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: NYT
November 28, 2011
Hidden in the coral terraces that line the eastern shores of East Timor are troves of artifacts and skeletal remains that tell a story of coastal activity going back tens of thousands of years — to the time when humans first settled nearby Australia.Recently, in a terrace cave called Jerimalai, a team of archaeologists discovered pieces of what are now the oldest known fishhooks in the world — dating from 16,000 to 23,000 years ago and made of shell. While these old samples are too incomplete to reveal exactly how they were used, the team also found fishhooks that are more intact from 11,000 years ago. These newer ones are classic baited jabbing fishhooks: They were most likely tied to a line, loaded with bait and thrown into the water.The archaeologists, whose findings appear in Science, also uncovered 42,000-year-old fish remains, including bones from tuna, which live only in deep water....
Source: AtlanticWire
November 29, 2011
Forty-one years after he was convicted for the murder of Robert Kennedy, Sirhan Sirhan's lawyers have filed a new appeal claiming that he's the victim of a setup and that he didn't fire the shots that killed the Senator. The filing includes a new report that claims to show through "sophisticated" audio tests that there were 13 shots (more than could be held in Sirhan's pistol) fired from multiple guns that night, as well as a further claim that one of the bullets taken from Kennedy's body was switched out before the trial, because it did not match his gun....
Source: WSJ
November 28, 2011
Lana Peters's life was a battle with history.Ms. Peters was born Svetlana Alliluyeva Stalina and she was the only daughter of Joseph Stalin. Her life was spent in the shadow of the man who helped to forge Soviet communism, led the nation to victory in World War II, and was held responsible for killing more people than Hitler.Much-married, restless, quarrelsome and elusive, she wrote best-selling memoirs, defected to the U.S., returned to the U.S.S.R., and finally settled in rural Wisconsin. She died there Nov. 22 of colon cancer, Richland County Coroner Mary Turner announced....
Source: AP
November 27, 2011
OYSTER BAY, N.Y. (AP) — Theodore Roosevelt had a lot of stuff.There's the massive head of a 2,000-pound African cape buffalo hanging over a fireplace near the front entrance of his home, Sagamore Hill, on the north shore of Long Island. Next to a large desk in the North Room sits a wastepaper basket made from the hollowed foot of an elephant. Nearby, there's an inkwell crafted from part of a rhino. More than four dozen rugs made from bearskins and other creatures taken down by the noted big game hunter adorn nearly every room.There are 8,000 books, and thousands of items from flags to furniture, busts to baubles and medals to mementoes.Everything must go.
Source: CNN.com
November 26, 2011
Los Angeles (CNN) -- Sirhan Sirhan, convicted of the 1968 assassination of presidential candidate Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, should be freed from prison or granted a new trial based on "formidable evidence" asserting his innocence and "horrendous violations" of his rights, defense attorneys said in federal court papers filed this week.In a U.S. District Court brief, Sirhan's lawyers also say that an expert analysis of recently uncovered evidence shows two guns were fired in the assassination and that Sirhan's revolver was not the gun that shot Kennedy.Attorneys William F. Pepper and Laurie D. Dusek also allege that fraud was committed in Sirhan's 1969 trial when the court allowed a substitute bullet to be admitted as evidence for a real bullet removed from Kennedy's neck.
Source: NYT
November 24, 2011
SACKETS HARBOR, N.Y. — Clayton F. Nans, a 57-year-old retired Marine colonel, halted his Chevrolet pickup truck near Lake Ontario recently and pointed to a grassy embankment. It was the very spot, he said, where British troops first made landfall in this upstate village, before American soldiers fought off their invasion.That engagement was two centuries ago, in the Second Battle of Sackets Harbor, a key New York moment in the War of 1812, whose bicentennial is fast approaching. And Mr. Nans, who periodically dons the blue woolen coat of an early 19th-century Marine as a War of 1812 re-enactor, is upset that New York State is not doing anything to commemorate it....
Source: AP
November 25, 2011
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico's archaeology institute downplays theories that the ancient Mayas predicted some sort of apocalypse would occur in 2012, but on Thursday it acknowledged that a second reference to the date exists on a carved fragment found at a southern Mexico ruin site.Most experts had cited only one surviving reference to the date in Mayan glyphs, a stone tablet from the Tortuguero site in the Gulf coast state of Tabasco.But the National Institute of Anthropology and History said in a statement that there is in fact another apparent reference to the date at the nearby Comalcalco ruin. The inscription is on the carved or molded face of a brick. Comalcalco is unusual among Mayan temples in that it was constructed of bricks....
