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: The Australian
November 13, 2011
A MEDIEVAL market town has discovered it owns an original version of Magna Carta, potentially worth about 20 million pounds, rather than a copy worth only 10,000 pounds.It was identified in the collection of Faversham town council in Kent by academic experts prompted by the auction of a version from 1297 owned by Ross Perot, who ran for the US presidency against Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996. In 2007 that version had fetched $US21.3m (about $A20.8 million at today's rates)....
Source: Discovery News
November 16, 2011
Jane Austen, the author of classics such as Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, may have died of arsenic poisoning, according to a crime writer who has reviewed the last letters of the British novelist.The crucial clue lies in a line written by Austen a few months before her mysterious death in 1817.Describing weeks of illness she had recently experienced, Austen wrote: "I am considerably better now and recovering my looks a little, which have been bad enough, black and white and every wrong colour."According to Lindsay Ashford, a British crime writer, the description matches the symptoms of arsenic poisoning, "which causes skin spotting if taken in small doses over a long time."...
Source: BBC
November 16, 2011
The Archbishop of Canterbury has paid tribute to the King James Bible at a service to mark its 400th anniversary.Dr Rowan Williams said the text was "extraordinary" and of "abiding importance".The Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales also attended the service at Westminster Abbey.The translation was ordered by James I in 1604 to help forge unity between religious factions.The final editing of the "Authorised Version" of the King James Bible was completed in the Jerusalem Chamber of the Abbey in 1611.Dr Williams told the congregation that the seventeenth century translators would have been "baffled and embarrassed" by the idea of a perfect translation of the Bible....
Source: BBC
November 14, 2011
An early Bronze Age burial cist containing cremated bones and material dating back 4,000 years has been excavated on Dartmoor.Archaeologists uncovered items from the site on Whitehorse Hill including a woven bag or basket and amber beads.Cists are stone-built chests which are used for the burial of ashes.Dartmoor National Park Authority (DNPA) said the discovery could be one of the most important archaeological finds in 100 years....
Source: Yale Daily News
November 10, 2011
Using a new technology known as optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), a team of Belgian scientists and Professor John Coleman Darnell of Yale have determined that Egyptian petroglyphs found at the east bank of the Nile are about 15,000 years old, making them the oldest rock art in Egypt and possibly the earliest known graphic record in North Africa.The dating results will be published in the December issue of Antiquity (Vol. 85 Issue 330, pp. 1184–1193).The site of the rock art panels is near the modern village of Qurta, about 40km south of the Upper-Egyptian town of Edfu. First seen by Canadian archaeologists in the early 1960s, they were subsequently forgotten and relocated by the Belgian mission in 2005. The rediscovery was announced in the Project Gallery of Antiquity in 2007.
Source: Science Daily
November 14, 2011
The Greeks were not always in such dire financial straits as today. German archeologists have discovered a very large commercial area from the ancient Greek era during excavations on Sicily.Led by Professor Dr. Martin Bentz, archeologists at the University of Bonn began unearthing one of Greek antiquity's largest craftsmen's quarters in the Greek colonial city of Selinunte (7th-3rd century B.C.) on the island of Sicily during two excavation campaigns in September 2010 and in the fall of 2011.The project is conducted in collaboration with the Italian authorities and the German Archaeological Institute. Its goal is to study an area of daily life in ancient cities that has hitherto received little attention....
Source: ABC News
November 15, 2011
Nearly 48 years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, fresh audio evidence from that fateful day has surfaced. The evidence comes in the form of the original reel-to-reel Air Force One radio recording, containing conversations between officials on the plane, the White House situation room, and others. The original tape was long thought to be lost or destroyed.The tape contains never-before-heard conversations between the presidential aircraft and the White House and immediately after the assassination of President Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963.
Source: WaPo
November 14, 2011
Washington — President Barack Obama’s “we can’t wait” refrain is all about projecting a sense of urgency and bold action heading into his fourth year in office. It turns out other presidents haven’t had much luck with that.The fourth year is often a disappointment, particularly when a president facing re-election is trying to coax action out of a Congress in the hands of the other party. The heady optimism of earlier years gets bogged down in partisan bickering, and big initiatives give way to less ambitious steps.Bill Clinton, chastened by huge GOP gains in the 1994 congressional elections, ended up tacking to the center in his fourth year, a remarkable transformation captured in his 1996 acknowledgment that “the era of big government is over.” Clinton, helped by a solid economy, did enough to get re-elected, but it was a year largely characterized by small-bore initiatives like school uniforms and neighborhood curfews.George H.W. Bush, frustrated that he couldn’t get action out of a Democratic Congress on his economic proposals, opened his fourth year in 1992 with words akin to Obama’s:“My friends: The people cannot wait,” he said in his State of the Union address that January. “They need help now.”
