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: Reuters
April 11, 2007
MEXICO CITY -- Ancient Mexicans brought human sacrifice victims from hundreds of miles away over centuries to sanctify a pyramid in the oldest city in North America, an archeologist said on Wednesday.
DNA tests on the skeletons of more than 50 victims discovered in 2004 in the Pyramid of the Moon at the Teotihuacan ruins revealed they were from far away Mayan, Pacific or Atlantic coastal cultures.
The bodies, many of which were decapitated, dated from between 50 AD and
Source: AP
April 11, 2007
BERLIN -- Benedict XVI, in his first extended reflections on evolution published as pope, says that Darwin's theory cannot be finally proven and that science has unnecessarily narrowed humanity's view of creation.
In a new book, "Creation and Evolution," published Wednesday in German, the pope praised progress gained by science, but cautioned that evolution raises philosophical questions science alone cannot answer...
He stopped short of endorsing intelligent
Source: AP
April 10, 2007
WICHITA, Kansas -- Forget the Pyramids of Egypt and the seven wonders of the ancient world.
Let's talk about the eight wonders of Kansas.
A non-profit group called the Kansas Sampler Foundation is asking the public to submit nominations using eight elements of rural culture: architecture, art, commerce, cuisine, customs, geography, history and people.
State officials hope the effort will boost tourism and draw attention to quirky attractions, such as Big Br
Source: Reuters
April 11, 2007
TOKYO -- Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, in a speech to Japan's parliament on Thursday, urged Japan to match its words of apology for Tokyo's wartime aggression with action.
"We sincerely hope Japan will use practical actions to manifest its public statements and promises," Wen told the Japanese lawmakers.
Wen, making the first visit to Japan by a Chinese premier since 2000, also called Japan's past military invasion of China a "calamity" but said the Ch
Source: Reuters
April 11, 2007
LIVERMORE, Calif. -- In the first purchase of his collection, Sellam Ismail loaded the trunk of his car with old computers he stumbled upon at a flea market for $5 apiece. Soon he had filled his three-car garage with what others would consider obsolete junk.
Years later, his collection of early computers, printers, and related parts is piled high across shelves and in chaotic heaps in a 4,500-square-foot warehouse near Silicon Valley. And it is worth real money.
Even as
Source: ABS-CBN (Quezon City, Philippines)
April 11, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Filipino World War II veterans marked Bataan Day by honoring their fallen comrades, on the eve of an important US Senate hearing that will tackle a counterpart bill granting full equity to surviving Filipino veterans.
Amid an unusual spring chill, a handful of aging World War II veterans gathered at the World War II Memorial to commemorate the 65th anniversary of the Fall of Bataan. On Wednesday, the US Senate Veterans Affairs Committee hears the pros and cons of Senat
Source: Press TV (Tehran)
April 11, 2007
Archeologists have unearthed an ancient statue which was buried as if to represent a corpse, shedding new light on Iran's Iron Age.
The archeologists uncovered the statue along with several pottery objects and human bones in the province of Qazvin on a mountain near the township of Abyek.
"The new discovery could lead us to further questions concerning the burial methods of Iron Age man," a member of the excavation team told reporters.
Experts bel
Source: Harvard Crimson
April 11, 2007
Professors rejected a call to add more history to the proposed general education curriculum in a close vote at yesterday’s sometimes-chaotic meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Faculty members spent nearly an hour debating whether to add the word “history” to the “Culture and Belief” category of the program that could replace the Core Curriculum as early as Fall 2008. The amendment, initially backed by 65 professors, ultimately failed in an 88-68 vote...
Yester
Source: Cox News Service
April 10, 2007
BAGHDAD -- Of all the frustrating jobs in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion four years ago, imagine the frustration of a man trying to entice tourists to visit here.
"It should be fun, but so far there is no fun," lamented the Iraqi tourism board director, 46-year-old Hamoud Mohsen al-Yacoubi. "When I came to this job I had black hair; now it is gray."
His office sends out promotional magazines to be displayed and distributed by Iraq's embassies abroa
Source: AP
April 10, 2007
WAPAKONETA, Ohio -- A museum honoring the first man to walk on the moon isn't afraid to confront conspiracy theorists who argue his 1969 lunar landing was a hoax.
"If it takes a controversy to get them here, that's fine with us," said Andrea Waugh, an education specialist at the Armstrong Air & Space Museum, named after Apollo 11 astronaut and hometown hero Neil Armstrong, who lives in suburban Cincinnati.
