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
May 1, 2013
NEW YORK — Using a pulley system and sheer brawn, police removed a suspected 9/11 plane part from between two buildings near the World Trade Center site, and the medical examiner said no potential human remains had been found there.About a dozen officers raised the jagged, 255-pound metal piece, which contains cranks, levers and bolts from the ground. They took it over a three-story wall, lowered it into a courtyard and they carried it through the basement of a planned mosque, where it was discovered by an inspector last week.Onlookers across the street took pictures as they heaved it onto a truck taking it to a Brooklyn police facility. The process took about two hours....
Source: WaPo
May 1, 2013
The first chops, to the forehead, did not go through the bone and are perhaps evidence of hesitancy about the task. The next set, after the body was rolled over, were more effective. One cut split the skull all the way to the base.“The person is truly figuring it out as they go,” said Douglas Owsley, a physical anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution.In the meantime, someone — perhaps with more experience — was working on a leg. The tibia bone is broken with a single blow, as one might do in butchering a cow.That’s one possible version of an event that took place sometime during the winter of 1609-1610 in Jamestown. What’s not in doubt is that some members of that desperate colony resorted to cannibalism in order to survive....
Source: WSJ
May 1, 2013
For centuries, the Japanese have identified with Mt. Fuji in a way few other nationalities have revered a single landmark. The iconic volcano has been at the center of Japanese art, spiritual worship and geographical orientation, while seeming to keep a watchful eye on the nation’s capital from a distance.For many foreigners, too, the majestic mountain holds a great allure, with a sighting of its exquisite curving lines almost serving to authenticate a visit to Japan.Now the 3,776 meter peak and surrounding associated sites are headed for official global recognition. The United Nations cultural organization UNESCO is set to approve Mt. Fuji as a World Heritage site when it meets in June, Japan’s Cultural Affairs Agency said late Tuesday....
Source: WaPo
May 1, 2013
DETROIT — When Eva Nelson-McClendon first moved to Detroit’s Birwood Street in 1959, she didn’t know much about the wall across the street. At 6 feet tall and a foot thick, it wasn’t so imposing, running as it did between houses on her street and one over. Then she started to hear the talk.Neighbors told her the wall was built two decades earlier with a simple aim: to separate homes planned for middle-class whites from blacks who had already built small houses or owned land with plans to build.“That was the division line,” Nelson-McClendon, now, 79, says from the kitchen of her tidy, one-story home on the city’s northwest side. “Blacks lived on this side, whites was living on the other side. ... That was the way it was.”That’s not the way it is anymore. But the wall remains, a physical embodiment of racial attitudes that the country long ago started trying to move beyond....
Source: WaPo
May 1, 2013
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — A small patch of prairie sits largely unnoticed off a desolate road in southwestern South Dakota, tucked amid gently rolling hills and surrounded by dilapidated structures and hundreds of gravesites — many belonging to Native Americans massacred more than a century earlier.The assessed value of the property: less than $14,000. The seller’s asking price: $4.9 million.Tribal members say the man who owns a piece of the Wounded Knee National Historic Landmark on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is trying to profit from their suffering. It was there, on Dec. 29, 1890, that 300 Native American men, women and children were killed by the 7th Cavalry in the final battle of the American Indian Wars....
Source: BBC News
Apr 30, 2013
Coded letters sent from a British prisoner of war to his parents in Cornwall have been deciphered thanks to academics at Plymouth University.Sub Lt John Pryor was captured at Dunkirk in 1940 and sent to a German prisoner of war (PoW) camp.He was held for the next five years but as a reward for good behaviour he was allowed to send letters home to his parents in Saltash.Those letters contained secret messages for the British military.The research began after military intelligence expert Barbara Bond, a pro-chancellor at the university, heard about the letters from Sub Lt Pryor's son Stephen, a university governor....
