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: NYT
February 9, 2009
Barack Obama has been compared to a lot people, everyone from John F. Kennedy to Josef Stalin, but South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford has a new one: Robert Mugabe. CNN reports:“We’re moving precipitously close to what I would call a sa
Source: LiveScience
February 9, 2009
The Greek god of thunder and lightning had Earthly beginnings, and scientists think they finally know where.
Ancient Greeks first worshipped the omnipotent Zeus at a remote altar on Mount Lykaion, a team of Greek and American archaeologists now think. During a recent dig at the site, the researchers found ceremonial goods commonly used in cult activity and dated at over three millennia old, making them the earliest known "appearance" of Zeus in Greece.
The dis
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 8, 2009
Archaeology in Britain is in "serious crisis" because of the recession-hit building industry, according to those in the profession.
By the end of the year around one in five of the country's 7,000 archaeologists are expected to have lost their jobs, experts believe.
The profession has expanded rapidly in recent years thanks to legislation that forced developers to pay for digs.
But now jobs are going because so many construction projects are bein
Source: National Geographic
February 6, 2009
The oldest known human hairs could be the strands discovered in fossil hyena poop found in a South African cave, a new study hints.
Researchers discovered the rock-hard hyena dung near the Sterkfontein caves, where many early human ancestor fossils have been found.
Until now, the oldest known human hair was from a 9,000-year-old Chilean mummy.
The sizes and shapes of the coprolites and their location suggest they came from brown hyenas, which still live
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
February 9, 2009
The medical records show that Heim suffered from rectal cancer, which eventually killed him in 1992.
Mr Heim says that his father’s body was buried in an anonymous common grave, although he did get a death certificate, a copy of which was recently obtained from the Egyptian authorities and shown to the world last week.
However, there are some who think that the evidence is far from conclusive. Chief among them is Dr Efraim Zuroff, the Israeli director of the Simon Wies
Source: BBC
February 7, 2009
Ever since the papers hit the news-stands here in Germany in January, there has been a bout of national soul-searching about the country's Nazi past.
Jewish groups and commentators have questioned the project's historic value, claiming that the reprints of the Nazi-era newspapers will play into the hands of far-right groups who could use the papers for their own propaganda purposes.
The authorities in the state Bavaria went one step further and announced that they wou
Source: BBC
February 9, 2009
An African campaigner involved in the 18th Century abolitionist movement which brought an end to the slave trade is to be honoured.
Olaudah Equiano, also known by his slave name Gustavus Vassa, will be honoured with a memorial in St Margaret's Church at Westminster Abbey.
Despite his enslavement as a young man, he purchased his freedom and worked as a seaman, merchant and explorer.
Source: Reuters
February 9, 2009
World Jewish leaders told Vatican officials that denying the Holocaust was "not an opinion but a crime" when they met on Monday to discuss a bishop they accuse of being anti-Semitic.
The meetings, the first since the controversy over Bishop Richard Williamson, who denies the extent of the Holocaust, began last month, took place three days before Pope Benedict is due to address a group of American Jewish leaders.
Catholic-Jewish relations have been extremely te
Source: Telegraph(UK)
February 9, 2009
Egyptian archaeologists have found about 30 mummies and at least one unopened sarcophagus in a burial chamber about 4,300 years old, the government said in a statement on Monday.
They found the chamber in the desert on the western side of the Step Pyramid of Saqqara, one of the earliest large stone structures in the world, dating from about 2,650BC.
The mummies appear to vary in age. One dates from about 640BC while the unopened sarcophagus, which is made of limestone
Source: Telegraph(UK)
February 9, 2009
The British bishop who caused outrage and sparked a public relations disaster for the Vatican by denying the extent of the Holocaust has been sacked as head of an Argentinian church.
Richard Williamson, who at the weekend defied the Pope's demand that he recant his views, was forced out as director of the seminary in Argentina by the breakaway Catholic faction of which he is a member, the Society of St. Pius X.
