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: Daily Mail (UK)
Mar 30, 2011
Local councils considering selling off their libraries and museums could be halted by a little-known Victorian law, it has emerged.
Hundreds of British libraries are thought to be under threat as local authorities are forced to reduce their budgets as a result of government cuts to public services.
But the sales could be worthless due to an 150-year-old law that means profits must be returned to the original landowners.
The Literary and Scientific Instituti
Source: Time.com
Mar 30, 2011
On a recent, unusually warm late-winter day, a young woman sat quietly at the foot of a white headstone at Arlington National Cemetery, among a cluster of graves of troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The woman, maybe 25 years old, sat in the grass, hugging the headstone.
The question is not why she was doing that (that's easy to understand); the question is whether the headstone she was hugging was the right one. Last summer, an Army inspector general's investigation confirmed
Source: Fox News
Mar 30, 2011
A German expedition team assembled to find a lost $290 million Maya treasure allegedly submerged underneath Guatemala’s Lake Izabal has returned home empty-handed, but controversy continues to grow over the treasure adventure and its motives.
Joachim Rittstieg, a retired 74-year-old mathematician claiming to have deciphered the famous Dresden Codex, a 400-year-old Mayan book, says he discovered information on page 52 leading to "a giant treasure of eight tons of pure gold"
Source: AlbanyPatch
Mar 30, 2011
A decade-long oral history project focused on those with home front experiences during World War II has put out a call for Bay Area residents with stories to share.
"We're looking for anyone who may have had unique or interesting experiences," said Sam Redman of Albany, lead interviewer of the Rosie the Riveter / WWII American Homefront Project. "What may have been seemingly mundane, like maintaining a victory garden, participating in war bond drives or going to work
Source: BBC
Mar 30, 2011
Peru has given a lavish welcome to hundreds of Inca artefacts returned by Yale University in the US, nearly a century after they were taken from the famed citadel of Machu Picchu.
A convoy of trucks escorted by police carried the remains from the airport to the presidential palace in Lima.
Yale agreed to return the artefacts last year after a long campaign by Peru.
President Alan Garcia led the welcoming ceremony.
The relics will be briefly
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 30, 2011
An American museum has agreed to return a 370 year-old painting that was looted by the Nazis during the Second World War.
The 1640 work "Landscape With Cottage and Figures" by Pieter Molijn previously belonged to Jacques Goudstikker, the biggest art dealer in the Netherlands in the 1930s.
Goudstikker fled the Nazis with his wife and young son at the beginning of the war, but fell through a trap door on a departing ship and died.
His large art c
Source: CNN
Mar 30, 2011
Recently discovered photos and letters are giving an inside look at the man convicted of assassinating the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
On April 4, 1968, King was shot and killed by a sniper as he stood on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was trying to mediate a garbage workers' strike.
Little was known of Ray's state of mind in his months in jail before his guilty plea -- until Shelby County, Tennessee, officials came across a bundle of do
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Mar 30, 2011
As he lies dead on a makeshift bed, his school- masterly round glasses still perched on his nose, it is hard to believe that this pathetic figure of a man was responsible for one of the largest genocides in history.
Taken just minutes after he had bitten down on a cyanide capsule, this previously unseen picture shows the still warm body of Heinrich Himmler, head of the dreaded SS and the twisted mastermind of the Holocaust.
It was taken by Corporal Guy Adderley of the
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 30, 2011
The term Satanism represents a broad range of religions, world views, and literature that all look favourably on Satan or similar rebellious figures.
Satan first appeared in the Hebrew Bible as an angel who challenged the religious faith of humans. In the Book of Job he is called "the Satan" ("the accuser") and acted as the prosecutor in God's court.
A character named Satan was described as the cosmic enemy of the Lord and tempter of Jesus within ma
Source: Discovery News
Mar 29, 2011
Ancient images that creationists claim are evidence of humans living alongside dinosaurs are at best just smeared pictures, scientists find.
At the site of Kachina Bridge in Utah — an immense sandstone formation resembling an arch more than 200 feet (60 meters) high and wide that was formed by the undercutting of a rock wall by flowing water — prehistoric cultures decorated the walls with paintings and engravings known as petroglyphs. Among them are what young-earth Earth creatio
Source: City Wire (AK)
Mar 29, 2011
The process began Monday (Mar. 28) to learn what may be buried on top of the Cavanaugh Mound and possibly to learn how the mound was built.
