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: Science News Daily
Nov 18, 2008
Archaeologists in southeastern Turkey have discovered an Iron Age chiseled stone slab that provides the first written evidence in the region that people believed the soul was separate from the body.
University of Chicago researchers will describe the discovery, a testimony created by an Iron Age official that includes an incised image of the man, on Nov. 22-23 at conferences of biblical and Middle Eastern archaeological scholars in Boston.
The Neubauer Expedition of the
Source: http://fredericksburg.com
Nov 18, 2008
Virginia stepped forward yesterday to help save portions of 15 Civil War battlefields from encroaching development.
The commonwealth will provide up to $5.2 million to front-line private groups defending Civil War battlefields--including Chancellorsville and Brandy Station. Preservationists must come up with $10.4 million to get the 21 matching grants awarded by the state Department of Historic Resources.
The resulting total, $15.57 million, would be one of the largest
Source: AP
Nov 18, 2008
Spain's most famous judge abandoned a drive for a symbolic indictment of the late Gen. Francisco Franco and his regime, dropping a probe Tuesday into atrocities committed during and after the country's ruinous civil war.
Judge Baltasar Garzon reluctantly yielded in a dispute over jurisdiction, and transferred the case to lower courts.
Garzon, a human rights and terrorism crusader known for going after Osama bin Laden and Chile's late Augusto Pinochet, launched a probe l
Source: Times (UK)
Nov 18, 2008
Spain’s best known judge has today reversed his decision to investigate the disappearance of thousands of people during the Civil War and the dictatorship of General Franco.
Judge Baltasar Garzón complied with a demand from public prosecutors that the case be handled by regional courts.
The judge, who is best known in Britain for his unsuccessful attempt to arrest the late Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet in 1998, last month opened an investigation into the d
Source: Deborah Lipstadt blog
Nov 18, 2008
Last Friday an unquestionably antisemitic cartoon appeared in Emory's student newspaper, The Wheel. I was sent the cartoon and the cartoonist's accompanying explanation.
The cartoon was split into two sides. One side showed the wall/fence between the West Bank and Israel with Israeli soldiers in front of it and on the other side were Jews in a ghetto with a Nazi guard in front of it. Underneath in caps was the following sentence: EXPERIENCE IS THE BEST TEACHER.
The acc
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Nov 18, 2008
Archeologists digging in northern Israel have discovered the 12,000-year-old skeleton of what they say was a witch doctor.
They said the skeleton was that of a deformed woman of around 45 years of age from the Natufian culture, which ranged from Syria to the Sinai peninsula at the time.
Leore Grosman, in charge of the excavation in the Galilee, said the bones were found in a carefully-carved oval grave with the skull resting on a tortoise shell.
The skelet
Source: Deutsche Welle
Nov 18, 2008
The 700-year-old windows were thought vanished or destroyed until 2005, when they were discovered by a Russian art historian at a cloister outside Moscow, under the jurisdiction of the Pushkin Museum.
The first 111 panels, which had been in the possession of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, were returned by Russia in 2002.
Another three years would pass before the remaining six panels dating back to the 14th century would be restored to their rightful home at the
Source: Deutsche Welle
Nov 18, 2008
The decision announced by the UN highest court in the Hague on Tuesday, Sept. 18, was a narrow one.
"The court ... by 10 votes to seven finds that ... the court has the jurisdiction to entertain the application by the Republic of Croatia," said presiding judge Rosalyn Higgins.
Croatian Minister of Justice Ivan Simonovic said he was very happy about the judgement.
"We won in round one," Simonovic told a Croatian daily newspaper. "Now
Source: Deutsche Welle
Nov 18, 2008
A pig's head was found stuck to the entrance gate at a Jewish graveyard in the town of Gotha next to a section of cloth with the words "six million lies" written on it.
Police said a blood-red liquid had also been thrown at the gate and that the ground was covered with broken glass -- perhaps a reference to the Night of Broken Glass, the 1938 Nazi pogrom against German Jews.
In Erfurt itself, police said, a memorial plaque at the entrance to another Jewish ce
Source: Sydney Morning Herald
Nov 18, 2008
IN A case of prehistoric paternity testing, the world's oldest known nuclear family has been identified: a mum, dad and two boys who lived 4600 years ago.
Although their deaths were violent, they were buried with care in a single grave: arms entwined, children facing their parents.
"Their unity in death suggests a unity in life," said Wolfgang Haak, of the University of Adelaide, co-leader of an international team that studied ancient DNA from the remains.
