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
Jan 15, 2010
The Doomsday Clock - a barometer of nuclear danger for the past 55 years - has been moved one minute further away from the "midnight hour".
The concept timepiece, devised by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) now stands at six minutes to the hour.
The group said it made the decision to move the clock back because of a more "hopeful state of world affairs".
The clock was first featured by the magazine in 1947, shortly after the
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Jan 14, 2010
The world's oldest light bulb has been burning for 109 years - so little wonder it has a fan club with thousands of members and its own website.
As EU rules deny householders the right to use traditional filament bulbs, the so-called 'Centennial Light' has been on almost constantly since 1901.
It holds pride of place in Fire Station 6, in Livermore, northern California.
The longest time the Guinness World Record-holding bulb has ever been turned off for is
Source: Secrecy News
Jan 14, 2010
A recent book written by two Israeli writers and published in translation (pdf) by the DNI Open Source Center (OSC) traces what the authors see as the decline of Israel’s political left.
“The Left died the day the Six-Day War ended,” wrote Shmuel Hasfari and Eldad Yaniv.
“Until 1967, the Left actually managed some impressive deeds — it took control of the land, ploughed, sowed, harvested, founded the state, built the army, built its industry from scratch, fought Arabs,
Source: LA Times
Jan 14, 2010
Was the J. Paul Getty Museum acting in good faith when it purchased one of the finest ancient bronze statues in existence?
That will be the central question before an Italian judge after Friday's closing arguments in a long-running legal battle in Pesaro, Italy.
At stake is a much-coveted work believed by some to have been created by Alexander the Great's personal sculptor and plundered by Roman soldiers around the time of Christ before being lost at sea. A regional pub
Source: NYT
Jan 14, 2010
Until 1923, the only school in the largely black farm settlement of Pine Grove was the one hand-built by parents, a drafty wooden structure in the churchyard. Anyone who could read and write could serve as teacher. With no desks and paper scarce, teachers used painted wood for a blackboard, and an open fireplace provided flashes of warmth to the lucky students who sat close.
This changed after a Chicago philanthropist named Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck, took up
Source: PR Newwswire
Jan 14, 2010
Renowned auctioneers Alexander Autographs has uncovered an incredibly rare find: notorious Auschwitz death camp Dr. Josef Mengele's treatise on eugenics and euthanasia, written by him in 1960 while in hiding in Argentina. The document will be offered along with over 1,400 other lots of historic autographs at auction on January 20th and 21st commencing at 10:00 AM at the auction house's Stamford headquarters.
Mengele, who escaped capture until his death by drowning in 1979, proves hi
Source: AAP
Jan 14, 2010
The massive task of reburying 250 Australian and British World War I soldiers found in a mass grave in northern France will begin in late January.
The soldiers' bodies were unearthed from the series of unmarked pits on the outskirts of the village of Fromelles by a team of archaeologists in late 2009.
Their remains laid undiscovered until an amateur historian from Melbourne tracked down their mystery resting place, paving the way for their bodies to be recovered.
Source: ABC News
Jan 14, 2010
The Netherlands will on Thursday return to Iraq a 4 000-year-old clay tablet discovered when it was put on sale on an online auction site, the government in The Hague said.
"The police found the tablet last December on the Marktplaats auction site," the culture ministry said in a statement. "The owner voluntarily gave it up after being informed that it was illegal to trade in Iraqi cultural artefacts."
The tablet, 7cm by 4.5cm, has been dated to 2040
Source: Fox News
Jan 14, 2010
Former chief United Nations weapons inspector Scott Ritter was arrested in a Pennsylvania sex sting in November on a litany of charges involving a lewd Internet conversation with a person he thought was a 15-year-old girl.
Ritter, 48, allegedly masturbated in front of a Web camera while he was engaged in conversation in an Internet chat room with an undercover cop posing as the teenage girl. He declined to discuss the charges Thursday when reporters visited his New York residence.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 14, 2010
This view was articulated before the Pope's planned visit to the city's temple for the first time on Sunday.
Only God can judge whether war time Pope Pius XII did enough to save Jews and whether he should have spoken out more forcefully against the Holocaust, according to the rabbi who will host Pope Benedict first visit to Rome's synagogue.
