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: Live Science
February 14, 2011
Two false mummy toes from Egypt may have actually strutted their stuff as functional big-toe prostheses for their owners, researchers have found.
The two toes — the Greville Chester housed in the British Museum and the Cairo toe at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo — date back to before 600 B.C., which the researchers say is much earlier than what had been considered the earliest known practical prosthesis (called the Roman Capua leg dating to around 300 B.C.)
The Greville C
Source: BBC
February 14, 2011
Scientists have identified why the bright yellows in some of Vincent van Gogh's paintings have turned brown.
A complex chemical reaction is behind the deterioration of the works.
The finding is a first step to understanding how to stop some of the Dutch master's most famous paintings from fading over time.
The results, published in the journal Analytical Chemistry, suggest shielding the affected paintings as much as possible from UV and sunlight.
Source: BBC
February 14, 2011
The film The King's Speech continues to pick up plaudits for its account of George VI's struggle with his stammer.
But less widely known is the role of a mid Wales village in tackling another of the future monarch's afflictions.
The then Prince Albert sought refuge for three weeks in Llangurig, Powys, while recuperating from a duodenal ulcer.
He rested in the village in September 1917, shortly after serving in the Battle of Jutland during World War I.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 14, 2011
The man topping the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's most-wanted Nazi list has been charged by Hungarian prosecutors for war crimes related to the massacre of hundreds of people in wartime Yugoslavia.
Hungarian Sandor Kepiro, now 97, was charged with being "complicit in the execution of four innocent civilians in the town of Novi Sad between 21 and 23 January, 1942, as the commander of a patrol".
An estimated 1,200 Jews, gipsies and Serbs died in the massacre that w
Source: CNN
February 14, 2011
The Mississippi NAACP has called on Governor Haley Barbour to publicly denounce an attempt by a Confederacy group to honor a Ku Klux Klan leader, the organization said Monday.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans has launched the campaign to recognize Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest on a specialty license plate.
Forrest, a popular and controversial figure, is best known as a leader of the KKK, the white supremacist group known for terrorizing blacks in the South aft
Source: NYT
February 13, 2011
SPOKANE, Wash. — The bomb was sophisticated and potentially deadly, but it did not detonate. No one was hurt, and no one has been arrested. So Spokane became a mystery.
“To me, it’s that God’s gracious hand moved,” said Chief Anne Kirkpatrick of the Spokane Police Department. “This was a bomb of significance that would have caused devastation.”
Nearly a month after a cleanup crew found the live bomb along the planned route of a large downtown march honoring the Rev. Dr.
Source: Fox News
February 11, 2011
...Found in a chest of books outside Rome by a dealer in antique books, the Voynich manuscript is among literature's great mysteries. The book of aging parchment is written in alien characters, some resembling Latin letters, others unlike anything used in any known language, and arranged into what appear to be words and sentences -- except they don't resemble anything written or read by human beings....
"Is it a code, a cipher of some kind?" asked Greg Hodgins, a physicist
Source: Progress-Index.com
February 11, 2011
PETERSBURG - National Park Rangers asked for assistance from local and State Police Thursday after serving a search warrant on a home in the city and finding a potentially live, Civil War-era, unexploded artillery shell.
The shell was discovered Thursday at around 1 p.m. after Park Rangers executed a search warrant on the home in the 1800 block of Oakland Street as part of a criminal investigation.
"Due to the dangers involved, when the shell was discovered we call
Source: BBC News
February 13, 2011
Love it or hate it, even the most hardened anti-Romeo will be hard pressed to avoid Valentine's Day this year. But as an exhibit at the British Library currently on show is testament to, there is a first for everything - even on Valentine's Day.
It is a letter, written from a young woman to her love, and is the first mention of the word Valentine in the English language. And, for the first time, the descendants of Margery Brews and her betrothed John Paston have been traced.
Source: WBRi Washington Bangla Radio
February 11, 2011
New York, Feb 11 (IBNS): The United Nations held a special ceremony on Thursday to pay homage to the six million Jews and countless others slaughtered in the Nazi death camps of the Second World War, stressing that the drive to prevent a repetition of such horror was one of the reasons the Organization was founded.
The ceremony, originally scheduled for Jan 27, the annual Holocaust memorial day, was delayed by a heavy snow storm in New York.
