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: Spiegel Online (Germany)
October 20, 2009
Archaeologists in Germany have made a number of sensational finds along a railway line under construction in eastern Germany -- Bronze Age treasures, burial sites and evidence of settlements dating back more than 7,000 years.
Archaeologists in the state of Saxony-Anhalt have uncovered 4,000-year-old skeletons and Bronze Age treasures in excavations along a railway line being built in eastern Germany.
Copper and amber jewellery and hundreds of dogs' teeth with holes bore
Source: The Daily Beast
October 21, 2009
Next Tuesday George W. Bush will join Terry Brandshaw, Zig Ziglar, and Rudy Giuliani as a featured speaker at a "Get Motivated!" business seminar in Fort Worth, Texas. Tickets to event are running at $19 per office. Bush will reprise his role as motivational speaker on December 2nd too. The organizers promise, "This motivational mega-show packs more inspirational firepower than a stick of dynamite!"
Source: NYT
October 20, 2009
MOSCOW — Until recently, Aleksandr Y. Khochinsky occupied a special niche in this capital, known as much for its corruption as for its wealth. He was an antiquarian who specialized in providing high-class grease for the best-connected palms in the government and other high-level circles.
Harried businessmen would rush in off the streets to his gallery here, Bogema, and think nothing of spending tens of thousands of dollars for the right item to delight the powerful, whether a set of
Source: NYT
October 20, 2009
DETROIT — To sell a car in the 1980s, dealers had to do little more than open their doors, and loyal buyers would show up to trade in their Chevrolet for a new Chevrolet, or their Toyota for another Toyota.
Nearly four in five Americans were repeat buyers back then, staunchly faithful to brands that they knew, trusted and were part of their self-image. The allegiance often continued through generations of families, like party affiliations in politics.
Now, partly as a
Source: NYT
October 19, 2009
He dropped out of the University of Texas at Austin in 1935 as a junior, because of what he called “awful grades,” to pursue a career in the news business, and what a career Walter Leland Cronkite Jr. had. But though he became a broadcasting legend, he never abandoned his Longhorn roots, as evident in his last will and testament now on file at Manhattan Surrogate’s Court.
The will bequeaths Mr. Cronkite’s personal papers to the university, a process that started before his death on
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 21, 2009
The last surviving Union Jack flown by the Royal Navy at Trafalgar will remain in Britain after ministers promised to block any foreign attempts to buy it.
The flag will be auctioned in London today, the anniversary of Admiral Lord Nelson’s victory over a joint French and Spanish fleet off the Spanish coast in 1805.
It is expected to fetch at least 15,000 pounds. Charles Miller, the auctioneer, has said he believes it is the last surviving flag flown during the battle
Source: BBC
October 20, 2009
A five-year project to make 190,000 wills available online has been completed.
About 800,000 pages of documents, some going as far back as the 14th Century, have been placed on the National Library of Wales' website.
Among the wills available at the click of a button are Twm Sion Cati's, known as the Welsh Robin Hood, and hymn writer William Williams, Pantycelyn.
Officials said it had taken more than five years to digitise the documents.
Source: Guardian (UK)
October 19, 2009
University College London has a jumbled collection of objects and is asking visitors to vote on what deserves to be kept
Agatha Christie's picnic basket – a wonderfully Miss Marple-ish object holding a bizarre assemblage including fragments of 4,000-year-old pottery, a door handle, a sheet of newspaper and a key – almost certainly did not belong to the world's most famous crime writer.
It is just one of myriad oddities that have ended up among more than 250,000 objects
Source: BBC
September 21, 2009
UK museums and art galleries have seen a rise in visitor numbers due to the recession but face financial worries, a new study has revealed.
Two-thirds of cultural institutions reported a rise in admissions during the summer, according to The Art Fund.
But at least a quarter reported having to deal with public funding cuts, rising running costs and heavier reliance on voluntary staff.
The survey encompassed 225 museums, including the London's V&A and T
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 21, 2009
Jean Chretien, Canada's former prime minister, has said he once made the Queen laugh by uttering a swear word during a historic ceremony.
The faux pas in question happened during the signing ceremony of the Constitution Act in Ottawa in 1982 that severed virtually all remaining constitutional and legislative ties between the UK and Canada.
