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: NYT
Jun 7, 2011
It may be a first in the annals of government secrecy: Declassifying documents to mark the anniversary of their leak to the press. But that is what will happen Monday, when the federal government plans to finally release the secret government study of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers 40 years after it was first published by The New York Times.
Source: NYT
Jun 7, 2011
WASHINGTON — When Walter Isaacson championed Voice of America’s decision to shut down its shortwave radio broadcasts to China — and shift those funds to the Internet, cellphones and other forms of digital media — he viewed it as th
Source: CBS News
Jun 7, 2011
Chalk up another win for the ancient Greeks. The Greek historian and geographer Strabo wrote nearly 2,000 years ago that Piraeus, a small peninsula near Athens, had once been an island--and a new study in this month's issue of Geology shows he was right.
Source: Discovery News
Jun 7, 2011
Markings in red paint found within the Great Pyramid by a camera-toting robot are likely numerals used by builders.
Mysterious hieroglyphs written in red paint on the floor of a hidden chamber in Egypt's Great Pyramid of Giza are just numbers, according to a mathematical analysis of the 4,500-year-old mausoleum.
Shown to the world last month, when the first report of a robot exploration of the Great Pyramid was published in the Annales du Service Des Antiquities de l'Egypte (ASAE), the images revealed featur
Source: BBC
Jun 7, 2011
The Historical Museum of Bern, Switzerland, has cancelled plans to put on an exhibition about the scientist Albert Einstein in Shanghai, China.
Shanghai's Science and Technology Museum had suggested merging the Einstein show with a display about the Chinese philosopher, Confucius.
A Hong Kong newspaper said Beijing had earlier asked for all references to World War I to be removed.
Neither the Shanghai nor the Bern museums have commented officially.
Shanghai is where Einstein is said to have officially learned that he wo
Source: BBC
Jun 7, 2011
An Argentine court has ruled that the heirs to the country's main media group must submit to DNA-testing, to see if they were born to left-wing prisoners killed by the military in the 1970s.
Judges ruled that Marcela and Felipe Noble Herrera - adopted children of the Clarin Group owner - must give direct samples such as blood or saliva.
They will be compared with samples on a genetic database linked to the missing.
The siblings object to the tests.
Source: CNN
Jun 7, 2011
...The 2010 census showed the South is becoming more diverse, and that descendents of African-Americans who migrated North decades ago are now heading South. For the first time, Greensboro's minorities outnumber white residents, 51.6% to 48.4%, census data showed. The city's African American population increased by nearly 31% in the past decade.
It's a subtle shift, but even after so much progress, it matters.
Source: NYT
Jun 7, 2011
GRANADA, SPAIN — To mark the first visit to Granada by a Jewish religious leader since Jews were expelled from Spain over five centuries ago, the city authorities had hoped to be host to a luncheon for Shlomo Moshe Amar, the Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jun 6, 2011
A dictionary of a dead language not used for two millenia has finally been completed after academics spent 90 years painstakingly deciphering ancient words scrawled on clay and stone tablets.As decades came and went generations of scholars travelled from across the world to the University of Chicago to work on the monumental Chicago Assyrian Dictionary project.
Source: Jewish Telegraph Agency
Jun 6, 2011
SYDNEY, Australia (JTA) -- An Australia-based online vendor has withdrawn T-shirts that satirized Hitler and the Holocaust following complaints by the Jewish community.Red Bubble, a Melbourne-based company that markets the works of more than 150,000 artists worldwide, this week stopped selling the “Hipster Hitler” line of T-shirts that parody the Holocaust with slogans such as “Eastside Westside Genocide,” “Back to the Fuhrer” and “Three Reichs And You’re Out.”In a statement Monday, the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission praised the decision by Red Bubble.
Source: WaPo
Jun 6, 2011
On election night, a jubilant Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) laid out the modern-day tea party’s philosophy — in the words of a man who was alive for the Boston Tea Party.“Thomas Jefferson,” the newly elected Paul said, “wrote that government is best that governs least.”
Source: NYT
Jun 6, 2011
Ninety years in the making, the 21-volume dictionary of the language of ancient Mesopotamia and its Babylonian and Assyrian dialects, unspoken for 2,000 years but preserved on clay tablets and in stone inscriptions deciphered over the last two centuries, has finally been completed by scholars at the University of Chicago.
Source: CBS News
Jun 6, 2011
The worldwide spread of ancient humans has long been depicted as flowing out of Africa, but tantalizing new evidence suggests it may have been a two-way street.
A long-studied archaeological site in a mountainous region between Europe and Asia was occupied by early humans as long as 1.85 million years ago, much earlier than the previous estimate of 1.7 million years ago, researchers report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Early human
Source: New Scientist
Jun 6, 2011
South Americans helped colonise Easter Island centuries before Europeans reached it. Clear genetic evidence has, for the first time, given support to elements of this controversial theory showing that while the remote island was mostly colonised from the west, there was also some influx of people from the Americas.
Easter Island is the easternmost island of Polynesia, the scattering of islands that stretches across the Pacific.
Source: Independent Online
Jun 6, 2011
Egypt's popular uprising may have arrived just in time to save a Neolithic site that holds the country's oldest evidence of agriculture and could yield vital clues to the rise of Pharaonic civilisation.
The site lies in a protected nature reserve along the shore north of Lake Qarun that until recently had remained virtually untouched, even though it lies only 70km from Cairo, Egypt's fast-expanding capital.
A month before the protests that toppled President Hosni Mubarak erupted in January, the Egyptian government carved 2.8 square kil
Source: UPI
Jun 6, 2011
Italian archaeologists say evidence from a sunken Roman ship suggests fish could have been kept alive in on-board tanks as they traded around the Mediterranean.
Due to a lack of refrigeration, historians have long assumed Roman ships catching fish could only deliver them locally or short distances away before the fish rotted.
However, a new report publi
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jun 6, 2011
Ratko Mladic has been awarded £44,000 in back pay of his war pension by Serbian authorities, his lawyer has claimed.
The former Bosnian Serb army general, who was extradited to the UN war crimes court last week to face charges of genocide and war crimes, had his pension of £714 a month frozen in 2005.
Source: NIH
Jun 6, 2011
The motion picture, Let There Be Light (1946), an early generation of which is held in the collections of the National Library of Medicine, has been named to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.
Source: AP
Jun 6, 2011
World War II veterans and Sen. John Kerry commemorated the D-Day landings in Normandy at an iconic and eroding cliff, one of several events along the coast Monday marking 67 years since Allied forces landed on a swath of beaches in Nazi-occupied France. The June, 6, 1944, invasion and ensuing battle for Normandy helped change the course of the war....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Jun 6, 2011
Sixty-seven years ago, American soldier Walter Ehlers landed on a Normandy beach in France, leading a squad of 12 men on D-Day who had no battle experience and had spent their Army tours entertaining the troops.Ehlers's squad scrambled up the beach under heavy fire, and all his men survived that historic turning point of June 6, 1944.
