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)
Oct 5, 2008
It may have taken Michelangelo four long years to paint his fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but his earliest predecessors spent considerably longer perfecting their own masterpieces.
By comparing the ratio of uranium to thorium in the thin layers on top of the cave art, researchers were able to calculate the age of the paintings
Scientists have discovered that prehistoric cave paintings took up to 20,000 years to complete.
Rather than being cre
Source: Independent (UK)
Oct 5, 2008
Arnhem Land, jutting into the Arafura Sea at the top of Australia, has always been a special place for Aboriginal people. Just how special has been reinforced by the discovery of an extraordinary collection of rock art recording life in the area for the past 15,000 years, up until 50 years ago.
Alongside ancient paintings of thylacines, a mammal long extinct on the mainland, are images documenting modern-day inventions – a car, a bicycle wheel, a biplane and a rifle – as well as por
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 5, 2008
The time capsule labyrinth lies deep below the Normandy city of Caen, which was all but destroyed by British guns around D-Day, June 6th 1944.
Largely undisturbed since, the makeshift bunkers still contain numerous reminders of a terrified population whose only thought at the time was survival.
They include packed suitcases, tins of syrup, decaying maps and official passes, and even lady's make-up bags including nail varnish and lipstick.
There are also
Source: WaPo
Oct 5, 2008
The sound of bells rang across Judiciary Square yesterday when the 850-pound bronze of Frederick Douglass was lowered onto its marble base.
The statue of the legendary abolitionist and Washingtonian, shrouded in green blankets and clear plastic wrap, had been wrestled from a flatbed truck by a crew of ironworkers, hoisted with a special gantry and then eased into place in the lobby of One Judiciary Square, at 441 Fourth St. NW.
Okay, so the bells were only tolling the t
Source: S.F. Chronicle
Oct 5, 2008
YREKA, Siskiyou County, Calif. -- Some folks around here think the economic sky is falling and state lawmakers in Sacramento and Salem are ignoring their constituents in the hinterlands.
Guess the time is ripe to create a whole new state.
That's the thinking up here along the border between California and Oregon, where 12 sparsely populated, thickly forested counties in both states want to break away and generate the 51st star on the nation's flag -- the state of Jeffer
Source: WaPo
Oct 5, 2008
HANOI The lake into which John McCain parachuted after his Navy plane was shot down is now surrounded by chic restaurants, cellphone stores and motorcycle dealerships. The prison camp where he confessed to being a "black criminal" has been turned into a multiplex cinema showing garish American movies. A five-star hotel occupies the site of the "Hanoi Hilton" jail, where he spent more than three years. The surface-to-air missile sites that once circled Hanoi have been replaced
Source: NYT
Oct 4, 2008
There’s that word again: maverick. In Thursday’s vice-presidential debate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, the Republican candidate, used it to describe herself and her running mate, Senator John McCain, no fewer than six times, at one point calling him “the consummate maverick.”
But to those who know the history of the word, applying it to Mr. McCain is a bit of a stretch — and to one Texas family in particular it is even a bit offensive.
“I’m just enraged that McCain call
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 4, 2008
More than 60 years after the end of the war, a plaque dedicated to the women was unveiled by the Grand Union Canal next to the National Waterways Museum in Stoke Bruerne, Northamptonshire.
The ceremony was led by Roger Hanbury, chief executive of the Waterways Trust, on a morning of carnival atmosphere, which featured wartime songs and Union Jack flags draped from surrounding windows.
Four of the surviving "Idle Women" - the canal equivalent of the Land Girls
Source: NYT
Oct 4, 2008
At a tumultuous meeting of anti-Vietnam War militants at the Chicago Coliseum in 1969, Bill Ayers helped found the radical Weathermen, launching a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol.
Twenty-six years later, at a luncheon meeting about school reform in a Chicago skyscraper, Barack Obama met Ayers, by then an education professor. Their paths have crossed sporadically since then, at a coffee Ayers hosted for Obama's first run for office, on the schools
Source: BBC News
Oct 4, 2008
British courts should refuse to act on an EU arrest warrant requesting the extradition of an alleged Holocaust denier, a senior Lib Dem has said.
Australian citizen Dr Gerald Toben was remanded in custody after his arrest by British police at Heathrow Airport.
German authorities allege Dr Toben published material online "of an anti-Semitic and/or revisionist nature".