Source: Stars & Stripes
Nov 18, 2008
The remnants of a U.S. Army B-24 Liberator shot down over Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II were returned to U.S. soil last week.
The pieces of fuselage from the "Taloa" had been kept in a local farmer’s barn for more than six decades. The farmer, who refused to disclose his name to Stars and Stripes, feared being punished for disobeying a Japanese military police order in 1945 to not touch the wreckage.
The Taloa was shot down as it returned from a missio
Source: Rachel's Democracy & Health News
Nov 17, 2008
In the middle of an abandoned suburban neighborhood, a long grassy mound pokes up a few feet higher than the cracked streets surrounding it. A green chain-link fence surrounds the small hill, which is covered with wildflowers in summer -- lavender chicory and small yellow daisies. The fence has no warning sign -- not anymore -- but this is Love Canal, the toxic waste dump that became synonymous with environmental disaster 30 years ago.
Adeline Levine, a sociologist who wrote a book
Source: International Herald Tribune
Nov 17, 2008
When the English monarch in Alan Bennett's novella "The Uncommon Reader" decides to write her memoirs, she takes the prudent step of abdicating first. Queen Sofia of Spain may be wondering whether she, too, should have waited for her husband, King Juan Carlos, to leave office before granting a Spanish journalist a series of uncharacteristically candid interviews.
The resulting book, "The Queen Up Close," has provided Spaniards an uncomfortably close look at their
Source: AP
Nov 17, 2008
Dozens of Poles were awarded medals Monday for risking their lives during World War II to save Jews from the Holocaust.
President Lech Kaczynski awarded state medals — many posthumously — to around 70 people from across Poland. First lady Maria Kaczynska presented them to the people or their relatives in a gala ceremony at Warsaw's National Theater.
Among those awarded was Zofia Brusikiewicz, 81, whose parents hid 13 Jews in an apartment in Warsaw and Irena Gut-Opdyke,
Source: NYT
Nov 17, 2008
Fielding questions about its diminished endowment fund, the possibility of charging admission fees and the fate of its fabled yet shuttered Arts and Industries Building, the Smithsonian Institution held the first public board meeting in its 162-year history on Monday as part of its new commitment to openness and accountability. Sitting on the stage of a 565-seat auditorium at the institution’s National Museum of Natural History, members of the governing body, or Board of Regents — including memb
Source: NYT
Nov 17, 2008
STANFORD, Calif. — Not long after he arrived at the Supreme Court in 1972 after three years in the Nixon administration, Justice William H. Rehnquist faced stinging criticism for participating in a decision dismissing a challenge to Army surveillance of domestic political groups in the Vietnam War era.
He had voted with the majority in the 5-to-4 decision, issued that June, after giving Senate testimony as a Justice Department official defending the spying and criticizing the suit.
Source: NYT lede blog
Nov 17, 2008
Evidently there will be no Blackberry One in the White House.
Concerns over e-mail security and the disclosure requirements in the Presidential Records Act, as The New York Times reported yesterday, will force Barack Obama to give up his second “addiction” in as many years. (The first may have been the easier one for the hyperconnected president-elect to leave behind.)
It seems Mr. Obama will be the third Internet-era president obliged to toil in an anachronistic bubble
Source: Washington Post
Nov 17, 2008
How was it that a German priest writing in Latin and living in a French city far from the coast became the first person to tell the world that a vast ocean lay to the west of the American continents?
That is one of the bigger mysteries in the history of the Renaissance.
But it is not the only one involving Martin Waldseemueller, a map-making cleric whose own story is sufficiently obscure that his birth and death dates aren't known for certain.
Waldseemuelle
Source: S.F. Chronicle
Nov 17, 2008
This country proudly fills plazas and parks with memorials to mark the past. History and those that made it get their due in bronze, granite, and here-lies inscriptions.
But what happens to nearly a thousand Americans who died in a faraway place, nearly all of them poor, idealistic and cut off from the mainstream? For the followers of Jim Jones who died in a failing plantation in Guyana, the answer is nothing. Their faces, names and stories are forgotten. A sorry chapter in human hi
Source: NYT
Nov 17, 2008
As President-elect Barack Obama rushes from secret job interviews with onetime rivals in the Democratic primary season to briefings on the financial crisis, to discussions of saving the American auto industry, the postelection period may feel frenetic.
But soon he and his transition team may look back on this phase as luxuriantly languid, a fleeting chance for “deliberate haste,” as Mr. Obama has characterized the pace of his cabinet selection process. Later it will be all haste.
