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: BBC News
March 25, 2011
The long-held theory of how humans first populated the Americas may have been well and truly broken.
Archaeologists have unearthed thousands of stone tools that predate the technology widely assumed to have been carried by the first settlers.
The discoveries in Texas are seen as compelling evidence that the so-called Clovis culture does not represent America's original immigrants.
Details of the 15,500-year-old finds are reported in Science magazine.
Source: BBC News
March 24, 2011
Six letters written by Frederic Chopin, thought to be lost in 1939, have been found and donated to a Warsaw museum dedicated to the Polish composer.
The letters, written by Chopin to his parents and sisters between 1845 and 1848, were believed lost after the outbreak of World War II.
After it emerged in 2003 that they still existed in a private collection, moves were made to secure them.
Chopin was born in Poland in 1810 but spent half of his life in France
Source: BBC News
March 24, 2011
Ukrainian ex-President Leonid Kuchma has told reporters he has been charged after being questioned by prosecutors over the 2000 murder of a journalist.
He said he had not read the charges himself. Prosecutors opened a case against him this week on suspicion of a role in Georgy Gongadze's death.
Gongadze was found beheaded months after being abducted in September 2000, when Mr Kuchma was in power.
The ex-president earlier denied any part in his death.
Source: BBC News
March 25, 2011
Education Secretary Michael Gove has called for children to read more books, again noting that John Steinbeck's novella Of Mice and Men dominates in many schools. Why should one American book be chosen by so many British teachers?
Michael Gove says children are reading too few books.
He says that some students only read two books in an academic year, and that a departmental survey suggests that "over 90% of schools teach Of Mice and Men to their GCSE students"
Source: BBC News
March 25, 2011
Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Lanford Wilson, best known for such plays as Talley's Folly and Burn This, has died aged 73.
The writer passed away at a New Jersey hospital on Wednesday after a long illness, his agent said.
Wilson wrote 17 full-length plays and more than 30 one-acts.
He was awarded the Pulitzer in 1980 for Talley's Folly, part of a trilogy of plays about several generations of a Missouri family.
He died on the eve of a new st
Source: Discovery News
March 22, 2011
King Tut's grandmother was a legendary beauty, but high-resolution images of her mummified face suggest her complexion wasn't perfect.
King Tut's grandmother, the powerful and beautiful Queen Tiye, might have had an unattractive flat wart on her forehead, according to a mummy expert.
Located between the eyes, the small protuberance was found on the mummy of the so-called Elder Lady (KV35EL). Boasting long reddish hair falling across her shoulders, the mummy was identifi
Source: BBC
March 24, 2011
A controversial mini-series about the Kennedy family that its US broadcaster refused to show is to be screened later this year on BBC Two.
The Kennedys was to air on the History Channel in the US before its parent company, A&E Television Networks, pulled the plug following complaints over its historical accuracy.
Greg Kinnear and Katie Holmes play John and Jackie Kennedy in the series.
The Kennedys will air in the US next month on ReelzChannel, a digita
Source: Yahoo News
March 24, 2011
TINTON FALLS, N.J – Dorothy Young, the last surviving stage assistant of illusionist Harry Houdini and an accomplished dancer, has died. She was 103.
Young's death was announced Wednesday by Drew University, where she was a prominent donor and patron of the arts. Drew spokesman Dave Muha said Young died Sunday at her home in a Tinton Falls, N.J., retirement community....
Source: Irish Times
March 21, 2011
Blacksmiths are a rare breed, but a woman working in Russborough House is re-igniting interest in the tradition
ON THE grounds of Russborough House in Co Wicklow, what Seamus Heaney termed “the hammered anvil’s short-pitched ring” echoes around empty outbuildings which were once hives of activity serving the commercial and domestic needs of the big house. Old carriage buildings are boarded up, while the stables and work sheds are all long since deserted.
All except one,
Source: Yahoo News
March 23, 2011
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – A sculpture of a Mayan warrior that sold for more than $4 million at a Paris auction house this week is a fake, Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History said.
The masked, stone figure, sold by a private collector, was billed as an impressive piece of Pre-Columbian art and was believed to be a unique work dating from around 550 to 950 A.D. It sold for 2.9 million euros ($4.1 million) on Monday.