But home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne said holocaust denial is not a crime in th
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 4, 2008
Lieutenant Commander Mannert Abele was killed when the USS Grunion went down with all hands on July 30, 1942, after fighting a Japanese freighter in the North Pacific Ocean.
His sons Bruce, 78, Brad, who recently died aged 75, and John Abele, 72, started searching for the wreck after a Japanese war historian pinpointed the area where he believed the Grunion sank.
Yutaka Owasaki told the brothers he had translated the journal of a military officer who commanded the Kan
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 4, 2008
Republican presidential nominee John McCain's son Jimmy, a Marine, could be sent back to Iraq for a second stint while another son Jack may be deployed there after he graduates from the Naval Academy.
Now the only man to have been in this position before says that the unusual family mix of presidential politics and combat service is so dangerous that Pentagon chief Robert Gates should reassign the candidates' children.
"I do not believe that the children of presi
Source: Guardian (UK)
Oct 4, 2008
A British mine-clearing expert who was murdered in Cambodia and his remains burned to hide the evidence was killed on the orders of the Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot, a court was told yesterday.
The trial of five former Khmer Rouge cadres accused of the kidnap and murder of Christopher Howes in 1996 heard that the communist leader had a blanket policy of killing foreigners on the grounds that they supported the Cambodian government.
Howes, 37, was shot within days of his
Source: Stan J. Liebowitz at the website of the Independent Institute
Oct 3, 2008
[tan J. Liebowitz is Research Fellow at The Independent Institute, Ashbel Smith Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for the Analysis of Property Rights and Innovation at the University of Texas at Dallas, and co-author with Stephen Margolis of Winners, Losers, and Microsoft: Competition and Antitrust in High Technology, published by the Independent Institute.]
Why did the mortgage market melt down so badly? Why were there so many defaults when the economy was not parti
Source: Guardian (UK)
Oct 3, 2008
An Australian revisionist historian wanted in Germany for alleged Holocaust denial will remain in British custody for at least another week, it emerged today.
Scotland Yard's extradition unit arrested Dr Fredrick Toben, 64, when he passed through London's Heathrow airport on Wednesday.
The district court in Mannheim, Germany, issued an EU arrest warrant that accuses him of publishing material on the internet "of an anti-Semitic and/or revisionist" nature.
Source: Times (UK)
Oct 3, 2008
Archaeologists believe that they have found the spot where the Roman legions landed to begin the conquest of England in AD43.
A stretch of Roman shoreline has been uncovered during excavations at Richborough in Kent that is now two miles from the sea because of silting. Two thousand years ago it was the shore of a large lagoon where the Emperor Claudius's troops landed after the crossing from Boulogne.
The Roman landing place was discovered during excavations at Richbor
Source: LAT
Oct 3, 2008
Thousands of Mexicans marched across their nation's capital Thursday to demand justice for victims of a 1968 massacre of students by government troops -- contemporary Mexico's most traumatic atrocity and one that remains unresolved.
Survivors of that bloody night 40 years ago and Mexicans who had not been born then joined forces, chanting "Dos de octubre! No se olvide!" (Oct. 2! Don't forget!) as they converged on the downtown Zocalo plaza.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 3, 2008
The Roman-era sculptures were located 8ft under water in a submerged port at Mandraki, on the western side of Kythnos, a Greek island in the Cyclades.
Greece's culture ministry said the statues consisted of a stone torso of a man in armour as well as another figure - the bearded head of another man.
In a statement, the ministry said it did not yet know whether the torso and the head were both taken from the same figure, but that the torso stood 4.5ft high.
It is not clear who the statues repr
Source: AP
Oct 3, 2008
They are the stories we heard from our grandparents, the pictures we studied in history books — bread lines stretching around street corners, shantytowns sheltering the unemployed, small-town banks with darkened windows.
Today's financial crisis is hardly that grim, though it does share some similarities with the economic collapse of the 1930s — both were preceded by a housing boom, a long period of cheap credit and a falling stock market. But those same similarities may offer some
Source: http://www.wausaudailyherald.com
Oct 3, 2008
Ron Lippi knew he was looking at an important discovery this summer after the dirt was brushed away from the ancient stone foundation.
Lippi, 59, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin Marathon County who specializes in archaeology, immediately noticed the trademarks of Incan stonework: The outer sections of the foundation were made with stones hand-chiseled and sanded to fit together perfectly, and the inside was filled with looser rocks and clay dirt.
