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: AP
Mar 23, 2010
Has even the Last Supper been supersized?
The food in famous paintings of the meal has grown by biblical proportions over the last millennium, researchers report in a medical journal Tuesday.
Using a computer, they compared the size of the food to the size of the heads in 52 paintings of Jesus Christ and his disciples at their final meal before his death.
If art imitates life, we're in trouble, the researchers conclude. The size of the main dish grew 69 per
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 23, 2010
The Blue Mass pills taken as antidepressants by Abraham Lincoln contained dangerously high levels of mercury likely to have caused his notoriously wild temper, scientists have found.
The 16th President of the United States took the pills in the 1850s to alleviate what one contemporary described as the “cave of gloom” in which he lived.
But researchers who analysed a recently unearthed sample of the medicine discovered it contained up to 120 times the acceptable daily i
Source: AP
Mar 23, 2010
A German court on Tuesday convicted an 88-year-old of murdering three Dutch civilians as part of a Nazi hit squad during World War II, capping six decades of efforts to bring the former Waffen SS man to justice.
Heinrich Boere, number six on the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of most-wanted Nazis, was given the maximum sentence of life in prison for the 1944 killings.
"These were murders that could hardly be outdone in terms of baseness and cowardice — beyond the r
Source: Medieval News
Mar 22, 2010
Experts from The University of Manchester's John Rylands Library are to spend four days at a beautiful seventeenth century mansion to capture its world famous Canterbury Tales manuscript on camera.
From today to March 25th, visitors to the National Trusts' Petworth House, Sussex, will be able to watch the team of four as they work with cutting edge equipment to record the early 15th century Chaucer manuscript in close detail.
It is part of a 18-month project - funded by
Source: NYT
Mar 22, 2010
The U-2 spy plane, the high-flying aircraft that was often at the heart of cold war suspense, is enjoying an encore.
Four years ago, the Pentagon was ready to start retiring the plane, which took its first test flight in 1955. But Congress blocked that, saying the plane was still useful.
And so it is. Because of updates in the use of its powerful sensors, it has become the most sought-after spy craft in a very different war in Afghanistan.
As it shifts fro
Source: Fox News
Mar 22, 2010
The growing movement for preservation of historical landmarks in outer space -- otherwise known as space archaeology -- just took a giant leap forward.
Californian historical preservationists have registered to protect the remains of the Apollo 11 landing site -- on the moon's famous Sea of Tranquility -- as an official historical resource, giving it protected status.
Beyond the well-known footprints and lunar lander tracks, the site also includes used urine containers
Source: CNN.com
Mar 22, 2010
In the beginning, there was the stone.
The blue-gray vein of granite that courses through northeastern Georgia spawned jobs in the quarries and finishing sheds of Elberton, where generations of stonecutters have turned slabs of rock the size of refrigerators into statues, tombstones and tile.
And one day, it brought a visitor who gifted the town with a landmark that leaves visitors scratching their heads decades later.
The nearly 20-foot high series of gran
Source: AFP
Mar 22, 2010
The oldest stone wall in Greece, which has stood at the entrance of a cave in Thessaly for the last 23,000 years, has been discovered by palaeontologists, the ministry of culture said Monday.
The age of the find, determined by an optical dating test, singles it out as "probably one of the oldest in the world", according to a ministry press release.
"The dating matches the coldest period of the most recent ice age, indicating that the cavern's paleolithic
Source: AP
Mar 22, 2010
Food coupons for some of the notorious Nazi doctors at the Auschwitz death camp — including perhaps the sadistic Dr. Joseph Mengele — have been found in the attic of a nearby house, where they had lain unseen for decades.
Also found in the attic were other documents relating to the lives of Nazi officials, including death certificates and a map.
Some sugar coupons bear the names of Horst Fischer and Fritz Klein, doctors who were executed for their crimes after the war,
Source: BBC
Mar 22, 2010
An exhibition of objects found during archaeological studies on the site of the Weymouth relief road has attracted 3,000 visitors on its first day.
The exhibition at Weymouth Pavilion includes a rare collection of human bones discovered in a mass burial pit.
Tests on the bones revealed them to be young Viking men, who were killed by decapitation and then dumped.