But Mexican experts at the institute w
Source: Fox News
March 23, 2011
World War II veteran Leeland Davidson has been living in America for nearly 100 years, but he only just learned he is not in fact a U.S. citizen.
The 95-year-old's parents were born in the U.S., but they had him while in Canada. And the proper paperwork apparently was never filed to report Davidson as being born to Americans living abroad.
The place of his birth was never an issue throughout his life in the United States until he recently tried to get a driver’s license
Source: Fox News
March 23, 2011
MUNICH – Relatives of people killed at the Nazis' Sobibor death camp and their lawyers said in closing statements at John Demjanjuk's trial Wednesday that the evidence shows he was a guard there and he should be convicted as an accessory to murder.
Ukraine-born Demjanjuk, 90, denies having ever served as a Nazi death camp guard, saying he was a soldier in the Red Army who was captured by the Germans and then spent most of the rest of the war as a prisoner himself.
But
Source: National Parks Traveler
March 21, 2011
Long before Ken Burns' PBS series on the national parks, the filmmaker produced another multi-program epic that features several NPS areas. THE CIVIL WAR, which first aired in 1990, remains the highest-rated series in the history of American public television. The series is being rebroadcast in early April to mark the 150th anniversary of the beginning of America's Civil War.
THE CIVIL WAR was a milestone in the history of documentary film and television,” notes John F. Wilson, chie
Source: Fox News
March 22, 2011
A substitute teacher's letter to Arizona lawmakers has reignited the state's immigration debate after he wrote that his Hispanic students hate America and just want to be gang members, MyFoxPhoenix.com reported Tuesday.
The letter by substitute teacher Tony Hill was read aloud Thursday as the state Senate considered one of five bills on illegal immigration. Hill wrote that a majority of eight-grade students who he taught recently at an unnamed Glendale school refused to say the Pled
Source: Guardian (UK)
February 21, 2011
Etched into the surviving art of the Moche, one of South America's most ancient and mysterious civilisations, is a fearsome creature dubbed the Decapitator. Also known as Ai Apaec, the octopus-type figure holds a knife in one hand and a severed head in the other in a graphic rendition of the human sacrifices the Moche practiced in northern Peru 1,500 years ago.
For archaeologists, the horror here is not in Moche iconography, which you see in pottery and mural fragments, but in the h
Source: Polskie Radio
March 22, 2011
The New York Times has become the latest media outlet in the US to order its journalists to refrain from using the phrase “Polish death/concentration camps” when referring to WW II German Nazi death camps in Poland.
Eileen M. Murphy, Vice President of Corporate Communications at the NYT has written to the Kosciuszko Foundation in the US – which has led the campaign against the use of what is seen in Poland as insulting and historically revisionist language – to inform them tha
Source: AP
March 22, 2011
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip – The United Nations has launched a new plan to teach the Holocaust in Gaza schools, drawing fierce condemnation from Gaza's militant Hamas rulers, school teachers — and even the body tasked with peace negotiations with Israel.
If implemented, it would be the first time most Palestinian children learn about Jewish suffering. But the outcry underscores how sensitive the issue is to Palestinians.
"Playing with the education of our children in th
Source: Yahoo News
March 22, 2011
NEW YORK – It was a warm spring Saturday when dozens of immigrant girls and women leapt to their deaths — some with their clothes on fire, some holding hands — as horrified onlookers watched the Triangle Shirtwaist factory burn.
The March 25, 1911, fire that killed 146 workers became a touchstone for the organized labor movement, spurred laws that required fire drills and shed light on the lives of young immigrant workers near the turn of the century.
The 100th annivers
Source: Lincolnshire News (UK)
March 22, 2011
THE last-standing remains of a medieval castle in Lincolnshire will be opened up to the public for the first time.
The South Kyme Tower once formed one of the four corners of a castle, which was built on a Saxon site.
It is believed that the 14th century castle was once visited by Robin Hood and was built by a knight whose signature is on the Magna Carta.
The tower stands on private land and for years has been closed....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
March 20, 2011
The final words of doomed Russian cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, were picked up by U.S. intelligence, according to a new book.
As Komarov hurtled towards earth and certain death in the stricken Soyuz 1 craft, he could be heard screaming and cursing the 'people who had put him inside a botched spaceship.'
U.S. National Security Analyst, identified in the book as Perry Fellwock, described intercepting Komarov's conversation with ground control officers in which he told them
