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: Discovery News
June 1, 2010
An unusually long-lasting drought plagued early colonists of the first permanent British settlement in North America.
Oyster shells excavated from a well in Jamestown, Va., the first permanent British settlement in North America, bolster the notion that the first colonists suffered an unusually deep and long-lasting drought.
The shells reveal that water in the James River near the colony, where many of those oysters were harvested, was much saltier then than along that
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 1, 2010
A Second World War bomb has exploded in central Germany, killing three people.
The bomb detonated as disposal experts were about to defuse it, local authorities said.
Six people were injured, two seriously, when the bomb, which was dropped by Allied aircraft on the university town of Goettingen, went off unexpectedly. It is believed that the dead were all members of the bomb disposal team.
Source: NPR
June 1, 2010
In the 55 years since Albert Einstein's death, many scientists have tried to figure out what made him so smart.
But no one tried harder than a pathologist named Thomas Harvey, who lost his job and his reputation in a quest to unlock the secrets of Einstein's genius. Harvey never found the answer. But through an unlikely sequence of events, his search helped transform our understanding of how the brain works.
How that happened is a bizarre story that involves a dead ge
Source: NYT
May 31, 2010
A long lost manuscript, one of the most important in the history of modern biology, has resurfaced as part of a dispute over its ownership.
The manuscript is the account by Gregor Mendel of the pea-breeding experiments from which he deduced the laws of heredity and laid the foundations of modern genetics.
Mendel read his paper in 1865 at two meetings of the Natural History Society of Brünn. He was then an Augustinian monk, later the abbot, in the Abbey of St. Thomas in
Source: WaPo
May 31, 2010
On April 1, 1917, a crewman aboard the German submarine U 46 spied a vessel riding low in the water off the northwestern coast of France. It was the American steamship Aztec, and it carried what the Germans considered a contraband cargo.
The United States had not yet entered the Great War, but the U-boat commander considered such freighters a provocation. He gave the order to fire a torpedo. Aboard the Aztec, manning one of the three-inch guns that had been hastily installed as a de
Source: WaPo
May 31, 2010
When he came home in 1967, he gathered everything from that time -- clothing, photographs, letters to his mother that she had carefully saved -- and he threw it all out. He set out to forget....
But as he got older, he wondered how much he had really moved on. He began to think that the path to healing might lie not in forgetting but in a meandering journey through all 50 states, visiting hundreds of memorials dedicated to those who had died and to those who had lived only to face o
Source: WaPo
May 31, 2010
Pop quiz: Does the school curriculum adopted in Texas really wind up in textbooks nationwide? If you answered yes, you might get a failing grade.
As the second-largest purchaser of textbooks behind California, the Lone Star State has historically wielded enormous clout in deciding what material appears in classrooms across the country. That's why the state school board's recent decision to adopt new social studies standards was closely watched far beyond Texas.
Critics
Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
May 31, 2010
Edward Brennan Healy, 39, was the oldest man in his Navy squadron. He was almost the age of his pilot’s father. That, and the fact that he had eight children back home, probably helped earn him the nickname “Pop.”
A gunner on a B-24 bomber based in the Solomon Islands, Healy flew off into a South Pacific morning on his 67th mission on March 9, 1944. During the flight, he and the 10-man crew sent out a distress signal, then disappeared, somewhere near Kapingimarangi in the Caroline I
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 1, 2010
Neanderthal man was living in Britain at the start of the last ice age - 40,000 years earlier than previously thought, archaeologists have said.
Francis Wenban-Smith from the University of Southampton discovered two ancient flint hand tools used to cut meat at the M25/A2 road junction at Dartford, Kent, during an excavation funded by the Highways Agency.
Tests on sediment burying the flints showed they date from around 100,000 years ago - proving Neanderthals were liv
Source: Science Alert
June 1, 2010
Almost two million years ago, early humans began eating food such as crocodiles, turtles and fish – a diet that could have played an important role in the evolution of human brains and our footsteps out of Africa, according to new research.
In what is the first evidence of consistent amounts of aquatic foods in the human diet, an international team of researchers has discovered early stone tools and cut marked animal remains in northern Kenya. The work has just been published in the
Source: Reuters
May 30, 2010
Mexican soldiers on Sunday paraded the bones of the heroes of the country's Independence War down the capital's most famous street before scientists begin trying to solve a century-old mystery by identifying the bones.