The museum set up a display Saturday featuring som
Source: AP
April 7, 2007
NEW YORK -- New DNA technology developed by a Virginia laboratory to help identify years-old remains of Sept. 11 victims is working for all but the smallest slivers of bones, a scientist says.
But identifying a Sept. 11 victim still takes weeks of painstaking review and often depends on factors like the quality of DNA samples originally provided by families from items like toothbrushes, a city spokeswoman said Saturday.
"The last thing we want to do is submit an ID
Source: Newsweek
April 16, 2007
Jonathan Cohn has studied health care for more than a decade, and in that time he's heard hundreds of grim tales—people who skimp on doctors' visits and skip medications so they can make the rent; patients who died because, as he writes in his new book, they "literally could not afford" to fall ill.
That book, "Sick: The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis—And the People Who Pay the Price," focuses in heart-rending detail on nine of those stories, the kind of whi
Source: AP
April 10, 2007
A Florida State University anthropologist has new evidence that ancient farmers in Mexico were cultivating an early form of maize, the forerunner of modern corn, about 7,300 years ago -- 1,200 years earlier than scholars previously thought.
Researcher Mary Pohl conducted an analysis of sediments in the Gulf Coast state of Tabasco and concluded that people there were planting crops in the New World about 5300 BC.
The discovery of cultivated maize in Tabasco, a tropical lowland area, c
Source: Racel Gordon, San Francisco Chronicle
April 9, 2007
Ed. note: With Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, approaching this weekend, the Chronicle profiles two former partisans."If I was going to be killed, I was going to be killed as a fighter and not because I was a Jew," a steely female voice said in December via a videotaped interview shown at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco's Kanbar Hall."That itself gave me strength to go on."
Beneath the huge overhead screen Sonia Orbuch sat proudly as a sold-out audience of 5
Source: New York Times
April 11, 2007
PRINCETON, N.J. -— In 1936, two of the Soviet Union’s greatest artists decided to work on a new theatrical production of Pushkin’s “Boris Godunov” for its author’s coming jubilee. Sergei Prokofiev wrote 24 musical pieces while the visionary stage director Vsevolod Meyerhold mapped out scenes and started rehearsals. The following year, Stalin’s terror fixed its gaze on Meyerhold and he abandoned the project. Three years later, he was dead, shot by a firing squad.
Now, thanks to the r
Source: Telegraph
April 10, 2007
The river is brown and pungent, the houses are haunted and the streets teem with thieves.
Charles Dickens's England, however, never had construction workers in hard hats and high visibility vests.
News that the finishing touches are being applied to the £62 million theme park may be unwelcome among literary purists, but Dickens World in Chatham, Kent, is expected to attract more than 300,000 visitors a year.
The complex offers a boat ride in a London sewer,
Source: Reuters
April 8, 2007
DEN BOSCH, Netherlands -- A new stained glass window in a Dutch cathedral that contains an image of the World Trade Center attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people was blessed on Sunday by a Dutch bishop.
The window, built up of about twenty different panes with representations of heaven and hell, has the WTC pane at the bottom showing "hell on earth", its maker Marc Mulders said.
"It was an assignment by the church to make a stained glass window that was
Source: Times (of London)
April 11, 2007
HYTHE, England -- A fisherman who caught an object weighing 500lb (227kg) off the coast of Kent decided that he had better take the coastguards’ advice on his catch.
After sending them a picture via his mobile phone, he learnt that it was a Second World War bomb, so lowered it back into the water before bomb disposal experts arrived to detonate the device.
Witnesses said that the explosion sent a spout of water shooting skywards. A dolphin that swims in the area was u
Source: Guardian
April 11, 2007
One of the last remaining pieces of Berlin Wall in the centre of the German capital was removed by workers on contract to the government in a secretly engineered operation over the Easter weekend, it was revealed yesterday.
In the hope that no one would notice because of the quiet bank holiday, the 18-metre strip of graffitied wall was yanked from its foundations in the dead of night...
At first the media spearheaded a hunt for the tourist attraction which contains well
Source: Weekly Dig
March 28, 2007
In 1775, the Essex Gazette published this account of a fatal Tory assault on Boston’s Liberty Tree: “Armed with axes, they made a furious attack upon it. After a long spell of laughing and grinning, sweating, swearing, and foaming, with malice diabolical, they cut down a tree because it bore the name of Liberty.”
For years, the tree had served as a flashpoint for all manner of incendiary violence and insurrection, both before and during the Revolutionary War. The mildly terrorist B
