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: CBS News
June 7, 2011
Chalk up another win for the ancient Greeks. The Greek historian and geographer Strabo wrote nearly 2,000 years ago that Piraeus, a small peninsula near Athens, had once been an island--and a new study in this month's issue of Geology shows he was right.
Source: EFE
June 3, 2011
A team of archaeologists from the University of Florida have discovered in St.
Source: Discovery News
June 7, 2011
Markings in red paint found within the Great Pyramid by a camera-toting robot are likely numerals used by builders.
Mysterious hieroglyphs written in red paint on the floor of a hidden chamber in Egypt's Great Pyramid of Giza are just numbers, according to a mathematical analysis of the 4,500-year-old mausoleum.
Shown to the world last month, when the first report of a robot exploration of the Great Pyramid was published in the Annales du Service Des Antiquities de l'Egypte (ASAE), the images revealed featur
Source: BBC
June 7, 2011
The Historical Museum of Bern, Switzerland, has cancelled plans to put on an exhibition about the scientist Albert Einstein in Shanghai, China.
Shanghai's Science and Technology Museum had suggested merging the Einstein show with a display about the Chinese philosopher, Confucius.
A Hong Kong newspaper said Beijing had earlier asked for all references to World War I to be removed.
Neither the Shanghai nor the Bern museums have commented officially.
Shanghai is where Einstein is said to have officially learned that he wo
Source: BBC
June 7, 2011
An Argentine court has ruled that the heirs to the country's main media group must submit to DNA-testing, to see if they were born to left-wing prisoners killed by the military in the 1970s.
Judges ruled that Marcela and Felipe Noble Herrera - adopted children of the Clarin Group owner - must give direct samples such as blood or saliva.
They will be compared with samples on a genetic database linked to the missing.
The siblings object to the tests.
Source: CNN
June 7, 2011
...The 2010 census showed the South is becoming more diverse, and that descendents of African-Americans who migrated North decades ago are now heading South. For the first time, Greensboro's minorities outnumber white residents, 51.6% to 48.4%, census data showed. The city's African American population increased by nearly 31% in the past decade.
It's a subtle shift, but even after so much progress, it matters.
Source: NYT
June 7, 2011
GRANADA, SPAIN — To mark the first visit to Granada by a Jewish religious leader since Jews were expelled from Spain over five centuries ago, the city authorities had hoped to be host to a luncheon for Shlomo Moshe Amar, the Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel.
Source: The Nation
June 1, 2011
Drawing from a trove of 1,918 Haiti-related diplomatic cables obtained by the transparency-advocacy group WikiLeaks, The Nation is collaborating with the Haitian weekly newspaper Haïti Liberté on a series of groundbreaking articles about US and UN policy toward the Caribbean nation.
Source: WaPo
June 6, 2011
On election night, a jubilant Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) laid out the modern-day tea party’s philosophy — in the words of a man who was alive for the Boston Tea Party.“Thomas Jefferson,” the newly elected Paul said, “wrote that government is best that governs least.”
Source: NYT
June 3, 2011
FRANKFURT — In 1919, a soldier in Munich discovered that he could galvanize small groups of fellow trench warfare veterans with virulently anti-Semitic oratory. A superior officer, impressed with the soldier’s oral skills, asked him to commit his ideas to paper.
Source: NYT
June 6, 2011
Ninety years in the making, the 21-volume dictionary of the language of ancient Mesopotamia and its Babylonian and Assyrian dialects, unspoken for 2,000 years but preserved on clay tablets and in stone inscriptions deciphered over the last two centuries, has finally been completed by scholars at the University of Chicago.
Source: CBS News
June 6, 2011
The worldwide spread of ancient humans has long been depicted as flowing out of Africa, but tantalizing new evidence suggests it may have been a two-way street.
A long-studied archaeological site in a mountainous region between Europe and Asia was occupied by early humans as long as 1.85 million years ago, much earlier than the previous estimate of 1.7 million years ago, researchers report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Early human
Source: New Scientist
June 6, 2011
South Americans helped colonise Easter Island centuries before Europeans reached it. Clear genetic evidence has, for the first time, given support to elements of this controversial theory showing that while the remote island was mostly colonised from the west, there was also some influx of people from the Americas.
Easter Island is the easternmost island of Polynesia, the scattering of islands that stretches across the Pacific.
Source: Independent Online
June 6, 2011
Egypt's popular uprising may have arrived just in time to save a Neolithic site that holds the country's oldest evidence of agriculture and could yield vital clues to the rise of Pharaonic civilisation.
The site lies in a protected nature reserve along the shore north of Lake Qarun that until recently had remained virtually untouched, even though it lies only 70km from Cairo, Egypt's fast-expanding capital.
A month before the protests that toppled President Hosni Mubarak erupted in January, the Egyptian government carved 2.8 square kil
Source: UPI
June 6, 2011
Italian archaeologists say evidence from a sunken Roman ship suggests fish could have been kept alive in on-board tanks as they traded around the Mediterranean.
Due to a lack of refrigeration, historians have long assumed Roman ships catching fish could only deliver them locally or short distances away before the fish rotted.
However, a new report publi
Source: BBC
June 5, 2011
Researchers have developed a new dating technique that has given the first detailed picture of the emergence of an agricultural way of life in Britain more than 5,000 years ago.
A new analysis of artefacts recovered from the first monuments built in Britain shows that the Neolithic period had a slow start followed by a rapid growth in trade and technology.
Scientists say the new approach can be used to unravel the detailed sequence of events of many more important moments in human prehistory.
It relies in part on radio-carbon d
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 6, 2011
Ratko Mladic has been awarded £44,000 in back pay of his war pension by Serbian authorities, his lawyer has claimed.
The former Bosnian Serb army general, who was extradited to the UN war crimes court last week to face charges of genocide and war crimes, had his pension of £714 a month frozen in 2005.
Source: Fairfax Times
June 3, 2011
The fate of a McLean property with historical ties to the War of 1812 and the Civil War will be decided by a task force that has been assembled by Dranesville Supervisor John Foust (D) and Fairfax County Park Authority Board member Kevin Fay.The formation of the task force was announced last week.The property, which is listed on the National Register of Historical Places and on the Virginia Landmarks Register, is known as historic Salona, the 19th-century estate where President James Madison is thought to have fled when British forces set fire to the White House in 1814.
Source: ENI News
June 1, 2011
(ENInews). In the wake of the destruction and surrender of the Japanese empire in August 1945, a "spiritual vacuum" emerged that the country's de-facto ruler, General Douglas MacArthur, sought to fill with religious and quasi-religious beliefs still new to Japan, from Christianity to Freemasonry.
Source: NIH
June 6, 2011
The motion picture, Let There Be Light (1946), an early generation of which is held in the collections of the National Library of Medicine, has been named to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.
