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: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 16, 2010
The Northern Ireland Affairs Committee said too many questions remained unanswered over how much the security services knew about the killers' movements around the time of the dissident republican attack 12 years ago and if police officers were left out of the loop.
Twenty-nine people, including a mother pregnant with twins, were killed when the Real IRA car bomb exploded in the Co Tyrone market town.
No one has been successfully convicted of the murders, but last year
Source: NYT
Mar 15, 2010
Among the archival material from Salman Rushdie currently on display at Emory University in Atlanta are inked book covers, handwritten journals and four Apple computers (one ruined by a spilled Coke). The 18 gigabytes of data they contain seemed to promise future biographers and literary scholars a digital wonderland: comprehensive, organized and searchable files, quickly accessible with a few clicks.
Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments, sweated ov
Source: NYT
Mar 15, 2010
In the middle of a terrifying desert north of Tibet, Chinese archaeologists have excavated an extraordinary cemetery. Its inhabitants died almost 4,000 years ago, yet their bodies have been well preserved by the dry air.
The cemetery lies in what is now China’s northwest autonomous region of Xinjiang, yet the people have European features, with brown hair and long noses. Their remains, though lying in one of the world’s largest deserts, are buried in upside-down boats. And where tom
Source: Discovery News
Mar 15, 2010
A newly found bumpy-skinned, terrestrial amphibian lived 70 million years before dinosaurs in what is now Pennsylvania.
An interesting "rock" initially tossed aside at a FedEx site near Pittsburgh International Airport turns out to be the skull of a meat-eating, early terrestrial amphibian that lived 70 million years before the first dinosaurs emerged, according to a paper released today in Annals of Carnegie Museum.
The approximately 300-million-year-old car
Source: Discovery News
Mar 15, 2010
What killed the dinosaurs? Ok, ok, we know an asteroid did it, roughly, but that made a comparatively small hole in the ground -- what actually killed them? We've heard lots about nuclear winter, global wildfires, all sorts of poisonous gases, and combinations thereof. But what if it was something far more mundane. What if it was ozone?
At the start, it seems hard to make a potent mass murderer out of a gas that is just three little oxygen atoms bounds together. And we all know abo
Source: NYT
Mar 15, 2010
The Texas Board of Education, notorious for its past efforts to undermine the teaching of evolution in public schools, has now moved to revise the social studies curriculum to portray conservative ideas and movements in a more positive light and emphasize the role of Christianity in the nation’s founding.
It was a disturbing intervention by the board’s Republican majority into educational decisions best left to the teachers and scholars who have toiled for almost a year to produce t
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 15, 2010
The Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile was created by a special painting technique which tricks the eye into thinking the expression is changing, a study has claimed.
Austrian neurologists say analysis of the masterpiece shows her face appears to shift depending where a person focuses their gaze.
If her eyes are stared at, it appears she has a subtle smile on her lips. But if the onlooker shifts their gaze to her mouth, then the smile disappears.
Professor Floria
Source: BBC News
Mar 15, 2010
A play which was first discovered nearly 300 years ago has been credited to William Shakespeare.
The work, titled Double Falsehood, was written by the playwright and another dramatist, John Fletcher.
Theatre impresario Lewis Theobald presented the play in the 18th century as an adaptation of a Shakespeare play but it was dismissed as a forgery.
But scholars for British Shakespeare publisher, Arden, now believe the Bard wrote large parts of the play.
Source: NYT
Mar 15, 2010
William John Scott is a freshman at Drew University. He studies political science. He plays defense on the lacrosse team. He describes himself on Facebook as a night person who likes to party.
But federal prosecutors say he is something else: a busy archives thief who stole famous letters written by a founder of the United Methodist Church and world leaders, including Abraham Lincoln and Madame Chiang Kai-Shek.
Mr. Scott pilfered the letters while working part time at t
Source: AP
Mar 15, 2010
Ernest Hemingway's Key West home, where the American author lived in the 1930s, has been designated a literary landmark.
Hemingway, who lived in the Spanish-colonial home with his second wife Pauline and their two sons, owned the property until his death in 1961. It became a museum honoring the Pulitzer and Nobel prize-winning author in 1964.
