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)
June 17, 2009
A new dinosaur resembling a giant parrot has been discovered in Mongolia.
The creature, Psittacosaurus gobiensis whose name means "parrot lizard", is thought to have lived about 110 million years ago.
Psittacosaurs are noted for being the most species-rich dinosaur genus with at least nine different species, including the latest found in the Gobi Desert, a famous dinosaur graveyard.
The three feet long psittacosaurs may also have had a diet dom
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 17, 2009
The oldest bird of prey nest ever recorded, that was first used before the time of Jesus, has been discovered in Greenland.
The nesting site on a precarious cliff edge is still continually used by gyrfalcons, the world's largest species of falcon.
Three other nests, each over 1,000 years old, have also been found, one of which contains feathers from a bird that lived more than 600 years ago.
However it is feared climate change may soon drive the birds fr
Source: Independent (UK)
June 17, 2009
How King Louis XV came to shoot his own horse in the bottom is described, by the monarch himself, in a batch of royal letters to be auctioned in Paris today.
The hunting accident took place near Versailles in September 1766 and appears to have caused the 18th-century equivalent of banner headlines all over the country.
In a laconic note to his cousin, the Duc de Penthièvre, the king reports that his "adventure" has been "certainly exaggerated".
Source: New York Times
June 10, 2009
The future of the history profession (as well as the journal’s title) are the subject of a roundtable discussion to be held this month at the annual convention of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Many historians “are on the defensive,” said Thomas W. Zeiler, the executive editor of Diplomatic History and the moderator of the panel. (Mr. Zeiler, who floated the name change, said he did not have a particular replacement in mind.)
The shift in focus began in t
Source: Michael Isikoff in Newsweek
June 13, 2009
The war over Watergate never ends. The latest battle is over a decision by the Nixon Presidential Library to commemorate this week's 37th anniversary of the Watergate break-in by inviting an especially provocative speaker: John Dean, the former White House lawyer who pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice after testifying about his boss's role in the cover-up. The invitation from the library—which is now run by the National Archives—has outraged Nixon's dwindling loyalists, who have mounted a
Source: LAT
June 16, 2009
Self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed told U.S. military officials that he had lied to the CIA after being abused, according to documents made public Monday. The claim is likely to intensify the debate over whether harsh interrogation techniques generated accurate information.
Mohammed made the assertion during hearings at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he was transferred in 2006after being held at secret CIA sites since his capture in 2003.
"I ma
Source: LAT
June 16, 2009
A 95-year-old Auschwitz survivor donated jewelry he took from the clothing of Jews who were gassed to death at the Nazi camp to Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum on Monday.
Polish-born Meyer Hack, who now lives in Boston, found the gems while sorting the clothing of victims sent to die in the gas chambers, which was his job at the camp where his mother, brother and two sisters died.
Source: NYT
June 10, 2009
An 88-year-old white supremacist with a rifle walked into the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, one of the capital’s most visited sites, on Wednesday afternoon and began shooting, fatally wounding a security guard and sending tourists scrambling before he himself was shot, the authorities said.
The gunman was identified by law enforcement officials as James W. von Brunn, who embraces various conspiracy theories involving Jews, blacks and other minority groups and at one point
Source: National Geographic
June 15, 2009
Given away by strange, crop circle-like formations seen from the air, a huge prehistoric ceremonial complex discovered in southern England has taken archaeologists by surprise.
A thousand years older than nearby Stonehenge, the site includes the remains of wooden temples and two massive, 6,000-year-old tombs that are among "Britain's first architecture," according to archaeologist Helen Wickstead, leader of the Damerham Archaeology Project.
For such a site to
Source: Daily Mirror
June 16, 2009
The Customs Bio Diversity Protection Unit which cracked the biggest ever attempt to smuggle out a large stock of priceless artefacts including Buddha statues belonging to 19th Century Kandyan era last January concluded the case yesterday.
The BDPU fined the Swedish national Robert Ulvenkrantz Rs.50,000 after the inquiry and released him. He was taken into custody on May 2 for attempting to leave the country with two priceless antique Buddha statues.
According to Customs
Source: CNN
June 16, 2009
Some 65 years after their service, the 300 surviving Women Airforce Service Pilots are being honored with the Congressional Gold Medal.
