murderer out of a gas that is just three little oxygen atoms bounds together. And we all know abo
Source: The Sydney Morning Herald
March 17, 2010
Now, the 249 lost Diggers of Fromelles have not only been laid to rest with full military honours but 75 of the soldiers will have a name, a headstone - and a family to grieve their passing.
Yesterday, 93-year-old Marjorie Whitford smiled joyously when told that her DNA sample has confirmed the identity of her adored uncle, Private Harry Willis.
The Herald has been told the names of three other men that have been identified.
One is Private John Turner who w
Source: BBC
March 16, 2010
A collection of previously unseen letters written by the famously reclusive Catcher in the Rye author JD Salinger, who died in January, has gone on show at a New York museum.
Out of respect for the author's desire for privacy, the Morgan Museum & Library has kept the letters under lock and key since it acquired them in 1998.
But now, following Salinger's death, aged 91, the museum is making the manuscripts public, and shedding light on one of the 20th Century's mos
Source: BBC News
March 15, 2010
A play which was first discovered nearly 300 years ago has been credited to William Shakespeare.
The work, titled Double Falsehood, was written by the playwright and another dramatist, John Fletcher.
Theatre impresario Lewis Theobald presented the play in the 18th century as an adaptation of a Shakespeare play but it was dismissed as a forgery.
But scholars for British Shakespeare publisher, Arden, now believe the Bard wrote large parts of the play.
Source: Vancouver Sun
February 26, 2010
Two U.S. scientists have published a radical new theory about when, where and how humans migrated to the New World, arguing that the peopling of the Americas may have begun via Canada's High Arctic islands and the Northwest Passage -- much farther north and at least 10,000 years earlier than generally believed.
The hypothesis -- described as "speculative" but "plausible" by the researchers themselves -- appears in the latest issue of the journal Current Biology,
Source: Belfast Telegraph (UK)
March 3, 2010
Thousands of years ago our Neolithic forebears were hunting wild game with flint arrows in the hills overlooking what is now Ballymena. Now they’re still making their presence felt, delaying a road dualling scheme that was aimed at easing congestion between the town and the M2.
The A26 Ballee Road East to M2 Ballymena bypass dualling scheme was due to be completed by the end of this month. But bad weather and the discovery of rare Neolithic remains have pushed that deadline back to
Source: The Press and Journal (UK)
March 6, 2010
Experts believe they have discovered another Iron Age power centre in Moray.
Yesterday National Museums of Scotland curator Dr Fraser Hunter said investigations at a field at Burghead have possibly revealed “a high-status site”.
The archaeologist said the remains of four Iron Age roundhouses could lie buried beneath the soil.
He said: “In combination with the finds that have been discovered at the site, it suggests that this is one of the more important are
Source: Irish Examiner
March 8, 2010
THE cyber age’s bid to spread its message into a pristine landscape has perished between a rock and a hard place in a Bronze Age valley.
Age-old archaeological remains are standing in the way of plans to bring modern internet communications to a scenic area of Kerry.
A telecommunications mast which would provide broadband to the mid-Kerry area would be a "new alien intrusion" on a very beautiful and almost pristine landscape.
That’s according to s
Source: Gulf Times (Qatar)
March 8, 2010
The Italian archaeological mission in Pakistan has discovered a large number of Buddhist sites and rock shelters in Kandak and Kota valleys of Barikot in Swat in the North West Frontier Province which depicted the carvings and paintings from the bronze and iron ages....