Source: CNN.com
November 11, 2011
From Gibbon to "Gladiator," it might seem like we know a lot about Ancient Rome, but our view of this civilization is a skewed one. The Romans lived in one of the most stratified societies in history. Around 1.5% of the population controlled the government, military, economy and religion. Through the writings and possessions they left behind, these rich, upper-class men are also responsible for most of our information about Roman life.The remaining people – commoners, slaves and others – are largely silent. They could not afford tombstones to record their names, and they were buried with little in the way of fancy pottery or jewellery. Their lives were documented by the elites, but they left few documents of their own.
Source: The Republic
November 11, 2011
RICHMOND, Va. — Archaeologists at the College of William and Mary have uncovered what's believed to be a Civil War-era well and other artifacts, a discovery that opens a window into a part of history largely overshadowed by the school's close association with the Colonial era.Crews doing archaeological studies ahead of a planned utility project on the oldest part of the Williamsburg campus recently uncovered the well, as well as minie balls, or lead bullets first used in the Civil War. They also found remnants of what could be a brick wall, along with pieces of bottle glass and pottery that date to the period when federal troops occupied school grounds."The Civil War is definitely a period where there was concentrated activity," said Joe Jones, director of William and Mary's Center for Archaeological Research.William and Mary was among many Southern colleges that closed during the 1861-1865 war. In the war's run-up, William and Mary students overwhelmingly supported Virginia's secession, thinking doing so could help create a new nation where their state would be at the forefront, said historian Sean Heuvel, a leadership and American Studies instructor at Christopher Newport University....
Source: LiveScience
November 11, 2011
Middle- and high-school students are preparing to help conserve recently exposed shipwrecks from the last major battle of the Revolutionary War in Virginia's York River.The Virginia students, from Point Option High School in Newport News, the Williamsburg Montessori Middle School, and Peasley Middle School in Gloucester, are traveling to the Waterman's Museum in Yorktown, near the shipwrecks, on field trips.
Source: LiveScience
November 14, 2011
A rare Arabic inscription from the Crusades has been deciphered, with scientists finding the marble slab bears the name of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, a colorful Christian ruler known for his tolerance of the Muslim world.Part of the inscription reads: "1229 of the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus the Messiah."The 800-year-old inscription was fixed years ago in the wall of a building in Tel Aviv, though the researchers think it originally sat in Jaffa's city wall. To date, no other Crusader inscription in the Arabic language has been found in the Middle East....
Source: Salon
November 14, 2011
On his Fox show Monday evening, Bill O’Reilly dismissed as “gutter sniping” reviews of his new Lincoln assassination history that pointed out multiple factual errors in the bestselling book.“We well understand our enemies are full of rage of [the book's] success,” O’Reilly said. “We also know the media lies at will with no accountability. ‘Killing Lincoln’ in an honest book that you will enjoy and learn from, and that every American student should read.”...The controversy started after Salon reported that the official National Park Service bookstore at Ford’s Theatre had rejected O’Reilly’s book because of “the lack of documentation and the factual errors within the publication.” A second review in a leading Civil War magazine identified another 10 or so alleged errors.A separate gift shop at Ford’s, which is not subject to the same rigorous review standards as the National Park Service bookstore, has decided to sell “Killing Lincoln.”...
Source: HuffPo
November 11, 2011
A recent report says Texas K-12 standards in history are inadequate, ineffective and "fail to meet the state's college readiness standards," and the report's authors are pointing the finger at Gov. Rick Perry's State Board of Education.In the report, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board and the Social Studies Faculty Collaborative say that Texas' K-12 system is "founded upon an inadequate set of standards." Keith Erekson, the author and history professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, analyzes in the report the entire process of Texas' history standards -- from board approval to the curriculum itself.The report notes that the Fordham Institute gave the state's history standards a grade of "D," calling it a "politicized distortion of history," that is "both unwieldy and troubling" while "offering misrepresentations at every turn."
