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: AP
Apr 10, 2007
A Florida State University anthropologist has new evidence that ancient farmers in Mexico were cultivating an early form of maize, the forerunner of modern corn, about 7,300 years ago -- 1,200 years earlier than scholars previously thought.
Researcher Mary Pohl conducted an analysis of sediments in the Gulf Coast state of Tabasco and concluded that people there were planting crops in the New World about 5300 BC.
The discovery of cultivated maize in Tabasco, a tropical lowland area, c
Source: ABC News
Apr 10, 2007
Can you Google your way to a more compassionate planet?
Google Earth hopes its highly detailed, 3-D satellite images will aid the process in a new effort to utilize the full social and educational potential of its images, which have mostly been used by individuals for personal enjoyment, such as checking out their houses, birth places, or national and international landmarks.
The company is now pairing with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to highlight the crisis in D
Source: AP
Apr 10, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Increasing pressure to find land for museums and memorials on Washington's cramped National Mall could spur new ideas about how to develop the nation's capital of the future.
Each new addition approved for Washington's monumental core in recent years —- from the World War II Memorial in 2000 to the future Smithsonian black history museum and a visitor's center planned for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial —- has drawn heated debate. The next challenge might be finding a si
Source: Financial Times Deutschland
Apr 10, 2007
TAIPEI -- The National Palace Museum has thrown out its statue of Chiang Kai-shek and is broadening its horizons.
In a valley on the outskirts of Taipei, school classes, families and tourists clog the entrance to the National Palace Museum. After a three-year gap, some of the world's foremost cultural treasures - the art collections of the Chinese emperors - are once again on view.
The 650,000 artefacts and documents, which any other nation might see as a blessing, have
Source: New York Times
Apr 10, 2007
In some sense, the iconic photograph of Rosa Parks recreating her quiet act of rebellion on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., belongs to every American. But as a practical matter, it belongs to Bill Gates.
Anyone wanting to use that image in a book or on a Web site must first license it from Corbis, a corporation founded and owned by Mr. Gates...The photo is among the 11 million prints and negatives in the legendary Bettmann archive, which Corbis bought in 1995.
Since that fir
Source: Telegraph
Apr 10, 2007
A unique Chinese tea kettle that belonged to Queen Elizabeth I fetched more than £1 million pounds at auction yesterday.
The Queen is said to have given the 10-inch high kettle -- one of the first pieces of imperial porcelain to arrive in England -- to her chaplain, the Bishop of Worcester, Henry Parry [1561-1616], who was at her deathbed in 1603.
The silver-mounted Ming "Wucai" kettle, painted in vibrant enamel and depicting songbirds and peach trees, was sol
Source: Discovery News
Apr 10, 2007
China's terracotta army, a mysterious collection of 8,000 life-size figures of warriors and horses found "ready for battle" in a 2017-year-old tomb, was painted in many colors, most distinctively bright purple.
New research on the purple paint suggests it was due to Taoist experiments in creating fake jade, which was thought to bestow immortality.
The discovery explains why the otherwise fierce army sports a springtime shade. It also suggests a religious link
Source: AP
Apr 10, 2007
CAIRO -- Locks of 3,200-year-old hair from the pharaoh Ramses II were unveiled at the Egyptian Museum on Tuesday, returned to Egypt after being stolen 30 years ago in France and put up for sale on the Internet.
The small tufts of brown hair were displayed alongside pieces of linen bandages and 11 pieces of resin used in the mummification of Ramses and his son Merneptah in a glass display case. Photographers mobbed the case as Egypt's culture minister and antiquities chief showed off
Source: International Herald Tribune
Apr 10, 2007
A Serbian court convicted four former paramilitary police officers Tuesday in the killings of six Bosnian Muslims from Srebrenica, where a massacre of thousands of Muslims took place the same week, in July 1995.
The verdict -- the first conviction in a Serbian court for crimes that rights officials clearly link to Srebrenica -- came in a 15-month case prompted by a video that appeared in 2005, showing the Serbian security officers taking six Muslim prisoners from the back of a truck
Source: NYT
Apr 10, 2007
The United Nations dismantled an exhibit on the Rwandan genocide and postponed its scheduled opening by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Monday after the Turkish mission objected to references to the Armenian genocide in Turkey at the time of World War I.
