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: CNN
Jun 18, 2009
The U.S. Senate on Thursday passed a resolution apologizing to African-Americans for the wrongs of slavery.
The nonbinding resolution sponsored by Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, is similar to a House resolution adopted last year that acknowledged the wrongs of slavery but offered no reparations. The House will have to vote on the issue again because the composition of th
Source: Pew Research Center
Jun 18, 2009
A solid majority of Americans (61%) continue to approve of Barack Obama’s job performance, although they express mixed views of several of his policies. An important positive sign for Obama is the public’s continued optimism that his policies will improve the economy – fully 65% express this view. A smaller majority (55%) is optimistic Obama will reduce the budget deficit over the long-term. Nonetheless, Obama’s job approval on the economy has declined from 60% in April to 52% currently.
Source: CNN
Jun 17, 2009
Families of September 11 victims visiting Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on Thursday urged the Obama administration to drop plans to close the facility and to restart terror trials there.
Other September 11 families have visited Guantanamo Bay for previous hearings and voiced support for using the facility for terror trials. The government uses a random process to select names of family members invited to observe.
The family members said they think Guantanamo detainees have been
Source: Baltimore Sun
Jun 17, 2009
Parts of Charles County's Zekiah Swamp are every bit as inhospitable as the name suggests, choked with tick-infested woods and boot-sucking wetlands.
But as archaeologists are discovering to their delight, in the late 17th and early 18th centuries Zekiah was a growth center for the young Maryland colony.
The site of a 1674 courthouse was found last summer. Excavations this month have uncovered what might be traces of the "summer house" that Gov. Charles Calver
Source: http://www.andina.com.pe
Jun 17, 2009
Archaeologists at the National Institute of Culture (INC) have found a pre-Inca tomb in the Salapunku archaeological site, located inside the Machu Picchu Archaeological Park in Cusco, southeastern Peru.
Resident archaeologist Francisco Huaycaya Quispe said that these remains would belong to a woman from the Quillke culture, an indigenous which flourished before the Inca Empire.
According to the archaeologist, this hypothesis is based on the pottery and ruminant and pou
Source: Science Daily
Jun 17, 2009
A University of Colorado at Boulder team has uncovered an ancient and previously unknown Maya agricultural system -- a large manioc field intensively cultivated as a staple crop that was buried and exquisitely preserved under a blanket of ash by a volcanic eruption in present-day El Salvador 1,400 years ago.
Evidence shows the manioc field -- at least one-third the size of a football field -- was harvested just days before the eruption of the Loma Caldera volcano near San Salvador i
Source: Irish Times
Jun 17, 2009
THE MOUNTAINS of Mourne may be fabled in song but now they have a new focus as scientists believe they were the source for most of Ireland’s prehistoric gold.
Ireland has a very high level of prehistoric gold objects especially from the early Bronze Age (2400-1800BC) when large quantities of it was used by skilled craftsmen.
They turned out beautiful objects such as the gold collars or lunula similar to the one which turned up recently following a robbery in Co Roscommo
Source: New York Times
Jun 17, 2009
The sun was barely up when federal agents began surrounding a dozen homes scattered across rural southern Utah, the final stroke of a two-year undercover investigation into the theft and trafficking of ancient Indian artifacts around the Four Corners area.
At most places, six or seven armed officers moved in, rousting the occupants and securing the homes so that government archaeologists and photographers could enter and begin cataloguing evidence. At one house, an FBI SWAT team was
Source: Time Magazine
Jun 17, 2009
Observers with a working knowledge of Iranian politics have largely been able to shrug off President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's bluster and bullying, knowing the diminutive President must still answer to a far more powerful figure: Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei. Since 1989, the shadowy cleric — a former president himself — has sat at the apex of Iran's complex hierarchy as the final word in all political and religious matters. The massive protests roiling Tehran in the aftermath of the June 1
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, is published by the Federation of American Scientists
Jun 17, 2009
The rise of “the wall” between intelligence and law enforcement personnel that impeded the sharing of information within the U.S. government prior to September 11, 2001 was critically examined in a detailed monograph (pdf) that was prepared in 2004 for the 9/11 Commission. It is the only one of four staff monographs that had not previously been released. It was finally declassified and disclosed earlier this month.In April 2
Source: AP
Jun 17, 2009
HANCOCK, Vt. – The aged maple floorboards are scuffed and creaky, worn thin and smooth by thousands of youngsters over the years in the Hancock Village School. Banks of tall windows, a dozen panes over a dozen panes each, flood a pair of classrooms with sunlight.