Dorset County Council senior archaeologist Steve Wallis said public interest in the finds have
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 22, 2010
Former President Bill Clinton has poked fun at Republicans, Democrats and his own health at the Gridiron Club's annual dinner, saying he was only there because "I really didn't have anything much better to do tonight."
The dinner marked the 125th annual gathering of the Gridiron Club, whose members include Washington based reporters.
The dinner marked the 125th annual gathering of the Gridiron Club, whose members include Washington based reporters.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 22, 2010
The National Museum of Natural History in Washington is celebrating its 100th anniversary with an exhibition on human origins featuring Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon skulls on show for the first time outside Europe.
The museum's new $20.7 million (£13.8) exhibition hall, dubbed the Hall of Human Origins, provides visitors an "opportunity to connect their personal life to the evidence that human species evolves over million of years," museum director Cristian Samper said as h
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 22, 2010
The only privately held copy of a list that Oskar Schindler drew up of Jews to be saved from Nazi concentration camps is on sale for $2.2 million (£1.5m)
The list compiled by Schindler and the accountant Itzhak Stern – and made famous in the Hollywood movie "Schindler's List" by Steven Spielberg – is dated April 18, 1945, and 13 pages long, Mr Zimet said.
Zimet, who runs the collector's website MomentsInTime.com, said he is selling the document on a "fir
Source: AFP
Mar 21, 2010
Ever paid top dollar for a bottle of wine that says on the label it's from a much-sought-after year, only to find that it tasted like cheap, non-vintage plonk?
Well, a team of researchers in Australia, who think "vintage fraud" is widespread, have come up with a test that uses radioactive carbon isotopes left in the atmosphere by atomic bomb tests last century and a method used to date prehistoric objects to determine what year a wine comes from, or its vintage.
Source: NYT
Mar 21, 2010
Down a winding alley, deep in a quiet neighborhood of rutted roads and donkey carts, where food vendors sold cheap sandwiches and children chased after a soccer ball, an extraordinary moment passed here with little notice: Jews and Muslims, Israelis and Egyptians sat together and celebrated their shared heritage.
But no one outside the small group of invited guests was allowed to see.
Egypt spent $1.8 million to restore a part of its historic past, the synagogue and off
Source: WaPo
Mar 21, 2010
As the final round of the battle over health-care reform begins Sunday, President Obama and the Democrats are in reach of a historic legislative achievement that has eluded presidents dating back a century. The question is at what cost.
By almost any measure, enactment of comprehensive health-care legislation would rank as one of the most significant pieces of social welfare legislation in the country's history, a goal set as far back as the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt and purs
Source: Los Angeles Times
Mar 21, 2010
A Getty Villa exhibit explores how Europeans looked to ancient Rome to understand the Mexican empire.
A 1,200-pound stone head of an Aztec moon goddess has moved into the Getty Villa. So have life-size statues of a warrior adorned with eagle feathers, a duck-billed wind god and a demon known as the Lord of Death.
Made between 1440 and 1521 and on loan from Mexico City's National Museum of Anthropology and the Templo Mayor Museum, the massive artworks are among 64 sculpt
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 21, 2010
Grave robbers in Cyprus have attacked the tombs of three archbishops in a case which echoed one targeting a former president's remains last December.
Cyprus police on Sunday arrested a Romanian man suspected of vandalising the tombs of three archbishops who led the church in the late 19th and early 20th century, a police spokesman said.
The graveyard in central Nicosia is a burial ground for several senior clerics of Cyprus's Orthodox Church, an ancient institution tr
Source: The Daily Maverick (South Africa)
Mar 21, 2010
Sunday, 21 March, leaves a five decade-mark on a timeline that started with the massacre that shocked the world and proved beyond doubt the inherent monstrosity of the apartheid system. It may have taken another 30 years for it to fall, but it was Sharpeville that first made its ultimate destruction inevitable.
Some years ago, in the company of one of its designers, this writer had the opportunity to visit the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, just before it was opened to the public
Source: Scientific American
Mar 20, 2010
A comparison of ancient and contemporary footprints reveals that our ancestors were strolling much like we do some 3.6 million years ago, a time when they were still quite comfortable spending time in trees, according to a study which will be published in the March 22 issue of the journal PLoS ONE.
Anatomical fossils have given scant confirmation about when our ancestors developed a fully modern gait. Although some researchers have argued that the 4.4 million-year-old ancient human