The panels of graphics, photos and statements had been installed in the visitors lobby on Thursday by the British-based Aegis Trust. The trust campaigns for the prevention of genocide and runs a center in Kigali, the Rwandan capita
Source: Telegraph
Apr 10, 2007
It was supposed to be a symbol of the rise of freedom in an Islamic nation with a proud history.
Instead it is an anonymous green blob at the heart of a nation without symbols.
Four years ago the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue by US marines in central Baghdad stood as the moment the regime's downfall was complete.
Two months later an artists' collective erected a replacement statue called Najeen, or Survivor. It shows a woman, supported by a man
Source: Guardian
Apr 10, 2007
The Nazi death camp of Auschwitz is at the centre of a bitter dispute between Russia and Poland, with Moscow accused of seeking to inflate the figures for Soviet wartime victims and Warsaw charged with trying to rewrite the history of the second world war.
The authorities -- in charge of the camp where around 1.5 million people, overwhelmingly Jewish, were murdered on an industrial scale -- are blocking the re-opening of the permanent Russian exhibition at the site because it clas
Source: Guardian
Apr 10, 2007
After lying almost untouched in the vaults of an Italian university for 500 years, a book on the magic arts written by Leonardo da Vinci's best friend and teacher has been translated into English for the first time.
The world's oldest magic text, De viribus quantitatis (On The Powers Of Numbers) was penned by Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan monk who shared lodgings with Da Vinci and is believed to have helped the artist with The Last Supper.
It was written in I
Source: Racel Gordon, San Francisco Chronicle
Apr 9, 2007
Ed. note: With Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, approaching this weekend, the Chronicle profiles two former partisans."If I was going to be killed, I was going to be killed as a fighter and not because I was a Jew," a steely female voice said in December via a videotaped interview shown at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco's Kanbar Hall."That itself gave me strength to go on."
Beneath the huge overhead screen Sonia Orbuch sat proudly as a sold-out audience of 5
Source: Discovery News
Apr 9, 2007
House buyers today usually peruse properties with a checklist of desired features in mind. This aspect of human behavior has apparently not changed much over the millennia, according to a new study that found prehistoric cave dwellers in Britain did exactly the same thing when choosing their homes.
The recently released three-year-long survey of approximately 230 caves in the Yorkshire Dales and 190 caves in the northern England Peak District determined that people there from 4,000
Source: NYT
Apr 9, 2007
Like the many branches of the “CSI” empire, “CSI: NY” is popular television police drama. Its Canadian co-producer, Alliance Atlantis Communications, is now arguing that the program is also about history.
Alliance Atlantis, based in Toronto, is in a dispute with Canada’s broadcast regulator over the true nature of “CSI: NY,” which is being broadcast two or three times a day on History Television, a cable channel also owned by Alliance Atlantis.
Maureen Parker, executive
Source: New York Times
Apr 9, 2007
THE HAGUE —- In the spring of 2003, during the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, hundreds of documents arrived at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague marked “Defense. State Secret. Strictly Confidential.”
The cache contained minutes of wartime meetings of Yugoslavia’s political and military leaders, and promised the best inside view of Serbia’s role in the Bosnian war of 1992-1995.
But there was a catch. Serbia, the heir to Yugoslavia, obtained the tribunal’s permission to
Source: New York Times
Apr 9, 2007
The neckties are wide and the sideburns long, the pickaxes gleam in the sunlight. The governor thanks the president for providing money. The mayor jokes that “whatever is said about this project in the years to come, certainly no one can say that the city acted rashly or without due deliberation.”
The governor swings his pickax, but the pavement is too hard. A jackhammer is brought in to loosen things up. Now the governor and the mayor lay to with gusto.
The Second Aven
Source: Times (of London)
Apr 9, 2007
Hundreds of important journals dating back to the early 19th century have been thrown away by Europe’s largest psychiatry library, including volumes signed by the doctor who founded its parent institution.
More than 50 scientists and students at the Institute of Psychiatry in London have signed a petition calling for the reorganisation of its library to be suspended, after books that appear to have belonged to Sir Frederick Mott were rescued from a skip.
Another discarded book includ
Source: Telegraph
Apr 9, 2007
ROME -- A small mountain village in Umbria is fighting New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art for the ownership of a 2,600-year-old Etruscan war chariot.
The Met intends to make the carefully restored bronze war chariot, which dates from 530BC, the star attraction of its $155 million (£80 million) Leon Levy and Shelby White Court, part of a new wing which is due to open on April 20.
The villagers of Monteleone di Spoleto, population 651, are determined to claim it back.
