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
March 28, 2011
It was Nov. 2, 1859. The jury in Charles Town, Va., deliberated only 45 minutes before sentencing John Brown to death by hanging for leading a raid on the federal arsenal at nearby Harper’s Ferry. The court asked Brown, a gaunt, craggy-faced abolitionist, if he wished to speak. He did.
His defiant yet humble words transformed Brown, notorious for the grisly murders of pro-slavery settlers in Kansas, into a martyr for the anti-slavery cause....
The speech was a bit over
Source: NYT
March 28, 2011
In the old days, anybody interested in seeing a Mets game during a trip to New York would have to call the team, or write away, or wait to get to the city and visit the box office. No more. Now, all it takes is to find an online ticket distributor. Sign in, click “Mets,” pick the date and pay.
But before taking the money, the Web site might first present the reader with two sets of wavy, distorted letters and ask for a transcription. These things are called Captchas, and only humans
Source: NYT
March 28, 2011
...The endgame in Libya is likely to turn in large part on the instincts of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, and any insight into those instincts would be enormously valuable to policy makers. Journalists have formed their impressions from anecdotes, or from his actions in the past; others have seized on his recent tirades about Al Qaeda and President Obama.
But at least one group has tried to construct a profile based on scientific methods, and its conclusions are the ones most likely to a
Source: BBC News
March 28, 2011
Inge Franken is a sprightly 70-year-old who lives in an apartment on two floors in Berlin. She has a task, a mission. She tours schools educating children about her - and their - country's dark history.
She shows the class a photograph of two young boys (see photo) who pose in Nazi regalia, and she seeks reaction. One has his chest puffed out in pride, the other seems reluctant. It is for today's children to decide which they would rather be.
If the school visit goes we
Source: NYT
March 29, 2011
American nuclear safety regulators, using a complex mathematical technique, determined that the simultaneous failure of both emergency shutdown systems that are designed to prevent a core meltdown was so unlikely that it would happen once every 17,000 years.
But 20 years ago, it happened twice in four days at a pair of nuclear reactors in southern New Jersey....
In the wake of the disaster in Japan, concerns were quickly raised at the Turkey Point nuclear power plant in
Source: BBC News
March 29, 2011
They could be the earliest Christian writing in existence, surviving almost 2,000 years in a Jordanian cave. They could, just possibly, change our understanding of how Jesus was crucified and resurrected, and how Christianity was born.
A group of 70 or so "books", each with between five and 15 lead leaves bound by lead rings, was apparently discovered in a remote arid valley in northern Jordan somewhere between 2005 and 2007.
A flash flood had exposed two nich
Source: BBC News
March 28, 2011
A website that illegally sold Beatles songs online for 25 cents each has agreed to pay record companies almost $1m (£625,000) to settle a legal case
BlueBeat.com, based in the US, streamed and sold music by The Beatles, Coldplay and others until it was sued in 2009.
In the few days before it was forced to shut down, it had distributed more than 67,000 Beatles tracks.
Judge Josephine Tucker ruled that the site had violated the music labels' copyright and was
Source: AP
March 28, 2011
Tourists are staying away from Egypt, two months after the start of a popular revolution that ousted long-time President Hosni Mubarak, dealing another blow to a nation already staggered by inefficiency, corruption and poverty.
Protesters compared Mubarak to the ancient Pharaohs. Their tombs, in time-worn and time-honored pyramids, rise majestically in Egypt's desert.
Now the sand-swept sites stand nearly empty. Turmoil during the pro-democracy revolution that overturn
Source: Science Daily
March 28, 2011
An Iron Age man whose skull and brain was unearthed during excavations at the University of York was the victim of a gruesome ritual killing, according to new research.
Scientists say that fractures and marks on the bones suggest the man, who was aged between 26 and 45, died most probably from hanging, after which he was carefully decapitated and his head was then buried on its own.
Archaeologists discovered the remains in 2008 in one of a series of Iron Age pits on the
Source: BBC
March 28, 2011
The Pakistani cabinet has supported moves to re-examine the death sentence meted out to former Prime Minster Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1979.
Mr Bhutto led the country's first democratically elected government, but was ousted from power in a military coup in 1977.
He was hanged two years later in what is widely seen to have been a controversial death sentence.
It was thought to have been at the behest of military ruler Zia-ul Haq.