Source: The Daily Beast
November 14, 2011
Philip Eade writes in the foreword to his new book, Prince Philip: The Turbulent Early Life of the Man Who Married Queen Elizabeth II, that he first became interested in authoring a bio about Prince Philip when he “briefly toyed with writing a book about prominent ufologists in the period just after the Second World War.” During the course of that research, Eade discovered not only that Prince Philip was a subscriber to the magazine Flying Saucer Review, but that he once sent his equerry, Sir Peter Horsley, “to meet an extraterrestrial humanoid at a house in Ealing.” Eade writes, “A number of witnesses were invited to Buckingham Palace to discuss their experiences, as Horsley later explained, to ‘put them on the spot’ and to test their honesty in the presence of royalty, a method as effective as any truth serum.” Horsley was on the prince’s staff from 1952 to 1955 before climbing to great heights in the Royal Air Force.
Source: NYT
November 15, 2011
MIAMI (AP) — Aging Holocaust survivors in the U.S. are looking to Congress to clear a path for them to sue European insurance companies they contend illegally confiscated Jewish life-insurance policies during the Nazi era.The survivors say companies owe as much as $20 billion....
Source: 11-14-11
NYT
JAMESTOWN — For more than a decade, the marshy island in Virginia where British colonists landed in 1607 has yielded uncounted surprises. And yet William M. Kelso’s voice still brims with excitement as he plants his feet atop a long-buried discovery at the settlement’s heart: what he believes are the nation’s oldest remains of a Protestant church.The discovery has excited scholars and preservationists, and unearthed a long-hidden dimension of religious life in the first permanent colony.It may prove to be an attraction for another reason: the church would have been the site of America’s first celebrity wedding, so to speak, where the Indian princess Pocahontas was baptized and married to the settler John Rolfe in 1614. The union temporarily halted warfare with the region’s tribal federation.Last week Mr. Kelso, the chief archaeologist at the site, hopped into the excavated pit topped with sandbags and pointed to where Pocahontas would have stood at the altar rail. Orange flags marked the church’s perimeter. The pulpit would have been to the left and a baptismal font behind, with a door opening toward the river....
Source: National Geographic
November 8, 2011
Last month, part of a major wall came tumbling down in Pompeii, the ancient Roman city frozen in time by a first-century eruption of Mount Vesuvius. It was only the latest in a spate of collapses at the site, which experts say is in critical condition.Though the site is said to be safe for tourists, the disintegration is alarming enough to have spurred the European Union to pledge 105 million euros (145 million dollars) for preservation.
Source: Science Insider
November 9, 2011
When engineers rebuilding a beach near Lewes, Delaware, in 2004 began finding bits of Colonial-era pottery mixed in with the sand, archaeologists quickly realized they had found a historic shipwreck. Soon, researchers were carefully excavating the wreck, which historians believe is the British vessel Severn, sunk in a storm in 1774.They've recovered more than 45,000 "world-class artifacts … nowhere else on the continent do we have this kind of stuff from this period," says David Clarke, the state archaeologist for the Delaware Department of Transportation (DelDOT), which received money for the dig from a special pot created by federal highway-building legislation. That pot, officially known as the Transportation Enhancements (TE) program, "has pumped a lot of money into our field," he says.More than $51 million, to be exact. But Clarke and other archaeologists are now watching anxiously as Congress debates whether to renew the enhancements program. Many lawmakers are calling for modifying the program, which has funneled funds to some 200 archaeology projects since 1992, and some want to kill it, calling it wasteful and unnecessary....
Source: Guardian (UK)
November 9, 2011
The UK military's long march out of Germany begins on Thursday when the Ministry of Defence announces details of a pullout that will eventually cover all 20,000 British troops there.Under the plans, 1,800 will leave by next January, and then there will be a steady return home of another 8,200 by 2015. The rest will be back in the UK before the end of the decade – 15 years earlier than first proposed.The pullout has been accelerated as part of the cuts announced in last year's Strategic Defence and Security Review, which was an attempt to streamline the armed forces at a time when billions were being taken out of the defence budget.The British bases in Germany still represent the biggest deployment of UK forces overseas. With civilians, families and children, the British contingent in the country stands at more than 43,000....