A 19th-century image of Abraham Lincoln hangs on a back wall in one classroom where studies began in 1801, 60 years before he took office.
That history comes to a close on Thursday. Fewer kids and rising costs
Source: USA Today blog
Jun 17, 2009
Who killed off werewolves? Darwin did it, says a science historian, by linking humans to ape-like ancestors.
In a July meeting of the British Society for the History of Science, historian Brian Regal of Kean University in Union, N.J., will demonstrate how werewolves, feared hiding behind every tree in travelers' tales for centuries, died out in folklore following the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859.
"The spread of the idea of evolution helped kil
Source: HNN Staff
Jun 17, 2009
On the day John Dean is releasing a new edition of his autobiography, Blind Ambition, one of his old critics is charging that Dean admitted to him that the book was based on incomplete research.
In a note to HNN Len Colodny reported that in a 1989 interview Dean admitted"I'm gonna be very honest with you. I didn't even reread my testimony when I wrote my book."
In the original acknowledgements to the book Dean wrote that he had reviewed his own testimony in writing the bo
Source: Statesman (Texas)
Jun 17, 2009
He was little more than a teenager, about 19 or 20 years old. Small and slight for warfare on the frontier, he had the delicate facial bones of a boy and had likely once been a slave.
He was a Buffalo Soldier: one of the legendary African American members of the U.S. Army who served at remote military outposts in the years after the Civil War.
But his grave outside an abandoned New Mexico fort had been violated. His bones were scrambled. And investigators think his sk
Source: Irish Times
Jun 17, 2009
THE MOUNTAINS of Mourne may be fabled in song but now they have a new focus as scientists believe they were the source for most of Ireland’s prehistoric gold.
Ireland has a very high level of prehistoric gold objects especially from the early Bronze Age (2400-1800BC) when large quantities of it was used by skilled craftsmen.
They turned out beautiful objects such as the gold collars or lunula similar to the one which turned up recently following a robbery in Co Roscommo
Source: AP
Jun 17, 2009
John Calvin, the Great Reformer, used dictatorial means in making Geneva a "Protestant Rome," but he also planted the seeds of modern democracy.
He enforced rigid morality and stressed the importance of helping others, while he also had a share in developing capitalism. He supported the destruction of religious statues and other images, but described the arts as gifts from God.
This is how Calvin's role in history is being assessed by theologians and historian
Source: BBC
Jun 17, 2009
During a holiday to Northern France, Ayrshire man Robert Taylor came across the grave of an Edinburgh pilot who died during a wartime mission in February 1944. Catherine Lyst recounts his two-and-a-half-year quest to trace the young airman's relatives.
Flt Sgt Archibald Blyth Kirkwood's headstone read: "Treasured memories of Archie our beloved elder son and brother."
Robert and his wife Elizabeth, from Dalmellington, Ayrshire, also noted the next grave, that
Source: BBC
Jun 17, 2009
A new dinosaur unearthed in western China has shed light on the evolution from dinosaur hands to the wing bones in today's birds.
The fossil, from about 160 million years ago, has been named Limusaurus inextricabilis.
The find contributes to a debate over how an ancestral hand with five digits evolved to one with three in birds.
The work, published in Nature, suggests that the middle three digits, rather than the inside three, remain.
Source: BBC
Jun 17, 2009
Woolly mammoths lived in Britain as recently as 14,000 years ago, according to new radiocarbon dating evidence.
Dr Adrian Lister obtained new dates for mammoth bones unearthed in the English county of Shropshire in 1986.
His study in the Geological Journal shows the great beasts remained part of Britain's wildlife for much longer than had previously been supposed.
Mammoths may finally have died out when forests encroached on the grassland habitats they fa
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jun 17, 2009
A new dinosaur resembling a giant parrot has been discovered in Mongolia.
The creature, Psittacosaurus gobiensis whose name means "parrot lizard", is thought to have lived about 110 million years ago.
Psittacosaurs are noted for being the most species-rich dinosaur genus with at least nine different species, including the latest found in the Gobi Desert, a famous dinosaur graveyard.
The three feet long psittacosaurs may also have had a diet dom