Source: Fox News
Apr 30, 2013
JERUSALEM – An ancient limestone tablet covered with a mysterious Hebrew text that features the archangel Gabriel is at the center of a new exhibit in Jerusalem, even as scholars continue to argue about what it means.The so-called Gabriel Stone, a meter (three-foot)-tall tablet said to have been found 13 years ago on the banks of the Dead Sea, features 87 lines of an unknown prophetic text dated as early as the first century BC, at the time of the Second Jewish Temple.Scholars see it as a portal into the religious ideas circulating in the Holy Land in the era when was Jesus was born. Its form is also unique -- it is ink written on stone, not carved -- and no other such religious text has been found in the region....
Source: The Atlantic
Apr 30, 2013
More than three decades ago, David Rumsey began building a map collection. By the mid-90s he had thousands and thousands of maps to call his own -- and his alone. He wanted to share them with the public.He could have donated them to the Library of Congress, but Rumsey had even bigger ideas: the Internet. "With (some) institutions, the access you can get is not nearly as much as the Internet might provide," Rumsey told Wired more than a decade ago. "I realized I could reach a much larger audience with the Internet."Bit by bit, Rumsey digitized his collection -- up to 38,000 maps and other items -- along the way developing software that made it easier for people to explore the maps and 3D objects such as globes online. Today, the Digital Public Library of America announced that Rumsey's collection would now be available through the DPLA portal, placing the maps into the deeper and broader context of the DPLA's other holdings....
Source: Time Magazine
Apr 30, 2013
On Saturday evening, I was a very happy attendee of the Computer History Museum’s Fellow Awards, an inspiring annual event which celebrates the contributions of individuals whose work has changed the course of computing history. Three people were honored this year: Ed Catmull, Harry Huskey and Bob Taylor.Ed Catmull, as I knew, started out as a computer graphics scientist, became one of the founders of Pixar and is now the president of both that extraordinary company and Walt Disney Feature Animation. I was also well aware that Bob Taylor headed up the research efforts at ARPA and Xerox PARC which produced the Internet, the modern graphical user interface, Ethernet, the laser printer and other utterly essential technologies.But Harry Huskey? I’d never heard of the man. Turns out that he did an awful lot — and, having been born in 1916, he did much of it in the very early days of the computing industry, even before the word “computer” came into use....
Source: Archaeology News Network
Apr 30, 2013
An argument between Germany and Turkey about ancient treasures is escalating. Turkey wants its treasures back, but German archaeologists say Turkish sites are being exploited for tourism.Archaeology often has a lot to do with politics - the current argument between Germany and Turkey is a prime example. Hermann Parzinger, head of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, last December accused Turkey of displaying "almost chauvinistic behavior." In reply, the Turkish culture minister Ömer Celik told German news magazine "Der Spiegel" that he demanded an apology, and he asked for five ancient objects to be returned that are currently shown in museums in Berlin. He claims they were taken out of Turkey illegally. Parzinger rejects any accusations of illegality for three of these objects: In December 2012, he said that the torso of the Fisherman of Aphrodisias, the sarcophagus from the Haci Ibrahim Veli tomb and a 13th-century prayer niche were all acquired legally.
Source: Archaeology News Network
Apr 30, 2013
New research from Oxford University casts doubt on the theory that the Mount Toba super-eruption, which took place at the Indonesian island of Sumatra 75,000 years ago, could have plunged the Earth into a volcanic winter leading to the near extinction of early humans. A fresh analysis of volcanic ash recovered from lake sediment cores in Lake Malawi in East Africa shows that the eruption spewed ash much further than studies have previously found. Other theories have said that the explosive volcanic eruption may have triggered a chain of climatic events resulting in a cooling of temperatures, but this latest study finds no evidence of a significant dip in temperatures in East Africa at the time. The findings are published in the early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Source: Archaeology News Network
Apr 30, 2013
Geomorphologists and dating specialists from The Universities of Aberystwyth, Manchester, and Adelaide say that it was the River Nile which made life viable for the renowned Kerma kingdom, in what is now northern Sudan. Kerma was the first Bronze Age kingdom in Africa outside Egypt.Their analysis of three ancient river channels where the Nile once flowed shows, for the first time, that its floods weren’t too low or too high to sustain life between 2,500 BC and 1,500 BC, when Kerma flourished and was a major rival to its more famous neighbour downstream.They also show that the thousand year civilisation came to end when the Nile’s flood levels were not high enough and a major channel system dried out - though an invasion by resurgent Egyptians was the final cause of Kerma’s demise....