“Let us remember: the United
Source: Canadian Free Press
February 12, 2011
DENTON, Texas — Paul Kletzki lost his inspiration to compose music after his sister and parents died in the Holocaust.
The native of Lodz, Poland, who wrote and conducted in Berlin before leaving Germany in the 1930s, went on to achieve international acclaim as a conductor but his own musical compositions faded into obscurity.
Now, one of his pieces from the early 1930s, a piano concerto, has been revived by a project at the University of North Texas, and a performance
Source: Fox News
February 13, 2011
PERRYVILLE, Ky. – Investigators in central Kentucky are probing the theft of multiple Civil War antiques, including belt buckles, arrowheads and old money, from a store.
Boyle County Sheriff's Chief Deputy Jim Wilcher said whoever broke into Merchants Row Cafe and Antiques in Perryville seemed to know what they were looking for....
Source: Fox News
February 14, 2011
Two false mummy toes from Egypt may have actually strutted their stuff as functional big-toe prostheses for their owners, researchers have found.
The two toes — the Greville Chester housed in the British Museum and the Cairo toe at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo — date back to before 600 B.C., which the researchers say is much earlier than what had been considered the earliest known practical prosthesis (called the Roman Capua leg dating to around 300 B.C.).
"We may
Source: Scotsman (UK)
February 12, 2011
THE ground where William Wallace won his most famous victory over the English is set to feature in Scotland's "Inventory of Historic Battlefields".
Historic Scotland revealed in December the first 17 nationally important sites for inclusion, including Bannockburn and Culloden.
Now the site of the 1297 Battle of Stirling Bridge is under consideration to join them as part of a second batch set to be revealed.
The battle would become the earliest dat
Source: Independent Mail (SC)
February 13, 2011
ELBERTON — Herbert Booth, known as H.V. in Elberton, tears up when he talks about his father.
Booth’s father, Isham Johnson Booth, died when Booth was only 15. His father was 87.
“He didn’t talk much about the war,” Booth said. “Whenever we asked about it he said ‘Children should be seen not heard.’”
At 92, Booth is one of a handful of men who are living sons of Confederate veterans, and one of only two in Georgia.
Isham Booth served as a guard
Source: Salon
February 13, 2011
While most gathered at CPAC this past weekend were busy gobbling up buffet-sized servings of Republican rage, one outsized commentator was left eating a slice of humble pie.
Former USDA official Shirley Sherrod has filed a lawsuit against conservative firebrand and web entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart. The suit stems from the notorious video Breitbart posted online last year, showing an out-of-context excerpt from a speech Sherrod gave to the NAACP Freedom Fund in March 2010. The clip
Source: NYT
February 13, 2011
The last living person who had seen Abraham Lincoln when his train stopped at Peekskill on Feb. 19, 1861, was Alida Hicks Hutchinson, who died in 1952.
An African-American child, she was 4 years old when Lincoln stopped and made a three-minute speech here as part of the 12-day, 1,900-mile, seven-state train trip that took him from Springfield, Ill., to Washington for his inauguration on March 4, 1861....
Up here we seem to be opting for a strictly do-it-yourself approac
Source: AP
February 11, 2011
A fierce sperm whale sank the first whaling ship under George Pollard's command and inspired the classic American novel "Moby-Dick". A mere two years later, a second whaler captained by Pollard struck a coral reef during a night storm and sank in shallow water.
Marine archaeologists scouring remote atolls 600 miles northwest of Honolulu have found the wreck site of Pollard's second vessel — the Two Brothers — which went down in 1823.
Most of the wooden Nantuck
Source: Deutsche Welle
February 13, 2011
Thousands of people have formed a human chain around the city of Dresden to protest against a far-right march on the 66th anniversary of the Allied bombing of the city during World War II.
The Allied bombing of the eastern German city of Dresden during World War II has in recent years become an opportunity exploited by far-right groups holding demonstrations.
This year, however, some 17,000 people braved freezing temperatures on Sunday to protest against the neo-Nazis b
Source: AP
February 14, 2011
Investigators in central Kentucky are probing the theft of multiple Civil War antiques, including belt buckles, arrowheads and old money, from a store.
Boyle County Sheriff's Chief Deputy Jim Wilcher said whoever broke into Merchants Row Cafe and Antiques in Perryville seemed to know what they were looking for.
Wilcher told WKYT-TV in Lexington that because of the number of items stolen, it is likely more than one person took part in the burglary on Saturday.