The Cambridge-educated cleric attracted global condemnatio
Source: Press Release--Montpelier
February 9, 2009
HNN EditorThe story told below about Dolley Madison's rescue of George Washington's portrait relies on an account she provided in a letter to her sister at the time of the evacuation of the White House in advance of the British attack. The Madisons' slave, Paul Jennings, provided a different account in his 1865 memoir. He wrote:
It has often been stated in print, that when Mrs. Madison escaped from the White House, she cut out from the frame the large portrait of
Source: Stone Pages Archaeo News
February 8, 2009
The entire genome of a 38,000-year-old Neanderthal has been sequenced by a team of scientists in Germany. The group is already extracting DNA from other ancient Neanderthal bones and hopes that the genomes will allow an unprecedented comparison between modern humans and their closest evolutionary relative.
The three-year project, which cost about 5 million euros (US$6.4 million), was carried out at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. "We are
Source: CBS News
February 8, 2009
If you want to know Abraham Lincoln - the man he was, the symbol he is - go to the Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg.
Cast in bronze, he stares pensively out over what would have been the terrible aftermath of three monstrous days of fighting and killing - seven thousand soldiers died here between July 1 and 3, 1863.
About a mile away, Lincoln presides over the place where the Union dead were reburied later that year.
"There were coffins stacked o
Source: Guardian (UK)
February 9, 2009
New hospital scanning techniques have revealed details about the mummified corpse of a 3,000-year Egyptian female singer, without opening her casket.
The images, which go on display for the first time today at Chicago's Oriental Institute Museum, show the remains of Meresamun - a singer priestess at a temple in Thebes in 800BC. The scans may help settle a debate among Egyptologists about the sex lives of such singers.
Meresamun was buried in an elaborately decorated cas
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 8, 2009
Prominent scientists and leading religious figures have joined forces to call for an end to the fighting over Charles Darwin's legacy.
Ahead of the 200th anniversary of the pioneering naturalist's birth on Thursday, they warn that militant atheists are turning people away from evolution by using it as a weapon with which to attack religion.
However, in a letter published in The Daily Telegraph, they also urge believers in creationism to acknowledge the overwhelming bo
Source: IHT
February 8, 2009
A bishop who faces a Vatican demand to recant his denial of the Holocaust said he would correct himself if he was satisfied by the evidence, but insisted that examining it "will take time," a German magazine reported.
Richard Williamson is one of four bishops from the ultraconservative Society of St. Pius X whose excommunication was lifted by the Vatican last month. The decision sparked outrage because Williamson had said in a television interview last month that he did no
Source: Chicago Tribune
February 8, 2009
Forty feet below the surface of Lake Michigan in Grand Traverse Bay, a mysterious pattern of stones can be seen rising from an otherwise sandy half-mile of lake floor.
Likely the stones are a natural feature. But the possibility they are not has piqued the interest of archeologists, native tribes and state officials since underwater archeologist Mark Holley found the site in 2007 during a survey of the lake bottom.
The site recently has become something of an Internet s
Source: IHT
February 7, 2009
In his first weeks in office, President Barack Obama has dismantled many environmental policies set by the Bush administration. But in some areas he will be building on the work of his predecessor, rather than taking it apart.
But even those who view his environmental record most harshly acknowledge that he also took significant action. He improved air quality, gave renewable energy a large financial boost, left behind the largest marine sanctuaries ever established and started a di
Source: BBC
February 8, 2009
A musical experience with a difference is being previewed at the National Museum Wales in Cardiff - an attempt to recreate the sound of the Neanderthals.
Jazz composer Simon Thorne was given the task of creating the "soundscape" to provide a musical backdrop to some of the ancient exhibits on display.
The musician says the work is "probably the most unusual" he has undertaken.
Despite having a reputation for lacking intelligence, rece
Source: CNN
February 8, 2009
German Chancellor Angela Merkel phoned Pope Benedict XVI Sunday over a Holocaust denier whom the pope welcomed back into the Roman Catholic Church last month.
Neither side seems to have shifted its position over Bishop Richard Williamson, who, shortly before the pope lifted his excommunication, denied the Nazis had systematically murdered six million Jews during World War II.
"It was a very constructive conversation," the German government and Vatican said in
