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: LiveScience
January 18, 2012
The fermented cereal beverage enjoyed by Sumerians, so-called Sumerian beer, may have been alcohol-free, suggests a recent review of ancient Sumerian practices.While ancient writings and vessel remnants show that Mesopotamia's inhabitants were fond of fermented cereal juice, how the brew was actually made is still a mystery.To investigate the brewing technologies of Mesopotamia, the late Peter Damerow, a historian of science and cuneiform-writing scholar at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, reviewed archaeological finds of ancient beer production and consumption, as well as 4000-year-old cuneiform writings, which included Sumerian administrative documents and literary texts dealing with myths and legislation....
Source: LiveScience
January 18, 2012
The hectic evacuation of the sinking cruise liner Costa Concordia has been compared with the likes of the disastrous Titanic disaster. In fact, Swiss survivors even told the newspaper La Tribune de Genève that Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On," the theme song to the 1997 film "Titanic," was playing in their dining room as the ship hit the rocks.So how do the two shipwrecks match up? While the loss of life on the Titanic was much worse than on the Costa Concordia, even the Titanic's poorly planned evacuation may have been less chaotic than the one off the Tuscan coast. By the numbers, here's a side-by-side look at the two cruise ship disasters:Date of wrecks: The Titanic went down on April 15, 1912. The Costa Concordia capsized on Jan.13, 2012....
Source: LiveScience
January 18, 2012
In 1850s America, most people relied on privies and outhouses for their bathroom needs. But the Davis family of Natchez, Miss., had something few other Americans did: indoor hot-and-cold running water and an indoor toilet.Now this marvel of 19th-century technology is getting a new home, moving from the Dunleith Historical Inn to another mansion nearby operated by the National Park Service. The new lodging will give the public a chance to see a pre-Civil War version of a luxurious lavatory, complete with shower/bath combo....
Source: BBC History Magazine
January 12, 2012
Newly-released documents have revealed that novelist JRR Tolkien was passed over for the Nobel literature prize in 1961, after his storytelling in the Lord of the Rings trilogy was described as second rate. Declassified after 50 years, the papers show that Tolkien was nominated for the award by fellow author CS Lewis but that the Nobel prize jury had said of his work: “The result has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality”. The documents also reveal that British writer Graham Greene – who never won the Nobel prize – was the jury's runner-up, followed by Karen Blixen, the Danish writer of Out of Africa. Other prominent authors put forward for the Nobel prize in 1961 were EM Forster and Lawrence Durrell.
Source: Mother Jones
January 17, 2012
Richard Nixon thought that doing it would make him look like a "jerk." Geraldine Ferraro said it spread germs and lipstick, but did it anyway. Andrew Jackson suckered his secretary of war into doing it for him. Davy Crockett did it so much it should have been mentioned in his theme song. We're talking about kissing babies, that revered yet reviled, much-analyzed yet meaningless American political custom.Few candidates dare avoid it, yet no one can point to a case of a politician's failure to do it (or to do it well) causing an electoral defeat. As we head into the thick of another hotly contested baby-smooching season, here's a short history of our love-hate relationship with a campaign-trail cliché.
Source: Jeff Biggers in Salon
January 18, 2012
Jeff Biggers, the author most recently of "Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland," is currently at work on a new book on Arizona politics and historyIn a clarification of last Friday’s announcement of a list of Mexican-American studies books to “be cleared from all classrooms” in order to comply with a state ban on ethnic studies, the Tucson Unified School District declared Tuesday that it ”has not banned any books as has been widely and incorrectly reported.”
Source: CNN.com
January 17, 2012
London (CNN) -- The year 2012 is a significant one in the Maya calendar.The ancient long count calendar of the Maya, a Mesoamerican civilization that flourished across Mexico and Central America from 2000 BC to the time of the Spanish Conquistadores, states that on the 12th December, 2012, the sun will be aligned with the center of the Milky Way for the first time in approximately 26,000 years.And 21 December, 2012, is said to mark the end of the 13th Maya Calendar, a 144,000-day cycle or "b'ak'tun" since the mythical Maya day of creation 5,200 years ago.Though popularly interpreted as signifying the "end of the world as we know it," scholars stress that the end of the "b'ak'tun" does not mean apocalypse....
Source: AP
January 17, 2012
LONDON (AP) — British scientists have found scores of fossils the great evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin and his peers collected but that had been lost for more than 150 years.Dr. Howard Falcon-Lang, a paleontologist at Royal Holloway, University of London, said Tuesday that he stumbled upon the glass slides containing the fossils in an old wooden cabinet that had been shoved in a "gloomy corner" of the massive, drafty British Geological Survey.Using a flashlight to peer into the drawers and hold up a slide, Falcon-Lang saw one of the first specimens he had picked up was labeled 'C. Darwin Esq.""It took me a while just to convince myself that it was Darwin's signature on the slide," the paleontologist said, adding he soon realized it was a "quite important and overlooked" specimen....