The mound, located behind the New Liberty Baptist Church in south Fort Smith, is believed to have been constructed by Native Americans (possibly Caddo Indian ancestors) between AD 1100 and 1300.
The mound, originally about 200 feet long at the base of each of the four sides and about 40 feet tall, is a project The Archaeological Con
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 29, 2011
The West is losing ground in the scientific research race, a Royal Society report reveals, and it's much harder to get backing for blue-sky thinking, says Michael Day.
Harvard's position as the world's leading university appears unassailable. This side of the Atlantic, Cambridge University is justifiably proud of its status as the pre-eminent producer of Nobel prize winners. But it would be unwise to draw too much comfort from the reputations of the West's top research institutions.
Source: NYT
Mar 29, 2011
American nuclear safety regulators, using a complex mathematical technique, determined that the simultaneous failure of both emergency shutdown systems that are designed to prevent a core meltdown was so unlikely that it would happen once every 17,000 years.
But 20 years ago, it happened twice in four days at a pair of nuclear reactors in southern New Jersey....
In the wake of the disaster in Japan, concerns were quickly raised at the Turkey Point nuclear power plant in
Source: BBC News
Mar 29, 2011
They could be the earliest Christian writing in existence, surviving almost 2,000 years in a Jordanian cave. They could, just possibly, change our understanding of how Jesus was crucified and resurrected, and how Christianity was born.
A group of 70 or so "books", each with between five and 15 lead leaves bound by lead rings, was apparently discovered in a remote arid valley in northern Jordan somewhere between 2005 and 2007.
A flash flood had exposed two nich
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 28, 2011
Italy has offered an olive branch to a US museum by proposing a deal under which a long-disputed ancient statue could be shared.
The "Victorious Youth" bronze, which dates from 300-100BC, was pulled from the sea by Italian fishermen in 1964 off the eastern town of Fano.
The Getty Museum in Los Angeles says it bought the piece, also known as the "Getty Bronze," in good faith in 1977 for $4 million (£2.5m).
But last year an Italian court
Source: Guardian (UK)
Mar 28, 2011
Majella O'Hare was 12 years old. It was a bright summer's day in 1976 and the schoolgirl had just walked past an army checkpoint on the way to church. Moments later, she lay dying on a country road in County Armagh, shot in the back by a paratrooper.
Now, almost 35 years after the infamous killing, an unprecedented apology from the Ministry of Defence will be handed over to her elderly mother at a ceremony in Belfast.
The letter, signed by the defence secretary, Liam Fo
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Mar 28, 2011
A museum dedicated to Holocaust victim Anne Frank is expected to move almost next door to the proposed controversial mosque at Ground Zero, it was revealed today.
The Anne Frank Center is reported to be about to sign a lease in the 20-floor glass and steel tower at 100 Church St.
The building's windows overlook Park 51, the planned 16-storey Muslim community centre and mosque at 45 park Place, just two blocks from Ground Zero.
The non-profit making Anne Fra
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Mar 28, 2011
Mahatma Gandhi was bisexual and left his wife to live with a German-Jewish bodybuilder, a controversial biography has claimed.
The leader of the Indian independence movement is said to have been deeply in love with Hermann Kallenbach.
He allegedly told him: ‘How completely you have taken possession of my body. This is slavery with a vengeance.’
Kallenbach was born in Germany but emigrated to South Africa where he became a wealthy architect.
Ga
Source: Bloomberg
Mar 28, 2011
Odyssey Marine Exploration Inc. (OMEX), the ocean salvager featured in the Discovery Channel series “Treasure Quest,” is trying to recover silver valued at as much as $260 million by October from a ship torpedoed by a Nazi submarine in 1941.
The Tampa, Florida-based company was awarded a contract by the U.K. government last year that would allow it to keep about 80 percent of the bullion treasure of the S.S. Gairsoppa, a cargo steamer sunk by a German U-boat off the Irish coast. The
Source: NYT
Mar 28, 2011
The latest skirmish in the caffeine wars — this one involving the high levels of caffeine in so-called energy drinks, especially those consumed by children — recalls one of the earliest.
It happened a century ago this month, in a courtroom in Chattanooga, Tenn. The trial grabbed headlines for weeks and produced scientific research that holds up to this day — yet generated no federal limits for caffeine in foods and beverages....
The drink was Coca-Cola. Harvey Washingt
