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)
January 15, 2008
The identity of the Mona Lisa may have been solved after German researchers claimed to have put a name to her face.
The debate over the name of Leonardo da Vinci's famous subject has raged for centuries and is one of the art world's greatest riddles.
Some suggested the master artist had amalgamated a variety of subjects to create his ideal woman, used his mother for a model, or even posed himself.
However, academics at Heidelberg University say scribbled
Source: Catholic World News
January 14, 2008
An organization devoted to inter-religious understanding has uncovered a large amount evidence to rebut the charge that Pope Pius XII was indifferent to Jewish suffering during the Holocaust.
The Pave the Way Foundation has announced discovery of a large quantity of evidence showing that Pope Pius XII actually worked to save the lives of Jews. Gary Krupp, the group's president, says that most of this evidence is already "available publicly but simply not known."
Source: Catholic Online
January 12, 2008
President George W. Bush has declared Jan. 16 Religious Freedom Day 2007 to commemorate the passage of the 1786 Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom written by Thomas Jefferson.
Each year, since 1993, the U.S. presidents have acknowledged Religious Freedom Day and asked Americans to "observe this day through appropriate events and activities in homes, schools and places of worship."
The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom stopped the practice of taxing pe
Source: Independent (South Africa)
January 15, 2008
French car-maker Citroen has apologised to China for running a full-page advertisement in several Spanish newspapers featuring a poster of late Chinese leader Mao Zedong pulling a wry face at a sporty hatch-back.Under the Biblical quotation "Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's", the text talked up Citroen's position as a car sales leader in a bombastic tone.
"It's true, we are leaders, but at Citroen the revolution never stops,&
Source: Bloomberg News
January 15, 2008
Political realists may find it reductive or even absurd to paint the failure of a U.S. presidency as the consequence of a son's unresolved relationship with his father.
Yet the approach was good enough for William Shakespeare, as Jacob Weisberg argues in "The Bush Tragedy,'' an unexpectedly compelling piece of armchair psychoanalysis.
"The term 'competition' doesn't begin to do justice to the Oedipal complexities of this particular relationship,'' Weisberg wr
Source: Deutsche Welle
January 15, 2008
Dutch families whose relatives were put to death during the Nazi occupation reclaimed the victims' personal effects from Red Cross archives on Monday, Jan. 15.The personal effects have been locked up in Red Cross archives in Bad Arolsen, in central Germany, for decades.
Viewing the items evokes ghosts from the past, said Gerrit Jan Evers, who learned just a few weeks ago that the effects had been discovered.
"So many died. And now, 63 y
Source: Reuters
January 15, 2008
Plague, the disease that devastated medieval Europe, is re-emerging worldwide and poses a growing but overlooked threat, researchers warned on Tuesday.
While it has only killed some 100 to 200 people annually over the past 20 years, plague has appeared in new countries in recent decades and is now shifting into Africa, Michael Begon, an ecologist at the University of Liverpool and colleagues said.
A bacterium known as Yersinia pestis causes bubonic plague, known in med
Source: HealthDay
January 14, 2008
A new analysis of the genetics of syphilis provides support for the theory that the disease hitched a ride with Christopher Columbus from the New World back to the Old World.
But in a new wrinkle, the research suggests the disease may not have been transmitted through sex until it adapted to the environment in Europe.
"It evolved this whole new transmission mode, and it didn't take very many genetic changes," said study lead author Kristin Harper, a graduate
Source: http://www.physorg.com
January 8, 2008
The historical, competitive, and ideological factors that structure the practices of commercial mythmaking remain largely unexplored and undertheorized. Now, a study from the February 2008 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research investigates these interrelationships by performing a comparative analysis of two prominent New South mythmakers – editors of nationally distributed magazines about the South – who are seeking to ideologically reconstruct the historical legacy of antebellum, confederat
Source: http://www.independent.ie
January 14, 2008
A "hugely important'' medieval artefact was within minutes of being accidentally dumped before it was retrieved from builders' rubble.
The stone carved bishop's head -- believed to date from the 15th century -- was rescued by amateur historian Seamus Lynch from the rear of a premises being renovated in Athenry, Co Galway.