On Sunday, Mr Aw
Source: BBC
March 28, 2011
Tourism plans to conserve a medieval castle which was once home to Welsh princes have taken a major step forward after a 10-year battle.
A £4.7m Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) grant will go to conservation work and new facilities at Cardigan Castle.
The money will also go to work on the historic grounds and gardens, which are home to rare trees and an endangered bat species.
The aim is to increase visitor numbers from 3,000 to 30,000.
The Friends
Source: BBC
March 28, 2011
Newly released documents suggest that the man who helped secure an independent Ireland, Eamon de Valera, covertly co-operated with Britain to crush the IRA.
The papers reveal that De Valera, whose entire cabinet in the late 1930s were former IRA members, asked London to help smear the organisation's chief of staff as a communist agent.
Tensions came to a head when the IRA began bombing Britain in early 1939.
Under what was called the Sabotage or S-Plan,
Source: BBC
March 27, 2011
Israel has demanded an explanation from Argentina over reports it proposed to Iran it would stop investigating two bombings if trade ties improved.
Argentina, Israel and the US have blamed Iran for the bombings of the Israeli embassy and a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires in the 1990s.
Iran has denied involvement in the bombings, which killed 114 people.
A car bomb exploded outside a Jewish community centre known as the AMIA on 18 July 1994, killing
Source: Telegraph (UK)
March 28, 2011
Harry Wesley Coover, known as the inventor of Super Glue, has died. He was 94.
Mr Coover was working for Tennessee Eastman Company, a division of Eastman Kodak, when an accident helped lead to the popular adhesive being discovered.
Cyanoacrylate, the chemical name for the glue, was first developed in 1942 in a search for materials to make clear plastic gun sights for the Second World War.
But the compound stuck to everything, which is why it was rejected
Source: CNN
March 28, 2011
A little English village church has just made a remarkable discovery.
The ornate old Bible that had been sitting in plain view on a table near the last row of pews for longer than anyone could remember is an original King James Bible - one of perhaps 200 surviving 400-year-old original editions of arguably the most important book ever printed in English.
In fact, the Bible at St. Laurence Church in Hilmarton, England, was sitting right under a hand-lettered sign saying
Source: New York Post
March 26, 2011
Gowanus Canal may hold more than toxic chemicals and dead mobsters — it keeps numerous artifacts from its industrial past, according to Environmental Protection Agency archeologist John Vetter, who is leading a study to determine what’s stuck in the muck.
Sonar readings taken along Brooklyn’s filthy 1.8-mile waterway have already uncovered several sunken boats, including the 60-foot-long hull of a wooden working vessel, a small fiberglass boat, the hulls of 126-foot-long and 110-fo
Source: The Atlantic
March 25, 2011
JeffBible1.jpgHow do museum professionals define the condition of an artifact, and determine whether it can be used or exhibited without harm? The answer is by very, very careful investigation, especially when the artifact is the Jefferson Bible, otherwise known as The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. Using excerpts from the Four Gospels of the New Testament, Thomas Jefferson arranged the text to tell a chronological and edited story of Jesus' life and moral philosophy.
A natio
Source: NYT
March 27, 2011
Politicians define themselves by choosing enemies, and exemplars. Suddenly, President Obama’s choices on Libya are reshaping his profile in unpredictable ways as he heads into the 2012 election season.
The president and his advisers have already highlighted the central factors that influenced Mr. Obama’s decision to act militarily, a process he plans to explain more fully to the nation at 7:30 p.m. Monday.
In Muammar el-Qaddafi, Mr. Obama saw an autocrat on the verge of
Source: Discovery News
March 25, 2011
Servilia and Lucius Caltilius Pamphilus, the married couple from Pompeii that was virtually reunited on a photomontage following the work of two British researchers, are now forever side by side in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples.
Following Discovery News story early this month, the 2000-year-old marble puzzle made of several inscribed fragments has been physically pieced together at the museum by Giuseppe Camodeca, professor of Roman history and Latin epigraphy at the
Source: Discovery News
March 24, 2011
For years now, paleontologists have been debating about how gigantic plant-eating dinosaurs, known as sauropods, held their long necks. Could they stretch their tall necks upright, as giraffes do today, or did they hold them horizontally, more parallel to the ground?
Other scientists have since run with that comparison to canister-style vacuum cleaners and have set out to prove or disprove it. Most recently, evolutionary ecologists Graeme Ruxton of the University of Glasgow and Davi