"Thanks to them, Mexico exists," President Felipe Calderon said at a ceremony involving hundreds of soldiers, a 100-piece military band and watched by thousands of Mexicans.
Army cadets dressed in formal 19th-century style uniforms gingerly carr
Source: The Independent
June 1, 2010
Archaeologists have discovered a previously unknown epoch in British pre-history when Stone Age hunters re-entered Britain after an absence of up to 90,000 years – because of climatically induced sea-level changes which turned the English Channel into dry land.
Until last month, no proof had ever been found for human occupation in Britain between 200,000 and 65,000 years ago – but now new evidence has revealed a human presence here in the middle of that period.
Althou
Source: The Independent
June 1, 2010
The lost tomb of an Egyptian general and scribe has been unearthed in the ancient necropolis of Saqqara – 125 years after it was first discovered. The tomb, of 19th Dynasty (1203 – 1186 BC) official Ptahmes, is over 70m long and features several chapels - so it's a wonder no-one recorded its location in 1885, leaving it to disappear beneath the desert sands.
Most of the tomb's treasures are already in museums as far apart as The Netherlands, Italy and the United States. But its lat
Source: AP
June 1, 2010
Former Vice President Al Gore and his wife, Tipper, are separating after 40 years of marriage.
According to an e-mail circulated among the couple's friends and obtained by The Associated Press on Tuesday, the Gores said it was "a mutual and mutually supportive decision that we have made together following a process of long and careful consideration."
Gore spokeswoman Kalee Kreider confirmed the statement came from the Gores, but declined to comment further.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 1, 2010
Legal attempts to ban Tintin in the Congo for racism are a form of "book burning", according to lawyers acting for the estate of Hergé, the Belgian cartoon hero's creator.
Belgium's courts are investigating whether Tintin's 1931 Congolese adventures, when the country was a Belgian colony, portrays black Africans in a racist way.
Alain Berenboom, a lawyer for the estate of Georges Remi, the Tintin cartoonist who worked under the Hergé pen-name, attacked the ca
Source: AP
May 31, 2010
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is the scene of a solemn ceremony Monday where the names of six American servicemen were recently added to The Wall.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, will remember the men and women who have fallen in service to their country during the annual observance.
The Memorial Fund website says the Memorial Day ceremony is hosted yearly by the Fund and the National Park Service to pay tribute to members of America's armed for
Source: AP
June 1, 2010
Poland has published cockpit conversations of the last dramatic minutes before the April plane crash that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski, revealing that pilots screamed and cursed after hitting a tree.
The recording shows that 16 minutes before the crash, the control tower in Smolensk, Russia, told the Polish pilots that heavy fog had created bad landing conditions. The pilots said they would give it a try anyway.
The Interior Ministry published the 40-page tran
Source: CNN
June 1, 2010
The marshes here have long been a refuge for the Native Americans living in Louisiana's bayou.
The tribe is made up of about 700 members whose ancestors were forced from their lands and resettled to Louisiana more than 100 years ago.
That refuge, already strained from coastal erosion, is facing a new menace: the oil spill spreading uncontrollably across the Gulf of Mexico. Since the tribe is still fighting for federal recognition, it i
Source: Toledo Blade (Ohio)
May 31, 2010
Sweating bullets beneath the blazing sun, Matthew Glover, 17, was gunning for the enemy.
"All our guys took hits," the Toledoan said yesterday afternoon, shortly after a swift skirmish with German soldiers near a quarry in the village of Whitehouse.
Matthew, who will graduate this week from Start High, has engaged in World War II battle re-enactments for nearly five years, fighting to make sure no one forgets the sacrifices made by America's Greatest Generatio
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 1, 2010
From Hitler to Henry VIII - the secret Vatican archives are a secret no more.
The man standing outside the Porta Santa Anna Gate of the Vatican wearing a blue Gap shirt and none-too-expertly pressed Muji trousers could easily pass as an academic, or the cultural correspondent of an obscure television channel.
In fact, he is neither of these things. He is a man on a mission, a mission of the utmost delicacy.
Soon the man will pass beyond the gate and the Swi