Source: ScienceNow
November 24, 2011
In a shallow cave on an island north of Australia, researchers have made a surprising discovery: the 42,000-year-old bones of tuna and sharks that were clearly brought there by human hands. The find, reported online today in Science, provides the strongest evidence yet that people were deep-sea fishing so long ago. And those maritime skills may have allowed the inhabitants of this region to colonize lands far and wide.The earliest known boats, found in France and the Netherlands, are only 10,000 years old, but archaeologists know they don't tell the whole story. Wood and other common boat-building materials don't preserve well in the archaeological record. And the colonization of Australia and the nearby islands of Southeast Asia, which began at least 45,000 years ago, required sea crossings of at least 30 kilometers. Yet whether these early migrants put out to sea deliberately in boats or simply drifted with the tides in rafts meant for near-shore exploration has been a matter of fierce debate.
Source: Dunya News
November 23, 2011
Suspects accused of collaborating with Pakistani forces in Bangladesh's war of independence are now on trial, but claims of appalling crimes are also tarnishing the "heroes" of that bloody struggle.Migrant families who moved to what was then East Pakistan after the subcontinent was partitioned in 1947 say they were targeted as outsiders during the 1971 fight to become the independent nation of Bangladesh.Thrown out of their homes and often murdered during the country s bloody birth, they believe their suffering at the hands of native Bengalis has been forgotten as Bangladesh focuses instead on alleged collaborators with Pakistan.The day after Bangladesh declared independence from Pakistan on December 16, 1971, Sairun Nesa survived a massacre in which 15 of her family -- including her husband, son and daughter -- were killed by "freedom fighters"...
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 23, 2011
A drought in Germany has brought water levels in the Rhine to dangerous lows, exposing ships to unexploded Second World War munitions.Bomb disposal experts have already had to blow up an incendiary bomb near Cologne and have yet to decide how to deal with a larger bomb spotted lying in 16 inches of water near Koblenz.River traffic was also disrupted earlier this week after a hand grenade was spotted on the banks of the Rhine near Bonn, and authorities along the course of the river have asked people to report any suspicious objects.During the Second World War the Rhine saw intensive fighting as German troops used it as a barrier to stem the eastern advance of Allied forces....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 23, 2011
In 1911 she furiously penned a strongly worded letter against the testing of a Britain's first successful sea plane, called 'Waterbird', over and on her treasured Lake Windermere, in the Lake District, blasting: "Those who want noise go to Blackpool."Despite her loud opposition the tests went ahead on 25th November 1911 after Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, ignored her pleas and pressed on with Edward Wakefield's unique aircraft.But plans to celebrate the centenary of that maiden flight and landing this Friday using a different sea plane were sunk when air enthusiasts lost a council application to temporarily lift Windermere's 10mph speed limit - which was introduced in 2005 and inspired by Potter's years of conservation campaigning....
Source: National Parks Traveler
November 20, 2011
The National Park Service has recognized the historic significance of gay rights activist Dr. Franklin E. Kameny by listing his home in the National Register of Historic Places. “Dr. Kameny led a newly militant activism in the fledgling gay civil rights of the 1960s,” said NPS Director Jonathan B. Jarvis. “He was a landmark figure in articulating and achieving gay civil rights in federal employment and security clearance cases, and in reversing the medical community’s view on homosexuality as a mental disorder.” Dr. Kameny’s efforts in the civil rights movement, modeled in part on African American civil rights strategies and tactics, significantly altered the rights, perceptions, and role of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered people in American society, a Park Service release said.
Source: WSJ
November 21, 2011
MOSCOW — The leader of Russia’s Communist Party defended his party’s use of Josef Stalin on election posters.“Under Stalin, we lived 30 years without corruption. This is our history,” Gennady Zyuganov said in an interview on Friday.As December parliamentary elections approach, billboards in Russia’s Far East displayed the Soviet hammer-and-sickle emblem and the slogan “time to change the power,” along with a portrait of of Stalin, the Soviet leader who ruled with terror from 1922 to his death in 1953....