The former politician was justice minister at the time and after the Queen signed the document, then then prime minister Pierre Tr
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 21, 2009
An ancient South American pyramid may lose its status as a UN World Heritage Site and even collapse after it was spruced up to "make it more attractive to tourists".
In a makeover of the 59-ft high Akapana pyramid in Bolivia that an expert has described as archaeologically disastrous, the structure was rebuilt with abobe instead of the original stone.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, or UNESCO, is due to visit Tiwanaku soo
Source: AP
October 21, 2009
Germany's highest court says it has thrown out a request to block the trial of John Demjanjuk on charges he was an accessory to the murder of thousands at a death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
The Federal Constitutional Court said Wednesday that it rejected complaints from Demjanjuk's lawyer against decisions to open the trial in Munich on Nov. 30 and to keep the 89-year-old retired Cleveland area autoworker in custody.
He maintains that he was a Red Army soldier who wa
Source: CNN
October 20, 2009
Sarah Palin will sit down with Oprah Winfrey the day before her new memoir hits bookstores, Harpo announced Tuesday.
The former Alaska governor will make the appearance on Oprah on November 16 to talk about her highly anticipated tell-all, "Going Rogue: An American Life."
Palin has never before appeared on the popular daytime talk show. Last December, Winfrey said she had invited her on the show to discuss the election, but suggested at the time that Palin had
Source: CNSNews.com
October 19, 2009
White House Communications Director Anita Dunn told high school students in May 2009 that one of her favorite political philosophers was Mao Tse Tung, the Communist dictator responsible for the death of millions of people, and she explained why his philosophy was important for achieving personal and political goals.
When questioned last week after a video of her speech surfaced, however, Dunn said she was using “irony” in reference to Mao. A leading expert on China told CNSNews.com
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 20, 2009
As medicine has allowed people who would previously have died young to live to childbearing age and beyond, many have assumed that natural selection no longer works on our species.
But Prof Stephen Stearns, the evolutionary biologist at Yale University behind the study, says: "That's just plain false."
While survival to reproductive age is no longer such a hurdle for humans, other evolutionary pressures – including sexual selection and reproductive fitness –
Source: WSJ
October 21, 2009
The Vatican said it will make it far easier for disgruntled Anglicans to convert to Catholicism, in one of Rome's most sweeping gestures to a Protestant church since the Reformation.
A newly created set of canon laws, known as an "Apostolic Constitution," will clear the way for entire congregations of Anglican faithful to join the Catholic Church. That represents a potentially serious threat to the already fragile world-wide communion of national Anglican churches, which h
Source: Chosun Ilbo (South Korea)
October 20, 2009
Japanese who believe that Tokyo should apologize for drafting thousands of Asian woman as sex slaves for the Imperial Army in World War II outnumber those who think otherwise for the first time, a straw poll suggests.
The Northeast Asian History foundation commissioned Gallup Korea to poll 527 Seoul citizens, and 500 citizens each in Beijing and Tokyo from Aug. 1 to 9. In the poll released Monday, 48.9 percent of respondents in Tokyo said Japan should apologize to the "comfort
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 20, 2009
If it nudges over 16.2 million pounds, the work, called Head of a Muse, will double the record for an Old Master drawing sold at auction.
Raphael's 1508 drawing was made as a working draft for his famous fresco Parnassus, one of four he was commissioned to paint by Pope Julius II in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican.
Created between 1508 and 1511, the fresco series is seen as Raphael's greatest masterpiece.
At the same time his rival Michelangelo wa
Source: Boston Globe
October 18, 2009
It was the oddest of scenes: A neurosurgeon delicately threaded a scope up the neck and into the skull of a disembodied, 4,000-year-old mummified head. Sweating with concentration, another doctor clamped a molar and began to rock it gently back and forth.
Three hours later, the nerve-wracking operation yielded a tooth, a time capsule holding precious DNA, which might reveal the identity of the ancient Egyptian head.
The surgical team - doctors from Massachusetts General
Source: WSJ
October 21, 2009
"You see, for me the Cultural Revolution was not as bad as all that, actually," says composer Guo Wenjing, 53, with a slightly bemused look on his face. He draws pensively on his cigarette and explains: "Nobody in my family had any interest in music. My father and mother were peasants from the north. They had joined the Communist Party early on and became soldiers in the People's Liberation Army. They arrived in Sichuan with the army, and once demobilized and assigned to do 'commu