The head -- thought to have been used to adorn a nearby Dominican Abbey -- had lain undiscovered, set into a wall behind an old sweet shop in Ath
Source: BBC
January 14, 2008
Britain's own underwater "Atlantis" could be revealed for the first time with high-tech underwater cameras.
Marine archaeologist Stuart Bacon and Professor David Sear, of the University of Southampton, will explore the lost city of Dunwich, off the Suffolk coast.
Dunwich gradually disappeared into the sea because of coastal erosion.
"It's about the application of new technology to investigate Britain's Atlantis, then to give this information
Source: LAT
January 13, 2008
There is a legend at UC Berkeley that human bones are stored in the landmark Campanile tower. But university officials say that's not true.
The human bones are actually stored beneath the Hearst Gymnasium swimming pool.
The remains of about 12,000 Native Americans lie in drawers and cabinets in the gym's basement. Most of them were dug up by university archaeologists and have been stored under the pool since at least the early 1960s.
Now the bones are at th
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 7, 2008
Conservationists and locals all agree that that the dilapidated Bonds Garage, and the fleet of second hand vans that surrounds it, are an eyesore that does no credit to the picturesque village of Avebury.
But the proposal to knock down the 1930s garage and house and to replace them with five new houses has set the Wiltshire village (population 486) on a collision course with the most influential conservation bodies in the land and even the world.
The reason is that Aveb
Source: Fairfax Media
January 10, 2008
A small fishing village established 2900 years ago in Tonga has been confirmed as the first settlement in Polynesia.
Using pottery shards, archaeologist David Burley says they have confirmed Nukuleka, just east of Tonga's capital, Nuku'alofa, is Polynesia's birthplace.
The confirmation comes as something of a blow for Samoa which has advertised itself for decades as the "cradle of Polynesia".
Source: South Florida Sun-Sentinel
January 10, 2008
Nine years ago, an array of American Indians, environmentalists, preservationists, New Age spiritualists, diviners, even Cub Scouts rose up to save the Miami Circle, a 2,000-year-old artifact that many embraced as America's own Stonehenge.
But today, the Circle — a series of loaf-shaped holes chiseled into the limestone bedrock at the mouth of the Miami River — is interred beneath bags of sand and gravel, laid over the formation in 2003 to protect it from the elements, and now will
Source: BBC
January 11, 2008
It's taken Terry Lightfoot a long time to come to terms with his son's death. He thinks of Paul all the time, lays a wreath at a memorial to him on his birthday and on the day he died - but still something was missing.
It wasn't until Terry travelled to the Falkland Islands that he found it. That's where 21-year-old Paul died.
He was serving in the SAS in the 1982 conflict when the helicopter he and 17 other men were in crashed into the sea.
Their bodies were nev
Source: NYT
January 12, 2008
INDEPENDENCE, Calif. | What Los Angeles took a century ago — a 62-mile stretch of river here in the parched Owens Valley — it is now giving back.
One of the largest river-restoration projects in the country has sent a gentle current of water meandering through what just a year ago was largely a sandy, rocky bed best used as a horse trail and barely distinguishable from the surrounding high desert scrub.
Mud hens dive for food. A blue heron sweeps overhead. Bass, carp an
Source: Haaretz
January 13, 2008
The Central Intelligence Agency, backed by bodies including the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Defense Intelligence Agency, determined in August 1974 that Israel had nuclear "weapons in being," a "small number" of which it "produced and stockpiled."
Israel was also suspected of providing nuclear materials, equipment or technology to Iran, South Africa and other then-friendly countries.
This top secret docum
Source: WaPo
January 14, 2008
There is a natural tendency to look to history as a guide to the future, but in the 2008 presidential campaign, that is of limited help. After the first two contests on the nominating calendar, neither the Democratic nor the Republican race clearly fits the pattern of past campaigns.
The Democratic race may come closer, at least at first glance. The battle between Clinton and Obama evokes comparisons to a number of past nomination fights in which an establishment front-runner drew a
Source: WaPo
January 14, 2008
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton defended her recent remarks on civil rights Sunday, as Sen. Barack Obama weighed in on the controversy for the first time, describing Clinton's earlier comments about the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. as "unfortunate" and "ill-advised."
Obama had previously tried to sidestep direct engagement in the debate over race. But the recent controversy has touched a nerve with many African Americans, including some sympathetic to the Clinton
