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: CNN
July 25, 2010
...In the film, directed and produced by Cambodian Teth Sambath and Briton Rob Lemkin, Teth tracks down about 100 former Khmer Rouge fighters who were responsible for the killing to learn why they participated.
Teth's odyssey began in 1996. His family's earnings went to his search for the fighters, leading him crisscrossing the southeast Asian nation looking for scarred men and women. But he never told his family or close friends about his mission since he did not want to bring up t
Source: WaPo
July 23, 2010
From Washington to Hollywood, once again those crazed stanzas echo and howl, drunk on adjectives yet oddly dispassionate, like a newspaper dispatch, dateline surreal:
<em>
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night .
Source: Discovery News
July 20, 2010
Researchers who probed tiny fragments of a Dead Sea Scroll with protons found its chemistry matches that of the water in the area where the ancient document was found.
Proton beams have shed new light on the origin of the longest of the Dead Sea scrolls, suggesting its parchment was manufactured locally.
According to a study carried out at the labs of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) in Catania, Sicily, the 28-foot-long Temple Scroll was made in
Source: BBC News
July 22, 2010
For hundreds of years, North African Muslims ruled southern Spain. Now some of their descendants are contributing to a "Moorish revival" that is regenerating parts of Andalucia, says the BBC's Sylvia Smith.
Sitting in Abdul Hedi Benattia's tea shop you forget for a moment where you are.
The sound of sweet mint tea being poured into tiny glasses, the murmur of Arabic in the background, and piles of almond cornes de gazelle, served to customers sitting on low so
Source: ABC News
July 21, 2010
Although Adolf Hitler's ideological autobiography remains banned in Germany and Austria, George Tabori's stage comedy of the same name, which debuted in 1987, still is held in great esteem -- so great that it has been adapted for the screen despite its barely marketable title.
International box office prospects, already dim to begin with, are further hindered by many inside jokes and allusions to Hitler's famous speeches that work in German but probably will not survive dubbing or s
Source: BBC
July 21, 2010
David Cameron has been criticised after mistakenly saying the UK was the "junior partner" in the allied World War II fight against Germany in 1940.
He made the historical slip, neglecting the fact that the US had yet to enter the war, on the second day of his first trip to the US as prime minister.
Labour's David Miliband called it a "slight", while a veterans' group said it could "alienate" former troops.
No 10 said Mr Cameron
Source: BBC News
July 22, 2010
Kosovo's declaration of independence from Serbia in 2008 did not break international law, top UN judges have ruled in a non-binding decision.
The International Court of Justice rejected Serbian claims that the move had violated its territorial integrity.
Kosovo officials said all doubt about its status had now been removed, but Serbia's president insisted Belgrade would never recognise the secession.
The US and many EU countries support independence; Russia
Source: Balkan travellers
July 22, 2010
A team of archaeologists recently discovered a unique residence of the rulers of the Odrysian Kingdom - a union of the ancient Thracian tribes that lasted between the fifth and the third centuries BC, in central Bulgaria.
Called “the Bulgarian Machu Picchu” by Bulgarian archaeologists because of the similarities in the two ancient cities’ organization, the site is located at 1,200 metres above sea level in the Kozi Gramadi mount, close to the resort town of Hisar in the outskirts o
Source: Tonic.com
July 22, 2010
Found in a neighboring galaxy, the massive star burns 10 million times brighter the sun.
In what's being hailed as a record-breaking discovery, UK astronomers have stumbled upon a giant star. The super-sparkly R136a1 has been spotted thousands of light years away from our solar system — and it's so luminous, it burns 10 million times brighter the sun....
Source: AFP
July 21, 2010
Egyptian experts have begun to explore the depths of Lake Qarun south of Cairo using remote sensing radars in search of sunken artefacts, antiquities officials told AFP on Wednesday.
Antiquities supremo Zahi Hawass said the work was launched a few days ago. "It is the first time ever that the antiquities department carries out an archaeological mission in Lake Qarun."
Khaled Saeed, who heads the department of pre-historic affairs at the Supreme Council of Anti
Source: AFP
July 21, 2010
In the Asterix comic books you only had to drink a magic potion to be able to lift a menhir. But in reality you need vast quantities of muscle power and lots of patience.