Source: LiveScience
January 17, 2012
On this day (Jan. 17) 100 years ago, British explorer Robert Falcon Scott and four weary companions reached their long-sought goal — the South Pole. It was a bittersweet day for the party, perhaps more bitter than sweet, and a milestone that would eventually prove to be their undoing.Not only had their two-and-a-half month march across a glacier, over the Transantarctic Mountains, and through blinding snow taken a toll on the men, but only the day before, on Jan. 16, the team discovered that what Scott had long dreaded had come true....
Source: LiveScience
January 17, 2012
What will likely never be forgotten about the Italian cruise liner disaster is the quickness with which the captain of the Costa Concordia abandoned the sinking ship.According to investigators, captain Francesco Schettino maneuvered the ship, which was carrying more than 4,200 passengers and crew, too close to shore of the Tuscan Island of Giglio to "make a bow" to the locals. The "significant human error," as described by the ship's owner, Costa Cruises, caused the 114,500-ton liner to capsize just 500 feet from the shore, killing at least 11 people, while 24 remain missing.According to the Italian police, who have detained Schettino on charges of manslaughter, failure to offer assistance and abandonment of the ship, the captain and some of the crew were among the first to bail into lifeboats....
Source: Foreign Policy
January 17, 2012
Let's face it. When Millard Fillmore, the undistinguished, uninspiring 13th president of the United States, comes up in political conversation these days, it's usually as the butt of jokes....But last night, during the GOP debate in South Carolina, Ron Paul issued a full-throated endorsement of Fillmore's approach to foreign policy, whether he realized it or not. "If another country does to us what we do to others, we aren't going to like it very much," Paul explained in the context of his opposition to war with Iran. "So I would say maybe we ought to consider a Golden Rule in foreign policy."...OK, but what does all this have to do with Millard Fillmore? The former president, it turns out, expressed nearly the same sentiments in 1850 during his first State of the Union address, in a formulation of foreign policy that sounds an awful lot like Paul's noninterventionist, empire-shunning worldview....
Source: NYT
January 17, 2012
First thing Saturday, Pierette Domenica Simpson’s boyfriend called and said, “Go online. You’ll be interested.”She checked the headlines. Something about an Italian ocean liner in trouble. The way the ship was listing, the report that it was taking on water, the light from the cabins reflecting in the water, the passengers’ struggle to clamber into lifeboats — everything seemed so familiar. “I thought, ‘How can this be? It’s 56 years later,’ ” Ms. Simpson said.For Ms. Simpson, the wreck of the Costa Concordia brought back memories of one of the most famous disasters in maritime history, an accident that she survived as a 9-year-old girl: The collision on July 25, 1956, that left the Italian ship Andrea Doria, bound for New York City, listing in the Atlantic after being struck by a Swedish ocean liner, the Stockholm.“It was unreal and surreal, the fact that they were both leaning on the starboard side,” she said. “If you put the two photographs together of the night scene of the Concordia and the night scene of the Andrea Doria with the incline on the starboard side and the lights coming from the portholes, you cannot tell the difference.”...
Source: NYT
January 17, 2012
It seems like a classic case of closing the barn door after the horses have gotten out.The Landmarks Preservation Commission voted on Tuesday to declare a row of 26 19th-century town houses and tenements on the north side of Tompkins Square Park in the East Village a historic district. But there was just one problem: A building project that the designation was intended to prevent received a permit from a different New York City agency just hours before and now, essentially, cannot be stopped.Preservationists had pressed the commission to move quickly to designate the north side of East 10th Street between Avenues A and B a historic district. The street has what the commission itself said is “an unusually intact row of single family row houses, including some dating to the 1840s, mid-to-late 19th Century tenements and the circa 1904 Tompkins Square branch of the New York Public Library, already a city landmark.”...
Source: NYT
January 17, 2012
The effective federal income tax rate paid by the wealthiest Americans has dropped significantly during the last several decades, largely because of tax cuts on investment income.The last major overhaul of the tax code, signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, set tax rates on capital gains at the same level as the rates on ordinary income like salaries and wages, with both topping out at 28 percent. But that link was uncoupled by his successor, President George Bush, and the rates on capital gains were reduced by President Bill Clinton. President George W. Bush then lowered the rates on capital gains and dividends to a high of 15 percent — less than half the 35 percent top rate on ordinary income.While rates for all American taxpayers have fallen to near 50-year lows, the wealthy have reaped the most savings from the changes because they derive a larger proportion of their income from investments.Between 1985 and 2008, the wealthiest 400 Americans saw the percentage of their income paid in federal income taxes drop from 29 percent to 18 percent, according to data from the Internal Revenue Service....