Source: Archaeology News Network
Apr 30, 2013
Archaeologists who unearthed the skeleton of England's King Richard III under a municipal parking lot say they want to dig up a 600-year-old stone coffin found nearby.University of Leicester scientists say they hope to learn more about the medieval Church of the Grey Friars, where Richard was unceremoniously buried after he was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485.In February scientists from the university announced that remains found on the site were "beyond reasonable doubt" those of the king....
Source: AP
Apr 30, 2013
FREDERICKSBURG, Va. — Attorneys for L. Douglas Wilder have a week to respond to the city of Fredericksburg’s attempt to sell 38 acres where the former governor wants to build the National Slavery Museum.The deadline is the latest back-and-forth over Wilder’s quest to build a museum telling the nation’s history of slavery. But first he must settle a large tax bill on the land and get fundraising back on track....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Apr 30, 2013
America’s Founding Fathers were actually Essex boys, with Plymouth accused of "hijacking" the Mayflower, the ship that carried them to North America nearly 400 years ago, according to claims.A rival claim to the Mayflower by the port town of Harwich states that the ship's crew were from Essex and only set foot briefly in the West Country before starting their transatlantic voyage.The claim has taken on extra significance as the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower's voyage in 2020 nears - Plymouth has already sent an invitation to whoever is the President of the United States in seven years' time.Although Plymouth has become closely associated with the Mayflower, Harwich claims it was no more than luck that the ship stopped at that port at all....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Apr 30, 2013
Nudity is an all or nothing kind of thing, as Qatari authorities recently discovered. Seek to drape the naughty bits of a pair of ancient sculptures of nude male athletes, and you end up with no nudes at all.This is precisely what happened at Alriwaq Doha exhibition space. Having loaned the gallery the two sculptures for its Olympics Past and Present exhibition, Athens preferred to see them returned than exhibited with their modesty veiled.The Qatari anxiety about displaying the naked body has a different root — but is no more or less valid — than that which saw thousands of statues suffer the chop across the history of the Western world....
Source: WSJ
Apr 29, 2013
NEW YORK — The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem have jointly acquired a 15th-century illuminated Hebrew manuscript, they announced Monday.The Mishneh Torah is a rare manuscript with text by the Middle Ages Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides. It is a synthesis of Jewish law and the second of a two-volume manuscript featuring six large illustrations plus 32 smaller images and marginal decorations. The first volume is housed in the Vatican.The two institutions said they would share the Mishneh Torah on a rotating basis.The manuscript was created in 1457 in the style of Northern Italian Renaissance miniature painting. It was restored at the conservation lab of the Israel Museum, where it has been on loan since 2007 and on public view since 2010....
Source: CS Monitor
Apr 29, 2013
Russian President Vladimir Putin met in the Kremlin Monday with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the first top-level Russo-Japanese summit in almost a decade.The two wrestled for hours with the problem that has stymied Russian and Japanese leaders for almost 70 years: how to find a mutually acceptable and hopefully profitable way to finally end World War II."The leaders of both countries agreed that the situation where, 67 years after the conclusion of [World War II], we have still been unable to conclude a bilateral peace treaty, looks abnormal," said a joint statement at the meeting's end Monday....
Source: AP
Apr 29, 2013
The billboards in this northern Colorado city show three men dressed in traditional Native American attire and the words “Turn in your arms. The government will take care of you.”
Source: Reuters
Apr 29, 2013
South Dakota is finding it difficult to change time-worn names of locations that are seen as offensive by African-Americans and Native Americans, such as "Negro" and "squaw" creeks, canyons and mountain ridges.The state issued a plea this month for public assistance in renaming five geographic features. The five are part of a total of 18 sites that include the word "squaw" or "Negro" in their names and have been designated by the legislature as needing renaming.But some of the replacement names suggested by the South Dakota Board of Geographic Names have been rejected by an obscure federal body called the U.S. Board on Geographic Names....