He worked on many of his best-known manuscripts in the Key West property's second-story writing studio.
Source: AP
Mar 15, 2010
A town in Arizona is missing a 25-year-old bottle of brandy.
When officials in Somerton opened a time capsule Saturday, they discovered mementos from 1985 — but didn't find a bottle of Mexican brandy that was supposed to be in the capsule.
Somerton street and solid waste supervisor Pancho Soto was part of the crew that buried the time capsule....
Source: Discovery News
Mar 15, 2010
Scientists were able to identify neurons and cerebral cells from the brain preserved from the 13th century.
An international team of researchers has identified intact neurons and cerebral cells in a mummified medieval brain, according to a study published in the journal Neuroimage.
Found inside the skull of a 13th century A.D. 18-month-old child from northwestern France, the brain had been fixed in formalin solution since its discovery in 1998.
Source: BBC
Mar 15, 2010
A fire which destroyed a church in the fenland area of Cambridgeshire is being treated as suspicious.
The fire broke out mid-morning at the 19th Century church of St Mary's at Westry on the outskirts of March.
Only the external brickwork remains and the building has been deemed structurally unsound.
Source: BBC
Mar 15, 2010
A war hero's Battle of Britain medals have been gifted to a museum on the site of the former Cambridgeshire airfield he was based at.
Wing Commander George Blackwood served at RAF Duxford during World War II with the 310 Squadron - the first completely Czech fighter squadron.
He received the Defence Medal, George Star, Aircrew Europe Star and Czech War Cross and Czech Military Medal.
His family gave the collection to Imperial War Museum Duxford later.
Source: BBC
Mar 15, 2010
Raoul Wallenberg was a heroic Swedish diplomat who made history by assisting and saving thousands of Jews in Budapest during the Holocaust. But Wallenberg was arrested by the Soviet Union and disappeared into the Gulag, never to return home to his family, or his own future.
One of the most admired figures from Holocaust history, Raoul Wallenberg is also one of the most enigmatic. Why did this scion of Sweden's most important family go to Budapest to save Jews during the Holocaust? A
Source: Metro (UK)
Mar 15, 2010
A treasure trove of 200 World War II propaganda posters is being auctioned after being found in an old printing factory.
The posters, with famous slogans such as Keep Calm And Carry On and Careless Talk Costs Lives, were described by the Imperial War Museum as a ‘once in a lifetime’ find.
They lay gathering dust until an employee took them home. ‘They are quite a find and as minty as can be. I can remember seeing quite a few of them myself during the war,’ said Roy Butler,
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 15, 2010
Germany hatched a plan during World War Two to infiltrate the Vatican with spies disguised as monks, according to secret MI5 intelligence reports.
A Nazi sympathiser living in Rome came up with the idea and it was quickly seized upon by officials in Berlin who saw it as the ideal opportunity to keep up with Allied activity in the city.
The plan is revealed in MI5 reports held at the National Archives in Kew and which have now been declassified - and it comes just days a
Source: BBC News
Mar 15, 2010
English Sporting icons don't come much bigger than Wembley Stadium but few realise that it owes some of its splendour to the labour of German prisoners of war .
The news, which follows an investigation by BBC Radio 4's Document programme, may come as a shock to many England fans who view Germany as their fiercest sporting rivals.
In 1948 the stadium was to host the Olympics and the area around needed to be redeveloped.
The trouble was that the carnage of WW
Source: BBC News
Mar 15, 2010
The internet celebrates a landmark event on the 15 March - the 25th birthday of the day the first dotcom name was registered.
In March 1985, Symbolics computers of Cambridge, Massachusetts entered the history books with an internet address ending in dotcom.
That same year another five companies jumped on a very slow bandwagon.
It took until 1997, well into the internet boom, before the one millionth dotcom was registered.
"This birthday is
Source: BBC News
Mar 15, 2010
Israel's ambassador to the US has said that relations between the two countries are at their lowest point for 35 years, Israeli media have reported.
Last week Israeli officials announced the building of 1,600 new homes in occupied East Jerusalem while US Vice-President Joe Biden was visiting.
The move was seen as an insult to the US. Palestinian leaders say indirect talks with Israel are now "doubtful".
But Israel's PM said Jewish settlements did