Source: CBS News
January 17, 2012
In 1945, Carl Clark saved the Navy destroyer ship Aaron Ward from Japanese Kamikaze pilots. But he was not recognized for his heroism because of his race. Now, 66 years later, Clark was awarded his Medal for Distinguished Service in Combat. John Blackstone reports.
Source: Guardian (UK)
January 17, 2012
He was one of the men who laid the foundations for God's own country, but Thomas Jefferson had his own revolutionary ideas about the Bible.The third US president's unwillingness to swallow miracles such as the virgin birth led him to cut out parts of the Gospels he did not agree with and compile his own version.The result, known informally as The Jefferson Bible, has been published in a new edition by Tarcher, part of Penguin USA, this month.The original, which has been painstakingly restored by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, where it is on display, was created by Jefferson in 1820 by cutting out passages from six other volumes with razors. He then pasted them into a book of his own, which he had bound.
Source: Guardian (UK)
January 17, 2012
The eldest son of North Korea's late leader Kim Jong-il has predicted the regime would soon fail, with or without reforms, according to a new book that the author says is based on emails and interviews with Kim Jong-nam.The book says that Kim Jong-nam – who has never met the new leader, his half-brother Kim Jong-un – described the dynastic succession as "a joke to the outside world", and said even his father had originally opposed the hereditary transfer of power."The Kim Jong-un regime will not last long," Kim Jong-nam is said to have written, forecasting a power struggle. "Without reforms, North Korea will collapse, and when such changes take place, the regime will collapse."...
Source: NYT
January 16, 2012
The British explorer Robert Falcon Scott finally reached his destination a century ago, Jan. 17, 1912, more than a month too late to claim victory in the race to be first to the South Pole. But the triumphant Norwegian Roald Amundsen could not deny him at least one distinction: Scott was the founder of The South Polar Times, the first magazine to be produced on the Antarctic continent.Just about anything done in Antarctica on Scott’s first expedition, beginning in 1902, had a good chance of being a first. When his ship Discovery entered McMurdo Sound, among the gear in its hold was a typewriter, lots of typing paper and art supplies. Scott had decided, in the tradition of other Royal Navy long voyages, that there should be a monthly periodical to entertain and help the explorers keep their chins up.Keepers of journalism’s flame should take note. The illustrious publication saturated its market. The single handmade copy of each issue, neatly typed and illustrated with photographs, watercolors and playful sketches, was passed around and read aloud to one and all, icebound during the darkness of the austral winter, April to August....
Source: NYT
January 16, 2012
A City Room post recently about a town house on the Upper East Side that blew up in 2006 brought to mind another town house, another era and another explosion — the town house in Greenwich Village that became a bomb factory for the radical group the Weathermen.Unlike with the physician on the Upper East Side who apparently intended to destroy his town house, the explosion on West 11th Street in Greenwich Village, in 1970, was an accident.Charles Lockwood remembers how loud it was. He was down the street, taking pictures.He was a senior at Princeton. He and a classmate with a new camera had driven to Manhattan to take photographs for Mr. Lockwood’s senior thesis. It served as the basis for his book “Bricks and Brownstone: The New York Row House,” published in 1972 and reissued by Rizzoli in 2003....
Source: My Fox Phoenix
January 16, 2012
BERKELEY, Calif. (AP) - On a bluff overlooking a sweep of Southern California beach, scientists in 1976 unearthed what were among the oldest skeletal remains ever found in the Western Hemisphere.Researchers would come to herald the bones - dating back nearly 10,000 years - as a potential treasure trove for understanding the earliest human history of the continental United States. But a local tribal group called the Kumeyaay Nation claimed that the bones, representing at least two people, were their ancestors and demanded them back several years ago.For decades, fights like this over the provenance and treatment of human bones have played out across the nation. Yet new federal protections could mean that the vast majority of the remains of an estimated 160,000 Native Americans held by universities, museums and federal government agencies, including those sought by the Kumeyaay, may soon be transferred to tribes.A recent federal regulation addresses what should happen to any remains that cannot be positively traced to the ancestors of modern-day tribes. Museums and agencies are required to notify tribes whose current or ancestral lands harbored the remains, then the tribe is entitled to have them back....