The House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a measure awarding the women one of the national's highest civilian honors. The Senate passed a similar measure in May and President Obama is expected to sign it.
With only about a quarter of the former WASPs still alive and all in their late 80s or older, it was important for the House to
Source: http://www.phnompenhpost.com
June 15, 2009
Govt hails pivotal moment for Cambodian culture as National Museum celebrates an upgrade to its ageing lighting system
FIVE foreign donors handed over five Khmer artefacts at a ceremony Friday to celebrate a new electrical and lighting system at the National Museum.
"Cambodia has lost a lot in the last 20 to 30 years. Anything that is given back to them of any value is of great importance," Douglas Latchford, a collector of Khmer antiquities, told the Post sho
Source: LAT
June 15, 2009
After federal raids last week on the somewhat casual, small-town traffic in illicit Southwest artifacts, one prominent pot hunter is dead and nearly a dozen more are under indictment.
The criminal actions grew out of a two-year undercover investigation in the Four Corners region, in which a wired informant purchased more than $300,000 in illicit antiquities. Most were bought in the high desert town of Blanding, Utah.
You might have an imaginary picture of the pot hunter
Source: http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com
June 15, 2009
Food poisoning, not wanderlust, may have inspired early Polynesian wayfarers to undertake risky voyages across the Pacific to Hawai'i, New Zealand and Rapa Nui, according to new research.
Using archaeological evidence, prehistoric climate data and recent reports of ciguatera poisoning from the consumption of contaminated reef fish, researchers at the Florida Institute of Technology theorize that climate conditions conducive to ciguatera outbreaks may have occurred in French Polynesi
Source: BBC
June 15, 2009
Part of a Neanderthal man's skull has been dredged up from the North Sea, in the first confirmed find of its kind.
Scientists in Leiden, in the Netherlands, have unveiled the specimen - a fragment from the front of a skull belonging to a young adult male.
Analysis of chemical "isotopes" in the 60,000-year-old fossil suggest a carnivorous diet, matching results from other Neanderthal specimens.
Source: CNN
June 15, 2009
Searching through the rubble of demolition sites across the 800-year-old capital of China, Li Songtang has unearthed a treasure trove of ancient relics. They include gate piers depicting Mongolians and the Han Chinese during the Yuan dynasty, a Buddhist carving that is more than 1,000 years old, and a Ming dynasty marble fish water tank.
Li Songtang is neither museum curator nor antiques expert, but an ordinary man who did not want to see China's rich history lost to modernization d
Source: The Tennessean
June 16, 2009
Archaeologists complete exhumation of remains on construction site.
Using shovels, brushes and dirt sifters, the partial skeleton of an unknown Civil War solider was exhumed Monday from his longtime burial plot along Columbia Avenue by a team of archaeologists.
The newly exhumed remains, which included bones from both of the man's legs as well as burial artifacts, will be kept by state environmental officials until a final burial site can be determined.
The
Source: Miami Herald
June 15, 2009
The construction crews were digging up a patch of land near Northwest 71st Street when they unearthed the unexpected: wrist bones, a human skull, skeletons of two small children. Then came crumbled headstones, nails, buttons and metal coffin handles.
The crew, working on an affordable housing project in the shadow of Interstate 95, had stumbled upon an apparently long-forgotten burial ground -- and a tantalizing puzzle that has stumped Miami's most knowledgeable archaeologists and h
Source: The Philadelphia Inquirer
June 16, 2009
Rich Remer mined his family's Kensington past for a quarter-century.
He found deeds, wills, letters, newspaper clippings, maps, diaries. The material took him to the first Remer in the colonies, a German butcher who lived on Shackamaxon Street by the Delaware River in the mid-1700s.
Then came unexpected news two weeks ago: Archaeologists for the state had unearthed 25,000 artifacts from a Fishtown property once owned by his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, the
Source: AFP
June 14, 2009
Egypt will soon provide evidence that the 3,400-year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti was taken illegally out of the country by Germany, Egyptian antiquities chief Zahi Hawass said on Sunday.
The fabled bust of Nefertiti, renowned as one of history's great beauties, was brought to Berlin in 1913, a year after German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt unearthed it on the banks of the Nile.
Cairo began demanding the statue in the 1930s, but successive German governments, beginning