Source: National Geographic
November 18, 2011
The nobility of Renaissance Venice may have been among the first to hear music in stereo, according to new acoustics research. Architectural innovations in churches may have been intended to clearly separate the sounds from a split choir, audio engineers announced this week.The researchers used computer models to simulate what concerts in some of the city's churches—including tourist staples such as the Basilica of San Marco—sounded like 400 years ago."First, we modeled the acoustics for the churches as they are now," explained Braxton Boren, a student in music technology at New York University."Once we were sure that the models were functioning correctly, we consulted with architectural historians and professional acousticians to tweak the models" to simulate how the churches might have sounded during the Renaissance, said Boren, who presented the findings this week at an Acoustical Society of America meeting in San Diego, California....
Source: Discovery News
November 21, 2011
Autumn festivals, including American Thanksgiving, East Asian Mid-Autumn Festival and Jewish Sukkot, celebrate family and the Earth's bounty in similar ways despite cultural differences.Of those three, Thanksgiving is the newcomer.The Pilgrims celebrated a harvest festival with the Native Americans in 1621. And their ancient Anglo-Saxon ancestors also celebrated autumn harvest festivals."Our word 'harvest' is a direct reflex of the Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, word 'hærfest,' which ... only meant 'autumn.' By extension, the word came to refer to the fruits of the field, brought home for processing," John Niles, emeritus professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison told Discovery News.But Thanksgiving wasn't an official annual event until 1863 when president Abraham Lincoln proclaimed, "...set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens."...
Source: Discovery News
November 21, 2011
Astronomer Edwin Hubble's landmark paper on the rate of expansion of the universe was published in 1929, overturning the long-held belief among scientists that the universe was static and unchanging.That's why the Hubble Constant (the number that describes the rate of expansion) is named after him, not to mention the Hubble Space Telescope.Less well known is that Hubble might not have been the first the person to make this momentous discovery.A Belgian priest and cosmologist named Georges Lemaitre published a paper reaching very similar conclusions two years earlier. It's a contentious issue among cosmologists, needless to say.The problem was, Lemaitre's paper was in French, and appeared in a rather obscure journal: Annals of the Brussels Scientific Society. This limited its distribution throughout the scientific community (at least initially).
Source: Discovery News
November 22, 2011
A series of crude graffiti drawn on the walls of a London flat are the "Lascaux of Punk," according to a controversial claim made by two British archaeologists who compared the rude markings to Paleolithic cave art.Found behind cupboards in the upper room of a two-storey 19th-century house at 6 Denmark Street in London, the intact graffiti was drawn by the Sex Pistols' John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten). The Sex Pistols ushered in an era of punk in the United Kingdom in the 1970s. According to John Schofield, of the Department of Archaeology at the University of York, and independent researcher Dr Paul Graves-Brown, the Pistols "cave art" is worthy of being reviewed in the same way archaeologists examine prehistoric art. While Lydon drew the pictures, other members of the band wrote some text on the walls....
Source: LiveScience
November 21, 2011
The Dead Sea Scrolls may have been written, at least in part, by a sectarian group called the Essenes, according to nearly 200 textiles discovered in caves at Qumran, in the West Bank, where the religious texts had been stored.Scholars are divided about who authored the Dead Sea Scrolls and how the texts got to Qumran, and so the new finding could help clear up this long-standing mystery.
Source: BBC
November 21, 2011
A healed fracture discovered on an ancient skull from China may be the oldest documented evidence of violence between humans, a study has shown.The individual, who lived 150,000-200,000 years ago, suffered blunt force trauma to the right temple - possibly from being hit with a projectile.But the ancient hunter-gatherer - whose sex is unclear - survived to tell the tale: the injury was completely healed by the time of the person's death.Details are published in PNAS journal."There are older cases of bumps and bruises - and cases of trauma," said co-author Erik Trinkaus from Washington University in St Louis, US....
Source: BBC
November 22, 2011
A Warwickshire man has described the moment builders found human bones under his patio.Stephen and Nicky West were having their home redeveloped when one of the builders unearthed the remains.Mr West said: "There was a tap on the door and the builder said 'Stephen, I think there's something you need to see'."He had a skull in his hand and I thought 'oh my goodness'."...