That is what a group of 30 holiday-makers found out when they heaved on a rope to move a 4.2-tonne stone block as part of an experiment probing the mysterious history of megaliths in France's northwestern Brittany region.
"It's experimental archeology," explained Cyril Chaigneau, an architect
Source: Live Science
July 21, 2010
Sex toys have come a long way since the Stone Age -- but then again, perhaps not as much as we might think.
Last week, an excavation in Sweden turned up an object that bears the unmistakable look of a penis carved out of antler bone. Though scientists can't be sure exactly what this tool was used for, it's hard not to leap to conclusions. [See "Sex Myths and Taboos"]
"Your mind and my mind wanders away to make this interpretation about what it looks like
Source: BBC News
July 22, 2010
Archaeologists have discovered a second henge at Stonehenge, described as the most exciting find there in 50 years.
The circular ditch surrounding a smaller circle of deep pits about a metre (3ft) wide has been unearthed at the world-famous site in Wiltshire.
Archaeologists conducting a multi-million pound study believe timber posts were in the pits.
Project leader Professor Vince Gaffney, from the University of Birmingham, said the discovery was "exce
Source: NYT
July 21, 2010
More than two years after trial judges acquitted the former prime minister of Kosovo of murder, rape and torture, an appeals panel at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague on Wednesday ordered him to be retried because the intimidation of witnesses had undermined his trial and produced “a miscarriage of justice.”
The ruling against the former prime minister, Ramush Haradinaj, shocked lawyers at the tribunal, which had never been ordered to conduct a retrial and had rarely seen one gr
Source: AFP
July 20, 2010
An 800-year-old, pre-Columbian burial ground with baskets full of human remains was unearthed at a building site outside San Jose, National Museum archaeologists said Tuesday.
The burial ground, dating from about the year 1200, yielded 26 sets of human bones from children to adults, contained in baskets made of plant fiber, an unusual material for native groups predating the discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus.
Gutierrez said the burial site was first dis
Source: AFP
July 21, 2010
Peruvian archaeologists have found remains from a person believed to be a leader of a key pre-Inca civilization that is more than 1,200 years old, one of the researchers said.
Carlos Elera told AFP the remains from the northern region of Lambayeque are from what some call the Sican culture that flourished in the area between around 700 and 1375 AD.
He said among the remains found two weeks ago in the archaeological complex Las Ventanas is a type of sarcophagus for an ad
Source: Discovery News
July 20, 2010
You might have thought there would be more than a few degrees of separation between President Abraham Lincoln and the infamous Donner Party, the group of pioneers who, legend says, was forced into cannibalism to survive a harsh winter crossing the Sierra Nevadas in the late 1840s. No direct evidence of that has ever been found, but that's neither here nor there for this post.
Because ... surprising new facts released yesterday show that, cannibalism or no, a member of the Donner Pa
Source: The Independent
July 22, 2010
Stonehenge had a previously unknown wooden "twin" just 900m to its north-west, according to remarkable new archaeological investigations.
Using the ground-penetrating equivalent of an X-ray, scientists have discovered what appears to have been a circle of massive timber obelisks, constructed more than 4,200 years ago.
The newly discovered "henge" would have been visible from Stonehenge itself – and seems to have been part of a wider prehistoric ritua
Source: BBC
July 21, 2010
Scotland's First Minister Alex Salmond has written to US senators who are calling for an inquiry into the release of the Lockerbie bomber.
Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the man convicted over the 1988 atrocity in which 270 people died, was released by the Scottish government in August 2009.
Mr Salmond said the Scottish government made the decision on "compassionate grounds" as Megrahi is terminally ill.
He said there were no representations from oil
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 20, 2010
Archeologists have uncovered the site of Bolshevik-era executions and mass graves at St Petersburg's Peter and Paul Fortress.
The remains of over 80 bodies were found shot through the head in six mass graves dating to after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
The graves were discovered when archeological digs began this summer in Russia amid restoration work, said Dmitry Masliakov, museum spokesman....