Rabbi Riccardo di Segni also said he hoped the event would help combat hostility towards the Jewish world and intolerance of any
Source: Medieval News
Jan 14, 2010
Conservation work has been completed on the Papal Bull which granted medieval Scotland its first university, the University of St Andrews.
The Bull of Foundation is one of a series of six letters from the Pope, sent in 1413, which together brought the University fully and formally into existence.
This document embodies the 1412 charter, issued by Bishop Henry Wardlaw, which granted the masters and students of St Andrews recognition as a properly constituted corporation.
Source: Daily Telegraph (UK)
Jan 14, 2010
Oliver Stone, the controversial film director, is facing another backlash after suggesting that Hitler was made an "easy scapegoat" by history.
Stone, who has previously been accused of promoting conspiracy theories and glorifying violence in his films, has made a new documentary series which he says will place historical figures including Hitler and Stalin "in context".
In the trailer for "The Secret History of America" the director says:
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Jan 14, 2010
Supporters of Israel have worried of late that much of the campus discussion about the country has taken place in rallies and counter-rallies on the quad, and not in the classroom. But a study released Wednesday found significant growth in the past few years in the number of courses focused on Israel. Further, these courses are appearing in a wider range of disciplines than in the past and do not focus exclusively on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the military history of Israel.
Source: Haaretz (Israel)
Jan 14, 2010
Nazi death-camp guards could expect the firing squad or hanging if they fled their posts, a historian told the trial of alleged SS guard John "Ivan" Demjanjuk in Munich yesterday.
Munich University historian Dieter Pohl was giving evidence for a second day at the trial where Demjanjuk, 89, is accused of being an accessory to 27,900 murders at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1943.
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Pohl detailed how Nazi Germany recruited
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 14, 2010
The minute hand of the Doomsday Clock will be moved at 3pm GMT for the first time in two years.
The timepiece in New York is supposed to represent how close humanity is to catastrophic destruction – represented by midnight.
Created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1947 - two years after the US dropped the first atomic bombs on Japan in World War II - it was first set at seven minutes to midnight.
Since then the Bulletin's scientific board, which
Source: Science Daily
Jan 14, 2010
Using texts and images, a University of Arkansas researcher has for the first time reconstructed the time when the use of porticos -- roof-covered structures supported by columns -- gave way to loggias, or recessed porticos.
In an article in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, architecture professor Kim Sexton accounts for the time between the 7th and 12th centuries when there are no surviving porticos. In European history, loggias represented more than just inte
Source: BBC News
Jan 14, 2010
The government has expressed its "sincere regret" and "deep sympathy" to the victims of the thalidomide scandal.
Health minister Mike O'Brien made the apology in a statement to MPs - it comes after he unveiled a compensation package for survivors in December.
Pregnant women were prescribed the drug in the 1950s and 1960s as a treatment for morning sickness or insomnia.
It was withdrawn from sale in 1961 after babies were born with limb
Source: Spiegel Online (Germany)
Jan 13, 2010
The remains of five members of the Kawesqar Indian tribe, abducted by a German explorer 130 years ago for display in "human zoos," found their way back home to Tierra del Fuego on Tuesday. Theirs is a story of degradation, shared by indigenous peoples from around the world.
It was a greatly delayed homecoming. But on Tuesday, the remains of five Kawesqar Indians, kidnapped in 1881 and brought to Europe for display in zoos, were returned to Chile for burial in their ancestr
Source: The Star (Malaysia)
Jan 13, 2010
Earth-works for the new ring road and sewage system in Chinatown here have uncovered hundreds of ancient coins and other artefacts.
And there is concern that workers at the site and the public may have been quietly digging up these items to sell.
Site manager Omar Mahmod said many items might have been sold before he realised that his worksite contained buried treasures when he uncovered a porcelain vase that he believed was from ancient China.
He questione
Source: NYT
Jan 13, 2010
Letters, journals and other correspondence written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan over the course of his half-century career in public service will be published in a coming book....
Among the noteworthy recipients of Mr. Moynihan’s correspondence that the e-mail message mentioned were Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis; Indira Gandhi; Chaim Herzog; William F. Buckley Jr. and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
